willhud9 wrote:

trubble76 wrote:

willhud9 wrote:

Grace wrote:willhud9, I need your sources and facts to back up that statement.

It's common sense from what I know about most progressive policies.

In order to enact many of the policies it would cost a ton of money, money the US does not have. So the only way to pay for the policies is with IOU funds and loans from foreign nations. That does nothing of getting our country out of debt.

Now, unless you know progressive policies that wouldn't cost the government a dime to enact, the solution at the moment is to focus on recovering our broken economy. If the government keeps favouring big business and multi-billion dollar bailouts to the auto industry than our economy is going to remain broken.

Name one progressive policy Obama wants enacted that I'd support and I'll be surprised.

The richest country in the world can't afford progressive policies, but less wealthy countries can?
How do you work that one out?

How exactly are we wealthy? Or is my country's debt obsolete? Cool. If the US government can just ignore debt and get away with it, than I am going to tell my parents too stop struggling to pay their mortgage, credit cards, and other loans since "hey, the government can fucking get away with it, why can't they?"

This kind of thinking is why we get those moronic "if the government's budget was a household budget" images popping up on facebook.

The government is not a household. The governments budget is not a household budget. They work in different ways for different purposes and the simplistic thinking that equates the two is why so many countries are strangling themselves with this 'austerity' bullshit.

You go beyond this through with the conceit that someone suggested the government stop paying on its analogous credit cards, which no one else has suggested.

The United States is enormously wealthy. We have an powerful GDP. Our businesses are making 60-year-record breaking profits. The United States is a wealthy nation.

We've got a debt. A huge debt. And we have that debt because we generally insist on running our economy ass-backwards.

Now times are hard. The private sector is not supplying jobs because there's no demand. This would be the sensible time for the government to step up spending. Provide jobs, or failing that, provide a significant enough cash injection to the pockets of citizens to create that demand. A minimum income or something like that.

Then, when the economy improves, the government should cut back spending. Attempt to pay down the debt once government spending isn't required to maintain the economy. Cease stimulus and subsidy.

Unfortunately, we do it the other way around.

When times are lean, we wail about the government living above its means, pretending it's like a spendthrift family with an overdrawn credit card, and popular support goes for cutting spending.

When times are good, no one cares so much about cutting spending, when that's the time its possible to reduce the debt.

So we have that problem. We also have a really fucked up set of priorities about where we spend the money we do spend. The fraction we spend on education is pitiful. The amount we spend on the military is ridiculous. The cost of our health care system is embarrassing given the pathetic services we get from it and our pigheaded unwillingness to learn from the successful outcomes of systems spending less per capita and getting more services.

And that's the national problem. The right wing has it's own set of problem where tax-cuts for the rich are the right action in any situation.

Nutshell: The US has a large debt. The problems we're having aren't because of that debt. It's because of our national attitudes towards spending: how, when, and on what. We're a wealthy nation, and our debt doesn't have to be a problem unless we make it a problem. We insist on making it a problem.

willhud9 wrote:That makes absolutely no sense at all. Increasing government jobs does not put money into people's pockets it shifts money around.

Yes. It shifts money that is not being spent and not creating demand into the pockets of people who will spend it.

In order to successfully pay these new government jobs the government needs money to pay them with. In order to that, taxes are either going to need to be raised or spending needs to shift.

Or it needs to borrow more, or create more money. The government bailed out the banks by creating 7.7 trillion dollars out of thin air. A much smaller amount would greatly help the general public.

Furthermore, by increasing government jobs and the field of jobs covered by the federal government, the private sector shrinks. The government starts competing with the private sector. The private sector loses revenue due to this competition thus causing other people to lose their jobs.

If the private sector was creating jobs, the government wouldn't need to. The government jobs can't compete with private jobs that don't exist.

The problem is in this crippled economy the people who can get the economy flowing smoothly is not the government through federal jobs, but private employers through the private sector. However, they are bogged down with regulations (some needed, others not) that the employers do not desire to hire new employees simply because it is costly. Remove the unnecessary regulations (even if temporary) and allow the private sector to start hiring. My father WANTS to work.

The private sector is making record profits. The problem isn't a lack of money on their end. Nor is it a problem with excessive regulation. What excessive regulations do you imagine are preventing private jobs from forming?

He does NOT WANT a federal paycheck (he went through that with the Navy). My dad wants to work in the private sector. Unfortunately, their not hiring in his field or the jobs that are hiring are not looking for older experienced workers but fresh meat that can be molded.

So what regulation being removed would help that?

Our job market is crippled and you expect me to look towards the government for help?

Yes. Unless you can come up with a better way to supply the missing demand that's crippling the private sector.

Loren Michael wrote:

quixotecoyote wrote:

willhud9 wrote:they are bogged down with regulations (some needed, others not) that the employers do not desire to hire new employees simply because it is costly. Remove the unnecessary regulations (even if temporary) and allow the private sector to start hiring. My father WANTS to work.

The private sector is making record profits. The problem isn't a lack of money on their end. Nor is it a problem with excessive regulation. What excessive regulations do you imagine are preventing private jobs from forming?

Employment and business licensing and the patent system are two of the biggest.

Licensing is rarely particularly onerous outside specific fields, but I'm with you 100% on patent law. Not the normal thing that comes to mind when you think "government regulation of business though" since it's businesses using the patent laws to patent troll and sue other businesses

Loren Michael wrote:

quixotecoyote wrote:

Loren Michael wrote:

quixotecoyote wrote:

The private sector is making record profits. The problem isn't a lack of money on their end. Nor is it a problem with excessive regulation. What excessive regulations do you imagine are preventing private jobs from forming?

Employment and business licensing and the patent system are two of the biggest.

Licensing is rarely particularly onerous outside specific fields, but I'm with you 100% on patent law. Not the normal thing that comes to mind when you think "government regulation of business though" since it's businesses using the patent laws to patent troll and sue other businesses

Licensing is valuable to society in instances where public safety and financial security are potential large issues, but outside that it serves as a barrier to entry and largely serves to protect incumbent business interests from upstarts, much like the current patent system. It's widespread, but it's also a local issue, an area that is frequently overlooked.

A barrier, sure, but a very low one. If you want a business license here in Kansas City, and you expect to have less than $100,000 in revenue, you pay $90. If you expect to have less than $50,000 it's $45.

Things like liqueur licenses, rent control, building height restrictions, parking requirements, NIMBYism... I wish there was an effective umbrella term to stuff these things under, but it's all regulation, it's all harmful to growth, and I don't think there's a good justification for the negatives that they bring. To a certain extent they're inevitable in a democratic society where people have a say, but they're problems, I think, that need to be dealt with all the same.

A lot of those are necessary to say how a business is run, but don't affect whether a business is run. I've been in areas with horribly laid out parking lots that make driving the sides streets terrible. Rent control is a separate thread, but I've mentioned the neat program KC has for rent control where X units have to set aside for affordable housing for Y years in any new development. New buildings keep going up, and there's at least a few affordable places to live that aren't shitholes.

Others like liquor licenses definitely stifle, and too often it involves NIMBYism and political cronyism. I'd say get rid of them, but it's something communities have a legitimate interest in controlling - where the areas of drunkenness are going to be (at least with bars, not retailers. Those I don't think should need special permission).

Loren Michael wrote:

quixotecoyote wrote:

Loren Michael wrote:

quixotecoyote wrote:

Licensing is rarely particularly onerous outside specific fields, but I'm with you 100% on patent law. Not the normal thing that comes to mind when you think "government regulation of business though" since it's businesses using the patent laws to patent troll and sue other businesses

Licensing is valuable to society in instances where public safety and financial security are potential large issues, but outside that it serves as a barrier to entry and largely serves to protect incumbent business interests from upstarts, much like the current patent system. It's widespread, but it's also a local issue, an area that is frequently overlooked.

A barrier, sure, but a very low one. If you want a business license here in Kansas City, and you expect to have less than $100,000 in revenue, you pay $90. If you expect to have less than $50,000 it's $45.

I think we're on the same side of this issue, but I don't think you appreciate the scope of the problem.

Another problem is that occupational licensing is often a tool with which one occupation fends off competition from another, usually lower wage, occupation. For instance, many states have regulations preventing dental hygienists from practicing without the supervision of a dentist. Dentists have an average of six years more schooling than a hygienists, who on average have 2.6 years of post high-school education. In addition, dentists make on average $100 an hour, and are 80% male, whereas hygiensts are 97% female and make around $37 an hour. Kleiner and Park find that these regulations transfer $1.5 billion dollars a year from hygiensts to dentists. This is a highly regressive transfer to a male dominated, higher educated, higher paid job from a female dominated, lower educated, lower paid job. In a very similar vein with likely similar impacts, many states restrict the ability of nurses to practice without the supervision of doctors. In fact these regulations are currently growing as regulators rush to restrict the number nurses working in retail health clinics in a variety of ways to prevent them from competing with doctors.

There's a similar problem with doctors and nurses, which serves to do little more than drive up healthcare costs.

It seems trivial, but I always love to bring up the horror story of hair-cutting licenses:

These cartel-like politics are what lies behind outrageously divergent licensing rules: 1,600 hours of instruction to get a hair-cutting license in Washington, for example, but only 130 hours to become an Emergency Medical Technician. In fact, you can earn certification as a fire fighter in Washington after just 385 hours of coursework—one-fourth the time it takes to become a stylist. And, as I said at the outset, it takes 1,700 times as long to win legal permission to braid hair in Oregon as it does to get a Food Handler’s Badge.

A lot of those are necessary to say how a business is run, but don't affect whether a business is run. I've been in areas with horribly laid out parking lots that make driving the sides streets terrible. Rent control is a separate thread, but I've mentioned the neat program KC has for rent control where X units have to set aside for affordable housing for Y years in any new development. New buildings keep going up, and there's at least a few affordable places to live that aren't shitholes.

Others like liquor licenses definitely stifle, and too often it involves NIMBYism and political cronyism. I'd say get rid of them, but it's something communities have a legitimate interest in controlling - where the areas of drunkenness are going to be (at least with bars, not retailers. Those I don't think should need special permission).

With respect to parking requirements, no, they really do affect whether a business is run. Land is a valuable commodity; forcing it to be used on parking just subsidizes car use at the expense of the business that wants to start up. Rent control leads to housing shortages and forces the people who aren't fortunate enough to live in the rent-controlled city center to pay in time and money for the commute if they want the jobs. More buildings, on the other hand, both increases capacity and makes housing more affordable. It also puts people to work. There may be some happy mediums as you suggest, but are those the rule, or are they the exception?

Regarding liquor licenses and keeping drunks away, I'd prefer to just have police be reactive to those kinds of issues. I haven't done as much looking into on that one though, so maybe that's just my aesthetic sensibilities speaking.

I'm not sure I understand the parking article, it seems to say the the cost of parking is artificially low?

Legally mandated parking lowers the market price of parking spaces, often to zero.

Rent control would take another thread to sort out.

With licensing, I'm struggling to understand the objection. If a dentist has 6 more years of training than a dental hygienist, wouldn't we want the hygienists to be supervised by the dentist? I appreciate the gender imbalance involved, but shouldn't that be addressed by encouraging more female dentists, not lowering the bar for quality dental work? Nurses and doctors are a little murkier because theoretically they're filling different niches, no?

You're absolutely correct that I didn't appreciate the scope of the problem, and it seems like there are more occupations than I realized where licensing can be unduly burdensome, but I question some of the areas the article suggests cutting.

Where I agree with that article is that this is an area for regulation reform, not removal:

instead of occupational licenses, governments could mandate testing, and offer certification for those who pass and have some set of qualifications. They could also allow private groups to offer alternative, competing certifications.