“Reining in corporate greed is the key to bringing down costs for families and kickstarting economic growth, and fortunately Congress has the opportunity do it. Passing the Inflation Reduction Act will ensure corporations will finally begin to pay their fair share in taxes. This bill will put billions of dollars more into the pockets of Americans by reducing the leverage big oil, health insurance and drug companies have to charge whatever they please – all while creating thousands of new jobs.”
The idea that folks will invest more to create more jobs when the return from investing to create more jobs is more highly taxed is, umm, contestable, to say the least.
Define “fair share”.
What’s the name of state control of private enterprise? Anybody? Bueller?
Complete bollocks from word one
“the Inflation Reduction Act”
Are these guys using Atlas Shrugged as an instruction manual for (bad) Government?
I’m sure this sort of Act featured…
Perhaps this bill should be renamed the “Drive all business off-shore Act”
Murphyesque.
Pumping yet another trillion or so into the economy and calling it “The Inflation Reduction Act”.
Honk.
The only way money gets into the pockets of the people from taxing corporations is if the corporation charge the public more for the stuff. And if the government don’t steal it. Fantasy land.
Just looked this up – in respect to Dennis’s comment it reads like something Murphy might have come up with – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act_of_2022
It just seems to be largely printing more
Money with nothing funding it whatsoever – the naming of the Act appears near – Orwellian as one thing it won’t do is reduce inflation in the slightest
If prices are driven mainly by momentum traders in paer markets and high recycling costs are “just one of those things”, why does nominal inflation matter? Why not value everyone at a basic income level and maintain everyone’s real purchasing power stability by printing faster than prices rise, and distributing it equally to subvert the Cantillon effect?
Surely the way to reduce the leverage of big oil is to scrap the anti-fracking regs.
As for drugs, patent abolition would work. But of course the incentive to develop new drugs would vanish. Still that might drive a stake through the incentive to produce more covid jabs.
As for health insurance, the ending of the perpetual covid fuss would mean that all those going to get the chop would die. So the insurers would need to cover fewer people.
Those standing in line to applaud my genius can all cheer together.
@rsm
And what happens to savings?
Corporations do not help themselves. Centrica reported results in a way that deluded Lefties feel enabled to pile in. The reality
“Statutory basic EPS loss of 14.7p (2021: profit of 23.2p) includes a £1.9bn loss on net remeasurements after taxation, reflecting the high commodity price environment”
Where is the “good” reporting from the media?
Is anyone else getting the impression that rsm is full of jargon, which implies full of bullshit? It’s not as if we all have in depth knowledge of the ideas of forgotten 19thc French thinkers. Perhaps he is unable to construct a coherent and cogent argument so just shoves in jargon to cover his lack of thinking
Okay, couple of things…
1. They’re using the same strategy as Venezuela by allowing the government to control pricing for private corporations. I imagine Maduro used similar rhetoric to justify it as well.
2. Tim himself has written at least once before that jobs should not be the goal of an economic policy. They are part of the cost of doing something. What output are we getting from those jobs? What kinds of jobs are these anyway?
3. In other reports, Biden says the bill will “combat climate change” and invest more in Obamacare. So, more of the stuff that was already tried and failed about 10 years ago. But this time with more money wasted! Those new jobs will be green jobs. The shovel-ready ones that didn’t materialize last time. But this time will be different, somehow.
To recap, this is a bill to spend more–while dealing with inflation and in the beginning of a recession–on climate change bullshit and unpopular healthcare initiatives that have both already failed spectacularly before. And yet, it’s not being called the “Climate Change & Healthcare Act.” Why can’t they come right out and say it funds climate change and healthcare? I thought those were popular goals that most Americans could get behind. Why would they name the bill something completely different? Do they think “inflation” is a sexier word or something?
@Diogenes
Is anyone else getting the impression that rsm is full of jargon, which implies full of bullshit? It’s not as if we all have in depth knowledge of the ideas of forgotten 19thc French thinkers. Perhaps he is unable to construct a coherent and cogent argument so just shoves in jargon to cover his lack of thinking
That
I have come to the conclusion that rsm is just an irritating troll. Time to not feed it.
From Biden’s Twitter:
A bill called the “Inflation Reduction Act” is to spend money on climate change. Not inflation. Got it. Perfectly clear.
Can someone please clear something up for me?
Mainly the whole jobs being a cost thing.
I get that from an accounting/business point of view, they are a cost as you have to pay your people, etc. And they have an opportunity cost as well.
Surely from a grander economic view, they must be a net benefit, not a cost?
They allow people to be productive and produce, to generate a value added and earn money, which then can be spent buying the products of other people with jobs. They also provide social stability as people need to crime if they can just buy the food/whatever instead at lower risk (this in turn reduces the costs on other producers as they have lower losses or security needs) and allows us all to be richer.
TIA
@Diogenes, July 28, 2022 at 8:10 pm
Is anyone else getting the impression that rsm is full of jargon, which implies full of bullshit?
Yes. When challenged on evidence, facts rsm goes silent same as several others
@aldkjadslkjf
Good summary. I posted here a month or two ago that Pelosi etc were pressuring Biden to introduce Venezuela style price controls
Name of bill, like all Left “sounds nice” things is disingenuous: UK’s UN & WEF “Online
SafetyCensorship Act”@Chernyy
Job cost: removed by automation, Potato pickers, Ocado, Amazon, self-checkout
eg Trains: diesel vs coal: no stokers, water fillers, coal fillers, ash removers…… needed
O/T The ultimate grifter. Murphy will be kicking himself he didn’t think of it first.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/07/27/inside-irish-billionaires-plan-make-britain-pay-slavery/
@ Chernyy
The goal isn’t to increase the amount of labor that must be done and paid for in order to produce something. The goal is to be able to produce and/or consume as much as possible for as little work as possible. Efficiency, that is.
If we could import everything we need from somewhere else for a few dollars a day, while working for an hour a day, wouldn’t you prefer that?
That’s an extreme scenario, but it illustrates that saying “my plan creates 10,000 jobs” has no point. And both sides of the political spectrum say it. May as well say, “And you’ll never believe how much we’re paying for all of this, and how long it will take to complete!”
Every job that is not needed for an initiative is a job that can be allocated to another task.
@bloke in spain
What about individual Fed CBDC deposit accounts, that pay the inflation rate plus 2% on your savings, should you choose to deposit them there (you would of course be free to hedge inflation your own way)?
What if you used your basic income to buy gold or bitcoin each month?
@Diogenes
Isn’t Cantillon a favorite of hard money fans, whose effect is often cited as a good reason not to print money, except the effect disappears if you distribute newly printed money equally via a universal basic income?
@Pcar
What facts have I not answered?
Doesn’t it come down to a theory of value? If Fischer Black is right and prices are noise, why does nominal inflation matter at all?
“they must be a net benefit, not a cost?”
The output is the benefit. The job itself is the cost of gaining that benefit. What we desire is of course that net benefit – the output is worth more than the input.
Ok. Think I get it now.
Thanks Tim and aldkjadslkjf
As long as “The Big Guy gets his 10%” and the minions like Pelosi get theirs, why should they give a flying phuq? It’s the little people who pay the cost of inflation in the decreasing real value of their payslips and the increasing cost of goods.
BiS.
As Ireland was part of the UK back then, surely it should be paying a heap of reparations for slavery itself?
But not good old Oz naturally!!
@Boganboy
It did occur that a large part of the Army that garrisoned the West Indies were Irish. Not conscripted but paid soldiers. Popular employer in Ireland, the British Army.
But then Paddies. Any thing good is Irish. Anything they don’t like, British.
Help if there was any fucking nationality as Irish before the English went there. It was a bunch of squabbling kingdoms, hated each other. It’s the English united them in hating us.
There’s a bit of writing survived from the first millennium describes what a traveller discovered.
“And island of savages where scarce one stone is built upon another” gets roughly the gist.
@rsm (Cathy Newman?)
That’s not what I said, not going down your rabbit hole
@Chernyy Drakon
I think the best example explaining jobs is to imagine if you pay some people to dig holes and others to fill them in again (often attributed to Keynes). Obviously, there is no actual product to these labours, even though you pay the workers. However there is the cost of the payments. If instead you just gave the people the same money without requiring any work, you would be no worse off, and they would have the free time to do something more useful. It’s only in extreme circumstances that paying for useless work does anything more – maybe if the workers need to be prevented from doing what they want because that would be contrary to what you want. Or you have a malicious streak and want to see them waste their time.