why do conservatives want the US to be like Europe?

You have everything backwards.

Government spending grows the economy. Those people who work for the government are paid for by tax dollars. Guess where they spend their money? In the PRIVATE SECTOR economy.

When the government bails out GM. Guess where that money goes? The PRIVATE SECTOR.
When the government pays my grandmother social security, guess where it goes. THE PRIVATE SECTOR
When the government subsidizes state governments, so they can pay pension, unemployment, and salaries... where does that money go? PRIVATE SECTOR
When the government funds a highway reconstruction in New York, guess who has get hired to build it? PRIVATE SECTOR workers.

Noticing a trend?

If the government stops spending, it gradually makes everyone poorer. That is what they are realizing in Europe.

 

He was a rural Texas Republican. How conservative do you have to get? Steppes of Hungary conservative?

 

Utter BS it is you who have everything backwards. !st that money for those government workers that they yanked out fo the economy would have been spent regardless of whether it was pulled out of the economy stuffed back in.

2nd the people that stuff it back in are engaged for the most part in stopping stuff from a happening and not producing much of anything other than red tape. Their job produces economic friction which slows growth, while simultaneously increasing demand which tends to produce inflaton even in the best of times.

3rd taxes, rules and regulations, and interest rates are inverse drivers of economy growth. That is to say the higher they are the more negatively they impact economic growth. And the real kicker for the working stiff is that slow economic growth means smaller deamand for labor especially unskilled labor, and therefore flattened wage growth, which means slow or no growth in wages whileprices still continue to escalate.

4th that puny check grandma gets every month after 40 or fifty eyars of the government hitting her to the tune of 320 or so a month between what she paid in and what her employer pays on her behalf would have sufficed to have allowed her to live on easy street for the rest of her life if it was handled by any half way competent retirement fund manager.

 

Wrong! Cut their jobs, you cut their injection of GOVERNMENT money into the economy.

You don't have a slightest fact to prove anything.

Inflation has nothing to do with government workers. Inflation exists in any economy regardless of wages.

You are preaching a religion, not a reality. Wage growth is flattened because of outsourcing and BS trade agreements.

The average person receives more from SS than they put in.

 

You can push for austerity when the economy recovers!! Doing so in the middle of a recession is pure idiocy!!

 

A position which was based on faulty data as well!! The same idiot neoliberal economists who caused all the problems in the first place. We are essentially allowing the people who drove us over the cliff, to try to put things right. The economist Dean Baker, who was among a small handful of people who saw the housing bubble and called for action years in advance, compared it to hiring Osama Bin Laden to oversee the war on terror!!

 

What cliff? The manufactured financial crisis? Yes, it was 100% engineered.

 

When you stop smoking crack you get withdrawals.

 

Yep, and our caring Conservative government who are preaching to us the benefits of austerity measures, have just voted themselves an 11% pay rise. For the rest of us wages have stayed flat for the past three years, while the cost of living has increased exponentially-especially energy costs-another 10% rise on top of the 40% rise last year. Over 30,000 vulnerable old people died of cold in Britain last winter-a third more than the previous year. For many the choice is eat or heat, but not both. If this coming winter is as bad as predicted, those numbers will surely increase. But the government will continue to assure us that their "difficult decisions" are for our own good, because, as the multi-millionaire Cameron points out, "we're all in this together"!
Then our government pulls a stunt like their 11% pay rise. It's nothing less than scandalous and the equivalent of bankers paying themselves bonuses for failing to do their jobs!

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/leading-article/9088931/winter-fuel/

 

True in theory, but for every dollar the govt uses to redistribute back to the private sector, since that's where it all comes fro in the first place, each dollar is only worth pennies after the govt skimmed off their share. You've seen the studies right, how much a dollar of govt spending is worth after they're done with it? Now imagine if the govt got out of the way a little and just made it as easy as possible for the private sector to simply do much of what the govt is doing instead? SHOCKING RIGHT??? The govt should only be there to make sure its being done in a legal way, without corruption. A fly on the wall, keeping it all in check. Instead the govt slows it all down, creates MORE bureaucracy, creates more kickbacks instead of less, and even welcomes corruption as we've seen more of in recent years.

A recent example....the Healthcare exchange website. You can not find a single professional agency that can claim that website should have cost what it did. NOT one!!!! It is a bloated mess and why? GOVT, nothing more!!! Now extrapolate that out to everything the gov does and you might understand if you pull your head out of the sand, how much LESS of the govt we truly need.

Don't get me wrong I don't hate govt. I hate how much they waste and how inefficient they are, when its so unnecessary. And I've worked in and with enough corporations to understand what out of control spending can do and how people, even in the private sector, deal with having too much money laying around. Very few will ever NOT spend it. You have to give them less to use more efficiently because the more you give them the even less caring they are. Why? No personal investment!!! Spending less doesn't mean more profit for them, because profit is of no concern, unlike a private business. The more they have the more they spend, the more they waste. PLEASE explain to me how that's a GOOD thing? I'm listening. WOW me.

 

Take the strangle hold off of private businesses and give them long term certainty and the tax payers won't have to give at both ends. As in more taxes and increased debt.

 

Lets take a look at two different families

Family A is 2 years behind on their mortgage for a total of 48k in debt. They can start a payment plan paying down an additional $500 per month. It will not benefit them at all, because within a few months the bank is going to foreclose in a few months regardless, and the truth is any money they spend on now paying their mortgage they would have been better off keeping.

Family B is 5 months behind on their mortgage for a total of 10k in debt. They also can start a payment plan paying down an additional $500 per month. Their debt is low enough that the bank will see those $500 payments as good progress to being able to tackle their debt, and they will continue to let them pay it down until it is in balance.

It seems to me that you are insinuating that because family A was too far gone to be able to save their home, that Family B clearly shouldnt attempt to get their financial house in order. In reality, the two families are in two entirely different financial situations, and the proper course for family A is NOT the proper course for family B. You are attempting to compare apples to oranges, and that simply doesnt work.

 

What the hell does any of this have to do with destroying the economy to "balance" the Federal budget? I'm talking about the economic fallacy that somehow government workers take from the private sector, which is 100% untrue.

Your personal attack on government means government efficiency needs to be FIXED not eliminated. The government will not go away because larger society needs larger government.

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Government debt does not follow the same rules as personal debt, as I continue to repeat. Functionally, they are COMPLETELY different.

 

Exactly the key point.

Austerity is 100% a political agenda to starve the poor. Starve the government, cut off social services to the poor and middle class, leave the wealth at the top.

 

It isn't government money it is taxpayer money and would be spent with or without government workers and almost certainly in a more productive fashion without their intervention. Fewer government workers means more private sector workers and economic recovery. And a lower economic drag into the bargain.

Inflation is created by excessive demand and government does not fill demand it only creates it and hampers others who are trying to meet that demand
excessive government creates excessive demand almost by definition.

There will be less outsourcing when government ceases to drive business overseas. Automation has destroyed more Jobs than outsourcing. Trade agreements have created more jobs here and abroad than they've have cost. The last two companies I worked for made 25% of their income from over seas sales and neither was a mega corps.

Yes and it is still about half of what they'd gotten had the same money the government took from them and their boss been invested in any decent retirement fund.

 

While it is true that govt debt does not follow the same rules as personal debt, it is ALSO true that you are trying to compare two ENTIRELY different financial pictures and pretending that the prescription for how best to proceed is the same.

 

By saying that the US shouldn't tackle our "debt problem" in the same way as Europe?

Last I checked, the UK and the US follow the same principles of sovereign fiat economics.

 

Their financial pictures are VASTLY different, and just as in the example with the two different families, the prescription for how best to proceed is also VASTLY different. To pretend otherwise is foolish.

 

Taxpayers do NOT FUND THE GOVERNMENT. The government can pay its workers regardless of if it takes in $0 of revenue or $10 trillion of revenue. They are independent of each other. The government can deficit spend at its discretion, and it should be doing it now.

How do you think we've run deficits for 55 of the last 60 years and still manage the lowest inflation and interest rates in the history of the country?!

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They are not vastly different at all.. UK's Debt / GDP is roughly the same as the US, slightly less actually if you want to get technical.

 

Oh yeah right the federal government just takes 2.1 trillion dollars out of the economy in the form of taxes for no reason at all. And by the way the last time we tried what you suggest was during the revolutionary war and the result was spiraling inflation.

 

Europes financial picture is COMPLETELY different than the United States, and their respective financial pictures have at least a thousand different variables, other than debt/ gdp.

To make this simple, lets take two patients that have just come into the emergency room...

Jim has a huge sliver that has entered his thigh, and he is losing 1 liter of blood per hour, and if left untreated, he will eventually bleed to death. He is also having a heart attack. The doctors ignore the heart attack and sew up his thigh. The heart attack killed him, so choosing to tackle the sliver in the thigh was the WRONG course of action.

John also has a huge sliver in his thigh and is also losing one liter of blood per hour. The doctors sew up his thigh and John is released from the hospital.

One could argue that they are both losing one liter of blood per hour and are thus the same, but that would be completely ignoring the fact that Jim was having a heart attack and John was not. Once again, you CANNOT look at the similarity between the thigh injuries and conclude that therefore the best way to proceed would be the same. Each patient needs to be evaluated differently because they are both presenting with two entirely different health pictures, REGARDLESS of the similarities in one area.

 

Who said anything about it going away? TAX payers pay for the govt. Govt workers are being PAID for by the private sector, so any taxes you gain from govt workers is basically just paying yourself. HELLO??? You don't get that? Govt workers only generate anything if its sold to other countries. Not hard to comprehend. Govt workers DO technically take from the private sector since much of what the govt does doesn't NEED to be done by them? How many different education depts do we need for example and how many are actually doing ANYTHING worthwhile or are doing the exact same thing as those on the state level? Go take a look....there is a lot of redundancy=waste. The state are already doing the job and then its all done again on a federal level. Something needs to go. And our larger society that we are taking care of, because they won't take care of themselves is the govt fault...HELLO ILLEGALS. There about 12-15 mil or more that we don't need, serve no purpose and only drain what resources we have, YET we cater to them. Govt documents written in Spanish?? What?? How in the world can a citizen of the US not understand English and why shouldn't they be forced to? The resources required just to cater to Spanish-only speaking "citizens" isn't needed, since we shouldn't be catering to ANYONE who isn't willing to learn the language that makes our country function. Its basically a big slap in the face to every one of us. It would be better spent sending them back home, then punishing their countries of origin, elminating foreign aid until they pay back the costs of us caring for the people they're kicking in our direction(YES, they are actively doing everything they can to move their undesirables over to us. Lucky us=(

 

US workers are not as dependent on the government as Euro workers are. In addition, "austerity" in the US is containing growth of spending, not actually cutting total federal spending. We are still spending more than we are taking in by the way of revenue. Lastly, in the US, states account for a decent amount of spending as well and they have had to cut their budgets back to the bone as a means of forced austerity due to federal mandates, so if this were an issue for the left, they would stop trying to force states to do things and actually join the effort to stop the federal government from engaging in such policies.

 

That might have been the case in the '50s, but any excess cash the economy is generating now ends up on Wall Street where it is pissed away on 'can't miss' overseas investments.

 

Taxes, interest rates, and quantitative easing are used to keep the currency inflation within the Federal Reserves' annual target rate (currently the annual goal is 2%, and they are doing just that).

Government spending requires no taxing at all. Takes are a pure deflationary measure used to redistribute wealth. For some reason you think the government collects taxes and then spends it. It works the opposite.. the government spends money then collects taxes. Why do you think they have a budget committee in Congress for future fiscal years?