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Greece still doesn't want to behave

 
 
 
ksen said:
dismal said:
If he never addressed it, it seems safe to say doing it was not a central part of his theory.
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I don't know if he addressed it. Do you know?
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My position is that raising taxes on rich people was not part of his theory.

Without someone producing evidence it was I win.

Positive claims must be supported. Negative claims stand until disproven by positive evidence to the contrary.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
bilby said:
Loren Pechtel said:
Togo said:
That's great. Does this particular form of investing help the Greek economy?

Loren Pechtel said:
Togo said:
dismal said:
But still, it logically follows that if the only way to unlock prosperity is taxing rich people you'd want to have lots of rich people.
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Only as a poor second to a more even distribution of resources in the first place.
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Thus with no rich people to tax your economy falls apart.
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You're not making any sense. You have to tax people with money. If all the money is concentrated in a few rich people, then you tax them. If the money is spread over more people, then you can spread the tax burden over more people. Most income tax systems manage this automatically.

What's happened in Greece is that the money has gone to rich people via corruption, and to Germany via sharing a common currency, which acts to raise prices in Greece and lower them in Germany. The EU's plan was to use the extra borrowing and fact of EU membership to stimulate growth to make up the difference. Unfortunately it didn't work.
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Once you have attained that liberal utopia with the assets redistributed who are you going to tax to fund it?
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Who the fuck was talking about complete redistribution of all assets? Togo was talking about simply having progressive taxation. Only a lunatic would equate this with the total redistribution of all assets so that everyone has the same.

You are aware, I presume, that it is possible for a little of something to be better than none, while a lot is not better still?

If not, then I suggest that, as a little salt in your food is essential to life, you should be trying to subsist on a diet of nothing else.

Or perhaps we should ask you, when you attain that capitalist utopia where one person finally has all of the money, with whom is he going to trade?
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"If that money is spread over more people".

That means taking it from the rich.
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Yes.

However it doesn't mean taking everything the rich have, and evenly distributing it across the population, which was your (frankly bizarre) claim.

If you have an income of a million bucks a year, and the government takes half of it to give a $50,000 income to ten unemployed people, you still have $500,000 a year in income; you can live twice as expensively as those guys, and still save $400,000 every year.

Whether that particular situation is reasonable has exactly fuck all to do with the 'fact' that all wealth is eventually going to be exactly evenly distributed. Anyone with half a brain can see that even that extraordinary level of taxation would not lead to eventual equality of wealth - or even close to it. And there is nothing in this scenario that approaches equality of income either. In year two, you are still earning $1 million, PLUS interest on your extra $400,000 of savings/investments.
 
ksen said:
hello?
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The real problem always appears to be rigidity in thinking and inappropriate outdated thinking. The European Union could have become a team of nations that worked solely toward being well served with public infrastructure and fully employed. Instead it became a heirarchy of gambling interests with mafia type lenders and borrowers with special rules to exclude the public interest from their considerations. The assumption is that all you have to do anything is to amass a large amount of capital and invest it. The problem is that those who did the borrowing are not the only people being required to pay the money back. I found this little snippet in your link regarding the rentier aspect of capitalist market economies. The only way that this can be eliminated would be by taxation. Keynes appears to have regarded this banking and investing model as transitional...but to what? Socialism? Possibly.

The close of the chapter talked about the real problem...addiction to bad ideas...coupled with a dearth of new ideas to cope with current conditions.rentier Keynes.JPG
 
dismal said:
ksen said:
I don't know if he addressed it. Do you know?
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My position is that raising taxes on rich people was not part of his theory.

Without someone producing evidence it was I win.
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No you don't. You claimed he would be "turning over in his grave" at the idea of taxing the rich. Unless you want to win the dishonest backpeddler of the year award, that is a blatant attempt by you to imply that Keynes was strongly against taxing the rich to stimulate the economy. The burden of evidence is actually on you to show that he or any part of his central theory went strongly against this method as a way to stimulate growth.
Without such evidence, you lose.

What I said was that beyond you have zero evidence for your claim, it simply makes no sense and is at odds with any logical implications of Keynes core emphasis on stimulating and enabling demand as the engine of growth. At worst his theory was neutral but more likely supportive of taxing people with extreme savings to stimulate growth (either of which make you wrong in your assertion that such taxes would make him spin in his grave).
I already presented the basic logic that connects redistributing money from the rich's savings accounts to the hands of people that will immediately spend every penny they get on consumer goods. This idea is logically coherent with the following two ideas:
from Wiki on Keynesian economics said:
To Keynes, excessive saving, i.e. saving beyond planned investment, was a serious problem, encouraging recession or even depression. ....

Keynes's ideas influenced Franklin D. Roosevelt's view that insufficient buying-power caused the Depression.
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By definition, the rich have the most excessive savings, whereas the poor have none and won't save any additional money they get. Thus targeted taxation of the rich and transfers (either directly or indirectly) to people without savings will inherently reduce excessive savings and transform it into increased aggregate demand.

Other features of Keynes theory that support such taxation are his strong emphasis on increasing government spending to stimulate growth and get out of recessions, which inherently requires additional tax revenues.
from the Wiki on Keynesianism said:
Investment by government in infrastructure injects income into the economy by creating business opportunity, employment and demand and reversing the effects of the aforementioned imbalance.[1]
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Also, consistent with my argument is Keynes belief that lower wages and worker layoffs worsened recessions.
from the Wiki said:
Keynes argued that when a glut occurred, it was the over-reaction of producers and the laying off of workers that led to a fall in demand and perpetuated the problem. ..... Keynes rejected the idea that cutting wages would cure recessions. He examined the explanations for this idea and found them all faulty. He also considered the most likely consequences of cutting wages in recessions, under various different circumstances. He concluded that such wage cutting would be more likely to make recessions worse rather than better.
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IOW, people with no or low incomes reduce aggregate demand which harms growth, and by logical inference, increasing those low incomes (which can be done by redistributing wealth via taxation) with increase demand and growth.

This explicates how Keynes most core and widely accepted ideas are consistent (and certainly not directly in conflict with as you claim) using taxation, especially on the rich, to stimulate growth and general economic prosperity.

As to Keynes more directly speaking to the exact issue, thanks to ksen's link above for the following:

Since the end of the nineteenth century significant progress towards the removal of very great disparities of wealth and income has been achieved through the instrument of direct taxation — income tax and surtax and death duties — especially in Great Britain. Many people would wish to see this process carried much further, but they are deterred by two considerations; partly by the fear of making skilful evasions too much worth while and also of diminishing unduly the motive towards risk-taking, but mainly, I think, by the belief that the growth of capital depends upon the strength of the motive towards individual saving and that for a large proportion of this growth we are dependent on the savings of the rich out of their superfluity. Our argument does not affect the first of these considerations. But it may considerably modify our attitude towards the second. For we have seen that, up to the point where full employment prevails, the growth of capital depends not at all on a low propensity to consume but is, on the contrary, held back by it; and only in conditions of full employment is a low propensity to consume conducive to the growth of capital. Moreover, experience suggests that in existing conditions saving by institutions and through sinking funds is more than adequate, and that measures for the redistribution of incomes in a way likely to raise the propensity to consume may prove positively favourable to the growth of capital.
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In sum, not only did Keynes core ideas implicitly favor taxing the rich, but he explicitly recognized this logic and the growth produced by using taxes to redistribute wealth, and saw drastic reduction in wealth inequality of economically positive and "progress", and rejected the fears about over taxing the rich as largely unfounded.
 
The difference between science and religion is that scientists argue about what the evidence shows to be true, mentioning individuals who came up with theories as a courtesy to give great thinkers their due; while religionists argue about what the great thinkers said, on the assumption that the words of the greats are of far more import than mere evidence.

Who gives a shit what Keynes did or did not say? Whether or not taxing the rich is a good idea to get out of recession has exactly fuck all to do with whether or not Keynes said it was.

You guys sound like a bunch of creationists arguing about whether Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed - as though that would somehow change the factuality of the Theory of Evolution.

Do you want economics to be the dismal science, or are you happier with keeping it as the dismal religion?
 
For the people who keep making Kensayan arguments about Greece:

Deficit spending can be a good thing to prop up an economy in a recession.

While Greece was in a recession the real problem was they were doing unsustainable deficit spending in good times also. In that case deficit spending is continuing to dig deeper when you find yourself in a hole.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
For the people who keep making Kensayan arguments about Greece:

Deficit spending can be a good thing to prop up an economy in a recession.

While Greece was in a recession the real problem was they were doing unsustainable deficit spending in good times also. In that case deficit spending is continuing to dig deeper when you find yourself in a hole.
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No, they weren't.
 
bilby said:
The difference between science and religion is that scientists argue about what the evidence shows to be true, mentioning individuals who came up with theories as a courtesy to give great thinkers their due; while religionists argue about what the great thinkers said, on the assumption that the words of the greats are of far more import than mere evidence.

Who gives a shit what Keynes did or did not say? Whether or not taxing the rich is a good idea to get out of recession has exactly fuck all to do with whether or not Keynes said it was.

You guys sound like a bunch of creationists arguing about whether Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed - as though that would somehow change the factuality of the Theory of Evolution.

Do you want economics to be the dismal science, or are you happier with keeping it as the dismal religion?
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I think it is a field, like metaphysics that can be taken over by people with dominant personalities and enforced on others in a most rigorously religious basis. It is a departure from science as I see it, or merely an internal study of undesiriable human transactions. One of its defenses is that only a certain type of hooligan or gangster would argue with the divine wisdom of either the church or the banks. It is the SAME TYPE OF ARANGEMENT....people are schooled in the Catacysm and they go fort and spew their shit into the air...in defiance of science, injurious to the body and the body politic.
 
ksen said:
dismal said:
Well then you shouldn't have any problem showing where Keynes said these things.

While you're at it, I would be curious to see where Keynes advocated the "abolition of interest" as that second one claims he did.
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Here you go:

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/keynes/john_maynard/k44g/chapter24.html#chapter24

Keynes discusses taxing the rich and interest rates in this chapter.
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Can you point me to the parts where he suggests higher taxes on the rich > lower taxes on the rich or where he advocates the abolition of interest in there?
 
arkirk said:
... I think it is a field, like metaphysics that can be taken over by people with dominant personalities and enforced on others in a most rigorously religious basis. ...
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Aren't you confusing dominant personalities with insistent closed minded persons? Not only will one repeat history if one fails to learn from it one will repeat history if one insists on making it precedent.
 
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