quote:

ORIGINAL: unome

You guys need to stop being fukking *******s!

See what I did there?

quote:

ORIGINAL: David F.

I don't understand the concept of a quarantine 'shutting down the economy' or 'the solution being worse than the problem'. It seems to me that the supply of food, water, energy, people, and natural resources is a constant. The only thing that changes in a quarantine is how, where, and at what rate money changes hands. Money is a man-made concept that theoretically should be able to be suspended for a short period of time for the health and safety of the people. Capitalism and a capitalist health care system doesn't seem to be able to handle a pandemic like this. It could be suspended for a short period of time until we have this thing licked.

quote:

ORIGINAL: David F.

I don't understand the concept of a quarantine 'shutting down the economy' or 'the solution being worse than the problem'. It seems to me that the supply of food, water, energy, people, and natural resources is a constant. The only thing that changes in a quarantine is how, where, and at what rate money changes hands. Money is a man-made concept that theoretically should be able to be suspended for a short period of time for the health and safety of the people. Capitalism and a capitalist health care system doesn't seem to be able to handle a pandemic like this. It could be suspended for a short period of time until we have this thing licked.

quote:

ORIGINAL: unome

quote:

ORIGINAL: David F.

I don't understand the concept of a quarantine 'shutting down the economy' or 'the solution being worse than the problem'. It seems to me that the supply of food, water, energy, people, and natural resources is a constant. The only thing that changes in a quarantine is how, where, and at what rate money changes hands. Money is a man-made concept that theoretically should be able to be suspended for a short period of time for the health and safety of the people. Capitalism and a capitalist health care system doesn't seem to be able to handle a pandemic like this. It could be suspended for a short period of time until we have this thing licked.

Not be be mean, but you could have just stopped at "I don't understand". The economy is something so complex and vast that you could have a PHD in Finance or Macroeconomics and still only know so much.

Right off the bat, the supply of almost everything is NOT a constant. Farmers will grow more of this food or that food if the prices are right. Marginal land will be planted if the prices are high and lay fallow or used for cattle feed if prices are lower. We saw just this year that pig farmers actually killed baby pigs because the prices were too low to raise them and make money doing so.

If there is a greater demand for water, prices rise and more expensive ways of getting water, like desalinization, become economically viable.

Same with energy. Cost of energy goes up and solar panels become more viable. Building a new nuclear plant, or oil field or wind farm becomes more viable.

People will want more money if the demand goes up for labor and also if costs go up.

Health care is trickier because if the only way to save yourself or your loved one, you want to pay any price. Government certainly has to be involved in a more substantial way in health care because supply and demand are not going to work as well since supply can be controlled by patents and demand is almost completely price inelastic for life-saving drugs and services. Inelastic meaning that you would pay almost any price, but you also would not buy more if they were cheap because you only need one heart surgery if that is all you need. You are not having another one because of a BOGO sale!

The damage that shutting down the economy does is huge, but every business is different. The easy ones to see is how quarantine harms anyone in the travel or tourism industries. Also, the restaurant and bar business. Events, concerts, etc. This affects the commercial real estate market, the ability for people to pay rent, the ability of landlords to pay mortgages.

You can shut all of this down, and we virtually did, but huge amount of people are employed in these industries. And they take the money they make in profits and wages and spend it in other areas of the economy.

Let's say you shut down 10% of the economy. What will happen? A recession. A huge one. Why? Because you cannot make the economy 10% smaller and not have a smaller pie for everyone to get a piece of.

And the effects are worse than just a lost 10%. So many businesses have fixed costs that cannot be changed so losing 10% of revenue could be the difference of making a decent amount of money or losing a large amount of money. When businesses start losing money that was not planned for, they only have a few options. They can dip into reserves if they have them, but after that they have to reduce expenses. They cannot pay less in rent or mortgage because they could be evicted and they cannot charge more for their products because competition will not let them. So they may have to let some employees go. And this just compounds the overall economic problem.

You just cannot suspend all of these realities because they have bad results during government shutdowns. And, when the government tries to intervene, it normally goes horribly wrong.

The first shutdowns were somewhat necessary to stop the surge and to figure out the full extent of the problem and how to treat it. We are way past the point where that makes any sense in a larger sense. But, there are clearly some areas that are, and should be, still shuttered. Bars and nightclubs. Full stadiums. But even these activities should be seen as a trade off where we are purposefully hurting our economy and people in those industries because the solution is better than the problem created.

But, at some point, in most learned people's opinion, there gets to be a point where the the solution of forced shutdowns is worse than the problem. This is easier to see in economic ventures, but harder to measure in educational ones. Hoiseth sniffs that lives are more important than times tables and this false choice is correct, but pointless. The point is how much damage are we created to our population and country if we teach large percentages of our population less over, say, a whole year, what happens over the long term?

But, there is not a short-term economic effect of not teaching children much for a year. The damage will happen in the future. I guess that is the point with all education, isn't it? In the short-term it is an expense with no immediate return and the benefits are all future based.

quote:

ORIGINAL: David F.

tl;dr

quote:

ORIGINAL: Daniel Lee Young

Jebuz, and to think I used to be the one charged with incompetent ranting...

I happily surrender that title to the new co- champions unome and kgb.

quote:

ORIGINAL: unome

quote:

ORIGINAL: David F.

tl;dr

Too long, didn't read.

And now we know why you don't know. ;)

I tried to explain supply and demands affect on supply, the effect of shutdowns on business, people and the economy as a whole and touch on how this effect is different and harder to measure for educational shutdowns or distance learning. My long post was shorter than a Cliff Notes version of those things. You cannot explain hard and complex things in a paragraph.

Let's just hope the people making these decisions are OK reading longer and more complex ideas or we are in big trouble.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Daniel Lee Young

Dude...

Explain to me without using fifteen single spaced paragraphs, why the supposed financial cost is worth the risk of a massive number of unwitting or witless asymptomatic carriers spreading a killer disease because it’s too inconvenient to adapt to a dire circumstance?

/ begin rant, CPA...

quote:

ORIGINAL: David F.



You assumed I didn’t understand economics. You could have just said ‘it’s to complex to suspend the changing hands of money temporarily’ and then I would have disagreed and said we very easily could so long as the top 1% of the wealthy were made to slow down or suspend their wealth accumulation and risk it that the majority of Americans didn’t decide they liked a resource based economy better than the existing capilism.

quote:

ORIGINAL: bohumm

The argument that we shut down and we can't afford to do it again is false. We didn't shut down while fully complying with universal infection control practices at the public health level; we've been uneven, sporadic, and incomplete from Day 1, and as long as we continue that path, our economy will continue to die the death of a thousand cuts. "I couldn't afford to make that necessary repair" turns into an exponentially more expensive necessary repair down the road that leads to other expensive repairs, compounding the problem.

We don't necessarily have to go all McMurphy at this point, but we need to go more there than where we are right now, or we will eventually have to go all McMurphy and maybe beyond eventually. Epidemiology is a complex discipline but getting it wrong leads to a simple outcome: the problem in its current form never goes away.

quote:

ORIGINAL: TJSweens

We had some of the greatest economies in the history of the US with the 1% paying 90% on their top tier of income. What Reagan set up did not work. It stagnated middle income and started the process of eroding the middle class and accelerated the flow of money up hill. The country got set on the path of deficit spending and massive debt. Don't try to tell me it works.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Daniel Lee Young

Jebuz, and to think I used to be the one charged with incompetent ranting...

I happily surrender that title to the new co- champions unome and kgb.

quote:

ORIGINAL: unome

quote:

ORIGINAL: David F.

tl;dr

Too long, didn't read.

And now we know why you don't know. ;)

I tried to explain supply and demands affect on supply, the effect of shutdowns on business, people and the economy as a whole and touch on how this effect is different and harder to measure for educational shutdowns or distance learning. My long post was shorter than a Cliff Notes version of those things. You cannot explain hard and complex things in a paragraph.

Let's just hope the people making these decisions are OK reading longer and more complex ideas or we are in big trouble.

quote:

ORIGINAL: unome

Let me say something that are important for the big government people to hear:

You cannot win.

Now, big government people could be Republicans that want to ban all abortion or Democrats that want to bring back the 'good old days' of 90% tax rates. But freedom will beat all your intentions to take away things from other people.

Ban abortion and women will be buying RU-486 over the Internet like 60 year-old men buy Viagra. You are not taking away what they see as their right. No way. That ship has sailed.

Raise the tax rates to 90%? You will crash the economy and see what massive amounts of capital flight looks like. It is so easy for the ultra rich or multinational corporations to take their profits in a different country that you will raise far LESS money by taxing much more.

And who will get hurt? Not the rich. They will either have money offshore or just have less takehome pay and be A-OK. You will hurt all of the rest of us because the next Microsoft will be headquartered in Hydrabad and so many potentially good ideas will not get funded. You do not risk millions for a big potential return if that return will be taxed at 90%.

Maybe the best way to understand all of this is look at what an investor looks at when judging a new investment: the required after-tax rate of return. What do you think a 90% tax rate does to the required rate of return? Plug in some numbers. It essentially makes ANY investment with risk in it a poor one! Good luck growing an economy like that.

Clinton and the Republicans in Congress refined Reaganomics by smartly changing one thing: raised the highest tax rate for the rich, but reduced the capital gains tax. This spawned greater investment in all the companies that are so crucial to America's success today. It also made investors more long-term focused, which is always a good thing.

I know, I know. Too many words. Even the older people are becoming like the Twitter and TikTok generation. Tell me in one paragraph how the economy works.

Well, that is not going to happen.

quote:

ORIGINAL: kgdabom

On a message board I don't read long posts either.

quote:

ORIGINAL: kgdabom

I read it all. You are doing a great job talking sense here.

quote:

ORIGINAL: kgdabom

quote:

ORIGINAL: unome

Let me say something that are important for the big government people to hear:

You cannot win.

Now, big government people could be Republicans that want to ban all abortion or Democrats that want to bring back the 'good old days' of 90% tax rates. But freedom will beat all your intentions to take away things from other people.

Ban abortion and women will be buying RU-486 over the Internet like 60 year-old men buy Viagra. You are not taking away what they see as their right. No way. That ship has sailed.

Raise the tax rates to 90%? You will crash the economy and see what massive amounts of capital flight looks like. It is so easy for the ultra rich or multinational corporations to take their profits in a different country that you will raise far LESS money by taxing much more.

And who will get hurt? Not the rich. They will either have money offshore or just have less takehome pay and be A-OK. You will hurt all of the rest of us because the next Microsoft will be headquartered in Hydrabad and so many potentially good ideas will not get funded. You do not risk millions for a big potential return if that return will be taxed at 90%.

Maybe the best way to understand all of this is look at what an investor looks at when judging a new investment: the required after-tax rate of return. What do you think a 90% tax rate does to the required rate of return? Plug in some numbers. It essentially makes ANY investment with risk in it a poor one! Good luck growing an economy like that.

Clinton and the Republicans in Congress refined Reaganomics by smartly changing one thing: raised the highest tax rate for the rich, but reduced the capital gains tax. This spawned greater investment in all the companies that are so crucial to America's success today. It also made investors more long-term focused, which is always a good thing.

I know, I know. Too many words. Even the older people are becoming like the Twitter and TikTok generation. Tell me in one paragraph how the economy works.

Well, that is not going to happen.

I read it all. You are doing a great job talking sense here.

quote:

ORIGINAL: unome

quote:

ORIGINAL: kgdabom

On a message board I don't read long posts either.

It has become pretty obvious that I am the wrong person in the wrong place talking about the wrong things to the wrong people.

What really breaks my heart is that I have spent a lot of time in China and the Chinese are generally much more entrepreneurial than most Americans are!

They ditched their planned central economy and allowed private incentives to help grow their economy as fast as any country in history. Despite this, a lot of people in the USA want to go the other way! I am sure that will work out well.

Immigrants to the US are four times more likely to be millionaires than native-born Americans. Why? Because immigrants are far more likely to open a business.

The American Dream is still alive, but many Americans are too stupid or lazy to go after it. We have to import people smart enough and hard-working enough to succeed. And then Trump tries to cut that off also. It is like both parties are trying to outdumb each other. And they are both winning.