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What a strange weekend to ride...Saturday was an icebox...Sunday was fabulous...got in two good rides, enough miles to mark the beginnin of the ridin season. Good to see so much energy in the team, too...everyone seems excited to ride together and race this spring.
- Tax cuts won't work. The problem for most of us isn't that we don't have the money, it's that we don't have the confidence to spend it. Tax cuts won't even give the rich confidence, it will just give them more money to take out of the system.
- We always seem to be fighting the wrong battles, here, IMHO. Blame it on Keynes. An economy is just the "flow" of money around in circles. Good economy comes when either more money is flowing around, or it is flowing around faster. Bad economies come about when the flow drops in volume or in pace.
- A Marxist will tell you that the problem is with the guys at the top, the capitalists, who will always be prone to take money out of the system to invest in more capital to make more money (capital surplus). But, if you take too much money out of the system, you strip money from the flow, and the losers are the workers, the people at the bottom. But eventually, as the flow drops, everyone loses. (This tends to be the PROGRESSIVE worldview)
- Others will tell you that the problem is with the government, that the government restricts or controls capital by trying to redistribute the wealth, which effectively takes money out of the more powerful capitalist system. And they are right, you can give money to the poor, which is great as a humanitarian, but the poor won't increase the economy. Money in the capitalist system, will indeed, create more means of production, which will increase the amount of flow. But, see above, if you take too much out of the system, it is always at the demise of the worker and if you keep taking it out, the system collapses. (This tends to be the REPUBLICAN / RIGHT WING worldview)
- Still others, which seems to be just about everyone designing these bailouts, claims that the problem isn't with the capitalists, the government, the rich, or the poor, but simply with the flow itself. Rather than trying to control capitalism, Keynes suggested trying to adjust the flow itself...hence, the Federal Reserve whose whole mission is simply to regulate this flow through controlling interest rates and with the Treasury, the printing of money...so, if the flow slows, you take whatever steps to get the flow back...print more money, pay people to dig holes and fill them back up, etc..and if the flow is increasing too fast, you do the opposite. (This tends to be the DEMOCRAT worldview).
- So here is the rub...they are all right...all correct and valid ways of viewing the world of the economy...yet they are all often quite ignorant of the opposing worldviews, and they absolutely have to come to terms with this. They have to soon be able to see that all of their worldviews point out hiccups in the capitalist system and have to soon respect each other's worldviews.
- But, we do have to lean towards a true solution, and it won't come from the REPUBLICAN camp...the reason is simple...we are humans...and we have to take care of the poor...and the REPUBLICAN way of looking at the world, right now, is incredibly ignorant of the poor...in their view...you give the money unrestricted to capitalists and the markets will self regulate, the economy will increase and living conditions will improve for all.....this is precisely what is going on right now, and this has been working...sort of...living conditions have improved greatly over the past twenty years, but sadly, not equally......and RIGHT NOW, our economy is simply readjusting to lower levels of production and consumption because we allowed the flow to increase too fast and we took too much out of the system in terms of relying on a balooning housing market as a source of assett...and I really don't think that any of us want to go through this crap again.
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