10Bears: Hey Miko2d I got a question,
I don’t have the link right now but remember the actual amount of cash on hand was 330 billion the last day Clinton was in office. Bush’s three years as President he’s managed to create a 400 billion dollar deficit. Now isn’t that 3/4 of a trillion freaking dollars? For starters, both numbers as well as the GDP number and its "growth" are total, meaningless BS.
There is a difference between value and money and what I am saying is our capital may be decumulating while the numbers show whatever the economicsts want them to show.
Remembering the previous paragraph, I am willing to engage into academic speculation why some meaningless numbers on Clinton's budget looked the way they did.
The Clinton's administration saw a huge spike in corporate taxes and capital gain taxes and projected such obviously unsustainable trends into the futre.
When people were selling at $400 what they bought at $4 - that was not a tax of $396 new value created. The
value of the underlying company proved to be zero or negative later.
S&P was growing 30% a year but nobody would claim that the economy was growing as fast, so the increased taxes were not a share of profit but confiscation of capital for consumption purposes.
Confiscation of capital has a negative effect on future production.
It is only natural that Clinton's budget at the peak of the huge bubble was different than Bush's budget even without the recession he inerited.
There is very little of Clinton's of Bushe's falt or merit to what has happened to the budget or economy.
What sort of interest rates are we talking here in the next couple of years?.. Big tickets items like a new car or new house.. I hope it’s not 18% like when Reagan was President. Greenspan controls the interest in conjunction with the foreign Central Banks accumulating our currency holdings.
Which is also a fake number because it does not reflect the natural interest rate which would have been much greater. considering a very high degree of time preference in our society.
Why do you care that an interest rate may quadrouple but not that the price would quadrouple, like it did with the houses and financial assets and some other stuff? Attempt to artificlally lower interest rate is an attempt to get something out of nothing - which ends up in waste, not gain.
One thing I haven’t heard much about lately is the national debt. It was 5 billion a year in interest back in Clinton’s term, bet it’s 15 billion by now. That's also a BS number. It does not include the bond holdings of the SSA and does not include the discounted value of SSA, Medicaire and other entitlement obligations. According to the GAO the real debt is about $50 trillion.
http://www.gao.gov/cghome/npc917.pdf As for Krugman's article, his fundamantal premises are so false that it does not make sense to address the specific claims. The guy does not recongize private property or the origin of value. What can one say untill one addresses those issues?
We may as well listen to Marx who made the similar errors - he was more consistent and would not make a distinction between Clinton and Bush like keynesian Krugman does.
The government system we have is socialist and corrupt but criticizing it does not make Krugman's fallacious economics or philosophy right.
Reducing tax burden on the rich would benefit poor more than it would benefit rich. Rich people's fortunes were accumulated dollar by dollar by finding ways to provide consumers with ceaaper and better goods. For every dollar the consumer got the value he valued more than that dollar.
Also, most of those fortunes are not consumption goods but capital - the stuff that is nominally owned by rich but is producing what is demanded by customers. The rich are just managing it for everybody's benefit.
The only way to provide more consumption is to have more prduction and for that we neet to encourage the formation of capital, not discourage it like Krugman suggests.
He suggests confiscating the current capital and using it for consumption - which will surely increase the consumption temporarily but will cause it to drop in the future.
The guy is so blind and or politically dishonest that he does not see that this process is going on anyway under Bush's government as well as under any other - and that is the problem I am referring to constantly. That we are decumulating the capital or not accumulating is as fast as we could.
miko
