Showing posts with label Economic Remedies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economic Remedies. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Monetary/Fiscal System
* I wonder occasionally about the natural history of money.
* Do all dollars come from the Federal Reserve as loans to big banks? Why?
* Can government create money? Why?
* By what mechanisms do dollars loaned by the Fed cease being owed back to the Fed, hence available for us to keep? What fraction of the money supply is owed to Fed and what are other fractions?
* Is there a relation between people's savings and government debt?
* Are savings in the money supply?
* What do profits do to the money supply?
* What are the roles of money supply and commodity scarcity in inflation?
* Compare the efficiency of supply-side and demand-side economic controls.
* What would be the harm of redistributing wealth from the top of the pyramid to the bottom? Consider effects on resource consumption, trade balance, immigration.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Economic Remedies
> Were Republican prescriptions for economic health effective, there would have been some balanced budgets under Republican administrations, instead of the 10x increase of national debt since 1980 and even bigger increases of private debt.
> The periods of apparent prosperity and economic vigor in the past three decades depended on irrational behavior by every segment of society. Ordinary citizens were irrational to take on mortgages so large that other forms of saving were precluded, to believe that prestige could be gained from owning a larger house or fancier car, to shop recreationally, to chronically carry credit-card balances, to take out second mortgages exceeding appraised values, to contract for ballooning or ARM mortgages, to believe that most businesses can increase revenues faster than inflation.
> Policy makers were irrational to cut taxes when spending exceeded revenues, to allow unfettered off-shoring of manufacturing jobs by multistate retailers for pennies per item, to neglect incentivizing wind and solar electricity generation, to neglect world-wide family planning, to organize society such that it depends on constant economic growth when the earth cannot support existing economic activity and when most of that activity is un-needed fluff.
> It is now clear that the our socio-economic system, capitalism, can't function when people start behaving more rationally. If tax cuts were the remedy, we'd have a hot economy now.
> The periods of apparent prosperity and economic vigor in the past three decades depended on irrational behavior by every segment of society. Ordinary citizens were irrational to take on mortgages so large that other forms of saving were precluded, to believe that prestige could be gained from owning a larger house or fancier car, to shop recreationally, to chronically carry credit-card balances, to take out second mortgages exceeding appraised values, to contract for ballooning or ARM mortgages, to believe that most businesses can increase revenues faster than inflation.
> Policy makers were irrational to cut taxes when spending exceeded revenues, to allow unfettered off-shoring of manufacturing jobs by multistate retailers for pennies per item, to neglect incentivizing wind and solar electricity generation, to neglect world-wide family planning, to organize society such that it depends on constant economic growth when the earth cannot support existing economic activity and when most of that activity is un-needed fluff.
> It is now clear that the our socio-economic system, capitalism, can't function when people start behaving more rationally. If tax cuts were the remedy, we'd have a hot economy now.
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