Granted you seem to agree on many occasions that public investment is needed on a number of fronts (housing, green energy, educational and transportation infrastructure). And I think you would also agree that these investments would be stimulative to the economy and thereby mitigate the severe recession (and perhaps the "d" word) which is gathering in Europe today and the absolutely certain stress it will put on the weakest among us, in particular workers who have had their protections bargained away, often by parties (like the SPD) who ostensibly represent them.
But you still insist on "pay-as-you-go" budget constraints, preferring a balanced budget environment to investment if both cannot be achieved at the same time, and you've never indicated what fiscal measures (and, of course, supporting non-fiscal measures to enforce those fiscal measures) you would specifically make in order to both have it your way, in the present environment, on the budget and also engage in stimulative, badly needed public investments in order to maintain employment and/or purchasing power of workers.
To me, this is simply Hayek with some high-sounding progressive principles to mask the deep, worker-damning conservatism which animates the underlying economic weltenshauung expressed here, and obviously, as expressed elsewhere, I think this is both deeply flawed and deeply anti-worker.
Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
The rot may have happened in more extremely unregulated financial markets like New York and London, but Paris and Frankfurt are not immune, not by any stretch of the imagination, because even the best front-end and back-end risk management and control systems can contain the damage that the system inevitably provokes via speculative bubbles which have been with us as long as their has been a bourgeoisie and the expression, via markets, of their economic interests.
We give unmerited cover to neo-liberalism in particular, and liberalism in general, by insisting there is a difference between a "financial" economy and the "real" economy. And even in a properly constituted socialist economy, command or otherwise, one sees cadres and decision makers who determine credit and capital allocation, who could not really be called anything else but financial analysts when observed in the present systems doing to much damage to workers today. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
Having more socialism, regulation or whatever might well have the opposite effect. In for example Sweden, the stagnation did not begin with deregulation but with overregulation, which broke the back of the almost constant century-long rocket development of my country, between 1870-1970, perfectly exemplified by how both left and right politicians jointly destroyed the most high-tech industry we had.
It took a quarter of a century to deal with the fallout and get back on track. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
I much prefer the capital allocation of the French technocats after WWII than the current one. They took pride in building systems that worked, not just in accumulating money.
Finance distorts the incentives by allowing selfish personal ones to be fulfilled via macroeconomic tools. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Happy New Year to you too, by the way! Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
We give unmerited cover to neo-liberalism in particular, and liberalism in general, by insisting there is a difference between a "financial" economy and the "real" economy.
There is a difference.
The financial economy is an intermediary layer between producers and consumers.
The big change is the emergence of direct "Peer to peer" connections. This is about to change the game IMHO and will disintermediate what is now an unnecessary layer. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
The requirement is still there for providers of financial services. But as value adding partners, not as value extracting middlemen.
It's a market approach: but it's a market operating on a "Not for Loss" basis, rather than "For Profit". There is no "Profit" and no "Loss" within a partnership framework. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
As starvid noted above, not increasign taxes now is akin to letting inflation deal with the revenue side of your stimulus, is a flat tax.
By pushing the notion that taxes cannot be increased, you sound like an objective ally of the neolibs. There - bonne année! In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Taxes of course can be increased. But unless you know something I don't, the UMP, the CDU/SPD, the Berlusconi and Balkenende governments are not going to do it until they've been tossed out of office, which in France is a long ways off. So, if you are insisting on tax increases to pay, today, for investments which are needed quite urgently, today, then you are saying that no investment should be undertaken under present circumstances. Here, it is you who is not being pragmatic, but rather, dogmatic. Where you accuse me of supposedly being (again) the objective ally of Sarkozy all the while borrowing his rhetoric on the real economy versus financial speculation, I would say rather that you appear to be hell-bent on worsening the crisis by doing nothing, and thereby condemning workers to even lower living standards, precarious housing, declining working conditions and greater overall exclusion and precarity, especially of the young and of minority workers.
And in any case, where is your PS now on the subject, besides vague belly-aching about the bouclier fiscale which, even if repealed, wouldn't pay for anywhere near what what we are talking about. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
