Forum Post: How To Create A Booming Economy
Posted 11 years ago on March 12, 2013, 7:05 p.m. EST by quantumystic
(1710)
from Memphis, TN
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Break up the monopolies and emphasize a green opensource syndical/cooperative economy. Both reindustrialize america and reagriculturalize(i just made that up i think) america at the same time putting our nation at the forefront of technology and the integration of science with systems already in place whether they are natural or man-made.
Ive thought about organizing my neighborhood as a cooperative. I have many expensive implements that could be used by others to maintain their properties. I thought if we had a central location for staging the implements and expensive tool folks need to do the work it would stop everyone having to purchase these same tools and implements. Who among us doesn't have a garage and or sheds full of stuff we need to maintain our properties? Also it would take a lot of meetings and planning but we could also use labor from in the neighborhood to get jobs done. I'm a little fuzzy about the way remunerations for work or use of implements would work but that would be what the planning would work out. (That implementation stuff) The implementation of a plan is where the details get injected and as we all know the devil is in the details, or lack of them.
I'm all about neighborhoods working together, but I had a couple of thoughts when I read your post:
You propose something that you think might be a need (property maintenance tools) and then say "who among us doesn't have a garage....full...stuff....need". If everyone has them, then no one really needs them...
If you live near a Lowe's or Home Depot type place, they stage and rent out every expensive and inexpensive implement you can imagine, including pick up trucks to haul them. Just saying that your neighbors might already know that if you have such businesses around.
Keep in mind, working with neighbors is like working with family. It doesn't always work out well. You've also got to think about liability-both on your items getting stolen/broken and/or someone injuring themselves with your items or on someones private property. Home owners insurance issues etc. Nothing ruins a neighborhood faster than an argument or problem in which people take sides.
Because everyone has a garage full of stuff doesn't automatically imply they have all the stuff they need to get the various jobs done. That's why I have only thought about it. Your absolutely right. I guess that is only feasible in a world where we have to share and home depot and lowes are out of business. Maybe after the next downturn huh? I guess Ill wait a few months on this idea. Now that would be funny if it wasn't true. My neighbors and I share now when we need tools the other doesn't have. It is a question of honor. We recently had to replace a cylinder on my neighbors wood splitter. We split the cost as I use it also. I'm sure details of how tools could be maintained could be worked out but as of now we all are too comfortable to look at this type of sharing on a neighborhood wide basis, besides Lowes and Home Depot are within blocks of me and are still open for the time being. We might want to keep an open mind for this type of sharing for the future.
Sharing is one thing, and most people are open to sharing. But you mentioned "remunerations for work or use of the implements" and that adds in a whole new dimension to the idea. Sharing is considered a kindness, an personal offer to assist or contribute to someone else's well being or happiness without expecting anything in return. RENTING or co-oping is considered a partnership in which all are expected to contribute in order to benefit equally.
The moment one person benefits more, or less, than everyone else-the partnership changes and becomes "unequal" in some way. As penguento has spoken about in another thread, there are a lot of people who want to be viewed as victims or heroes and at work it's one thing, at home in day to day relationships, it's another.
By all means share with your neighbors if and when you can. Just be careful of altering or introducing a dynamic that might change those relationships in a way that might not be positive for all.
Of course a coop of this type would have to managed and maintained with fees for belonging and usage to cover damages and repairs and management but the costs should be substantially lower than renting from Home Depot. Their rates are so high its almost justifies purchase of the item especially if you are going to need it again in the future. Another plus is that I wouldn't have to store and maintain the stuff I have now and I would gain access to tools I need now and cannot afford to buy at a substantially lower rate than I am forced to pay at Home Depot. Just a thought I have been entertaining. One obstacle would be a location for all this stuff that was centrally located in the area.
"Nothing ruins a neighborhood faster than an argument or problem in which people take sides."
Good point. I think we are seeing that at a national level right now, consuming every single neighborhood in the country, to a certain extent.
Sounds great. Seems like you've summed over a few details on implementation, though.
Raise taxes. Everyone making over 80K a year should be paying 90%.
If they were taking 90% of it, why would you bother earning it? Most of the people that I know that earn more than 80k do do by working very long hours. They'd be much better off in your scenario simply working less and earning less, because it would cost them virtually nothing out of pocket. And as a result, you'd be collecting 90% of nothing from them. Hardly productive.
I have heard this argument before, it is weaker than a right hook from Betty White. Most likely someone else would be employed on at a minimum part time basis to recover the lost productivity from the reduction of hours. If not then there would be a market force correction and the competitive business or service would pick up the proverbial slack. Do you conservatives think something through before you say it or is it all stream of consciousness? You don't even observe the phenomena that the philosophies you worship predict.
Well, maybe someone else might get employed. Or maybe not. You're engaging in pure speculation here. If, for example, I worked less, the work might just go undone. The work I do is too specialized and technical to be reallocated arbitrarily to some anonymous body picked out of a workforce report someplace. You'd have to find another annoying person very much like me, who might well be disinclined to pick up the slack, for much the same reasons as me.
But even in cases where it could be, your tax receipts would still be far below expectations, since your new guy would be taxed at a far lower rate. So the market adjustment you postulate would in and of itself serve to defeat the stated goal of increased tax revenue.
Did you miss the part about market force correction or what? The market forces will decide if more hours are worked or more profit made, it's called free market capitalism. I am betting if there is a demand then supply will rise to meet the demand.
Think so? You're assuming that high income workers are fungible, like burger pushers at McDonalds. Not true. Try this example:
I've got a friend who's an OBGYN. Works about 75 hours a week, brutal stress, lots of responsibility and legal liability, on call all day and all night when he's not working. Makes about $275k. Earns every dime of it, I wouldn't trade jobs with him for any amount of money. You want to tax him at 80%, so he says screw it, and cuts back to part time so he's under your threshold. What have you accomplished?
Not much, smart guy. Most immediately, his tax bill drops by 80% or more. He was probably paying north of $100k in income taxes of various sorts on his income, leaving aside sales taxes on his toys. Now he's paying maybe $15k. So you've already screwed the public fisc.
And what about all of those underemployed OBGYN's out there waiting to take his place? There aren't any, dummy. There's already a doctor shortage in this country, and you didn't create any new ones with your tax policy. All you did was worsen the already severe shortage of medical care for women in this country. And worse still, your tax policy discourages new people from entering the medical field. If you think that people are going to spend 10 years and incur $250,000 in loans getting a medical license just so you can hit them up with an 80% income tax, you've got a lot to learn.
So you fucked it up on three counts: tax revenue drops in the short term, you've exacerbated the doctor shortage, and your tax policy institutionalizes both the revenue drop and the doctor shortage. And some version of this is the case whenever you impose confiscatory taxes on skilled professionals.
The problem with you meatheads is that you're stuck in that freshman year Marxist worker-as-a-faceless-interchangeable-drudge notion of workers. That may be fine at Micky D's or the line at some widget factory, but interchangeable drudges don't make $250k. You've got to be pretty good at something to make that kind of money. And people like that aren't so easy to replace, so your we'll-just-replace-them-with-someone-more-like-us theory doesn't work. Their potential replacement, if there is one, is going to be in the same income bracket, and subject to the same drivers, as they are.
The severe shortage for health care for women??? What the hell are you talking about? There is no doctor shortage in this country we graduate plenty of Md.'s that they choose to go into cosmetic surgery instead of becoming obgyn's is a structural problem with in the healthcare industry. Your argument has several prominent flaws. 1st it assumes that he will cut his hours but you have no evidence to back that up. If the doctor owns or is partners running a clinic then he as little choice but to work the long hours hour or risk loosing clients to other clinics in the vicinity. If he works for an employer well then it is likely he has little choice in the amount of overtime hours he puts in. 2nd you make the assumption there is no one to take his place. Therefore you have no evidence to show beyond pure speculation that either he will reduce his hours worked or that another willing participant will absorb the man hours and thus the productivity. We had 1,232,000 unemployed health service professionals in 2012 are you telling me none of them were obgyn looking for a job? By the way ad hominem fallacies will get you no where in life.
You very clearly don't know what you're talking about. The structural problem you refer to proves my point, not yours. The American Academy of Family Physicians reports there will be a shortage of 40,000 primary care doctors (Family Practice jobs, Internal Medicine jobs, Pediatric jobs and OB/GYN) by 2020. And, the number of medical students choosing primary care as a profession has already dropped by 51.8% since 1997 to only around 2%. Meanwhile, demand is expected to rise by 14% by 2016. Medical students are choosing other specialties because of the high cost of malpractice insurance (my friend pays around $100k a year). People go into cosmetic surgery because it pays a hell of a lot more and is much less risky and stressful than being an OBGYN. So, your notion that there's some sort of excess of physicians in fields like OBGYN is just plain silly and ignorant. Likewise, your imagined flood of new OBGYN's is just that -- imagined. There's a shortage now, and that shortage will increase. And unemployed health care aides don't count in this equation, friend. To replace an OBGYN, you need another OBGYN; and they take 10 years and several hundred thousand dollars to produce, and incentives that will get people to go through all of that. And if you think that making a lot of money isn’t one of them, you’re out of touch with reality.
A tax scheme like the one you posit will simply make it worse. It’ll discourage people from going to medical school, and encourage the ones that do to go into the high-dollar/low risk fields like cosmetic surgery, because now they have to make enough to pay your 80% tax rate on top of $100k in malpractice insurance and everything else.
Next, you don't seem to understand how businesses work. If somebody owns a practice, it's like any other business -- you only keep it open if it’s economically viable to do so. It its not, you don't care about losing customers, because you're getting out. And if you impose confiscatory taxes or other costs, it's not economically viable. My own doctor bagged it a couple of years ago because it wasn't worth it any longer. And where I live, you'd better not have a serious head injury, because there are NO neurosurgeons -- high costs and malpractice costs have driven ALL of them out. And none of them is much interested in where their ex-patients have gone, because they have themselves bagged it and left. Meanwhile, all of your hypothetical replacements have yet to arrive.
And quit your silly-assed whining about ad hominem attacks. You started it, son. The problem is, you’re in over your head.
Son? Hey asshole I am not your fucking son. Furthermore you clearly are still resorting to logical fallacies besides the ad hominem attacks you seem to be using both the argument from final consequences fallacy and the confusing association with causation fallacy. Once again I will ask, where is your proof.for any of your claims? Imposing confiscatory taxes make a business economically un-viable? You obviously don't understand tax policy or the term profit because no one is asking to tax people making 250k 80% of anything.
In addition the structural problems are not a result of tax law. They are a result of the free market choice of concentration of major for Md's. This can be mediated with single payer health care legislation and regulation of this particular economic sector. Course you will be opposed to that. It's socialism and the commies are coming.
You wound me with your crushing rhetoric. But I'll struggle on.
I quote the comment that started all of this, from someone named Brady: "Raise taxes. Everyone making over 80K a year should be paying 90%." So you appear to be mistaken here.
So, lessee: If my friend is making 250k, and you tax everything over 80k at 90%, that's $170,000 taxed at 90%. That's $153,000, which leaves him $17,000. Do you really, seriously think that that he, or anybody else, is going to work that extra 30 or 40 hours a week in a high-stress, high-risk job like that for $17,000 a year? He could make more working second shift at Wendy's.
You apparently don't understand the interaction between taxes and market forces, and you very clearly don't understand human nature. Medical students choose the high dollar specialties for exactly that reason -- they want to make a lot of money. Maybe you haven't noticed, but doctors tend to drive nice cars and live in nice houses. They like money, and feel like they've earned it. If you raise their costs, and taxes are one such cost, you're not going to force anybody into the lower-paying end of the field. They'll simply want to make even more money, so they'll concentrate even more into the high-dollar specialties. That's exactly what they are doing now, and that's why there is a shortage of primary care physicians. Pretending that higher taxes won't affect this is just silly.
And I might observe, Mr. where-is-your-proof, that I haven't seen any proof of any of your assertions either, other than your self-referential ipsi dixit statements. My figures on physicians shortage come from the American Academy of Family Physicians. I haven't seen any cites for anything you've said.
By no one I thought it was inferred "of consequence" obviously you can find some asshole to endorse any political or economic position.
I have a pretty comprehensive understanding of economic and political theory. I am discontinuing this conversation, you are just wasting my time with your argumental fallacies you continue to pursue the confusing association with causation fallacy.
We need to raise taxes so everyone has money to spend on the things that make life good. If everybody had a bit of disposable income the economy would flourish.
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too big to fail = violation of anti-trust laws = therefore illegal