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What Is Wrong with "Trickle Down Economics"?

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Going back to a gold standard makes no sense given our understanding of economics now.

You cannot use a finite resource whose grows unreliably as a store of value for something which grows much more quickly: that is, the supply of human labor. Ultimately, that is where our money's value comes from. By that token, it would then make the most sense to argue that the money supply should more or less keep pace with population, but expanding and contracting as inflationary and unemployment circumstances require.

We could mine the asteroids for more gold and so expand the money supply.

:rofl::rofl::rofl:

The asteroids have plenty more gold than is available on the Earth's surface, gravity and the pressures that build quickly with depth greatly limits our ability to dig deeply into the Earth, on a weightless asteroid, that is a different story.
 
We could mine the asteroids for more gold and so expand the money supply.

:rofl::rofl::rofl:

The asteroids have plenty more gold than is available on the Earth's surface, gravity and the pressures that build quickly with depth greatly limits our ability to dig deeply into the Earth, on a weightless asteroid, that is a different story.

That is not cost effective. At all.

I notice going out into space is your go-to solution for everything. If only everything could be so simple.
 
We'll never be able to successfully compete with any nation of 1.3 billion people that uses dirt cheap or even free prison and slave labor to make popular consumer goods for mere pennies on the dollar...not unless we want to erradicate federal minimum wage and workplace safety laws and start paying well educated American college graduates a pittance per hour to put together plastic crap for the shelves of a Walmart or dollar store.

We competed successfully with a nation that used slave labor in the 1860s. We don't know we can't compete with China until we really try, defeatism never works.

We were a nation that used slave labor prior to end of the Civil War in 1865.
Are you an economist?
 
Besides, this is 2012...not 2072. And anyways with the current trend towards economies less reliant on if not completely rid of paper currency I don't think the good ol' $1 bill is going to be the relative monster it is now half a century or more down the road.

By the time we as a species get around to actively mining the Moon or the solar system's asteroids for resources paper currency might have gone the way of the Daguerrotype or eight-track player. All I know is that right now? As we sit here and read these posts? Not happening. All the gold we're going to have access to in the near future is right here on earth...and there's not enough of it by a light year.
 
If we were to transition to any other kind of economy, one based on something physical, then I would recommend a technate. None of this nonsense of using gold and/or silver or some other metal, the supply of which has zero relation to the actual size and productivity of the economy.
 
How about 2 cents for a 20 oz bottle of soda instead of two dollars, is that sound better? Governments instead of spending trillions of dollars annually would now be spending only tens of billions of dollars.

:wtf:

If you devalue currency by one hundred percent, then that two cents your paying is still equivalent to two dollars.

I hope that was a joke...
 
How about 2 cents for a 20 oz bottle of soda instead of two dollars, is that sound better? Governments instead of spending trillions of dollars annually would now be spending only tens of billions of dollars.

:wtf:

If you devalue currency by one hundred percent, then that two cents your paying is still equivalent to two dollars.

I hope that was a joke...

I don't think so.
 
2 cents for a bottle of soda? Won't happen. Ever. None of his ideas for a new currency system and standard of valuation are tenable or make any practical sense.

A brand new, from-scratch paper currency backed by gold isn't going to happen in the United States of America. As we've said repeatedly...gold is a terrible standard to tie a national as well as globally accepted and used currency to. Finite resources and expanding populations and labor forces don't mix.
 
Currency devaluations aren't uncommon. Some countries just lop digits off the end. The only benefit is that it saves printing lots of zeroes in ads.

If America wants to regain its leadership just through currency innovations, we should switch to hexadecimal instead, unless too much of our population would have difficulty, in which case octal would be a good fall back option.
 
Currency devaluations aren't uncommon. Some countries just lop digits off the end. The only benefit is that it saves printing lots of zeroes in ads.

If America wants to regain its leadership just through currency innovations, we should switch to hexadecimal instead, unless too much of our population would have difficulty, in which case octal would be a good fall back option.

Sexatrigecimal numbering systems or bust!
 
A Christian nation can't have a monetary system with the word "sex" in it, even though the DNC convention speakers had me wondering if we were going to switch the basis of our monetary system to birth control pills.
 
2 cents for a bottle of soda? Won't happen. Ever. None of his ideas for a new currency system and standard of valuation are tenable or make any practical sense.

A brand new, from-scratch paper currency backed by gold isn't going to happen in the United States of America. As we've said repeatedly...gold is a terrible standard to tie a national as well as globally accepted and used currency to. Finite resources and expanding populations and labor forces don't mix.

It retains its value better than paper, which is the purpose of money. Do you want the government stealing the value of your money by printing more of it? I've noticed my income has not kept up with inflation, therefore inflation is making me poorer, and I don't like it, I don't see any advantage in having an inflatable currency, its just a vehicle that allows government to rob you without officially taxing you!
 
We'll never be able to successfully compete with any nation of 1.3 billion people that uses dirt cheap or even free prison and slave labor to make popular consumer goods for mere pennies on the dollar...not unless we want to erradicate federal minimum wage and workplace safety laws and start paying well educated American college graduates a pittance per hour to put together plastic crap for the shelves of a Walmart or dollar store.

We competed successfully with a nation that used slave labor in the 1860s. We don't know we can't compete with China until we really try, defeatism never works.

We were a nation that used slave labor prior to end of the Civil War in 1865.
Are you an economist?

Slavery was on its way out in the North, yet we won the war with the slave owning south, thus we out competed their slave labor. If slavery was more efficient, they would have won.
 

The asteroids have plenty more gold than is available on the Earth's surface, gravity and the pressures that build quickly with depth greatly limits our ability to dig deeply into the Earth, on a weightless asteroid, that is a different story.

That is not cost effective. At all.

I notice going out into space is your go-to solution for everything. If only everything could be so simple.
This is the Star Trek Forum after all, what do you expect? There are two ways to deal with space travel, one as a fantasy land with warp drives and vulcans and the other is as a real place where we may spend our future. I think too many people treat space travel as just another fantasy world as in Middle Earth. Middle Earth won't happen, but space travel might, that is the difference between science fiction and fantasy literature, no one will ever cast a spell, but travel into space is certainly possible.
getting gold out of asteroids requires bringing what's in space down to Earth, that is a lot easier than getting into space, because its "downhill" going in the other direction.
 
If gold is suddenly used almost exclusively to back currency, what do ya think is going to happen to the price of electronics which currently utilize gold for its excellent conductive properties? Are you willing to pay ten or twenty times as much as you currently do for home electronics that still utilize gold? Or will you instead be content with a future where new electronic devices don't perform nearly as well as our current tech, because they no longer utilize gold, but are limited to using lesser conductors?
 
If gold is suddenly used almost exclusively to back currency, what do ya think is going to happen to the price of electronics which currently utilize gold for its excellent conductive properties? Are you willing to pay ten or twenty times as much as you currently do for home electronics that still utilize gold? Or will you instead be content with a future where new electronic devices don't perform nearly as well as our current tech, because they no longer utilize gold, but are limited to using lesser conductors?

Actually we don't use very much gold in electronics because it's expensive and not a very good conductor compared to copper (silver is the best conductor, then copper). A very thin gold coating is found in some high end connectors because it doesn't corrode over time.

But the question is, why does money (or electronic bits) have value? It's not because it's backed by something like silver or gold, because that's just pushing the question back a level. Why would they have value?

And it turns out that the only things that make money work are trust and confidence. You trust that it's not fake, and you accept it as payment because you're confident that anyone else you need to transact with will accept it as well, assigning it the same value you did. That means our money doesn't need its value tied to one particular thing, because it's tied to the vaue of everything.

The job of the Fed and other bodies is to try to keep the money supply (T1, T2, etc) pretty closely matched up with the "everything" that it represents, so that the ratio of "everything" to dollars doesn't get wonky.
 
A Christian nation can't have a monetary system with the word "sex" in it, even though the DNC convention speakers had me wondering if we were going to switch the basis of our monetary system to birth control pills.

Are you implying a liberal plot to feminize the male population in order to make them more docile?

Devious.
 
^
Are you implying that the feminine population is more docile than the male population?

Discrimination!
 
A Christian nation can't have a monetary system with the word "sex" in it, even though the DNC convention speakers had me wondering if we were going to switch the basis of our monetary system to birth control pills.

Are you implying a liberal plot to feminize the male population in order to make them more docile?

Devious.

Besides which, I thought Sex and the City and its movies were the real plot.

:shifty:
 
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