7 Economic Lies

7 Economic Lies

Watch the video.

http://youtu.be/mM5Ep9fS7Z0

Good find. I would hope that those points are already evident to most. I personally hate taxes. It saddens me every time I think about how I could have bought a couple of cars with my personal taxes this year. However I do realize that taxing is the solution. Think about it, if my tax rate was to go up significantly I'd just pay myself less and use that money to drum up more business. Eventually I'd pay myself what I want to earn any way (at the high tax rate) and the government would get way more money and I'd be providing way more jobs.

I see you are both from Houston. So, as a fellow Houstonian, let me encourage you to give the Government every penny you make. Nothing is stopping you.

In the meantime, I will keep as much of mine as I can and invest it back into my business. The men I employ will appreciate it.

Pffff I'd never voluntarily do it. I'm not insane. I think we have similar points. If you reinvest your money into your business then you're not paying yourself and not paying the high tax. However my point was slightly different in that being forced to pay more tax personally would force me to re-invest much more instead of paying myself (to avoid giving it away to the gov.) But yea... I hate seeing how much I lose in taxes already as is, so I won't give a penny away voluntarily haha.

Robert Reich is a clueless Keynesian socialist. There are hundreds of economists who would disagree with him, who are much smarter than him. Let's see, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, and others who Reich isn't competent enough to shine their shoes.

Big government is a jobs program? All Reich knows is government. What an idiot.

Thomas Sowell couldn't pour piss out of a boot. Joe Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Brad deLong. . . . Those are some smart economists, and frankly, Smarter than Reich. But Sowell??!!! If you're going to pick an economist who is wrong almost all the time, at least pick one who is admittedly smart, but wrong -- like Robert Barro.

TTH, I doubt if we will ever agree on this issue. I think Reich is a charlatan. And I greatly respect the Austrian school. In fact, it was Milton Friedman who said, I believe,

"If you laid all the economists in the world end to end, that would be a good thing."

An economist, a physicist and a chemist are stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat but a can of beans.
Chemist: Perhaps we can find the materials that would allow me to create a primitive explosive to blow open the can.
Physicist: Perhaps I can write an equation that will tell us where each bean lands after the explosion.
Economist: You guys are nuts. First, let's assume we have a can opener. . .

Thomas Sowell couldn't pour piss out of a boot. Joe Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Brad deLong. . . . Those are some smart economists, and frankly, Smarter than Reich. But Sowell??!!! If you're going to pick an economist who is wrong almost all the time, at least pick one who is admittedly smart, but wrong -- like Robert Barro. Originally Posted by TexTushHog

There you go again. Thomas Sowell is black.

You've really got a problem.

There you go again. Thomas Sowell is black.

You've really got a problem. Originally Posted by TheDaliLama

The points made in the short video are largely valid, but Reich made a few misleading, disingenuous statements. Just for fun, would anyone like to identify them and point them out?

Thomas Sowell couldn't pour piss out of a boot. Joe Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Brad deLong. . . . Those are some smart economists, and frankly, Smarter than Reich. But Sowell??!!! If you're going to pick an economist who is wrong almost all the time, at least pick one who is admittedly smart, but wrong -- like Robert Barro. Originally Posted by TexTushHog

Thomas Sowell has more knowledge of sound economics in his little finger than somebody like Krugman has in his entire brain.

Notice that I said sound economics. In Krugman's world, almost no amount of borrowing, spending, and money-printing is enough. It's as though his brain somehow got stuck in the 1970s. He has no idea how the economy works and how the capital markets work in the real world. Last spring he advocated QE in the $8-10 trillion range. That's not a typo; that's what he actually said. And he also complained almost incessantly that the $860 billion "stimulus package" of 2009 was much too small(!)

Stiglitz doesn't quite go that far, but he's certainly pretty far to the left on most issues. For instance, he has said that the the top tax rate on capital gains should be "at least as high" as that on ordinary income. Since he is unlikely to be very affluent, I suppose it's understandable that he has little idea of how taxation works in the real world. But it's astonishing to me that a prominent Ph.D. economist would be so apparently unaware of the distortive effects of very high capital gains taxes or of the strong inverse correlation between capital gains realizations and the top tax rate on cap gains. You might note that not even the finance ministers of most European social democracies advocate capital gains tax rates above about 25-30%, at the most -- even though tax rates on high salaries are typically much higher. There are very good reasons for that.

DeLong has written some pretty interesting stuff, and I've always enjoyed his writing. However, he too seems to have a pantry stocked with a little too much Keynesian Kool-Aid.

But I don't consider the stuff propounded by Krugman and some others to be Keynesianism, but rather a bastardization of Keynesianism. As I said in a nearby thread, I don't believe for a minute that Keynes would have approved of a lot of the snake oil being peddled in his name, especially in the face of very large structural budget deficits and balance-of-payments deficits that no one is likely to meaningfully address until forced by continuing crises.

At least TexTushHog acknowledged that Barro is smart -- but before claiming that he's wrong, it might be a good idea to undertake more than a cursory examination of his work, or at least read a little bit about it. Barro has probably done more than any other well-known economist to debunk high-multiplier myths peddled by people like Mark Zandi, who claims that things like spending on food stamps and other social welfare programs produce multipliers of about 1.75. "Intellectual cover" such as this enables big-spending politicians to do what they love most, which is to buy votes with other people's money.

But Barro's research shows that "multipliers" for such spending are actually in the 0.60 to 0.80 range, at best, and are often significantly closer to zero.

If we paid more attention to people like Barro, and less to those who have learned nothing from the history of the U.S. and Europe over the last forty years or so, we would be much better off.

Taxes for Thee, but not for me! The practice, though not the rhetoric of the limousine liberal.

http://campaign2012.washingtonexamin...ro-taxes-years

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_941099.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123187503629378119.html

Maybe the Left should change their mantra from "raise my taxes" to "tax me if you can".

These assholes aren't even subtle enough to be entertaining.

Here's another big Obummer supporter:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-1...oid-taxes.html

The George Carlin post is dead on right. But Reich is part of the owner class.