Nope, not astrology land at all. I can see the numbers on my paycheck. I can go to the websites of nearly any publicly traded organization and get their reports, statements, releases, etc with a wealth of information, including how much they pay in taxes. Maybe you can argue about how a business uses the extra money from lower tax rates, but there's no question that taxes are a real number on real budgets and it really affects businesses. The problem is not a lack of hard data, rather the issue is usually how to interpret it.

What is astrology is stuff like the "societal inertia" that Ron mentioned that has no basis in any sort of facts.

Well, I'll ignore your rant on morals and self awareness, and focus on the biological boom/bust cycle as a metaphor for economics.

While it is interesting that people are claiming to be ale to control the boom/bust cycles of economics, I am far from convinced. When a lot of control of a single group is placed over an economy and they place tight controls on everything, it nearly always gets worse as the controls are tightened and eventually breaks down. That's what killed the Soviet Union IMHO. They overcontrolled their economy and it blew up on them.

The best thing for an economy is to have some checks and balances systems in place, and to keep corruption to a minimum. So yeah, there is a bit of control over an economy. But too much control can kill an economy just as much as having no control over it.

IMHO, some form of checks and balances should serve to keep the economy at a desireable level - not some hard line somehwere where you say "This is how far you can go, and you will be punished if you go further."

I would agree with this. The president is an easy to blame target, and many people overstate how much control he has over the economy.

Did you know unemployment and poverty were lower before the progressive era than after?

At the start of the progressive era, the business cycle was absolute, boom, bust, boom, bust.  The employment rose and fell several points in cycles that only lasted a few years.  As they kept adding programs in, the cycles got less severe.  The average rate got larger.  The great depression comes along, more and more programs keep getting added in, the rate keeps getting larger.  WW2 comes around, the unemployed finally have stuff to do, the wartime draft and following reconstruction era is the first time the average rate of unemployment is lower than before the changes.  The draft is ended, the oil crisis hits, poof, back to higher unemployment!

Progressive, or counter productive?

Wish in one hand, shit in the other.  Refusal to accept reality will not change it.

For thousands of years, people have been attempting to change reality by denying it, form a utopia where people don't act like animals.  It still hasn't worked.  We're animals.

The individual is a relatively intelligent being, just as a dog is a relatively intelligent being.  Society is a collection of idiots.  This is proven countless times every day.  You need only turn on the tv to see just how dumb society is.  The first commercial you see is proof that people are fucking stupid.  If they weren't, commercials would be simple information spots instead of propaganda.

Global warming is going to kill us all.   Global warming, the single greatest achievement mankind could possibly hope for.  The nightmare scenario where the polar caps melt means doubled food production, increased range of habitat, less destructive weather.  Yeah, people wont be able to live on some of the sand bars they're currently inhabiting.  We're in a brief lull between ice ages and the world panics over a temporary, and already finished warming period that would have been helpful anyway.  This alone proves that people are about as intelligent as sheep when in a large group.

Quoting CobraA1,

comment 73

"Joe the Plumber isn't a business owner. He's intending to buy the business he works at.... . . and I'm assuming he intends to do stuff with it. I don't think he'd buy itif it didn't have potential for growth."

"Joe the Plumber" is a fucking liar that tried to press the issue on Obama's tax plan. In reality, not BS, Joe benefits far more under Obama then he would have done under McCain. The guy went out there and started speaking publicly and was a total asshole in just about every interview that was conducted outside Fox News. If you've only watched Fox, you wouldn't know any of this as they never corrected the story like they always do, but it's already old news. The guy was a plant and isn't even a registered plumber for fucks sake, he's broke, and was NEVER going to buy any business in the first place, let alone start making 250k + a year. All of this is so damn dumb to begin with. The extra 3 percent that he would have to pay AFTER 250k is whopping 3 percent! Oh, he's doomed to fail for sure, yep. That would have prevented him from buying a business in the first place? That's just crazy talk, which was his implication to Obama. That's insanity and stupid. If you noticed, McCain singled him out first in the debates, this is politics 101 man. Problem is, it didn't work or have the effect it was intended to have. The Republicans and especially Conservatives have a hard time connecting with most of the working class in America.  Joe the douche was an asshat that got caught with his pants down, and on top of all that, owes back taxes, which I hope McCain will pay off for him since he used him like a cheap prop.

Have you not seen the news lately? Numbers are everywhere boy, there's a fucking massive mess out there, just start with Retail sector first, since that's the latest, then make sure you take a look at all of the financial institutions, including banks. The Economic policy takes years to kick in, and the Bush Administration's policies are certainly due their portion of blame(since they're a direct extension of Reagan's policy which is the bottom line culprit), along with the system we're running on, which is unregulated Capitalism. And why should it?

The system we run in doesn't care for external problems outside of it's own interests. Our economy has been built on a house of cards, for years and years, and now it's coming  down hard. Ownership is down, everything is being borrowed at usery like interest rates, the complete opposite of what Bush talked about for years with the "ownership" society, which is complete fucking BS. Not buying any of it. Debt is through the roof, just go look up the average debt the American household has, and compare that to a few generations ago, previous to Reagan. Let's also not talk about Deficit spending, which happened because the POTUS decided to ram through the Tax Cuts immediately once in office, and then take our Country to War, weakening the dollar. If he had a backbone, he would have rolled the tax cuts back until the Wars were at a level of spending that wasn't crippling our Country.

Outside of Government, which were enablers to all of this, the Private sector took advantage of every inch of the subprime lending scheme and went after everyone under the sun that needed to borrow money. If my Wife didn't work for one of the biggest Firms for a long period of time, I wouldn't know half  the things I do about this particular mess, or probably even be aware of just how f'ed up all of this is. The Democrats don't have clean hands either at all, but were in the minority for 6 of the 8 years with Bush, and could get nothign done, even if they wanted too. They were supposed to be there in speaking out against the complete lack of regulation in the industry(Which Obama did do to his Credit, but was part of only a few), and make no mistake about it, there was basically NO regulation at all. People would get pre-approved without any documentation whatsoever, and then bulk combine  these loans together and sell them off to investors domestic and foreign. This built up to enormous proportions and it exploded. The President and the Republican congress blocked many proposals, some bipartisan, to place regulations on this industry, but nothing was done about it, since these firms were making ungodly amounts of money selling these loans on the secondary market, and most of these companyes (GS, AIG, ETC,,) all have ties directly to this administration. This just can't be ignored.  The Administration should have come out years ago, preferably back in 2004, and said to all financial institutions, "STOP DEALING IN BAD PAPER", they all knew it back then and did nothing.This would have had an enormous effect in the market, and probably would have eased some of the crash we saw just a month ago.

Well, since quibbling is clearly fair game in this thread, I'd say that you're confusing power with influence. Power is the ability to get people to do that which they otherwise would not. Influence is the ability to get people to adopt your point of view voluntarily. Perhaps more importantly, the US is (hopefully still) a democratic republic, so being best-in-class (CEOs in this case) pales in comparison to being part of an alpha gang (say, the US Chamber of Commerce or the Business Roundtable). To get large shifts in federal spending, federal regulations, or even federal employment levels, a president *must* work *with* Congress, major interest groups, and our increasingly byzantine bureaucracy. He can't even get all that much done in the bowels of the Pentagon, else we'd have a fairly big chunk gone from our national debt (busting bad defense contracts was one of my favorite things about McCain; hope he gets back to it).

On a different quibble, I wasn't saying that there's no info, just that it is self-delusion to treat *any* information about economic processes as the same kind of data you'd get running white cell counts on a patient's blood sample. Money is the purest abstraction I know of (it's almost like "concrete" postmodernism), and the past few years of business news has made it clear that what ends up on public balance sheets is often a loooong way from "the truth," much less a hypothesis that can be confirmed by repeating a consistent experiment in multiple labs. A sufficiently skilled astrologer can run predictive and analytical rings around a mediocre psychologist. Just like picking an astrologer or shrink, picking your economist(s) is a personal matter in the end--a question of faith in another person's superior understanding.

You're tossing quibbles with a former political scientist, so I both have to defend your right to defining your own terms *and* try to clarify my distinction so I can "win."

With power, you *get* what you want, period; with influence, you work hard, and *maybe get* what you want. I'd throw a Pong graphic in if I could make myself bother with 3rd-party pic hosting...

WOAH!

English is the biggest language with over 800,000 words!

Just because you may not know them doesn't mean it doesn't have them.

Compare it to French, with about 80,000 operable words. Sorry Frenchies

And it's technically not a "lingual issue" it's a semantics issue, to clarify

Umm Psychoak - that math doesn't even make sense.

Reagan didn't submit a balanced budget - the budget he submitted was 20/21sts of the way to the 6% of GDP budget that was finalized. The Democrats chose not to accept *all* of the cuts he made in democratic plans, which added a final 1/20th of the budget.

No matter how you calculate that, that doesn't mean Reagan submitted a balanced budget in the first place - Democrats were responsible for adding 5% of that budget, not adding 5% of GDP.

Sorry, that's the stupidest bit of Karl Rove/Fox News math I've ever seen. Even Dick Cheney said "Reagan proved deficits don't matter". It turns out they do, but being less in touch with reality than Dick Cheney is a bad sign.

Jonnan

Actually, no, it does not make sense for them to change the price based on taxes. Your're conflating two separate things - the supply demand curve, and the profit per unit.

The supply demand curve determines the point at which the revenue/unit * unit's sold gives the maximum number. Actually determining this curve obviously varies greatly depending on elasticity etcetera, but tax does not actually affect where that point is - assuming a smooth curve with no inflection points (i.e. demand always goes down as price goes up), there is one and only one point of maximum revenue.

Finding where the point is exactly may be a trick, and with a very low elasticity to demand it may stay very stable across a large range of prices, but fundamentally, there's only one spot where price per unit*unit's sold maximizes, every other spot is inferior to that one.

So assume for a moment that the optimal price is $20 per game, with a profit of $5.00 per game.

If I tax you 5% , and you raise your price$1.00 to compensate . . . you have made a fundamental mistake. Because your total revenue has gone down - you left the optimal spot - the exact amount you are losing by leaving the optimal point is going to vary highly by elasticity (Theoretically, in the corrupt case of elasticity=0, you lose nothing by raising the price $1.00. Practically there's no such thing as elasticity zero but there are things that come close - addictive drugs, gasoline, et al. The problem with these is the the optimal price is exceedingly high, and never used in practice.)

To be fair - the government can raise taxes sufficiently that it is *unprofitable* to sell units (In this case, 25% tax). But given anything with a sane demand curve, it's almost always a mistake to raise prices in response to it's being taxed.

Jonnan

Jonnan

That's the truth - and it's not just words. It's grammar as well. Not to mention figures of speech and cultural differences. People who have not been involved much in translation do not realize how much we uses phrases that have completely different meanings when taken literally.

Well, according to the source article, the number of words is estimated between 1 and 60 million. If you count the different forms of words you get to 60 million words. The low estimate of 1 million is still larger than 800.000.

As for the example word Ron Lugge had trouble with, "power", I know at least 4 Dutch words that map to the English word "power": kracht, macht, vermogen, mogendheid. Words that all have a different meaning, i.e. if a device is powerfull, is it "krachtig" in Dutch, but if someone has a lot of power, he is "machtig" in Dutch. Translating such words to English often looses information.

On the other hand, there are also usages of the word "power" that don't map directly to a Dutch word, for example, when "power" is meant to be "electric power", In such case you could translate it with "electriciteit", but that is not a 1:1 mapping, so in that case you loose information when translating to Dutch.

The moral of the story is that while English may not really have a lack of words (nor do other languages have), it can be a challenge to write down what you want to say, because the available English words do not 1:1 match what you want to say.

I totally agree. But I tire quickly of political arguements because there's no perfect answer so no one can win. Everyone is so mired in their own opinions that they'll never change their minds. You can't win an arguement on the Internet. Period.

Let's just drop this topic before the inevitable happens, and someone calls someone else either a racist or a facist.

I don't know any Dutch to speak of, but I've known a fellow native Floridian who got fluent at a pretty young age. Not only could he do neat cognate tricks (saying whole sentences in Dutch that all us ignorant yokels could follow), he told me that Dutch has four (more?) words for "reasonable."

Apparently, being reasonable is very important to the Dutch, but mabye a bit odd from a typical Southern US point of view. This guy was once in a long line for a Dutch night club, in the wee hours of some morning back in the '80s. A very drunk couple in the line decided that the best way to pass the time was to lie down in on the sidewalk and copulate. The other folks in line proceeded to spend their time discussing whether that was "reasonable." IIRC, the local consensus was that the copulators were not being reasonable, but calling the cops was also not reasonable. Alas, I forget the Ductch flavors of "resonable" and which one was in play for those chats.