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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
02/21/09
Expanding broadband to rural America somehow makes it easier to do something that literally no company has trouble doing now?
Do they actually go on to explain why/how highspeed internet services rolling out to a place like Castle Dale, Utah or Wright, Wyoming mean that more companies will move their jobs over seas?
Companies are either going to outsource or they are not. Increased demand and an expanding customer base doesn't change that.
Unfortunately if there was actually any teeth in the bill, like say, penalties for companies that outsource, it would have been stripped out by the corporatist wings of both parties while trying to demonize anyone supporting it as "isolationists" and anti-capitalism.
Unfortunately, most politicians seem to forget that we have a government of the people, by the people and not for the multinationals by the multinationals.
02/21/09
Did anything pre-WWII actually "stimulate economic growth"? Maybe. Maybe not.
I don't actually care.
Did it ensure that people actually had some work to do they could be proud of and enough money to eat at the end of the day. Yes. Yes it did.
It didn't ensure they all were "equal" economically.
It didn't threaten the fabric of the small "m" market.
But it did mean that Daddy didn't spend all day in the breadline hoping he'd make it through the week.
So, yes, build roads. Yes, provide broadband access. Yes, invest in education.
It enables a smarter, better life of work for pay for the average American.
The big picture cycles of economic growth and reduction will take care of themselves regardless.
For the fat cats who won't make their short-term profits quickly enough because their precious Dow isn't shooting up like a rocket? Who gnash their teeth because people are merely living and not becoming mini-economic-super-heroes? Who swear that their tax cuts will help everyone by allowing them to "invest" in companies, jobs...oh, and that nice plot of land in Antigua.
Here's a quarter....
02/21/09
What I actually meant to say was:
"Why the f*ck am I even pretending to think about economic policy on a Gadget Blog on a Saturday afternoon???"
Somehow I got sidetracked from that initial impulse.
*shakes head*
*walks away*
02/21/09
02/21/09
Look at the last 100 years. Name ONE stimulus package that actually stimulated the economy. Look at the 1930s, Japan in the 1990s, and even Bush's stimulus package last year.
Government spending does NOT stimulate the economy. However, a proven method, has been to reduce tax rates on economic activity, which incentivizes people to create, save, and invest.
There's a reason over 300 economists opposed Obama's "stimulus" package, and I could only find a list of about 7 that supported it.
And yes, I am an economist.
02/21/09
1) The New Deal. GDP rose consistently from 1933 (When FDR took office) well off into whenever. The one exception being in 1938, which was a result of a spending cutback, but even still it was well above 1932's GDP and level with 1929's, when the GDP just started to drop off.
Unemployment and GDP (33-39)
3) Bush's "stimulus" packages were nothing but tax cuts (or more specifically rebates) $300 + his first term, $500 + his second. And he has continually cut tax rates on the upper income brackets. Where did it get us?
People got smart with the most recent one and put it into savings, paid off/up debt, they didn't do anything that was "stimulating" to the economy.
There is really very little evidence that tax cuts do anything but create bubbles. More accurately, a "proven method" of, or form, of stimulus and more importantly; fast spending, is WIC/food stamps 100% of it is returned to the economy and adds roughly $1.75 for every $1.00 spent on the program.
And yes, I get drunk and sing for a band.
02/21/09
Racists!
02/21/09
One flaw in their logic is that they only appear to be considering jobs that currently exist. With escalation in broadband speed and penetration, new industries develop around that, and create jobs unanticipated and unpredicted before the technology existed.
Faster, broader broadband will drive innovation that will create jobs no one is able to predict before it happens. And yet, when it happens, it happens. With each stage in the economy's transformation from industry to information, new industries pop up that were inconceivable before the enabling technology rolled out.
By their logic, highways would never have been built, since all the trucks and cars that would drive on them and spawn interstate commerce didn't yet exist.
02/21/09
i'm not planning on having any....
02/21/09
Although maybe, in your case, it might be.
02/21/09
The broadband is a short term fix to our job situations. The dot-com bubble laid the foundation for outsourcing to India because of the massive amount of fiber optic cable that was laid down. People thought that there would be no end to the dot-com bubble, that the internet would just keep expanding. While that was true, we all saw what would eventually happen.
This is an opportunity for the entire world, not just Americans. We have to be able to work harder and smarter than the rest of the world. America loves competition, so it is up to us to win. Mediocrity is not an option anymore.
02/21/09
If anyone reads this book, and you somehow find yourself agreeing with him, beat yourself to unconscious. With the book if at all possible.
Friedman and his totally illogical and ultimately destructive free market arguments are either painfully ill-informed, or unabashedly dishonest.
He may be able to lay out the problem, but he trumpets the beauty of outsourcing both overseas and at home using H1-B visas that caused those problems to begin with. (Amazingly, there is no rule in the H1-B program that requires, unlike similar programs in Canada, that the company even look for an American to fill that position. Luckily Bernie Sanders and Charles Grassley added an amendment restricting stimulus money to companies who would staff those jobs with works here on an H1-B visa.)
The guy is a big money shill multimillionaire and a member of one of the wealthiest families in the world (one of the 100 richest in the country)!
He's such a hack he quite literally writes about thing he knows nothing about:
In a CNBC interview with Tim Russert, Friedman said:
"We got this free market, and I admit, I was speaking out in Minnesota--my hometown, in fact, and guy stood up in the audience, said, `Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you'd oppose?' I said, `No, absolutely not.' I said, `You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn't even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade."
Good god, he actually called the Central American Free Trade Agreement the "Carribbean" Free Trade Agreement.
02/21/09
Broadband internet should be considered a utility, like running water, sewage, and electricity.
02/21/09
Broadband, regardless of how many jobs it creates in the next few years, is a necessity to keep our youth educated and competing in the western world. Short term, nobody knows. Long term, guaranteed win.
So start stretching some fibers on the farms, you Telco asswipes.
02/21/09
Keynesian economics has failed us. get rid of the fed and government control. Replace with the Austrian system.
02/21/09
Given that ultra-liberal economic policies have cause social and economic collapse in every place they've actually been tried, I'll stick to a well-regulated economic system of checks with stricter enforcement of laws such as the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Your logic amounts to telling a kid that breaks a plate that he doesn't have to do the dishes any more. The problem wasn't that you told your child to do the dishes; the problem is that he broke a plate. Letting him off of dish-duty just incentivizes the kid to do the rest of his chores poorly. The way you deal with "the kid who breaks the dishes" is you take the cost of the plate out of his allowance and tell him to get back to doing the dishes.
Over the last decade, government regulation was implemented poorly if at all. The solution to government regulation is not "get rid of the government"; it's "figure out what does and does not work".
If you don't let companies get too big, they can't get too big too fail. Regulation, when actually implemented, works.
02/21/09
The notion that the Sherman Act did anything other than harm our economy is kind of scary. The Sherman Act does nothing other than punish success and reroute funds from successful firms to less efficient firms, resulting in a deadweight loss to the entire economy. That's what ALL regulation does. And as far as "too big to fail," you can thank that entire concept on regulation. The fact is the government created the precedence. It doesn't need to exist not matter how large a firm is. Just let it fail. Yes, large scale bank failures might produce very sharp (but very short) recessions. What you're looking at right now is a long, drown out recession because everything is in a clusterfunk thanks to regulation.
The government has no place in economics. They don't understand it, they don't want to understand it. All they want to do is do things that sound popular and win votes. When it comes to economics, only the market should be making decisions. A true and completely free market would not cause catastrophes likes the Great Depression, which you can thank the Federal Reserve system for entirely, but that's for another post.
02/21/09
02/21/09
It's been exactly the opposite. For the past 50 years, the work done by Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek have pretty much laid to rest the ideas of Keynes for government intervention.
02/21/09
We've just had 8 years of the most "Austrian" government we've ever had. And it's led to a collapse of our financial system and economy. Yeah... I want more of that.
02/21/09
Sadly, they do.
The problem with "just letting a bank fail" is the damage it otherwise causes. Sterilize it, euphemismize it, dress it up as "collateral damage" - but at the end of the day, you'll have people's lives ruined. Not just people who took out mortgages to buy houses for flipping either.
These are people with businesses that operate on a properly managed line of credit which is operating capital. And the people employed by those businesses. These are people whose 401k accounts have been damaged - not out of mismanagement on their part either. These are people whose own home values are being damaged by the past actions of their neighbors.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Instead of having directors and officers asking the Congress for money, armed with the argument that "if we fail, the country fails", it is better to head it off. This is one of the detrimental attributes of a monopoly. They are too big to protect against, too big to fail, and, as they are almost universally proving, too big to even manage.
The dangers of megacorporations was seen a long time ago and the tools to prevent their rise put in place. Citi should have never been allowed to get this big. BoA should have not been allowed to either. Or GM or Chrysler - both of which find themselves unable to sell off their now crippled arms.
Companies proved themselves incapable of restraining themselves from self-injurious behavior a long time ago. And because they cannot control themselves, the government should.
02/21/09