The net result of Reaganomics

Discussion in 'Business & Economics' started by iceaura, Jun 24, 2019.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/06/14/top-1-up-21-trillion-bottom-50-down-900-billion/
    As a side effect, Most analysis finds that great inequality reduces total productivity and total wealth.
    It also suppresses median height and reduces median healthy lifespan.
     
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  3. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Nationalization is not involved.
    Taxation works much better - a restoration of the US tax system that produced the time of greatest prosperity would about cover it.

    To get most of the benefits of reduced inequality, no redistribution is strictly necessary. The US could simply destroy the damaging overhead, if that seemed more fair than handing it to the undeserving. Or use it to spiff up the infrastructure, care for the landscape, set the increasingly screwed up agriculture system in better order.

    The incentives might, plausibly, if handled right, revert to what they were when the US was not afflicted with current inequality levels. That seemed to be working, at the time, and still looks good in retrospect.
     
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  7. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    In that article nationalization is effectively involved since it is talking about taking all capital gains. No one is going to provide capital under that scenario (and very little labor).
     
  8. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    In that article nationalization is not involved. A confiscation of 3.2 trillion from the 5 trillion currently available to be distributed as capital gains is visible in the arithmetic - which leads to the government owning nothing, nationalizing nothing, not even stock, while the capitalist investor has seen their gains (not their wealth) taxed at 64%.
    That would not be the highest rate ever levied against capital gains by the US - shortly after WWI the US taxed very high capital gains at 67% - 73%.
     
  9. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    You don't do very well with concepts do you? It's effectively nationalized. It doesn't have to be actual. No one is going to give their capital gains away. Sure, I agree with higher tax rates past a sufficiently high level. Not something that dramatic though and certainly not just to buy solar panels. Get real.
     
  10. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    The government does not own it, or run it. It's privately owned and privately run, by a capitalist who exchanged capital for the status and rights and privileges of ownership.

    That means it's not nationalized. It's taxed, instead. If it were nationalized, it would not be taxed - all its earnings would be in the government's coffers already.

    The concept involved here is "ownership". The question of who owns the means of production in an industrial economy is normally thought to be significant. In this case, we have a capitalist system and capital exchange determines ownership.
     
  11. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    If you take all of the profit then no one is going to want to own anything.
     
  12. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    1) except those who want to pay themselves big wages, live in luxurious company houses, etc.
    2) And if you don't, some will.
    So?
    The invalid "if" is standard wingnut posting, but usually there's some point to it.
     
  13. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    In order to be real, yes, it does need to be actual.
    Taxation is taxation, not nationalization. How taxation might affect industry; how people might react to being fairly taxed - are matters of conjecture, not fact.
    Capital gains taxed at 64% would still leave quite a few billions up for the grabbing - they might just have to compete for it.
     
  14. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Name calling is standard wingnut posting as is the inability to earn a decent living from their own efforts. Posting doesn't pay well.
     
  15. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    Which millionaires earn "a decent" living by their own efforts? (By decent, I suppose you mean a quantity of money sufficient for a median standard of living, rather than income gained by ethical and human methods methods.)
     
  16. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Most of them. Money doesn't grow on trees after all. I suppose you want to quibble over the meaning of "own efforts"?
     
  17. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    If you call the meaning of words a quibble, yes.
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    1)Most of the wingnuts I know make a more than decent living, before their debts are subtracted anyway. It's kind of their thing - how they know they are ok, and not bad people.

    2)So?
    You were replying to a post that pointed out the fairly obvious fact that capital gains were not the only payoff from ownership - so taxing capital gains at 64% would not eliminate ownership from the society, especially not ownership of businesses, farms, productive machinery, etc. The idea that no one would want to own anything in such a system (the US adopted such high tax rates for capital gains around WWI - there is no indication that ownership became less desired in those years) is bizarre and ahistorical.

    The invalid "if" - such as this one:
    in reference to a situation in which no one had suggested taking all the profits, and if they had and succeeded people would still want to own things for the many benefits accruing - characterizes the posts of a particular political faction in the US, normally referred to as "wingnut". (It resembles the "Fox Question" in its function, which is to attempt to frame the discussion without incurring the responsibility of argument, evidence, or accountability for the introduced viewpoint).
     
  19. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    I was referring to you as the wingnut in this particular case.
     
  20. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Of course you were.

    For your next display of typical bubble-world political thought, you could refer to a kangaroo as a rabbit, Hillary Clinton as a leftwing politician, Obamacare as socialist, taxation as nationalization, and so forth.

    You might as well - you have nothing to lose.
     
  21. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Would you prefer bandar-log because I could lead with that? I assume you don't live in a glass house (although it would be pretty cool if you did).

    Keep up the good work though, for the cause I mean.
     
  22. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    You have nothing to lose.
    Your pattern of misrepresentation used as a basis for immediate personal attack is the common one among your kind here, and you cannot escape it now - it's all you know.

    Illustration, just from the stuff thrown my way: Not only will you never be able to shake off insisting that I was not American and had never taken an economics class and lived in a basement and so forth, but you will insist on making and defending yet more such idiocies for as long as you post replies to me. That kind of posting is your future as long as you reply to my posts. You literally cannot - as in are physically unable to - post otherwise, in reply.

    And nothing to gain.
    One problem with the bandarlog life is that there's nowhere to go and no way to get there, no way to build anything worth the time and trouble. Once you have cut free of physical fact, abandoned history, discarded reason and reality and joined the amnesiac Republican bubble, there's no way out - no door handle on the inside, no window with a view. Escaping delusion and error by one's own power is what all that liberal arts stuff was for.

    Notice the assumption, the illusion, the smell of cheese that draws them in:
    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
    Spot it?
    He's assuming he can act creatively in his empire world - build something, create a new reality - but he has no contact with the existing reality. He can't build anything except by unlikely accident, because he can never know what he's doing or dealing with. He abandoned all that knowledge. He can only destroy, flail and damage at random. And he doesn't know it. The trap has closed.
     
  23. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    I have a liberal arts degree so I guess I have the keys to the escape hatch. Whew, that was close.

    You do seem like you are in your own little world however rather than me, but what do I know, eh?

    You do work from home though, don't you?
     
  24. Seattle Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,849
    I have a liberal arts degree so I guess I have the keys to the escape hatch. Whew, that was close.

    You do seem like you are in your own little world however rather than me, but what do I know, eh?

    You do work from home though, don't you?
     

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