More economics questions

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Originally Posted by Bob the Mercenary

I figured instead of going around taking other threads off the rails with my questions, I could pool them all here instead. There are also a couple articles I would like to link, so this will avoid some unorganization.

This first article is kind of creepy, if not a complete hyperbole.




Over the top, and I'm not one of those who huddles in his fallout shelter with a gun worrying when Obama Vader will come to take over his stuff, but it's been making too much sense to me lately. The same can be said about nationalizing healthcare. If that ever becomes a reality doesn't that pretty much give the government the opportunity to regulate every aspect of your life under the guise of cutting costs? Example, not allowing your kids to play in the pool for fear they might accidentally hurt themselves or drown (a little extreme I know, just trying to illustrate).

Not true. There are plenty of countries throughout the world with nationalised healthcare. I lived in them and stuff like that doesn't happen.
What happens is that the people who actually need healthcare can actually get it.

Whenever I've brought this up I've been shot down by people saying that lowering taxes on businesses would destroy the country. Then, on the flip side I've been told raising taxes on businesses would destroy the country. That's too much pressure! Anyone care to clear this up? I have been rooting through my local B&N for books on economic history and philosophy so I can be more prepared in the future for debates such as this.

Raising taxes on business is generally a good thing as excesses businesses make don't tend to get passed onto consumers or workers but to executives. By raising taxes you can take these bonuses and hand them to less well-off people.
The argument is that raising taxes will destroy business profitabilty/ competition but this is really not true as large businesses make astronomical amounts of money most of which does actually go to thier upper tier who can afford to lose it.
As for smaller business, well tax them less.

The second thing I wanted to ask about is a little more...sketchy. And I apologize for bringing this blight upon the hallowed grounds of the boards, but today I committed the mortal sin of listening to a half hour of Rush Limbaugh. The thing was, it was a very convincing half hour where he talked about the press conference from yesterday, talking about the new unemployment rate. I'll save you from reading the entire transcript by posting snippets here, but I'll link the transcript as well. The reason I'm linking it is because he made it seem like a complete clusterfuck, and reading back on the actual press conference, that's how their answers did sound.

Not sure what exactly you are getting at here. It isn't helped that Limbaugh didn't actually make any arguments except Oh no, Socialism!
Is it that unemployment predictions were wrong? Because that is a very hard thing to predict. Generally government stimulus will increase jobs. It's hard to fault them for not predicting exactly how many jobs they would have at the end.




I want to stress that I didn't create this thread to argue any points, only to get answers. I know approximately dick about economics. Is there something about this I'm missing or does none of this actually make any sense? I have a mean habit of missing the big picture.

With so many objections I have to the President's policies, it would be nice to know if I'm basing my opinions off of faulty "facts".[/QUOTE]