Centroles wrote:So it's easy to see that the best way to stimulate the economy is by increasing demand for products. When sales go up, investment goes up and production goes up. It's a simple principle really. You see this occur every single christmas.
And what happens the day AFTER Christmas? Sales drop and all of the seasonal help that was hired gets laid off.
Quote:And what's the best way to increase sales? By giving tax breaks to the people that actually need to buy things. Lower working class individuals are barely making ends meet. They have many expenses, cars, clothes, food, housing that they need to buy. If not, they atleast have a few modest desires (televisions, dvd players etc.) they will buy. If the tax breaks are given to the working class, you're almost assured that sales for these goods will go up. Stores make more money. Manufacturers make more money. Ad agencies make more money. And in turn, all these industries expand and increase employment. And these new employees buy even more incresing demand even more, on and on and on.
To an extent what you said here is true. Increasing household income for the poor by a few hundred dollars a year isn't going to do much in the grand scheme of things either though. A family buying a few more boxes of pasta or cans of peas doesn't create a significant enough demand for manufacturers to ramp up production on any sort of major scale and isn't enough to create new jobs. Jobs it does create tend to be short term and low paying.
Quote:Purchasing products is contributing to the economy. The "no poor person has ever made a substantial financial contribution for the benefit of others and no poor person has ever offered a good paying permanent job to other people" is a bunch of BS. Define substantial. Poor people invest a much larger percentage of their income back to the economy than rich people. As a percentage of their total income, poor people invest more into getting businesses to hire more employees (whether for manufacturing or sales) than rich people ever did. Because with poor people, just about all of their income goes into buying essential supplies and making ends meet. With the rich, they buy everything they need, invest in everything they want to, and they still have money left over.
"Buying essential supplies" isn't investing. The poor may spend a higher proportion of their income but your comment that they invest more is waaay off. Buying items in a retail store isn't investing and that's where most of the poor's income goes.
Quote:You have to try really hard to deny that giving tax breaks to the rich would see more of the money reinvested into the economy than if these same tax breaks were given to the working class.
Horse crap. When was the last time you saw a "poor" person build a new manufacturing plant? Tax breaks, along with lower interest rates, get business to invest in CAPITAL goods - buildings, heavy equipment, assembly line robotics, etc.. Tax breaks to the poor create increase demand at McDonalds and WalMart.
Quote:I mean you say yourself that rich people spending money is good, just as good as investing it if not better. Whether you buy a product, or buy stock in the company that produces the product, you're giving money to the compnay to spend.
No you aren't. If I buy stock I'm buying it from the stockholder that is selling it (unless I'm buy at an IPO). The transfer of most shares of stock are private transactions between two individuals (or other corporate investors) and NOTHING goes to the issuer of the stock. The only time the issuer gets anything directly out of the sale is during their IPO and if they sell off shares of company held stock (which they usually don't do).
Quote:The fact is, working class individuals WILL spend their money. They need every penny they can get to make ends meet. Rich people already have millions in the bank, often in an offshore swiss bank so tehy don't have ot pay taxes on this. They have the option to invest it in something or buy something but they don't. They don't because they don't see anythign they think is worth investing in and nothing they want to buy. So how is what is a relatively small tax cut for them going to cause them to invest in something they already decided wasn't worth investing in or to buy something they already decided wasn't worth buying?
Sure, working class people will spend their money. So what? The question is "does that spending create jobs?" and by and large it doesn't. It creates a slight number of minimum wage jobs. Create a situtaion where someone can build a new factory though and all of a sudden you have employees that have to be hired to build the factory, equip it and work in it as well as the making the supplies the factory uses to create it's product. That's a few hundred people that are now getting a paycheck for jobs that didn't exist at all before and those people spending the income they earn (which is usually well above minimum wage) and they'll spend it which puts more money in retails stores than your tax breaks to the poor does.
But whether a rich person spends the money or puts it in the bank is largely irrelevant. If they just put it in the bank it's an increase in the amount of money their bank can loan to others and as the supply of money available increases interest rates drop which benefits anyone that borrows money (including most home buyers out there). Money doesn't have to be spent to work for the economy.
Quote:Tehre is absolutely no theoretical or practical basis for suggesting that supplyside economics is more effective than demand side economics. There is every reason to believe that giving tax cuts to the poor would do more to sitmulate the economy.
Heh, 6 or one - half dozen of the other. You have no proof that giving tax cuts to the poor is more effective either.
You've got a lot of conjecture but no proof. But even in your conjecture you only speculate about what happens in the retail economy. You've totally ignored the rest of the economy.
Quote:So why don't republicans want to do it? Because they want to get rich and they wan't their friends to get rich? But even more importantly, they see working class individuals as lazy and have only themselves to blame for not being rich. They state that if they studied harder in school like they did, they would be rich too.
Blah blah blah. Sorry. You're gonna have to come up with something better than "All those Republicans are big meenies!" and the other standard canards.
[/quote]They fail to consider that most of these working class individuals grew up in impoverished violent areas having to work a job since they were 16 just to pay their way through school. [/quote]
lol Really? Fact check for you - Most people didn't grow up in an "impoverished" or "violent" area (at least those in the US). There are a whole lot more people in this country that grew up in rural or suburban middle class neighborhoods that grew up in Harlam or Watts. Step outside the city for once and realize that it's is a great big country out there.
[/quote]They completely ignore the fact that most of these working class individuals work multiple minimum wage jobs 60 hours a week jsut to make ends meet, a lot harder than most rich people.[/quote]
Really? Do you have an authoriative reference for this "fact"? I suspect it isn't supportable in any way.
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