What Warren said....Follow

My bad. It's a 17"

HAHA BIJOU IS BLIND!!
HAHA BIJOU IS BLIND!!

now he can see it.

Edited, Aug 19th 2011 2:41pm by Xsarus

Wouldn't most poor people (or at least many, don't hold me on "most") rent and therefore have a fridge as part of their rental dwelling rather than them throwing down $1,100 for a brand new Kenmore?

Edited, Aug 19th 2011 3:59pm by Jophiel

Bwahahahahahahahahaha!!!



Edited, Aug 19th 2011 6:14pm by Jophiel

"That amount is only 700,000 NPRs!"

Edit; Oops, off by a magnitude of THOUSANDS

Edited, Aug 19th 2011 7:33pm by LockeColeMA

It's also what gbaji does, accidentally, when he hilariously swings and misses trying to refute it.

It's weird when you can see how his views cause him to skew a point before it's even had a chance to be made.

Edited, Aug 19th 2011 7:32pm by Eske

Dig in deeper, man

What counter? You're just babbling, you obviously hadn't seen the clip before you started babbling (who knows if you have by now) and are just spinning.

Gee, Gbaji, should I point out the errors so you can start yelling "It's just my opinion!!!"?

Or should I just laugh at the hysterical martyrdom complex on display before me?

Answer:

Why do you ask a question I've already answered 500 times on this forum?

I'll give you a hint: The second sentence you wrote is false. As I have said numerous times, when you tax the rich, you don't really take anything from that rich person. Most people we'd label as rich could pay several times as much taxes as they do and not have to reduce their own personal standard of living a single dime. But "someone" pays that tax, right? That someone is us. It's all the people their investments benefits. It's the people the money that was taxed away might have hired, or the products they might have made which are now just a little bit more expensive or less advanced, or any of the zillions of things that rich people do with their money.


Who do you think is actually paying the tax if a guy who earns $500M/year, spends $50M of it on himself, and then rolls the remaining $450M each year into his investment portfolio pays an extra $20M in taxes? Do you honestly think he's going to deduct that from his personal expenses? Or do you think he'll just put less of the remainder back into the market?


And I'll ask this question again: If you don't believe that money held/invested in the market actually affects the fortunes of regular joes, then why do you suppose a housing bubble collapse, which almost exclusively affected the total volume of wealth in the investment pools of large financial institutions caused a recession and made unemployment increase from 5% to nearly 10%? As I have also said repeatedly, clearly money invested in the market *does* affect all of us. If a reduction in that money causes us to lose jobs, then it's reasonable to argue that the presence of that money was what created those jobs in the first place (or at least sustained them). Not directly, but indirectly via market effects (yes, the dreaded "trickle down theory" that liberals have worked so hard for 3 decades to convince everyone doesn't work).


This can't really be in question anymore, can it? And if we accept that that money does help all of us, and not just the rich, and we accept that by raising taxes on the rich, we're really taxing that pool of investment money, why continue to think that it doesn't hurt us at all? Why on earth, after we just saw a reduction of investment capital in the financial industry caused by a bubble trigger a nasty recession would we refuse to believe that the same reduction caused by taxation would be any different? It might be slightly less dramatic, but it will have the same dollar for dollar effect.


That's why I oppose higher taxes on the rich. Because it does affect me, and everyone else.

Gbaji, let's say increase the percentiles in the upper tax brackets instead of the middle tax brackets. These are not the poor, they have investments, which as you said help to build companies and are a component in growing the economy. Keep in mind that these are the only two taxation models available, as increasing the very bottom tier tax brackets is realistically not sufficient to generate any sort of income increase, as they don't have enough taxable wealth. Both potentially taxable groups will have to make changes in their investment choices, taxing no-one won't affect the policy decisions in nearly they way you want; as public debt isn't as strong a motivator for program reform as actual taxation, and will lead to higher taxes down the road.

If anything, higher taxation rates in the higher brackets (on investment income) would give a competitive advantage to broad based asset management, which would created less irrational markets and thus tighter and less rigid hi-low swings, since the fundamental mechanics get weird when investor size is enough to buyout swaths of market assets.

Sidenote: I'd actually like to make several entitlement adjustments, like a progressive welfare incentive system (ie. transitioning out the irregular income edge effects created by the mish-mash of current entitlements into a smooth income curvature for those working while on public assistance), similar reforms for those who have been laid off/are out of work (along with a decaying compensation scale), and a couple other smaller things. I haven't taken enough of a look at EoL care modeling to give any well balanced solutions for that.



Yeah, no, it's not the reduction of capital that hurt the financial industry. It's a valuation problem.

If a bank is worth less than zero dollars (A solvency problem), it's not a problem that can ever be solved by increasing investment returns by cutting taxes on that investment. It is **** out of luck. (Barring a negative case bailout)

If noone wants to lend to the bank because they think it's worth less than zero dollars, due to unknown asset evaluations, it's not a problem that can be solved by increasing investment returns by cutting taxes on that investment. It's a problem that requires public evaluation (and subsequent correction), capital bridging (positive case public or private bailout) or increases in investment returns orders of magnitude above capital gains tax reduction, unless the tax is somewhere on the order of 50%+.

Please think things through here.

Then why did we see increases in the aftermath of other such collapses in the financial sectors? As the S&L crisis progressed, we saw unemployment spike up to 8%. After the tech-stock bubble and 9/11 attacks, unemployment spiked up just over 6%.

Clearly, this is not a factor that is unique to some economic conditions which started in 2001 and can somehow be blamed on Bush and the GOP. This is *normal*. When the financial sector takes a hit, unemployment tends to increases. The effects of less capital held in the supply side "trickles down" and affects Joe public working at their jobs.


Hell. It's a very clear labor trend. Plug in a good starting date on that applet and look at the output.

What's interesting is that the low points for unemployment occur just before the "crash" in each case, with the high point occurring about 1-2 years afterwards. Crisis point for S&L crisis was 1989. Crisis point for techbubble and 9/11 was late 2001. Crisis point for housing bubble was mid 2008. While I'm sure a "correlation != causation" response is coming, given that both our arguments are based on an assumption that one is causative to the other, it's an unfair counter. If you're going to argue that the housing bubble caused false low unemployment and then high unemployment after it crashed, it's kinda absurd to argue that it *didn't* have the same effects in the others given that we see a very similar pattern.

This pattern is not "new" in any way. It's normal. There's just no data to support the supposition that Bush and the GOP made some fundamental change to our economic structure to make this recession "different" than the previous ones. Certainly, you can't make that argument just looking at the employment figures.

What is new is the lack of recovery though. And as I've been arguing all along, that's because of the difference in what our government did in response to the respective economic conditions. While the specifics of the events leading up to each crisis were different, the pattern of effect was very similar in all three cases. If we want to look at why the recovery is different in this case, we need to look at the differences. And in this case, those differences occurred *after* the crash, not before. The before-crash pattern is the same. It's what happened after that is different.

Edited, Aug 22nd 2011 3:06pm by gbaji