Economics

https://archive.ph/WsaRI

Trump has promoted a number of plans to make America strong – at other countries’ expense. Given his “we win; you lose” motto, some of his plans would produce the opposite effect of what he imagines.

That would not be much of a change in U.S. policy. But I suggest that Hudson’s Law may be peaking under Trump: Every U.S. action attacking other countries tends to backfire and end up costing American policy at least twice as much.

Income taxes can be made progressive. Sales taxes are almost always regressive. Businesses need to do a lot more paperwork to document these taxes.

Why don't leftist parties campaign to abolish sales taxes and replace the lost revenue with an increase in a progressive income tax?

Am I missing some critical functionality of sales taxes that income taxes cannot replicate?

Edit: Here's an important feature of sales taxes that a few commentators helped me realize. It's better if we think of a sales tax as a "revenue tax" instead. Let's say we are in a country with multiple provinces. A business sells stuff in province A. However, the business and its owners are both located in province B. If sales tax didn't exist, then all money earned by the business would go to province B's government. Province A cannot enact tariffs and stuff like that. Thus, it puts up a "revenue tax" that is taxed to business for all revenue earned, i.e., a sales tax.

For those wondering, no, a corporate tax is not a revenue tax. It's a tax on profit. Non profits for example, do not pay any corporate tax, but they do pay sales tax (which is basically, revenue tax).

TLDW

Resource-based economies control the essential raw materials needed for manufacturing and high-tech industries. This gives them leverage over nations that rely on these resources. China's dominance in gallium production is a great example as it's essential for making advanced semiconductors.

Real power resides at the top of supply chains, where raw materials originate. Controlling these resources allows countries to dictate terms and disrupt industries further down the chain.

Sanctions enacted by higher-level supply chain economies often fail because resource-based economies can retaliate by restricting access to essential raw materials. This renders sanctions ineffective and can even harm the sanctioning nation's economy.

BRICS economies, who control many of the essential resources, will continue to develop domestic industries to process and utilize their own resources. Doing so reduces reliance on imports and creates new economic opportunities.

Access to critical raw materials provides a significant advantage in developing and manufacturing key technologies like semiconductors, telecom equipment, and renewable energy systems. This ultimately leads to technological leadership and economic dominance in those sectors as we're seeing happening with China.

Economies higher up the supply chain become vulnerable to disruptions and price fluctuations caused by resource-based economies. This dependence weakens their negotiating power and hinder their economic growth in the long run.

Rohan Grey, who taught us to understand money as a creature of law, is back for his tenth appearance on Macro N Cheese.

Steve and Rohan dissect the humor and horror of the political landscape. They make a realistic assessment of the Biden administration and look at figures like Elon Musk and Ramaswamy as part of a new wave of governance setting out to undermine the fabric of federal institutions.

The inherent assumption in “big computer” socialism is that the problems in the Soviet system of planning were not insurmountable, and other alternative planning systems, like the brief Cybersyn experiment in Chile show a way forward. Indeed, there was a glimmer of this possibility in the USSR. Faced with a stagnating economy in the 60s, it was clear to many that the Soviet planning system needed reforms. The road taken was that of the Kosygin-Lieberman 1965 reforms which introduced some market mechanisms, such as using profitability and sales as the two key indicators of enterprise success. These substituted the old Stalinist principle of “business bookkeeping”, where enterprises had to meet planners’ expectations within a system of fixed prices for inputs/outputs, causing perverse incentives such as making badly-made surpluses or increases in product weight as a net positive for the enterprise.

However, there was another option to the introduction of some market mechanisms in the economy: the road of using the available computing technology to help the planners plan and eliminate the perverse incentives. This was the main idea of Victor Glushkov, and his OGAS system. OGAS was not just “the Soviet internet” as it has sometimes been referred to; in its original form, it was supposed to be a system for radically modifying the planning systems of the economy. The original idea of OGAS was never implemented. Instead, it was downgraded and gutted to the point it became a ghost of itself, failing to provide a line of flight for the creation of a new economy. However, the principles behind it still hold, and can guide us in thinking about what shape the future can take. It is in this context that we present a short biography of Victor Gluskhov and the Soviet attempt at having a “big computer” plan its economy.

“The need is infrastructure,” he said. “You may produce all this light sweet crude oil in Texas. But if you don’t have pipelines to the nation’s refineries to deliver it, how are you going to be able to utilize it?”

So importing foreign crude oil is cheaper. Meanwhile, De Haan said, increasing renewable energy demand is making investments in fossil fuels riskier.

So we buy and refine the cheaper stuff, and we sell our more expensive stuff to places that can’t do that. There’s one more discount: The majority of our oil comes from our closest neighbor.

I've posted this in response to Trump's promise to "drill, baby, drill" as well as for all the people who have fuel prices as one of their primary concerns.

The reason gas prices are high is because it doesn't make fiscal sense for corporations to invest in the infrastructure to refine locally sourced crude oil. And, as it seems, refining local crude may actually increase prices at the pumps.

From everything I've read (please share anything that's contradictory), it seems like Trump's agenda is going to increase the cost of everything. For the number of people who voted based on 'the economy', I wish we had had more transparent discussions about the impact of his plans. I'm already scared for whomever has to inherit this pending catastrophe.

Not completely sure I'm doing it right, but a 2:1 safe state for swing state swap seems like a bad deal. Here's my reasoning:

• In New Jersey, as an example of a safe state for Harris, Fivethirtyeight has Harris winning in 993 out of 1000 simulated elections. Assuming the same turnout as 2020 of 4,549,457 votes, there's a 0.500546 chance, on average, that a NJ voter will vote for Harris. I figured that out using the BINOM.DIST.RANGE function and the Goal Seek tool in Excel.
• In Michigan, with a turnout of 5,539,302 voters in 2020, Harris wins in only 605 out of 1000 simulations. Using the same tools above, if you randomly picked any Michigan voter, there's a 0.500059 chance that he or she is voting for Harris.
• Using the BINOMDIST function with the assumed turnouts and the chances we determined that voters in each of the above states would go for Harris, there's a 3.25986e-4 chance that Michigan is decided by a single vote. Likewise, there's a 2.47681e-5 chance for the same in NJ. Based on the probability that it could shift electoral college votes, a Michigan ballot is distinctly more powerful than an NJ one.
• If you could could reliably convince one more person to vote like you in NJ, your chances of affecting the NJ outcome only increase to 2.48222e-5.
• For an NJ voter to match their chances of affecting the Michigan outcome, they would have to command about 1,925 votes besides their own. In other words, there's an almost equal chance of a single vote Harris victory in MI as a 1,926 vote victory in NJ.
• Therefore, if a Michigan voter values their power, they should not trade their vote for anything less than 1,926 New Jersey votes. The rate should actually be greater to account for welching and Michigan having one more electoral vote than NJ.

Am I missing something?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22156613

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22156612

Matt Sledge
November 4 2024, 1:56 p.m.#

ahead of Germany and Japan. Using PPP GDP measure.

a more detailed, but biased, article https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/11/no_author/russian-economy-zooms-ahead-outpaces-us-and-eu-growth/

There is more likely to be a collapse on the west from supporting a Ukraine war. There is zero resonance of "NATO is a purely defensive alliance" propaganda meant to be a friend to the world or to Russia inside of Russia. It is fully understood as an existential threat in Russia, while it is a casual inconvenience to those who trust western media in the west. A deep concern for the world/west is that Russia's extreme growth in military production means that we will soon be asked to boost competing military production and compromise our own sustainability and leisure.

Re-publishing this, because I rewrote the post a bit.

Target audience is people who like to talk about "negative externalities" and the need to "internalize" them.

Although at this point, it might make strategic sense to use the language of neoclassical economists to push for (e.g.) a carbon tax, we should recognize the fundamental flaws in the underlying world view.

https://mishathings.org/posts/internalize-this-environmental-economics/

#CarbonTax #EnvironmentalJustice #ClimateDiary @economics

In article's first chart, it lists China as competitive this year in robotics and machine tools. It is far more appropriate to call it a global leader in these categories, as that is where all of the manufacturing customers are.

While Musk is referring to the magical $2T+ in budget cuts to US budget he will sail through magical congressional unanimity...

Hardship has to include the extreme difficulty in reindustrializing the US in an environment where labour is deported, and reciprocal tariffs means serving a local declining market where fewer people have money left over if they are overpaying for imported goods.

Recessions not only reduce tax revenue, they also are typically responded to by significant government investment to pull out of recession, and the US is nearly maxed out already.