Starting to Get It?

[Lurker]

It's funny that in a thread you titled "Starting to get it" where you agreed that additional revenue must be part of the deficit solution, you've ended up with the moronic proclamation that tax cuts (reductions in revenue) don't cause deficits.

Embar proclaims, "Pay cuts don't cause debt! Continuing to buy food and pay your mortgage causes debt!".

If you want to talk about backward thinking, look to the party that dupes it's followers into thinking that tax cuts increase revenue. The Republicans lie because they know the public wants a properly funded government and doesn't want drastic cuts to government programs. They lie because they don't care that their policies actually leads to huge deficits. They just want lower rates for the wealthy; That's their one concern.

And no... you didn't answer a single question. You dodged them all. Here they are again.

a) How do you feel about your Party proposing solutions to the deficit that make the deficit worse
b) Are you concerned that your Party believes their own propaganda and crafts policy based on the false belief that tax cuts lead to higher revenue
c) Does it bother you that your Party is taking steps to remove or change the triggers
d) Are you operating under the delusional ideological fantasy that tax cuts result in higher revenue?

[Embar Angylwrath]

It's funny that in a thread you titled "Starting to get it" where you agreed that additional revenue must be part of the deficit solution, you've ended up with the moronic proclamation that tax cuts (reductions in revenue) don't cause deficits.

Embar proclaims, "Pay cuts don't cause debt! Continuing to buy food and pay your mortgage causes debt!".

If you want to talk about backward thinking, look to the party that dupes it's followers into thinking that tax cuts increase revenue. The Republicans lie because they know the public wants a properly funded government and doesn't want drastic cuts to government programs. They lie because they don't care that their policies actually leads to huge deficits. They just want lower rates for the wealthy; That's their one concern.

And no... you didn't answer a single question. You dodged them all. Here they are again.

a) How do you feel about your Party proposing solutions to the deficit that make the deficit worse
b) Are you concerned that your Party believes their own propaganda and crafts policy based on the false belief that tax cuts lead to higher revenue
c) Does it bother you that your Party is taking steps to remove or change the triggers
d) Are you operating under the delusional ideological fantasy that tax cuts result in higher revenue?

a - I have no feeling at all, it doesn't produce an emotional response in me.
b - loaded question, I reject the premise
c - yes, I'm all for the triggers
d - I'm operating under the fact that spending is the issue, not taxes. Your question is irrelvant if there is no need for the revenue in the first place. We should be reforming the programs that drive a perceived need for revenue.

[Lurker]

Embar's answer: "I have no feeling at all [about my Party proposing solutions that make the deficit worse], it doesn't produce an emotional response in me."

So we can conclude that you don't care about the deficit; all you care about is lower taxes.

We can also conclude that you, by your own standard as stated in the beginning of this thread, aren't starting to get it. You are hopelessly confused about how reducing tax revenues leads to deficits.

You also don't care that your party has to lie to the public about their tax policy. The public wants a properly funded government and the public does not want to see drastic cuts in government programs, so the Republicans push a fantasy (and seem to have started believing their own propaganda) that tax cuts increase revenue. Again, they don't care about the deficit; all they care about is lower taxes.

Spending is an issue that needs to be addressed, but it needs to be addressed honestly. Not by lying to the public about the affect your policies will have and then gutting federal revenues.

You sound like an ideologue living in a fantasy world when you talk about taxes and deficits. There's you, and then there's a rational take on the affect Bush's cuts have on the economy and deficit. But as you said in your answer to question a), you really couldn't care less about deficits as long as you get lower taxes. We'll have to remember that the next time you parrot the propaganda about Obama.

[Embar Angylwrath]

Reducing reveneus WITHOUT REDUCING SPENDING leads to deficits. In other words, REDUCING SPENDING can avoid deficits. Don't know why you can't grasp that.

What prpoganda about Obama.. you agreed that he extended the zBush tax cuts.. the ones you wanted to keep in place. He didn't have to sign the bill, no one had a gun to his head. Bottom line, revenues would have increased if not for Obama's signature, do you disagree?

[Lurker]

Reducing reveneus WITHOUT REDUCING SPENDING leads to deficits. In other words, REDUCING SPENDING can avoid deficits.

And not reducing revenues can avoid deficits. And I know why you can't grasp that. Your party propaganda tells you that tax cuts increase revenue. You are a rube.

Your party lies about the affect of their policies because they know the public doesn't want cuts in government programs. They propose policies that are guaranteed to increase the deficit.

Yes, Obama signed a two year extension of the Bush tax cuts even though those cuts increase the deficit and do almost nothing to stimulate the economy. That was the price the Republicans made him pay to get some small part of his economic agenda enacted.

That doesn't change the fact that your Party is the one pushing legislation that makes our problems worse. The Republicans are the ones living in a fantasy world where tax cuts don't lead to increased revenue instead of deficits. But as you said, you don't care.

[Embar Angylwrath]

Not controlling entitlement spending is making the issue worse. Without the perceived need to spend, there wouldn't be a need for as much revenue.

But you just can't accept that, can you? Its too dangerous to the whole entitlement mentality the left uses to buy votes.

[Lurker]

Not controlling entitlement spending is making the issue worse. Without the perceived need to spend, there wouldn't be a need for as much revenue.

I agree with that.

Democrats are at the table willing to accept meaningful entitlement reform. Republican's are refusing to accept meaningful restoration of revenue.

And since the Bush tax cuts and entitlement expansion, the wars, and the recession have resulted in enormous debt we need to have both items on the table. Anyone who doesn't accept the fact that spending cuts and restoration of revenue is required don't "get it", to use your words.

Agreed?

Policy proposals need to be presented honestly. That means not pushing for tax cuts as a solution for a deficit; that's dishonest and insane. That means not pushing for vouchers as a solution to Medicare spending and telling people it wouldn't destroy the program or dramatically hurt the poor and middle class.

Republican's simply can not sell their policies honestly. That's why they've spent decades constructing a fantasy world for the rubes to live in, courtesy of Fox News and Drudge. And now the Party leaders believe their own propaganda and are pushing insane solutions to real problems. That's dangerous to the country.

But as you said, you don't care as long as your taxes go down.

[Embar Angylwrath]

LOL.. if you only knew...

My taxes have gone up. Why? Simply because I'm a business owner. I get taxed on health benefits I receive, employees like you don't. Employee's get to use tax free dollars on healthcare, I don't, even if I'm insuring dependents. I get taxed on profits that have to stay in the business in order to make payrolls and pay vendors because clients are slow-paying me, you don't get taxed on money you don't receive. Think I'm the top paid person in the company? Think again, my top performing sales people are better paid than I.

But really, I don't expect you to understand what its like to actually create jobs, and therefore create tax revenue. What I expect from you is exactly what I've seen.. enitlement mentality, anger at those trying to wean you from the government teat, hissy fits because the 1% is paying you the fair share you think you're entitled to.

[Ddrak]

I get taxed on health benefits I receive, employees like you don't. Employee's get to use tax free dollars on healthcare, I don't, even if I'm insuring dependents.

This is another reason health care shouldn't be related to employment.

I get taxed on profits that have to stay in the business in order to make payrolls and pay vendors because clients are slow-paying me, you don't get taxed on money you don't receive.

Uh, you need to fire your accountant if any of this is true. It's not profit if you're holding onto cash to make payroll.

But really, I don't expect you to understand what its like to actually create jobs, and therefore create tax revenue.

Surely it's not YOU creating those jobs. I mean, if YOU weren't around then someone else would have filled the niche, right? That's the central theory of capitalism. The jobs exist because there is a demand for the services. If there was no deman, you wouldn't have any clients (slow paying or not), and therefore no jobs, and therefore no tax revenue. This is the absolute fallacy of supply side economics - that the employer is the one "creating" the jobs instead of the customer.

Dd

[Lurker]

Embar,

When confronted with the fact that your Party is proposing "solutions" that make the deficit worse, the fact that the public does not want drastic cuts in government programs so your Party lies about the affect of their policies (duping rubes like you and apparently even the Party leaders) , and that your Party is crafting legislation based on the ideological fantasy that tax cuts increase revenue...

you said you don't care about any of that.

I concluded the obvious. All you care about are tax cuts.

And you respond with a rant about how much taxes you pay. Thanks for proving my point.

The bottom line is this. The Republican Party and the rubes who support it are living in a fantasy world (courtesy of Fox News, Rush, and Drudge) at a time when we have enormous problems that need to be solved. There's no clearer example than Toomey thinking that massive tax cuts are going to increase revenue and a Republican deficit reduction proposal that actually increases the deficit.

But again... you don't care as long as your taxes go down.

=========

Uh, you need to fire your accountant if any of this is true

Based on past experience with Embar making up numbers I'm guessing none of it is true.

[Embar Angylwrath]

I get taxed on health benefits I receive, employees like you don't. Employee's get to use tax free dollars on healthcare, I don't, even if I'm insuring dependents.

This is another reason health care shouldn't be related to employment.

I get taxed on profits that have to stay in the business in order to make payrolls and pay vendors because clients are slow-paying me, you don't get taxed on money you don't receive.

Uh, you need to fire your accountant if any of this is true. It's not profit if you're holding onto cash to make payroll.

But really, I don't expect you to understand what its like to actually create jobs, and therefore create tax revenue.

Surely it's not YOU creating those jobs. I mean, if YOU weren't around then someone else would have filled the niche, right? That's the central theory of capitalism. The jobs exist because there is a demand for the services. If there was no deman, you wouldn't have any clients (slow paying or not), and therefore no jobs, and therefore no tax revenue. This is the absolute fallacy of supply side economics - that the employer is the one "creating" the jobs instead of the customer.

Dd

Profits are an accounting fiction (and I use that term in the turest sense, its not a jab or anything), governed by accounting rules. There are cash and non-cash expesnes, and there is cash an non-cash revenue. It also depends on the type of accounting used, cash or accrual. Trust me when I say profit doesn't equal cash received. But that doesn't matter to the government. After uyou put all the numbers in all the places, if the number is postiive at the bottom, you get taxed, whether or not that means positive cash flow or not.

Yes, its me (my company) creating jobs. We've done it several ways, but to your point, one of the ways we've done it is we developed a niche that no one had up to this point. This drove the market to us, even though we exist in a deflationary customer base. Along the way, we've hired people that were laid off truckers, laid off clerical workers, laid off sales people. So yeah, we are creating jobs.

[Embar Angylwrath]

Embar,

When confronted with the fact that your Party is proposing "solutions" that make the deficit worse, the fact that the public does not want drastic cuts in government programs so your Party lies about the affect of their policies (duping rubes like you and apparently even the Party leaders) , and that your Party is crafting legislation based on the ideological fantasy that tax cuts increase revenue...

you said you don't care about any of that.

I concluded the obvious. All you care about are tax cuts.

And you respond with a rant about how much taxes you pay. Thanks for proving my point.

The bottom line is this. The Republican Party and the rubes who support it are living in a fantasy world (courtesy of Fox News, Rush, and Drudge) at a time when we have enormous problems that need to be solved. There's no clearer example than Toomey thinking that massive tax cuts are going to increase revenue and a Republican deficit reduction proposal that actually increases the deficit.

But again... you don't care as long as your taxes go down.

=========

Uh, you need to fire your accountant if any of this is true

Based on past experience with Embar making up numbers I'm guessing none of it is true.

Lurker - about half the population put that party in place, and iostensibly agree with what they are doing. You can't negate that, no matter how hard you try. Also, its YOUR party (actually both parties recently) that have spent us into $15 trillion of debt. The difference now is the Reps are trying to put a stop to that. The US is eventually going to have to take some pain and reform entitlements, yet your party just wants to kick the can down the road. It may not be pleasant, but it has to be done.

[Lurker]

Also, its YOUR party (actually both parties recently) that have spent us into $15 trillion of debt. The difference now is the Reps are trying to put a stop to that.

Like I said, you live in an ideological fantasy world created by Fox News and Drudge.

Here's reality.

110725_bushobama.jpg

110520_debt.jpg

Republican policies caused the deficits. Democrats are at the table offering a balanced solution that would lower the deficit. Republicans respond with a proposal that would increase the deficit, believing their own delusional propaganda that tax cuts increase revenue.

You look at those facts and think Republicans care about anything other than tax cuts and are trying to do something about the deficit. It's laughable.

[Ddrak]

Profits are an accounting fiction (and I use that term in the turest sense, its not a jab or anything), governed by accounting rules. There are cash and non-cash expesnes, and there is cash an non-cash revenue. It also depends on the type of accounting used, cash or accrual. Trust me when I say profit doesn't equal cash received. But that doesn't matter to the government. After uyou put all the numbers in all the places, if the number is postiive at the bottom, you get taxed, whether or not that means positive cash flow or not.

It sounds to me like you really don't understand accounting very well. You keep saying how hard it is for you to figure these things out and then throw a lot of terms around that basically conflate cash-basis and accrual-basis accounts. You keep beating the strawman that "profit doesn't equal cash received" when you're the only person ever to have suggested it does, not even "the government".

You're taxed on gross income minus allowable deductions. Gross income is the total amount invoiced (assuming accrual, which any sane corporate uses) minus cost of sales (at the time the costs were incurred). Looking at the bank account will only confuse you because of the variable delays from invoice to payment on both sides of the equation, so just watch the income sheet unless you have significant short term risks that need mitigation.

I'd actually recommend you start to learn about accounting and stop trying to explain it as 'fiction" - it can make a significant difference to the profitability of your business.

Yes, its me (my company) creating jobs. We've done it several ways, but to your point, one of the ways we've done it is we developed a niche that no one had up to this point. This drove the market to us, even though we exist in a deflationary customer base. Along the way, we've hired people that were laid off truckers, laid off clerical workers, laid off sales people. So yeah, we are creating jobs.

If the demand didn't exist, you wouldn't have been able to create jobs. You need to drop your entitlement mentality and stop thinking you're entitled to the customers that come through your door. You exist solely because they exist, not the other way around. Just because you happened to find the niche doesn't mean none of the other 300 million people in the US wouldn't have found the exact same niche, so it's not you and you're nothing special. The jobs exist because the demand exists and you're just a transient benefactor of the flow of money from customer to worker. Congratulations, you got some customers together with some workers and by your own admission gave most of the value of that work to the people who facilitated the transaction (ie salesmen) rather than the ones doing the real work.

Sorry, but you didn't create any jobs at all. The customers did. If you can explain to me how your business would survive without customers then I'll concede it's you're own magical hand in things, but without that you just have to follow the money and it's obvious where the real job creation comes from - people spending money.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Our customers created the demand that my boss filled by hiring people in Manila

We pay the company that rents them out to us about $8 an hour per programmer. I wonder what that company pays them. They don't get medical but they sure the fuck get lots of time off. They are allowed to claim religious holidays too and a couple of them take both Muslim and Jewish holidays off, which seems like an interesting mixture of beliefs.

[Partha]

Bottom line, almost all business is demand driven - Embar's included. Props to him for filling that business, but he's not the driver of the job engine - the demand is. Supply side economics is a fantasy of the ownership class in the world.

In other words, what Dd said without the five dollar words.

[Embar Angylwrath]

@ Dd...

For a pretty intelligent guy you made a lot of ignorant statements in your post.

First, I'm not conflating cash and accruals. I said the accounting is different for each. To make it more clear, you choose one or the other. Both of which have tax implications.

Without going in to what the demand shit... suffice it to say that we created the demand for the service.

As to the snark about rewarding the salespeople instead of the people that actually do the work... without the salespeople, there wouldn't be any work. And its a lot harder to get a good salesperson than most of our technical positions.

Anyway, you're too ignorant about what I do (not stupid, just ignorant) for me to have an intelligent conversation about it with you. Not a slam, just an opbservation.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Surely it's not YOU creating those jobs. I mean, if YOU weren't around then someone else would have filled the niche, right? That's the central theory of capitalism. The jobs exist because there is a demand for the services. If there was no deman, you wouldn't have any clients (slow paying or not), and therefore no jobs, and therefore no tax revenue. This is the absolute fallacy of supply side economics - that the employer is the one "creating" the jobs instead of the customer.

I've been thinking about this, and it almost seems like you're oversimplifying. Certainly there's demand for jobs that go unfufilled, and there's jobs created that there's no demand for, right? Capitalism isn't some universal force that compels jobs into existence. People take chances. Someone might start a company not knowing if there is a niche for it. And not every demand is met. There's no guarantee that Embar's competitor would recognize the demand if Embar didn't hire the new employee. And if they recognize the demand, there's no guarantee they could find the right person to fill the position. Also, they might over- or underestimate that demand. His competitor might hire 5 guys instead of Embar's 1, and realizing he overestimated the demand might hold on to those extra guys and even pay them out of his own pocket until demand picks up.

So it's not the demand itself that compels these jobs into being. It's the people with the money to pay salary, the vision to see the need and huevos to make it all happen and not fuck it all up. A customer jumping up and down screaming for a product is no guarantee they will ever get it. Somebody has to say "I will mortgage my house and borrow money from my relatives in an attempt to give you that product."

It's also possible for a company to create and/or anticipate a demand that doesn't currently exist and may or may not ever exist. Maybe I just invented the Slinky. I hired a bunch of people to build it, which are jobs I created. There's no niche to fill because nobody has ever heard of a Slinky. That makes me a pioneer, and I don't think your statement accounted for scenarios that.

Anyway, just some random thoughts on the subject...

[Ddrak]

@Embar,

If you're not conflating cash and accruals then you're confusing yourself somehow. It's not as difficult as you're making out. The difficult part of accounting isn't in what the terms mean, it's in knowing the law and exactly what falls under which column in the book. Things like "Profit", "Taxable Income", "Revenue" and "Cash" are all quite simple and have real-world meanings.

I don't believe you created the demand. I'm not even sure it is possible for a supplier to create a demand. You may have discovered an unfilled demand or raised the priority of a demand above others but it doesn't make any sense to me that anyone can create a need in another person that didn't exist before your service to fill that demand existed.

To put it another way, I believe people have an extremely long set of demands, all with priorities. They exercise those demands by spending money with suppliers up to where their money runs out. Suppliers are competing for a finite pool of cash so they "create" demand by raising an existing demand above the cutoff, forcing other demands out. The only way I see to create jobs is to alter the cutoff, not to play with the relative list of demands.

The salespeople thing wasn't a snark. It was a statement about relative value in a macroeconomic sense. Salespeople add very little (if any) value to a service and exist solely to inflate the apparent value of a service to a customer, essentially doing their best to distort the demand side of the equation in order to benefit a particular segment of the supply side. That means they are working against Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand", not for it. Now, if you end up in a situation where people adding little value are the highest rewarded then it means your economic system is less efficient than it could be if the money flows and rewards the more value-generating members of the workforce. It's obvious when you think about it - a workforce of engineers is far more valuable than a workforce of salespeople to the economy as a whole but it's a prisoner's dilemma for the individual companies.

I don't need to know what you do - I'm making general economic statements. If you believe you can actually create a demand from nothing then I'd be interested to know how.


@Freecare

Yeah, it is oversimplifying because a lot of the argument is statistical and can break down at the individual anecdote. In the long term, jobs that exist without a demand disappear and demands that exist without jobs result in the creation of jobs. While not every demand is met, demands tend to be met in the order of people's priorities up to where their cash runs out. In the specific examples there's no guarantee a competitor will fill a demand or not, but there is an almost certain guarantee that the customer will spend that money somewhere and not hide it under their mattress.

So, while you're talking about the chaotic short term, I'm more reasoning from a longer term result. Demand does compel jobs into being because it attracts people who want to take the money. Someone with "money to pay salary" won't last long without the demand no matter what loans they've taken or how much they believe.

On the Slinky - there was a demand for entertainment, or maybe even a demand for the as-yet unnamed "Slinky" product that you brought into being. Creating the product or service is filling an existing demand, not creating it. Maybe we're counting differently, but (for example) I see a demand for anti-grav suits even though we have non in existence right now. I don't see a big demand for extra-grav suits, so suppliers are likely to gravitate more to the anti-grav side and ultimately create a product to fill that demand and push it above the "my money runs out here" cutoff - especially when you add sales people into the mix to distort the market. I'd even argue that there was a demand for iPhones in Jesus' time just no one knew it then.

Kudos to Embar for seeing a demand he could fill and pump cash into marketers to bump it up on the potential customer's radar but I don't buy the "created jobs" line because I don't see how his taking money did anything more than redistribute the customer's budgets a little differently to push money (and jobs) his way instead of some other way. it's why demand side economics historically works and supply side doesn't.

Dd

[Kulaf]

You can certainly "create" demand through supply. Just look at the personal computer, the cell phone, etc. Marketing companies like Apple and Microsoft are masters of convincing people that you "need" this or that product.