NorthHawk wrote:There’s a reason the American population are as dissatisfied with their govt than many other nations.
That is the lack of services that arise from lower tax revenues. If you look at the list of populations that are the happiest,
most of the top ranked countries have higher taxes. The reason they are happier is they have trust that their
government has safety nets in place so if something happens they aren’t left on their own. In other words the social
safety nets are much stronger than in the US. It hasn’t stifled entrepreneurship in those countries as they have vibrant
and varied economies with people able to take risks without having to worry about losing their kids education or their
homes should they have a major health crisis or business failure.
Basically they are happy with how their taxes are being spent on education, health, infrastructure, and others all of which
require tax revenues.
It really depends on the country. There are only a handful of nations in this position, the closest in size to us is Germany. Understanding the economics of a nation you look at with envy and applying to a nation 30 times the size of many of these Scandinavian Utopias as the most used example, seems like not looking at the economics of managing a population our size.
Even now Social Security and Medicare are two of the largest expenses of government. Neither one of them is cheap and that is taking into account they manage about 15% of the U.S. population or 44 million people. Could we build an effective system for manage 330 million people and the insane level of immigration we have? One of the key factors in many of these Utopias is controlling who gets to come in and out of a given nation. It is rarely talked about as a factor in providing social services. If you are a nation providing a strong and expensive social safety net, you can't have millions of people migrating to your country yearly, enough to displace most of the nations on your list. It becomes quite expensive when a number of people nearly equal to most nations is moving in yearly.
We have a lot to manage providing a social safety net like less populous nations do. Those comparisons are extremely difficult.
The genius of the right wing in the US is they’ve convinced most of the people that lower taxes help them when
it’s really not in their best interest. What has happened is fewer services, more homeless, more food banks,
more people having to work until they die, lower wages, more people being food insecure, and more.
You had unprecedented wealth building in the United States with easy access to investment opportunities that people ignored due to a lack of knowledge, fear, and lack of discipline due to our education system not preparing them for taking advantage of the United States economy. Why did that happen? Even if a bunch of regular people had put money in companies like Microsoft, Apple, or even an index fund they would have increased their wealth a 1000% or more and yet they did not. Why?
Gone are the days when it was expected that a person could work until they are 65 and retire. That’s more the exception
than the rule today and god forbid there is a stock market crash with so much retirement income dependent on good results
in the market. That’s the genius of the monied elite’s program of appealing to the base instinct of the government being
the problem and not the solution or part thereof.
There are many ways to invest. "Moneyed Elite" are the Democratic boogieman that more and more people have been joining through intelligent money management because how the "moneyed elite" as you like to refer to them often start as a regular person who learns to manage their money well. You can go to Youtube right now and get a ton of investing advice from regular people who have worked their way up to millionaire status. People like Financial Education, Graham Stephan, Andre Jick, Chris Sain, and Meet Kevin. All started off poor and worked their way up with disciplined, intelligent money management that they teach to others.
Why do Democrats teach this as some kind of bad knowledge? Why do they do it? Why do they try to teach people that the government would spend their money better than they could? Does it ever cross the Democratic mind that people can and do learn how to build and manage wealth if they take the time to learn. And these people aren't part of the "Moneyed Elite" as you like to call them. They are in fact people like you and me who went out there and built wealth using the techniques taught by successful people which can very much be replicated. They do this all over the world.
Wealth is not a zero sum game. I don't know why Democrats teach this. The "moneyed Elite" as you like to refer to them benefit more from people making money. But they can't make people act in an intelligent manner with their money. They can't stop them from making stupid purchases, not managing their savings well, or being disciplined enough to not sell during a market crash when all available information is that the market will return and rise even higher.
In any event, capitalism is constantly evolving and the authors of the article suggests we are at some type of
inflection point with big companies changing their business priorities..
Big business has always adjusted priorities to changing times. This isn't even new. Big Tech as an example has been treating employees differently for 40 years. Microsoft started a completely different type of work environment four decades ago where it gave employees access to free drinks, office supplies, and great benefits to retain quality talent. They created a highly productive college campus type of work environment to improve recruiting.
It seems to me that you have not been keeping up with the changing world and thus assume things are a certain way when they are not. Capitalism has already changed and you just haven't been paying attention. I see you acknowledging none of the changes I listed. In fact, I wonder if you even know what the companies I listed do.
By the way, businesses are closing daily because of online purchases and Amazon is the biggest online
business, so I doubt it’s a net positive for local Mom and Pop small businesses.
This is completely false. Businesses, even mom and pops, are moving online. I once again refer you to SQ, Etsy, and a Canadian company from your area known as SHOP. All of these companies provide tools for allowing small business to flourish in an online environment. Companies like Grubhub an Doordash allowed a bunch of restaurants which would have died during the coronavirus to continue doing business with online food delivery. They would have died due to the government restrictions that these delivery companies allowed them to comply with while still providing food and drink.
You talk about changing capitalism, yet you don't actually keep up with the changes. You seem to keep going back to this idea of tax and spend FDR type of economics when the economy has already changed substantially. It's never been this global and open to freelancers and wealth building worldwide.
I can literally hop on my brokerage and invest in companies in India, China, Europe, Singapore, or the like. I can apply for jobs worldwide or offer services and goods worldwide.
Companies like Paypal allow small businesses not only in America to conduct business on a global scale, but businesses all over the world. A co-worker of mine buys traditional Ethiopian clothing using Paypal from a local tailor in Ethiopia, while living here in Washington State.
I want to be clear. I'm not saying things are perfect as perfect doesn't exist. But if you don't know that capitalism has drastically changed already, then you're asleep at the wheel. The fact that right now if you have a cell phone you can make purchase from a business be it a large retailer like Amazon or a mom and pop on Etsy or running a Shopify storefront, then you're not reading much deeper than a puddle as to the changes to global commerce.
Then you have the Decentralized Finance push with cryptocurrency which aims to become a hedge against inflation and a competing global currency with decentralized control that doesn't allow the government to print money endlessly devaluing the dollar and building debt loads that our descendants will be paying for ages with the only plan to limit the damage is inflating our way out of the debt until you're paying $10 a candy bar that used to cost a $1.
Given the incredible mismanagement by our government, I'm not sure why you trust them to improve your life.
Though I am all for nationalized healthcare, mostly because I feel like that is what we have now with like five major companies managing all health insurance. Health insurance certainly isn't competitive. It's managed more like a utility with the government putting a lot of limits on it. We might as well move to a nationalized heatlhcare system with supplemental private insurance like Medicare is right now.
And K1 through 12 has to seriously be revamped. It is absolutely criminal that kids in America graduate with no money management training when we're growing the economy on credit and fiat currency. It's fricking criminal. There is no way that learning some local history or some crap writing class is more important than a student learning to how to manage credit, assess an investment, or do basic business math considering almost every U.S. Citizen will at some point have credit, a mortgage, or other loan instruments as well all should be taught the power of inflation to erode monetary savings. What is the government agenda not to teach all these important aspects of finance? How much does leftist doctrines about "Moneyed Elite" and "Money and capitalism bad" interfere with the ability of our school system to be modernized.
From what I read European and Chinese students learn finance in High School. How are American kids going to compete with kids from other nations who know how to take advantage of wealth building opportunities than the people born here due to our archaic and limited school system? Why are we screwing our people this way by keeping them in the dark about how our economy works?