Leftist Failure - The EU is on brink

[Ricter]

if you read Keynes you know the answer was lowering taxes.

AND increasing spending.

 

[jem]

sure once you balance the budget through economic growth. after providing for infrastructure and safety spending becomes less and less effective.
each dollar spent becomes less effective at expanding the economic growth part of gdp.

AND increasing spending.

 

[Ricter]

sure once you balance the budget ...

False. Keynes advocated running a deficit (if necessary).

 

[Martinghoul]

I realize they are many countries, but I wonder about the composition of their debt. Do they mostly owe themselves, or owe foreigners?

Some, like Italy and France, have a lot of external debt, indeed... For the Eurozone as a whole, the number seems to be arnd 45% (although, again, it depends on whether you use the gross or net measures).

 

[Martinghoul]

The problem with these official stats is not taking into account unfunded liabilities (like GSEs, for example)

Yeah, it's tricky to perform these comparisons, for sure... There's all sorts of devils in the details.

One way to look at it - wherever this Spend Your Nuts Off road goes, Japan is way ahead of us all at 200%+. Pretty impressive that we've managed to keep this thing going this long. I mean, it seems hard to believe that people even accept Yen as money without laughing.

People sure do get stuck in their ruts.

Yeah, although there are key differences. Japan was, and is, a proper basket case of many things going wrong. At the same time, Japanese society was so cohesive and well-organised and the Japanese people so diligent that they have been able to keep the show going for this long (including lending their hard-earned savings to their government at ridiculously low yields).

 

[Tsing Tao]

False. Keynes advocated running a deficit (if necessary).

True. But not permanently.

 

[Lucrum]

As of 2013, it took 73,954 regular 8-1/2″ x 11″ sheets of paper to explain the complexity of the U.S. federal tax code.

Keep in mind, this page count does not include any state or local tax regulations.

 

[murray t turtle]

if you read Keynes you know the answer was lowering taxes.



http://reason.com/blog/2012/04/17/ke...t-supply-sider

But if Keynes wasn’t a Keynesian, what was he? As it turns out -- fasten your seat belts and take a deep breath – he was a supply sider. Yes. It’s true. He believed that, up to a point, cutting taxes would actually increase government revenues and vice versa. Here is a quote of Keynes that I stumbled upon in a 2004 Heritage Foundation paper by Arthur Laffer, the modern-day guru of supply side economics:.....

Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object, and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget. For to take the opposite view today is to resemble a manufacturer who, running at a loss, decides to raise his price, and when his declining sales increase the loss, wrapping himself in the rectitude of plain arithmetic, decides that prudence requires him to raise the price still more--and who, when at last his account is balanced with nought on both sides, is still found righteously declaring that it would have been the act of a gambler to reduce the price when you were already making a loss.

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Good points
That's also why when they raised the ''luxury'' tax on big boats.They got a lot less tax + more unemployed boat workers.