“We can reduce the federal government to nothing more than a glorified assisted living facility and we still wouldn’t be able to balance the budget.” That is the best line ever!
We would have a balanced budget. That's actually about it. We would be anywhere from 1 week to 2 months into the next year, i'm not exactly sure, but interest social security, medicare, medicaid, and all the other bullshit we should never have spent money on in the first place is the majority of our spending.
This video very nicely displays the problems of the USA government budget deficit. However, this video goes beyond things like increasing government revenues due to taxation or GDP growth thereby effectively reducing your relative debt. That said the fact that the current situation is unsustainable over the longer term without intervention is to me at least as clear as day.
My point was that government's deficit usually goes down when interest rates have risen and it becomes harder for them to borrow without racking up massive interest payments. At the same time, the Domestic Private Surplus also drops when interest rates rise - generally during an unsustainable boom that causes a recession to greatly shrink the surplus. Further, the most recent recession shows that the massive Bush deficits coincided with massive domestic private deficits.
No no, I understand that's his point, that's why he mentions S.S. and retirement obligations at the end. I was just highlighting this fact by explicitly stating it.
It depends on the individual and sacrifice. Back to executives who do work very hard: there are prominent others with limited oversight, attend few meetings and at best court other leaguers and officials to lavish outings and activities. How is that worth more than the functions of a business whole? There are investors deprived of dividends and/or returns while board members dictate unilateral, insider compensation while not doing much good, if much at all.
"Crashes and booms are fueled by more than just the credit market" They are directed by other factors, but the easy credit provided by the Fed setting interest rates lower than the market normally would is how they get going. And the Fed cannot sustain this without high levels of inflation, so it lowers the rates, ergo crash. The particulars of what kind of bubble, etc. are determined by the other factors (govt interference, shape of the economy, etc.)
Well, if that trading is influencing the need or desire for action by the state department then it should be paid for in some way by the interests at hand, not everyone. If there is an inherent risk in dealing with foreign governments, then that can and should be forecasted as easily as any other expense a business takes into consideration.
Taxes are analogous to prices. If a store owner lowers prices, he'll get more customers but make less money with each sale. If he raises prices, he'll have fewer customers, but make more money with each sale. If you graphed his expected revenue compared to prices, you would see a curve that rises up from 0, levels off at a point called "unit elasticity", and then falls back down. This is analogous to government revenues, taxes are price investors pay for conducting business in this economy.
Does the video have any citations to some of these numbers? A lot of these seem to be a lot shorter than they're supposed to be. Defense-related expenditures for example have had reports for 2012 that ranged around 1.03-1.45 trillion dollars, rather than the 930 billion we've got here.
Yes, I know of Stefan Molyneux. I was actually introduced to anarchism with his book "Practical Anarchy." "But, then, I don't need to convince YOU of that, do I?" I am not sure what you mean here.
if I were to give you a million dollars a day to spend until you spent a trillion dollars from the day Christ was born, you'd be 2013 years old now and would still need to spend $1 million/day for the next 726 years to hit a trillion. We now owe 17.9 trillion dollars.
In theory, the problem can be solved by privatizing Social Security and Medicare. In practice, this is less likely to happen than is a monetization of the deficit. IOW, the government prints money to fund its spending. We're seeing the start of that now with the repeated quantitative easings.
[[...and the wildly disparate import/export taxes.]] ... Import tariffs create type II inflation & shrink markets. Example: You put an import tariff on new car imports. That reduces the supply of imports, demand exceeds supply = shortages, ergo high prices, placing more demand on domestic new cars, & again, demand exceeds supply = shortages and higher prices. Prices have increased on all new cars, shrinking the 'new car' market. This demand trickles to other cars and prices increase everywhere.
Crashes are the result of unsustainable inflationary booms fueled by easy credit (and that credit drying up when fears of inflation drive up interest rates). Easy credit happens to ALSO help fund large deficits, and those deficits tend to shrink some (but not much) when the easy credit is lessened. You are missing a common cause. And a dangerous one at that, as the US can no longer afford for interest rates to rise - and keeping them low will create inevitable inflationary disaster.
Not so fast, it's recognized even in the corporate world that outsourcing has it's own cons. 1. There's a loss of quality. 2. There's a higher risk of confidentiality and privacy loss. 3. Hidden costs, because you don't know all of the operations going around to these people you're contracting to, it may end up costing more than you realize. 4. loss of managerial control, your turning to another company, as such, you lose DIRECT control. 5. You're tied to that companies success.
PRE-obamacare healthcare programs make up 33% of of government spending, and social security costs about the same, healthcare and social security are the U.S. government's two biggest expenses, with military spending coming in at a distant third
It's a matter of profitability. Taxes are taken out of revenue, not profits. That distinction is key to understanding how taxes can literally drive a company out of business. If Microsoft made 10 billion in revenue, but had 6 billion in expenses (just an example) a tax rate of 45% for Microsoft would result in the company losing 500 million dollars. The only way to encourage businesses to start up or expand in the US is to give them every opportunity to turn profit.
Correlation is not causation. The deficit may have been minimized in the late 90s - that did not have anything to do with the tech bubble bursting. They just happened to occur at the same time. One could point out that we are currently experiencing the worst economic crash and aftermath since the Great Depression, while running deficits greater than most countries GDPs.
Hong Kong on the other hand is considered by most the most free market in the world, even more so that the U.S., and it shows. Although Hong Kong is only one city and surrounding residential areas, it has the 8th most traded currency in the world. So I think if you were trying to make a decision whether high taxes on business were good or bad for the people, the comparison of Hong Kong and the rest of China is pretty convincing.
I dont think so. Brazil was in high debt and pulled itself out and is on the rise and has great programs running right now and its very government run. Higher taxes are the way to roll. Also aiding the poor so they become middle class and spend their money on the private sector.
The things he said at the end, "The only things left: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Interest on the debt" (one thing he ignores is that the interest rate on the debt is at an historic low and will most likely rise in the future).
During the early 80s, taxes were cut but revenues actually increased. Why? Because tax rates in the 70s were above unit elasticity. the government lowered taxes to unit elasticity and thus, increased their revenue.
Remember, the economy was in decline during the bush administration, so it doesn't necessarily mean that we're still on this or that side of the laffer curve. I suggest you watch "Can We Balance the Budget By Raising Taxes?" by LearnLiberty. Regardless, you're right about one thing, as taxes increase, raising them further becomes more asymptotically unjustifiable.
"comfortable" is subjective and retirement money is still an individual's responsibility, not the government's. if your profession is unprotected, you should probably start saving. people of today, both old and young, need to readjust their spending habits and lifestyles to what is affordable and practical for their specific income and savings. it is possible to live a frugal life with walmart and amazon, but many are unwilling to adapt their mindsets or lifestyles.
Furthermore, I've been known to out an anarchist that didn't know he was one from time to time. It goes a little something like this: "Do you think it's wrong to initiate force to achieve an end." "Yes." "Then you're an anarchist."
They can - through the natural mechanism of labor competition. "Pay me more or I will go to Company B that pays its employees better." Labor unions and minimum wages only help a few workers at the price of the rest being unemployed. Labor benefits that cannot be paid for are the reason that many American companies (like GM) are going under (and keep getting bailouts). Unions aren't a problem if they are voluntary, but with the force of law, they essentially extort companies to insolvency.
Actually it took that money from the private sector and gave a grant to Vicent Cerf who had already come up with packet switching on his own. Not to metion that TCP/IP isn't the only protocol that could have done the job.
I heard somewhere that in ancient times, civilizations like Egpyt and Greece would whipe detbs clean. They essentially whipe the slate clean and start over. That is never going to happen, but at the very least they should cut the interest rate. 14 trillion dollars in debt is more money than anyone can ever have.
The US started out more like 13 independent nations under a union that brought a stronger common protection, and a free trade zone that brought prosperity. Robert E. Lee was an Abolitionist wouldn't be shocked if he voted for Lincoln, but he couldn't raise arms against his native Virginia, back then it was your State first US second. Lincoln changed this in the Gettysburg address with "the United States is" as in singular. When before it was "the United States are." as in plural.
True, the US is 50 times bigger than Denmark, but on the other hand the US GDP per capita about 7.000 USD bigger than the Danish in PPP. Of course, the US is using too much money on the military (4,75 % of GPD for the US vs. 1,46% for Denmark and 2,5 for the world) So there is more money per person in the US than in Denmark, and even though the liberal government we had through the '00 used a "boom-and-bust" financial policy, Denmark is still considered a strong, or at least safe, economy.
The current market economy IS a resource based economy. Also, eliminating currency would run us into the problem of the double-coincidence of wants which makes economic transactions much less efficient.
Interest = 230 billion. Pensions = 775.6 billion Health care = 858.2 billion = 1,8 trillion. I think the deficit was revised down by the remaining 300 billion, while the following years were revised upwards. This year the fed government debt alone will hit 16 trillion which is larger than the entire yearly product of the nation. And thats only the federal debt. You should take the unfunded/contingency liabilities and state debts (3T) into account as well.
I don't doubt that but I think his point was (or at least I hope) that we need to both cut money and raise some, it's impractical to just to one to fix such a huge deficit
It realistically will not be as sweeping, but yeah. Also squeeze indirect beneficiaries of social programs, raise trade tariffs and we can reduce the debt while encouraging domestic commerce and industry, in turn creating more revenue. Government officials should be volunteers whose living is funded by nonprofit charities and their constituents, instead of acting as brokers for entities who are extracting government capital and currency for profit.
A one-year temporary 50% tax on the rich would likely not have too bad of an effect on the economy (provided everyone believed that it was really temporary and really a one-time event). The problem is the second part. Government isn't good at making things efficient because the incentives in the public sector don't reward efficiency (if anything, they tend to award inefficiency). Consequently, my guess is that the $400 billion would be largely wasted.
Cuts before taxes. One needs to streamline services to the point where it is felt that only the most necessary remain before you can take the public's money to fund them. Otherwise you would be taking resources out of the economy, shrinking the private sector to fund a public sector that may not be as answerable to end-user's demands.
Well the CEO I was thinking of was Home Depot's Nardeli who got fired with a nice $210 million severance package. He didn't do anything and made out like a bandit. Ask the common shareholders of HD whether they had a say on that severance package. There are plenty of CEO's that are major shareholders of the companies they manage.
Taxes are higher than ever. In the past loopholes existed that made the effective rate much lower than it is today. Tax revenues as a percentage of GDP may be lower, but raising taxes more will jobs and the middle class along with them. It's a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
Often there is no choice in purchasing from certain companies. The board could get rid of a CEO but rarely ever do due to contracts. If the shareholders vote out a board member they can be simply reappointed by the other board members. Often the majority of shares are focal. If it's so rare to find a good CEO, then why do they ALL need to be paid so well? The statement is a contradiction in point. The excuse is disclosure and the problem is equity as compensation. CEO is not the only executive.
One could argue that only if one entered the jurisdiction voluntarily. Being born in a jurisdiction does not constitute an agreement to this social contract any more than having a contract fall into your lap constitutes an agreement to its terms.
That doesn't mean we should stop trading with them. Countries that engage more in trade have a de facto higher standard of living, that's what the numbers show. China has a brutal dictatorship, but by allowing some measure of free markets to exist there, people now live far better than they did 20 years, there's now a MIDDLE CLASS in the country about 2/3 the population of the U.S. Hong Kong itself is an even greater example, their life expectancy is higher than ours, education quality too.
If the executive wasn't providing some type of service to the company, the board of directors would fire him and get a new executive. The problem is that good CEOs (et al.) are VERY hard to find, which is why their job pays so well. Keep in mind that it's not up to you to decide what is and is not good for a business. If you don't like a company, you don't have to do business with them. The only people who should have a say are the board of directors and the shareholders.
I'm not going to argue that the gov't's debt isn't concerning, it most certainly is, but the data would suggest that some debt isn't a bad thing. In fact, it would suggest that sustaining a controlled amount of debt is actually a good thing for a gov't to do. It's only when it's allowed to get out of control that it becomes a problem. For example, no one would fret if the gov't was in $500k debt because that's not hard to pay back, when it gets into the billions and trillions there's a problem.
Crashes and booms are fueled by more than just the credit market, an economy is indeed a complicated thing after all. I know I was missing a common cause, I was missing all causes because that wasn't the point of what I was saying. I wouldn't take on the task of finding causes because that's a complicated task; I would however point out what years of records have found.
The math shows that the government can only fund itself for 7 months, and that it would have to cut nearly everything in order to make it the rest without running such a massive deficit that it obliterates all services for future generations. That's the point.
That's the silliest thing I've heard (at least on a video of this caliber.) That's like saying, if my income level goes up, I'll have the same amount of money. And if my income goes down, I'll have the same amount of money. If that's the case, why not just have no taxes at all? Then we'd still have 2.2 trillion a year right? From no taxes at all?
How will abolishing the Federal Reserve help? They are in charge of making sure the US dollar doesn't rapidly inflate through maintaining the number of government bonds in circulation. By abolishing the Fed the government would be forced to pay the bond holders all at once, which would only sky rocket the debt even higher. And getting rid of taxes would give even less income for the government, so that wouldn't help either.
astrological calendars are the positioning of constellations and other patterns in stars along the ecliptic, or earth's orbit around the sun. Mayans used a solar calendar, not an astrological calendar which was 365 days, but even if they knew how to correct the extra fourth, the fact remains that the alignment between the Earth, sun and galactic center happens every 25,000 years or so, and were never responsible for any phenomena in the past. Just don't get your hopes up.
I'll try to help, but i'm not entirely sure what you said, to be honest. The point this video's trying to make is that our mandatory spending (social security, medicare, medicaid, interest on the debt) is so overwhelmingly massive that that ALONE gives us a budget deficit. And therefore if we want to balance the budget we have to make major cost-cutting reforms to our entitlement state.
Fifth, everytime the US gov't has avoided a deficit it was disasterous for the economy as a whole and resulted in the private sector (businesses and citizens) suffering. I have a chart if you want to see.
Fortunately, we don't have to raise tax rates. All we really need to do is reform the tax code by cutting out many exemptions. It's the "Simpson-Bolles" plan, and it even results in a lower marginal rate, yet generates more revenue. I'll check out that vid...LearnLiberty knows their stuff.
What is not mentioned, is what the Government spends the money on from July-31 on back to January-1. 7 full months of tax paying money is not accounted for. He basically removed all of the things our Government spends in the mainstream, but does not regard where the unaccounted spending goes. Ron Paul - 2012.
I'm going to split a hair here because it's worth mentioning. The modern-day corporation is actually a legal entity, protected by law, to basically absolve or limit liability by individuals involved in economic activity. So basically, through this structure or entity, the benefits of capitalism flow only in one direction. Many large corporations today couldn't get to their size if the CEO's personal assets were on the line.
That was not the point he was trying to make. He was showing that people complain about taxes being too high, and yet they want all these things from the government, but the government can't pay for all these things unless taxes were to go up. Him saying the cuts was a way to emphasize how crucial it is that taxes are implemented.
why would the government cut these things when it can just print money? sure this will mean that the dollar goes down in value, but other currencies which are also pegged to the us dollar (the chinese currency at the moment i think) would also depreciate, so america's purchasing power in china would remain constant.
[[ If there is an inherent risk in dealing with foreign governments, then that can and should be forecasted as easily as any other expense a business takes into consideration]] Thumbs up. But of course forecasts are easy. Getting them right isn't always easy. That's true of all forecasts. As you say though, dealing with foreign government is yet another risk to assess.
I just thought that it was worth mentioning that you cannot really compare Hong Kong to he rest of China, as Hong Kong was under British control until 1997. The the poor majority that you mentioned live in rural areas of China outside of the SEC's (Special Economic Zones which are basically free market bubbles along the east coast). Damn 500 character limit cutting me off in mid thought.
I would agree. The best that anyone can do for now is set up some type of IRA. Over any given 40-year work life they definitely tend to do better than social security.
so what i want to ask is: if all those things are such a small fraction of the spendings, what is the bigger fraction? if all the things we traditionally expect from governments are a drop in the bucket then WhO is FiLlInG thE rest of the bucket?
If you* had paid attention, he didn't mention NASA or the military ect..until after the first 7 months, which he was explaining how if these programs were cut they would not even cover the last 5 months. Does that ring a bell?
Yes, what we now call "Social Security" -- a combination of payroll taxes and retirement benefits -- would become "general taxes" -- the same payroll taxes but no retirement benefits.
What you lose in cost you gain is risk. It's understood that outsourcing is a short term measure to lower costs, but in the longer-term, it's hardly ever the answer. Take Boeing Aircraft, over 87% of their people work right here in the U.S., most likely to due to issue #2. They aren't the only ones, Wal mart certainly can't outsource everyone, they need people working here, as does every shopping & shipping chain
It will make the tax code less complicated and cut back on administrative costs of collection. That alone means more revenue. Besides, why is it fair for one company to pay 10% because of XYZ exemptions, while another pays 35%? Why is it fair for a doctor making $250K to pay 35% of his/her income, while the Wall Street investor making billions pays 15%? Reagan saw that problem, and he fixed it in 1986...revenue went up. Unless now is so much different, the same would likely result.
Small debts are not a problem (although I wouldn't say they are necessarily GOOD either). Just as a few hundred dollars of debt on your credit card isn't a problem, but a few tens of thousands would definitely be.
Yes. I actualy already have insurance, so I can use the private health care clinics that are much better. Once I had paronychia and I had to wait 9 hours for a minute of service in apublich hospital. That was the last straw. Universal health care is inefficient and should be replaced by the free market.
i agree with cutting the future of these programs, and honoring the ones in place now, but i believe it's our foreign aid that needs to be cut if we truly wanted to continue these programs, that i don't personally think should be there.
I don't think so. Today our economy is based on money because all those resources can be reached through it. In a resource based economy money is nothing, services and products are free for all people in the world. You must reed about The Venus Project is and his creator Jacque Fresco's ideas. It is very interesting and will save the planet. I recommend you.
think of how much money fucking 18 trillion dollars is, I can't even wrap my head around a million, let alone a billion, but a trillion? times 18??? What the fuck dude...
if I were to give you a million dollars a day to spend until you spent a trillion dollars from the day Christ was born, you'd be 2013 years old now and would still need to spend $1 million/day for the next 726 years to hit a trillion. We now owe 17.9 trillion dollars.
The video *did* look at the cost of all foreign aid and the cost of occupying other countries. The fact that cutting all of that *still* wouldn't balance the budget is the reason why they said that the government needs to go beyond these normal cuts if it is to balance its budget. In any case, we know that the government isn't going to balance its budget. Politicians don't have the right incentives to do that.
@LearnLiberty Please note that I do not mean to come across as whining (as at least one person has said about me in the comments). I appreciate what you are doing to spread awareness about the government, it's false promises, and it'd debt problems. I just wanted to make it clear that not everyone considers themselves to be a part of the government and so when you say "we" it makes it seem like you think all of us are to blame for the government's wrongs, which of course is not true.
“We can reduce the federal government to nothing more than a glorified assisted living facility and we still wouldn’t be able to balance the budget.” That is the best line ever!
I really wish we could have seen that same calender, but reversing the cuts. What would it have looked like cutting S.S., Medicare and Medicaid?
We would have a balanced budget. That's actually about it. We would be anywhere from 1 week to 2 months into the next year, i'm not exactly sure, but interest social security, medicare, medicaid, and all the other bullshit we should never have spent money on in the first place is the majority of our spending.
This is by far the best video I've ever seen on government spending.
This video very nicely displays the problems of the USA government budget deficit. However, this video goes beyond things like increasing government revenues due to taxation or GDP growth thereby effectively reducing your relative debt. That said the fact that the current situation is unsustainable over the longer term without intervention is to me at least as clear as day.
My point was that government's deficit usually goes down when interest rates have risen and it becomes harder for them to borrow without racking up massive interest payments. At the same time, the Domestic Private Surplus also drops when interest rates rise - generally during an unsustainable boom that causes a recession to greatly shrink the surplus. Further, the most recent recession shows that the massive Bush deficits coincided with massive domestic private deficits.
No no, I understand that's his point, that's why he mentions S.S. and retirement obligations at the end. I was just highlighting this fact by explicitly stating it.
It depends on the individual and sacrifice. Back to executives who do work very hard: there are prominent others with limited oversight, attend few meetings and at best court other leaguers and officials to lavish outings and activities. How is that worth more than the functions of a business whole? There are investors deprived of dividends and/or returns while board members dictate unilateral, insider compensation while not doing much good, if much at all.
"Crashes and booms are fueled by more than just the credit market" They are directed by other factors, but the easy credit provided by the Fed setting interest rates lower than the market normally would is how they get going. And the Fed cannot sustain this without high levels of inflation, so it lowers the rates, ergo crash. The particulars of what kind of bubble, etc. are determined by the other factors (govt interference, shape of the economy, etc.)
Well, if that trading is influencing the need or desire for action by the state department then it should be paid for in some way by the interests at hand, not everyone. If there is an inherent risk in dealing with foreign governments, then that can and should be forecasted as easily as any other expense a business takes into consideration.
Taxes are analogous to prices. If a store owner lowers prices, he'll get more customers but make less money with each sale. If he raises prices, he'll have fewer customers, but make more money with each sale. If you graphed his expected revenue compared to prices, you would see a curve that rises up from 0, levels off at a point called "unit elasticity", and then falls back down. This is analogous to government revenues, taxes are price investors pay for conducting business in this economy.
Does the video have any citations to some of these numbers? A lot of these seem to be a lot shorter than they're supposed to be.
Defense-related expenditures for example have had reports for 2012 that ranged around 1.03-1.45 trillion dollars, rather than the 930 billion we've got here.
Yes, I know of Stefan Molyneux. I was actually introduced to anarchism with his book "Practical Anarchy."
"But, then, I don't need to convince YOU of that, do I?" I am not sure what you mean here.
if I were to give you a million dollars a day to spend until you spent a trillion dollars from the day Christ was born, you'd be 2013 years old now and would still need to spend $1 million/day for the next 726 years to hit a trillion. We now owe 17.9 trillion dollars.
In theory, the problem can be solved by privatizing Social Security and Medicare. In practice, this is less likely to happen than is a monetization of the deficit. IOW, the government prints money to fund its spending. We're seeing the start of that now with the repeated quantitative easings.
"Federal departments which are focused under the accountability of lawmakers"
That's a good one.
[[...and the wildly disparate import/export taxes.]]
...
Import tariffs create type II inflation & shrink markets.
Example: You put an import tariff on new car imports. That reduces the supply of imports, demand exceeds supply = shortages, ergo high prices, placing more demand on domestic new cars, & again, demand exceeds supply = shortages and higher prices. Prices have increased on all new cars, shrinking the 'new car' market. This demand trickles to other cars and prices increase everywhere.
Crashes are the result of unsustainable inflationary booms fueled by easy credit (and that credit drying up when fears of inflation drive up interest rates). Easy credit happens to ALSO help fund large deficits, and those deficits tend to shrink some (but not much) when the easy credit is lessened. You are missing a common cause. And a dangerous one at that, as the US can no longer afford for interest rates to rise - and keeping them low will create inevitable inflationary disaster.
Not so fast, it's recognized even in the corporate world that outsourcing has it's own cons.
1. There's a loss of quality.
2. There's a higher risk of confidentiality and privacy loss.
3. Hidden costs, because you don't know all of the operations going around to these people you're contracting to, it may end up costing more than you realize.
4. loss of managerial control, your turning to another company, as such, you lose DIRECT control.
5. You're tied to that companies success.
PRE-obamacare healthcare programs make up 33% of of government spending, and social security costs about the same, healthcare and social security are the U.S. government's two biggest expenses, with military spending coming in at a distant third
It's a matter of profitability. Taxes are taken out of revenue, not profits. That distinction is key to understanding how taxes can literally drive a company out of business. If Microsoft made 10 billion in revenue, but had 6 billion in expenses (just an example) a tax rate of 45% for Microsoft would result in the company losing 500 million dollars.
The only way to encourage businesses to start up or expand in the US is to give them every opportunity to turn profit.
@Mann do you think the government didn't overspread or have debt before GWB?
Correlation is not causation. The deficit may have been minimized in the late 90s - that did not have anything to do with the tech bubble bursting. They just happened to occur at the same time. One could point out that we are currently experiencing the worst economic crash and aftermath since the Great Depression, while running deficits greater than most countries GDPs.
Wow!!! really enjoy how these gov't debt videos put things into perspective.
Hong Kong on the other hand is considered by most the most free market in the world, even more so that the U.S., and it shows. Although Hong Kong is only one city and surrounding residential areas, it has the 8th most traded currency in the world.
So I think if you were trying to make a decision whether high taxes on business were good or bad for the people, the comparison of Hong Kong and the rest of China is pretty convincing.
Plus there happened to be a little revenue producing thing called the internet coming up at that time.
I dont think so. Brazil was in high debt and pulled itself out and is on the rise and has great programs running right now and its very government run. Higher taxes are the way to roll. Also aiding the poor so they become middle class and spend their money on the private sector.
All the things he mentioned afterwards. By removing those, that extends how far the available money can go.
The things he said at the end, "The only things left: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Interest on the debt" (one thing he ignores is that the interest rate on the debt is at an historic low and will most likely rise in the future).
His channel is great. The videos you mentioned are exactly what i was looking for!
Thank you!
During the early 80s, taxes were cut but revenues actually increased. Why? Because tax rates in the 70s were above unit elasticity. the government lowered taxes to unit elasticity and thus, increased their revenue.
Remember, the economy was in decline during the bush administration, so it doesn't necessarily mean that we're still on this or that side of the laffer curve. I suggest you watch "Can We Balance the Budget By Raising Taxes?" by LearnLiberty. Regardless, you're right about one thing, as taxes increase, raising them further becomes more asymptotically unjustifiable.
"comfortable" is subjective and retirement money is still an individual's responsibility, not the government's. if your profession is unprotected, you should probably start saving. people of today, both old and young, need to readjust their spending habits and lifestyles to what is affordable and practical for their specific income and savings. it is possible to live a frugal life with walmart and amazon, but many are unwilling to adapt their mindsets or lifestyles.
I also heard that they take in more private donations than federal subsidies.
Furthermore, I've been known to out an anarchist that didn't know he was one from time to time. It goes a little something like this:
"Do you think it's wrong to initiate force to achieve an end."
"Yes."
"Then you're an anarchist."
They can - through the natural mechanism of labor competition. "Pay me more or I will go to Company B that pays its employees better." Labor unions and minimum wages only help a few workers at the price of the rest being unemployed. Labor benefits that cannot be paid for are the reason that many American companies (like GM) are going under (and keep getting bailouts). Unions aren't a problem if they are voluntary, but with the force of law, they essentially extort companies to insolvency.
Actually it took that money from the private sector and gave a grant to Vicent Cerf who had already come up with packet switching on his own. Not to metion that TCP/IP isn't the only protocol that could have done the job.
I heard somewhere that in ancient times, civilizations like Egpyt and Greece would whipe detbs clean. They essentially whipe the slate clean and start over. That is never going to happen, but at the very least they should cut the interest rate. 14 trillion dollars in debt is more money than anyone can ever have.
The US started out more like 13 independent nations under a union that brought a stronger common protection, and a free trade zone that brought prosperity. Robert E. Lee was an Abolitionist wouldn't be shocked if he voted for Lincoln, but he couldn't raise arms against his native Virginia, back then it was your State first US second. Lincoln changed this in the Gettysburg address with "the United States is" as in singular. When before it was "the United States are." as in plural.
True, the US is 50 times bigger than Denmark, but on the other hand the US GDP per capita about 7.000 USD bigger than the Danish in PPP. Of course, the US is using too much money on the military (4,75 % of GPD for the US vs. 1,46% for Denmark and 2,5 for the world) So there is more money per person in the US than in Denmark, and even though the liberal government we had through the '00 used a "boom-and-bust" financial policy, Denmark is still considered a strong, or at least safe, economy.
@LearnLiberty, We cut funding for all those things at jan 1st?
Make an updated version for 2021!!!
Who is we? I didnt make any promises to anyone.
very good and accurate video... Ron Paul would love this Professor.
The current market economy IS a resource based economy. Also, eliminating currency would run us into the problem of the double-coincidence of wants which makes economic transactions much less efficient.
Interest = 230 billion.
Pensions = 775.6 billion
Health care = 858.2 billion
= 1,8 trillion.
I think the deficit was revised down by the remaining 300 billion, while the following years were revised upwards. This year the fed government debt alone will hit 16 trillion which is larger than the entire yearly product of the nation.
And thats only the federal debt. You should take the unfunded/contingency liabilities and state debts (3T) into account as well.
I don't doubt that but I think his point was (or at least I hope) that we need to both cut money and raise some, it's impractical to just to one to fix such a huge deficit
It realistically will not be as sweeping, but yeah. Also squeeze indirect beneficiaries of social programs, raise trade tariffs and we can reduce the debt while encouraging domestic commerce and industry, in turn creating more revenue. Government officials should be volunteers whose living is funded by nonprofit charities and their constituents, instead of acting as brokers for entities who are extracting government capital and currency for profit.
I doubt that it would do much, but good point.
They are taking a portion of my income for social security every month. What will I get in return?
A one-year temporary 50% tax on the rich would likely not have too bad of an effect on the economy (provided everyone believed that it was really temporary and really a one-time event).
The problem is the second part. Government isn't good at making things efficient because the incentives in the public sector don't reward efficiency (if anything, they tend to award inefficiency). Consequently, my guess is that the $400 billion would be largely wasted.
Cuts before taxes. One needs to streamline services to the point where it is felt that only the most necessary remain before you can take the public's money to fund them. Otherwise you would be taking resources out of the economy, shrinking the private sector to fund a public sector that may not be as answerable to end-user's demands.
Well the CEO I was thinking of was Home Depot's Nardeli who got fired with a nice $210 million severance package. He didn't do anything and made out like a bandit. Ask the common shareholders of HD whether they had a say on that severance package. There are plenty of CEO's that are major shareholders of the companies they manage.
Has Antony Davies even published anything?
www.antolin-davies.com/index_files/research.htm
First timer to the internet?
Taxes are higher than ever. In the past loopholes existed that made the effective rate much lower than it is today. Tax revenues as a percentage of GDP may be lower, but raising taxes more will jobs and the middle class along with them. It's a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
Powerful. Thanks, Dr. Davies.
Cutting exemptions is effectively the same as raising taxes. It won't significantly increase revenue if at all.
Yes, have a question?
Often there is no choice in purchasing from certain companies. The board could get rid of a CEO but rarely ever do due to contracts. If the shareholders vote out a board member they can be simply reappointed by the other board members. Often the majority of shares are focal. If it's so rare to find a good CEO, then why do they ALL need to be paid so well? The statement is a contradiction in point. The excuse is disclosure and the problem is equity as compensation. CEO is not the only executive.
Awesome video. I would like one for each year. Starting from 2000.
One could argue that only if one entered the jurisdiction voluntarily. Being born in a jurisdiction does not constitute an agreement to this social contract any more than having a contract fall into your lap constitutes an agreement to its terms.
That doesn't mean we should stop trading with them.
Countries that engage more in trade have a de facto higher standard of living, that's what the numbers show.
China has a brutal dictatorship, but by allowing some measure of free markets to exist there, people now live far better than they did 20 years, there's now a MIDDLE CLASS in the country about 2/3 the population of the U.S.
Hong Kong itself is an even greater example, their life expectancy is higher than ours, education quality too.
If the executive wasn't providing some type of service to the company, the board of directors would fire him and get a new executive. The problem is that good CEOs (et al.) are VERY hard to find, which is why their job pays so well. Keep in mind that it's not up to you to decide what is and is not good for a business. If you don't like a company, you don't have to do business with them. The only people who should have a say are the board of directors and the shareholders.
I'm not going to argue that the gov't's debt isn't concerning, it most certainly is, but the data would suggest that some debt isn't a bad thing. In fact, it would suggest that sustaining a controlled amount of debt is actually a good thing for a gov't to do. It's only when it's allowed to get out of control that it becomes a problem. For example, no one would fret if the gov't was in $500k debt because that's not hard to pay back, when it gets into the billions and trillions there's a problem.
Crashes and booms are fueled by more than just the credit market, an economy is indeed a complicated thing after all. I know I was missing a common cause, I was missing all causes because that wasn't the point of what I was saying. I wouldn't take on the task of finding causes because that's a complicated task; I would however point out what years of records have found.
That math doesn't work. If you cut everything, then you're not counting the remaining days of the year based on the old rate of spending.
your right it should be percentage per day
The math shows that the government can only fund itself for 7 months, and that it would have to cut nearly everything in order to make it the rest without running such a massive deficit that it obliterates all services for future generations. That's the point.
That's the silliest thing I've heard (at least on a video of this caliber.) That's like saying, if my income level goes up, I'll have the same amount of money. And if my income goes down, I'll have the same amount of money.
If that's the case, why not just have no taxes at all? Then we'd still have 2.2 trillion a year right? From no taxes at all?
How will abolishing the Federal Reserve help? They are in charge of making sure the US dollar doesn't rapidly inflate through maintaining the number of government bonds in circulation. By abolishing the Fed the government would be forced to pay the bond holders all at once, which would only sky rocket the debt even higher. And getting rid of taxes would give even less income for the government, so that wouldn't help either.
astrological calendars are the positioning of constellations and other patterns in stars along the ecliptic, or earth's orbit around the sun. Mayans used a solar calendar, not an astrological calendar which was 365 days, but even if they knew how to correct the extra fourth, the fact remains that the alignment between the Earth, sun and galactic center happens every 25,000 years or so, and were never responsible for any phenomena in the past. Just don't get your hopes up.
I'll try to help, but i'm not entirely sure what you said, to be honest.
The point this video's trying to make is that our mandatory spending (social security, medicare, medicaid, interest on the debt) is so overwhelmingly massive that that ALONE gives us a budget deficit. And therefore if we want to balance the budget we have to make major cost-cutting reforms to our entitlement state.
Fifth, everytime the US gov't has avoided a deficit it was disasterous for the economy as a whole and resulted in the private sector (businesses and citizens) suffering. I have a chart if you want to see.
Fortunately, we don't have to raise tax rates. All we really need to do is reform the tax code by cutting out many exemptions. It's the "Simpson-Bolles" plan, and it even results in a lower marginal rate, yet generates more revenue. I'll check out that vid...LearnLiberty knows their stuff.
What is not mentioned, is what the Government spends the money on from July-31 on back to January-1. 7 full months of tax paying money is not accounted for. He basically removed all of the things our Government spends in the mainstream, but does not regard where the unaccounted spending goes. Ron Paul - 2012.
I'm going to split a hair here because it's worth mentioning. The modern-day corporation is actually a legal entity, protected by law, to basically absolve or limit liability by individuals involved in economic activity. So basically, through this structure or entity, the benefits of capitalism flow only in one direction. Many large corporations today couldn't get to their size if the CEO's personal assets were on the line.
social security, medicare, medicaid, other welfare spending, interest on its debt, other agencies such as the EPA or FDA.
We are now part of what is going to be a lesson in economics for future generation.
Me too. Buy platinum and palladium!!
That was not the point he was trying to make. He was showing that people complain about taxes being too high, and yet they want all these things from the government, but the government can't pay for all these things unless taxes were to go up. Him saying the cuts was a way to emphasize how crucial it is that taxes are implemented.
Please give a lecture to Bernie!
why would the government cut these things when it can just print money? sure this will mean that the dollar goes down in value, but other currencies which are also pegged to the us dollar (the chinese currency at the moment i think) would also depreciate, so america's purchasing power in china would remain constant.
[[ If there is an inherent risk in dealing with foreign governments, then that can and should be forecasted as easily as any other expense a business takes into consideration]]
Thumbs up. But of course forecasts are easy. Getting them right isn't always easy. That's true of all forecasts. As you say though, dealing with foreign government is yet another risk to assess.
I just thought that it was worth mentioning that you cannot really compare Hong Kong to he rest of China, as Hong Kong was under British control until 1997. The the poor majority that you mentioned live in rural areas of China outside of the SEC's (Special Economic Zones which are basically free market bubbles along the east coast).
Damn 500 character limit cutting me off in mid thought.
I would agree. The best that anyone can do for now is set up some type of IRA.
Over any given 40-year work life they definitely tend to do better than social security.
so what i want to ask is: if all those things are such a small fraction of the spendings, what is the bigger fraction? if all the things we traditionally expect from governments are a drop in the bucket then WhO is FiLlInG thE rest of the bucket?
If you* had paid attention, he didn't mention NASA or the military ect..until after the first 7 months, which he was explaining how if these programs were cut they would not even cover the last 5 months. Does that ring a bell?
how much time will medicare, medicde and social security buy us?
Change the paradigma of the state. It is necessary everywhere, including my country.
Yes, what we now call "Social Security" -- a combination of payroll taxes and retirement benefits -- would become "general taxes" -- the same payroll taxes but no retirement benefits.
The things that he cut (discretionary spending) are actually essential roles of government... and yet we still can't balance the budget.
What you lose in cost you gain is risk.
It's understood that outsourcing is a short term measure to lower costs, but in the longer-term, it's hardly ever the answer.
Take Boeing Aircraft, over 87% of their people work right here in the U.S., most likely to due to issue #2. They aren't the only ones, Wal mart certainly can't outsource everyone, they need people working here, as does every shopping & shipping chain
It will make the tax code less complicated and cut back on administrative costs of collection. That alone means more revenue. Besides, why is it fair for one company to pay 10% because of XYZ exemptions, while another pays 35%? Why is it fair for a doctor making $250K to pay 35% of his/her income, while the Wall Street investor making billions pays 15%? Reagan saw that problem, and he fixed it in 1986...revenue went up. Unless now is so much different, the same would likely result.
If they already don't work then what difference would that make?
Small debts are not a problem (although I wouldn't say they are necessarily GOOD either). Just as a few hundred dollars of debt on your credit card isn't a problem, but a few tens of thousands would definitely be.
Yes. I actualy already have insurance, so I can use the private health care clinics that are much better. Once I had paronychia and I had to wait 9 hours for a minute of service in apublich hospital. That was the last straw. Universal health care is inefficient and should be replaced by the free market.
i agree with cutting the future of these programs, and honoring the ones in place now, but i believe it's our foreign aid that needs to be cut if we truly wanted to continue these programs, that i don't personally think should be there.
I am VERY interested as to how many days social security Medicaid and Medicare is worth
Its all about money. A resource based economy is the solution. Jacque Fresco has the answers.
I don't think so. Today our economy is based on money because all those resources can be reached through it. In a resource based economy money is nothing, services and products are free for all people in the world. You must reed about The Venus Project is and his creator Jacque Fresco's ideas. It is very interesting and will save the planet. I recommend you.
think of how much money fucking 18 trillion dollars is, I can't even wrap my head around a million, let alone a billion, but a trillion? times 18??? What the fuck dude...
if I were to give you a million dollars a day to spend until you spent a trillion dollars from the day Christ was born, you'd be 2013 years old now and would still need to spend $1 million/day for the next 726 years to hit a trillion. We now owe 17.9 trillion dollars.
BroGamer32 I'd have to kill myself eating buritos to match that monetary value (if I were to do it in just burritos)
The video *did* look at the cost of all foreign aid and the cost of occupying other countries. The fact that cutting all of that *still* wouldn't balance the budget is the reason why they said that the government needs to go beyond these normal cuts if it is to balance its budget. In any case, we know that the government isn't going to balance its budget. Politicians don't have the right incentives to do that.
@LearnLiberty Please note that I do not mean to come across as whining (as at least one person has said about me in the comments). I appreciate what you are doing to spread awareness about the government, it's false promises, and it'd debt problems. I just wanted to make it clear that not everyone considers themselves to be a part of the government and so when you say "we" it makes it seem like you think all of us are to blame for the government's wrongs, which of course is not true.
Taxes for everyone (including corporations) are at the lowest they've ever been. It hasn't worked so far, so why would it work now?