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When they passed the tax cuts, the opposition said it’ll increase inequality! Companies will buyback stocks and stock pile money! And they did. When you can g
by oeo82vc 7y ago
When they passed the tax cuts, the opposition said it’ll increase inequality! Companies will buyback stocks and stock pile money!
And they did.
When you can give government a cudgel to use on the people they will.
In that vein, Economics has been a cudgel. It has absolutely fuck all nothing to do with physics and is often ex post facto. “This is how it was so it’s how it must be.”
What a shock, since that’s essentially traditional values level emotional thinking and oh right a lot of our economic policy has been formed by limbic systems captures by childhoods of having “believe in bullshit forever” jammed down their throats.
Neuroscience has revealed too much about the functional loops in our brain for me to buy anything else. This was emotionally fueled justification to stick to a social meme. Not useful science or social philosophy. More of the same “justify in math, a language the masses cannot reason around well, the structure of our inequality.”
Economists are yesterdays wise men and today more like the those who insisted we’d be driving nuclear powered rocket cars: crackpots
- specialist 7y agoI love a good rant. Especially the "emperor has no clothing" variety. So yay. But that's too easy. What I need, personally and emotionally, are new ideas, solutions, some notion of a path forward. When I rant (in public), I try to also propose an alternative, to somehow make it constructive. So please stay angry. Moral outrage is a potent tool. But also please help me (us) by converting your outrage into action.
- QuesnayJr 7y agoEveryone who rants about economics has moral outrage. What we need is dispassionate judgement, which is considerably harder to come by.
- specialist 7y agoAgreed. I imagine the bereavement model applies. Too often people get stuck. I certainly have. It's a lot of work to recognize in oneself. Then even more work to force myself to the next stage.
- QuesnayJr 7y agoEconomists frequently get things wrong, because understanding the economy is hard. Pro-tax-cut people said that the tax cuts would have a stimulative effect (which both economists and the opposition were skeptical about). And they did. US prime age employment is almost back to its pre-financial crisis peak. Does that mean economists were wrong to reject trickle-down economics? Economists will always be the people policy-makers turn to, because they are the only people who actually try to understand the economy. Economists sometimes try to advance an agenda (and the actual economist varies by person), but the alternative is to turn to someone who only has an agenda.
- jayd16 7y agoThe decrease in unemployment has gotten slower since the last huge tax cuts so you can't even use it as an example of "maybe it worked, its hard to say".
- QuesnayJr 7y agoUnemployment is 3.7%, which is pretty closest to the lowest ever observed figures (other than during World War 2). How much faster can it drop?
- jayd16 7y agoI don't mean to imply it's bad. But yes. How much lower could it go? What did a trillion dollars do? Its not a great example of a large effect being correlated to a policy change.
- dlp211 7y agoUnemployment had been steadily declining for like 6 years before the tax cut. You can't just attribute the continuing drop in the U3 rate to the tax cuts.