Should property taxes be swapped out for something else?

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I never would've thought that Justin Bieber was a productive genius. Actually your hard work is only as good as other people value it. His customers and higher ups obviously don't value thought provoking lyrics which takes effort, hence why he is rich.

For the third f**king time!! !! !

I think what he's getting at is that if we get rid of public schools altogether there will be children from families that can't afford private schooling, hence they don't really have a choice when it comes to private schools so their choices would pertain to child labour instead of which private school they'll go to?

The question is would we be cutting our own throats economically?


The good news - China and India may well be bubbles. At least for the states its been made mention that their prices and costs of living are creeping up to where much of our industry might very well be coming back within this decade.


Regardless of my last response, agreed - its a huge problem.


That's one that still seems like a partial platitude. I get that a society ridden with crime gets more crime with more poverty but are we seeing causality from economics or just correlation?

Wow, no wonder I didn't understand. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

Poor families unable to afford private schooling -> Children being roasted and eaten? The f**k?

No sh*t, right?

Lol, I'm never one to rule out things getting significantly worse from big changes. We had coal companies as well in the 1800s who had their own non-portable currencies keeping their workers captive. Little more than 100 years and I doubt much in human DNA has changed.

We had the great idea to shift off of the gold standard in the early 70's and what I keep hearing from people of all stripes is that the drawbacks to fiat and gold are pretty equal so it just ends up being a circular game of getting rid of which ever we're more sick of.

That said though, I'd agree, what he's saying has an eerie similarity with Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, etc. etc.. and we are starting to get a wonderfully disgusting corporatist gov't/bank/megacorp rollout. That needs to be dealt with.

Sorry to burst your bubble but there are three problems with that theory.

1. China has massive reserves of money and can do Keynes. (By that I mean they save while their economy is growing and then when a recession hits like it did 2008 they pull out all the stops and restructure the economy with reserve spending.) As a result China's GDP growth in 2011 was 8.9%. Jealous yet?

2. While China may have a lot of new shiny cities they still have 500 million migrant rural labourers who have very low living conditions. I don't mean poor by American/European standards I mean family living in a single room ramshackled hut with a mud floor and no electricity or running water poor.

If you think these guys won't be able to out compete you on price when in comes to cheap labour, think again...

3. India is even poorer, a poor Indian dreams of being as poor as a poor Chinese man, imagine the luxury! India's population is also growing so fast that even if they manage to grow their infrastructure and GDP as quickly as China has over the last 30 years, they will still probably end up with the same number of people in poverty by 2050.

The disadvantage they've always had though was very corrupt government and a great deal of nepotism, bribery, etc.. Seems like for as bad off and hungry for work opportunity as their citizens may be, really bad central government decisions can go a long way in killing cometitiveness. The rust belt in the US is also a great show of how cities on the great lakes - who should be perfect for industry, have fallen down and aren't getting back up thanks to awful local government.

Its hard to tell, I don't think non-invested assets should be taxed beyond the income gained from interest. The question is that if the reduced capital in the private sector and the potentially increased income to the government would be beneficial or not. Flagging out is a danger, but the US has amongst the lowest taxes on the rich of any developed country in the "west". From my point of view the core problem is that the US system is funneling money out of America to other countries. In essence consumers buy goods, the company gets money, the US government takes very little, the US company transfers money out of the US.

As I said I'm not familiar enough with the U.S tax system and corporate incentives to propose a solution, other than educating and reeducating people away from the manufacturing sector towards a knowledge based economy.


The good news - China and India may well be bubbles. At least for the states its been made mention that their prices and costs of living are creeping up to where much of our industry might very well be coming back within this decade.
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The Chinese government is clever and control much of the business sector, so just from that starting point they are in a superior position. When Chinese companies do well, the Chinese government makes money, when Chinese companies do poorly the government can directly support them. The problem in the US is that when American companies do well the government does worse (post Bush tax cuts) and when companies do poorly the government is unable to clean up the mess the companies made.

The yuan is also tightly state controlled, they have plenty of cheap labor and have been focusing a lot on domestic demand growth over time.




Regardless of my last response, agreed - its a huge problem.
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That's one that still seems like a partial platitude. I get that a society ridden with crime gets more crime with more poverty but are we seeing causality from economics or just correlation?[/quote]

Partial platitude perhaps, but when comparing countries based on social inequality and crime rates, crime goes up when social inequality goes up and vice versa. Paraphrasing Freud, he said that man is only willing to repress his anti-social behavior when he is compensated for it or threatened to do so. In a case where the benefit of a criminal act is being able to eat and have a roof over your head and the potential consequence is 3 meals a day in prison, the choice is not all that hard for a desperate person.

Yeah, I still can't make sense outta that part. All I know is I've heard this story about some kid in North Korea having to eat his own mother to survive but it's not like mothers would eat their own children to survive?

f**k I dunno, I give up lol.

Read -A Modest Proposal- by Jonathan Swift.

ruveyn

http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

Ahhh....makes much more sense now.

But wouldn't poor families be better off if their children could earn an income?