ishii:
Raskolinkov, give a poor person $1000 and he’ll spend it on goods and services until the money runs out and then he’s back where he started. Give the poor man a job and he’ll spend $1000 of his own money on goods and services regularly. Maintain a strong economy which gives the poor man with his new job a chance for advancement and he’ll end up buying the car, the house, the TV, etc.
If you read one of my other posts around, you’d see that I said that when I say poor, I don’t mean unemployed and penniless; I was using an extreme example to maky my point about the marginal rate of consumption being greater for poorer people than rich people. Giving tax breaks to poor and working class people who have jobs and earn regular income increases consuption more than giving the same amount of tax breaks to wealthy people.
And what is is with everyone and jobs? You can every last person in the country working fll time and producing all kinds of goods an services, but ifnobody’s buying anything then the economy simply won’t work. Who do you want to give unemployed people jobs? The job fairy? No, increased demand and increased consumption means increased production. If poor and working class people (who have jobs, let me specify once again; I’m not talking about transients her) have more disposable income, they buy more stuff, and businesses need to produce more stuff, so they hire more employees. Thus, increased aggregate demand means more jobs!
The best benefit for a poor man is a job created by the private sector, not a govt. handout.
How does the private sector create jobs? By making goods and services that people consume. Once again, giving wealthy people all the tax breaks doesn’t increase consumption much because they save a higher proportion of their money, rather than spending it. And your claim isn’t really relevant because I’m talking about handouts for the unemployed, I’m talking about tax breaks for the employed.
The matter is pretty much settled: govt is inefficient because there is no incentive to be efficient! As long as the bureaucracy keeps getting fed, it will grow and grow, and the problem or issue it was created to deal with will keep getting worse. Dept. of Education? How is Johnny doing now after decades of federal govt funding of education? Dept. of Energy? How is our energy situation now after decades? They need to be abolished.
I just love when people talk about “the bureucracy.” Every organization in the world that employs more than 10 people has a “bureaucracy.” I’m not sure what you’re trying to demonize here, given the ambiguity of that word. Political scientist James Q. Wilson wrote a great book named “Bureaucracy” which I’d recomend if you want to know both about bureaucratic agencies that function well, and those that don’t, and learn about why or why not, rather than just making the crass generalization that bureaucracy is evil. Oh, and James Q. Wilson is a Republican, so don’t worry, you wouldn’t go to hell for reading it.
And many countries which have federal education are doing a much better job of educating their kids. Not every problem can be solved by abolishing half the federal government.
Liberals overwhelmingly support abortion rights. Where have you been? If your imagined “pro-life” liberal votes for Barbara Boxer or Nancy Pelosi (or just about any Democrat for that matter) then they are effectively pro-abortion rights.
I don’t live anywhere near California, so I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I’m well aware that most self-identified liberals are pro-choice. And I wasn’t even talking voting. I was simply arguing that it’s absurd to say that someone who supports, say, gun control, is going toburn in hell because that’s a democratic position. Like, in order to really be pro-life, you have to brainwash yourself into whole-heartedly accepting the Republican party platform in its entirity. Some day, the circumstances will change and the political dichotomies that exist today will make no sense at all, just as it makes no snse to us today that 200 years ago all the liberals were fanatically pro- free trade and all the conservatives supported tariffs. Support for abortion does not follow logically from most of the other positions of the ‘liberal’ platform, whether they are right or wrong. Indeed, most political positions logically have almost nothing to do with each other. It’s just the way the two party coalitions formed that makes them seem intertwined. That’s my argument, at least.
