Yakk

Thank you for reading my mind. Now that you have pulled off that trick, I guess you'll divine the effects of massive state intervention in economies done willy-nilly.

So would digging holes and filling them in. Good old "new deal" economics -- they are quite useful, when you are in the midst of a huge massive depression with an economy spiralling into destruction.

This isn't the case in the USA right now. What you are describing is welfare -- but welfare that people can take pride in. I like my welfare honest. It should be designed to get people off the dole, not living on it and feeling they are entitled to it. Look at what living on the dole for decades did and does to the US farming industry.

When corperate welfare becomes acceptable, the corperations buy the government. The same is true of many other special interests. It is a corroding attack on democracy itself.

There is a tax base. A massive one. In case you didn't notice, the USA has a GDP per capita that is easily amoung the highest in the entire world. The fact that your tax revenues are hijacked by special interests is a pretty large problem.

And in case you didn't notice, the USA has a shortage of blue collar tradesmen. Mechanics, Plumbers -- good, solid, decent paying jobs, that require a few years of education.

America and Americans deserve to be rich because it out produces, out thinks and out does every other nation on Earth. You can build up temporary illusions of productivity via protectionism, hiding inefficiencies, but they are a waste in the long term.

Of course there are ramifications to that. Right now, the USA is living with an unsustainable standard of living, subsidized by the Chinese, who will one day stop the subsidies and the US standard of living will fall. Most probably, it will fall to a point that is higher than it would have if the Chinese never subsidized the USA.

Where are, say, the Canadian steel and lumber subsidies? How does the USA respond to losing their trade cases in court?

And yes, the Chinese are often protectionistic and social welfare-istic.

I'm critizising your ham-handed massive market manipulations, because the market is pretty damn good at solving alot of these problems. Better than you are, I can almost guarantee. Guild the market, provide incentives, when there isn't a natural monopoly (and there isn't in steel production -- steel production doesn't scale properly for that).

I consider taxing the poor stupid. They have no money, they are "the poor", sort of what the word means.

You quoted fighting Japan and Germany in WW2, and needing to buy weapons off them. My apologies if I took this to mean "what if we where fighting a relative industrial equal".

Iraq, North Korea and Iran are pushovers. Of the three, Iran is the healthiest economically -- and it has half the GDP of that weak, small, cuddly nation called Canada just north of you.

When someone's reasoning is based on the last set of wars, be it WW2 or the Cold War, I will call them out on it when it doesn't apply.

A world war between large powerful industrial nations will be a war in which both sides have nuclear weapons. Talking about the amount of steel production you have will be irrelivent.

And for the flyswatter wars like Afghanistan and Iraq, so long as your supply of raw materials is sufficiently broad-based, you'd require every single resource supplying nation to turn on you for you to be in serious trouble. If that is happening, perhaps you need to reevaluate your policies. Hell, if that is happening, you are probably shortly devolving into the previously mentioned world war 3.

I explained what will happen if you follow your advice. The massive costs that tarrifs cause will cause a reduction in the standard of living and wealth of the USA. If you let things go as they stand, eventually a smaller reduction will occur. Make the American education system better, tidy up waste, and clean up.

Actually, the Soviets had a massive, government-backed and supported, heavy industry. Hell, in many areas they pulled off innovations that the USA didn't match -- their heavy lift rockets beat out American ones, their Math was pretty top notch (if quite different). What they didn't have was the massively powerful computation engine called "the market" working full time for them.

Because they are starving to death -- would you rather starve, or work at starvation wages? The USA has tonnes of wealth. Taxing it is a matter of political will, not income distribution. Taxing it has costs: it reduces the incentive to produce. Taxing it has benefits.

You have yet to acknowledge the costs. You seem to think large-scale interventions into the economy have no impact other than what you want them to have: and what you are describing is large scale.

When you put up steel tarrifs, you save some jobs. And you destroy countless others and take wealth from nearly every American. But, the jobs saved are obvious and you can point at them -- while the wealth and jobs destroyed occur over the entire economy. When you can steal from the many to bribe the few, it makes political sense, especially when you wrap yourself in the flag.

The American standard of living will fall -- I have said this before, why are you asking me this again?

Americans will have to produce more to get less than they do today, in order to pay off the debts they and their forefathers built up. That is what building up debt at the rate they are today means. If you don't believe you should be doing this, then make sure the government you elect moves away from a pro-debt platform.

All the magic bullets and financial lies you are told are exactly that -- lies. You will have to pay for what you are borrowing, one way or another. There isn't any such thing as a free lunch.

You are attempting to describe a free lunch. "Simply make Americans buy American! All will be well!" You are glossing over the costs of this policy. As the American standard of living and dollar falls, it will start making more sense to build factories in America that take advantage of your better infrastructure and better educated and easier to train populance, to sell to both Americans and for the export market.

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.

flstf

originally posted by pan6467
I believe it was Buckminster Fuller who said back in the '60s that one of the problems we will have in the future is what to do with all the surplus workers. Our productivity would increase to the point where all our goods and services could be provided by fewer and fewer workers. Perhaps we are just seeing the beginning of this.