I’m actually wary of stock market upticks. There are many positive trends in the economic field. But with me, the dollar and interest rates, MACRO-economics has more weight with me, and I’m not a fan of Trump’s protectionist sentiments, though not sure how much it’s being implemented. Yes, I think that Trump has contributed to the dip in unemployment and perhaps the stock market rise as well, but if he doesn’t get serious about busting this bubble, raising interest rates or keeping a strong dollar (which goes against protectionist concerns), which to me is the fundamentals for a sound economy, then all the positive things he’s doing on the MICRO-economic front won’t amount to a hill of beans.
I think Clinton was popular, couldn’t be taken down with a scandal because he kept a strong dollar. I thought Bush became vulnerable to political attack because he weakened the dollar. I think Nixon could have weathered Watergate easily had he not weakened the dollar by 4. And Clinton would have succumbed to Monicagate had he weakened the dollar.
I’m actually afraid Trump may become another Nixon. Nixon was very smart, especially foreign policy, knew how to make deals and strategize. But he was arrogant enough to think he could negotiate with economic law, and in the end, it conquered him.
If your definition of wisdom and experience is hobnobbing with government officials, then yes, you have an advantage, and unjust advantage. And capitalism has been thwarted by most likely Democrat government officials who deal with you. That was easy.
You do sound like a broken record on this. It doesn’t matter D or R, business is business and the only party that matters is money. End of story.
See, smart business owners actually support wage increases. They know it is ultimately good for business. Its a tool. Like a greased palm. Whether that palm belongs to a politician (D,R,I doesn’t matter) or that palm belongs to the supplier who just happened to give me my pizza delivery shop’s competition’s pepperoni shipment on Superbowl Sunday.
From the grottiest burger joint to the penthouses of high finance, greed is the name of the game. Call it whatever you want if it makes you happy.
You sound very Keynesian. You keep talking about doing things according to the textbook and theories, but that’s what you are spitting out, these Keynesian economic concepts, not me.
He always reiterated that you have to get money sloshing around to stimulate the economy. Money money money. So you print it, you lower interest rates, and you get everyone to spend spend spend, and then voila, there’s life on the market.
The problem is, capitalism doesn’t work that way. You can’t generate wealth by continuously spending and consuming it. It must be accumulated and saved, you must forgo present spending for future investment and wealth generation. That is the story of capitalism.
So you increase wages thinking more people will have money and it gets sloshed around in the system. But how is all that extra money generated, where does it come from? It will be taken out of future revenue if they don’t fire people or stop hiring them (or make more money somehow). That means capital with which to engage in future business prospects and hire more labor for future earnings. When you destroy capital, less wealth is generated with which to pay for labor, let alone labor at higher wages.
But you can’t be so naive as to think that higher wages will magically generate wealth in society. If that were the case, why not increase them by $9, get that money sloshing around and see what happens. If it doesn’t work by a lot, why do you think it works by a little? You just don’t notice the damage as much when it is by little.
You have avoided my main points. But, that is OK. You are trying to defend what you have learned and believe in. When something flies in the face on conventional thought, people scramble to defend and debunk. They dig in their heels. Its like that YouTube guy who says Scandinavian socialism and happiness is a myth. Despite all indicators otherwise, he insists that it is all a failure and they are 3rd world countries because…the numbers do not add up.
(His methodology was all screwed up and manipulated. No Scandinavian country uses the Euro, and Norway is not a member of the EU. Yet, he combines them all together to try to make a sad point. When trying to prove some nonsense about spending, he uses Finland. Finland is not, traditionally, a part of Scandinavia. Although, they do use the Euro and are a member of the EU. Then when he remarks about tax revenues, Finland is suddenly absent.)
I am willing to bet you think Obama’s trickle down economic theory was a triumphant success. I am also willing to bet you are not even old enough to remember that.
It is like arguing science to a religious person. I will say the universe started with a big bang, that can be seen with radio telescopes. You will say that is impossible, because that is not what you learned in Sunday School.
It’s about freaking high time that they raised the freaking minimum hourly wage.
Now, it’s gonna be like 140 TWD per hour.
Still a long way to go to catch up with that of the US (8 USD=240 TWD).
If they wanna keep Taiwanese young laborers in Taiwan, they had better keep raising it up to at least 200 TWD per hour.
And then probably there won’t be so many green-card diggers that wanna marry an American so that she can go work in a restaurant or a shop for the less than 8 USD per hour.
Yes, let’s run this experiment. Taiwan minimum hourly wage is 240 TWD. Then Taiwan will be as rich as the USA. Isn’t that how economics works?
The problem is that Taiwanese labor is not as productive as American labor. I don’t mean that they don’t work hard or try their best. That has nothing to do with it. America has a history of 200 years of accumulated capital, with which entrepreneurs have access and can make workers more productive than Taiwanese entrepreneurs. Taiwanese companies copy or use American or Western technology to get a head start, which means the Taiwanese economy hasn’t had their industrial revolution during which the thinking and mentality of the people are democratized and based in economic freedom. They have all the accoutrements of Western economic freedom, but they aren’t themselves – they still can’t produce it themselves without our helping them and always lending them access to the latest invention that results from our accumulated capital.
I’m not saying they are communists. They are a democratic nation and certainly some capitalism going on, but they don’t have the advantage of 200 years of accumulated capital. Their capitalism is limited. Their workers are more productive than communist workers, but not as productive as a nation with 200 years of accumulated capitalism.
Gosh why does everything with you have to be all or nothing.
Reading that article, I thought there must surely be more than that. I think some inventions are just hard to explain, but really important, so they don’t list everything. Half of this short list is just food and games. Bubble tea, ramen, walking green man traffic light, this seems so lightweight.
Show me where I said communist? Show me! Can you even read?
I have to becareful, otherwise my choice of words may get me suspended. But, you bring this in yourself.
Their GDP and economic output is limit d only to their size.
You effectively said “you sniveling shits are nothing without me, and would die if I wasn’t here.”
You’re argument was that I said they don’t invent anything. But I recognize that they aren’t like communists who don’t invent anything. They are in between but much closer to capitalist side.
It has nothing to do with intelligence or willingness to work hard. It has to do with availability of capital. If you have capital, you can do lots of cool things with people to better society.
It isn’t all about that. The more important factor is capital available per head, population. If it is higher like in the USA, then wages should go up similarly. You have to have capital to make capitalism work. And simply raising wages without commensurate production doesn’t provide capital.
There are countries in Africa and the Middle East where slavery has been going on for almost 2000 years, long before those EVIL WHITE BOIS joined the party, and is still widely practiced long after it was abolished in the West. How are they doing from an economical point of view?
No, slave labor kept us back. The South stuck with an unsustainable, outdated, aristocratic economic model because their slaves/serfs made it possible. Thus they didn’t develop along capitalist lines as the North, who had innovated travel by railroad, and was an industrial powerhouse based on capitalism. By the civil war, the South was in a very much inferior position compared to the North in terms of prosperity and diversity of production, which was one of the factors helping the north to topple them.
General Sherman having instituted absolute warfare and burning all their mansions and crops, whatever accumulated capital they had before the war was certainly decimated, and they had to start again as if by scratch.
It’s more than money, you can spend it or you can save. Capitalism is about saving and accumulating. It is foregoing present consumption for investing for future profit. It requires discipline, strategy, and self-denial. Greed seems akin to present consumption, like the times when we are in bubbles.
Yes, economics isn’t just about algebraic equations that you can solve if you plug in the right numbers. There are some, chiefly the Keynesians, who have tried to do such in order to make economics into a science. You can’t predict when the stock market will rise or fall or such things because ultimately it’s about people, who are not reduced to number. Economics more properly fits in with the humanities and shouldn’t pretend to be about science.
But economics is about principles, and when there is more capital per head in this country than there is in that country, such available capital makes possible more business adventures which translates into more demand for labor, which translates into rising wages. But you can’t just raise the price of labor when the demand isn’t there, when the capital simply isn’t there to drive more productivity and need for more workers. Without capital, workers are superfluous.
