Opinions of economists There are many different ways to assess the consensus of economists on policy issues. Much of the public believes that economists tend to be libertarian and to favor laissez faire economic policy. That idea- that economic wisdom favors leaving all things to the free market- is actually dead wrong. Economists generally tend to support policies at least as liberal as the policies the Democratic Party supports. Some examples:
• 71% of economists favor using government to redistribute wealth and only 8% strongly oppose it. In fact, the concept of the diminishing marginal utility of wealth is a very well established and non-controversial economic principle. Even Adam Smith expressed the view that the government should redistribute wealth.
Comparing results between red and blue states We have 50 different states, each with its own set of policies. In many cases, states have adhered to a generally consistent approach to policy for decades or even a century or more, so the condition the states are in is a strong indicator of the effects those policies have. This presents a great opportunity to evaluate the impacts of those policies by comparing the economies of the states.
The most straight-forward way to see whether the economy is performing better in red states or blue states is simply to look at the per-person median household income. The differences in that regard are stark:
Another way to measure which states are doing well economically is to look at the percentage of people in poverty. The results are the reverse of the results above for median income:
Comparing performance between Republican and Democratic years
The most fundamental measure of economic performance is the rate at which the gross domestic product (GDP) grows. At the national level, the differences between how fast our GDP has grown during years when the Democrats have controlled both the legislature and the presidency, how fast it has grown when the Republicans controlled both, and years when the parties have split control are as follows:
The parties' records for stock market performance vary even more dramatically:
But, GDP and stock market performance are not everything. It is always possible for the size of the economy and the value of the market to grow without actually benefiting the average American much if the wealth is overly concentrated in the pockets of the very rich. The U.S. certainly does have a major problem with overconcentration of wealth. So, we should also look at some indicators that measure how typical Americans are doing.
One obvious measure is the unemployment rate:
That result certainly is dramatic. But, still, if, for example, the number of jobs fell under Republicans and grew under Democrats, but wages did the opposite, that might not be as strong of an endorsement for Democrats as it first seems. Or, if taxes shoot up so much under Democrats that it swamps the gains for most Americans, that would weaken the Democrats' case as well. The way to see if either of those problems is occurring is to look at how much personal income Americans are getting after taxes:
No matter how one looks at the data- by relying on the findings of economists, by looking at state level or looking a federal data, and no matter which economic measure one looks at, the answer is the same: Democratic policies are performing better. And not just a little better- drastically better.
Each alone is damaging to the concept of republicans being fiscally responsible but the consilience of all the data points to an overall tendency that we all do better under democrats, while only the economic elites benefit from republicans.
Case study: Minnisota vs Wisconsin -- neighboring states ...
Think of Dayton as Scott Walker's mirror image. With the help of GOP-controlled legislatures, Walker and other Republican governors, such as Kansas' Sam Brownback, have passed wish lists of conservative policies and touted their states as laboratories that demonstrate the benefits of conservative governance. Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, has parlayed that hype into a potential 2016 presidential run. And across the border in Minnesota, Dayton seized a brief moment of unified Democratic control to create the liberal alternative to Walker's Wisconsina blue-state laboratory for demonstrating the potential of liberal policies. Dayton didn't "set out" with the objective of one-upping Walker in mind, he told me after the Eagan event. But "the contrast," he notes, is obvious.
Over the past several years, Minnesota has become a testing ground for a litany of policies Democrats hope to enact nationally: legalizing same-sex marriage, making it easier to vote, boosting primary education spending, instituting all-day kindergarten, expanding unionization, freezing college tuition, increasing the minimum wage, and passing new laws requiring equal pay for women. To pay for it all, Dayton pushed a sharp increase on taxes for the top 2 percentone of the largest hikes in state history. Republicans went berserk, warning that businesses would flee the state and take jobs with them.
The disaster Dayton's GOP rivals predicted never happened. Two years after the tax hike, Minnesota's economy is booming. The state added 172,000 jobs during Dayton's first four years in office. Its 3.6 percent unemployment rate is among the lowest in the country (Wisconsin's is 5.2 percent), and the Twin Cities have the lowest unemployment rate of any major metropolitan area. Under Dayton, Minnesota has consistently been in the top tier of states for GDP growth. Median incomes are $8,000 higher than the national average. In 2014, Minnesota led the nation in economic confidence, according to Gallup.
Minnesota has even pulled ahead of Walker's Wisconsin, leapfrogging its neighbor to the east on measure after measure. "In a whole number of ways, we're very, very similar," Bakk, the DFL Senate leader, says of the two states. "But politically, we have taken just totally different paths in the road."
Dayton came into office as the state GOP was fighting the final battles of a civil war that had already pulled the party dramatically to the right. For decades, the Minnesota GOPwhich until 1995 had called itself the Independent-Republican partyhad worked with Democrats to invest in education, infrastructure, and job growth. That began to change in the 2000s, as religious conservatives like Michelle Bachmann displaced the Rockefeller Republicans of old. The state's last budget surplus came in 1999, when then-Gov. Jesse Ventura returned the money to voters in the form of tax cuts and rebates rather than shoring up the state budget for a rainy day. When, inevitably, revenues later dipped, Republicans under Gov. Tim Pawlenty refused to raise taxes (especially as Pawlenty began to angle for the White House). The state constitution prohibits the government from borrowing money in almost all instances, so legislators pushed costs down to the school districts that could take out loans, with the hope that the state would one day pay them back.
By the time Dayton was sworn in, on January 3, 2011, the recession and Pawlenty's budget tomfoolery had left Minnesota with a $6.2 billion deficit ...
Republicans found a workaround, bypassing Dayton's veto to put two constitutional amendments before the voters in 2012: one to implement a voter ID law, and another to prohibit same-sex marriage. The ballot measures backfired spectacularly, fueling Democratic fundraising, organizing, and turnout. Dayton and the state party cited the shutdown and the marriage measure to paint Republicans as obstructionists and overreaching social crusaders. Two years after Dayton took office, Democrats were swept back into legislative control, (11-seat majority in the Senate, 12 seats in the House), and he finally had his chance.
Priority No. 1 was raising taxes on the rich. The final tax planwhich bumped up income taxes 2 percent for couples earning $250,000 per yearmade Minnesota the fifth-highest tax state in the nation. But the hike paid for an arsenal of new programs. The same day Dayton signed the tax bill, he also approved a $429 million jobs bill. ...
In the end, the Legislature passed the union bill Spika wanted. And pretty much everything else Dayton and outside liberal activists asked for. That two-year session is widely considered to be among the most active in recent memory by political observers in Minnesota.
What we have are two socio-political experiments on government programs running side by side:
Scott Walker and the republicans on one side, and Mark Dayton and the democrats on the other.
The results are in folks. Democrats win over Republican in all categories but one: catering to the elite corporatistas.
Enjoy.
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Fix quote in 2nd quote box.
... Congressional Republicans say they will spend billions of dollars generously subsidizing blue states if the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell.
Or yet another way of saying this: the GOP's plan to stop Obamacare has slowly become a plan to rip themselves off. It would end not with Obamacare's repeal, but with a terrible financial deal for red states.
If the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell, the subsidies will basically shut off in (mostly) red states. And congressional Republicans won't do anything about it. That means Republicans in those states will be paying the taxes and bearing the spending cuts needed to fund Obamacare but getting none of the benefits.
Which is to say, the biggest fight in American politics in recent years began with Democrats creating a law that was a giant subsidy from blue states to red states and has evolved into Republicans working to turn the law into a giant subsidy from red states to blue states. It is very, very weird.
Now the Supreme Court will take up King v. Burwell, in which the plaintiffs argue that the text of the Affordable Care Act makes it illegal for subsidies to flow through federally-run exchanges. If they're successful, then it will be possible for a state that opposes to Obamacare to withdraw from both the Medicaid expansion and the exchange subsidies that is to say, from pretty much all of Obamacare's benefits. But they will still pay all of its costs. They will still pay the law's taxes and their residents will still feel the law's Medicare cuts. Obamacare will become a pure subsidy from the states that hate the law most to the states that have embraced it. It's like a fiscal version of reverse psychology.
What it comes down to is that republican policies are the opposite of what would benefit the people.
This is a socio-political experiment that we will see operate in the next several years and my prediction is that it will get worse for the red states and better for the blue states.
Back in the 1970s, when the Canadian economy imploded for the umpteenth time, a Conservative politician said that, "the economy is out of control."
My reaction was, "Good." I consider myself pretty left wing but I don't want the government in control of the economy. Feed the hungry, heal the sick. Stay out of the economy.
My reaction was, "Good." I consider myself pretty left wing but I don't want the government in control of the economy. Feed the hungry, heal the sick. Stay out of the economy.
But when you feed the hungry and heal the sick, you're intervening in the economy.
There are no choices for how the government taxes and spends that don't affect the economy.
Given that this is the case, the government ought to make choices that will affect the economy for the better. This is, surely, one of the things that should weigh on their decisions as how to tax and spend.
I recently talked to one of your right-wing counterparts. He said, let's tax everyone at 15%, the rich, the poor, corporations, then at least the government isn't trying to intervene in the economy.
But --- I pointed out --- by making such a change, we would affect the economy. True, we wouldn't be trying to do so, we wouldn't be trying to increase or decrease growth, we wouldn't be trying to increase or decrease unemployment. But we would in fact do so. If the execution of his plan raised unemployment and depressed economic growth, then it would hardly be an excuse for him to say: "But I was indifferent to, and ignorant of, the consequences of my tax plan, so my hands are clean because unlike you liberals, I wasn't trying to improve the economy".
But our choices do affect the economy. If someone puts his car in cruise control at 45 mph, puts a blindfold on, and then holds the steering wheel straight for the next five minutes, then he's neither trying to improve traffic conditions nor trying to cause a crash. But we know that something will happen as a result of his decision. In order to make that result better or worse, he could take his blindfold off, adjust his speed according to traffic conditions, and use his steering wheel.
But our choices do affect the economy. If someone puts his car in cruise control at 45 mph, puts a blindfold on, and then holds the steering wheel straight for the next five minutes, then he's neither trying to improve traffic conditions nor tryingto cause a crash. But we know that something will happen as a result of his decision. In order to make that result better or worse, he could take his blindfold off, adjust his speed according to traffic conditions, and use his steering wheel.
And we have minimum and maximum speeds on interstate highways so that everybody moves along in a safe and mutually beneficial manner.
The same speed limits apply to women and lgbt as well as men, and they apply to each different racial segment in the same degree -- there is no special speed limit for white males ... nor is it adjusted by the shape your car is in.
Just the other day I was watching folks on TV comment on how to use the surplus. One group whined and moaned about taxes, the other wanted to invest it in infrastructure and education.
There was no confusion as to which political group each commenter belonged.
Yes. It was a few years back. Which is why it is completely outside of political (and most of public) history
Yea we all know infrastructure is not sexy, but if you guys elect a republican for president America will go in to another ware it cant afford while you infrastructure totally collapses, and republicans literally cant raise taxes so there will be no money to fix it.
Christianity, One woman's lie about an affair that got seriously out of hand
What are the Christians gonna do to me ..... Forgive me, good luck with that.
But when you feed the hungry and heal the sick, you're intervening in the economy.
I objected to government "control" of the economy, not government "intervention" in the economy. Of course a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rain forest has an influence on the economy. I'm talking about deliberately trying to influence the economy.
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