A. There are many variables that were not taken into consideration in the past. Much much longer life expectancy. Less population for much lesser tax collected. Digital currency (that you may have just mentioned). B. There are also many variables that we cannot foresee their potential and impact yet today. Food can be produced in the lab anywhere (no distribution required). People can live in other planets (new resources). Hard to say about the long term future, but a mixed economy would be a reality, as always (depending on the % of mix.)! When the super computers get enough power, a planned collaborative economy would waste minimum, and the monies could be used in a much more efficient way in the future. You'd better investigate What I do mean by waste (including waste among All nations)! Actually every country waste a lot of money every year for no real meaningful purpose! I just posted the quest, but don't have any idea, Yet! However, minimising waste could be the top priority among All nations! Minimising waste alone could save the world a lot of money that could reverse the existing trend, not only just feasibly, but also Easily, probably. One of the best statisticians, Deming's idea of a new economy (planned and collaborative) within a nation as well as among nations could be the best feasible answer - A happy world!!! But who cares about Deming today!
Start paying anyone who works for the U.S. government 25% less till they are making less than outside employment. Wipe out welfare 99% in form of housing, money and if one needs food, open up centers which employ those who needs jobs to prepare food for those who don't earn enough, must do monthly screening for illegal drugs. US is missing tax money by those who refuse to work because we have made it so easy not to work. If you are disabled, have to prove it each year. Flat tax of 10% on all monies earned both corporations and employees. Any foreign made product has a 100% tax at the register as we do not have free equal trade, keep increasing percentages till corporations bring back jobs to USA. Get rid of green cards and send illegals back to wherever they came. Put 99% of those in prison to work farms making 16 cents an hour, they learn skills. Those who refuse to work, we will outsource their confinement to like Turkey, am sure it cost less for them to house our prisoners. If banks or other companies need help, let then go bankrupt. Let's see, have I not pissed off anyone still standing? I bet our debt is paid off in handful of years and our country is much better financially, hmm back to bed for another useful dream.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Ist paragraph is very wise; look @ long term Citigroup chart,its penny stock BUT reverse split 1 to 10 Best is to do like Israel; every 50 years jubilee, debt forgiveness. Only downside is IRS calls that income so you have to pay tax on that, LOL,still best idea. Mr R Dallo is a better money manager than public policy manager. but I like his interviews , fun + volume read.................................................................. Another way , not the best; is 1929 Bear ..... fixed it also. Good points
I agree with most/all of what you have said. The above is the only one I would humbly disagree with. Thought Experiment: Imagine a household stating they'll pay double for each item they get from outside the house. The household personnel might try to do things they can but the quality is likely to suffer. The other users in the household will have a worse experience using that product and may be forced to create something substandard themselves as a result of these substandard inputs. (If all people in the household agree to this taxation based action then it's their right to do so). When we expand that analysis to include a city, the effects are mitigated, and for a large country as USA the effects are mitigated further. It does not though detract from the argument that the quality still suffers. German cars, Japanese robots, Chinese whatever, all may have comparative advantages. Most people are likely to suffer as a result of higher taxes, except for those who are providing the new substandard goods. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= I am currently reading a book (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion) and the gist seems to be that we use reason to justify the morality that we already believe in. Morality is the elephant and reason is the rider who must assist the elephant as the author states it. As a result my eagerness to find faults is also mitigating rapidly. In other words, maybe you are right! Gringo
Matter of fact you have make my statement even more valid, if businesses opened here in USA like a Toaster Co and they started selling at $20 bucks and one from China that was $10 plus the $10 tax makes it $20 but it is better made, no brainer who going to get sale which in turn going to force USA Toaster to build them better, Competing products change. Old man Walton who created Walmart use to advertise 98% of his products sold was USA made, He believed in America, when he died and kids took over, all our most factory jobs went to cheap China, it wasn't a matter that our products were not well made, people went and bought the THEN crappy products of China cause it was cheap, early on there were many recalls as China make products out of lead and some are still recalled cause of lead based paint, you can't oversee all products made in foreign countries. And the taxes collected from foreign made goods would sell down our huge debt. It is just like trading, you want to compete better than the next trader or you lose.
Most likely , "BAD" people are divided by Politics and Religion also. Isn't morality a judgement? Bad and good are contextual but whose context shall we use? A trading principle (for decades) has been the vast majority of people make decisions using emotion and justify it later on by reason. I have been told (by a huge fund manager) that handbags and shoes are really an investment, for example. Lots of ... isms and movements are started for the purpose of profitable irrationality. Political correctness, for example, is used when the truth just won't do IMO. Fashion is used to oversell when the market is saturated - very logically. Fair trade movement, planned obsolescence, more regulation etc. Tolle says "The whole consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened and no longer sought their identity through things. " So maybe the economic world slowdown is ultimately caused by human reason or enlightment rather than a lack of demand for animal spirits, mercedes, handbags and shoes? http://commonground.ca/OLD/iss/201/cg201_eckhart.shtml
Barry Eichengreen Barry Eichengreen is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley; Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge; and a former senior policy adviser at the International Monetary Fund. His newest book, Hall of Mirrors:The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses – and Misuses – of History, was just published by Oxford University Press. Q http://www.project-syndicate.org/co...omics-revolution-by-barry-eichengreen-2015-05 MAY 14, 2015 21 An Economics to Fit the Facts CAMBRIDGE – The economics profession was arguably the first casualty of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. After all, its practitioners failed to anticipate the calamity, and many appeared unable to say anything useful when the time came to formulate a response. But, as with the global economy, there is reason to hope that the discipline is on the mend. Mainstream economic models were discredited by the crisis because they simply did not admit of its possibility. And training that prioritized technique over intuition and theoretical elegance over real-world relevance did not prepare economists to provide the kind of practical policy advice needed in exceptional circumstances. Some argue that the solution is to return to the simpler economic models of the past, which yielded policy prescriptions that evidently sufficed to prevent comparable crises. Others insist that, on the contrary, effective policies today require increasingly complex models that can more fully capture the chaotic dynamics of the twenty-first-century economy. This debate misses the point. Simple models have their place. They are useful for making the straightforward but counterintuitive points that distinguish macroeconomics from other fields of economic analysis. We rely on such models to explain, for example “the paradox of thrift,” whereby individual decisions to increase saving can, by depressing spending and output, result in the population as a whole saving less. At the same time, complex models can be useful for illustrating special cases and reminding us that the world is a messy place. Neither class of models is useful, however, for providing the practical advice that policymakers need in a crisis. Both are too stylized to be of use when analyzed in the abstract. To make them useful, evidence is required. In fact, largely unbeknownst to the protagonists in this debate over models, an evidentiary revolution is already underway. While older members of the economics establishment continue to debate the merits of competing analytical frameworks, younger economists are bringing to bear important new evidence about how the economy operates. For example, a longstanding debate in macroeconomics has focused on how prices respond to news about the economy, and whether companies pass through to consumers changes in import prices that result from exchange-rate movements. Today, “big data” promises to enhance our ability to understand and even predict such responses. One application of this approach, the Billion Prices Project at MIT, uses billions of observations from online retail websites to track inflation. A second approach relies not on big data but on new data. Economists are using automated information-retrieval routines, or “bots,” to scrape bits of novel information about economic decisions from the World Wide Web. Websites where commercial artists submit designs for company logos and freelance editors offer services for authors promise to shed new light on issues like the determinants of innovation. A third approach employs historical evidence. A number of commentators have observed that the global financial crisis was good for economic history, because it directed attention to previous crises and to the insights that could be gleaned from studying them. In fact, economic history never stopped playing its role in economic research. But the financial crisis served as a useful reminder that history is replete with similar events and with evidence concerning which policy responses work. This realization then dovetailed with the availability of more extensive historical data on the operation of the economy. Economic historians have long gathered information from parish registers, population censuses, and corporate financial statements. But working in dusty archives has become easier with the advent of digital photography, mechanical character recognition, and remote data-entry services. Larger data sets are enabling economic historians to address key questions – for example, how aggregate economic conditions affect labor-force participation decisions in different times and places – more effectively than ever before. This reference to different times and places points to the fourth and final focus of the new empirical research: institutions. Macroeconomic models have tended to neglect the role of institutions, ranging from trade unions and employer associations to property-rights regimes and mechanisms for redistribution. Taking them seriously means considering long historical intervals, because institutions change slowly and vary significantly only over time. Renewed attention to history is thus allowing economists to consider more systematically the role of institutions in macroeconomic outcomes. These developments amount to a sea change in economics. As recently as a couple of decades ago, empirical analysis was informed by relatively small and limited data sets. To be sure, analytical frameworks are still needed to help make sense of the data. But now there is reason to hope that, in the future, economists’ conclusions and policy advice will be shaped not by those frameworks’ elegance, but by their ability to fit the facts. UQ
They could try and live within their country's means. If they have to borrow, some assets should be put aside to cover it. Nothing else will stop the politicians happily spending away their grandchildren's wealth - the bums ! Bush and his cronies should be put on trial and all, yes all their assets forfeited for incompetence and mis-management.