[jeffkrol]

Thanks for playing...........

The best polling on how Americans want to fix the budget and avert the fiscal cliff. - Slate Magazine

The results of our survey offer some perspective on the fiscal cliff negotiations in Washington. Americans, it appears, support the broad outline of the fiscal cliff: deep cuts to discretionary and defense spending, increased taxes, and stable entitlement benefits. The people’s grand bargain may look more like the fiscal cliff, in fact, than the current likely alternatives. Before Congress and the president resolve their differences by cutting entitlements and preserving defense spending, perhaps they should spend the holidays talking to their constituents

Of course the biggest problem is thinking of the need for that large of a cut to "gov. stimulus"....

https://survey-us.yougov.com/v05sKJSpvgLB05

I stopped here.. good enough for me

Your current total is $626 billion out of $900 billion

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Last edited by jeffkrol; 12-21-2012 at 12:51 PM.

[Winder]

deep cuts to discretionary and defense spending

We can cut every dime of discretionary spending.... All of the military, FBI, CIA and every other government acronym and still not cover the cost of social welfare system and non-discretionary obligations.

[jeffkrol]

We can cut every dime of discretionary spending.... All of the military, FBI, CIA and every other government acronym and still not cover the cost of social welfare system and non-discretionary obligations.

just for you...............

James Livingston makes three economic arguments in favor of consumption over private investment/greater production. 1) Without enough buying, a consumer-driven economy like ours swoons; 2) Growing inequality in America exacerbates the problem of too little consumption -- in economese: "insufficient aggregate demand"; 3) private investment hasn't driven the US economy for nearly a century.


James Livingston: Corporations Don't Need Our Savings | The Business Desk with Paul Solman | PBS NewsHour | PBS

JL: Yeah; that's certainly how it's happened, again, since the 1920s. Except that I think the linchpin here, the keystone, might be the research and development provided by government spending; public spending. And then the public spending that validates, or affirms, this technological kind of innovation.

We can do all the research and development in the world; we can develop all kinds of technologies; if there's not sufficient consumer demand to buy the goods, then what? Then what happens? Then we have stagnation; we have economic crisis, which is what we've got on our hands now.

The theory that Hayek and others have brought to us, as against, say, Keynes or Marx or whoever you want to choose -- what it does, it reinstates the investment function of private enterprise, private investors - we used to call them capitalists. It magnifies that role in the modern world in ways that are very satisfying to people who believe that the way we do things now is the way we should always do them.

The problem with it is that these private investors, these so-called job creators, don't, in fact, drive the economy. They just don't.

PS: They don't create jobs?

JL: They do not, and they haven't for the last four years, and for that matter, they haven't for the last 80.

PS: Well, there have been a lot of jobs created in the last 80 years.

JL: Yes, but consumer demand has driven that growth and it seems to me that the key to it -- the explanation that you need -- is to look at the 1930s and '40s and '50s. That's the heyday of consumer culture -- the New Deal first, then the Second World War and then the decade of the 1950s.

PS: But military spending wasn't consumption spending, was it?

JL: No, but it created enough jobs to promote consumer spending and then especially in the 1950s with the conversion of military spending to regular private spending. The whole era between 1933 and 1973 -- if you look at it minus 1941-45 -- it's driven by consumer spending. The fastest growth rates of the 20th century are recorded 1933-37, when net private investment not only declined, there was net capital consumption in the '30s.

PS: But if government spends, then there's enough demand to draw producers to make the things that will make us rich.

JL: Yes. Demand drives everything and the question is: What kind of demand do we promote? What kind of demand do we want? What kind of growth, in effect, do we want? In the post-war world -- that is to say, the beginning of the 1950s and '60s -- the economic debate worldwide was between: Shall we have extensive growth -- capital stock driven, investment driven -- or shall we have intensive growth? The most far reaching theories that we know of came here with the development of Keynes' theories, but also in Eastern Europe, where people said: Up until now we've had extensive growth, driven by industrial investment "by the plan." What we need to do is make the transition to intensive consumer driven growth, because if we don't, Eastern Europe will stagnate. They were making these arguments in the 1960s and everything they said came true in the '70s and 80s. That's what led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

PS: We beat the Soviet Union by consuming better?

JL: Yes. We beat them by shifting from extensive capital stock investment -- private investment-driven growth -- to consumer demand.

PS: And so that old cliche about how the Russians loved our jeans and Beatles records is an accurate account of how we won the Cold War?

JL: It's one of the arguments I make in the book "Against Thrift," yes, that consumer culture was a political piece of dynamite in Eastern Europe.

PS: The transition to modern consumer culture.

JL: Yes.

[graphicgr8s]

Jeff. Shut up.

[jeffkrol]

Jeff. Shut up.

[Winder]

PS: We beat the Soviet Union by consuming better?

JL: Yes. We beat them by shifting from extensive capital stock investment -- private investment-driven growth -- to consumer demand.

The Soviets had a price book with 3 million different items in it that they regulated. They tried to control the price of practically every good sold in the country. Even with super computers it could be months or even years before prices got adjusted. They had massive surpluses and shortages. Economically the USSR imploded because they were inefficient. They could not respond to the demands of their economy because they had destroyed the price system that communicates market demand. Black markets ran rampant. Even controlling their own currency, they could not control the value of the currency or the economy.

We did not beat them by consuming better. They imploded from within and would have regardless of what we were consuming.

[graphicgr8s]

Kid President - Guide To Being A Party - YouTube