Yes, but what's your idea for catching these people who are doing bad things? Seriously. How? How can you possibly catch someone who, say, sells bad meat if you don't do some sort of analysis on who's getting sick from what food? You want that information to be obvious enough that we can just act on it, but that is a fantasyland fairytale. Somebody has to find that kind of information, do that sort of testing, and collect that information.
There is no fear of reprisal if there is no one to catch you. To go back in terms of the police, you want to punish criminals, and have them stop doing crime because of fear of reprisal, but you don't want there to be any police, detectives, or prosecutors. You're going to have to explain how that is supposed to work.
Psychic_Robot wrote:rather than cutting them another check, the government should be helping them find jobs.
No, no, no. This is obvious. Unemployment goes up. What happened? Did jobs move and start hiding under rocks? No. Those jobs literally disappeared off the face of the earth. Those jobs are no more. You are saying the solution to unemployment is to help people find jobs that no longer exist.
You're also going to have to explain how that is supposed to work. Seriously; recession means backwards economic growth. Getting people to hire in a recession is hard, because there is literally less to employ people to do. The profit-maximizing move is to fire employees, since it increases their profit margin if they were at equilibrium before. Your idea is to help people find jobs, but the problem isn't that jobs are hard to find it's that less of them exist than did previously. An obvious solution to this is to create more jobs. So how?
Psychic_Robot wrote:but ramping up infrastructure spending in the middle of a recession
Spending breaks recessions. Recession means lack of economic growth. When money gets spent, that means increased demand in some region of the economy (for the thing money is getting spent on). To meet increased demand, the economy has to grow. When the economy grows, you aren't recessing anymore. Anybody can do the spending. In this case, the infrastructure is the government spending money, and then people getting paid money to work, so they spend money, so demand for commercial products goes up, which means employers have to increase supply by hiring new people, and then those people are getting money, which they can spend on things they want to increase demand... etc, etc.
Raising taxes is not a bad idea during a recession at all. Hell, raising taxes on the top 2% wouldn't even cost us jobs. The point of a company is to maximize the profit margin. This means, when they decide whether to fire/hire someone, they are looking at, "how much money does their work make us, and how much money does it cost to pay them?" Increasing taxes on corporate
profits does not shift this analysis. It means their work will make them less money, but reducing a number by a percentage cannot make it negative. If corporations raised taxes, and in response fired people, they would be losing money twice over (assuming equilibrium before). This is a crude analysis, because it turns out there's some 'flat numbers' and 'overhead' here and there that change this, but it is not proportional in the way you expect. You can make more
moneygrowth than you lose by taxing corporations, easily.
Unless you think changing the corporate tax rate makes us competitive with the third world, and we will either lose more jobs to them/win jobs back from them, which is stupid. No tax rate will make us competitive with the third world; the labor costs are vastly different. The only jobs that stay here are the ones people haven't figured out how to outsource yet. You can't serve me burgers from China.
Of the people who receive welfare, whites are the largest group. They are the plurality. If you lump all minorities together, you barely beat whites. Barely.
