US Politics Megathread

[Dolan]

don't keep track of what you do or don't make fun of. You just seem to subscribe to the core neoliberal idea of small government and in particular minimal government intervention in the economy.

It's not like we're more than 15 regular posters here, by this time I think everyone has a basic idea on what regular posters gravitate to.
I don't have any pre-set idea on how big or small government should be. It should be the size that it needs to be.
And it should intervene in the economy as it's the case to intervene. Times change, economic conditions change, there's no point in being dogmatic about this.
There is a point in learning about what worked before and what didn't, though.

[Dolan]

If anyone self-identifies as a neoliberal, it's probably the ear. He even made a post letting everyone know how proud he is of being a neolib. xD

[Goodspeed]

don't keep track of what you do or don't make fun of. You just seem to subscribe to the core neoliberal idea of small government and in particular minimal government intervention in the economy.

It's not like we're more than 15 regular posters here, by this time I think everyone has a basic idea on what regular posters gravitate to.

Yeah and I got the basic idea that you are one of the resident neoliberals on this forum. I know you don't like to be labeled but I think this one fits pretty well. The only neolib policy you don't support iirc is global free trade.
Might be misremembering though. Feel free to list neoliberal ideas you don't agree with.

[Goodspeed]

If anyone self-identifies as a neoliberal, it's probably the ear. He even made a post letting everyone know how proud he is of being a neolib. xD

Source? I actually remember something similar but don't think the label fits him all that well. Maybe it's that he supported Biden and people here tend to mistake Biden's policy agenda for a neoliberal one.
@fightinfrenchman Your thoughts?

[Dolan]

Average income in $ is a useless comparison because:
- It fails to take into account that US wages are extremely top-heavy (CxOs commonly getting paid 8 if not 9 figure salaries as well as white collar jobs typically paying a lot), so it hides the fact that the majority of wages are relatively low.
- It fails to take into account living expenses which especially in the bigger cities can be very high in the US.

As you can see from this graph, income distribution in the US is a lot more even than just this myth of having a few big shots at the top and a large mass of low income plebs at the bottom:

graph

The largest segment is actually represented by those in the 50-100k brackets.

If you make $50k and live in the middle of a big city, you're living small and still barely getting by. On the other hand if you're making $30k and living in the middle of nowhere, you're probably fine. The difference in living expenses can be so great in the states, that graphs like that one aren't necessarily meaningful. A lot of the higher wages are in places like Cali, which, as you just pointed out, is also a very expensive place to live. Imagine trying to get by on a waitress' salary in LA.

Yeah, but I think Americans tend not to live in the cities, they drive a lot to work and lots of them live in the suburbs. I guess this varies a lot by location. The cost of housing is insanely disproportionate in everyone's income, though, and this isn't a problem just in the USA, it's everywhere. And well that's not the employers' fault, it's landlords and real estate speculators driving the prices.

I know lots of people, including in Europe, who did their damnedest to make sure they found a cheap rent outside the city and who keep commuting every day, just to get a grip on those living costs.
Housing prices are one of the most negative factors in the current economy, they raise everyone's costs, including employers' costs, without producing anything in the economy.
I've always said that housing and financial speculation are the two worst parts of the current form of capitalism.

Yeah so, going back to the US argument, that's why Americans often move from state to state, seeking lower living costs. Europeans can do this to a lesser extent as there are tens of languages in Europe and it's not that easy to relocate when you don't speak the language.

[occamslightsaber]

prices where i used to live, i was paying $1690 for a 1 bed 1 bath with lease agreement starting in 2021.... in the past year they raised prices almost $400

https://www.arborcourtapts.com/floorplans/

also these prices don't include any utilities costs, so tack on another $60 for gas, water, electric, trash, etc. and $50 for internet

I’m currently paying $625 per month for 1 bed 1 bath in Upstate NY. The rent includes heating and water. The lease is also month-to-month, which will afford me a lot of flexibility when I eventually move away for another job.

[Goodspeed]

Show hidden quotes

Average income in $ is a useless comparison because:
- It fails to take into account that US wages are extremely top-heavy (CxOs commonly getting paid 8 if not 9 figure salaries as well as white collar jobs typically paying a lot), so it hides the fact that the majority of wages are relatively low.
- It fails to take into account living expenses which especially in the bigger cities can be very high in the US.

As you can see from this graph, income distribution in the US is a lot more even than just this myth of having a few big shots at the top and a large mass of low income plebs at the bottom:

graph

The largest segment is actually represented by those in the 50-100k brackets.

If you make $50k and live in the middle of a big city, you're living small and still barely getting by. On the other hand if you're making $30k and living in the middle of nowhere, you're probably fine. The difference in living expenses can be so great in the states, that graphs like that one aren't necessarily meaningful. A lot of the higher wages are in places like Cali, which, as you just pointed out, is also a very expensive place to live. Imagine trying to get by on a waitress' salary in LA.

Yeah, but I think Americans tend not to live in the cities, they drive a lot to work and lots of them live in the suburbs. I guess this varies a lot by location. The cost of housing is insanely disproportionate in everyone's income, though, and this isn't a problem just in the USA, it's everywhere. And well that's not the employers' fault, it's landlords and real estate speculators driving the prices.

I know lots of people, including in Europe, who did their damnedest to make sure they found a cheap rent outside the city and who keep commuting every day, just to get a grip on those living costs.
Housing prices are one of the most negative factors in the current economy, they raise everyone's costs, including employers' costs, without producing anything in the economy.
I've always said that housing and financial speculation are the two worst parts of the current form of capitalism.

Yeah so, going back to the US argument, that's why Americans often move from state to state, seeking lower living costs. Europeans can do this to a lesser extent as there are tens of languages in Europe and it's not that easy to relocate when you don't speak the language.

Yeah it's a problem here too, but that's not surprising since the neolibs have been in power for decades. Unfortunately we caught that virus too.

[Dolan]

don't keep track of what you do or don't make fun of. You just seem to subscribe to the core neoliberal idea of small government and in particular minimal government intervention in the economy.

It's not like we're more than 15 regular posters here, by this time I think everyone has a basic idea on what regular posters gravitate to.

Yeah and I got the basic idea that you are one of the resident neoliberals on this forum. I know you don't like to be labeled but I think this one fits pretty well. The only neolib policy you don't support iirc is global free trade.
Might be misremembering though. Feel free to list neoliberal ideas you don't agree with.

I don't know why you associate me with neoliberalism. Sure, the meaning of the term has mutated so much that people project on it whatever bothers them about the current form of capitalism or the one from the 80s.
In terms of trade, if the current situation is anything to learn from, we see that free trade is less important than strategic reliability. If you allow your companies to create an enduring dependence on a country that later starts a war and massacres civilians, you might end up realising you made a big strategic mistake. So being a free trade dogmatic is not part of what I'd support in terms of economic policy. Neither would I support autarkic isolation, though in some strategic respects, it'd be a good policy not to be too reliant on trade partners that could wield too much influence on your foreign policy.

Neither do I support deregulation at any cost. Deregulation is like vitamins, having more deregulation doesn't make the economy healthier, making sure you don't make it too hard for enterprises to thrive due to regulations should be just a vital concern. But it's no silver bullet, no point in being dogmatic about this either. Does more deregulation tend to produce higher profits and more dynamic economic activity? Sure it does, just as it tends to produce more financial crashes.

Monetarism (money supply controls in the style of Friedman and the Chicago school) is a useful tool but I think people are expecting too much from controlling the quantity of money to get certain economic effects. Case in point, as Italy knows that the ECB is currently keeping basically negative interest rates in the Eurozone to shield Italy from a run on its bonds, there's less urgency for Italy to get its public finances in order. They just don't feel the burn.

State intervention in the economy is occasionally necessary, as we can see today with the global energy crisis, brought by the war in Ukraine. If anything, I'm starting to think we made a mistake when we liberalised our energy market because the EU asked us to do so. Who benefited from this? It was a privatisation done for the sake of checking those neoliberal dogma points: if you liberalise, the market will be more efficient and bring costs down. Basically energy prices never went down since then. And in the end, what really matters is the costs of energy production and how you're controlling those. Consumers are captive and don't have much choice on whether they need energy or not, just like housing. So companies already know there's no pressure on them to ever try to bring production costs down or adjust prices down if their costs decrease. I don't remember seeing any gasoline price cuts during the Covid crisis, when oil prices fell too.

I think we're going to have to relearn what an economy is and how it can be made to work. And that will include managing our economic dependencies for strategic purposes and coming to terms with the reality that a handful of economic goods and services (housing, energy) have a disproportionate impact on the entire economy, through chain reactions, and that this doesn't have to be that way. We don't need to get inflation priced in multiple times in the production and distribution chain, just because oil prices increased. Very often, this kind of price hikes happen due to psychological contagion, sellers in the market just hike prices because of perceptions rather than their own costs actually increasing. And it's a lot easier for prices to go up than to be rolled back. Speculative price increases are making things worse for everyone and that's because market participants only think about their own local maxima, rather than understanding the big picture, how their own price hikes will come to hit them back.

[Dolan]

And in fact, I don't even think there is such a thing as an ideal set of economic policies. What worked wonders during a certain era will not necessarily work at any other given time in history. The economy does not operate in a vacuum, the motivations that drive people work in a certain cultural and social context.
You could make a gift economy work, if all the people in that area shared some kind of spiritual beliefs that made them prioritise strengthening social ties, rather than individual gains.
We often forget that the reason why we think about the economy in these terms is because we live within the confines of a culture that looks at the world through a quantitative lens and shapes policy with individual outcomes in mind.

[Goodspeed]

Show hidden quotes

don't keep track of what you do or don't make fun of. You just seem to subscribe to the core neoliberal idea of small government and in particular minimal government intervention in the economy.

It's not like we're more than 15 regular posters here, by this time I think everyone has a basic idea on what regular posters gravitate to.

Yeah and I got the basic idea that you are one of the resident neoliberals on this forum. I know you don't like to be labeled but I think this one fits pretty well. The only neolib policy you don't support iirc is global free trade.
Might be misremembering though. Feel free to list neoliberal ideas you don't agree with.

I don't know why you associate me with neoliberalism. Sure, the meaning of the term has mutated so much that people project on it whatever bothers them about the current form of capitalism or the one from the 80s.
In terms of trade, if the current situation is anything to learn from, we see that free trade is less important than strategic reliability. If you allow your companies to create an enduring dependence on a country that later starts a war and massacres civilians, you might end up realising you made a big strategic mistake. So being a free trade dogmatic is not part of what I'd support in terms of economic policy. Neither would I support autarkic isolation, though in some strategic respects, it'd be a good policy not to be too reliant on trade partners that could wield too much influence on your foreign policy.

Neither do I support deregulation at any cost. Deregulation is like vitamins, having more deregulation doesn't make the economy healthier, making sure you don't make it too hard for enterprises to thrive due to regulations should be just a vital concern. But it's no silver bullet, no point in being dogmatic about this either. Does more deregulation tend to produce higher profits and more dynamic economic activity? Sure it does, just as it tends to produce more financial crashes.

Monetarism (money supply controls in the style of Friedman and the Chicago school) is a useful tool but I think people are expecting too much from controlling the quantity of money to get certain economic effects. Case in point, as Italy knows that the ECB is currently keeping basically negative interest rates in the Eurozone to shield Italy from a run on its bonds, there's less urgency for Italy to get its public finances in order. They just don't feel the burn.

State intervention in the economy is occasionally necessary, as we can see today with the global energy crisis, brought by the war in Ukraine. If anything, I'm starting to think we made a mistake when we liberalised our energy market because the EU asked us to do so. Who benefited from this? It was a privatisation done for the sake of checking those neoliberal dogma points: if you liberalise, the market will be more efficient and bring costs down. Basically energy prices never went down since then. And in the end, what really matters is the costs of energy production and how you're controlling those. Consumers are captive and don't have much choice on whether they need energy or not, just like housing. So companies already know there's no pressure on them to ever try to bring production costs down or adjust prices down if their costs decrease. I don't remember seeing any gasoline price cuts during the Covid crisis, when oil prices fell too.

I think we're going to have to relearn what an economy is and how it can be made to work. And that will include managing our economic dependencies for strategic purposes and coming to terms with the reality that a handful of economic goods and services (housing, energy) have a disproportionate impact on the entire economy, through chain reactions, and that this doesn't have to be that way. We don't need to get inflation priced in multiple times in the production and distribution chain, just because oil prices increased. Very often, this kind of price hikes happen due to psychological contagion, sellers in the market just hike prices because of perceptions rather than their own costs actually increasing. And it's a lot easier for prices to go up than to be rolled back. Speculative price increases are making things worse for everyone and that's because market participants only think about their own local maxima, rather than understanding the big picture, how their own price hikes will come to hit them back.

Fair enough

[RefluxSemantic]

I get that a super capitalist society is the thing that has worked best so far, but I feel like we've hardly tried any variants. We've tried an aristocratic system and we've tried communism where the elites just enrich themselves and people don't care to work hard because it won't give them more money.

I'm sure there are systems in between here. Eg. reward actual labor more and increase taxes on profit/investing. And I want this to be tried. It's not like our amazing 'economic growth' has given the average Joe much.

[iNcog]

prices where i used to live, i was paying $1690 for a 1 bed 1 bath with lease agreement starting in 2021.... in the past year they raised prices almost $400

https://www.arborcourtapts.com/floorplans/

also these prices don't include any utilities costs, so tack on another $60 for gas, water, electric, trash, etc. and $50 for internet

I’m currently paying $625 per month for 1 bed 1 bath in Upstate NY. The rent includes heating and water. The lease is also month-to-month, which will afford me a lot of flexibility when I eventually move away for another job.

wow nice

[princeofcarthage]

prices where i used to live, i was paying $1690 for a 1 bed 1 bath with lease agreement starting in 2021.... in the past year they raised prices almost $400

https://www.arborcourtapts.com/floorplans/

also these prices don't include any utilities costs, so tack on another $60 for gas, water, electric, trash, etc. and $50 for internet

I’m currently paying $625 per month for 1 bed 1 bath in Upstate NY. The rent includes heating and water. The lease is also month-to-month, which will afford me a lot of flexibility when I eventually move away for another job.

Aren't you part of the 1%er. Can't you/your family just buy a penthouse in middle of new york.

[Dolan]

prices where i used to live, i was paying $1690 for a 1 bed 1 bath with lease agreement starting in 2021.... in the past year they raised prices almost $400

https://www.arborcourtapts.com/floorplans/

also these prices don't include any utilities costs, so tack on another $60 for gas, water, electric, trash, etc. and $50 for internet

I’m currently paying $625 per month for 1 bed 1 bath in Upstate NY. The rent includes heating and water. The lease is also month-to-month, which will afford me a lot of flexibility when I eventually move away for another job.

Aren't you part of the 1%er. Can't you/your family just buy a penthouse in middle of new york.

If you're part of the 1% you know the first step to making money is to spend as little as possible and produce as much as possible.
The rich are wealth anorexics and productivity bulimics.

[princeofcarthage]

Show hidden quotes

prices where i used to live, i was paying $1690 for a 1 bed 1 bath with lease agreement starting in 2021.... in the past year they raised prices almost $400

https://www.arborcourtapts.com/floorplans/

also these prices don't include any utilities costs, so tack on another $60 for gas, water, electric, trash, etc. and $50 for internet

I’m currently paying $625 per month for 1 bed 1 bath in Upstate NY. The rent includes heating and water. The lease is also month-to-month, which will afford me a lot of flexibility when I eventually move away for another job.

Aren't you part of the 1%er. Can't you/your family just buy a penthouse in middle of new york.

If you're part of the 1% you know the first step to making money is to spend as little as possible and produce as much as possible.
The rich are wealth anorexics and productivity bulimics.

This generalization is really not true. Of course, some of them are but not really generalized. The people you describe generally are attention seeking and want to carve an immortal place in history. For ex. Jeff Bezos. He could donate 100 billion dollars and solve numerous problems, and yet his seven generations could live extremely rich life. But he won't. I have seen extremely rich people throw money and be lazy all day.

[gibson]

prices where i used to live, i was paying $1690 for a 1 bed 1 bath with lease agreement starting in 2021.... in the past year they raised prices almost $400

https://www.arborcourtapts.com/floorplans/

also these prices don't include any utilities costs, so tack on another $60 for gas, water, electric, trash, etc. and $50 for internet

I’m currently paying $625 per month for 1 bed 1 bath in Upstate NY. The rent includes heating and water. The lease is also month-to-month, which will afford me a lot of flexibility when I eventually move away for another job.

wow nice

Its because he lives in the middle of nowhere. Good luck finding a cardboard box to rent for 625$ in any metropolitan area.

[spanky4ever]

Show hidden quotes

prices where i used to live, i was paying $1690 for a 1 bed 1 bath with lease agreement starting in 2021.... in the past year they raised prices almost $400

https://www.arborcourtapts.com/floorplans/

also these prices don't include any utilities costs, so tack on another $60 for gas, water, electric, trash, etc. and $50 for internet

I’m currently paying $625 per month for 1 bed 1 bath in Upstate NY. The rent includes heating and water. The lease is also month-to-month, which will afford me a lot of flexibility when I eventually move away for another job.

Aren't you part of the 1%er. Can't you/your family just buy a penthouse in middle of new york.

If you're part of the 1% you know the first step to making money is to spend as little as possible and produce as much as possible.
The rich are wealth anorexics and productivity bulimics.

This generalization is really not true. Of course, some of them are but not really generalized. The people you describe generally are attention seeking and want to carve an immortal place in history. For ex. Jeff Bezos. He could donate 100 billion dollars and solve numerous problems, and yet his seven generations could live extremely rich life. But he won't. I have seen extremely rich people throw money and be lazy all day.

I think we should tax his azz, and that it should not be up to his mood or wimps. We all have to contribute, and the rich should not be exempt. I really do not get this; Do not tax the rich ppl

[Dolan]

If I were rich, I'd liquidate everything, get a farm and do self-sustaining living. Let "the people" create jobs, because they're known to be very smart and innovative.

[spanky4ever]

If I were rich, I'd liquidate everything, get a farm and do self-sustaining living. Let "the people" create jobs, because they're known to be very smart and innovative.

That is actually a good idea, Wish the rich would make a farm, live there, and give their money to things that are needed.

[princeofcarthage]

Show hidden quotes

prices where i used to live, i was paying $1690 for a 1 bed 1 bath with lease agreement starting in 2021.... in the past year they raised prices almost $400

https://www.arborcourtapts.com/floorplans/

also these prices don't include any utilities costs, so tack on another $60 for gas, water, electric, trash, etc. and $50 for internet

I’m currently paying $625 per month for 1 bed 1 bath in Upstate NY. The rent includes heating and water. The lease is also month-to-month, which will afford me a lot of flexibility when I eventually move away for another job.

Aren't you part of the 1%er. Can't you/your family just buy a penthouse in middle of new york.

If you're part of the 1% you know the first step to making money is to spend as little as possible and produce as much as possible.
The rich are wealth anorexics and productivity bulimics.

This generalization is really not true. Of course, some of them are but not really generalized. The people you describe generally are attention seeking and want to carve an immortal place in history. For ex. Jeff Bezos. He could donate 100 billion dollars and solve numerous problems, and yet his seven generations could live extremely rich life. But he won't. I have seen extremely rich people throw money and be lazy all day.

I think we should tax his azz, and that it should not be up to his mood or wimps. We all have to contribute, and the rich should not be exempt. I really do not get this; Do not tax the rich ppl

It isn't that rich people aren't taxed. They have just found loop holes. Not really a loophole, you can also do that, but certain conditions need to be met like you need to have large amount of shares of a reliable company. Large amount of shares of companies which pays good dividend and stuff.

[princeofcarthage]

If I were rich, I'd liquidate everything, get a farm and do self-sustaining living. Let "the people" create jobs, because they're known to be very smart and innovative.

That is actually a good idea, Wish the rich would make a farm, live there, and give their money to things that are needed.

He was sarcastic, also why should they give their earned money to anyone else? unless the wished too of course.

[spanky4ever]

If I were rich, I'd liquidate everything, get a farm and do self-sustaining living. Let "the people" create jobs, because they're known to be very smart and innovative.

That is actually a good idea, Wish the rich would make a farm, live there, and give their money to things that are needed.

He was sarcastic, also why should they give their earned money to anyone else? unless the wished too of course.

I guess they would not. They should though. But the rich class is something i really despise with all my hearth. They horde money, and pay little, receive workers who are educated, and the infrastructure is layed out for them. What do we need them for?

[princeofcarthage]

Show hidden quotes

If I were rich, I'd liquidate everything, get a farm and do self-sustaining living. Let "the people" create jobs, because they're known to be very smart and innovative.

That is actually a good idea, Wish the rich would make a farm, live there, and give their money to things that are needed.

He was sarcastic, also why should they give their earned money to anyone else? unless the wished too of course.

I guess they would not. They should though. But the rich class is something i really despite with all my hearth. They horde money, and pay little, receive workers who are educated, and the infrastructure is layed out for them. What do we need them for?

Without Bezos, Amazon wouldn't exist. He literally created millions of jobs. They earned their money through hard work just like you do. What they do with their money is their concern and no one else's. Here is a fact for you. Bezos actually took only ~82k annual salary from Amazon and ~1.6 million usd in annual security which is one of the lowest for companies the size of amazon. Their wealth primarily derives from their stakes in the companies they founded. Do you know how much efforts it takes to build a company the size of amazon. You are free to try. you could also be as rich as him!

[spanky4ever]

Show hidden quotes

If I were rich, I'd liquidate everything, get a farm and do self-sustaining living. Let "the people" create jobs, because they're known to be very smart and innovative.

That is actually a good idea, Wish the rich would make a farm, live there, and give their money to things that are needed.

He was sarcastic, also why should they give their earned money to anyone else? unless the wished too of course.

I guess they would not. They should though. But the rich class is something i really despite with all my hearth. They horde money, and pay little, receive workers who are educated, and the infrastructure is layed out for them. What do we need them for?

Without Bezos, Amazon wouldn't exist. He literally created millions of jobs. They earned their money through hard work just like you do. What they do with their money is their concern and no one else's. Here is a fact for you. Bezos actually took only ~82k annual salary from Amazon and ~1.6 million usd in annual security which is one of the lowest for companies the size of amazon. Their wealth primarily derives from their stakes in the companies they founded. Do you know how much efforts it takes to build a company the size of amazon. You are free to try. you could also be as rich as him!

Without Bezos a lot of shopping senters would exist, and a lot of small businesses would also trive. Bezos is only the delevery guy that has cost more jobs than he could ever create. Get a grip man.

[scarm]

Well, to be quite frank online retail probably created the demand for a lot more goods. I am regularly trying to buy local and support SMEs, but fact of the matter is if price is like 25% lower on Amazon, choice of products is infinitely larger, and delivery times are shorter, and to top it all off the salesmen, which arguably are the one thing online retail cannot replace, are incompetent or unfriendly, at some point my egoism kicks in because i am not enduring a trip on public transport, spending a lot more time and effort, to be rewarded with higher prices and no benefit, when i could just spend 10 minutes on Amazon getting exactly what i want for cheap.