Rich American Destroys The Fiction That Rich People Create The Jobs

[the DRIZZLE]

From a formal economics perspective the limiting factor in economic output is production (and the ability to trade). Consumers can borrow money to consume more but as we've seen in the past 15 years that's not such a hot idea. This is why you can't spend your way to prosperity in the long run, you can only produce your way there.

 

[Craig234]

Sooo lame. That's kinda the rightwing version of denial, isn't it?

Products are created that nobody wants, aka the Edsel & a few Apple products over the years-

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/...flops_n_936038.html#s339143&title=1_Apple_III

It's they whole "If you build it, they will come", except nobody did...

The simple existence of any product doesn't mean people will buy it, no matter how much that idea is necessary for you to support your ideology & the necessary level of denial...

How about the spiffy faceplant done by Android tablets, huh? Yeh- everybody wants those, so much that they're hard to offload at a loss...

In any business other than addiction, business meets demand, sometimes taps latent demand through innovation, but they don't create it.

Both are needed, really. Let's say you get a great product - perhaps an Apple iPad, and I tell you you are the salesperson for selling a ton of them in Yemen.

You find that the people in Yemen are worried about eating and can't afford iPads. You can't sell any. Hey, let's cut the taxes of their rich! Nope, still can't sell any.

On the other hand, in a great market, it still takes good businesses to make and innovate products. Most companies didn't innovate the iPad.

If incentives really were removed for Apple to make the iPad, something that has never happened in America and is not a danger, it would hurt.

You need both the 'consumer' and the 'producer' to have a nice iPad market.

The dirty little secret of the right is that like a crack addict who buys crack with the rent money, the rich are utterly incapable as a whole at the policy level at any moderation to their just taking everything they can and destroying the wealth of the rest of the country that is needed for prosperity. They happily 'make the pie smaller' in exchange for grabbing a bit more. It's a destructive abuse of power.

It's why many business leaders, recognizing this, came to actually support FDR's reforms because they understood that on their own, the economy would be ruined.

They wanted the government to put policies in for everyone to have to follow to keep a stronger economy. They couldn't just voluntary follow good policies; if they did, competition with companies who didn't would put them out of business. Just paying their workers more would bankrupt them if others paid them less - but a minimum wage everyone was required to pay, labor organizing for every business similar to them, made the economy work better.

Not many people who serve the rich have a sales pitch of 'you have gotten plenty, time for more balance and for you to get a bit less'. They get the business of the rich by offering to get them the most - screw the country. That's why you hear Republicans always talk about 'all tax cuts (for the rich) are good' - not 'we support lowering taxes on the rich to X%, and strongly oppose going any lower.' I have never heard that once from a Republican leader.

Excesses for the rich led to the crash of the economy in the late 20's. FDR put policies in place to help the average American, and was called a 'traitor to his class'.

Excesses for the rich have led to major economic problems today - to the point they 'own' much of the government and pass economic policies good for them in the short term, helping lead to the 2008 crash and to prevent the sort of recovery FDR helped with. They'd rather have the politics be about the destruction of the middle class become 'the new normal', so the US isn't a force in the world pushing global wages up, but instead pulling US workers down to global cheap labor.

It's not so much that they 'have this plan' though some do, it's that they have enough economic power that no one is telling them 'let's have some balance'.

Everyone is just fighting to get the rich to back them by promising more. Some wealth left in people's homes? We'll get it for you! Some wealth left in Medicare and Social Security going for the benefit of the people? We'll cut those programs and pay the money to you!

It's not a coincidence that Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand-driven proposal is to cut Medicare spending by a third, about $8,000 per person, AND to cut taxes on the rich by an amount that comes out to the same $8,000 per Medicare recipient. It's a blatant reverse Robin Hood 'take medical care from the people and trasfer the money to the rich' proposal. And when it's done, they'll do it again. And again. Until we're back to the gilded age, a third world economy, a plutocracy.

But the people won't let that happen! Well, maybe not in a functioning democracy.

Which we're not really anymore with the corruption of elections systematically funded to that ONLY the top 0.01% matter to many leaders - and the policy proposals quickly lead to 'strangling government in the bathtub', to stripping it of the power to reverse these policies - they don't want FDR again.

Buried in these ever-popular free trade agreements are provisions stripping elected government of its power to represent the people on these issues. It's a start.

The country is facing a historic battle, organized by the anti-citizen pro-corporate political organizing group ALEC, to make it harder to vote, to help prevent the people from electing different leaders, after the historic Republican gains by Republicans in the targeted races in states across the country. To cement their having majorities in states to serve their interests against the people - starting with the policies to kill the funding of the people, the union money. They're trying to lock in their power to take more and more from the people while the people are more powerless to change their government.

So it doesn't so much bother them that they're destroying the economy - it's sort of the short-sighted plan. Some of them know better and point it out, but the 'nice 1%' don't have that much power and are not setting the policies. Institutions such as ALEC backed by people like the Koch Brothers are setting the policies.

Many American leaders have said variations of 'you can pick extreme concentration of wealth or democracy, but you can't have both'.

It's amazing how effective a few propaganda ideology messages (see the 'think tanks' like AEI and propagandists like Frank Luntz), supported by a corporate media, are at manipulating many average Americans into cheering the gutting of their own economic policies and fighting for the interests of the 0.01%. How the lies about things like 'the job creators' needing more tax breaks while hating 'the poor' are fooling many voters.

Politics need organized groups in a democracy, really. The ones for the people are relatively weak. The money and power are in ones like ALEC, in ones like the mega-PACs such as the one run by Karl Rove who 'pick the winners' using mostly anonymous corporate donations.

Right now, democracy isn't working that well. There's not one political candidate with a chance to win the Presidency, and fewer and fewer in Congress as the progressives are targeted and picked off, who support the American people's interests economically. Obama talks a lot of the talk around election time, but massively compromises that agenda as the 'least bad', while Republicans openly call for plans that would further harm the people enormously.

And that's just what they admit in the campaign. As we've seen, they do a lot more once elected (Bush didn't much run on what he actually did once in office. The closest he came was he did mention a tax cut, but it was only based on 'returning a surplus to the people, not borrowed tax cuts, and not one so weighted for the rich.)

We take for granted that we can 'vote out the bad guys', but really, if we can, where are the 'good guys' who can win, and it's going to get worse.

There is no FDR in the race. People like Bernie Sanders are a small minority who lose vote after vote. Elizabeth Warren is a raging centrist moderate calling for the very basic limits of some of the worst Wall Street abuses - not a 'left-wing' candidate by any means - and was blocked from running an agency that would do something so terrible as requiring some honesty in consumer loans. She much be descended from Marx! And she is the #1 target of Wall Street in this election.

What will help is the constitutional amendment to overturn the five radical right corporatist Supreme Court justices who said corporations can own our elections.

Yet that amendment needs the votes of the very statehouses which are now controlled by record numbers of corporate-sponsored Republicans.

Save234

 

[woolfe9999]

Not fully. Creating new markets - you know - investing creates something and marketing of said new thing creates the demand. Consumer demand sustains jobs if anything - not creates them.

That is true only to a point. You're not going to invest in marketing in a low demand economy. People have to be able to afford what you want to market or the marketing is a waste of money. So yes, marketing can stimulate demand, but it doesn't transform paupers into consumers.

The second problem with the supply side theory is it is harder to predict what the supply side will do with the extra money from their tax cuts. Even if marketing will help stimulate demand in a limited way, there is no guaranty that the money will be directed there. It might simply end up as higher compensation for corporate brass, in which case it doesn't get spent because they already have more money than they can spend. OTOH, if it ends up in the hands of ordinary people, our consumer culture makes it fairly predictable that they'll spend it.

 

[DominionSeraph]

From a formal economics perspective the limiting factor in economic output is production (and the ability to trade). Consumers can borrow money to consume more but as we've seen in the past 15 years that's not such a hot idea. This is why you can't spend your way to prosperity in the long run, you can only produce your way there.

You really should clarify that you mean useful production, because any spending is predicated on getting production (otherwise it's just wealth transfer), but the question is whether it's useful.

 

[CADsortaGUY]

You're really not very quick.

Investment is made on the speculation of profit. If there are no customers there is no profit.
You can't invest in a vacuum and just *poof", money appears.

If investment was the driving force of an economy we could make every country in the world rather prosperous. "Invest, and the money will come." But it doesn't, because poor people are shit. You can't just sell to someone who has nothing, and you can't employ people who lack the basic education to to the job you require of them.
Investment needs a churning economy already in place. It can provide the trigger for the rise to the next rung on the ladder, but it cannot be said to be the force which sustains the rungs already in place.

lol, talk about not being very quick... You do realize that without those with money/capital/etc there wouldn't be any economy right? It seems people think new stuff just magically appears and that somehow the "economy" created it. It's BS. There may have been a market identified, but it takes capital to fill/expand/mature that need.
But whatever, you kids can think how you want if it helps you sleep at night.