[Economics] If Obama actually gives us the VSP Grand Bargain

[RobbyPants]

Is the Treasury authorized to sweeten the deal of IOUs with bounties or interest payments? If this is allowed then it's actually a really clever way to do stimulus -- but since it's also obviously a form of non-Congressional debt, I can see the judiciary readily cockblocking anything but a zero-interest IOU.

I'm not sure what you mean? We'd be paying them more than what we owed them by effectively borrowing a second time?

[Lago PARANOIA]

We'd be paying them more than what we owed them by effectively borrowing a second time?

I don't like how you said 'borrowed', but yes. You would convince people to accept your IOU by promising to pay them back even more money.

Granted, it's probably unnecessary to actually sweeten the deal enough to get people to accept federal IOUs in the first place. It's not like inflation/interest rates are high or that many of the people the Treasury can stiff even have a recourse.

[Essence]

government needs to be more efficient, when it's already running with half the waste of the private sector?

Source?

[DSMatticus]

government needs to be more efficient, when it's already running with half the waste of the private sector?

Source?

Slightly unrelated, but keep in mind that the argument people use to spout the glories of the free market (perfect efficiency at infinite, instant, unrestrained competition with rational, omniscient consumers) is that the free market minimizes profit and profit is a form of inefficiency in that model (because if you are profiting, the ratio of money pumped into your firm through sales vs quantity of goods sold is necessarily worse than it would be if you were not profiting). Profit is both inefficient and a sign of the free market's failures, and the ludicrous profits of modern corporations in the U.S. pretty conclusively demonstrate our private sector is neither particularly efficient nor free.

Of course, people who love the free market also get upset when you tell them that the free market hates people who try to profit because profit is a good thing! People who do well deserve to be successful! Being rewarded for a successful business endeavor? What a socialist notion. The free market would never stand for that.

[Username17]

government needs to be more efficient, when it's already running with half the waste of the private sector?

Source?

Sorry, one eighth the waste of the private sector. My bad.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

[url=http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-1 ... nuary.html]Economists didn't expect raising payroll taxes to send consumer confidence to a one-year low.[/ur]

Yet just 10 days back I posted about that being a "A FUCK YOU to the working class" and implyied heavily that it would do notable and immediate damage to the recovery.

It still remains to be seen if the tax season / EITC payment delay will have as notable a negative effect as I expect it to.

[sabs]

It's only 40 dollars a paycheck for me. It's not nothing, but it's not exactly the end of the world.

[virgil]

government needs to be more efficient, when it's already running with half the waste of the private sector?

Source?

Sorry, one eighth the waste of the private sector. My bad.

-Username17

"People can make numbers do anything they want. You need to look at the real world to know how much Medicare wastes, like my sister whose Medicare rented a chair for $50 a day that could've been bought in a store for $200."

The "you need to form your own opinion from real world life experience" is such a common counter to any numbers I cite.

[sabs]

Ooh, Anectdote.
There are always going to be weird things like that. We're talking about gross waste over the entirety of the budget. The thing is, if they BOUGHT the chair for everyone who needs it, even for a day, that's $200 per person. Where probably they figured that the average use for people who need that chair is $100.

They're not even wasting anything until you reach 5 days.

[Shatner]

It looks like the Republicans are backing down on the debt ceiling. Who knew?

[Essence]

government needs to be more efficient, when it's already running with half the waste of the private sector?

Source?

Sorry, one eighth the waste of the private sector. My bad.

-Username17

That's good, but it's hardly indicative of the entire public sector vs. the entire private sector, and I know the conservatards that I would really like to wave this in the face of are going to call me on it. Does anyone have anything broader to substantiate this claim?

[K]

The thing is that no one considers what the private sector does as wasteful.

So the fact that most health insurance companies only spend about half of every dollar they take in to provide care and pay for their own employees is not considered "waste" because most of that other money goes to shareholders (though ten cents of every dollar is spent on advertising, so not all of that is pure profit... fucking health insurance companies advertise a lot).

The fact that the most hospitals converted to for-profit in the last 15 years and this adds another 20% to all healthcare costs in order to give the profits to shareholders is also not considered waste.

The fact that the government is not allowed to bargain with drug providers for prices or that they are often given things like half a billion dollar handouts from the government is not considered waste.

Now, the new healthcare law is going to make it so that health insurance companies need to spend about 70 cents of every dollar taken in on healthcare and salaries, but I don't see that substantially making the non-waste waste any smaller. I expect an accounting trick will be used to avoid that because the Republicans don't believe in having government watchdogs to catch corporate crimes.

[Maxus]

Side note, I found out that the US Army Corps of Engineers has 1/10th the accident rate of private sector construction.

Which helps to put a nail in the "government is inefficient" stuff...

[Whatever]

You probably don't want to bring up the IRS to "conservatards" but their collection rates are insane. I think it was something like 25 cents in costs per $100 collected, last I checked.

[Josh_Kablack]

Based solely on anecdotal experience from working in tax preparation and having friends still working in tax preparation, I strongly suspect that the single most efficient way to balance the budget would be to reallocate federal dollars into IRS enforcement.

[Koumei]

Whereas when you pay a tax lawyer or whatever to minimise your taxes paid by doing various things (whether reasonable like "you bought this PC exclusively to help run the business, that's all it's for, yes that is a deduction no I don't care that you played Solitaire on it that one time" or unreasonable like "So there's this other country, right..."), how much money is being wasted in the sense of "handing it over to the accountant"?

[Josh_Kablack]

Whereas when you pay a tax lawyer or whatever to minimise your taxes.... how much money is being wasted in the sense of "handing it over to the accountant"?

For a typical taxpayer, an actual accountant (CPA) will usually charge between $80-$500 dollars depending on the complexity of the return and how busy that accountant is with other returns. Of course if you go to a CPA, you probably have a more complex than usual return.

The big three tax prep firms operate on a different model, where the narrow majority of their revenue comes from operating as fronts affiliates for out-of-state banks who make predatory loans to the working poor to skim off chunks of their EiTC payments. Customers at those places can expect to pay someone who is not an actual CPA about $300 for tax prep (as distinct from loan interest and fees) if they get their return done before the middle of February, somewhere from FREE to $200 if they get it done between the middle of February and late March, and a rate comparable to an actual accountant if they get it done between late March and the filing deadline of April 15th( + potential weekend and obscure holiday).

The loans generally have $50-75 in handling fees tacked on and are often at like 200% annual rates -- of course that's an annual rate for a loan which is paid back in 2-3 weeks when the refund comes through. This sounds scammy, and in a way it is, but I can also get into the reasons that costs have to be structured this way for offices to operate. -- Mainly that the franchisee has to pay rent and utilities all year on an office that only generates revenue for 3 months and the indentured-servitude masquerading as entrepreneurship that are the franchisee agreements.

As the IRS slowly joins the 1990s and manages to accept "Modernized" E-Files and pay out refunds electronically, the quicker turnaround time (combined with harsher regulations) has cut down some of the predatory lending. However the people from the IRS are missing the key point here - early season clients don't just need the money "now!now!now! --whatever the future cost will be -- but they also do not have cash up front to pay preparer fees. Thus the only way for a preparer to be paid for their time is to be able to withhold their fee from the anticipated refund -- and that can only be done via a bank as intermediary.

[Whatever]

Whereas when you pay a tax lawyer or whatever to minimise your taxes paid by doing various things (whether reasonable like "you bought this PC exclusively to help run the business, that's all it's for, yes that is a deduction no I don't care that you played Solitaire on it that one time" or unreasonable like "So there's this other country, right..."), how much money is being wasted in the sense of "handing it over to the accountant"?

For accountants, see above. You generally wouldn't hire a tax lawyer to fill out your tax forms, but you might hire one to help you structure a business deal or a retirement plan in order to minimize taxes. At the bare minimum, you'd be paying thousands of dollars, and quite possibly significantly more. Tax lawyers can make three figures/hour, times however many hours they manage to bill you for.

[K]

Debt limit explained in case you need a simple video for your conservative friends.

Pretty good channel for a variety of topics actually.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Word on the (K-) street is that Obama's SOTU is going to push a massive jobs and stimulus plan aimed towards infrastructure spending.

I approve, but what's the over-under on the Republican party actually going through with this? Obama wasn't exactly successful with this in late 2011/early 2012. On the other hand, the Tea Party wing's pitiful performance with the Speaker of the House election/Bush tax cuts makes me think that they're not as strong as feared -- and I think that the business wing really is salivating over what's probably the last opportunity to have a cheap-as-free infrastructure package for the foreseeable non-D.D. Recession future.

Who knows. I'm very cautiously optimistic; the Tea Party wing has been shown to be disorganized and weak lately.

[Chamomile]

@K: Thanks for posting that, I saw that guy's first two videos years ago when they first came out, but then I lost track of his channel before he ever released anymore.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm really looking forward to the double-dip recession come Friday.

I'm also wondering just how retarded the United States voter really is. They wanted (in abstract) untenable contradictory policy, got it, and are going to predictably suffer over it. The real question remains is whether they are actually going to blame the people and economic philosophies responsible for their suffering or if they're going to lash out like a bunch of butthurt crybabies at the closest, most visible target and empower the people who caused them to suffer in the first place.

Right now, the polling says that the putrid, deeply retarded American voter actually blames the Republican party. I expect that to change after a couple of weeks due to explicit right-wing media propaganda, 'subtle' centrist corporate whore media propaganda, and of course the fact that Americans are too stupid to remember anything from more than a month back.

What really blazes my balls about the whole thing is that the most likely outcome next to kicking the can down the road is the VSP Grand Bargain I worried about earlier in this thread.

[Username17]

The American voter believes that they want tax increases and entitlement cuts. That's progress, because they used to believe that hey wanted tax decreases and entitlement cuts. When you tell the American voter what "entitlement cuts" actually entail, the American voter wants nothing to do with them.

If Bush couldn't push a pile of medicare cuts through a Republican congress, the catfood lobby can't get one through a Democratic senate. hell, the only reason anyone voted for the Ryan budget is they knew it had no chance of passing the senate.

I worry that chained CPI or some shit will gut Medicare. But the vouchers and shit that Republicans are wanking about has absolutely no chance of going anywhere.

-Username17

[John Magnum]

I retain an irrational hope that people will collectively make the jump from "We can't cut government spending on military! It creates so many jobs!" to "Hey, we could have the government create jobs in other sectors, building nice things." Maybe even all the way to "Oh yeah, that's how we got out of the last depression."

I also have an irrational hope that people will FINALLY notice that Republicans are very keen on cutting the deficit, right until actual deficit-reducing legislature is set to go into effect, at which point they suddenly become Keynesians. It happened with the "fiscal cliff", it's happening with the sequester. At some point, right, people will notice that even Republicans think government spending is necessary to keep the economy going when push comes to shove, and we'll get a big infrastructure stimulus package?

Haha of course we won't as long as the House is under Republican control and Senate Republicans break new ground in obstructionism, but it's nice to dream.

[Stahlseele]

i like how obama is basically all like:"i don't care about the next election, i can't win another round anyway, so i am going to do what i think is right no matter what"