Could you have an economy...

Discussion in 'Business & Economics' started by Roman, Jul 30, 2006.

  1. Roman Banned Banned

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    where the government buryings money underground and people dig it up?
     
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  3. baumgarten fuck the man Registered Senior Member

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    Please elaborate.
     
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  5. redarmy11 Registered Senior Member

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    Ignore him, he's stoned again.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
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  7. Roman Banned Banned

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    The United States Treasury takes money and buries it mine shafts.

    People then dig it up and use this legal tender to purchase goods and services.
     
  8. redarmy11 Registered Senior Member

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    Hmmm, I suppose it could work...
     
  9. Roman Banned Banned

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    Yeah? You really think so?

    I'd like to see what Mr. G and the other conservatives think of my little plan before I uh, stick my foot down my throat while jerking it to animal porn.

    I mean make an ass of myself.
     
  10. Roman Banned Banned

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    One more question, then it's something else for a bit and I bid everyone a goodnight:

    How drunk do you think I am to propose this idea?
    Was it fingers, shots, cans or bottles?
     
  11. redarmy11 Registered Senior Member

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    My guess is: alternating shots of Absinthe and drain cleaner.

    I still think it could work though. Give it some more thought when you've sobered up.
     
  12. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    How would the government get money to pay its own bills? It would have to engage its own employees in the excavation. But they would get to keep the money they found as their salary, like everyone else, rather than giving it back to the government. There's no mechanism in this system for any money to be left over for government operations.

    Assuming there's no special provision for the government to withhold some of the money to pay for its own operating expenses, the only way it can raise that money is to levy taxes on the incomes of the diggers. So already we have to replicate in this new system one of the most abusive artifacts of the current system: taxation.

    Under this scenario, then, there is no way for anyone to obtain money except to be a digger or a government contractor/supplier. The diggers and government contractor/suppliers (after paying their taxes) have all the money in the country that doesn't belong to the government.

    How do insurance agents, musicians, plumbers, cooks, auto mechanics, and everybody else get paid? They have to provide services to the diggers and government contractor/suppliers.

    Therefore, there have to be enough diggers or enough government contractor/suppliers, or both, to provide the money supply for the entire economy. That's ten trillion dollars in round numbers.

    If every American were a digger, and the money were buried in large enough bills that 300 million Americans could dig up ten trillion dollars in a year, each American would be digging up the per-capita GDP of about $30,000 a year. That would be fine... except for the fact that nobody is doing anything else so there are no pancakes, cars, or concerts.

    So you have to make it possible for a lot fewer people to dig up all that money. Bigger bills, less well hidden caches. Let's say we adjust it so that it only takes 12 million people--the entire federal workforce--to do it. That leaves plenty of people to design fuel injectors and flip hamburgers. But it also means that each of those twelve million people is digging up almost million dollars a year. Boy-o-boy, those digging jobs are going to be quite popular. Everybody except Bill Gates and George Soros would rather be a digger than go into any other line of work.

    Some of those people will have no compunctions at all about shooting each other to get the digging jobs.

    This isn't working. The government will have to tax the diggers so their take-home pay isn't much better than anyone else's, otherwise nobody will want to do anything else for a living.

    So every digger takes home $30,000 and the government takes more than $900,000 from each of them in taxes. A higher tax rate on the wealthy than even Sweden's.

    Those 12 million diggers with an aggregate after-tax income of $360 billion can't support the entire economy. Obviously, because they just can't eat that many burgers and burn out that many fuel injectors.

    The government, with the other nine trillion and change, has basically all the money in the country. They'll have to find a way to distribute it to the citizenry so they have money to spend in order keep the economy going--not to mention keeping themselves fed, clad, housed, educated, transported, medicated, and entertained.

    How are they going to do that? They could give it out in welfare to everybody. But if everybody is getting welfare, a vast percentage of them are not going to want to bother working. (Boy wouldn't that be an interesting experiment! Just what proportion of the American people would work even if they didn't have to?) Production will fall, real GDP will drop, the money will be ruinously inflated... In other words that won't work either.

    Give it away in a lottery so that only certain people get it? Those people will be really rich because you're dividing up an awful lot of money among a small number of people. Really rich people don't drive an economy very well. They spend too much of their money on champagne and luxury cars. This economy will limp along very poorly. This won't work either.

    What's the only other solution? The government will have to hire everybody and make them do an honest day's work in order to get their share of that ten trillion bucks.

    But wait, they already have twelve million civil service employees doing all the work the government has to do. (And that's a pretty charitable way to put it. About ninety percent of them are bureaucrats who do nothing all day but "administer" each other.) Okay, we put all those people to work digging, so they can hire twelve million more to run the government. But what are they going do with ten or twenty times that many employees? Everything would have to become a government enterprise in order to create that many jobs.

    Instead of the government having a near monopoly on the education and charity industries, it would also have one on food service, housing, communication, transportation, energy, entertainment, haircutting, pet breeding, gardening, plumbing, clothing...

    It would be socialism or communism all over again.

    Sounds like a bad idea!
     
  13. redarmy11 Registered Senior Member

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    The obvious solution to this is for the government to bury hamburgers as well as money.

    I think that answers all your questions.

    Roman: ignore the doubters. They clearly haven't thought it through.
     
  14. Roman Banned Banned

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    Where would the government get money from? Taxation of course! We'd be filling in empty mine shafts since the mine owners already dug the holes. The government only has to fill them back in.

    Anyone is free to dig up money, the feds aren't doing it. The feds just put it there. Once they dig that money up, they take that money and spend it on goods and services. People get money from people purchasing their goods and services, just like any other economy that uses currency.
     
  15. Roman Banned Banned

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    Hey, do you guys remember this thread?
    Well it looks like some queer British guy named Keynes stole this idea and made a whole fucking school of economic thought out of it.

    The prick!
     
  16. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    It was stupidity!
     
  17. Roman Banned Banned

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    ....
    You don't know shit.
    None of you do.
    It's what makes this thread so goddamn hilarious.
     
  18. Pinwheel Banned Banned

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    And we are followng it, the part where we dig it up. Except no-one has pointed out that no-one buried the money in the first place....
     
  19. YoYoPapaya Trump/Norris - 2012 Registered Senior Member

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    I don't think Keynes said to bury the money. I believe he or someone else said that in principle you could do that to stimulate the economy. Of course it's better to invest them in building windmills or whatever than to bury them.
     
  20. John99 Banned Banned

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    shame...the way you talk to peopple.

    Mod HatEdit by Billy T. (I don't post as hope this thread soon sinks into archive.) I considered moving it to the jokes thread, but it is not even funny, just sad however, there is nothing wrong with some silliness in B&E so continue posting if it amuses you.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 7, 2011

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