And again......Follow

Very Wrong A person paying with food stamps will had paid the same amount that the store has marked up the food item. Their is no discount for food stamp recipients, as per the store costs and with use of EBT cards their handling cost have gone down. States can't collect tax on food brought with the stamps though.

I'm not talking about changes in the cost of food though. That's irrelevant. Nor does taxation on the food matter. I'm talking about the fact that the person with the food stamp isn't actually buying the food. The people who paid the taxes which funded the food stamp program paid for that food. But that cost comes out of money that they would have used to do other things. You didn't add anything to the system. You subtracted X dollars, then added them. The net is zero.

The only way this has a positive economic effect at all is if you can argue that all of the tax dollars used to buy those food stamps would have been spent or used in less economically useful ways. And that's incredibly hard to argue. And when you factor in the negative incentive effects of these sorts of programs (I'm not just talking about food stamps btw), it's arguable that the net effect is actually negative.

Edited, Aug 17th 2011 4:44pm by gbaji

As Gbaji frantically spins and backpedals, let's keep our eyes on the prize...


Want to cut this short by just admitting you were wrong? You can even go into your usual fifteen paragraphs of insisting that it doesn't matter that you, as usual, just made shit up to sound like you have a clue because... wait!... here's fifteen more paragraphs of made-up shit!

The tangent being the original point? You're getting lazy.

You two should just fuck and be over it.

I try.

Of course it does. If we agree that there's economic benefit to the Jophiel Tax then we agree that the government CAN create economic benefit in this manner. Now the only question is where the sweet spot is between the Jophiel Tax and the point of no (or negative) benefit.

If you disagree with the economic benefit of the Jophiel Tax then that's up to you to say why.

We don't agree though. The Jophiel Tax creates no economic benefit. Every single penny of benefit to the burger joint is offset by a penny of economic loss to someone else.

It's easy math Joph. Why can't you get this?




Are you kidding me!? I've said why several times already. Holy hell!


Math. Subtracting and adding the same number brings you back to your starting point. And wait for it... this stays true even as the numbers get larger. It's the same whether I'm adding and subtracting 1, or 1,000, or 1,000,000, or 305 million. It's the same truth. It doesn't change because you shuffle the money around and change the name and form of it. It's still X being taken away and then X being put back somewhere else.


You don't actually think that if you dig a hole, and then fill the same hole with the same dirt, that you'll somehow have more dirt in the hole, right? Even though the specific location of each dirt clod has changed, it's still the same amount of dirt in the same sized hole. You moved things around, but didn't change the total size or amount at all.

I could probably come up with 50 different analogies for you to show you why you're wrong if you want. Is that really necessary?

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. How much will your life change if you lose a penny? You wouldn't even notice, would you? It's probably come out from under your sofa or in the crease of your car seat.

Focusing assets (in this case, one penny per person) results in greater effect than the same assets diffused and unused across a vast area.

It's pretty funny watching you argue this, though.


No, one store gained, a crapton of new McD's employees gained*, grill makers gained, bakers and ranchers gained, paper companies gained, the timber industry gained, the new people hired by bakers or meat processors or paper companies gained, every business frequented by these new cooks/bakers/meat guys/whatevers gained...

On the other hand, the loss was negligible because one penny didn't make any individual impact. Because of the diffuse nature of the loss, it would be hard to make a credible argument that it had any local impact. But you insist that there was an equal loss of economic activity. Good times.

*The average McD's serves around 700 burgers a day so I'm effectively increasing their output over tenfold. You're going to need some new cooks...

Edited, Aug 17th 2011 8:14pm by Jophiel

Tax breaks don't "give" money to anyone. They take less of it away. Remember when I said that money is a placeholder for productive labor output. That corporations profits represent the net labor output of its employees (minus expenses). Its profits go up if the total combined value of those labors increase somehow, or the expenses decrease (or some combination). When the corporation buys things with that money, it's generating economic growth because their money is backed by real productive output. One increase builds another increase and grows the economy.



Wrong. Taxing the corporation takes the money representing the combined labors of the workers away. It breaks that correlation, resulting in a net economic loss. Putting that money back into the economy somewhere else at the very best breaks us even. At the very best.



Wrong! The government didn't produce the output which that money represents. It takes it from the corporation (and the workers) in the form of taxes. It then shuffles it around and spends it on other things.


We can argue for that process on the grounds of national defense, sustainment of legal systems, or even for social reasons. But you cannot argue for it on the ground of economic growth. Want to argue for food stamps, then make a moral/social argument. Argue that the need to those receiving them is worth the cost to provide them. But don't try to argue that there's some kind of economic benefit to providing someone food stamps.


Oh. And it's got to be the absolute most desperate example of political spin to attempt to deflect the fact that a rising percentage of people in the US are in need of food stamps because they've lost their jobs into some kind of bizarre argument that this is really a good thing because all those people on food stamps actually stimulate economic growth! I mean, that's got to take the political spin cake right there. I'm sure all those people who lost their jobs and are on food stamps are so happy that the Democrats put them in a position to be so helpful! Wow. Just wow...

No, otherwise I'd be arguing for the actual Jophiel Tax. Try and keep up instead of seeking a way out. The point remains that focused assets can be a force multiplier that diffuse assets are not even if the totals of both are the same. I know this is more complicated than your little "1-1!!" thing but the rest of us have moved on from preschool.


Sweet Jesus, you're an idiot.

Oh. Whew! So you were equating the liberal idea of redistributing wealth to something we both agree doesn't work? I'm good with that!



I'm keeping up just fine. I'm trying to figure out why you thought it was a good idea to use an example you admit doesn't work to support a real economic proposal. Seems kinda counter productive.



Fine. I'm yanking your chain. Whatever. Just channeling you for a moment there, with your silly analogy.

You're correct that focused assets can be a force multiplier. And that absolutely can work in economics. Heck, it's the basic concept behind things like buying stock, right? A bunch of investors, each risking a small amount of capital, can collectively build something none of them could have done (or would have wanted to risk doing) on their own. I just keep coming back to three problems though:


1. Government isn't very good at picking what to focus on. I mean, food stamps are great if our objective is to help prevent people from starving. But is that really the best place to focus economically? More important, is it better than where we took the money in the first place? As I said earlier, that's a hard argument to make.

2. It's not a choice. When people choose to focus their efforts in some way, we tend to see positive results. When they are forced to do so by someone else, this isn't necessarily the case. I suppose this is an offshoot of the first problem, but it's a biggie IMO. I don't get to choose how my money is spent, and the person spending the food stamp doesn't really either. It's just not flexible enough to work.

2. It's not really focused enough, or "special" enough. When a group of people invest in a corporation, 100% of their investment goes into the corporation, with a single business plan involved (hopefully) to accomplish something none of them would do on their own. But what we're doing here is taking a smallish amount of money from a large amount of people, then handing it in the form of food stamps to a slightly smaller number of people, then having them spend those stamps at an even smaller number of stores (but we're still talking tends of thousands of stores spread across the whole country). Where's the focus? Take that money and spend it building a moon base or some other thing we wouldn't otherwise build, and you're using the focused-asset concept to great effect. Spending it to buy food? Not so much.


Um... Which actually brings me to another point. Not sure if this is number 4, or something else entirely. The big flaw specifically with the whole argument being made that more people on food stamps is somehow a good thing because of the economic effect is that it misses one important fact:

The people buying food with the stamps didn't just magically appear today. They existed yesterday and the day before that, right? Prior to losing their jobs and ending out on food stamps, they were buying food in the same stores that they'll be buying food with their food stamps. This ties into my whole "they didn't earn the money from their own labors" bit. Before they bought the food with their own money, which was a subset of that earned by their own labor output. Thus, the cost of the food was really zero from an economic standpoint. Now, even if we assume that they are buying the exact same amount of food, there's no economic stimulus effect since we haven't actually increased the amount of food the store sells. There is a negative effect because that dollar had to be taken from someone else's productive output.


Even ignoring the broader flaws with income transfers creating economic growth, in this particular case, we can say with absolute certainty that it can't create growth. Certainly, we can say that an increase in the total number of people on food stamps (the condition at hand) cannot possibly be said to be a positive economic effect. There is nothing but negatives resulting from the transfer from other people, and absolutely zero positive at all.