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Willie Tomg posted:|_______M~I~R~R~O~R__________| You're downplaying real world value while making an anti-finance Keynesian defence.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:20
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Willie Tomg posted:No it isn't hyperbole, that's the point! That is the whole and entire point of Keynesian economics actually! If hedge fund quants and investors and managers dug holes and filled them back up for a living they would be creating far more of Actually Existing Economic Value than what their current occupations which is manufacturing the ultimately baseless impression of value in the form of ten-figure numbers on a balance sheet whose total is reached by pressing the equals key on a calculator a few thousand times a second with high frequency trades until the operator and algorithm feel better emotionally, which intersects with Actually Existing political policy in extremely counterproductive Actually Existing ways when the perception of economic value is much much higher than it Actually Is at present! Are there leftists out there that really don't understand that the intelligent allocation of capital is itself a valuable contribution to society? ----------------
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Jul 22, 2015 04:23
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tentative8e8op posted:I dont like your idea that governmental goals should be judged worthwhile almost solely by how much tax revenue is brought. IMO, it is perfectly okay for a federal program to be a money hole as long as such a thing acceptably serves the public good. How do you define serving the public good where it comes to infrastructure? I could propose any number of dumb projects that are not worthwhile. Subsidies are not the end of the world, but the idea that unlimited subsidies are beyond question because they may have some possible benefit is loving dumb.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:26
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Keynes was literally a stockbroker even during the depression so I doubt that he had beef with people trading stocks. The whole dig ditches thing was meant to be a way to stimulate demand, not because it stimulates the noble proletariat experience
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Jul 22, 2015 04:27
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Narciss posted:Are there leftists out there that really don't understand that the intelligent allocation of capital is itself a valuable contribution to society? Depends what you mean by that. Private landlording for example is not at all productive, in comparison to socialised housing. Despite it being a perfectly viable way to make money and thus likely argued as intelligent allocation of capital.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:28
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OwlFancier posted:Depends what you mean by that. Why isn't it?
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Jul 22, 2015 04:29
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Typo posted:Why isn't it? What does it do that social housing does not do better? Other than make landed individuals wealthier.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:30
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OwlFancier posted:What does it do that social housing does not do better? Fullfilling individual preferences for one I can see socialized housing being better if you want to provide it as a social program for the poor (but even then, it might be better to offer up a subsidy instead). But if I'm a middle class guy who wants to rent a place close to the downtown core or buy a house in the suburbs I'll probably get something more to my liking from the private sector.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:33
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Typo posted:Fullfilling individual preferences for one Your preferences are void in the face of necessity, unfortunately. And in the face of other people's individual preference to have somewhere to live at all. Also you likely won't get better for the money, because private landlords don't build houses much. Building houses is generally outside the scale of small landlords, and in urban areas likely impossible without some form of government assistance due to organisational difficulties. It tends to lead to housing shortages when people buy up property and then start trading it and letting it for profit. Central planning on housing goes a long way towards making house building more viable, keeping rents at reasonable rates, ensuring efficient occupancy or accounting for inefficient occupancy in planning, and generally ensuring everyone has somewhere to live, ideally close to their job.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:37
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OwlFancier posted:Your preferences are void in the face of necessity, unfortunately. And in the face of other people's individual preference to have somewhere to live at all. So why can't you have social housing for the poor but keep a private housing market alive for people who aren't poor?
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Jul 22, 2015 04:39
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Typo posted:So why can't you have social housing for the poor but keep a private housing market alive for people who aren't poor? You can so long as the latter is subservient to the former. As in, I can demolish your house to make way for a needed apartment block. Otherwise the latter gets in the way of the former. Of course if you do decide to eminent domain everyone's house because you need to upgrade then it's not really private property so it's up to you whether that really counts. And it's still something of an extravagance. Do we really need a small market of fancy houses for the elite? Wouldn't that land be better used for more productive enterprises and the money so generated put back into the social housing to make it better quality? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Jul 22, 2015 |
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Jul 22, 2015 04:40
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Spazzle posted:How do you define serving the public good where it comes to infrastructure? I could propose any number of dumb projects that are not worthwhile. Its not ideological. In the context of the U.S. we would economically benefit from additional infasteucture spending for multiple reasons. It's one of the more clearcut economic decisions we could make.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:45
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OwlFancier posted:You can so long as the latter is subservient to the former. As in, I can demolish your house to make way for a needed apartment block. So basically you plan on giving the government the exact same type of power that the Chinese government currently uses to evict farmers to make way for development projects.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:47
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Typo posted:So basically you plan on giving the government the exact same type of power that the Chinese government currently uses to evict farmers to make way for development projects. Sounds alright to me? Give them a house and a job/supplementary income seeing as you demolished their existing one but yeah, if folks need houses more than farms then you build houses. Many individuals have more right to a home than a single individual has a right to the one of their preference.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:49
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OwlFancier posted:Sounds alright to me? Give them a house and a job/supplementary income seeing as you demolished their existing one but yeah, if folks need houses more than farms then you build houses. Many individuals have more right to a home than a single individual has a right to the one of their preference. I can think of literally no way a power of this sort is going to be possibly abused or captured by special interest groups. See also eminent domain and football stadiums
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Jul 22, 2015 04:52
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Narciss posted:Are there leftists out there that really don't understand that the intelligent allocation of capital is itself a valuable contribution to society? Intelligent allocation of capital is not what actually happens when practiced in a political system that views unfettered capital as an end in itself and not capital as a means by which to accomplish ends determined by other means. c.f. a gauzy and debatable point in the latter half of the clinton years extending to the present day, climaxing smally in the dotcom bust, climaxing violently in fall of 2008 and giving every indication of climaxing again and again until we are all but dust
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Jul 22, 2015 04:53
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Typo posted:I can think of literally no way a power of this sort is going to be possibly abused or captured by special interest groups. So much worse than our current not at all abusive or oligarchic self-serving system then?
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Jul 22, 2015 04:54
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OwlFancier posted:So much worse than our current not at all abusive or self-serving system then? Yeah, the government more or less being able to arbitrarily seize the house of anyone who owns a home on the basis of "theoretically, your home which houses 3 people can be demolished to make way for a house which houses 4 people" sounds a lot worse than the current system indeed.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:56
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asdf32 posted:Its not ideological. In the context of the U.S. we would economically benefit from additional infasteucture spending for multiple reasons. Infrastructure has long term maintenance obligations. It costs money to repair. Just building tons of stuff without regard to how much revenue it brings in leaves us with either a bunch of debt or saps resources from other things. Some things may be worth subsidizing, but not all subsidies are equal. It is absolutely not clear cut that dumping out a bunch more roads and bridges will be worth it. You're just repeating propaganda from lobbyists for the engineering profession.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:57
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Spazzle posted:How do you define serving the public good where it comes to infrastructure? I could propose any number of dumb projects that are not worthwhile. I'm not arguing for unlimited funds for everything, I just think that wanting monetary returns from our programs is an inherently wrong approach when we're choosing how worthwhile such things are.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:58
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Typo posted:Yeah, the government more or less being able to arbitrarily seize the house of anyone who owns a home on the basis of "theoretically, your home which houses 3 people can be demolished to make way for a house which houses 4 people" sounds a lot worse than the current system indeed. Possibly we could have some kind of series of escalations and necessary conditions before that particular scenario were to occur? Offer to buy, gauge how many buildings you would need to seize in relation to projected increased occupancy, whether there are alternative locations nearby, requirement to compensate evicted residents commensurate to the value of the property, etc. Or we could continue doing say, this on the basis that landlords vote and we don't want to upset them. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Jul 22, 2015 |
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Jul 22, 2015 04:59
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OwlFancier posted:Possibly we could have some kind of series of escalations and necessary conditions before that particular scenario were to occur? idk dude, your whole idea seems to be a kneejerk reaction that gears itself towards the emotional appeal of smashing middle class people's things and maybe some middle class people along with it
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Jul 22, 2015 05:03
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Typo posted:idk dude, your whole idea seems to be a kneejerk reaction that gears itself towards the emotional appeal of smashing middle class people's things and maybe some middle class people along with it *shrug* I don't consider individual preference to be a valid argument when it is put up against the needs of others. You may prefer to drive on the other side of the road, but you're not allowed to because other people need to have a safe road. You're not allowed to not pay tax because you'd prefer to keep the money because other people need that money to fund public services. I don't really see why you should be allowed to own a house to rent or to obstruct the development of much needed infrastructure because you like having money/owning your own house, when other people are forced to live in poverty to support your preference. Your preferences are void in the face of the needs and basic rights of others. Simple as that. I don't think the fact that I am fully erect at the thought of crushing the dreams of the petit-bourgeoise diminishes the logical consistency of my argument. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Jul 22, 2015 |
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Jul 22, 2015 05:07
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OwlFancier posted:*shrug* I don't consider individual preference to be a valid argument when it is put up against the needs of others. Why is it necessity for the new social apartment to be built on top of my house instead of somewhere else that's empty. Maybe it's not applicable to Luxembourg or w/e but it certainly is applicable to less densely populated place like america.
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Jul 22, 2015 05:09
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tentative8e8op posted:I'm sorry, but I don't think there is any easy single answer as to what the public good is, such a thing needs to be decided on a case by case basis as much as anything else which happens. I brought that up because how a program serves society should be the main selling point, my worry is how many people want each governmental program to be run as if a business, and judge such federal programs by how much profit is brought back. It is one thing to say how it is hard to measure how social programs for the poor will return monetary value. However, in this thread we have people saying that it is unambiguous that infrastructure spending will have clear benefits above their costs. This isn't some nebulous program, this isna physical object that costs money to build and maintain. There should be a justification to why it exists that accounts for that.
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Jul 22, 2015 05:09
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Typo posted:Why is it necessity for the new social apartment to be built on top of my house instead of somewhere else? *shrug* it might not be. If there's space elsewhere you could build it there. London's kind of dense though, as are other cities, so someone's going to get the lovely end of the stick. If you keep on sprawling you will eventually hit the sea and that costs more in infrastructure. You'll need to keep funding the infrastructure and people's access to it. Denser populations are generally cheaper to provide the same amount of services to so in the interests of economy it's probably better to redevelop sometimes.
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Jul 22, 2015 05:11
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OwlFancier posted:*shrug* it might not be. If there's space elsewhere you could build it there. London's kind of dense though, as are other cities, so someone's going to get the lovely end of the stick. If you keep on sprawling you will eventually hit the sea and that costs more in infrastructure. So why don't you built the apartments on the outskirts where land value is a lot cheaper and then built like a really fast subway system so people can commute into the city for their jobs instead?
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Jul 22, 2015 05:11
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Typo posted:So why don't you built the apartments on the outskirts where land value is a lot cheaper and then built like a really fast subway system so people can commute into the city for their jobs instead? Because that's more expensive. The apartments probably doesn't cost much more to maintain wherever they are. But if you need apartments and a subway and fare subsidies and an extension of the gas and electric supply and bin wagon routes and hospital coverage to achieve the same goal, then it's going to cost more. For that money we could supply better services to the city center and let more people live there.
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Jul 22, 2015 05:13
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OwlFancier posted:Because that's more expensive. The apartments probably doesn't cost much more to maintain wherever it is. But if you need apartments and a subway and fare subsidies to achieve the same goal, then it's going to cost more. So you are telling me that a government which has the power to seize a billionaire's home based on some nebulous "necessity" can't tax the rich to expand the subway line by a couple of zones?
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Jul 22, 2015 05:14
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Typo posted:So you are telling me that a government which has the power to seize a billionaire's home based on some nebulous "necessity" can't tax the rich to expand the subway line by a couple of zones? It can tax the rich anyway and spend that money making more houses and better services because it doesn't have to pay for the infrastructure to support massive amounts of sprawl on the basis that people want to live in single self-owned detached houses with a big lawn. More efficient is better than less.
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Jul 22, 2015 05:16
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Spazzle posted:You're not defining how something serves society. Some projects will produce marginal or even negative return. Who's saying we should pick projects out of a hat? Governments are just as capable as any other entities of making priorities based on expected returns, the returns just happen to be public rather than private. And of course the decisions won't always be perfect, but then neither are those from private entities. That said, it seems pretty straightforward that there are more than enough projects that would easily provide value for the investment in the United States today, rather than the hypothetical country teeming with infrastructure in your strawman. Borrowing the money at rates marginally above inflation means the threshold for a value-added project is actually pretty damned low, and directly providing large numbers of people with decently paying jobs with benefits would be a huge step up from allowing contractors to skim off the top before going out and hiring people at the bare minimum compensation the market will bear as is the standard for such projects today.
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Jul 22, 2015 05:16
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Like, the modern history of America is basically based on unquestionally building the exactly wrong infrastructure regardless of costs. This both creates huge amounts of unmaintainable crap and creates loving awful cardboard places that collapse in a generation. We should build what we need to, but we need to reject nonsense about building stuff just cause.
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Jul 22, 2015 05:19
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OwlFancier posted:It can tax the rich anyway and spend that money making more houses and better services because it doesn't have to pay for the infrastructure to support massive amounts of sprawl on the basis that people want to live in single self-owned detached houses with a big lawn. More efficient is better than less. So basically we've pretty much established there is no "necessity" to demolish people's houses and you want to do it on the basis that it will cost less.
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Jul 22, 2015 05:19
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Spazzle posted:Infrastructure has long term maintenance obligations. It costs money to repair. Just building tons of stuff without regard to how much revenue it brings in leaves us with either a bunch of debt or saps resources from other things. Not all subsidies are equal which is why I support infrastructure in particular which has immediate employment benefits for groups which are underemployed (thus reducing real cost) and, more significantly, long term benefits. Upkeep of the highway system pales in comparison to the long term economic benefits. Economics is driven by capital and infrastructure is capital which the private sector is ill suited for producing and currently underinvested in. Willie Tomg posted:Intelligent allocation of capital is not what actually happens when practiced in a political system that views unfettered capital as an end in itself and not capital as a means by which to accomplish ends determined by other means. c.f. a gauzy and debatable point in the latter half of the clinton years extending to the present day, climaxing smally in the dotcom bust, climaxing violently in fall of 2008 and giving every indication of climaxing again and again until we are all but dust Also nonsense.
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Jul 22, 2015 05:21
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Typo posted:So basically we've pretty much established there is no "necessity" to demolish people's houses and you want to do it on the basis that it will cost less. "The world will not literally end if people continue to endure poor public services and housing shortfalls as a result of excessive private control of the housing market so I think I am justified in continuing to obstruct improvements in that area."
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Jul 22, 2015 05:22
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Who's saying we should pick projects out of a hat? Governments are just as capable as any other entities of making priorities based on expected returns, the returns just happen to be public rather than private. And of course the decisions won't always be perfect, but then neither are those from private entities. If infrastructure spending returns less money in tax revenue then it costs to build and finance, it is not a clear slam dunk project. It may be worth building for other reasons, but that is something that needs to be determined on a case by case basis.
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Jul 22, 2015 05:26
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asdf32 posted:Not all subsidies are equal which is why I support infrastructure in particular which has immediate employment benefits for groups which are underemployed (thus reducing real cost) and, more significantly, long term benefits. Upkeep of the highway system pales in comparison to the long term economic benefits.
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Jul 22, 2015 05:32
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Spazzle posted:You want it both ways. You say it is cheap to borrow money to build things, but you willingly want to ignore what it takes to pay off the debt incurred to do so. If infrastructure generates more economic activity than it costs to build and finance, then it is a clear slam dunk project. Such a project might add to the debt, but it would still be beneficial from the perspective of debt:GDP, which is the more relevant figure. But yes, on top of that, some projects cannot be directly measured just by the financial returns. If building a wind farm and shutting down a coal plant provides no direct economic benefit, it may still be a good choice from a public policy perspective. The point is, opportunities for many such value-added (directly financial value or otherwise) exist today. Plenty of highways and bridges are in need of repair, the state of public transportation is woeful in most urban areas, energy generation and distribution can be modernized, internet services could be greatly improved, the list goes on and on. The problem with the United States is not that there is not valuable work to be done, it's that the structure of the economy inefficiently allocates resources for to provide that value in part due to the inefficiencies of private market forces. Creating a public agency that can take on projects based on the public good would benefit the economy and nation as a whole, and again since you seem to be ignoring this part, could directly benefit the workers who make these projects happen rather than lining the pockets of shareholders who in turn depress wages. Spazzle posted:How do you know this? How would you determine if a new chunk of highway would payfor itself. By measuring the predicted benefits against the expected costs of the project. Is the whole concept of project analysis alien to you or something? A multi-lane bridge to an island with 300 people on it may be a poor investment. Repaving or expanding a highway between two major metropolitan areas may be a better investment. It's a good thing there are experts and professionals who can take on such decisions. AreWeDrunkYet fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Jul 22, 2015 |
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Jul 22, 2015 05:36
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:If infrastructure generates more economic activity than it costs to build and finance, then it is a clear slam dunk project. Such a project might add to the debt, but it would still be beneficial from the perspective of debt:GDP, which is the more relevant figure. No, if a project generates more tax revenue than it costs to build it is a clear slam dunk. Dollars of GDP does not equal dollars of tax revenue.
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Jul 22, 2015 05:40
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Spazzle posted:No, if a project generates more tax revenue than it costs to build it is a clear slam dunk. Dollars of GDP does not equal dollars of tax revenue. No one has made the equivalence between GDP and tax revenue except in your head. Government spending that expands the economy, within certain bounds, is for the public good. The government is not a company that has to justify its own existence with money it takes in as a result of its spending.
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Jul 22, 2015 05:44
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