Government jobs can help fill in the gaps left by diminishing private
employment. The jobs may not be as lucrative as many of those that have been
lost, but they are generally secure and have good benefits, including the
likelihood of being able to complete a career and retire as was once the
norm for good companies in the 50s and 60s. There could also be the
equivalent of CCC and WPA to provide jobs, housing, training, and
discipline, which is also a benefit of military service.
Of course, this requires some redistribution of wealth and more equitable
taxation. But it will greatly stimulate the economy, even if it involves
more government spending.
It's called "Kenyan Economics"
On Friday, October 2, 2015 at 11:21:56 PM UTC-4, P E Schoen wrote:
"Bill Sloman" wrote in message
news:18879ccc-597f-44be-9572-906d93c8e21a@googlegroups.com...
On Saturday, 3 October 2015 07:58:05 UTC+10, krw wrote:
But the Slomans of the world will tell you that it's good that there is
more leisure time and even better that there are so many government
workers to provide them all the services they're entitled to. Remember,
Sloman is really good at it.
Krw busy inventing things that he thinks I'd tell you. He's even more out
of touch with reality than Jim Thompson, and even more convinced that
whatever rubbish he believes is the last word on any subject.
I don't happen to think that having people unemployed is any kind of good
thing. There's loads of statistical evidence that the unemployed almost
always want work, and try to find it. I'm certainly still responding to
job ads, though it's almost certainly a total waste of time.
And what krw and James Arthur don't ever seem to notice is the military is
one of the larger pools of government workers, and almost all they ever
produce is destruction. They may be incidentally productive from time to
time - as in the US Army Engineers - but it's not why they are there..
As I keep saying, because of increased worker productivity and reduced
demand, there will be, inevitably, more people unemployed, marginally
employed, on unemployment or welfare, involved in criminal activity, or in
prison. I don't see how any other outcome is possible, although the
timetable and severity is uncertain. The severity can be minimized if people
can accept a lifestyle less based on individual material possessions and
monetary wealth, which can be accomplished by means of intentional
communities and sharing of resources.
Government jobs can help fill in the gaps left by diminishing private
employment. The jobs may not be as lucrative as many of those that have been
lost, but they are generally secure and have good benefits, including the
likelihood of being able to complete a career and retire as was once the
norm for good companies in the 50s and 60s. There could also be the
equivalent of CCC and WPA to provide jobs, housing, training, and
discipline, which is also a benefit of military service.
Of course, this requires some redistribution of wealth and more equitable
taxation. But it will greatly stimulate the economy, even if it involves
more government spending.
It's called "Kenyan Economics"
The difficulty is that redistribution simply doesn't work.
It's called "Kenyan Economics"
Keynes wasn't into redistribution. He was more interested in fooling the rich into investing more. There are arguments for a more equitable distribution of income - particularly in the USA - but more equitable taxation is only one way of getting there. The Japanese have a tolerable egalitarian income distribution which pretty much depends on not paying the people at the top what they think they are worth, but rather what they can be shown to be worth.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
On Saturday, October 3, 2015 at 4:05:26 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
It's called "Kenyan Economics"
Keynes wasn't into redistribution. He was more interested in fooling the rich into investing more. There are arguments for a more equitable distribution of income - particularly in the USA - but more equitable taxation is only one way of getting there. The Japanese have a tolerable egalitarian income distribution which pretty much depends on not paying the people at the top what they think they are worth, but rather what they can be shown to be worth.
"Kenyan Economics" has nothing to do with Keynesian Economics.
On Saturday, October 3, 2015 at 1:10:20 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 2 Oct 2015 20:52:47 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:
On Friday, October 2, 2015 at 8:36:05 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 02 Oct 2015 19:29:16 -0400, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno
DLU1@DecadentLinuxUser.org> wrote:
On Fri, 02 Oct 2015 15:39:47 -0700, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> Gave us:
I don't blame any company for using foreign labor to save money. I
blame US government policy for making US labor so expensive.
With what? Minimum wage declarations? They have always been far
behind actual need and *never* even kept up with normal middle class
living standards.
Payroll tax. Unemployment insurance. Workman's comp insurance.
Corporate income tax, almost the highest in the world. City gross
receipts tax. Property tax. Permits. Inspections. City equipment tax.
Graffiti penalties. Estate tax.
Lawyers and bookkeepers and accountants to manage all that.
When I left high school, a single job at the box factory could get a
person a 2 br apt.
Now, it takes a minimum of two incomes of kids fresh out of high
school to afford the same. So things are at least twice as bad now as
they were then. Then there are utilities and food... everything has
greedily overinflated through the roof.
Immigrant labor has squashed the low end of the income scale. Those
boxes are made by illegals here, or legals in Mexico.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jobs-up-only-for-immigrants-14000-down-262000-for-native-borns/article/2573290
"Over the past three months, the job numbers for native-born have dropped
by nearly 1 million, exactly the number of jobs President Obama promised
to add when he ran for re-election in 2012.
During that period, jobs for immigrants grew 218,000."
Food isn't expensive; we have lots of cheap farm labor to grow it for
us. Housing is expensive, because too many people are competing for
it.
Yep. Dr. Thomas Sowell marks that down to building restrictions.
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2015/09/29/the-affordable-housing-fraud-n2058059
"Housing prices in San Francisco, and in many other communities for miles
around, were once no higher than in the rest of the United States. But,
beginning in the 1970s, housing prices in these communities skyrocketed
to three or four times the national average.
San Francisco is jammed with over-paid coders, and they are bussed to
Mountain View every day. SF has become the bedroom community for the
towns on the Peninsula that allow huge Google and Apple campuses but
don't allow more housing to be built.
Why? Because local government laws and policies severely restricted, or
banned outright, the building of anything on vast areas of land.
Somebody has vast areas of land, but we don't. We have 49 square miles
and nowhere to grow.
Well, we could allow 50,000 houseboats or something.
This is
called preserving 'open space,' and 'open space' has become almost a cult
obsession among self-righteous environmental activists, many of whom are
sufficiently affluent that they don't have to worry about housing prices."
We do kind of like having beaches and parks and mountains and a canyon
with coyotes. Nobody wants to pave them over.
You could pave over the Golden Gate Bridge. Oh, wait...
San Francisco would get a premium no matter what, but the current premium
may be much higher than need be.
The people density here is already huge. There are maybe a billion
people who would live here if they could.
For economic reasons, yes. That's the U.S.' problem too. People who soil their
own nests want to live according those same principles (that wrecked their
homelands), but in a place that isn't soiled, so they move.
I'm speaking of Californians, naturally.
There is no way to build
enough housing to make a difference; the only thing that limits the
population is the cost of housing. Sowell is wrong. It's not a supply
problem, it's a demand problem.
It's both, and you've got a limited patch, no doubt. But the weather has
always been the same and the land hasn't shrunk, yet prices were once low
enough for hippies and radicals. If there were less pressure from the
outlying areas, it would have to make at least some difference in your area
too.
The real problem is you've got a monopoly on--an unfair share of--tech
companies forming a critical mass that sucks more and more suckees into
its vortex.