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Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action. |
On March 13 2017 01:06 warding wrote:Show nested quote +On March 13 2017 00:31 Big J wrote:On March 12 2017 22:31 Wegandi wrote:
While I wasn't alive at the time, it wasn't too long ago that the 'left' was about localism = empowerment. Since the mid 70s it seems like everything has inched towards one world Government. Now, if you're for local control and power you're an evil racist xenophobe lol. Don't get me wrong, there are those people out there, but just because you're for national sovereignty and local empowerment doesn't mean you're a racist xenophobe. That's just an epithet to try and shut down any coherent debate. It's the lowest of low brow. Besides, if you think the US is dysfunctional due to having disparate ideologies and culture (to an extent) crammed into one body vying for power to rule over everyone and impose their own personal beliefs (which it is), implementing the same non-sense system on an even more disparate group of people and nations is beyond dumb. All you're going to accomplish is more conflict and strife, not less. There are not many people against the EU as an economic free-trade zone, but politicizing and continentalizing (my own made up word since it's beyond nationalization lmao), the EU will only lead to more ruin imho. I am however, a dumb American who has seen what 50 separate nations (the states) under one Government body (DC) has driven the country into - rife with conflict, hyper-partisanship, etc. If you want some of that by all means keep pushing to make the EU into a federalized nation. Maybe it's just the cultural difference in what we consider "the left" (America --> liberals; Europe --> socialists), but in my country "centralism" has always been a catch phrase that was heavily used against the left. Which is not quite wrong, since the socialists used to believe in centralized planning, centralized economical interventions and state enterprises. And yeah, obviously the socialist left tends to be against big federal rights within a common market. If you globalize the economy, you also have to globalize the government. If you open all the floodgates for capital you have to be incredibly dumb to think you can keep 25% tax on company income, when 50 kilometres east Hungary wants to go down to 9%. There are only 2 solutions: 1) You stop being a socialist and just go with the flow, since you have no control anymore. That's what we have seen happening with social democrats. They are becoming centrists with a focus on liberal politics and no economic topics or other topics for the lower classes, since anything they would want to do would immidiately backfire. 2) You close the floodgates. That's what nationalists and some "far-leftists" (they are really just the true social democrats) want to do. If you don't have control, you take it back, for one reason or another. That's what many working people are voting for right now. Right-wing populists that want to fight anything foreign and far-leftists, that describe the EU as what it is: a neoliberal enforcement spiral, that serves the rich who can use the best laws of each of the member state, have their firm central in Ireland, produce in romania and sell in Germany, while bunkering their money in Switzerland. But I cannot force my employer to garantuee me a 35-hour working week from France, get paid like I was a Norwegian and buy beer for Czech prices. The type of federalism that exists in the EU (and the USA) creates socialism for the rich and liberalism for the poor. One class that gets subventions, that falls comfortable into a social net when their actions would blow up the whole system like in 2008 and one class that is told to fuck off and pay 40-50% of their income to fund these subventions and that funds the cheap foreign labor, that the rich are drawing into the country to make even more profit. You are confusing companies and rich people when talking about policy, which is a mistake. I also have no idea what you mean socialism for the rich and liberalism for the poor. What subventions are you talking about? The poor also benefit, if not proportionally more than the rich, from open borders - otherwise why is over 15% of the Portuguese population living in other EU countries? The European poor can seek opportunities in other EU countries, they benefit greatly from lower prices and availability of goods that the single market brings. In general, the common market drives economic prosperity for all EU countries which favors everyone (with the possible exception of the previously established national elites). Does the single market create tax-rate competition? Yes. Does that mean you have to globalize government? No. It means that competition will create incentives for governments to shape up and create better economic environments for companies and individuals. It is a check on governments, favoring its people. Viewing everything from a class-warfare perspective seriously limits the understanding of political institutions and economic phenomena.
What are you talking about? The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. The middle class gets thinned out more and more. Most people simply don't profit and on top of that they are getting pissed, because their votes matter less and less. If you are pro-liberalism you have to make the case. If you don't make the case for giving up control but just give it up then you get what's happening all over the world right now: People voting for any jerk that tells them to take back control and who behaves the most authoritarian.
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Who paid for the losses of the banks after the 2008 crisis?
This was a national problem, solved at national levels in different ways. I can only speak for Portugal, where shareholders took huge if not absolute losses on BES, BCP, BPN, BPP and where the government guaranteed deposits. So, uhm, the rich lost and the poor were mostly unaffected by the banking collapses themselves. The crisis in Portugal was not caused by the banks - or at least not in the way you might think it was.
Being virtually forced to emigrate from your own country because there's no future for you there given the high unemployement, that's what you call “poors benefitting from open borders”?
You're not getting causality right. They could've stayed in Portugal unemployed and in poverty which is what would have happened if there was no EU. They weren't forced to leave because of the open borders, the unemployment isn't there because of the open borders. The EU gave people a chance for a better life - from the very poor to the young and talented. So yes, it's pretty obvious the poor and pretty much everyone benefits from open borders.
Aka social/environmental/fiscal dumping. Levelling-down/race to the bottom and concurrence as the only ideal is exactly why the EU is slowly collapsing. But viewing everything from a liberal [market] perspective seriously limits the understanding of that phenomenon, hence why people in charge are structurally incapable of changing things and are reduced to useless moral imprecations against “the rise of populism”.
I didn't write an empy demagogical sentence, I made a point about how competition between governments actually creates incentives that drive better public policy. Let me know if you actually wish to discuss the merits of the issue or just shout meaningless banalities like "social/environmental/fiscal dumping".
EDIT: Big J, it's not perceptible what it was that I said that you're actually arguing against, so I'm unable to reply.
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You wrote that the poor benefit. They don't in the more developed countries, as they are getting poorer. The only ones who benefit are the ones who have so much money that they can live of investing it and reaping the hardly taxed benefits. Most below the top 1% are not benefitting. The ones further up, because all the social nets have to be paid from high taxes on work, the ones on the bottom because they are in a more fierce competition with cheaper foreign workers. "Shaping up government" so far has always meant cutting back services, closing hospitals and so on. Stuff that goes to the broad masses equally. I don't buy that shit anymore, that somehow due to cutting money for our universities those will become better, as the right put it during their coalition.
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Source that the poor are getting poorer? Something that goes more than a decade back please since the financial crisis causing more poverty doesn't have much to do with policy.
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The extent to which a solution to a financial crisis allocates burdens is absolutely a matter of policy......
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The Gini coefficient in the EU of the 27 has barely moved from 30.6 to 31 between 2005 to 2015, so I'm not even sure I buy the rich getting richer thing.
If you're claiming that the poor would be better off without the single market and the EU as it is, well I guess we'll see with the UK. I'd point out to the experience of the Baltic tigers and other Eastern European countries after joining the EU, or to the experience of Portugal, Spain, Greece and Ireland. Unemployment rates in central EU like Germany and Denmark are extremely low and social programmes in the latter, as an example, have helped create extremely cohesive societies within the EU. I don't see where the problem is and how the EU institutions are the cause of it.
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On March 13 2017 02:30 RvB wrote:
Source that the poor are getting poorer? Something that goes more than a decade back please since the financial crisis causing more poverty doesn't have much to do with policy.
I believe that its not so much that the poor are getting poorer, because they are probably better off now then they were 50 years ago in absolute terms, but that the the relative gap between the poor and everyone else is rising.
If the standard of living for the poor rises 2% and 20% for everyone else you might argue that the 'poor got poorer'.
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On March 13 2017 02:31 farvacola wrote:
The extent to which a solution to a financial crisis allocates burdens is absolutely a matter of policy......
Fine but I'm still waiting for a source.
On March 13 2017 02:38 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On March 13 2017 02:30 RvB wrote:
Source that the poor are getting poorer? Something that goes more than a decade back please since the financial crisis causing more poverty doesn't have much to do with policy. I believe that its not so much that the poor are getting poorer, because they are probably better off now then they were 50 years ago in absolute terms, but that the the relative gap between the poor and everyone else is rising. If the standard of living for the poor rises 2% and 20% for everyone else you might argue that the 'poor got poorer'.
No you can't. Especially because statistics don't catch all of the improvements in life. i.e. google improved the quality of life but you won't see that back in statistics. You can argue that the poor are profitting less from growth but you can't argue they're getting poorer as an absolute since they're not.
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On March 13 2017 02:38 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On March 13 2017 02:30 RvB wrote:
Source that the poor are getting poorer? Something that goes more than a decade back please since the financial crisis causing more poverty doesn't have much to do with policy. I believe that its not so much that the poor are getting poorer, because they are probably better off now then they were 50 years ago in absolute terms, but that the the relative gap between the poor and everyone else is rising. If the standard of living for the poor rises 2% and 20% for everyone else you might argue that the 'poor got poorer'.
The poorest 10-30% are actually stagnating and getting poorer, often working more jobs per household than they used to. I can give some evidence when I'm not on my phone anymore. ;-)
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it's very hard to accurately measure the value though that is being added by public services. Education is expanding, healthcare outcomes are much better than they were decades ago, you've basically got access to all information for free if you have a smartphone and so on. The environmental situation is improving in places that were polluted etc.. All of which doesn't really impact your net worth immediately.
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Measuring poverty is a rather complex question, because any definition that is relative to the mean income in the country or a similar measure is highly biased - it could be that people are just getting richer, but some of them slower than others. An interesting definition is through "material deprivation" - the lack of ability to purchase predefined goods or to react to a defined life situation. Using this measure, the amount of deprived people has dropped sharply in the Czech Republic around the years when we entered the EU, then it stagnated for some time and the latest data I found is for 2015 when it started to drop again. The 2015 value is half the 2005 one, so from this point of view, the poor are getting significantly better, unless the 5.6% of remaining deprived is doing so much worse, but I seriously doubt that given the social safety net that exists.
In a stark contrast to these numbers, I have the feeling that poverty-related issues seem to demonstrate themselves more and more, there are "excluded locations" with very high concentration of poor people, there are scandals with providers of accomodation leeching off the government support for accomodation of the poor by inflating the rates, repossession rates going through the roof, so many people in personal backrupcy etc... In my personal observation it seems that even the lowest-income groups are much better off in terms of what their income can materially provide than 25 years ago, but their lives are worse for some reason. I think that a possible explanation is that back then, people were almost conditioned to be poor, it was the universally accepted way of life, they helped each other and knew how to handle the situation. Now all they see is the middle class, they try to live like them, get in huge debts and end up deep in shit.
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You can just look at real household income and section it into percentiles. If after some years the real household income of the bottom x% has sunk then they are getting poorer. That's what's going on. The bottom percentiles have less and less income.
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On March 13 2017 00:31 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On March 12 2017 22:31 Wegandi wrote:
While I wasn't alive at the time, it wasn't too long ago that the 'left' was about localism = empowerment. Since the mid 70s it seems like everything has inched towards one world Government. Now, if you're for local control and power you're an evil racist xenophobe lol. Don't get me wrong, there are those people out there, but just because you're for national sovereignty and local empowerment doesn't mean you're a racist xenophobe. That's just an epithet to try and shut down any coherent debate. It's the lowest of low brow. Besides, if you think the US is dysfunctional due to having disparate ideologies and culture (to an extent) crammed into one body vying for power to rule over everyone and impose their own personal beliefs (which it is), implementing the same non-sense system on an even more disparate group of people and nations is beyond dumb. All you're going to accomplish is more conflict and strife, not less. There are not many people against the EU as an economic free-trade zone, but politicizing and continentalizing (my own made up word since it's beyond nationalization lmao), the EU will only lead to more ruin imho. I am however, a dumb American who has seen what 50 separate nations (the states) under one Government body (DC) has driven the country into - rife with conflict, hyper-partisanship, etc. If you want some of that by all means keep pushing to make the EU into a federalized nation. Maybe it's just the cultural difference in what we consider "the left" (America --> liberals; Europe --> socialists), but in my country "centralism" has always been a catch phrase that was heavily used against the left. Which is not quite wrong, since the socialists used to believe in centralized planning, centralized economical interventions and state enterprises. And yeah, obviously the socialist left tends to be against big federal rights within a common market. If you globalize the economy, you also have to globalize the government. If you open all the floodgates for capital you have to be incredibly dumb to think you can keep 25% tax on company income, when 50 kilometres east Hungary wants to go down to 9%. There are only 2 solutions: 1) You stop being a socialist and just go with the flow, since you have no control anymore. That's what we have seen happening with social democrats. They are becoming centrists with a focus on liberal politics and no economic topics or other topics for the lower classes, since anything they would want to do would immidiately backfire. 2) You close the floodgates. That's what nationalists and some "far-leftists" (they are really just the true social democrats) want to do. If you don't have control, you take it back, for one reason or another.
Speaking about this, I just stumbled upon the following text (http://www.euro-planb.it/index.php/il-documento/) and thought it might interest you. It's a statement from various European radical left forces regarding (what should be done with) the EU.
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So, two graphics for Germany and the US on household income:
+ Show Spoiler +
+ Show Spoiler +
What is happening is that the bottom is stagnating or even dropping over time.
it's very hard to accurately measure the value though that is being added by public services. Education is expanding, healthcare outcomes are much better than they were decades ago, you've basically got access to all information for free if you have a smartphone and so on. The environmental situation is improving in places that were polluted etc.. All of which doesn't really impact your net worth immediately.
You are talking about technological progress. Yes, we profit from that. But society also paid for all of that. We live in peaceful times, we build up more and more wealth because noone destroys it. The standard rises, that is true. But it does not come for free. There were investments made to research technology, to build up houses and infrustructure, to educate people, to build up the WWW and so on and so on. There are still investments made for that, I can't access the internet for free, behind every service is someone who profits in one way or another from you using it. You pay for almost everything, with money or with your data, everything has some upkeep or gets lost eventually. And that is OK. What is a problem is if the people who own all these things take much more than what it is worth, but noone can enter the market who isn't dirty rich to begin with.
What do you do as a small firm that needs investments, when all the investors only invest if you pay them more than your employees for no work at all? There is no way around getting that capital, so it's up to those who have the money to dictate their own income, and they simply take more and more of it:
+ Show Spoiler +
The ones with capital are cutting deeper and deeper into the overall cake for themselves. Firm and Capital income that is by the way heavily undertaxed, i.e. socialism for the rich. Where are the true economic liberals, that ask for "any income is to be taxed equally, whether it is capital income, work income or heritage. It's liberalism, not tribism or heritagism."
How come, that when I enter this world no matter how hard I try, no matter what I do, it is completely up to some investors or company owners whether they want me to succeed or not? People that simply were lucky to be born from someone who owned a pile of money or land or rights, that generates money. That is not liberalism!
Why can't I download music today for free on the internet? Why is it protected? People did not expect the internet to happen back in the days, it was an entrepreneurial risk they were taking. But no problem, instead of giving the wealth of the world to the people through the internet, we come up with new laws so that you have to pay for it again. You know, gotta protect the interests of those who are powerful already.
We had absurd cases of companies fighting over the right to use a certain geometric form for their phones, how in the heck is that useful for society? It isn't, it is socialism for the rich, so that they can protect the most absurd rights and monetarize them. And then tell me again that we live in a free market society. "Oh yeah, you can always enter the market. Just not if you want to make something in a 3-dimensional shape, those are all 'owned'."
You know something is deeply wrong, when we start living in a society that has to forbid everything so that we cannot spread information, music and films for nothing. "But then they don't make films and music anymore" - "But what about the supply and demand logic and market forces?" "Fuck that! Gotta make more money for myself!"
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On March 13 2017 07:18 TheDwf wrote:Show nested quote +On March 13 2017 00:31 Big J wrote:On March 12 2017 22:31 Wegandi wrote:
While I wasn't alive at the time, it wasn't too long ago that the 'left' was about localism = empowerment. Since the mid 70s it seems like everything has inched towards one world Government. Now, if you're for local control and power you're an evil racist xenophobe lol. Don't get me wrong, there are those people out there, but just because you're for national sovereignty and local empowerment doesn't mean you're a racist xenophobe. That's just an epithet to try and shut down any coherent debate. It's the lowest of low brow. Besides, if you think the US is dysfunctional due to having disparate ideologies and culture (to an extent) crammed into one body vying for power to rule over everyone and impose their own personal beliefs (which it is), implementing the same non-sense system on an even more disparate group of people and nations is beyond dumb. All you're going to accomplish is more conflict and strife, not less. There are not many people against the EU as an economic free-trade zone, but politicizing and continentalizing (my own made up word since it's beyond nationalization lmao), the EU will only lead to more ruin imho. I am however, a dumb American who has seen what 50 separate nations (the states) under one Government body (DC) has driven the country into - rife with conflict, hyper-partisanship, etc. If you want some of that by all means keep pushing to make the EU into a federalized nation. Maybe it's just the cultural difference in what we consider "the left" (America --> liberals; Europe --> socialists), but in my country "centralism" has always been a catch phrase that was heavily used against the left. Which is not quite wrong, since the socialists used to believe in centralized planning, centralized economical interventions and state enterprises. And yeah, obviously the socialist left tends to be against big federal rights within a common market. If you globalize the economy, you also have to globalize the government. If you open all the floodgates for capital you have to be incredibly dumb to think you can keep 25% tax on company income, when 50 kilometres east Hungary wants to go down to 9%. There are only 2 solutions: 1) You stop being a socialist and just go with the flow, since you have no control anymore. That's what we have seen happening with social democrats. They are becoming centrists with a focus on liberal politics and no economic topics or other topics for the lower classes, since anything they would want to do would immidiately backfire. 2) You close the floodgates. That's what nationalists and some "far-leftists" (they are really just the true social democrats) want to do. If you don't have control, you take it back, for one reason or another. Speaking about this, I just stumbled upon the following text ( http://www.euro-planb.it/index.php/il-documento/) and thought it might interest you. It's a statement from various European radical left forces regarding (what should be done with) the EU.
Thanks, that's interesting!
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At least for the US your graph doesn't support your statement. Since 2000 everybody has stagnated. What it mainly shows is that when the economy grows, the top percentiles grow faster than the bottom percentiles, and in particular during the 90s.
In Germany I'm not sure what's going on. Is the first Dezil the bottom or the top 10%? You're either showing that the purchasing power of the richest 10% has grown by 15% in that timespan while everybody eles has stayed more or less the same between 1991 and 2008, or you're showing that the poorest 10% have increased purchasing power by 15% in that timespan while everybody else stayed more or less the same... in any case, I'm not sure a 10% spread is very indicative of anything, especially given the massively increased differences in the US (unless the scale has been screwed with there as well... because percentages are tricky and can easily be played with: they are a relative scale, so relative to what exactly... a growth from 0 to 100% is kinda meaningless unless we know in comparison to what that is. I'm assuming inflation adjusted income didn't double between 1965 and 2011 for the richest 5%, so not sure how to interpret that graph either.
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So you have a problem with the economic systems of the western world in general... against the EU you have a problem to the extent that you feel it is exacerbating that problem. Fine, but then I don't think this really is a discussion about the EU.
It's not really possible to address everything you're talking about without going into 1000 different directions, so I'll pick on one in particular. I wonder what you compare the taxation on capital and company income to in order to declare it 'heavily undertaxed'. If you own 100% of a business in Germany in end the year with 100k profit, that'll be taxed under corporate tax at a rate of 29.72% (according to deloitte), leaving you with 70,28% which will then be taxed at 30.5% (capital gains tax), leaving you with 48.8k. So that's a 51.2% tax rate on the profit you generated on a company. What basis is there to call this heavily undertaxed?
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On March 13 2017 08:48 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On March 13 2017 07:18 TheDwf wrote:On March 13 2017 00:31 Big J wrote:On March 12 2017 22:31 Wegandi wrote:
While I wasn't alive at the time, it wasn't too long ago that the 'left' was about localism = empowerment. Since the mid 70s it seems like everything has inched towards one world Government. Now, if you're for local control and power you're an evil racist xenophobe lol. Don't get me wrong, there are those people out there, but just because you're for national sovereignty and local empowerment doesn't mean you're a racist xenophobe. That's just an epithet to try and shut down any coherent debate. It's the lowest of low brow. Besides, if you think the US is dysfunctional due to having disparate ideologies and culture (to an extent) crammed into one body vying for power to rule over everyone and impose their own personal beliefs (which it is), implementing the same non-sense system on an even more disparate group of people and nations is beyond dumb. All you're going to accomplish is more conflict and strife, not less. There are not many people against the EU as an economic free-trade zone, but politicizing and continentalizing (my own made up word since it's beyond nationalization lmao), the EU will only lead to more ruin imho. I am however, a dumb American who has seen what 50 separate nations (the states) under one Government body (DC) has driven the country into - rife with conflict, hyper-partisanship, etc. If you want some of that by all means keep pushing to make the EU into a federalized nation. Maybe it's just the cultural difference in what we consider "the left" (America --> liberals; Europe --> socialists), but in my country "centralism" has always been a catch phrase that was heavily used against the left. Which is not quite wrong, since the socialists used to believe in centralized planning, centralized economical interventions and state enterprises. And yeah, obviously the socialist left tends to be against big federal rights within a common market. If you globalize the economy, you also have to globalize the government. If you open all the floodgates for capital you have to be incredibly dumb to think you can keep 25% tax on company income, when 50 kilometres east Hungary wants to go down to 9%. There are only 2 solutions: 1) You stop being a socialist and just go with the flow, since you have no control anymore. That's what we have seen happening with social democrats. They are becoming centrists with a focus on liberal politics and no economic topics or other topics for the lower classes, since anything they would want to do would immidiately backfire. 2) You close the floodgates. That's what nationalists and some "far-leftists" (they are really just the true social democrats) want to do. If you don't have control, you take it back, for one reason or another. Speaking about this, I just stumbled upon the following text ( http://www.euro-planb.it/index.php/il-documento/) and thought it might interest you. It's a statement from various European radical left forces regarding (what should be done with) the EU. Thanks, that's interesting!
I quite like the Plan A in many ways though it isn't perfect. Many of those trade deals need to be re-written with the other considerations highlighted but they should not be scrapped. Just for the same reason the EU is a peace project those trade deals if well written can also promote shared values and peace.
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On March 13 2017 04:01 Nyxisto wrote:
it's very hard to accurately measure the value though that is being added by public services. Education is expanding, healthcare outcomes are much better than they were decades ago, you've basically got access to all information for free if you have a smartphone and so on. The environmental situation is improving in places that were polluted etc.. All of which doesn't really impact your net worth immediately.
Also all things which the poor have less benefit from than the rich.
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On March 13 2017 09:01 Acrofales wrote:
At least for the US your graph doesn't support your statement. Since 2000 everybody has stagnated. What it mainly shows is that when the economy grows, the top percentiles grow faster than the bottom percentiles, and in particular during the 90s.
In Germany I'm not sure what's going on. Is the first Dezil the bottom or the top 10%? You're either showing that the purchasing power of the richest 10% has grown by 15% in that timespan while everybody eles has stayed more or less the same between 1991 and 2008, or you're showing that the poorest 10% have increased purchasing power by 15% in that timespan while everybody else stayed more or less the same... in any case, I'm not sure a 10% spread is very indicative of anything, especially given the massively increased differences in the US (unless the scale has been screwed with there as well... because percentages are tricky and can easily be played with: they are a relative scale, so relative to what exactly... a growth from 0 to 100% is kinda meaningless unless we know in comparison to what that is. I'm assuming inflation adjusted income didn't double between 1965 and 2011 for the richest 5%, so not sure how to interpret that graph either.
Visuals, you have to look more closely since the green line barely moves when put on the same graph with the top 5%...  the bottom quantile has fallen from +40 to +25 at that time if you actually look at the numbers, so they have roughly lost 10% income. They are back to 1990.
yeah, 1.Dezil is the bottom 10%. They put the 100 in the middle, so the developmenton the left is "bottoms up". The top 10% are furtherst down then, because they have the greatest increse until 2000. The time series is much shorter. But it shows quite some losses, especially for the poorest.
The scale is the cumulative growth rate. so yes, the top 5% income has doubled. Top 5% is still a lot of people, people that aren't really all that rich and many haven't gotten the average +100%. Top 1% or 0.1% is when it gets insane.
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