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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On March 30 2016 18:50 Kipsate wrote:
Not sure why Breivik is even a relevant example, if you talk about the justice system and why it is broken/works you don't talk about that one mass murderering psychopath with a manifesto which occurs once every few generations.
Edit: For the record I think Norway handled it really well.
Yeah I feel like he's a pretty shit example. But I feel like many people assume that he's actually going to get our after 20 years. So it's a situation where some say "look this boogeyman is going to be out on the streets again!" and argue for harsher penalties. Where the odds of him ever actually getting out are slim to none. But he's a monster and people see the 20 years thing and assume he's only got 15 years to go before he's your neighbor.
On March 30 2016 18:05 plated.rawr wrote:Show nested quote +On March 30 2016 17:32 OuchyDathurts wrote:
Every Norwegian I've ever talked to have all said Breivik might only have the 20 year sentence but he'll never get out again. He'll be put into a psych unit or something and won't ever get out. Yea, he's got max sentence of 21 years plus 'forvaring' (which google translate tells me is custody, but i dont think that translates the function very well). Forvaring basically means that he'll recieve psychological evaluations every x years, or when situation demands a check, and unless there's been a significant improvement, he'll stay locked up untill the next check. In practice, this means that he can stay locked up the rest of his life. His recent evaluation is that he has not changed at all since he was apprehended. It has only been 5 years of prison thus far, but if nothing changes the following 15 years, his sentencing will be extended. + Show Spoiler +On March 30 2016 14:14 SK.Testie wrote:Side note: Do you feel Breivik should be able to walk free again? Y/N/Death.Poll: BreivikLock him up for good (13) 65% Why haven't we killed him yet? (5) 25% Freedom once his debt to society is repaid (2) 10% 20 total votes Your vote: Breivik (Vote): Freedom once his debt to society is repaid
(Vote): Lock him up for good
(Vote): Why haven't we killed him yet?
Letting him out if he stops being a violent threat? Sure, his political standpoint isn't much worse than those of the fringe right parties of Norway, and would most probably be drowned out by them, so its not like he'd radicalize the political landscape any more than he's already done. Death would probably be the worst choice. Turning him into a symbol and martyr for the radical right would be beneficial for them. As long as he's alive, however, he'll keep showing how petty and pathetic he is, as the most recent trial (Breivik versus the State of Norway) a few weeks back has shown. If anything will defuse his ideas and legacy, its himself. Sorry to deviate from your presidental debate, but I felt i'd add some Norwegian perspective on this.
The indeterminate penalty (civilian penal code), called "preventive detention" (Norwegian: forvaring), is set at up to 21 years' imprisonment, with no eligibility for parole for a time period not exceeding 10 years. If the prisoner is still considered dangerous after serving the original sentence, the detention can be extended by five years at a time. Renewal of the detention every five years can in theory result in actual life imprisonment. Preventive detention is used when the prisoner is deemed a danger to society and there is a great chance of his committing violent crimes in the future.[2] However, after the minimum time period has elapsed, the offender can petition for parole once every year, and this may be granted if it is determined that he is no longer a danger to society.
Source
Ah yes, there you go. Thanks for the insight!
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If you want a bogeyman in Europe who would still be in jail/dead in the US system, talk about Volkert van der G., the Dutch "political activist" who murdered Pim Fortuyn. He is free now (released on parole after 12 years) after having served his time. A significant portion of the Dutch population wants him locked up again. The justice system considers that he has been punished for the murder and there is no reason to believe he will be a continued threat to society (he was extensivelying psychologicallyrics evaluated).
I personally believe that he has a right to make something of the life he has left.
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HAVANA (AP) — Days after President Barack Obama's historic visit, the leaders of Cuba's Communist Party are under highly unusual public criticism from their own ranks for imposing new levels of secrecy on the future of social and economic reforms. After months of simmering discontent, complaints among party members have become so heated that its official newspaper, Granma, addressed them in a lengthy front-page article Monday, saying the public dissatisfaction is "a sign of the democracy and public participation that are intrinsic characteristics of the socialism that we're constructing." The article did little to calm many party members, some of whom are calling for a Communist Party congress next month to be postponed to allow public debate about the government's plans to continue market-oriented reforms for Cuba's centrally controlled economy. Continue reading here
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
they have every reason to be concerned as commie party true nature is revealed and party elites get the juicy assets
as far as inflation targeting, depends on what channel this is pushed through. monetary means of changing the long term inflation expectation is pretty exhausted.
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On March 30 2016 20:12 Acrofales wrote:
If you want a bogeyman in Europe who would still be in jail/dead in the US system, talk about Volkert van der G., the Dutch "political activist" who murdered Pim Fortuyn. He is free now (released on parole after 12 years) after having served his time. A significant portion of the Dutch population wants him locked up again. The justice system considers that he has been punished for the murder and there is no reason to believe he will be a continued threat to society (he was extensivelying psychologicallyrics evaluated).
I personally believe that he has a right to make something of the life he has left.
I actually don't know that person, but i don't think that he's comparable to Breivik. Neither in psychology, nor in crime.
Psychologic evaluations are extremely bullshit btw. If i had a say, no criminal ever would get out of jail based on that. Plenty of kids in germany (don't really follow if that's the case in other countries too) died by the hands of previously convicted people who were considered "cured" now.
Murderers, rapists, should never get the chance to leave jail on parole. Ever.
For the underlined part: yeah, sure. If you can make absolutely, 100% sure that the person who you're arguing for will not destroy another life one way or the other. Those paroles etc would look a lot different if those "evaluators" could be held responsible in case the guy they enabled to go back to society starts murdering/raping etc again.
edit
But considering many of those criminals were on welfare to begin with and never paid taxes in their life it's hard to say on a case by case basis.
That's a dumb blanket statement. And neglecting the fact that there's plenty of non-criminals who never paid taxes and still can vote, too. Using taxes as a reason to vote (or not) is.. "interesting", considering that paying taxes has nothing to do with voting rights.
The same is true for felons, who never regained voting rights in the past because they never lived long enough (in general) to get off parole, or were simply executed summarily for crimes we no longer execute for. These developments in no way are indicative that felons are now more worthy to vote than they were in the past.
That sounds awfully apologist, to keep the status quo.
Because they never really lost the worth in the first place. Not every criminal is a 250lbs black tank killing people. No person is inherently criminal either. I've yet to see a reason as to why they shouldn't vote or make it harder for them to "come back".
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On March 30 2016 03:00 Ghanburighan wrote:
The idea that we ought to increase the 2 percent central bank target is interesting for discussion. I hope you don't mind if I pull it apart from the rest of the discussion.
First, a few things need to be set aside. This isn't a political decision, but is done by the central bank, which is an apolitical institution (in fact, if there's an inkling that the central bank is no longer independent, people start losing confidence in the management of the economy which leads to FDI running off, and suchlike). That doesn't mean that it might not be a good idea for central bank governors to consider.
The trade off is generally between those that own property and those that do not. It's not simple though. As I understand, generally speaking the biggest winners are people with few savings and price-adjusted income (take someone who takes out bank loans to rent out apartments to other people: their loan loses value quickly, while they can increase rent reasonably often). The greatest losers are those with little income that live off their savings (old people). I don't know how to calculate the impact though, for example, I don't know how much larger the trade off would be from changing it from 2% to 3%.
Inflation has a positive effect if an individual has debt and hurts if an individual has savings. This typically helps a poor person as they are living paycheck to paycheck and are saddled with debt. It hurts the wealthy as their wealth has to find returns greater than inflation or they get poorer.
There are many ripple effects to take into account. Let's start with some: bank loans will have higher interest rates. As bank loans will lose value quicker as the price of money depreciates, banks must ask for higher interest rates to make it worthwhile to give out loans. These can become prohibitive and slow down financial markets in that people cannot afford the interest rates. This is a problem for both private individuals and companies (and banks themselves).
This happens in opposite order with opposite results historically. Central banks raise interest rates to combat inflation. It adds another viable asset class(debt) to invest in as opposed to capital flooding to hard assets causing inflation.
One danger is that the people who are most likely to suffer ill effects are the most vulnerable. With high inflation, the cost of basic goods increases, so people who cannot scale back consumption suffer the most. Poor people spend more of their income on basic necessities such as rent, food, commutes, etc; costs you cannot live without easily. So their real income would decrease unless there's fast wage growth. This is generally unfortunate for competitiveness as companies would need to be able to quickly and frequently increase their revenue to keep up. If they hit a hitch, they'll lose competitiveness. Companies in countries with less inflation might be more inclined to innovate and spend on research and development because their loss of competitiveness isn't quite as quick.
Yes the elderly are hurt as they have saving typically have their savings in fixed income(debt). On the plus side, they should have real estate that should increase in value but they may have to liquidate at an inopportune time. The poor are typically helped by inflation as they live paycheck to paycheck anyway. Companies are typically affected the opposite regarding R+D and inflation. If inflation is high the want to spend MORE on R+D and M+A as they need their cash to return more growth quickly as sitting on cash is bad and they want to spend it. This is why central banks raise interest rates to slow down inflation because if companies spend too recklessly trying to get rid of the devaluing cash, they end up making poor R+D and M+A choices. When these poor choices come to roost it hurts the general economy.
This isn't to say that there aren't merits to this. For a country that is behind its neighbors in terms of wages and a general level of living standards might prefer such a shake-up. I don't quite see how this would apply to the US, though. Also, with higher inflation and resulting wage growth, exports become relatively more difficult to sell as your labour and manufacture costs as a whole increase, requiring you to either cut profits to remain competitive (see the point about R&D above) or to increase your prices. On the reverse, imports become more desirable as you can buy them relatively cheaply. This will probably skew your trade balance. As the US already exports a great deal less than it imports (Source), this might be a problem. I hope this serves as an introduction to the discussion. There's a great deal more to this topic but I ran out of time. I would also be glad if someone provided a way to quantify the effects.
A goal of 2-3% inflation is fine and typically a worthy central bank goal. Their primary mandates are controlling inflation with catastrophic failures being hyperinflation(Weimar Germany/Zimbabwe) and deflation(Great Depression/recession) and stable growth.
I personally find inflation to be one of the best solutions to wealth inequality with the other being cutting the work week from 40 to 32ish hours by legislating overtime at 32 hours. Raising taxes on the rich may help income inequality but will do little to affect wealth inequality.
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2 % is not enough. Wolfstan your entire argument is true but based on a microeconomic perspective (the effect of inflation on individuals). From a macroeconomic perspective, we must also understand the role of inflation on unemployment - the Phillips Curve and the possibility of a trade off.
Their primary mandates are controlling inflation with catastrophic failures being hyperinflation(Weimar Germany/Zimbabwe) and deflation(Great Depression/recession) and stable growth.
No, controlling hyperinflation is not their objective. Hyperinflation only happens when a country is in deep political crisis, any functionning country can control this kind of scenario (note that hyperflation is set at 50 % inflation a month) : the central banks wants to prevent inflation because they defend the interests of the capital.
Not sure anyone linked that, but it seems some study on fracking showed clearly the effect it has on earthquake (more specifically, the effect fracking wastewaters' have) :
On Monday, the U.S. Geological Survey published for the first time an earthquake hazard map covering both natural and "induced" quakes. The map and an accompanying report indicate that parts of the central United States now face a ground-shaking hazard equal to the famously unstable terrain of California. Some 7 million people live in places vulnerable to these induced tremors, the USGS concluded. The list of places at highest risk of man-made earthquakes includes Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio and Alabama. Most of these earthquakes are relatively small, in the range of magnitude 3, but some have been more powerful, including a magnitude 5.6 earthquake in 2011 in Oklahoma that was linked to wastewater injection. Scientists said Monday they do not know if there is an upper limit on the magnitude of induced earthquakes; this is an area of active research. Oklahoma has had prehistoric earthquakes as powerful as magnitude 7.
Pumping wastewater from natural gas drilling sites into wells buried deep underground is probably why Oklahoma is experiencing more small earthquakes than California, a new study says.
Like previous research, the study says hydraulic fracturing for gas cannot be directly linked to increased seismic activity, but the injection of wastewater from drilling at disposal sites creates fluid pressure below the surface that can trigger earthquakes of magnitude 3 or higher, said its lead author, Katie Keranen, an assistant professor of seismology at Cornell University in New York. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/pumping-fracking-wastewater-underground-likely-triggered-okla-quakes-study-says/2014/07/03/116efcfc-0212-11e4-b8ff-89afd3fad6bd_story.html
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On March 30 2016 21:37 Wolfstan wrote:Show nested quote +On March 30 2016 03:00 Ghanburighan wrote:
The idea that we ought to increase the 2 percent central bank target is interesting for discussion. I hope you don't mind if I pull it apart from the rest of the discussion.
First, a few things need to be set aside. This isn't a political decision, but is done by the central bank, which is an apolitical institution (in fact, if there's an inkling that the central bank is no longer independent, people start losing confidence in the management of the economy which leads to FDI running off, and suchlike). That doesn't mean that it might not be a good idea for central bank governors to consider.
The trade off is generally between those that own property and those that do not. It's not simple though. As I understand, generally speaking the biggest winners are people with few savings and price-adjusted income (take someone who takes out bank loans to rent out apartments to other people: their loan loses value quickly, while they can increase rent reasonably often). The greatest losers are those with little income that live off their savings (old people). I don't know how to calculate the impact though, for example, I don't know how much larger the trade off would be from changing it from 2% to 3%. Inflation has a positive effect if an individual has debt and hurts if an individual has savings. This typically helps a poor person as they are living paycheck to paycheck and are saddled with debt. It hurts the wealthy as their wealth has to find returns greater than inflation or they get poorer. There are many ripple effects to take into account. Let's start with some: bank loans will have higher interest rates. As bank loans will lose value quicker as the price of money depreciates, banks must ask for higher interest rates to make it worthwhile to give out loans. These can become prohibitive and slow down financial markets in that people cannot afford the interest rates. This is a problem for both private individuals and companies (and banks themselves). This happens in opposite order with opposite results historically. Central banks raise interest rates to combat inflation. It adds another viable asset class(debt) to invest in as opposed to capital flooding to hard assets causing inflation. Show nested quote +One danger is that the people who are most likely to suffer ill effects are the most vulnerable. With high inflation, the cost of basic goods increases, so people who cannot scale back consumption suffer the most. Poor people spend more of their income on basic necessities such as rent, food, commutes, etc; costs you cannot live without easily. So their real income would decrease unless there's fast wage growth. This is generally unfortunate for competitiveness as companies would need to be able to quickly and frequently increase their revenue to keep up. If they hit a hitch, they'll lose competitiveness. Companies in countries with less inflation might be more inclined to innovate and spend on research and development because their loss of competitiveness isn't quite as quick. Yes the elderly are hurt as they have saving typically have their savings in fixed income(debt). On the plus side, they should have real estate that should increase in value but they may have to liquidate at an inopportune time. The poor are typically helped by inflation as they live paycheck to paycheck anyway. Companies are typically affected the opposite regarding R+D and inflation. If inflation is high the want to spend MORE on R+D and M+A as they need their cash to return more growth quickly as sitting on cash is bad and they want to spend it. This is why central banks raise interest rates to slow down inflation because if companies spend too recklessly trying to get rid of the devaluing cash, they end up making poor R+D and M+A choices. When these poor choices come to roost it hurts the general economy. Show nested quote +This isn't to say that there aren't merits to this. For a country that is behind its neighbors in terms of wages and a general level of living standards might prefer such a shake-up. I don't quite see how this would apply to the US, though. Also, with higher inflation and resulting wage growth, exports become relatively more difficult to sell as your labour and manufacture costs as a whole increase, requiring you to either cut profits to remain competitive (see the point about R&D above) or to increase your prices. On the reverse, imports become more desirable as you can buy them relatively cheaply. This will probably skew your trade balance. As the US already exports a great deal less than it imports (Source), this might be a problem. I hope this serves as an introduction to the discussion. There's a great deal more to this topic but I ran out of time. I would also be glad if someone provided a way to quantify the effects. A goal of 2-3% inflation is fine and typically a worthy central bank goal. Their primary mandates are controlling inflation with catastrophic failures being hyperinflation(Weimar Germany/Zimbabwe) and deflation(Great Depression/recession) and stable growth. I personally find inflation to be one of the best solutions to wealth inequality with the other being cutting the work week from 40 to 32ish hours by legislating overtime at 32 hours. Raising taxes on the rich may help income inequality but will do little to affect wealth inequality.
I don't see cutting the work week helping at all. Higher management already has a workweek way above the 40 hours. It's already factored in their wage. Senior management isn't going to work or make less because of a 32 hour work week and neither will wealthy business owners.
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On March 30 2016 22:27 RvB wrote:Show nested quote +On March 30 2016 21:37 Wolfstan wrote:On March 30 2016 03:00 Ghanburighan wrote:
The idea that we ought to increase the 2 percent central bank target is interesting for discussion. I hope you don't mind if I pull it apart from the rest of the discussion.
First, a few things need to be set aside. This isn't a political decision, but is done by the central bank, which is an apolitical institution (in fact, if there's an inkling that the central bank is no longer independent, people start losing confidence in the management of the economy which leads to FDI running off, and suchlike). That doesn't mean that it might not be a good idea for central bank governors to consider.
The trade off is generally between those that own property and those that do not. It's not simple though. As I understand, generally speaking the biggest winners are people with few savings and price-adjusted income (take someone who takes out bank loans to rent out apartments to other people: their loan loses value quickly, while they can increase rent reasonably often). The greatest losers are those with little income that live off their savings (old people). I don't know how to calculate the impact though, for example, I don't know how much larger the trade off would be from changing it from 2% to 3%. Inflation has a positive effect if an individual has debt and hurts if an individual has savings. This typically helps a poor person as they are living paycheck to paycheck and are saddled with debt. It hurts the wealthy as their wealth has to find returns greater than inflation or they get poorer. There are many ripple effects to take into account. Let's start with some: bank loans will have higher interest rates. As bank loans will lose value quicker as the price of money depreciates, banks must ask for higher interest rates to make it worthwhile to give out loans. These can become prohibitive and slow down financial markets in that people cannot afford the interest rates. This is a problem for both private individuals and companies (and banks themselves). This happens in opposite order with opposite results historically. Central banks raise interest rates to combat inflation. It adds another viable asset class(debt) to invest in as opposed to capital flooding to hard assets causing inflation. One danger is that the people who are most likely to suffer ill effects are the most vulnerable. With high inflation, the cost of basic goods increases, so people who cannot scale back consumption suffer the most. Poor people spend more of their income on basic necessities such as rent, food, commutes, etc; costs you cannot live without easily. So their real income would decrease unless there's fast wage growth. This is generally unfortunate for competitiveness as companies would need to be able to quickly and frequently increase their revenue to keep up. If they hit a hitch, they'll lose competitiveness. Companies in countries with less inflation might be more inclined to innovate and spend on research and development because their loss of competitiveness isn't quite as quick. Yes the elderly are hurt as they have saving typically have their savings in fixed income(debt). On the plus side, they should have real estate that should increase in value but they may have to liquidate at an inopportune time. The poor are typically helped by inflation as they live paycheck to paycheck anyway. Companies are typically affected the opposite regarding R+D and inflation. If inflation is high the want to spend MORE on R+D and M+A as they need their cash to return more growth quickly as sitting on cash is bad and they want to spend it. This is why central banks raise interest rates to slow down inflation because if companies spend too recklessly trying to get rid of the devaluing cash, they end up making poor R+D and M+A choices. When these poor choices come to roost it hurts the general economy. This isn't to say that there aren't merits to this. For a country that is behind its neighbors in terms of wages and a general level of living standards might prefer such a shake-up. I don't quite see how this would apply to the US, though. Also, with higher inflation and resulting wage growth, exports become relatively more difficult to sell as your labour and manufacture costs as a whole increase, requiring you to either cut profits to remain competitive (see the point about R&D above) or to increase your prices. On the reverse, imports become more desirable as you can buy them relatively cheaply. This will probably skew your trade balance. As the US already exports a great deal less than it imports (Source), this might be a problem. I hope this serves as an introduction to the discussion. There's a great deal more to this topic but I ran out of time. I would also be glad if someone provided a way to quantify the effects. A goal of 2-3% inflation is fine and typically a worthy central bank goal. Their primary mandates are controlling inflation with catastrophic failures being hyperinflation(Weimar Germany/Zimbabwe) and deflation(Great Depression/recession) and stable growth. I personally find inflation to be one of the best solutions to wealth inequality with the other being cutting the work week from 40 to 32ish hours by legislating overtime at 32 hours. Raising taxes on the rich may help income inequality but will do little to affect wealth inequality. I don't see cutting the work week helping at all. Higher management already has a workweek way above the 40 hours. It's already factored in their wage. Senior management isn't going to work or make less because of a 32 hour work week and neither will wealthy business owners.
What has higher management got to do with cutting the work week? You don't cut the work week for higher management, but for the bottom of the pyramid. Cut work week to 32 hours: you now have to hire 6 people to do the same work (measured in number of hours) as you used to have 5 people. Either that, or you pay the 5 people overtime (assuming they are willing to do that, and don't want to spend their 8 hour on education and working towards a better job). Either way, it is intended to improve QoL for the bottom, not the top.
Whether it works is a second issue. More probably than allowing this sorta thing to cut into their profits, companies will just raise the prices or outsource more tasks to countries where you can have your employees work 40+ hour weeks for a lower wage.
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On March 30 2016 22:36 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On March 30 2016 22:27 RvB wrote:On March 30 2016 21:37 Wolfstan wrote:On March 30 2016 03:00 Ghanburighan wrote:
The idea that we ought to increase the 2 percent central bank target is interesting for discussion. I hope you don't mind if I pull it apart from the rest of the discussion.
First, a few things need to be set aside. This isn't a political decision, but is done by the central bank, which is an apolitical institution (in fact, if there's an inkling that the central bank is no longer independent, people start losing confidence in the management of the economy which leads to FDI running off, and suchlike). That doesn't mean that it might not be a good idea for central bank governors to consider.
The trade off is generally between those that own property and those that do not. It's not simple though. As I understand, generally speaking the biggest winners are people with few savings and price-adjusted income (take someone who takes out bank loans to rent out apartments to other people: their loan loses value quickly, while they can increase rent reasonably often). The greatest losers are those with little income that live off their savings (old people). I don't know how to calculate the impact though, for example, I don't know how much larger the trade off would be from changing it from 2% to 3%. Inflation has a positive effect if an individual has debt and hurts if an individual has savings. This typically helps a poor person as they are living paycheck to paycheck and are saddled with debt. It hurts the wealthy as their wealth has to find returns greater than inflation or they get poorer. There are many ripple effects to take into account. Let's start with some: bank loans will have higher interest rates. As bank loans will lose value quicker as the price of money depreciates, banks must ask for higher interest rates to make it worthwhile to give out loans. These can become prohibitive and slow down financial markets in that people cannot afford the interest rates. This is a problem for both private individuals and companies (and banks themselves). This happens in opposite order with opposite results historically. Central banks raise interest rates to combat inflation. It adds another viable asset class(debt) to invest in as opposed to capital flooding to hard assets causing inflation. One danger is that the people who are most likely to suffer ill effects are the most vulnerable. With high inflation, the cost of basic goods increases, so people who cannot scale back consumption suffer the most. Poor people spend more of their income on basic necessities such as rent, food, commutes, etc; costs you cannot live without easily. So their real income would decrease unless there's fast wage growth. This is generally unfortunate for competitiveness as companies would need to be able to quickly and frequently increase their revenue to keep up. If they hit a hitch, they'll lose competitiveness. Companies in countries with less inflation might be more inclined to innovate and spend on research and development because their loss of competitiveness isn't quite as quick. Yes the elderly are hurt as they have saving typically have their savings in fixed income(debt). On the plus side, they should have real estate that should increase in value but they may have to liquidate at an inopportune time. The poor are typically helped by inflation as they live paycheck to paycheck anyway. Companies are typically affected the opposite regarding R+D and inflation. If inflation is high the want to spend MORE on R+D and M+A as they need their cash to return more growth quickly as sitting on cash is bad and they want to spend it. This is why central banks raise interest rates to slow down inflation because if companies spend too recklessly trying to get rid of the devaluing cash, they end up making poor R+D and M+A choices. When these poor choices come to roost it hurts the general economy. This isn't to say that there aren't merits to this. For a country that is behind its neighbors in terms of wages and a general level of living standards might prefer such a shake-up. I don't quite see how this would apply to the US, though. Also, with higher inflation and resulting wage growth, exports become relatively more difficult to sell as your labour and manufacture costs as a whole increase, requiring you to either cut profits to remain competitive (see the point about R&D above) or to increase your prices. On the reverse, imports become more desirable as you can buy them relatively cheaply. This will probably skew your trade balance. As the US already exports a great deal less than it imports (Source), this might be a problem. I hope this serves as an introduction to the discussion. There's a great deal more to this topic but I ran out of time. I would also be glad if someone provided a way to quantify the effects. A goal of 2-3% inflation is fine and typically a worthy central bank goal. Their primary mandates are controlling inflation with catastrophic failures being hyperinflation(Weimar Germany/Zimbabwe) and deflation(Great Depression/recession) and stable growth. I personally find inflation to be one of the best solutions to wealth inequality with the other being cutting the work week from 40 to 32ish hours by legislating overtime at 32 hours. Raising taxes on the rich may help income inequality but will do little to affect wealth inequality. I don't see cutting the work week helping at all. Higher management already has a workweek way above the 40 hours. It's already factored in their wage. Senior management isn't going to work or make less because of a 32 hour work week and neither will wealthy business owners. What has higher management got to do with cutting the work week? You don't cut the work week for higher management, but for the bottom of the pyramid. Cut work week to 32 hours: you now have to hire 6 people to do the same work (measured in number of hours) as you used to have 5 people. Either that, or you pay the 5 people overtime (assuming they are willing to do that, and don't want to spend their 8 hour on education and working towards a better job). Either way, it is intended to improve QoL for the bottom, not the top. Whether it works is a second issue. More probably than allowing this sorta thing to cut into their profits, companies will just raise the prices or outsource more tasks to countries where you can have your employees work 40+ hour weeks for a lower wage.
It was a response to cutting the work week reducing wealth inequality. To cut wealth inequality either senior management and rich business owners have to earn less or lower income employees have to earn more. Cutting the work week does neither.
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Jobs that can have hours cut so neatly seem like they would be pretty replaceable for the most part. For higher skilled shift-type work it's limiting supply of labor as well, because there aren't 20% extra mechanics waiting in the wings to make up for the reduction in hours.
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Netherlands45349 Posts
+ Show Spoiler +It’s Really Hard To Get Bernie Sanders 988 More Delegates
By NATE SILVER
Bernie Sanders at a campaign rally at the Alliant Energy Center on Saturday in Madison, Wisconsin. SCOTT OLSON / GETTY IMAGES
After a trio of landslide wins in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii on Saturday — the best single day of his campaign — Bernie Sanders narrowed his delegate deficit with Hillary Clinton. But he still has a lot of work to do. Sanders trails Clinton by 228 pledged delegates and will need 988 more — a bit under 57 percent of those available — to finish with the majority.
That alone wouldn’t be enough to assure Sanders of the nomination because superdelegates could still swing things Hillary Clinton’s way in a close race, but put aside that not-so-small complication for now. The much bigger problem is that it isn’t easy to see where Sanders gets those 988 delegates.
If you’re a Sanders supporter, you might look at the map and see some states — Oregon, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Montana and so forth — that look pretty good for Sanders, a lot like the ones that gave Sanders landslide wins earlier in the campaign. But those states have relatively few delegates. Instead, about 65 percent of the remaining delegates are in California, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland — all states where Sanders trails Clinton in the polls and sometimes trails her by a lot.
To reach a pledged delegate majority, Sanders will have to win most of the delegates from those big states. A major loss in any of them could be fatal to his chances. He could afford to lose one or two of them narrowly, but then he’d need to make up ground elsewhere — he’d probably have to win California by double digits, for example.
Sanders will also need to gain ground on Clinton in a series of medium-sized states such as Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky and New Mexico. Demographics suggest that these states could be close, but close won’t be enough for Sanders. He’ll need to win several of them easily.
None of this is all that likely. Frankly, none of it is at all likely. If the remaining states vote based on the same demographic patterns established by the previous ones, Clinton will probably gain further ground on Sanders. If they vote as state-by-state polling suggests they will, Clinton could roughly double her current advantage over Sanders and wind up winning the nomination by 400 to 500 pledged delegates.
But things can change, and polls can be wrong — and so it’s worth doing the math to see what winning 988 more delegates would look like for Sanders. Call it a path-of-least-implausibility. If you think Sanders can meet or exceed these targets, then you can say with a straight face that you think he’ll win the nomination. If you think they’re too good to be true, then you can’t. Here’s the Bernie-miracle path I came up with:
SANDERS DELEGATE TARGET
STATE OR TERRITORY NO. ELECTED DELEGATES ORIGINAL REVISED POPULAR VOTE MARGIN NEEDED TO REACH TARGET
California 475 239 274 Sanders +15
New York 247 125 128 Sanders +4
Pennsylvania 189 96 101 Sanders +7
New Jersey 126 61 67 Sanders +6
Maryland 95 42 43 Clinton +9
Wisconsin 86 48 50 Sanders +16
Indiana 83 44 48 Sanders +16
Oregon 61 37 45 Sanders +48
Puerto Rico 60 30 33 Sanders +10
Connecticut 55 28 31 Sanders +13
Kentucky 55 28 33 Sanders +20
New Mexico 34 18 18 Sanders +6
West Virginia 29 17 19 Sanders +31
Rhode Island 24 13 16 Sanders +33
Delaware 21 10 10 Clinton +5
Montana 21 13 16 Sanders +52
South Dakota 20 12 14 Sanders +40
District of Columbia 20 8 9 Clinton +10
North Dakota 18 11 14 Sanders +56
Wyoming 14 9 11 Sanders +57
Guam 7 3.5 4 Sanders +14
Virgin Islands 7 3.5 4 Sanders +14
Total 1,747 896 988 Sanders +13
Sanders’s unlikely path to a pledged delegate majority
To repeat, these are not predictions. On the contrary, they describe a rose-colored-glasses scenario for Sanders that I consider to be very unlikely. To develop them, I started with our original pledged delegate targets for Sanders. Those already look optimistic for Sanders, who has underperformed his delegate targets in most primaries (he’s beaten them in most caucuses, but there aren’t many caucuses left on the calendar).
But for Sanders to get a pledged delegate majority, even our original targets aren’t enough now — they’d leave him 92 delegates short. So I kept tweaking these numbers upward until I got Sanders to 988 delegates. I was a bit more conservative about giving him extra delegates in states with substantial black or Hispanic populations, since Sanders has tended to underperform our original projections in those states. But mostly, I had to be very liberal about those extra delegates.
I assumed Sanders would narrowly win New York, for instance, even though he’s trailed Clinton by margins ranging from 21 to 48 percentage points in recent polls there. Likewise, I had him winning Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where polls also have him down by 20-something points. And I had Sanders winning by a landslide, 15-point margin in California, even though he’s behind in polls there also. (Because Democrats’ delegate allocations are highly proportional, it’s easy to approximate the popular vote from the delegate count and vice versa.)
I assumed Sanders would win Oregon by the same enormous margin that he won Washington, even though Oregon is a primary while Washington held caucuses. I gave a blowout win to Sanders in Kentucky, even though neighboring Ohio and Tennessee easily went for Clinton.
The most recent poll of Wisconsin, which votes next week, has Clinton winning there. I ignored it and assumed Sanders will win by 16 percentage points instead. The demographics do look pretty good for Sanders in the Badger State.
But is Connecticut a good state for Sanders? I’m not so sure: Its demographics are more Ralph Lauren than L.L. Bean. I gave it to Sanders anyway.
I assumed Sanders would win Puerto Rico because it’s a caucus, even though Clinton has much of the party establishment behind her. New Mexico? Nearby Arizona and Texas went overwhelmingly for Clinton, but let’s give it to Sanders.
You get the picture. It’s not hard to imagine Sanders meeting these super-optimistic projections in a few of the states. But he’ll have to do so in all of the states, or else he’ll have even more ground to make up elsewhere. If he loses Wisconsin, for instance, or only narrowly wins it, that’s more votes he’ll need to win in New York or California.
The good news for Sanders is that this scenario would represent such a massive sea-change that superdelegates really might have to reconsider their positions. You might even say it would require a revolution, a profound rejection of Clinton and the status quo.
I didn't neccesarily knew what u meant by readable so I copy pasted it.....?
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On March 30 2016 23:10 RvB wrote:Show nested quote +On March 30 2016 22:36 Acrofales wrote:On March 30 2016 22:27 RvB wrote:On March 30 2016 21:37 Wolfstan wrote:On March 30 2016 03:00 Ghanburighan wrote:
The idea that we ought to increase the 2 percent central bank target is interesting for discussion. I hope you don't mind if I pull it apart from the rest of the discussion.
First, a few things need to be set aside. This isn't a political decision, but is done by the central bank, which is an apolitical institution (in fact, if there's an inkling that the central bank is no longer independent, people start losing confidence in the management of the economy which leads to FDI running off, and suchlike). That doesn't mean that it might not be a good idea for central bank governors to consider.
The trade off is generally between those that own property and those that do not. It's not simple though. As I understand, generally speaking the biggest winners are people with few savings and price-adjusted income (take someone who takes out bank loans to rent out apartments to other people: their loan loses value quickly, while they can increase rent reasonably often). The greatest losers are those with little income that live off their savings (old people). I don't know how to calculate the impact though, for example, I don't know how much larger the trade off would be from changing it from 2% to 3%. Inflation has a positive effect if an individual has debt and hurts if an individual has savings. This typically helps a poor person as they are living paycheck to paycheck and are saddled with debt. It hurts the wealthy as their wealth has to find returns greater than inflation or they get poorer. There are many ripple effects to take into account. Let's start with some: bank loans will have higher interest rates. As bank loans will lose value quicker as the price of money depreciates, banks must ask for higher interest rates to make it worthwhile to give out loans. These can become prohibitive and slow down financial markets in that people cannot afford the interest rates. This is a problem for both private individuals and companies (and banks themselves). This happens in opposite order with opposite results historically. Central banks raise interest rates to combat inflation. It adds another viable asset class(debt) to invest in as opposed to capital flooding to hard assets causing inflation. One danger is that the people who are most likely to suffer ill effects are the most vulnerable. With high inflation, the cost of basic goods increases, so people who cannot scale back consumption suffer the most. Poor people spend more of their income on basic necessities such as rent, food, commutes, etc; costs you cannot live without easily. So their real income would decrease unless there's fast wage growth. This is generally unfortunate for competitiveness as companies would need to be able to quickly and frequently increase their revenue to keep up. If they hit a hitch, they'll lose competitiveness. Companies in countries with less inflation might be more inclined to innovate and spend on research and development because their loss of competitiveness isn't quite as quick. Yes the elderly are hurt as they have saving typically have their savings in fixed income(debt). On the plus side, they should have real estate that should increase in value but they may have to liquidate at an inopportune time. The poor are typically helped by inflation as they live paycheck to paycheck anyway. Companies are typically affected the opposite regarding R+D and inflation. If inflation is high the want to spend MORE on R+D and M+A as they need their cash to return more growth quickly as sitting on cash is bad and they want to spend it. This is why central banks raise interest rates to slow down inflation because if companies spend too recklessly trying to get rid of the devaluing cash, they end up making poor R+D and M+A choices. When these poor choices come to roost it hurts the general economy. This isn't to say that there aren't merits to this. For a country that is behind its neighbors in terms of wages and a general level of living standards might prefer such a shake-up. I don't quite see how this would apply to the US, though. Also, with higher inflation and resulting wage growth, exports become relatively more difficult to sell as your labour and manufacture costs as a whole increase, requiring you to either cut profits to remain competitive (see the point about R&D above) or to increase your prices. On the reverse, imports become more desirable as you can buy them relatively cheaply. This will probably skew your trade balance. As the US already exports a great deal less than it imports (Source), this might be a problem. I hope this serves as an introduction to the discussion. There's a great deal more to this topic but I ran out of time. I would also be glad if someone provided a way to quantify the effects. A goal of 2-3% inflation is fine and typically a worthy central bank goal. Their primary mandates are controlling inflation with catastrophic failures being hyperinflation(Weimar Germany/Zimbabwe) and deflation(Great Depression/recession) and stable growth. I personally find inflation to be one of the best solutions to wealth inequality with the other being cutting the work week from 40 to 32ish hours by legislating overtime at 32 hours. Raising taxes on the rich may help income inequality but will do little to affect wealth inequality. I don't see cutting the work week helping at all. Higher management already has a workweek way above the 40 hours. It's already factored in their wage. Senior management isn't going to work or make less because of a 32 hour work week and neither will wealthy business owners. What has higher management got to do with cutting the work week? You don't cut the work week for higher management, but for the bottom of the pyramid. Cut work week to 32 hours: you now have to hire 6 people to do the same work (measured in number of hours) as you used to have 5 people. Either that, or you pay the 5 people overtime (assuming they are willing to do that, and don't want to spend their 8 hour on education and working towards a better job). Either way, it is intended to improve QoL for the bottom, not the top. Whether it works is a second issue. More probably than allowing this sorta thing to cut into their profits, companies will just raise the prices or outsource more tasks to countries where you can have your employees work 40+ hour weeks for a lower wage. It was a response to cutting the work week reducing wealth inequality. To cut wealth inequality either senior management and rich business owners have to earn less or lower income employees have to earn more. Cutting the work week does neither.
i wouldnt be so sure of the latter. the wage/time of a single worker in respect to time is roughly U-shaped with the minimum at the standard working hours (i.e. 40 hours). for a small amount of time companies are willing to pay a higher rate and workers are only willing to accept at a higher rate, for a large amount of time workers will also only be willing to accept at a higher rate.
what happens when the usual working hours are reduced is twofold:
first it increases the demand of labour which should increase wages, second it should move the minimum of the "U-shaped" curve to the left which means more money.
if companies apply avoidance strategies or the bargaining power of the workers is so bad that they dont get shit out of it is all possible, but it could work to raise wages, especially at the lower end.
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On March 30 2016 23:38 Kipsate wrote:+ Show Spoiler +It’s Really Hard To Get Bernie Sanders 988 More Delegates
By NATE SILVER
Bernie Sanders at a campaign rally at the Alliant Energy Center on Saturday in Madison, Wisconsin. SCOTT OLSON / GETTY IMAGES
After a trio of landslide wins in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii on Saturday — the best single day of his campaign — Bernie Sanders narrowed his delegate deficit with Hillary Clinton. But he still has a lot of work to do. Sanders trails Clinton by 228 pledged delegates and will need 988 more — a bit under 57 percent of those available — to finish with the majority.
That alone wouldn’t be enough to assure Sanders of the nomination because superdelegates could still swing things Hillary Clinton’s way in a close race, but put aside that not-so-small complication for now. The much bigger problem is that it isn’t easy to see where Sanders gets those 988 delegates.
If you’re a Sanders supporter, you might look at the map and see some states — Oregon, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Montana and so forth — that look pretty good for Sanders, a lot like the ones that gave Sanders landslide wins earlier in the campaign. But those states have relatively few delegates. Instead, about 65 percent of the remaining delegates are in California, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland — all states where Sanders trails Clinton in the polls and sometimes trails her by a lot.
To reach a pledged delegate majority, Sanders will have to win most of the delegates from those big states. A major loss in any of them could be fatal to his chances. He could afford to lose one or two of them narrowly, but then he’d need to make up ground elsewhere — he’d probably have to win California by double digits, for example.
Sanders will also need to gain ground on Clinton in a series of medium-sized states such as Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky and New Mexico. Demographics suggest that these states could be close, but close won’t be enough for Sanders. He’ll need to win several of them easily.
None of this is all that likely. Frankly, none of it is at all likely. If the remaining states vote based on the same demographic patterns established by the previous ones, Clinton will probably gain further ground on Sanders. If they vote as state-by-state polling suggests they will, Clinton could roughly double her current advantage over Sanders and wind up winning the nomination by 400 to 500 pledged delegates.
But things can change, and polls can be wrong — and so it’s worth doing the math to see what winning 988 more delegates would look like for Sanders. Call it a path-of-least-implausibility. If you think Sanders can meet or exceed these targets, then you can say with a straight face that you think he’ll win the nomination. If you think they’re too good to be true, then you can’t. Here’s the Bernie-miracle path I came up with:
SANDERS DELEGATE TARGET
STATE OR TERRITORY NO. ELECTED DELEGATES ORIGINAL REVISED POPULAR VOTE MARGIN NEEDED TO REACH TARGET
California 475 239 274 Sanders +15
New York 247 125 128 Sanders +4
Pennsylvania 189 96 101 Sanders +7
New Jersey 126 61 67 Sanders +6
Maryland 95 42 43 Clinton +9
Wisconsin 86 48 50 Sanders +16
Indiana 83 44 48 Sanders +16
Oregon 61 37 45 Sanders +48
Puerto Rico 60 30 33 Sanders +10
Connecticut 55 28 31 Sanders +13
Kentucky 55 28 33 Sanders +20
New Mexico 34 18 18 Sanders +6
West Virginia 29 17 19 Sanders +31
Rhode Island 24 13 16 Sanders +33
Delaware 21 10 10 Clinton +5
Montana 21 13 16 Sanders +52
South Dakota 20 12 14 Sanders +40
District of Columbia 20 8 9 Clinton +10
North Dakota 18 11 14 Sanders +56
Wyoming 14 9 11 Sanders +57
Guam 7 3.5 4 Sanders +14
Virgin Islands 7 3.5 4 Sanders +14
Total 1,747 896 988 Sanders +13
Sanders’s unlikely path to a pledged delegate majority
To repeat, these are not predictions. On the contrary, they describe a rose-colored-glasses scenario for Sanders that I consider to be very unlikely. To develop them, I started with our original pledged delegate targets for Sanders. Those already look optimistic for Sanders, who has underperformed his delegate targets in most primaries (he’s beaten them in most caucuses, but there aren’t many caucuses left on the calendar).
But for Sanders to get a pledged delegate majority, even our original targets aren’t enough now — they’d leave him 92 delegates short. So I kept tweaking these numbers upward until I got Sanders to 988 delegates. I was a bit more conservative about giving him extra delegates in states with substantial black or Hispanic populations, since Sanders has tended to underperform our original projections in those states. But mostly, I had to be very liberal about those extra delegates.
I assumed Sanders would narrowly win New York, for instance, even though he’s trailed Clinton by margins ranging from 21 to 48 percentage points in recent polls there. Likewise, I had him winning Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where polls also have him down by 20-something points. And I had Sanders winning by a landslide, 15-point margin in California, even though he’s behind in polls there also. (Because Democrats’ delegate allocations are highly proportional, it’s easy to approximate the popular vote from the delegate count and vice versa.)
I assumed Sanders would win Oregon by the same enormous margin that he won Washington, even though Oregon is a primary while Washington held caucuses. I gave a blowout win to Sanders in Kentucky, even though neighboring Ohio and Tennessee easily went for Clinton.
The most recent poll of Wisconsin, which votes next week, has Clinton winning there. I ignored it and assumed Sanders will win by 16 percentage points instead. The demographics do look pretty good for Sanders in the Badger State.
But is Connecticut a good state for Sanders? I’m not so sure: Its demographics are more Ralph Lauren than L.L. Bean. I gave it to Sanders anyway.
I assumed Sanders would win Puerto Rico because it’s a caucus, even though Clinton has much of the party establishment behind her. New Mexico? Nearby Arizona and Texas went overwhelmingly for Clinton, but let’s give it to Sanders.
You get the picture. It’s not hard to imagine Sanders meeting these super-optimistic projections in a few of the states. But he’ll have to do so in all of the states, or else he’ll have even more ground to make up elsewhere. If he loses Wisconsin, for instance, or only narrowly wins it, that’s more votes he’ll need to win in New York or California.
The good news for Sanders is that this scenario would represent such a massive sea-change that superdelegates really might have to reconsider their positions. You might even say it would require a revolution, a profound rejection of Clinton and the status quo. I didn't neccesarily knew what u meant by readable so I copy pasted it.....?
Yeah, that's what I meant. Thank you.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
generally labor market restrictions are proposed to correct for lack of bargaining power by workers. for example in minimum wage law you see argument that employees have a bargaining power shortfall and there is thus rent obtained by employers by using the power of granting a job to pay a lower than competitive rate.
in the work hour exxample, if employers have a lot of power to demand hours at the same total pay, then workers may be helped by a capped work week/higher overtime premium.
those familiar with japanese or whatnot work culture may be familiar with another mechanism that a workweek cap is meant to help with. employees who are expected to work really long hours to signal their loyalty, compete with fellow workers for a position or promotion etc. same dynamic at entry level of law/finance.
the trick is in the scenario in which monopsony power (leverage by employer) is greatest, the work week cap would be pretty good. it is the case the law is designed to correct. however, the implementation of the law in this situation is also the most difficult. employers could lower wages and benefits. speaking of benefits, the current benefits tied to full time job structure in the u.s. is a big friction to any drastic reduction in hours.
the most influential literature on this is alan manning (2003) but it's ultimately an empirical question
the empirical result on employment effect is not that strong. (see e.g. pg.12-13 http://economics.mit.edu/files/3230) this makes sense because work is not an infinitely divisible lump, and work hour standards are mostly formed by institutional habit/culture, not rational planning every hour of an employee's day. firms hire new people to fill the perceptible gap in work done. in positions where the hour is reduced but no new guys are hired, there is a big wage increase because employer has to pay higher rates to retain that person.
the logic that would lead to higher employment applies to the interchangeable and monotonous jobs, but those are already subject to displacement by automation so this cap may lead to speed up in that effort.
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On March 30 2016 23:10 RvB wrote:Show nested quote +On March 30 2016 22:36 Acrofales wrote:On March 30 2016 22:27 RvB wrote:On March 30 2016 21:37 Wolfstan wrote:On March 30 2016 03:00 Ghanburighan wrote:
The idea that we ought to increase the 2 percent central bank target is interesting for discussion. I hope you don't mind if I pull it apart from the rest of the discussion.
First, a few things need to be set aside. This isn't a political decision, but is done by the central bank, which is an apolitical institution (in fact, if there's an inkling that the central bank is no longer independent, people start losing confidence in the management of the economy which leads to FDI running off, and suchlike). That doesn't mean that it might not be a good idea for central bank governors to consider.
The trade off is generally between those that own property and those that do not. It's not simple though. As I understand, generally speaking the biggest winners are people with few savings and price-adjusted income (take someone who takes out bank loans to rent out apartments to other people: their loan loses value quickly, while they can increase rent reasonably often). The greatest losers are those with little income that live off their savings (old people). I don't know how to calculate the impact though, for example, I don't know how much larger the trade off would be from changing it from 2% to 3%. Inflation has a positive effect if an individual has debt and hurts if an individual has savings. This typically helps a poor person as they are living paycheck to paycheck and are saddled with debt. It hurts the wealthy as their wealth has to find returns greater than inflation or they get poorer. There are many ripple effects to take into account. Let's start with some: bank loans will have higher interest rates. As bank loans will lose value quicker as the price of money depreciates, banks must ask for higher interest rates to make it worthwhile to give out loans. These can become prohibitive and slow down financial markets in that people cannot afford the interest rates. This is a problem for both private individuals and companies (and banks themselves). This happens in opposite order with opposite results historically. Central banks raise interest rates to combat inflation. It adds another viable asset class(debt) to invest in as opposed to capital flooding to hard assets causing inflation. One danger is that the people who are most likely to suffer ill effects are the most vulnerable. With high inflation, the cost of basic goods increases, so people who cannot scale back consumption suffer the most. Poor people spend more of their income on basic necessities such as rent, food, commutes, etc; costs you cannot live without easily. So their real income would decrease unless there's fast wage growth. This is generally unfortunate for competitiveness as companies would need to be able to quickly and frequently increase their revenue to keep up. If they hit a hitch, they'll lose competitiveness. Companies in countries with less inflation might be more inclined to innovate and spend on research and development because their loss of competitiveness isn't quite as quick. Yes the elderly are hurt as they have saving typically have their savings in fixed income(debt). On the plus side, they should have real estate that should increase in value but they may have to liquidate at an inopportune time. The poor are typically helped by inflation as they live paycheck to paycheck anyway. Companies are typically affected the opposite regarding R+D and inflation. If inflation is high the want to spend MORE on R+D and M+A as they need their cash to return more growth quickly as sitting on cash is bad and they want to spend it. This is why central banks raise interest rates to slow down inflation because if companies spend too recklessly trying to get rid of the devaluing cash, they end up making poor R+D and M+A choices. When these poor choices come to roost it hurts the general economy. This isn't to say that there aren't merits to this. For a country that is behind its neighbors in terms of wages and a general level of living standards might prefer such a shake-up. I don't quite see how this would apply to the US, though. Also, with higher inflation and resulting wage growth, exports become relatively more difficult to sell as your labour and manufacture costs as a whole increase, requiring you to either cut profits to remain competitive (see the point about R&D above) or to increase your prices. On the reverse, imports become more desirable as you can buy them relatively cheaply. This will probably skew your trade balance. As the US already exports a great deal less than it imports (Source), this might be a problem. I hope this serves as an introduction to the discussion. There's a great deal more to this topic but I ran out of time. I would also be glad if someone provided a way to quantify the effects. A goal of 2-3% inflation is fine and typically a worthy central bank goal. Their primary mandates are controlling inflation with catastrophic failures being hyperinflation(Weimar Germany/Zimbabwe) and deflation(Great Depression/recession) and stable growth. I personally find inflation to be one of the best solutions to wealth inequality with the other being cutting the work week from 40 to 32ish hours by legislating overtime at 32 hours. Raising taxes on the rich may help income inequality but will do little to affect wealth inequality. I don't see cutting the work week helping at all. Higher management already has a workweek way above the 40 hours. It's already factored in their wage. Senior management isn't going to work or make less because of a 32 hour work week and neither will wealthy business owners. What has higher management got to do with cutting the work week? You don't cut the work week for higher management, but for the bottom of the pyramid. Cut work week to 32 hours: you now have to hire 6 people to do the same work (measured in number of hours) as you used to have 5 people. Either that, or you pay the 5 people overtime (assuming they are willing to do that, and don't want to spend their 8 hour on education and working towards a better job). Either way, it is intended to improve QoL for the bottom, not the top. Whether it works is a second issue. More probably than allowing this sorta thing to cut into their profits, companies will just raise the prices or outsource more tasks to countries where you can have your employees work 40+ hour weeks for a lower wage. It was a response to cutting the work week reducing wealth inequality. To cut wealth inequality either senior management and rich business owners have to earn less or lower income employees have to earn more. Cutting the work week does neither.
How do you propose we draw up legislation making the management and owners making less? Higher taxes? If your boss is taxed at point A, what sort of cause/effect chain allows you to close the wealth gap? Higher taxes would have a negligible effect on inequality, it mainly will help with balancing a federal budget.
Here's the chart lefties like to show when talking about inequality:![[image loading]](https://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/productivity-and-real-wages.jpg)
Here's the mindset from a fiscal conservative.
I believe labor will never see those productivity gains returned to the trend line in the form of larger paychecks. Some of that went into benefits and some of that went into efficiency and automation. Labor will have a better time receiving those productivity gains by redistributing production hours than lobbying for monetary redistribution. Excess capacity gained by mechanization, robotics, and IT have been used to enhance our lifestyle while having the consequence of hammering the traditional worker into increasing obsolescence. Minorities and women entering the workforce in greater numbers over the last half century haven't helped either.
The fact of the matter is that there are only so much productive capacity that the population needs. It leaves many people underemployed and putting downward pressure on wages by workers fighting over the limited number of necessary hours.
Legislating overtime for hourly wage earners is the easiest and most targeted way for elected officials to legislate more equitable opportunities. Those who earn their income through other methods (salary, contract work, business profits, investment income, shared economy) should be given time to try to find equilibrium and assess before further legislation is attempted.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
^the main alternative to restricting hours worked for manufacturing and 'end user' type service work is unionization, which has its own can of worms.
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what this gets at is that:
'people in the upper half of the bottom quintile of earnings should split their share of the pie with the lower half, to combat inequality'
it is utterly ridiculous
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Canada11279 Posts
I don't really see the advantage of reducing the work week, especially if the goal is to deal with inequality. Unless the country is at full employment, it seems to me more people will be hired rather than more over time will be paid. But considering so many people just had their hours reduced and are therefore making less, but still need to make ends meet, might not the additional hours be filled by other people that had their hours reduced? In effect, we've just created a forced job swap so more people need to hold multiple jobs?
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EPT![[image loading]](https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://img.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp-content/uploads/sites/36/2016/03/Seis1.jpg&w=1484)
