I'm very capitalist, but I have come to realise that tax cuts for the rich are more or less a meme...

should be "problem.atic", i forgot about the wordfilter

You're a business owner?

Laws against profit promote capital consumption
I don't know how you mean 'from the labour' or how you would calculate it, so I don't know.
Sounds troubling though

Usually Socdems get pressured into funding higher education by organised student groups. It then ends up benefiting mostly the middle class with the lower classes' tax money.
Can't intelligent people rise to the top anyway even without university?
Or can't they take out debt?

sage classcuck threads

And here I was thinking you were an actual soc dem and not a complete cuckitalist. The point I'm making being is that if the government provides these things it lowers the cost of living and thus forestalls the profitability crisis of capitalism as well as the immiseration of the proletariat common under capitalism.

This is your only serious argument–that the state would crowd out private investment and that this could cause a problem for capitalism. But don't you think you're suffering from some serious cognitive dissonance here? If the state can do it better then the private sector, and in effect out compete it then why should the public protect the capitalists """god-given"""" right to make a profit here.

If even the bourgeois state, as incompetent as it is, can outcompete private industry then what is the point of keeping capitalism again?

No it doesn't, it shifts it onto the taxpayer.
You'd be better off just giving the poor people cash. Then they can buy whatever they want.

No, it isn't doing it better, it just puts the cost on other people.
It could tax people $1,000,000 to build 1000 footballs and give them away free.
Even a private businessman who can make a football for $500 would be undercut.

This is obvious, and does not require cognitive dissonance to understand.

it's not trivial to do so. many poor people don't even know how to get welfare benefits they're eligible for, or even that they are eligible in the first place, so I'm not sure how they're going to find a way to break in to the pedigree-obsessed software or financial industries, for example.

Do you mean they're intelligent, it's just they don't know what they're eligible for and can't find out?

I've heard from different sources about how college is a meme and you're better off getting a job. I just wondered if you'd be better off spending the money on something else than funding them to get into higher education

i should add that the increases in tuition costs are driven in a yuge way by administrative bloat. if you could pass a law denying accreditation to colleges using over a certain percentage of their endowment on administration, you could probably bring down tuition quickly.

Reevaluate your priorities.

NASA research has shitloads of applications besides space you dip.

What if administrative bloat is a symptom of having a higher number of students?

They don't just spend money on administration for nothing

SPACE COMMUNISM WHEN YOU FUCKING TROT FAGGOT

it is different in other countries, but in the US there is not a whole lot in the way of decent-paying jobs that don't require a college education aside from some trades, which are also hard to get in to. You often have to know someone to get an apprenticeship, or whatever.

for example, countries like Finland and Germany have more structured high schools that funnel people into trades or higher-paying manufacturing jobs, which the US had no interest in doing, and there seems to be more cooperation between unions and employers. Seeing as we just elected Trump in a large part due to the destruction of manufacturing jobs for dumb whites, I think there is some value in ensuring that some route to moderate success exists for people who don't go to college.

plus, if you buy in to the idea that innovation has been largely responsible for America having better growth statistics that Europe or Japan in recent years, and that intelligence is important to this, then there's no real reason to not try to cast a wide net and try to get a decent education for as many people as possible. As we have also seen from the recent surge in authoritarian right populism, such leaders can target rural, uneducated voters resentful of globalization and capture a countries' institutions. so I think there are a number of decent justifications for spending on education aside from pure economics.

they literally do lol, they aren't run to maximize profits.
administrators create more administrative jobs for their friends so they can do nothing and collect mid-high 6 figure salaries every year.
also, all for-profit colleges in America are shit, and their degrees aren't worth the paper they're printed on, so I don't think this approach will work here either.

I honestly don't think any of it helps.

It comes from the same source dumbass whether your talking about creating better social services or paying out welfare payments.

For someone who allegedly cares so much about fostering inefficiency you fail to see the fact that this is just a scam to subsidize inefficient employers: both those who are unwilling to pay wages that would give their workers a decent standard of living and those unwilling/unable to cut the prices of their consumer goods so that the masses of poor people can afford to purchase them.

In the real world, the state gives hundreds of billions in direct subsidies and trillions in indirect subsidies to private enterprise. We pay the costs of their "entrepreneurialism" both through taxes and from our exploitation at work so that they can line their pockets. Most of the world's R&D is increasingly being done by the state both through public universities and through the mil-industrial complex and """productive""""""private enterprise""" appropriates the fruits of technological advance like a parasite: gowans.wordpress.com/?s=publicly owned

In case you haven't notice the cost of living is going up in almost all of the developed world and most basic wants and needs are left to the market. This is true even in """free market""" America, Britain, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

I know

It's not a scam; if you give them money they are better off than if you gave them something else

How much you pay your workers /how many low wage employees you have has nothing to do with how efficient an employer you are.
Giving poor people more money doesn't subsidise anyone. It probably reduces the workforce somewhat because marginal workers would drop out to have more leisure or look after their children. That makes labour more expensive.

Because that would mean selling at a loss, wasting productive resources and going out of business

I doubt that's the intention.
And where does this money come from?
The state is the 'parasite' on private industry since it feeds on taxes from private business / private employees. It's strange you didn't notice that the argument applies much more forcefully in the other direction.

Private industries depend on the state to protect their property rights.

If that's true then they would be parasitic on each-other.

If they're wasting the money on administration then they ought to go broke. Are you saying they're non-profit and that's why they get away with it?
But at the same time the industry must be completely flooded, from what I know. Obama flooded demand even more, and there had already been talk of a bubble.
So maybe they're helping their cronies while they can.

The reason not to spread a wide net might be because, like I said, it's mostly not very poor people that go to university. And there are supposed to be too many people there already.

I'm very sorry to hear that, is there anything we can do to help?

1. Assuming the thing that needs to be proved.
2. there's this thing called inflation that devalues the real value of these payments.
3. If you try to reverse this problem by pursuing a deflationary course of action then it will likely cause even more pain for the proletariat as the real value (and thus their burden) of rent and interest payments will increase for the proletariat.

It has something to do with it, employers rely often on low-wage labor instead of hiring/training more productive skilled workers or investing in new technologies to increase output because its more profitable not to do so. That's one reason why small, ineffecient businesses with high-labor inputs are more prolific at an earlier stage of capitalism when wages and living standards are low.

Likewise, what these employers are asking for is for society to cover the costs of people who are oftentimes their employees because they don't want to do it themselves. Instead of raising their own wages to be more inline with what society has come to see a decent standard of living by raising their wages they ask the rest of society to cover it itself. That's the problem with using supply and demand in order to provide for worker's well-being (and thus society as a whole) when employers have obvious incentives to buy labor at the lowest possible price.

No, it would merely mean getting a lower profit, not necessarily selling at a loss. But of course it would mean less efficient producers would go bankrupt, that's the norm under capitalism. Yes, a lot of productive resources are lost due to capitalist crises that result in widespread bankruptcies that is one reason why we oppose capitalism.

But the capitalist logic, is of course, that saving unprofitable businesses encourages inefficiency. If you think there's value in saving them, which is implied by your defense of this indirect subsidy, you should consider the idea that the profit motive itself is a barrier to increasing production for human want and need.

It is.

Again besides the hundreds of billions in direct subsidies even to industries that pollute the commons like fossil fuels, there are trillions of dollars in indirect subsides like tax cuts, essential infrastructure and defense outlays, social services like education that helps offsets the costs of getting skilled labor etc.

It's interesting you talk about money since the capitalists own trillions of dollars in bonds, fees that the capitalists extract from the state at the taxpayer's expense as a fee upon the public for the muh privilege of using their own money. And all this despite the fact that zero-interest public fiat money has been tried and it works. Those whacky libertarians who go on about the money supply are closer to the truth on this issue then you are as a social democrat.

are you that Venezuelan poster? your arguments are the same as him

I forgot to mention the trillions that private enterprise launders and offshores in taxes illegally in addition to the legitimate tax breaks and incentives.

One more point. In practice this doesn't really happen as experiments with basic income have shown. Workers on average use it as a cushion in addition to their employment or use it to improve their skills/get education–not to merely pursue leisure.You also ignore the fact that people often leave the labor force when they don't think working is remunerative enough. Thus welfare payments keeps the labor pool from contracting, for instance it keeps women from choosing to go back to being housewives etc.

Of course this assumes that the choice isn't between work and literal lethal starvation, as it is in many poor countries. Thus its no surprise they have no need for genuine welfare programs there, people accept work whatever the going price for wages. There is little difference between that and slavery.

Is your argument that people can't spend money for themselves? I already provided a study that came to that conclusion.

Just to clarify-
A company that lowers its prices and goes out of business isn't necessarily inefficient. It might just be in a very competitive industry.

Tax breaks and not having to lower prices below production costs (?) don't seem like subsidies.

The subsidies they do provide, who knows why they provide them; it seems like they'd do better to lower the broad tax rates instead.

R+D has a 'public good' / 'information good' argument behind it that people would be more eager to point to than just lining anybody's pockets

What am I ignoring? If working doesn't pay much, you're thinking about quitting because the wage is so low, and you get more money, you are more likely to quit, not less.

Basic income by eliminating the employment trap, has less of an effect on labour supply than other welfare programmes. But it probably still has some effect- and nobody had mentioned basic income specifically, it was just cash programmes in general.

The effect of both though is less labour supply, not more

Faggot.

It's a Holla Forums tier characterisation but it happens to be spot on. Many people are just too fucking stupid to be trusted to act in their long term self-interest.

Thats a serious non-argument; no that's not what its about. Ask yourself this, which is going to cost a poor person more, 1. an efficient public train/bus system or 2. having to hire an uber or a taxi everytime they turn around. There's a similar argument to be made about health, Americans pay more per capita then any other industrialized nation and they don't get better health insurance. If anything the quality of the care their provided with (unless your real wealthy) has declined while the prices have increased. Nations like literally the rest of the developed world do a better job providing the best care for the best price precisely because their health systems are perfect. I would expect someone pretending to be a social democrat to know that much.

Also see the fact that capitalists literally have a vested interest in public services being provided successfully:

Yes, they are subsidies, but people are conditioned not to count them as subsidies unless the state literally hands private business a check for nothing–which they do massive amounts of. The state doesn't bargain and make deals with private individuals to the same extent that they do the capitalists– they usually don't say "hey serve in the military and we'll give you a lifetime tax break" usually when there are "tax breaks" for private citizens its for things like breeding in order to ensure that there is a plentiful supply of workers in the next generation.

Bringing business to your country by saying "hey, set up shop here and you don't have to pay taxes" is a form of subsidy since businesses use public resources but without or not paying their fair-share of taxes. A few countries can succeed as tax havens but a global society where every country is competing to see who can bring in the global business by offering greater tax breaks then their rival can not work. Not only are we seeing this in the anger the EU has with Ireland and the US too though this isn't spoken for essentially being a giant tax haven that undermines revenue that would've gone to the EU is emblematic of this. This is also why the Panama Papers stoked genuine international controversy.

The poor and the petit-bourgeoisie end up saddled with the real burden of taxes and the gigantic corporations get off scot-free, they choose the rate they want to pay. You're just brainwashed if you think somehow their overtaxed or exploited by the state; they hire legions of people whose jobs are to make sure they don't pay taxes.

As true as this is the only real measure of efficiency that capitalism understands is profit. If something makes a lot of profit but isn't very efficient it is ipso facto rubber-stamped as efficient by bourgeois economists. Again, why subsidize inefficiency by putting money in the hands of poor people (at state expense at interest) in order that people can buy goods that employers do not pay them enough to buy? In the United States the government actually pays people not to farm so that they don't flood the market and make food production unprofitable. That's madness and that's not counting the massive subsidies that go into the food that is produced and sold. Then when it gets to the market where unemployed/poor workers are subsidized so they can afford to buy that food at market price i.e. whats going to make a profit.

Are you starting to understand why capitalism is insanity now? It would be much better for a proletarian state or community to plan the production and distribution of the food in order to fulfill human need first and then wants second. Our agriculture is literally so productive that it cannot yield a profit to the people who run it–yet over a billion people (or more) are classified as hungry and millions upon millions of people are dying from hunger and hunger related diseases every year.

While the US was massively subsidizing its agriculture and using it as a club to beat third world producers to death with it was making sure that farmers in poor countries couldn't get loans for their agriculture or pass laws to protect it. Its done everything it could to get US agribusiness in control of the world food supply and now it reaps over a trillion dollars annually. That's nuts and as long as there is capitalism its going to be in the interest not only of agricultural capitalists but the capitalist class as a whole to make sure that food prices are high and that there are people working driven by hunger.

None of it, allowing capitalists to buy out the government results in generational class warfare.

Food, Clothing, Shelter, Transportation.

Something to keep them preoccupied, you something to do besides fucking to keep that birth rate down. Probably education. Make people more useful and less likely to reproduce.

*And since education has come to mean getting a useless degreen in some people's minds, let's say training. Skills that will hopefully be in demand for the immediate future at least.

This is a decent point but consider the fact that an argument often made in favor of capitalism is that people pursue their self-interest and as a result of that they naturally try to get more and more things. This is considered completely natural in the case of the capitalist but somehow if a worker gets more security then he isn't going to want to work anymore. A worker might use basic income or other welfare programs to leave a particular employer but that doesn't mean they leave the labor force; the fact they receive such things doesn't even mean their needs are met, much less their wants.

What the capitalists don't want to happen is for people to get frustrated and quit the labor force altogether–whch millions upon millions of people have been doing in the United States. If welfare programs or "workfare" keep people looking for work and the body of available workers large then that is an acceptable compromise.

If the labor force contracts and a capitalist boom occurs then its well-within the power of the remaining workers to push wages through the roof. And that was not an uncommon occurrence prior to neoliberalism.

Aside from the reasons previously given, the aid programs for the unemployed are mostly there to forestall revolution and mass outbreaks of violent/property crime in the rich capitalist countries.

*not being successful

**health care systems are public

>gowans.wordpress.com/?s=publicly owned
Is that your blog?

This was an absolutely stellar post.

No, I wish it was though, Gowans outs out some quality work.

They don't go broke, they just raise tuition or divert funds away from researchers. My undergrad institution has gone up several thousand in tuition since I graduated a few years ago. In one year they hiked tuition to pay for more diversity officers due to BLM becoming a thing. People just take out bigger loans to pay for rising tuition costs.

Woah
That makes perfect sense

Again, government paying for something doesn't put the cost down. Businesses provide things cheaper due to competition.
The US healthcare system is one industry out of millions of industries and it is extremely heavily regulated, with a restricted supply of doctors and drugs- while demand is subsidised
You're very dishonest.
My argument applies to all industries except that one- and that one would be only due to all the government control, which makes it a shitfest

Only if they actually pay practically nothing and use more than they pay in taxes. What does government even give corporations? Use of roads? Corporation tax brings in 9 percent of government revenues each year, but road spending is only 0.5% of GDP. Work that one out.
My theory is they would be better off buying these services privately. However they are being used as 'cash cows' by the government, to the detriment of the economy and ordinary workers

Reduces the supply of labour

Schools, hospitals, both physical and mental, drug rehab, prisons,universities, in that order.

or I'd spend this money on grants for people to open co-operatives

And police to beat up strikers
And knowledge/technolgy born out of public founded programs
And military/intel forces to secure their interests in third world countries
And pressures on international organizations to make more corporate friendly regulation.
In some civilized part of the world, corporations also profit from already trained workers, a reliable electric grid, and workers getting quickly on their feet when they become ill.

Also that graph doesn't tell which ones of thoses countries use mostly private vs mostly public healthcare.

Also i'd like to see what are the percentage of GDP going to health related costs, or what share of people's income does those expenses represents in thoses countries.

Taxes are a meme in the first place

...

I thought about police but a lot of them provide their own security and CCTV. Prisons maybe but not much
Policies that make workers more productive also make them more expensive, so I don't know if they count as a subsidy. It's more of a subsidy to individuals that makes them more productive. It's hard to argue that education raises wages AND subsidises corporations, isn't it?

Knowledge / technology maybe, but potentially not because the value of it doesn't depend on how many corporations there. Though it still seems legitimate to tax them for it, if your argument is that it's a public good.

Non-defence R+D is only 2% of the budget. Eh, they'd probably prefer to be in control of the money themselves

Old flag
Yes I have become a socdem

It's not so much about the amount of money poured into research than what is being researched. The private sector goes to what is quickly profitable, applied research. But no major progress is possible without fundamental research, which is long and don't guarantee direct profit, so not intersting for corporations.

Not at all, more qualified workers, more added value and no supplementary investment into forming the required skills.
Altough it depend of the nature of the activity of said corporations. Activity tied to high qualification labor benefit more from that kind of plocies than low qualification labor (for which the taxes outweight thoses benefits)

So how are you saying it subsidises them?
They'd be indifferent between hiring a $1 worker that produces $1 an hour and a $2 educated worker that produces $2 an hour

Making them more qualified / add more value just makes them more expensive

Actually taxing them for it doesn't improve legitimacy. And it's quite a stupid tax– why is it better to tax 'corporations' just because 'they' are the ones benefiting?
They are making products and hiring people.
Just tax the rich and sue that to fund the R + D

There was a time in India when every morning the wealthy would step over the bodies of those who had died of starvation the day before. America can do better.

All we need to do is let bankruptcy clear student debt. It would mean universities could no longer balloon prices infinitely because at certain point no one's going to get loans to go there because of how bad of a bet it would be.

The entire economy can't run on a single activity you know? At some point, some commodities more complex than loinclothes have to be made. And not all work can be summed up to push a button (yet).

So the situation is: