Posted on 05/26/2016 2:31:06 PM PDT by InvisibleChurch
“Let small business compete, thrive and prosper.”
It seems like a long time since I have heard that. That was another of Reagan’s priorities.
This makes Soros and his Bush/Clinton puppets very sad.
I agree this needs to be handled carefully. Tax cuts, without other sensible policies regarding off-shoring, reductions in regulations here, and so on will not be the same magic bullet it was in the 1980s.
>>Supply-side economics is just another way to say “freedom.”
I’m 54 so I remember Carter and Reagan. Can’t you see that the conditions are quite different between now and then?
But, you are correct. Supply side is freedom. It is also lassaiz-faire. A managed economy fails badly. A free economy fails just as bad when half of your country is not working.
>>He’s right. This is a BIG part of the FIX.
>>It is TIME to DownSize DC. Close entire Rogue/Unconstitutional Departments, including their SWAT Teams.
>>This is the only path out of the is ComDem engineered mess.
Agreed! But that is not the whole solution.
>>MOST people do not work for a Corporate decision maker.
>>Let small business compete, thrive and prosper.
Go talk to a small business owner. The Corporate decision makers affect their businesses to the point where they cannot stay in business. The hardware store owner is destroyed by Home Depot. The small pharmacist is wiped out by Walgreens. The repairman is put out of business by cheap, non-repairable Chinese “durable” items. The landscape guy is beaten out by the competitor who hires illegals.
See how that works?
I think that severe Federal regulations have more to do with outsourcing labor than supply-side economics. Moving a company outside the borders reflects poor tax policy. Outsourcing labor reflects excessive regulations, i.e. setting the minimum wage to $15.
>>Wow! You really have **no** idea what supply-side economics is about.
Yes, I do.
>>Jobs are not created because “corporate decision makers” become altruistic.
That was sarcastic. It was meant to imply that they will NEVER create jobs in America as long as third-world slave labor is cheaper. Do you want Americans to compete with third-world slaves for a dollar an hour to make a $900 iPad? Do you understand what the Federal Reserve has done to our money system to insure that our workers can NEVER compete with the rest of the world?
An economy is a SYSTEM. Its not a collection of independently operating theories. Remember that all economic theories begin with “ceteris paribus”: with all other things equal. It is not equal. The “other things” are never equal nor are they static! If you push here, something pops out there. If you don’t work with the SYSTEM, you just create a problem or two or three every time you try to poke something to fix it.
>>I think that severe Federal regulations have more to do with outsourcing labor than supply-side economics. Moving a company outside the borders reflects poor tax policy. Outsourcing labor reflects excessive regulations, i.e. setting the minimum wage to $15.
The big outsourcing boom began 20 years before anyone mentioned a $15/hr minimum wage. That’s just a boogeyman. Outsourcing happened because the internet and the ISO container ship made it cheap. Period. Everything else is just an excuse used to cover the real reason.
>>Read and weep.
Did I ever say that over-regulation was not a part of the problem? It is partly to blame. But I remember when the rivers would catch on fire and you could smell the St Johns River from 30 miles away. I remember when kids choked to death on cribs. These are some of things that go into that $100B. Now, a lot of that $100B is pure BS...most of it in fact.
And the inconvenient fact is that outsourcing of American jobs began long before Obama was president. He carries a lot of blame, but not even a majority of it. That is shared by politicians and CEOs spanning decades.
This should be obvious, but just today I heard Alan Greenspan reply to a question about Trump and China. He said tariffs or other limits on imports from China would not bring jobs back to America — manufacturers would just move to Viet Nam, Philipines, or wherever. That trade has always been good for America and we shouldn’t restrict it.
The difference is that in the past, America was always the one producing the heavy machinery, toys, electronics, etc. that we would trade for the raw materials or even hand-crafted goods made by third-world countries — items that were very labor-intensive. That is no longer the case. In fact, it is almost reversed — we import the highest tech goods and export the low-tech agricultural products. That is a death spiral for wages.
If I were Trump, I would not even bother with tariffs or target specific countries. I would try to limit imports in general. Require that all manufactured products sold in America have some percentage of total sales manufactured here - by unit numbers, by content of components, by dollar value. Ramp it up from 10% in the first year to 80% by year 4. There is no reason we should cede the manufacturing expertise to the rest of the world and try to live off of a service and agricultural economy.
Apple would have to make its phones here, from components made here. If they want to manufacture elsewhere, fine, but only a small percentage of US sales can be foreign made. If Samsung wants to sell phones here, it had better open a factory here to make them. If BMW and Mercedes want to sell cars here, they better either make them here or partner with Ford or GM to pool their numbers so the percentage of content threshold is met. If Ford wants to build cars in Mexico, they had better plan on selling them somewhere outside the US.
I am a small business owner. My biggest problems are:
1) Federal tax and labor laws putting all of my domestic suppliers out of business.
2) Federal tariffs making the cost of imported goods from foreign suppliers too high.
3) Federal bailouts and favors done for banks and commercial real estate interests that put commercial real estate costs and rents out of reach for all but well-connected mega-corporations.
4) Federal Department of Education promulgating regulations that have led schools to raise a generation of moron citizens who can't think and have no work ethic.
I'm sure the corporate decision makers have done bad stuff, too - it's just that their misdeeds don't affect me as much on a daily basis. :)
Agree.
Depends what you are importing. The USA collects less than 1% tariffs on over $2.7Trillion in imports. Almost a trivial amount.
>>1) Federal tax and labor laws putting all of my domestic suppliers out of business.
Most of my domestic suppliers that have “gone out of business” actually sold out to some MNC and now their products are made overseas.
As for the “labor laws” excuse, what labor laws are we talking about? Obviously, the 800 lb gorilla is ObamaCare. But, all of this was going on long before 2014 when it actually affected businesses, long before 2010 when it passed, long before 2008 when he ran for office. So that boogeyman is not a cause. It’s just made it worse.
What other labor laws? I hear a lot of complaining about having to pay overtime, but when you have one person doing the work of 3 you have to expect OT, but it is quite annoying to have to pay a worker for ALL of the hours worked, isn’t it? Safety is big cost. Those spoiled Americans want a safe workplace, but a Chinese factory owner can just mop up after a worker dies in an industrial accident and bring in a new one—no harm, no foul! The costs of Affirmative Action? Yeah, that’s a big one. Do you believe that any president will end Affirmative Action? Remember that this thread is about supply-side economics so how will Art Laffer end Affirmative Action?
An inconvenient truth is that the US suffers from one of the highest corporate taxes in the world. An inconvenient truth, there are $2.5 Trillion dollars overseas waiting to be repatriated to the US due to poor tax policy.
” Job creation is rivaled only by the subject of national security as priority #1 for the New York billionaire “
Excellent. Trump has the right priorities. Unlike Obama and Hillary, who want to destroy America in the name of imaginary “global warming”.
“He said tariffs or other limits on imports from China would not bring jobs back to America — manufacturers would just move to Viet Nam, Philippines, or wherever.”
Probably true. We need a creative solution. I have actual hope that Trump and his advisors will come up with one.
“That trade has always been good for America and we shouldn’t restrict it.”
It was good for America when we received goods and currency in return for our manufactured goods. Now we merely send a raging river of hard currency overseas to pay for consumer goods.
What we have now is not good for us at all.
Nice lecture. No new arguments, but plenty of fire.
“Remember that all economic theories begin with “ceteris paribus”: with all other things equal. It is not equal. The “other things” are never equal nor are they static!”
I would recommend Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit.” Supply-side economics is just the implementation of what Hayek called, if memory serves, “the extended order of human cooperation.”
That means, what people do when nobody is forcing them to comply with some ideology.
Call it classical economics, the Chicago School, supply-side economics, or whatever sparks your plug, it comes down to “how people choose to act when nobody is forcing them to act in other ways.”
And that force, because it is the composite of millions or billions of individual decisions, is never static; never “ceteris paribus,” but always “mutatis mutandis.”
Reagan was right.
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