Obama: Capitalism dosen't work and it has never worked

Quote from Lucrum:

I know that socialism communism and Keynesianism don't work well in the long run...


I think Keynes ideas would work if they were properly implemented. The jury is still out this time around, but I really don't think that there will be enough leveraging down by the government, once a robust economy returns, as Keynes recommended, to compensate for leveraging up during the recession. If the Keynes prescription is not properly applied, you can't blame Keynes.
 
Quote from piezoe:

I think Keynes ideas would work if they were properly implemented. They jury is still out this time around, but I really don't think that there will be enough leveraging down by the government once a robust economy returns to compensate for leveraging up during the recession, as Keynes recommended.

Ummmm, "the jury is still out".

Are you *&)*ing kidding me?
 
Quote from piezoe:

I think Keynes ideas would work if they were properly implemented. The jury is still out this time around, but I really don't think that there will be enough leveraging down by the government, once a robust economy returns, as Keynes recommended, to compensate for leveraging up during the recession. If the Keynes prescription is not properly applied, you can't blame Keynes.

There's a lot of truth to that. The problem, like you mentioned, is Governments can't be trusted to responsibly police the system. Nor can Central Bankers, who are overwhelming beholden to private banks that own the Federal Reserve System and hold appointment and voting sway on the FOMC. The bottom-line is Keynesian economics works great in theory, but not in practice. It's completely corruptible and been completely corrupted. We need to legalize competing currencies and go from there. The ruling political, banking and industrial elite won't let that happen so it's pretty much unavoidable we'll get a dollar and economic collapse, followed by some type of marital law, and then only God knows what from there.
 
Quote from denner:

Ummmm, "the jury is still out".

Are you *&)*ing kidding me?

No. Not at all. There are two parts to what Keynes recommended. We are still very much in the first part. You'll have to wait and see if the government properly implements the second part, which could be a number of years from now, before you can judge whether Keynes prescription for recessions worked in the present case. (I don't have much hope of the government applying the second part properly, in which case you certainly could not conclude that Keynes prescription for recessions did not work.)
 
Quote from MKTrader:

+1. Here's what an accountant wrote about the mythological "golden age of high tax rates":

"the dishonesty or perhaps ignorance in the tax debate that is going on today is the complete misrepresentation of the pre-TRA86 higher marginal rates in the old '53 code. Sure the marginal rates were insane, but the underlying tax code was rife with loopholes that a good tax planner (I was one) could exploit to get a persons effective tax rate as low or lower then it is today. Those loopholes are no longer part of the tax code which is a good thing as they encouraged investors to invest in projects that had no economic viability other then the income sheltering effect they created.

What else is ignored in the conversation is the fact that there was a massive amount of tax fraud at all income levels under the old code. It was so bad and so common that most people took pride in telling others how they cheated on their taxes. When I was practicing it was quite common for us to pick up clients that had owned businesses that had grown into large enterprises that cheated extensively on their income taxes sometimes for
decades. Usually the only reason this ever got exposed was due to the owners wanting to sell or go public.

Today it would be very hard to get away with significant tax fraud for very long and the current code does not offer very many ways to legally shelter income, so a marginal tax rate of 70% would probably produce an effective tax rate on the top 5% of at least 45-50% which would be more than double what the effective rate was under the old tax code. Thus, if we were to go back to those insane marginal tax rates, we would be crossing into a level of taxation never seen in this country."

Also, no matter the rate, the gov't has only been able to collect around 18% of GDP. At that point, people will do everything they can to evade and have little incentive to be productive.

Great post. Thanks :)
 
Quote from achilles28:

There's a lot of truth to that. The problem, like you mentioned, is Governments can't be trusted to responsibly police the system. Nor can Central Bankers, who are overwhelming beholden to private banks that own the Federal Reserve System and hold appointment and voting sway on the FOMC. The bottom-line is Keynesian economics works great in theory, but not in practice. It's completely corruptible and been completely corrupted. We need to legalize competing currencies and go from there. The ruling political, banking and industrial elite won't let that happen so it's pretty much unavoidable we'll get a dollar and economic collapse, followed by some type of marital law, and then only God knows what from there.

I'm curious. What do you mean by competing currencies?
 
Quote from piezoe:

What I understood Obama to say was that just simply getting out of the way by cutting taxes and getting rid of regulation, failed to produce a robust economy in the long run.

We didn't get rid of regulations in the net (the number grew/grows every year) and the tax cuts weren't met by spending cuts. David Stockman noticed the problems while he worked for Reagan. The whole "Reagan tried the laissez faire approach and it didn't work" line is another myth. He only tried the easy parts of it--just like all modern politicians.
 
Quote from piezoe:

No. Not at all. There are two parts to what Keynes recommended. We are still very much in the first part. You'll have to wait and see if the government properly implements the second part, which could be a number of years from now, before you can judge whether Keynes prescription for recessions worked in the present case. (I don't have much hope of the government applying the second part properly, in which case you certainly could not conclude that Keynes prescription for recessions did not work.)

Keynesianism should've been thrown out in the 70s, when stagflation occurred. That was supposed to be impossible...so major textbook rewrites were in order.

Basically, Keynes sold politicians ideas that they loved and the rest is unfortunately history.
 
Quote from piezoe:

I'm curious. What do you mean by competing currencies?

"Lawful money" is defined by legal precedent as only federal reserve notes. Competing currencies is an idea put forth by Ron Paul, which legalizes alternative currencies to fiat, federal reserve notes. It could be silver and gold-backed notes. It could be commodity-back money (oil/cattle/grains etc). It could be time-value notes, where laborers trade their own time in lieu of payment. It could be something nobody has thought of, but the market later accepts and runs with it. The Feds shut-down E-gold and Liberty Dollars because they intend to suppress the movement towards alternative currencies. If left to take root, commodity-backed money would spread like wild fire. The basis of Government and Banking power is seniorage, which implies 1) a fiat currency and 2) the general economy using that fiat currency in all transactions. If we move to an alternative currency, something that can't be counterfeited, both the Government and Bankers would lose their counterfeiting monopoly ("monetization" and "loan creation"), which would erase the massive power they hold over the nation. It's all academic, but it's an age-old battle that's raged on for thousands of years.
 
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