Canadian Politics Today
Beyond Canada => American Politics => Topic started by: kimmy on January 03, 2019, 05:59:19 am
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This piece discusses American situations and American politics, but it's probably equally relevant to Canada and to every other western nation:
https://newrepublic.com/article/152680/one-issue-left-right-can-agree
Everybody seems to be concerned about monopoly power, but nobody seems to be actually doing anything about it.
A big part of Elizabeth Warren's platform, in the article I posted the other day, involves using existing US law to break down some of the large monopolies that are killing competition in many industries. This article expands on that theme.
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FOX says "The richest man in the world just got $2 billion in taxpayer subsidies. How does that work?"
Left, meet right.
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Same reason Wisconsin gave FoxConn billions of dollars in incentives and subsidies to build a plant there. States feel pressured to compete with each other for these job-creating megaprojects. Even if the numbers don't add up.
If New York didn't offer Amazon a big subsidy, somebody else would have. I think Toronto was on the short list for a new Amazon HQ, weren't they? Was Ontario's government offering any incentives? Maybe they just didn't bribe hard enough.
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How about ICBC? Originally brought in to provide low cost insurance but government unloaded everything else on it, licensing, regulating, enforcement etc then used it as a cash cow until it became a financial basket case.
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FOX says "The richest man in the world just got $2 billion in taxpayer subsidies. How does that work?"
Left, meet right.
just a part of the **** Tucker Carlson's act... this time playing up he actually agrees with the newly crowned 'socialistQueen' AOC's criticism - which, considering she's the U.S. Congressional representative for Queens (the NY Burough where Amazon chose to put one of its new hq's), was expected. In any case, Amazon's promise/commitment to & presumptive benefits in that regard:
(https://i.imgur.com/99YghPj.png)
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If New York didn't offer Amazon a big subsidy, somebody else would have. I think Toronto was on the short list for a new Amazon HQ, weren't they? Was Ontario's government offering any incentives? Maybe they just didn't bribe hard enough.
Amazon already knew it was going to NY and Washington even if they did not get a rich subsidy offer. It just played city officials for the fools they are. I was very happy that TO did not promise a rich subsidy package.
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I think Toronto was on the short list for a new Amazon HQ, weren't they?
I am not sure they were a real contender, although probably a better candidate than many of the other American cities that bid. Amazon wanted New York for the talent pool, and Washington for the connections.
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Same reason Wisconsin gave FoxConn billions of dollars in incentives and subsidies to build a plant there. States feel pressured to compete with each other for these job-creating megaprojects. Even if the numbers don't add up.
If New York didn't offer Amazon a big subsidy, somebody else would have. I think Toronto was on the short list for a new Amazon HQ, weren't they? Was Ontario's government offering any incentives? Maybe they just didn't bribe hard enough.
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We're at the point where capitalism is gorging itself. Even populist conservatives (let alone sensible ones) are starting to ask why Bezos - the richest man on earth and owner of the anti-Trump Washington Post - gets $2B.
Truly paradoxical times like no other.
The FoxConn deal was $200K PER JOB. 30-year time horizon for payback to start. Now, tell me that a government couldn't fund small start ups to employ people at 1/2 that rate. There are so many signs to me that hard leftism is coming back, and that I will be a vocal conservative the last 20 years of my life.
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We're at the point where capitalism is gorging itself. Even populist conservatives (let alone sensible ones) are starting to ask why Bezos - the richest man on earth and owner of the anti-Trump Washington Post - gets $2B.
Truly paradoxical times like no other.
Remember in late 2016 when Pence and the incoming government were making a deal with Carrier to save the factory in Indianapolis from being shut down and moved to Mexico?
Sarah Palin, of all people, said “Republicans oppose this, remember? Instead, we support competition on a level playing field, remember? Because we know special interest crony capitalism is one big fail.” (https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/sarah-palin-donald-trump-carrier-deal-crony-capitalism-232139)
And Carrier took their millions from the US government and shut down the plant a few months later anyway.
The FoxConn deal was $200K PER JOB. 30-year time horizon for payback to start. Now, tell me that a government couldn't fund small start ups to employ people at 1/2 that rate. There are so many signs to me that hard leftism is coming back, and that I will be a vocal conservative the last 20 years of my life.
Yeah... fund small start-ups that get put out of business because they can't compete with mega-corporations. Isn't the failure rate for start-ups and small businesses something like 90%?
It always makes me laugh when conservatives tout entrepreneurship as the answer for unemployed and underemployed workers. Experienced entrepreneurs fail at such a high percentage of their ventures... so this is a great plan for laid off workers with no experience at all in the field? Sounds like a great plan to turn unemployed people into unemployed people with high debt burdens from failed ventures.
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...fund small start-ups that get put out of business because they can't compete with mega-corporations. Isn't the failure rate for start-ups and small businesses something like 90%?
It always makes me laugh when conservatives tout entrepreneurship as the answer for unemployed and underemployed workers. Experienced entrepreneurs fail at such a high percentage of their ventures... so this is a great plan for laid off workers with no experience at all in the field? Sounds like a great plan to turn unemployed people into unemployed people with high debt burdens from failed ventures.
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Mega-corps are dinosaurs. Blockbuster, Netflix etc.
The failure rate isn't the point - the successes make up for the failures. It's better than not trying. This is not a plan to help 'unemployed people' but the economy overall.
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Mega-corps are dinosaurs. Blockbuster, Netflix etc.
Netflix killed Blockbuster, along with millions of smaller mom-and-pop video stores. Amazon might kill Walmart some day, along with millions of smaller retailers that are already dead or dying.
Existing mega-corporations and established industries might be vulnerable to the arrival of new disruptive technologies, but that's usually not good news for Joe Average.
Uber arrives and starts killing off taxi companies... replacing taxi drivers with cheaper precarious employment "gig-economy" jobs. Sooner or later those "gig-economy" jobs will be eliminated entirely as Uber and others roll out self-driving cars to replace Uber drivers and other sorts of professional drivers as well. Where will all those displaced drivers go to work?
The failure rate isn't the point - the successes make up for the failures. It's better than not trying. This is not a plan to help 'unemployed people' but the economy overall.
If the health of the economy isn't measured by whether people can obtain work and support themselves, then we need a better way of measuring the health of the economy.
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Strange times over at Bullshit Mountain as Tucker Carlson went on TV and said something interesting.
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/10/18171912/tucker-carlson-fox-news-populism-conservatism-trump-gop
The gist of his message was that capitalism isn't working for Joe Average:
America’s “ruling class,” Carlson says, are the “mercenaries” behind the failures of the middle class — including sinking marriage rates — and “the ugliest parts of our financial system.” He went on: “Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.”
He concluded with a demand for “a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement.”
The monologue was stunning in itself, an incredible moment in which a Fox News host stated that for generations, “Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking, while simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars.” More broadly, though, Carlson’s position and the ensuing controversy reveals an ongoing and nearly unsolvable tension in conservative politics about the meaning of populism, a political ideology that Trump campaigned on but Carlson argues he may not truly understand.
Moreover, in Carlson’s words: “At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be gone too. The country will remain. What kind of country will be it be then?”
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Carlson is hardly the first right-leaning figure to make a pitch for populism, even tangentially, in the third year of Donald Trump, whose populist-lite presidential candidacy and presidency Carlson told me he views as “the smoke alarm ... telling you the building is on fire, and unless you figure out how to put the flames out, it will consume it.”
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“I’m just saying as a matter of fact,” he told me, “a country where a shrinking percentage of the population is taking home an ever-expanding proportion of the money is not a recipe for a stable society. It’s not.”
Carlson told me he wanted to be clear: He is not a populist. But he believes some version of populism is necessary to prevent a full-scale political revolt or the onset of socialism. Using Theodore Roosevelt as an example of a president who recognized that labor needs economic power, he told me, “Unless you want something really extreme to happen, you need to take this seriously and figure out how to protect average people from these remarkably powerful forces that have been unleashed.”
“I think populism is potentially really disruptive. What I’m saying is that populism is a symptom of something being wrong,” he told me. “Again, populism is a smoke alarm; do not ignore it.”
But Carlson’s brand of populism, and the populist sentiments sweeping the American right, aren’t just focused on the current state of income inequality in America. Carlson tackled a bigger idea: that market capitalism and the “elites” whom he argues are its major drivers aren’t working. The free market isn’t working for families, or individuals, or kids. In his monologue, Carlson railed against libertarian economics and even payday loans, saying, “If you care about America, you ought to oppose the exploitation of Americans, whether it’s happening in the inner city or on Wall Street” — sounding very much like Sanders or Warren on the left.
Carlson's monologue launched think pieces at National Review (https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/tucker-carlson-monologue-populism-politics-personal-responsibility/) and American Enterprise Institute (https://www.aei.org/publication/tucker-carlson-and-the-republican-turn-against-the-market/). Other right-wing figures have responded (https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/tucker-carlson-populism-america-needs-virtue-before-prosperity/)by complaining that Carlson sounds like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
This piece asks: Why is Tucker Carlson on TV pretending to be a critic of capitalism? (http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/tucker-carlson-romney-monologue-capitalism-social-conservatives-fox-news.html) but also gets on to explaining the historical alliance of convenience between social conservatism and free market capitalism, and points out that at several times in American history, social conservatives were not allied with capitalists at all. Are we seeing that happen again?
It seems like right now the people in the US who voted for Trump are restless again, wondering when the "making America great" part happens. People keep hearing about how great the economy is doing, but they look around and see that they and everybody they know is still living paycheck to paycheck, and ask "if the economy is so great, why am I still struggling? WHO exactly is doing so great right now?"
That's the question underlying Tucker Carlson's monologue. If it's not you or the family next door or the people on Mainstreet Yourtown who are enjoying this allegedly great economy, then who, exactly, is it working for?
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If the health of the economy isn't measured by whether people can obtain work and support themselves, then we need a better way of measuring the health of the economy.
Very well said. Too many people think about the economy as a numbers game without ramifications on people and environment, that needs to change.
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If the health of the economy isn't measured by whether people can obtain work and support themselves, then we need a better way of measuring the health of the economy.
What the government cares about is tax revenue. If tax revenue goes up the economy is good. If it goes down the economy is bad. That is why governments worry about the GDP because that is a close proxy for tax revenue. Other wishy-washy measures like the GINI or HDI don't correlate was well so they are not useful to governments that need tax revenue to implement any policy choices.
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What the government cares about is tax revenue. If tax revenue goes up the economy is good. If it goes down the economy is bad. That is why governments worry about the GDP because that is a close proxy for tax revenue. Other wishy-washy measures like the GINI or HDI don't correlate was well so they are not useful to governments that need tax revenue to implement any policy choices.
Tax revenues in the US have certainly gone down since Trump took office but the economy seems to still be doing well. Of course there's that little problem of soaring debt.
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What the government cares about is tax revenue. If tax revenue goes up the economy is good. If it goes down the economy is bad. That is why governments worry about the GDP because that is a close proxy for tax revenue. Other wishy-washy measures like the GINI or HDI don't correlate was well so they are not useful to governments that need tax revenue to implement any policy choices.
But the government's reason for existing isn't to maximize tax revenue.
And an economy is a system by which resources are allocated and means of production are utilized. Measuring its effectiveness by measuring the total gross output might be one way of measuring its effectiveness, but it's not the only way.
To quote from Carlson's monologue:
Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite.
If the economy were a toaster, one way to measure its effectiveness might be to measure the total amount of toast it can produce. A better way might be to measure how many people are actually getting enough toast to keep their bellies full. The ability to create ever-increasing quantities of toast is of dubious value if all the toast is just being exported to sit in breadboxes in the Cayman Islands or Barbados.
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But the government's reason for existing isn't to maximize tax revenue.
True but it can't exist without tax revenue so a government needs policies that ensures that tax revenue can keep up with demands for services. If the GDP drops tax revenue drops and demand for services rises so governments have no choice but to pay close attention to what happens with GDP.
Measuring its effectiveness by measuring the total gross output might be one way of measuring its effectiveness, but it's not the only way.
Sure but governments need a measure that correlates with changes in tax revenue so they can plan. The GDP does that because it measures taxable things. Measures that incorporate non-financial subjective measures are not going to do that.
A better way might be to measure how many people are actually getting enough toast to keep their bellies full.
A measure that is useful in political debates but it does not help with government planners that need to know how much money there is to spend on programs. A government that can't pay for programs is not going make progress on whatever subjective measure you prefer.
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Tax revenues in the US have certainly gone down since Trump took office but the economy seems to still be doing well. Of course there's that little problem of soaring debt.
Tax cuts will stimulate the economy but if it means the country can't pay its bills without borrowing even more, it is all just smoke and mirrors.
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Tax cuts will stimulate the economy ...
Cite.
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Cite.
They do because they leave more money free for investment and consumption. Whether they are worth if for the amount of stimulation produced is another question and a balance that government is always trying to manage. At least it should be.
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They do because they leave more money free for investment and consumption. Whether they are worth if for the amount of stimulation produced is another question and a balance that government is always trying to manage. At least it should be.
You’re making an assertion again. Provide a cite.
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/tax-cuts-not-the-best-stimulus/
https://www.allbusiness.com/economic-stimulus-why-tax-cuts-are-a-bad-idea-11748893-1.html
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You’re making an assertion again. Provide a cite.
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/tax-cuts-not-the-best-stimulus/
https://www.allbusiness.com/economic-stimulus-why-tax-cuts-are-a-bad-idea-11748893-1.html
I just said they may not be the best stimulus or that they are necessarily a good idea.
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True but it can't exist without tax revenue so a government needs policies that ensures that tax revenue can keep up with demands for services. If the GDP drops tax revenue drops and demand for services rises so governments have no choice but to pay close attention to what happens with GDP.
Sure but governments need a measure that correlates with changes in tax revenue so they can plan. The GDP does that because it measures taxable things. Measures that incorporate non-financial subjective measures are not going to do that.
A measure that is useful in political debates but it does not help with government planners that need to know how much money there is to spend on programs. A government that can't pay for programs is not going make progress on whatever subjective measure you prefer.
I get that these big-picture economic indicators-- the GDP, the stock market indexes, unemployment rate, growth, inflation rate, and so on-- are all useful in their own way. But I think there's a danger of not being able to see the forest through the trees. As with the proverbial three blind men trying to describe an elephant, the overall picture is much larger than individual indicators can measure.
Politicians can go around talking about how the GDP is growing, and the stock markets are up, and whatever, but those measures don't really reflect peoples' day to day reality. The GDP may keep growing, but for many parts of the economy wages are very stagnant. The stock markets might be going up, but large numbers of people don't actually own any stocks or investments.
There might be a big list of macro economic indicators that say that in macro terms we have collectively never been wealthier or more successful. But in individual terms, many people don't feel that they're wealthy or successful. More people than ever are living paycheck to paycheck, more jobs are precarious than ever, people have more debt than ever, fewer and fewer full time workers have pension plans, people are having a hard time saving for the future. The Macho Mango gets on Twitter and brags about how great the economy is, but large numbers of people aren't any more well off than they were a few years ago regardless of what the macro numbers say. People hear about how the economy is growing while they feel stalled, and it just makes them feel like they're being left behind.
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I get that these big-picture economic indicators-- the GDP, the stock market indexes, unemployment rate, growth, inflation rate, and so on-- are all useful in their own way. But I think there's a danger of not being able to see the forest through the trees. As with the proverbial three blind men trying to describe an elephant, the overall picture is much larger than individual indicators can measure.
I think is reasonable to say GDP is a necessary but not sufficient measure. i.e. if GDP or GDP per capita is declining then government will be in trouble because tax revenues are declining relative to demand. But if GDP is rising that does not mean everything is good. All these other measures should be part of the political conversation which is used to judge the success of a government. However, these measures will always be in addition to GDP rather than instead of GDP which will give politicians excuses to ignore them when convenient for them.
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Monopolies. Yah people think...Colgate-Palmolive Dow Chemical, Dupont, Coca Cola, MacDonald's, GM. The tendency is to thin large mega multi-nationals. I get that. Fact is though the biggest monopoly is the Chinese Communist Party and its subsidiaries.
The problem has always been, our governents across the world are controlled by these mega corporate creatures. These corporate entities outgrew in power and size any government that once regulated them. There's no cure for them. No one is going to bring back true supply and demand price determination or free trade. To do that you would need to break these companies up not to mention take down the Chinese system of economy.
Who can or would do that? Who can take down the oil cartels, the drug (legal and illegal) cartels? Anyone have any idea just how big Bayer or Delmonte or Chiquita Brand or Kraft-General Goods is?
They all eventually inter-connect with subsidiaries.
These institutions grew by momentum and not necessarily brilliant planning. They grew no different than a cancer cell multiplies. There is no chemical or approach to reverse the process not unless you radiate the whole area which has lasting side effects and problems of its own.
Its a sad reality but monopolies are nothing but back behaviour, an inherent trait of human behaviour. Its what we do, form packs with Alpha males (CEO's) at the head and these packs run about the planet procreating and hunting for prey to feed off of.
At least with whale pods, or packs of seals, they self regulate. Human packs (corporate entities) do but only in a very limited form. Our corporate institutions created a feeding pecking order and the corporate creatures line up to eat off the prey based on their size and power no different than lions, hyenas, African wild dogs, jackals, vultures.
It is also not an accident the most successful corporate institutions that have survived the longest and have the largest networks took on the behaviour or rats and ****-roaches, i.e., banks and other financial institutions.
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But in individual terms, many people don't feel that they're wealthy or successful.
So you prefer anecdotal data to actual economic numbers... makes sense, if all you want to do is point out that Joe the Plumber doesn’t have a job, so Trudeau sucks.
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Fact is though the biggest monopoly is the Chinese Communist Party and its subsidiaries.
Interesting, what industry do you see them having cornered?
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So you prefer anecdotal data to actual economic numbers... makes sense, if all you want to do is point out that Joe the Plumber doesn’t have a job, so Trudeau sucks.
It's not anecdotal. The sentence I wrote right after the one you quoted explains:
But in individual terms, many people don't feel that they're wealthy or successful. More people than ever are living paycheck to paycheck, more jobs are precarious than ever, people have more debt than ever, fewer and fewer full time workers have pension plans, people are having a hard time saving for the future.
These aren't anecdotes from Joe down the street. These are supported by statistics. We know that people are higher in debt than ever. We know that personal savings hit a record low last year. We know that fewer and fewer jobs include pension plans and other benefits. That's not from Joe down the street, that's from Statistics Canada.
There's plenty of statistical data to support the fact that people on the whole are under more financial stress than ever. It's not that we don't measure those things. It's just that those statistics aren't how the government measures whether the economy is doing well.
So you prefer anecdotal data to actual economic numbers... makes sense, if all you want to do is point out that Joe the Plumber doesn’t have a job, so Trudeau sucks.
And it's not about blaming Trudeau (or Trump, or any of their predecessors either) for anything. The economy under Trudeau is doing just fine by the metrics that have been used to measure economic performance.
If you go back and read Reply #9 and #10 in this thread, Michael said:
This is not a plan to help 'unemployed people' but the economy overall.
And that's where we got started on this disconnect between the health of "the economy overall" and the economic health of the people in it. I replied:
If the health of the economy isn't measured by whether people can obtain work and support themselves, then we need a better way of measuring the health of the economy.
Which is basically also the question behind the Tucker Carlson thing I wrote about (reply #11). If the economy is doing so great and growth is so strong and all of these other indicators are all pointing way up... why are people struggling? Why are so many people under such financial stress if the economy is doing so great?
If you read the whole thread and somehow came to the conclusion that what I'm really saying is that Trudeau sucks, then I just can't help you.
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I think is reasonable to say GDP is a necessary but not sufficient measure. i.e. if GDP or GDP per capita is declining then government will be in trouble because tax revenues are declining relative to demand. But if GDP is rising that does not mean everything is good. All these other measures should be part of the political conversation which is used to judge the success of a government. However, these measures will always be in addition to GDP rather than instead of GDP which will give politicians excuses to ignore them when convenient for them.
As you say, the GDP and the need for continual growth in the GDP seems to be central in the macro planning area... and I've been wondering whether that's really a good thing.
Is the housing affordability crisis in Vancouver actually "good" if we measure it in terms of GDP? The real estate and construction and financial services industries are all making money hand over fist as a result of skyrocketing prices, right? Those numbers should result in increased GDP, I think? And yet things like the resulting debt load on people living there, or economic opportunities lost because people could afford to move there or had to move away, or peoples' longer commute times, or peoples' increased anxiety over the high cost of living... those things don't show up in the GDP.
People are being pushed in a direction that ensures they're carrying more debt and saving less, which in turn ensures there'll be a higher load on government services in the future. And right now the debt-funded spending and decreased propensity to save shows up as a positive on the balance sheet, because spending is good for the GDP. But it's dubious progress. The 2008 financial crash was driven primarily because lenders were incentivized to put short-term gain ahead of long-term stability. I can't help wondering if we are doing the same from a public policy standpoint.
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Is the housing affordability crisis in Vancouver actually "good" if we measure it in terms of GDP?
This example illustrates my point. The BC government makes a lot of money from real estate transactions and rising property prices mean more transactions which means more money to spend on programs. You correctly point out that there is a viscous circle at work where rising prices increase the need for government spending which means the government can't afford to do things that jeopardize that revenue.
Moving to a zero growth economy would require a culture change in citizens because it is citizens that have to accept that government revenues are finite and if the GDP is not growing they have to go without increases in government services. Similarly, public servant unions would need to accept that the total cost of their benefits has to stay constant or decline over time to allow a government to live within the revenue constraints. This is not likely to happen.
IOW, this is not a problem that can be solved by a government policy change. It would require a social revolution.
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If the health of the economy isn't measured by whether people can obtain work and support themselves, then we need a better way of measuring the health of the economy.
Economists will say that the work will appear as the economy grows, and they have been right.
Now, there have been interventions to encourage distribution/pry the wealth from the investor class.
As liberals, this is what we count on. And I mean pretty much everyone on this board.
When a lot of money flows upwards quickly, due to technology or some other phenomenon, there can be immediate repercussions that need a remedy. I feel that that is what we're seeing now, and the fact that our revolution has been so minor is maybe a testimony to us learning things over the centuries.
Go ahead and fight me, though.
And while you're at it, explain how automated vehicles is going to go down. Here's a hint:
- It's not going to NOT happen
- Boycotts and calls to think of the little guy will not work
- The same people who elected Trump will see their job prospects dwindle significantly
- There will be no work for them in the immediate future
I don't see any other path than guaranteed income, make-work jobs, paid volunteer work and government-manded handouts.