Re: UNCIVIL UNIONS

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 2:24 AM, Karl Swenson <[email protected]> wrote:
> **I don’t, at least not to a degree.  I think people who earn something are
> entitled to it.  Period.

So is taxation ever justified?

> **sure, but then again, that would exclude manufactures like Boeing, who
> sell billion dollar things to a few customers but hire tens of thousands to
> do it, wouldn’t it?

I don't exclude these.  Of the top twenty public corporations in the
USA I linked to, at least 4 of them are like Boeing in that their
bread and butter is very large million dollar plus multiyear
contracts.  I'm just saying that they are a *smaller* piece the
overall economy.  I'm not even saying that trickle down doesn't exist;
it does, at least a little bit.  I am claiming that consumer goods and
commodities are a more important part of the overall economy than are
luxury goods and perhaps even more than capital expenditures.

And if we want to disregard government phantom currency economic
distortions, we might as well ignore that Boeing's biggest contracts
are with governments.  Their most common contracts are to *consumer*
airlines.

> >  The real estate bubble was inflated and burst largely on the
> > backs of tens of millions of middle class and working class wage
> > earners, with the net result being a massive arbitrage to the upper
> > class.
>
> **You forgot to mention that it was done at least in part because we wanted
> to provide opportunity to those who could not afford it and those markers
> came due.

Yes.  Multiple parties have fault.  One side got overwhelmingly
punished.  Traditionally, lenders are responsible to calculate and
carry the risk of default.  The arbitrage is where the poor and middle
class parties lost their money and their credit and their jobs and
their homes, the tax payers paid for stimulus and bailout, and the
reckless financiers made record bonuses.  Heads I win, tails you lose
is a great financial innovation.

> > So, yes.  Poor people contribute to job creation.
>
> **yes, but only indirectly, and that is a substantive difference.

I don't think it is.  Circulating currency is circulating currency,
regardless of who last touched it.  What is the substance of the
difference?

> > (and as an aside, yes.  some poor people own businesses.  and some of
> > those businesses even have employees.  although that's entirely
> > tangential to my point.)
>
> **then maybe the definitions matter. What would you define as poor, and what
> manner of business would qualify?

I'm no sociologist, but the Dept of Health and Human Services puts the
poverty line at $18,530/yr for a family of three, and if anything I'd
say that's perhaps a little low (obviously poverty can also depend on
the region's cost of living and a person's previously accumulated
assets).  What manner of business would qualify?  A struggling one.  A
corner store or a barbershop in a depressed neighborhood.  A
mechanic's shop still struggling to make end's meet after the nearby
businesses have all moved on and boarded up.  It's entirely possible
that the business owner of small businesses like this might be able to
pay his employees minimum wage or higher and not have enough profits
left over after rent and other overhead to pay himself above the
poverty threshold.

-- 
Nick

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