More tariffs paid by US consumers

[*bfine32*]

(06-12-2019, 08:17 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: I would rather have a smaller economy growing at a slower rate if it meant improved infrastructure, lower debt, higher wages, better housing security, guaranteed healthcare, etc., etc. We have a tendency to argue for growth for the sake of growth, forgetting the people that are trampled on in order for that growth to occur. We have a government ignoring that role of providing for the general welfare, all for the sake of larger corporate profits and larger stock market gains.

I'd gladly pump the brakes on our economy if the tradeoff were stronger social programs for the citizenry, which is what countries like Germany and the Nordic states have done.

To each his own, but like I said folks are confusing economy with society. 

It also helps when USA is flipping more than their portion of shared bills. 

[Belsnickel]

(06-12-2019, 08:28 PM)bfine32 Wrote: To each his own, but like I said folks are confusing economy with society. 

It also helps when USA is flipping more than their portion of shared bills. 

I just tend to see things the way FDR put it in the quote in my signature.

[fredtoast]

Germany's debt as a percentage of GDP (60%) is about half of the United State's (108%).

Conservatives like Bfine used to care about the national debt until Trump took office, now they don't care if tax cuts don't pay for themselves as long as they throw gas on the fire and make "Trump's economy" look better.  It is like they guy who points to his $250K house to prove how much better off he is than his brother with a $150K house, but he neglects to mention that he owes $275 on his house while his brother just owes $50K.

Funny how socialized health care would "bankrupt" the United States  while Germany provides it and still has half as much debt as us.  But if anyone dares suggest that the United States can learn something from another country it is considered heresay.

[*bfine32*]

(06-12-2019, 08:31 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: I just tend to see things the way FDR put it in the quote in my signature.

I get you lean socialistic, but it doesn't change the economy. 

[fredtoast]

(06-12-2019, 08:28 PM)bfine32 Wrote: To each his own, but like I said folks are confusing economy with society. 

I don't see how you could separate them.

Basically you are telling a middle class person that if he makes less money that is still a "good" economy as long as the rich get richer.

[Benton]

(06-12-2019, 08:32 PM)fredtoast Wrote: Germany's debt as a percentage of GDP (60%) is about half of the United State's (108%).

Conservatives like Bfine used to care about the national debt until Trump took office, now they don't care if tax cuts don't pay for themselves as long as they throw gas on the fire and make "Trump's economy" look better.  It is like they guy who points to his $250K house to prove how much better off he is than his brother with a $150K house, but he neglects to mention that he owes $275 on his house while his brother just owes $50K.

Funny how socialized health care would "bankrupt" the United States  while Germany provides it and still has half as much debt as us.  But if anyone dares suggest that the United States can learn something from another country it is considered heresay.

We're derailing a bit here, but in regard to healthcare, as I understand it, Germany has base coverage for everybody (in other words you don't die if you're a diabetic and can't afford insulin or have to decline going to the hospital after you've had a heart attack because it costs too much). But if you want better than basic, you can get additional coverage at your own expense.

Which is what I'd like to see here. 

[*bfine32*]

(06-12-2019, 08:37 PM)fredtoast Wrote: I don't see how you could separate them.

Basically you are telling a middle class person that if he makes less money that is still a "good" economy as long as the rich get richer.

Well I can do nothing to help your inability to separate economy from society but they are separate. 

Basically, I'm telling a middle class person that they are living in a good economy if the economy is good. You're telling them they would be better off if we changed society. I know it's a hard concept to grasp when you cannot see how they are seperate

[Dill]

(06-12-2019, 08:06 PM)bfine32 Wrote: Saying that the larger economy growing at a higher rate is not a "shred" of counter evidence? 

As to the unemployment: What are talking fractions of a percentage? Our employment numbers are fine and as I've said when you start pointing to those; you're just grasping at straws. Have you ever heard of the term Frictional Unemployment? It's used to combat that wage stagnation that someone else is pointing to. 

I'll admit you guys come up with some whoppers sometimes, but this one may take the cake.  

As I said before, even Trump would agree those two metrics alone would not make an economy "better."  And they CERTAINLY don't prove that the US balance of trade is better than Germany's.

Who thinks that when national economies are ranked by nominal GDP, by quantity, that equates to a ranking of quality, as in healthcare or education rankings? Following your chosen metrics and the logic of your argument, Greece's economy is better than Qatar's because it bigger, and Finland's economy is worse than Bengladesh's because it is smaller.  

Sounds like you have to grudgingly grant Germany's unemployment numbers are better than the US', though we are only talking "fractions of a percentage"--just as the US advantage in "growth," your other metric, is similarly "fractional." Bengladesh is also growing faster than Finland, a country with a smaller GDP. So Bengladesh has a better economy?  Sure, if we separate "society" from "economy" LOL. 

Our disagreement began when I mentioned we might learn something from Germany, since its balance of trade is better than ours and it has better retained manufacturing. I did not claim Germany had a "better" economy. Rather I was posing a question any thoughtful, curious US economist might pose. (Inversely, what sort of economist would say "we can't learn from them because we are bigger!)

But raising questions about the US economy struck you as "ideological" and "socialistic." So you asked in what areas the German economy was doing better.

And you got a direct answer.

But instead of acknowledging the answer, you decided, instead, to refute an argument that had never been made, keeping "subjective quality of life" out of the discussion to "prove" the US economy, like Trump's brain, is BIGGER, "the BEST."  If Germans are good at soccer we can learn THAT from them, but if they are good at keeping manufacturing, we can't learn that from them.  Because WE are THE BEST, not them. LOL.  

Why doesn't that "swing and a miss" "take the cake"?

[Belsnickel]

(06-12-2019, 08:36 PM)bfine32 Wrote: I get you lean socialistic, but it doesn't change the economy. 

(06-12-2019, 08:54 PM)bfine32 Wrote: Well I can do nothing to help your inability to separate economy from society but they are separate. 

Basically, I'm telling a middle class person that they are living in a good economy if the economy is good. You're telling them they would be better off if we changed society. I know it's a hard concept to grasp when you cannot see how they are seperate

Economics is a social science for a reason. The economy is the management of resources within society. Therefore, the economy is a product of society and they cannot be separated.

[jj22]

Conservatives used to care about bailouts too. Well I guess they cared when it was programs for the poor/unemployed/laidoff. Now they claim it's a good time to be a Farmer because of the billions of bailouts being provided thanks to Trumps failed tariffs wars.

As far as I'm concerned they voted for this (99% of them voted for Trump). They shouldn't get a dime of my tax money. Votes have consequences.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGDJPs-vKFM

[Dill]

(06-13-2019, 08:31 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Economics is a social science for a reason. The economy is the management of resources within society. Therefore, the economy is a product of society and they cannot be separated.

Any good economist will agree that the separation of "economy" from "society" is an analytical distinction which enables clearer isolation of measurable inputs and outputs. We are not talking about some natural, self-evident distinction here.

Some economists will also agree that data in whatever form are an abstraction, and in the case of economies only a partial measure of health or efficiency or whatever is deemed to make an economy good.  The latter judgment will always rely on values as much as data. And which metrics one uses to judge the "health" of an economy cannot be unrelated to values. E.g. whether one decides to include metrics such as the wealth gap, or to exclude them, is a value judgment. 

So you are correct that economy and society are inseparable.  There is no measurement/assessment of the former which does not already imply some assumption about what is good for society, or what the good society is. 

I have a strong suspicion that business students may be taught to apply some economic instruments/measures with little attention to their status as or derivation from social science. One consequence of this is they don't see how their choice of metrics always already involves value judgments.  They are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) taught a worldview which naturalizes the free market and assumes the neutrality of their measurements.  That is why they are so often hard to reason with. Regarding their own claims as self-evident, they cannot argue for them, only repeat them. And they cannot process counter arguments well enough to address them rationally, term for term. 

[*bfine32*]

(06-13-2019, 08:31 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Economics is a social science for a reason. The economy is the management of resources within society. Therefore, the economy is a product of society and they cannot be separated.

One  Some can absolutely separate the 2. There's no doubt that the Economy is a component of a society but the terms are not the same and easily separated. Hell, you guys are doing it in your very argument.

According to World Finance Bhutan is the fastest growing economy in the world, but be a woman in that country and tell me how you rank their society.

[Dill]

(06-12-2019, 08:43 PM)Benton Wrote: We're derailing a bit here, but in regard to healthcare, as I understand it, Germany has base coverage for everybody (in other words you don't die if you're a diabetic and can't afford insulin or have to decline going to the hospital after you've had a heart attack because it costs too much). But if you want better than basic, you can get additional coverage at your own expense.

Which is what I'd like to see here. 

More like this: everyone below a certain income MUST buy insurance. No notice of per-existing conditions.

The insurance market includes public and private companies, the public being cheaper coops, whose directors were voted in or out of office by the membership.

The market and laws have changed somewhat since I lived there, but when I did, our family was completely covered, including dental and eye care (but if wanted designer glasses we had to pay for the frames).  The birth of my son, my daughter's leukemia, my gall bladder removal--all included, with no raise in rates.  There were small copays for prescription drugs, but not for children. While treated, my daughter had a free pass for public transporation, and insurance paid for a babysitter.  We had to pay 5 marks for every night she spent in the hospital, roughly $2.50. There was a limit on all this, something like a million dollars.  We chose own doctors and never had to wait.

All this cost about third of the Blue Cross insurance we had before leaving the US and took up again when we returned.  But with Blue Cross we had to select what we were covered for (e.g., appendicitis, but not gall bladder removal), and coverage did not include emergency room visits or cat scans for my daughter.  It was like we were paying triple for half the coverage. And we arrived back in the US just as Hillary and Bills healthcare initiative was being defeated by a campaign which emphasized the US had the best health care system in the world.

NB, US doctors told us that Germans had a statistical edge over the US in treatment of childhood leukemia. Yet when we placed her in a German rather than an American hospital, some acquaintences thought we were crazy and "playing with our daughter's life"--because they all knew the US was the best.  Somehow. 

So yeah, I'd like to see something like the German system here too.  Something less insurance driven.

[Dill]

(06-13-2019, 05:05 PM)bfine32 Wrote: One  Some can absolutely separate the 2. There's no doubt that the Economy is a component of a society but the terms are not the same and easily separated. Hell, you guys are doing it in your very argument.

According to World Finance Bhutan is the fastest growing economy in the world, but be a woman in that country and tell me how you rank their society.

LOL that woman will be just fine once she separates the economy from society and learns that size and growth determine "better."

[*bfine32*]

(06-13-2019, 05:42 PM)Dill Wrote: LOL that woman will be just fine once she separates the economy from society and learns that size and growth determine "better."

No the woman won't be fine, but it's because of the society she lives in, not the economy. I appreciate  your assist. 

[BmorePat87]

(06-13-2019, 08:06 PM)bfine32 Wrote: No the woman won't be fine, but it's because of the society she lives in, not the economy. I appreciate  your assist. 

Did the expansion of the economy lead to more women working and getting an education in Bhutan or did more women working and getting an education in Bhutan lead to the expansion of the economy? Which can we credit with causing a record number of women to now hold office in Bhutan?

It's a symbiotic relationship. Neither can be looked at in a vacuum, unaffected by the other. 

Regardless of whether the egg or the chicken came first, I imagine a lot of women in Bhutan see the increased number of economic, political, and educational opportunities as being means to improve their standing and treatment in society. 

[Belsnickel]

(06-13-2019, 08:06 PM)bfine32 Wrote: No the woman won't be fine, but it's because of the society she lives in, not the economy. I appreciate  your assist. 

But the economy is the distribution of resources in a society. If women are getting fewer resources than would be proportionate, that is an economical problem.

[*bfine32*]

(06-13-2019, 08:20 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: But the economy is the distribution of resources in a society. If women are getting fewer resources than would be proportionate, that is an economical problem.

Nah, they're just being told to keep you ass at home. 

We're going nowhere and I doubt we will. You assert you cannot gauge economy separate from society and I do. We'll just leave it there

[Dill]

(06-13-2019, 08:20 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: But the economy is the distribution of resources in a society. If women are getting fewer resources than would be proportionate, that is an economical problem.

LOL NO!!!  It's "society" when women receive greater or lesser resources!! 

Just IS!

[Dill]

(06-13-2019, 08:24 PM)bfine32 Wrote: Nah, they're just being told to keep you ass at home. 

We're going nowhere and I doubt we will. You assert you cannot gauge economy separate from society and I do. We'll just leave it there

No one so far has said you cannot MEASURE an economy separate from "society," if measure means count the GDP. But you are doing way more than that when you claim the US economy is better than Germany's, or that a middle class person is living in a "good" economy. A coach doesn't call a football player a "good" player just because he records a low time in the 40 yard dash, which can be measured separately from this performance in a game.

Further, Bels and Bpat can support their claim economies cannot be evaluated separately from society with arguments.

You can only assert, and re-assert, they are separate, while evaluating them together. That's not a tie.

But that's where we'll just leave it. Far from the original balance of trade question.