ToxicSlurpee posted:

One of the biggest issues is money circulation. You can stimulate an economy by dumping raw capital into it. You can seriously just spend your way out of a recession. A bit of inflation happens but inflation is generally impossible to avoid entirely. A healthy economy also tends to have a low level of inflation anyway. Once money gets moving around it improves for everybody.

Right now money has a low velocity. A dollar isn't just a single dollar; if I give you a dollar for a sandwich you're going to take that dollar and spend it on something else. Too much saving is actually bad for the economy which is also why having public retirement funds and safety nets is a good thing. If you create a system where everybody needs to have multiple years of savings just to survive you have a lot of money sitting around doing nothing which is an issue. Which is another reason why a functional banking system is nice; to you that money is sitting there waiting for you but the bank gets to invest it.

Anyway as it stands money doesn't have enough velocity because the super rich are sitting on absurd amounts of it while using their money, power, and influence to prevent Keynsian economics. They're furiously worshiping economic policies that are at this point well known to not work at all. They have their fingers in everything and have it set up that they can't lose. You saw this in the Great Recession; their gambles paid off? loving right, more money! Their gambles failed? They had passed off the liability already and bought insurance against it failing so loving right, more money!

The blood funnel just constantly sucks money out of the economy and then sits on it. Money has no movement other than "out."

rscott posted:

I think he's talking about the estimated $10-20 trillion parked in off shore accounts not really doing anything at all, even ignoring the effects that has on the value of the dollar through monetary velocity, the $2-3 trillion dollars in government revenue that could be reasonably expected to be recovered of that money through taxes is not insignificant when it comes to the world's overall economic growth.

Overall, it appears that we have reached the end of what supply side monetary policy can accomplish in propping up a top heavy, ridiculously unbalanced economy. The best thing the US government could do right now is to print money and hand it out to people who are going to spend it immediately. Inflation is the last thing anyone should be worrying about, if anything deflation could be an issue in the future.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

That's exactly what I was talking about. Demand, as it turns out, is what drives an economy and as it stands worldwide demand is crapping out because people can't afford to buy much. When you have that much money being pulled out of the system and used to pull more money out of the system you have massive numbers of people who can't afford to much, if anything. With rising rent prices, rising cost of living, and stagnating wages the economy can't make any sort of meaningful improvements. Then you consider other things like the over $1 trillion and you've created a perfect economic poo poo storm.

Now you have billions of frustrated, angry people in the world. The world's right wing political movements are seeing that and going "it's those people who aren't like us! Let's get them!"

Helsing posted:

Josh Lyman posted:

He sleeps in a box. Surely he has access to the rest of the house.

icantfindaname posted:

I mean, to be fair nobody really has any concrete idea of how to fix the wage growth inequality problem, but I do think it's reasonable to expect a party nominally working for the economic interests of the majority of the public to act like they give even a single gently caress about the problem. You really can't say that for the people in charge of liberalism today

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Put regulations back on the banks. Increase minimum wage to where it should be. Tax the rich as heavily as they used to be taxed.

Really, the entire reason is that banks managed to rig the game.

Helsing posted:

The idealistic non-sense here is your asinine civics101 vision of US government and party politics where the only thing holding back the Democrats from implementing more substantive efforts to raise wages is because their constituents haven't been sufficiently vocal.

The Democrats easily could have put more effort into passing card check legislation which the organized labour movement really wanted (and needed) to have implemented. Organized labour is a crucial democratic constituency, they are well organized enough to pass make their demands heard, and they were traditionally an instrumental part of the institutional support for the welfare state the the Democrats were intermittently constructing from the 1930s to the 1970s. One could make a similar point about charter schools. They are massively unpopular with key democratic constituents and if anything hurt the long term viability of the Democratic party by hurting teachers unions. We could go through a list of other policies like trade or entitlement reform where significant parts of the Democratic establishment commit time, energy and political capital to carry out policies that their core constituencies don't support or even actively oppose.

Politicians are more concerned about their donors than their constituents, and on top of this they come from the same schools and they cycle in and out of the same workplaces as the ultra-wealthy lobbyist and business class so it's hardly surprising they broadly share the same economic vision and agenda. If you want to believe they're only opposed to the minimum wage out of technocratic concerns about creating an economic shock you can keep telling yourself that but they weirdly didn't seem all that concerned about the economic shock caused by trade deals they've supported. Why it's almost as though the Democrats selectively care about economic shocks that hurt large businesses while remaining largely indifferent toward policies which strip collective bargaining, throw people off welfare or otherwise strip away the economic and social rights that an older generation of liberals spend decades constructing.

Ardennes posted:

The problem is turning that rising internal discontent (which I think is real) into anything that can threaten the way things are done. As for formal political change, I am rather doubtful it is going to be possible especially after each party re-doubles their efforts to stamp out inter-party dissent. Also, the identity/race issue is going be an factor that will likely continue to be used to divide "have-nots" against each other even with changing demographics.

If anything I could see the next decade consisting of both parties doubling down on wedge-issues/identity politics because neither one wants to address the elephant in the room. You may have more people in the streets but there is still going to be a segment of the population that is loyal to the "old system" in both parties. Neither party actually wants to reform in the system in any meaningful way and almost certainly won't until they have absolutely no other choice.

There doesn't be any solution on the horizon probably until eventually a "bloody Sunday" type event happens.

Helsing posted:

Having money or control over media outlets or otherwise commanding influence is no guarantee of getting the outcomes that you expect. Being rich and powerful is sort of an entrance fee to US politics -- you won't have much influence without those things -- but it doesn't guarantee you'll get the outcomes you wanted. And even a seemingly stable situation like the GOP being dominated by an alliance of business money and Christian evangelism can blow apart very suddenly, which is what we've been watching since the end of the second Bush administration.

This isn't a great analogy but you could compare money in politics to gravity. It exerts a constant and powerful pull over everything but under the right circumstances you can still get yourself into the air and even stay there for a while.

Also, while Trump is a disaster for the GOP in the short term his success also reflects how effectively the political centre has been moved rightward since World War II. Behind the year-to-year struggle between the Republicans and Democrats or between workers and bosses there has also been a long running ideological contest over how capitalism and free enterprise are viewed by the public. Go back to the late 1940s and you'll find a business class that was exceedingly anxious about the perceived left-wing sentiments of the population. That anxiety reached a fever pitch in the 1970s when major business magnates started to think capitalism as a system might be in danger (however silly that fear seems in retrospect). A lot of resources have been invested in changing the broad ideological coordinates of American public life (I'm thinking here about major businesses hosting 'World Fairs' about the bright future capitalism would bring or business interests bankrolling Milton Friedman's TV show or numerous other examples of propagandizing outside the narrow realm of year-to-year electoral politics). This helps explain why the revolt against globalism and Wall Street among white blue collar Americans is being channeled into the doomed candidacy of a big business tycoon who promises to kick start the economy through deregulation.

So while Trump is a short-term disaster for the GOP leadership, the fact that the revolt against the GOP establishment is taking this particular form is arguably a marker of their long term success. The white working class is safely isolated from the rest of the population and thus politically inert. The political operatives most dependent on the success of the GOP will suffer but the larger movement conservative project of destroying the labour movement and trying to shutdown any European-style social democratic policies continues to yield some success.

Helsing posted:

There was a crisis in the 1970s, and it was certainly tied into white racial anxiety and increasing international competition, among other things. But the particular shape of the response of that crisis was in part dependent on power relations within society. Much in the way that the Russian revolution was a combination of a particular political tendency combinign with a particularly crisis-moment in history to produce a unique and contingent outcome (the USSR) which wasn't necessarily inevitable. In the case of the 1970s there was a pre-existing network of activists and donors that had come into existence in reaction to the New Deal and which had already made a conscious decision to take over the Republican Party and make it a vehicle for their movement.

So while the particular historical forces you point out are obviously important to explaining what happens, that doesn't mean we should ignore the actions or statements of the specific people who were participating in that historical moment. Saying "Oh, race relations broke down in the USA and international competition increased" is not really an adequate explanation for neoliberalism / neoconservatism / whatever labels you want to apply to the political developments of the late 20th century.


Business interests did mobilize though, and there are measurable impacts one can look at related to specific actions like electoral races, major labour disputes, etc. Like, you're free to type out a couple sentences making an unsupported assertion about how everything is determined without any human agency whatsoever if you like and I'm really not sure how to respond to a claim that is so sweeping and vague.

Presumably we can agree that the events of the last 40 years weren't engineered single handedly by some sinister capable of rich-people Illuminati executing some kind of grand world conspiracy. But it's pretty hard to dispute that a specific movement with specific intentions arose and seized the moment that hte 1970s offered them, and used it to carry through their ideas, and central to their political project was a desire to destroy the labour movement and roll back the New Deal. And this isn't hypothetical, they were pretty open about what they wanted to do. Sure, they wouldn't have been able to do it without the breakdown of the liberal post-war order, but that doesn't mean that movement conservatism was just some epiphenomenon surfing on the wave of 1970s discontent.


If I understand the implications of what you're saying correctly, then this is an incredibly silly position to adopt. There are clearly differences across time and space in terms of how widely political power and influence are distributed. You're basically saying "well if we can't remove 100% of inequality then there's no point trying to reduce the inequality that does exist" which is absurd and I think is a pretty clear example of motivated reasoning on your part. As you often do you start from the undefended assumption that we already live in the best possible world (I assume you wouldn't phrase it this way yourself but this is how it comes off).

Also, as a sidebar: you seem to think I'm making some kind of simplistic claim like x dollars spent directly translates into y amount of political influence. That would obviously be wrong. I think the contingent flow of historical events plays a huge role in determining outcomes and any attempt to reduce politics to a simple model in which one factor determines another factor in a clean and mechanical way, like one ping pong ball hitting another, is a dangerous and usually foolhardy exercise. Actual politics and history is very messy and confused and even in a situation where money and power are strongly correlated the rich don't always get what they want. But that doesn't mean the converse -- the idea that money is irrelevant -- is true or even plausible sounding.

Helsing posted:

You're speaking at a ridiculous level of abstraction where in one sweeping sentence you're comparing Ancient Athens, Ancient Rome, Eighteenth Century America and modern America. And your conclusion is "they all had inequalities of money and power, therefore money and power are irrelevant."

quote:

Just like your case for the robust health of American democracy is entirely reducible to "one billioniare who most other billionaires disagree with was able to win the Republican primary, therefore money in politics is irrelevant".

quote:

Or when I point out that the average elected officeholder in the federal government is a multimillionaire your only answer is that the average politician is always, on average, richer than the average person. That's an answer which is technically accurate in the most autistic way possible and completely ignores that while there's always some discrepancy, in most democratic societies it isn't anywhere close to as large as it is in the USA.

quote:

There's a lot of evidence suggesting that the American political system isn't very responsive to popular pressure and anyone with eyes to see can recognize the impact that lobbying and corporate influence have had on how the American government functions in the last 40 years. If you want to keep making these extremely vague justifications of the situation you can go ahead but they just don't seem terribly convincing.

Subjunctive posted:

That's basically tautological. "Powerful" effectively means able to influence large groups of people, directly or otherwise.

cheese posted:

What percentage of "health care" jobs are actually related to the insurance industry? It can't be very high.

Helsing posted:

Wow, the industry that benefits the most from an extremely inefficient system is full of people who don't think the system should be abandoned. I'm shocked.


Switching to a universal public system would be a massive cost saver and have the added benefit of freeing up economic resources that could be used more effectively elsewhere.

Helsing posted:

Like any disruptive economic or regulatory change some people would stand to benefit and others would stand to lose, but in this case it would clearly be a net gain. I personally would like to see a much stronger safety net and an economic policy geared around ensuring people get and keep high wage jobs, even if they have to transition from industry to industry. But insofar as some economic disruption is necessary and inevitable I think it's loving hilarious when some neoliberal shithead singing the praises of the American healthcare system suddenly starts crying over job losses.


It's one of those examples of a historically arbitrary and path-dependent outcome that sort of made sense in the past (though even then it left a lot to be desired) and which now can literally only be justified by appealing to how disruptive it would be to change it. Even this thread's resident apologist cannot quite bring themselves to argue that the system is working fine -- all they seem capable of doing is insinuating that somehow any change would make it worse.

Helsing posted:

Doctors are actually a pretty good example of how "free" trade works in America. Right in the mid 1990s at the height of free trade mania and when other, especially blue collar, industries had been hit hard by economic changes, doctors and their organizations started freaking out about how the government was training too many physicians:


So, of course, the government tightened licensing restrictions to reduce the supply of doctors and thus protect the wages of the existing physicians. By the exact same logic that justifies free trade in manufactured goods, this is a huge cost to the rest of the economy. If American doctors were compensated at the same rates as European doctors the result would be -- again, using the exact same logic that justifies gains from trade in other areas -- tens of billions of dollars saved every year. Indeed the cost savings would be much greater than many of the trade deals that are relentlessly advocated for by "free trade" advocates.

Xae posted:

That is a non-sequitur if I ever saw one. Automation and Labor savings has gently caress all to do with the current clusterfuck.

And here is the backstory:
Healthcare wasn't always unaffordable. It became unaffordable due to medical inflation. It has been sitting there growing at 7-10% a year for decades. The inflation has to be stopped because 7-10% growth is just not sustainable under any payer system.

It isn't just "administrative overhead". Look up OECD figures for things like MRI per capita or procedures per capita. Right now the USA performs almost twice as many MRIs per person as the UK (55/107). The US performs dramatically more procedures per person than places like the UK. Simply changing the payer system does nothing to address that.

See these are good ideas because they address the core problem: The cost of providing care. Paying for care is ultimately secondary if it is affordable in the first place. Cracking down on the tech arms race is a huge one too. Hospitals are getting into dick measuring contests over technology and patients are demanding the latest and greatest things, particularly in imaging, even if they don't need it. You don't need a state of the art MRI scan for a routine broken bone, but you'll probably get one in the USA.


Just nationalizing the payers is literally the dumbest thing you can do. It is the one thing worse than doing nothing. Because the only thing that happens is shifting a cost that is growing uncontrollably onto the public books. With no cost control and at the current growth rates Medical Care will be 30% of the US economy in 10 years. It is projected to start to drop in ~15 years due to "natural demographic changes". It will be something like 40-45% of the US economy at its height.

Single Payer is a lovely hill to die on in the United States. CO, a blue state, put single payer on the ballot in 2016. It lost by 80 points. There are plenty of countries that have non-single payer systems that work well. Implementing a system that mimics one of those is a winnable fight that can improve people's lives.

And as a side note, Medicare isn't the panacea everyone who doesn't have it thinks it is. Its claims get denied much more than private insurers do. It is just that when they get denied the provider fixes the problem and resubmits to medicare instead of trying to bill the patient. I spent my last couple of years in the industry dealing with the Re-submission poo poo. If I hammered home one thing it was that providers are loving poo poo at paperwork. We had a project that was billed as this miraculous RULES ENGINE (tm) that could determine if a providers claim would get rejected. It was just a bunch of stupid poo poo "Hey, if you diagnose a broken left arm make sure the treatment is coded for treating a broken left arm. Not a broken right arm or a broken left leg. ". One of the smarter things Obamacare did was mandate the ICD10 changeover, which hopefully kills off all these lovely homegrown coding systems hospitals used then tried to transcribe to ICD9.

Orange Devil posted:

Even if it's invested, private wealth always seeks a positive return, so it's only ever invested in things which are expected to be profitable in the relatively short term. The exception here is if a wealthy person takes a personal interest in either a branch of basic research or other long term scientific goal or trying to eradicate a disease or something of that nature. Even in those cases though, the bulk of that person's wealth still remains profit seeking, as a single person is literally unable to personally manage billions of dollars in any kind of effective way.

It means that massive amounts of wealth by definition can not be used to do any of a million terribly useful things which would trivially and demonstrably make life better on this planet because you can't make a relatively short term individual profit off of it.

Oh and most if not all of the major problems facing humanity are exactly the kind of problems doing those terribly useful things, such as solving hunger and abject poverty, providing access to medical care and curing diseases, developing infrastructure and educating people, would at the least contribute to solving. The other major kinds of problems we have tend to be caused by massive amounts of money being profit seeking (and failing to find adequate returns), such as the financial bubbles of the last 2 decades.

Capitalism is a woefully inefficient economic system for improving human lives. Though I will concede it is better than slavery and feudalism.

Helsing posted:

Simple, intuitive and compelling narratives like "let's give everyone access to this highly popular and efficient program so that they don't have to go bankrupt or forgo medical treatment when they get sick" is, in my opinion, a better strategy for mobilizing voters. It's far fetched at the moment but I think one thing that leftists and liberals in the US have lacked in recent years is a longer-term agenda or guiding ideology that goes beyond technocratic tinkering. Having a broadly understood goal like expanding health insurance to the masses rather than trying to force people through economic sanctions into a fundamentally broken market for health insurance is the way to go.

As for subsidising employment that isn't the same as trying to keep every parasitic or inefficient job in the country frozen in place. You're right I'm being a bit flippant here but that's mostly because I assume that Xae's "won't somebody think of the jobs?!" argument isn't really in good faith and is, as I said above, just a form of special pleading that he wouldn't extend to other victims of economic change.


I wasn't suggesting doctor salaries are the main driver of healthcare costs. The point is more to illustrate how economic regulations are mostly driven by the power of various special interests and have only a very limited relationship to economic efficiency. We could have globalized the doctor's profession in much the same way that we've globalized manufacturing supply chains and the result would have been, by textbook economic theory, massive savings for the rest of the economy.

Orange Devil posted:

Uhuh, and who controls the government?

Orange Devil posted:

Because it's only indirectly controlled by corporate interests rather than outright. Also the government isn't so much easily corrupted as literally created by and for the capitalist class. That was the whole point of the liberal revolutions. In any case, the solution can not be to democratically (or otherwise for that matter) change the government to serve the interests of the people without also doing away with the capitalist economic system.

Also when I talk about the capitalist system being terrible at improving the human condition and mention healthcare, why the gently caress is everyone else only talking about the US? People are dying of easily and cheaply treated diseases by the loving millions in other parts of the world you know. It's a massive indictment of capitalism.

Helsing posted:

The "centre" isn't a coherent position, it's more of a rhetorical stance for defending the status quo, which is all but indefensible.

And people didn't lose faith in the status quo because of a Russian mind virus or the meme magick of the internet. They lost faith because of repeated and highly visible failures. Domestic and foreign policy events that weren't supposed to happen have continued to happen year after year. There's absolutely no evidence, even after all these failures, that anyone within the "centre" actually recognizes or acknowledges their significant role in creating these situations. They are very much the problem and as long as they're allowed to keep running things they are going to continue screwing up and those screw ups are going to add fuel to the flames.

I mean, what would your proposal actually look like in practice? I cannot imagine how "the left", whatever we want that to mean in this context, could do anything except discredit itself further by trying to restore people's "faith" in the status quo.

If the establishment wants to restore faith they could take a page from the lessons of the 20th century. A strong political commitment to broadly shared prosperity, sharp limits on monopolies and oligopolies to prevent price gouging, ensuring an ample supply of good jobs and a strong distrust of finance and financial deregulation, those are some of the basic requirements for a system where people have faith in their government (notice I say they are necessary but not that they are sufficient, since other factors are required as well). There's zero evidence that the people benefiting from the status quo right now would ever tolerate those policies.

quote:

What the hell are you talking about? It would not be difficult to either import medical experts or even to subsidize medical tourism and fly people out to approved clinics in other countries where care is less expensive. A throw away line about how "healthcare is local" is not a substitute for making an actual argument.

Helsing posted:

This is a rather hoary and cliched way of defining the "centre". What does it look like in practice for someone to adopt and defend this view, and are you seriously arguing (as seems to be your implication) that any defense of a government program or indeed democracy itself can only be channeled through "centrism"?

quote:

The closest thing to a concrete example of how this would play out is implying in your last post that the left somehow bears some responsibility for Trump because they tend to share his sentiment that "the system is rigged". So your suggesting the left just drop that critique so it can make mealy mouthed civics 101 homilies to the importance of compromise?

quote:

Why? Given the vast sums of political capital that were expended to clear the way for major trade deals why do you think it's somehow prohibitive for the government to bring in foreign trained doctors or to subsidize medical tourism for patients? You're not even making an argument here you're just stubbornly repeating "it just is!"

call to action posted:

Why does globalization/free trade seem to be viewed as inevitably as climate change or the sun rising in the east, in some circles? Certainly there's a lot of momentum behind it, but it doesn't seem like a force of nature to me.

Helsing posted:

Centrism didn't lose legitimacy because people said nasty things about it. It lost legitimacy because it was the expression of a corrupt and sclerotic system that was incapable of reforming itself even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it was failing. This seems to be completely absent from your analysis.


This is all so reductive and simplistic that I don't even know where to begin formulating a response. Has it occured to you that supposedly centre-left politicians supporting financial deregulation, and then responding to a massive finanical crisis by imposing government austerity measures, probably played a much larger role in the rise of political extremist groups?

Your entire post is written as though objective reality doesn't exist and the only thing that influences political trends is what people say rather than what they do. Left-wingers correctly criticizing the massive failures of the status quo is not what lead to Donald Trump or the rise of right-wing extremists in Europe.

quote:

Give me a loving break. How can you make such sloppy arguments in good conscience? You're not in any way responding to the substance of what I said, you're trying to redefine a word so you can win the argument on the narrowest possible grounds. I've pointed out that, if the political will existed, the US could realize billions of dollars of savings by either sending people abroad for treatment or bringing in more foreign doctors. The truth or falsity of that statement in no way hinges on how you define the term "globalization". This is such a slimy attempt at a response that word's almost fail me. You haven't in any way challenged the substance of my claim you've tried to define it out of existence.

It's even more egregious because you're using a definition of globalization that you seem to have invented just to win this argument.

Here's a summary from an IMF document that I found with about two seconds of googling. It's very much a pro-globalization document so I can't imagine you'll object to its ideological tilt:


The reason that trade in medical care isn't globalized but manufacturing is has more to do with politics than logistics. If the stated reasons for reducing trade and investment barriers in manufacturing were followed to their logical conclusion then our policy makers would be dedicating time and effort to reducing doctors salaries through foreign competition. The logistical hurdles are nowhere near great enough to explain why this hasn't happened. The clear explanation -- as illustrated by that story I posted up thread -- is political, not technocratic. Because, as uncomfortable as it might make you to acknowledge this, political power and conflicts between domestic interest groups (such as capital vs. organizd labour) are a fundamental part of the calculus surrounding which industries have been most exposed to international competition. No, they are not the only factor, and yes logistics (such as the rise of containerization) play a role here, but you consistently try to write as though domestic political struggles between special interests isn't absolutely crucial for understanding how globalization plays out in practice.

Uranium Phoenix posted:

Funnily enough, I just read an article about economic wealth being siphoned from developing countries to developed ones: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/jan/14/aid-in-reverse-how-poor-countries-develop-rich-countries
As the article says: Since 1980, about $16.3 trillion
Here's the report the article is based off of and the nice graph they made:

Helsing posted:

Reducing these incredible complicated world-historic processes down to a couple abstract numbers and then using them to prove that progress happens either because of or "in spite of" globalization seems like a dubious exercise. I think it's fair to point out that trade flows end can end up extracting significant amounts of wealth from already poor countries but trying to say that development in, say, China, is happening despite globalization is a bit of a reach.

It's fair to say globalization doesn't work in the way it's commonly presented, that the most successful economies don't follow the advice laid out by the so-called "Washington Consensus", or to point out that global growth rates have actually been lower in much of the world since the 1980s, but I don't think you can completely dismiss the exchange of technology, movement of factories or the opening of first world markets. If we broadly define globalization to refer to the process of greater global economic interchange and trade then I don't see how you can fully explain the growth of various Asian economies without reference to their trade with other parts of the world.

Your argument might apply more directly to some other countries but at least in the case of a large country like China it sure seems as though they were able to bring in huge flows of investment and technology that they wouldn't have otherwise had access to had they tried to finance their growth exclusively through their own national economy. One might also argue that at least to some extent the pressure to sell in foreign markets is part of what helped Asian development strategies excel whereas a lot of Latin American import-substitution strategies under performed expectations, at least in part because companies had captive domestic markets and friendly governments which reduced pressure to develop globally competitive products.

Helsing posted:

I know from our past discussions that your position here stems from a tautological definition of American democracy in which you assume that elections are accurate reflections of what voters want because otherwise they'd elect someone else. This despite a substantial body of evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, showing deep and pervasive dissatisfaction with government and with both political parties.

The full answer to your question would be a monograph length essay (at minimum) on the role large investors play in the political process, the extent to which voters are forced to choose between two extremely narrow ranges of options (neither of which actually disagrees on the fundamentals of the economic system), etc. One recent study which I know that you're aware of concludes, on the basis of extensive comparisons between the expressed preferences of voters at difference income levels, that: "the preferences of economic elites have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do." This wikipedia page on the so called "Investor Theory of Politics", which was coined by politician scientist Tom Fergusson, offers a reasonably good theoretical framework for understanding how this situation develops.

quote:

Obviously there's a lot of cultural baggage here. You can't really discuss the rise of New Right ideology or neoliberalism in the late 20th century without going into the role of race, crime, Vietnam, generational change, etc. And voters have made plenty of decisions to enthusiastically support right-wing figures like Reagan (even if his popularity is massively exaggerated in retrospect compared to what it was at the time). The US electorate is certainly not secretly yearning for socialism, even if a lot of individual social democratic policies poll extremely well. Indeed to a large degree the evidence suggests the underlying desires of voters are somewhat contradictory and incoherent.

But the really obvious reality here is that overall voters and their preferences aren't what drives policy making. Voters are obstacles to be dealt with on the road to power, and they're made significantly easier to deal with when both parties have to cater to the same basic pool of large political investors. Political disagreements are safely displaced to 'safe' issues which won't threaten the parasitic layer of lobbyists and special interests that run the country.

There are specific situations where organized blocks of voters are able to press their demands more forcefully onto the system and get some kind of response. Life isn't a computer game where everyone always plays out their assigned role. There are unexpected upsets or disruptions and the people who run society are fallible humans who make mistakes or strategic oversights, which is how you can end up with a widely disliked figure like Trump winning an election he wasn't supposed to win. The claim here isn't that monied interests are omnipotent or that the US ruling class is monolithic and has no internal divisions that sometimes result in very real competition. But facile civics 101 models of the government in which political parties are just vote-maximizing efforts that cleanly replicate the desires of the "median voter" and produce an outcome based on that median voters policy preferences are an absolutely worthless way to interpret election results.

quote:

Look, this is just ridiculous. You're completely ignoring anything I say and repeating these "just so" stories. You don't have to agree with my arguments but you need to at least demonstrate you've read the words I wrote and took them into account before crafting a response. Everything you've written here could have just as easily been written by you had you not read any of my arguments.

I posted an article in this very thread describing how right at the height of free trade mania in the 1990s there was a lobbying move by American doctors to limit the influx of foreign trained doctors, a move explicitly prompted by a desire to prevent an "over supply" of doctors that they feared would reduce their wages. You also haven't addressed why the government couldn't just subsidize medical tourism to certified foreign clinics. Yes there would be barriers to entry here but they are far from insurmountable and would indeed be comparable to the similar technical and legal barriers to trade in goods and services that had to be overcome before modern supply chains could be internationalized to the extent that they are today.

If you want to have a debate about globalization and the technical constraints on it and what the root drivers of American trade policy are (special interest lobbying vs. technical and structural constraints, or however you want to frame it) then that's great. I enjoy debates that force me to reconsider my positions or to arrange my own thoughts into arguments. But that's not what's happening here. Replying to you feels, frankly, like a big waste of time because your responses almost never seem to reply to anything specific I've said. Your just making the same bald assertion again and again. You don't really listen to what other people say and then integrate it into your future arguments, you wait for your turn to speak and then proceed as though you didn't listen to a single thing the other person said.

VitalSigns posted:

Yes you are effectively saying that the rich should have more stuff. If your argument for liberal free trade policies is that it creates more wealth overall on the planet then there is no need for there to be 'winners' and 'losers', that wealth can be used to maintain the health and security of American workers while also raising up workers in developing countries.
When you argue that it's okay if American workers can't afford to go to the doctor or send their kids to college or save for retirement if that helps foreign workers, what you're really saying is that it's okay if all the profits from free trade go to the ultra-rich. Not only is that morally wrong, but from a practical standpoint you get a populist backlash and if the first-word left won't protect workers then the fash will make those promises and win. Which is what is happening in the Anglosphere now.

at you quoting "Workers of the World Unite" and then pitting workers against each other by telling one group they have to suffer and watch their jobless kids die of opiate addiction to help another group of workers. Socialism means defending the right of all workers to a decent living, not defending the right of capitalists to use one group to undercut another's wages and safety.

Although as Helsing pointed out, even your supposition that free trade is the best way to help developing countries is suspect because the poor countries that developed the most in the twentieth century and had the largest gains in quality of life, like the Asian Tigers, did not follow the Washington Consensus and instead followed the successful precedents of 19th-Century wonders like America, Prussia, and Japan.


Nah the Top 8 richest people have as much wealth as the bottom half of the world combined. You could feed the world with just the wealth those people control. The idea that the ultra-poor can only be helped by loving the poor is a right-wing framing to get the poor to vote to "protect" what little they have (actually, this outcome only protects the rich).


"Workers of the World Unite except American workers can get hosed, that capitalist who paid himself a billion-dollar bonus to fire you and hire someone else for a starvation wage in unsafe conditions is a noble humanitarian". OK well enjoy watching the fash take over more and more developed countries I guess, I hope you're from a place that has a good military.

Corporations are greedy and evil, and people like Mitt Romney and Margaret Thatcher and Charles Koch are soulless monsters who will happily grind grandmothers into grist sandwiches and sell them back to the poor to make a buck. If you're being sarcastic about evil corporations then you're no friend of the working class.


No they do not "hurt" me, even as a young single professional I benefit from taxes because I can't afford my own private army and police force, and I don't have enough savings to support myself forever if I lose my job, I need unemployment insurance and medicaid and social security and food stamps to be there for me and I do not benefit by destroying these programs to save a couple hundred bucks. This is the same "logic" that says insurance hurts me economically because the average person loses money on all insurance. You're completely ignoring that even if an edge case exists where a middle-class person pays more than he receives directly (and I'm not sure such a case exists, but even if it does), that person is still buying risk management which is really important.

Your argument "but if you alone were exempted from taxes it would benefit you" is stupid, "I alone" am not exempted from taxes when they're cut, when taxes are cut they are cut for everyone and the programs I need go away. Also there's the hidden cost of regressive tax cuts: rising inequality and the corresponding drop in demand hurts the economy and therefore hurts me financially, which is why I'm not convinced that your theoretical edge case middle-class person who would be better off in a Randian world without taxes and public education and welfare and regulation actually exists.

I would also "benefit" if "I alone" were exempted from having to pay for anything, so I guess literally every transaction I make "hurts" me if I don't get everything for free.

The logical conclusion of your argument by the way is that the worst possible time period for American professionals was the post-war boom with crippling 90% tax rates, and the best was the gilded age because of all the "benefits" of no income taxes, I'll leave you to work out where you went wrong.

VitalSigns posted:

My opinions on immigration are the complete opposite of Donald Trump's. I want amnesty and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants because their illegal status is how businesses are able to exploit them to undercut wage and workplace safety laws without fear that their employees will report them to the authorities. I agree with you that H1-B visas should be fixed to end exploitation (for example, H1-B visas should not be tied to a job for a single employer) and not abolished. Unionizing and collective bargaining in those industries would make it impossible to undercut wages by importing foreigners while still serving the original purpose of H1-B visas (to make it possible to bring in skilled workers to solve shortages of qualified personnel). When programmers complain about Indian visa-holders undercutting their pay, we should tell them "here's what a union would do for you." We should not tell them "gently caress you, I'm glad you're unemployed because it's good for the third-world poor" because they will notice their employers making bank on the deal, will rightly conclude you're fine with that and hate you, and vote for the guy who comes along and says "we'll kick out anyone browner than this bag and make %country% great again".

Trade:
I'm not against "globalism" in the vague and general way this thread is using it, because that kind of anti-globalism makes a technologically advanced economy impossible, if you want devices using rare earth magnets in New Jersey you're going to need global trade. But you can't boil down all trade to vague definitions and hat-sized slogans, so as briefly as I can (ie, not briefly at all):

Absolute advantage: This is the kind of trade you're talking about that makes the world wealthier overall. We could build greenhouses to grow coffee and bananas in the USA and "create jobs" but this is less efficient and makes the world poorer overall. We should absolutely trade for these commodities provided that we require the producing countries to pay a living wage and protect workers. Then the money those workers get from us can be spent to buy goods Americans produce, and this is more efficient than creating American coffee-growing jobs in greenhouses. Coffee companies should not be allowed to exploit their workers and pocket the extra savings, that money should be coming back to America in trade for American goods that in turn benefit Columbian farmworkers instead of that money being hoarded by the ultra-rich and used to speculate in our housing markets or whatever

Comparative advantage: Again, the kind of trade you're talking about. There may be no absolute advantage to buying Mexican-made clothes rather than producing our own but if, say, we could be using our advanced education and industrial base to employ those workers doing something else like alternative energy generation, producing electric cars, etc then again this makes the world overall wealthier. And again we should do this provided we actually make those investments and create those jobs and provided those Mexican workers make a living wage so they can buy our electric cars and Hollywood movies. If you start shipping Wisconsin's factories overseas you better make drat sure there is free education and a living stipend for those laid-off workers and you are building (or encouraging companies to build) the new factories in their place, if not for moral reasons, then for practical reasons because they will vote fash if they think it will bring their lost jobs back.

Cost-cutting with cheaper foreign labor: this does not make the world richer. It is environmentally damaging to ship goods around, and it is simply a transfer of wealth from American workers to (a) poor people in other countries and (b) the ultra-rich. (a) is a good goal but this is an inefficient way of achieving it. What we should do is tax the rich and use that money to help that country build up its own domestic industry and education (incidentally, this is what the United States did for global strategic reasons whenever it wanted to build an actual economically powerful and prosperous ally rather than an exploitable colony. The Marshall Plan, the rebuilding of Japan, our massive foreign aid program to South Korea, etc). Free trade, exploitation of labor and resources, and dumping of manufactured goods on their economy were reserved for countries we wanted to keep poor and powerless for as long as possible.


This is correct and this is what we should do. A properly designed progressive tax system benefits everyone except the top richest minority for whom the loss is a minor inconvenience.

Earlier you were arguing something different, namely


This is right-wing ideology. First of all, it's wrong: the top 10% of earners in America bring in half of the country's income. They alone could pay all our bills.

84% of income tax receipts come from the top 20% of earners: if their tax bills just increased by a less than a quarter, income taxes could be zero on everyone else. "The rich don't have enough money, the Democrats really want to tax you out of house and home" is a right-wing lie, the rich have more than enough money.

Taxing the rich would not hurt the ability to invest for lots of reasons. Money doesn't disappear when it's taxed, it is spent on schools and roads and food stamps and whatever, and that money goes somewhere, and when non-rich people have money to spend there are investment opportunities. The ultra-rich don't invest their monthly paychecks, they invest the vast amounts of wealth they control (and except for property taxes, wealth is not taxed) in order to get returns and those investments will continue to be made as long as there are profitable investments (because only gains are taxed). We had a 90% top tax rate in the 1950s and there were plenty of funds available for private investment.

And anyway our problem isn't too little money to be invested, our problem is too few places to invest because consumer demand is slack. To deal with this the ultra-rich tried to chase returns by funneling money into huge bubble-inflating casinos like the housing market that hosed up prices for a generation of people trying to buy homes and ultimately crashed the economy when no one could afford their mortgage payments anymore. After 2008 happened no one should be seriously suggesting the ultra-rich are in danger of "running out" of money to invest: the opposite is true, they have so much money they can't find enough places to invest it, it is such a problem that US Treasuries have occasionally dipped to negative interest rates, they have literally paid the government to take their money.

Private Speech posted:

Well there's foreign aid and other such forms of economic transfers, but yeah pretty much.

I wrote free competition in goods originally, I used free trade as a shorthand for it when I edited the post. I suppose either way it's not actually very meaningful to call it "free" though.

Dr. Fishopolis posted:

You're still assigning penalty to taxation, and referring to it as "redistribution". You seem to consider it a sort of necessary punishment that the rich "take care of the poor".

Have you considered that higher marginal tax rates help the rich as well? It's not just "the right thing to do", taxing the rich is good for the economy in general, which in turn, is good for the rich. The rich certainly don't benefit from the social breakdown and authoritarian chaos that massive wealth inequality generates, either.

Put very simply, would you rather have half a billion dollars that you have no hope of spending in your lifetime, but you live in a country with a strong middle class and a growing economy, or would you rather have three billion dollars that you have no hope of spending in your lifetime, but you live in a post-soviet authoritarian satellite state?

Dr. Fishopolis posted:

And a benefit in the medium to long term that vastly outweighs the short term penalty. It's not a silly detail, it's the core difference in perspective that I'm trying to reconcile.

edit: It's not even a short term penalty. The only way that could be true is if tax money disappeared into space after collection. In a progressive system, some benefit more than others in the short term, but everyone is buying something tangible and immediately helpful with their tax money.

VitalSigns posted:

No, if the goods are cheaper to make overseas for any reason (including lower cost of living) that's absolute advantage. Comparative advantage is when you and I can both make shirts for $10, but I can make pants for $20 and you can make pants for $30. And therefore everyone is goods-richer if I spend more time making pants and you spend more time making shirts and we trade for what we need. Theoretically

Theoretically. Because what do you mean make "everyone" goods-richer? Not everyone, not literally every single person affected, not the Wisconsin family whose breadwinner gets laid off before qualifying for a pension, whose kids now have no jobs after high school. So no, not "everyone". Some of that money turns into higher profits which are extracted by the ultra-rich and used for other rent-seeking unproductive activities like gambling in financial markets instead of being productively invested (because families like that Wisconsin family are no longer buying, the investment opportunities from selling to them dried up). Which is why I qualified that you need to tax away enough of the profits to actually make those investments in American workers and industry to replace the industry that's leaving, and not let the country hollow out into an unemployable underclass rife with opiate addiction and petty crime, ruled over by a small ultra-rich owner class.

quote:

David Ricardo developed the classical theory of comparative advantage in 1817 to explain why countries engage in international trade even when one country's workers are more efficient at producing every single good than workers in other countries. He demonstrated that if two countries capable of producing two commodities engage in the free market, then each country will increase its overall consumption by exporting the good for which it has a comparative advantage while importing the other good, provided that there exist differences in labor productivity between both countries.[5][6] Widely regarded as one of the most powerful[7] yet counter-intuitive[8] insights in economics, Ricardo's theory implies that comparative advantage rather than absolute advantage is responsible for much of international trade.

VitalSigns posted:

You know what else is a "short-term" benefit to the individual? Stealing!

You get stuff without paying anything, what's not to love?

BrandorKP posted:

The model was flawed. The rising tide of comparative advantage did not lift all boats. It exacerbated inequality instead eg. As described in The China Shock. Those of us in the center failed to recognize what was going on. The idea failed to provide fruit for the people it made hungry.

If there is a future for the model it must bear fruit. To me that means a new, new deal. Universal health-care, universal education, and universal welfare/ unemployment/ retirement.

Helsing posted:

I'm not denying that many millions of people have risen out of absolute poverty. The statistics there are unambiguous. We know that in absolute terms people are getting more calories of food, more dollars of payment, consuming a larger basket of goods, etc. I would point out that the sustainability of this situation is questionable given the incredible strain we're putting on the planet's environment, and given that the current global economy has no effective mechanisms for regulating carbon emissions. But to be clear I am in no way denying that there have been improvements across many metrics.

My point of contention here is whether it makes any sense to bundle all these improvements into one giant process that gets called "globalization" or whether there are actually numerous semi-independent processes at work here.

asdf32 is trying to attribute the success of, for instance, China, in pulling large numbers of people out of poverty to a "liberal model" but this is a really sketchy statement to be making, and at bare minimum it ought to be accompanied with supporting evidence. To use a really extreme example: let's say I'm scratching a lottery ticket just as Beethoven's Fifth starts playing. I win a million dollars. It would be really stupid of me to just assume that because the two events were correlated in time, therefore I won the lottery "because I was listening to Beethoven!" I could even produce a graph over time showing how my income growth spiked at just the moment I was listening to the song. Just look at these before and after numbers, they can't lie! I went my whole life without listening to Beethoven and never earned more than $80,000 in a year. Five minutes after I put on Beethoven I was raking in a $1,000,000 jackpot!

This reductive tendency to pretend every economic policy, model and idea of the last forty years is somehow magically vindicated by the fact a bunch of countries -- many of which violated the key rules outlined by neoliberal economists and governance organizations -- increased their income per capita, is propaganda, not reasoned argument. To properly frame an argument like that you need to go into way more specific detail.