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| Obama's budget is . . . |
| fine |
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9% |
[ 2 ] |
| bleak but necessary |
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23% |
[ 5 ] |
| irresponsible and inflationary |
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52% |
[ 11 ] |
| bad, but not his fault! |
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14% |
[ 3 ] |
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| Total Votes : 21 |
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DorkothyParker
Joined: 11 Apr 2009
Location: Jeju
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 Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2009 10:59 pm Post subject: |
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| ontheway wrote: |
| Those Americans who save, invest and build the economy will pay less according to how much they save. |
I was told spending is what builds the economy. This message came with a nifty $600 check.
Maybe I am misunderstanding, but if I have to spend every cent of what I earn to barely scrape by, and I do, it hardly seems fair that I should have to pay more money than those who have extra cash laying around to set aside. I might just be confused.
The only economic text I ever understood was Marx's Das Kapital. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2009 5:21 am Post subject: |
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| Hater Depot wrote: |
| I worry about falling into a liquidity trap and our own lost decade or worse. If that is inevitable then the budget and the stimulus and the fed's actions are indeed wasteful. But we don't know that, and it's probably worth taking the chance. |
The liquidity trap is the natural end result of our way (that is, the ideas of Greenspan and Ben B.) of dealing with monetary policy. Anyways, we're already in a lost decade (actually, we lost a decade in gains/growth and have another to go) and it isn't because of the "liquidity trap". |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2009 5:21 am Post subject: |
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| DorkothyParker wrote: |
The only economic text I ever understood was Marx's Das Kapital. |
Is that right? So, you read all of them, eh? |
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OneWayTraffic
Joined: 14 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2009 6:04 am Post subject: |
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| DorkothyParker wrote: |
| ontheway wrote: |
| Those Americans who save, invest and build the economy will pay less according to how much they save. |
I was told spending is what builds the economy. This message came with a nifty $600 check.
Maybe I am misunderstanding, but if I have to spend every cent of what I earn to barely scrape by, and I do, it hardly seems fair that I should have to pay more money than those who have extra cash laying around to set aside. I might just be confused.
The only economic text I ever understood was Marx's Das Kapital. |
Well things that are penalised by taxes tend to be less common than they would be otherwise. So if you want more saving and investing then you need to remove tax penalties on it, and if you want less spending then you need to increase taxes on that.
Spending doesn't build an economy if that spending is money sent offshore. For example, every time you start your car you are sending money out of the American economy and overseas. Same if you're in pretty much any Western country, or Korea. Of course if no one spends then nothing gets produced, which is bad. Simplistically, people in the cities want to be producing goods and services which are exchanged for food and resources by country folk.
But spending too much isn't good. That's America's current problem. People overseas work hard to produce goods and services, which are sent to America in exchange for dollars and IOUs. About $2B a day, every day.
The people who take these dollars shouldn't just be happy to put them under the bed, though something like that happens, when money's sitting in foreign reserves. Eventually, those dollars and IOUs will go back to America and must be redeemed with something American. No other country has the ability to honor the dollar after all. Now you'd like them to buy bonds or government debt with it, but it's a lot more likely that at least some of that money will be used to buy American land and American companies. |
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DorkothyParker
Joined: 11 Apr 2009
Location: Jeju
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| Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2009 7:14 am Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
| DorkothyParker wrote: |
The only economic text I ever understood was Marx's Das Kapital. |
Is that right? So, you read all of them, eh? |
It's implied that I mean of the ones I have read. Though, based on that, I would guess that I wouldn't understand the other texts. Social theory and quantum physics are where my interests lie. Money bores me. Though, will the way things are going I figure I ought to know a thing or two.
Thus, I'm asking for assistance in understanding and you're being condescending. Some teacher! |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2009 7:23 am Post subject: |
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I'm not a teacher.
Marx is like Chomsky. People like to put the books on their coffee table and not read them. I've never, ever met somebody who has sat down and read Das. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2009 1:53 pm Post subject: |
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| I've never, ever met somebody who has sat down and read Das. |
I don't imagine Marx is all that popular among the stock market crowd. I've heard, but don't know for a fact, that Aristotle's 'Ethics' isn't either.
Greed is good.
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2009 10:20 am Post subject: |
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| Ya-ta Boy wrote: |
| Quote: |
| I've never, ever met somebody who has sat down and read Das. |
I don't imagine Marx is all that popular among the stock market crowd. I've heard, but don't know for a fact, that Aristotle's 'Ethics' isn't either.
Greed is good.
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Actually, I already proved -likely- that the poster did not read Das. It is three books, and when I used the plural to refer to them, she/he figured I was speaking of all economics books. Cause she didn't read them. |
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