Tax the rich? Tax everyone the same? No taxes at all?

[Repugnant Abomination]

Fuck you, DJFC.

[thekremlin]

That was a little catty.

[Saint DH]

The problem with this whole "social contract" bullshit, is that there are plenty of other countries out there with working roads, police and fire departments, educated citizens, etc, that don't tax the job creators. That's why there are no god damn jobs in this country. Economics 101, entities respond to incentives. Give these people who have the fucking money to create jobs a reason to create them in America. Fuck the social contract. I want economic growth and prosperity. I want jobs.

[Beebs]

What countries are you actually thinking of?

[Saint DH]

Costa Rica is always one of the first countries to come to mind. Tons of American companies have facilities operating there.

[Beebs]

Not a terrible example, but sort of a different situation I would say. They offer incentives for foreign investors, and I would say it is indeed working, but once an economy becomes more advanced, continuing to do so is going to eventually result in government interference in the market by choosing who qualifies and who doesn't.

While some people are going to point to the obvious relative gap in infrastructure of Costa Rica compared to the US, which is true to a point, It's more important to realize that the infrastructure is better than it would be without these policies.

It comes back to the "fairness" issue; "progressives" would rather the companies be taxed as some sort of justice, since they subconsciously or consciously think of profit as at best a luxury afforded by the state, and usually as an inherent sin that needs to be repented against in the form of taxes. In all this "fairness" issue they seem to forget that the true, and only, reason for collecting taxes is to cover the necessary expenses of the government; by inciting these companies to move to Costa Rica, they are both decreasing the amount the government needs to spend on social welfare, and increasing the tax base by putting money in the hands of citizens through their employment.

The only explanation for condemning this sort of system when it works, as it currently is in Costa Rica, is the sense that nobody actually deserves the money they are making, that they are all stealing it in some form or another, a huge mental block for a lot of people.

[DJ FC]

Originally Posted by Dirty Harry

Fuck the social contract. I want economic growth and prosperity. I want jobs.

Do you really want jobs? Or do you want economic prosperity? Wouldn't it just be better if nobody worked and the machines took care of us?

[Mr. Blonde]

"And those, my children, were the humble beginnings of the Robot Revolution of 2134..."

[Beebs]

I for one welcome our new robotic overlords.

[Saint DH]

Actually, DJFC kind of makes a point for me. Companies move operations overseas to move profit overseas, thereby achieving a huge tax benefit. The cheap labor is simply an added bonus. The fact is that many manufacturing processes and other low-skilled labor is virtually completely automated by machines. This will only become more prevalent in the future. Machines can do almost everything better than humans can, but they can't think. This leaves skilled jobs remaining for humans, thinking jobs. Unfortunately, even those jobs are leaving the country. Those are the kind of jobs that we could keep here in America if we provided the right incentives. It's simple cost-benefit analysis. If the government wasn't squeezing the lifeblood from small businesses, I am fairly confident most of them would keep the jobs in America.

[DJ FC]

In all seriousness, think about it:

Would you rather a society where 10% of the people worked to create 99% of the wealth and were taxed to create jobs for the other 90% who created 1% of the wealth

OR

A society where 10% of the people worked to create 100% of the wealth and were taxed to support the lives of the other 90%?

My vote is for #2, what's the point of having the population toil away, wasting their lives, on useless jobs just for the sake of jobs? Jobs are overrated.

[Ugly Bastard]

Originally Posted by DJ FC

My vote is for #2, what's the point of having the population toil away, wasting their lives, on useless jobs just for the sake of jobs? Jobs are overrated.

I agree, but you realize this requires further forms of socialism, right? Right now it's hard to be a participant in society unless you have a job, so to get to your "job optional" utopia, it will require further government entitlements to ensure people can live comfortable lives without having to work.

[DJ FC]

Originally Posted by Ugly Bastard

I agree, but you realize this requires further forms of socialism, right? Right now it's hard to be a participant in society unless you have a job, so to get to your "job optional" utopia, it will require further government entitlements to ensure people can live comfortable lives without having to work.

Yes, and no, Ugly Bastard. The Utopia is a long way off, but we're already seeing some of this now.

Take sugar beet farming, for example. The US government in all it's socialist wisdom believes the US needs Americans growing this otherwise dirt-cheap crop. So what do we do in order to keep these good-ol Americans working? We pay em a bunch of cash, and we limit the amount of sugar that can get into the US through import tariffs and quotas. So every good American pays way over fair market value for sugar. To keep the jobs. Because we furiously whack off to jobs. We'd be much better allowing the sugar to be imported and just paying the farmers to sit on their asses. At least then they wouldn't be wasting their lives growing a worthless crop. They'd have much better lives. Is this solution more socialist than what we already have? I'd argue against it.

[Saint DH]

I would much rather see a society where the 10% creating 99% of the wealth are able to keep 90% of their wealth. That way they can create good jobs for the other 90% of the population. While that 90% will still only create 1% of wealth, it will be a much larger value than what it would otherwise be or currently is. Right now, a business owner who earns 100k a year (let's say it's an S-corp so that 100k is the corporate profit) has to give 40k to the government. That's at least 1 entry level job that he could have created, but instead has to pay in taxes. And that's a very small business, too. If a guy is making 700k a year, he's paying nearly 300k in taxes. That's a lot of entry level accounting positions.

I'm not arguing against the efficient allocation of resources. Tariffs and quotas are just another form of tax. Taxes create inefficient allocation of resources and deadweight losses.

[Mr. Blonde]

I'd like to hear the case for banishing environmental regulation. While I can sympathize with tidying up inefficient regulation agencies, it seems to me that many Republicans think ANY regulation = the devil. One of the things I could never get in line behind Ron Paul is he does not seem to take into account the general shadyness of humans and how they will fuck over other people, or a large population in a dime to make money.


The argument often said in reply is: "Why would corporations want to ruin the environment or ruin their business image, causing them to lose money?"

My retort to this would be that, the vast majority of business owners who rely on environmental resources do not have a long-term view (50-200+ years forward) into the future, most likely because they will be dead. Also, businesses can relocate facilities, and many of the men in charge likely do not reside in an area that might be environmentally affected.

On top of that, when it comes to damaging public perception/ruining client base, most of the time it seems like any damage done by corporations to environment or human health becomes apparent years, or decades after the men in charge have made their money and moved on or died.



I can understand (sort of...) the mindset of people who want to "create wealth/jobs" (let's just call it what it is; these men are mostly not philanthropists: Many of them are only concerned with getting rich themselves and the more they get rich themselves the more people happen to have jobs to make the men rich) and not wanting the government stopping them from making their money, but many Conservatives and business owners seem to ignore large parts of human nature. Here are two things that seem to be often ignored in debates and public addresses:

Tragedy of the commons - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Externality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[angry pancake]

I'm having trouble taking this job creator shit seriously. When the actions of some of these creators seem to be using job contraction to help increase profits. When the job creators layoff, then turn large profits, it make one wonder if some job creators know that they're job creators at all. I think they all would admit that their goal is to turn a buck, not create jobs. Taxes are already lower than they've been in a long time, unemployment has been hovering pretty high for a while.

Whoever these job creators are, they're doing a really shitty job creating them.

[Mr. Blonde]

Originally Posted by angry pancake

I think they all would admit that their goal is to turn a buck, not create jobs. \

This, exactly. It's hiding behind a faux-sense of...I don't know what you'd call it, economic chivalry?

[Beebs]

Profits mean economic prosperity, etc etc.

[Beebs]

All sorts of failed protesters, in all different flavors of "idiot" Day of FAIL: Nationwide anti-capitalist revolution flops

[Beebs]

"Capitalism must go!"
-Sent from my iPhone

[Mr. Blonde]

Yeah, while I can usually rally behind Anon, it was really hard for me to take the whole Occupy Wall Street thing seriously. If these people were more focused on working hard to get jobs and contribute to society by attending local government meetings rather than doing whatever it is they were doing they'd be much more likely to make an impact on the world.


Although I do think the cops macing and beating some of the peaceful protesters was pretty dumb -- but I haven't heard the full story behind that yet.

[Mr. Blonde]

Wow I consider myself fairly liberal but that was a fucking disaster. I haven't seen the equivalent of the

Tea Party Interviewes

Tea Party Interviewes

really but this is definitely the opposite.

Pretty embarrassing stuff. At least the Tea Partiers generally follow the same line. That rally seemed all over the place.

[angry pancake]

Originally Posted by Beebs

All sorts of failed protesters, in all different flavors of "idiot" Day of FAIL: Nationwide anti-capitalist revolution flops

Interesting link. While the author is dismissive and patronizing, the idea that this could even happen on a small scale was impossible 30 years ago. It might seem cute right now, but I find it disturbing when people start to wonder out loud about what's so great about capitalism. I'm not sure if this blogger realizes that the fact this is even happening should be a concern.

[Mr. Blonde]

Originally Posted by angry pancake

but I find it disturbing when people start to wonder out loud about what's so great about capitalism.

The result of spoiled kids (most of Nubblies, including myself falls under this category), most of which whose biggest life sufferings are a broken heart or divorced parents (do any Nubblites have divorced parents, actually?), who were brought up with delusions of fantastic future lives via the media (specifically television shows) as well as the general trend of "Everybody gets a blue ribbon" during our lifetime. This has led to a general sense of elevated self-worth for very little actual hard work or natural talent.

While there is obviously a semblance of personal responsibility here, our entire generation is very deluded as a result of our social grooming. You have people who, whether through personal networking, family connections, or just plain dumb luck get paid fairly well for doing very general or relatively unskilled work -- certainly nothing that can't be learned in 3-6 months. These people (not the engineers and such, but the "Marketing Professionals", "Finance Managers", "Sales Professionals", "PR reprentatives" and "Club managers" etc. tend to be the loudest when it comes to social situations and being general braggards/"showoffs". Many of them have a distorted personal image of their own self-worth compared to other humans, without taking into effect all the variables (other than hard work) that happened to get them in their own situation.

The relative rarity of these jobs being available combined with the unfortunate spoiled "I worked hard to get here" attitude of those who have them creates a pretty sharp class divide, resulting in a lot of pissed-off 20-somethings who feel that their lives should have been better and don't know how to make it so, given the challenges of daily life that they were not expecting on facing at whatever point in their life they may be.


I'm sure there's much more to be said about it, and a big part of it can be blamed on the actual people not being introspective or proactive enough with their own lives, but a lot of it is situational as well. A lot of our generation just bought into the assumption our lives would be better, and need something to blame. Enter: "Get mad at the rich guys".


EDIT: To be fair to these kids, it seems to be extremely hard and very rare to get to a position of power and wealth man assumed they would attain on hard work alone. To them, rather than persevere working hard and having a positive attitude (which can be very hard to do after multiple failures), they have an idealized version of a socialist society in which everyone is on a level playing field.

[angry pancake]

Fair enough. I do think the typical 20 something is a stupid, spoiled, piece of shit. I like to think that when we (AP's peeps) were that age we were so much further ahead. Then I look around the early forty something's I know and think to myself, " No AP, they're still just as fucking stupid as they were then."