I feel compelled to declare that I harbor no animosity for Ms. Romer personally, it is her, er, profession that I loathe (or more succinctly, how that profession is currently ‘practiced’…if that’s what you want to call it.)
I love Paul Krugman despite the fact he regularly
Perhaps that is the ‘divide’. Mr. Krugman still displays the ‘old school’ charm of what it means to be a Democrat while Ms. Romer is a prime example of ‘Modern’ Democratic philosophy, those fucking ‘centrist-triangulators’!
Famously paraphrased by Curly of the Three Stooges when he complained; ‘I’m trying to think but nothing happens!’
Puzzled? Perhaps this will clarify matters for you.
JOBS A key argument for encouraging manufacturing is to create jobs and reduce unemployment. Unfortunately, those effects are probably small.
Unemployment today is high, but not because of a decline in manufacturing. That decline has been going on for 30 years — and for most of the 1990s and 2000s, the unemployment rate was less than 6 percent.
Today, we face a profound shortfall of demand. That truly is a terrible market failure, and it warrants government intervention. But we need actions that raise overall demand — like a tax cut for households so they have more take-home pay to spend, more aid to troubled state and local governments, and public investments in infrastructure. These are all things that President Obama has advocated.
A narrow tax cut for manufacturing is unlikely to raise aggregate demand significantly. By making our industrial goods cheaper, it might stimulate foreign demand, but probably not enough to make a dent in our unemployment rate. On the other hand, more aggressive monetary policy that lowered the price of the dollar would stimulate all our exports, and so have far more impact.
I selected this particular article because the title, “Do manufacturers need special treatment” exemplifies just how badly the global economic model is broken.
The above is what I’d refer to as a ‘bonus’.
Let’s begin with the excerpt and what it says to me: It says, don’t listen to me, I’m an idiot!
Lets take erroneous assumption number one:
We have been shedding manufacturing jobs for decades and the unemployment rate has remained ‘on average’ below 6%.
Which is the first ‘idiot statement’ made…what does the ‘average unemployment rate’ spread out over 30 years tell you? Why not back up ten thousands years and drop that bad boy right down to the hundredths column…it’s the SAME THING!
Old guys like me remember the last time unemployment was this bad was back when Reagan took over (and he didn’t give a fuck, nor did he ‘do’ anything about it. Ironically, he pointed to high unemployment and preached that ‘trade protectionism’ was the culprit!
He was going to ‘fix’ the economy by throwing the trade doors wide open with ‘free trade agreements’.
IF we agree that the founding tenant of capitalism is MARKET SHARE then the ‘global destruction’ of domestic industries led to what, good citizen?
Global monopolies! Held aloft by a greatly reduced number of ‘competitors’.
What is the ‘end result’ you may ask?
YOU become an obsolete member of a redundant society that will be driven into extinction.
But we digress…and we’ve drifted quite a ways off topic as well
Um, the next statement is no better than the first. She is spot on about the (formerly masked by credit cards) ‘lack of demand’ problem but totally misses the relationship between the tens of millions of workers that the monopolists have ‘squeezed’ out of the workforce and that same ‘lack of demand’.
I mean fucking Duh! (But that’s what happens when you ‘average’ figures that have no basis in reality in the first place!)
As I have pointed out repeatedly, the global economy IS bankrupt, the only thing keeping it glued together is some extremely ‘creative accounting’…and even that will eventually fail.
And the rest reads like a communist indictment against capitalism!
She falls just short of screaming for The State to ‘rescue us’…which is why the fucking clueless Republicans have been having a field day accusing the ‘Liberals’ of ‘Socialism’, ironically for trying (stupidly) to prevent the collapse of the economy brought on by the ‘global race to the bottom!’ (That the Republicans championed!)
I have made the case, the same case Ms. Romer is making, ironically, that providing ‘special treatment’ for manufacturers would do nothing to improve economic conditions that have been ‘porked’ by monopolists.
But tax cuts for that rarest of beasts, the employed US citizen will have even less positive effect. Our ‘economic desert’ has grown to the point where it can no longer support the number of people living here.
But this is true throughout the ‘Western World’ (as well as the ‘emerging nations’ that are trapped in capitalist economic models…that form the foundation of their political systems as well.
IF you do not directly influence the laws you will live under then you remain at the, er, ‘mercy’ of those who DO get to decide…and two hundred and thirty years of ‘representative democracy’ is enough to inform us quite clearly that this ‘experiment’ has failed…miserably.
In fact, the title of today’s offering comes from the opening tune of the opera of the same name, Les Miserables.
Particularly poignant is the stanza:
Look down, look down, your standing in your grave!
Don’t let others decide for you.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
No comments:
Post a Comment