Is inflation in the Liberal plan for the next election?
- Thread starter Machjo
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That I agree with. My point though was: How do you keep taxes down, pay off the debt, and increase stimulous spending simultaneously? The money's got to come from somewhere. So if you're not raising taxes, the only way to get the money to pay off the debt and raise stimulous spending is by printing it pretty much, and that woudl lead to inflation. At times of deflation, printing money could be considered a wise move, but not when all indicators suggest that the current deflation is temporary and we're about to start growing again.
We have to be careful with definitions of domestic and international. For example, free trade allows a person from Vancouver to buy a car from Bellingham (Washington State, right across the border and very close to Vancouver) whereas before he may have had to buy the car from the province of Ontario. That would help to lower inflation owing to the gas saved from transportation, along with the money saved on trucks and drivers. Raise tariffs, and all of a sudden that Vancouverite has to buy from farther afield at the other end of Canada, and the extra gas, driver salaries, etc, woudl push the price up and cause inflation.
As for currency trading though, I fully agree. A world currency would put alot of currency traders who just make their money producing nothing but simply by tading currency, out of work, and good riddance.
So what concrete steps do you propose?
"And heard today by all spectrums of parties like the Cons and their union bashing.
All parties have the same long term objective, go into a socialist NAU or get mowed over even harder by the EU."
And you don't think the Liberals have the same agenda? Gordon Campbell, Premier of BC lied his way into the Premier's Office and continues to lie to the people of BC in the unrealistic belief that lying and covering up is acceptable. Unfortunately for hi and his fellow Liberal MLA's they have lied once to often to the people, We are all looking for a way to recall this liar and show him and his Liberal Party members where the out door is. The scary thing is the damage he will cause to the Province of BC during this reign of terror.
All parties have the same long term objective, go into a socialist NAU or get mowed over even harder by the EU."
And you don't think the Liberals have the same agenda? Gordon Campbell, Premier of BC lied his way into the Premier's Office and continues to lie to the people of BC in the unrealistic belief that lying and covering up is acceptable. Unfortunately for hi and his fellow Liberal MLA's they have lied once to often to the people, We are all looking for a way to recall this liar and show him and his Liberal Party members where the out door is. The scary thing is the damage he will cause to the Province of BC during this reign of terror.
I guess you were not around to see the mess the dippers did to our province during their reign of terror. Campbell fixed most of it despite the militant government unions fighting every inch of the way. And don't forget it was the dippers that started us on the road to the olympics.
And now the Liberals can do more with less (apparently)with EI:
The Liberals released the budget office report today, which puts the Liberal plan at $1.15 billion - far less than the $4 billion claimed by the Tories.
"We have worked in good faith with the (EI) committee and the Harper government, they introduced numbers which are not credible," he said.
The budget office analysis was conducted at the request of the Liberals, after the Tories refused to consider Ignatieff's proposal for single national EI eligibility threshold. They dismissed the idea as unaffordable.
But in the analysis, the budget office calls the government calculations "flawed" and "overstated." It says a more "reasonable" estimate is about one quarter the Tories' price tag.
I think that like our BC Premier and his staff - they lie like a rug.
What he did first time around Taxslave, turned out well when we all thought it was awful at the time. I was one of the people who lost my job over it. That said, this time he has lied big time and the BC gov't should be recalled. What he got away with once for good reasons, he is now trying to get away with to cover up the massive over spending for the Olympics. I believe we need to turf him in the same way Ignatieff needs to be turfed.
Actually this is the biggest fiction of Classic Liberal Economics. The creation of money has now been delegated to the private financial and banking industries, something that should be in the sovereign control of national governments.
What the banks and investment firms have done is pyramided up near moneys, derivatives (promissary notes to be redeemed at some future date, under given circumstances) in a grotesque, gigantic, floating, speculative bubble. This can never be redeemed, it represents many times the productive capability of the world to which it lays claim.
The most recent crisis, the default of the Credit Default Swaps, worth perhaps $50 trillion is the smaller part of this bubble (and it has still not been resolved). The bigger part is the Currency Derivatives, which has a value now approaching $1 Quadrillion, perhaps 20X the World Annual GDP.
There is no reason that governments cannot monetarize debt, and retain control of its inflation rates, since none of this money will not necessarily circulate, and there are many other tools with which to control infationary pressure.
The idiots who go into paroxysms of rage and fear at the deficit do not know what they are talking about. Or more likely they are in the pay of super rich oligarchy that now controls the global investment organism.
The worst thing national governments could do is what they've done now. Through deregulation they have passed full control of money creation to the banking industry, and internationalized it, putting it beyond their ability to control. The huge profits you see in the latest quarter in the Canadian banking industry are all from currency speculation, often debasing their native money in the interests of profit.
It is really a crime, economic treason, and Harper is one of the stooges of the increasingly parasitic character of the banking industry. He's just not smart enough, too wrapped up in his mealy minded neoliberal ideology, to see that he has knocked out the mainstays of the Canadian economy with his Liberal economics. The only problem is no one else has come up with a viable alternative, which exists in our economic origins under the National Policies of John A. MacDonald's government.
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See above post for some of my response. My point is that a collapse of the productive capacity, that mean hard physical production through processing of natural resources, manufacturing and agriculture, there is no way we can support our current living conditions. That is what we are facing now.
A couple of points you allude to. First of all reasonable levels of protection are not isolationism as the Free Traders are so fond of characterising it. In the best of worlds a protected economic environment will have more to trade, and will be more capable of developing higher order industrial and scientific capacities than one that does not nurture these with reasonable tariff levels.
Second National Systems of economy are not socialist. They are designed to foster internal competition. What's more they are not intended to unfairly insulate processes from foreign competition on a level playing field. They are merely meant to compensate for unfair and predatory wage exploitation in developing countries, and from dumping of product, and, to maintain an integrated and self sufficient productice capaoity at home.
I'd also comment that the taxation system we have now have become increasingly regressive. They are based on demand sapping sales taxes, and have little incentive to invest in job producing domestic manufacturing. The entire gamut of income, excise and investment taxes has to be retooled to reestablish the progressive and siimulative taxation that existed until the neoliberal paradigm came to ascendancy in the early 70s.
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Which this are you talking about? The next few paragraphs don't really clear that up for me. Are you agreeing with me? I cannot really tell.
I don't know if i can do much better. I'm not sure exactly what your case is.
Classic Liberalism refers to the economic ideology of Free Trade, Free Markets, laissez-faire policies that demonized government supervision of trade, currency, taxation and economic planning. It's fathers were Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus amongst others.
Its first criticism came from Friedrich List, in his National System of Political Economy, who articulated policies put in place by Alexander Hamilton in America that is the antithesis of Liberalism. That became known as the National or American Economic Systems and were the model for MacDonald's National Polices. They have produced the strongest, most vital, and equitably distributed economic growth in history.
The Conservative monicer for Free Trade is a fraud, what Harper and the Free Market ideologues support is pure Economic Liberalism.
It is this i am saying that is failing, profoundly and driving us into an even deeper economic crisis.
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Ok, that's fair.
My observation was that when the governments control the currency, they easily cause inflation by turning the debt into currency (Germany, Brasil, others I cannot remember). Whereas today, in my opinion, the financial institutions control the "money supply" to a certain extent (I don't really want to explain the quotes... at the moment) and so they can easily cause inflation when people are willing to take out and accept loans willy nilly.
Maybe this is what you were getting at as well?
That's only partially correct Anna. In the modern era, the founding treatise of Economic Liberalism was Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. In the U.S. Jefferson and Hamilton were at opposite ends of the political spectrum. It was Jefferson, largely in support of agricultural (and slavery) interests, who promoted limited government, private banking, and free trade.
Hamilton in support of manufacturing, established the the Bank of the United States, the first central bank, and promoted tariff protection, public investment in infrastructure, notably transportation, and government planning in the economy, through regulation of credit and currency. It was Hamilton who prevailed and layed the groundwork for the explosive growth of the American economy, which provided the model for the Canadian economy under MacDonald.
Ok. I should have said, "Classical liberalism in North America goes back to the days of Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, et al."
Inflation is coming regardless of who is in power - Remember what started our current mess - High cost of housing - High cost of oil. Unless somebody figures out how to make houses affordable or invents a new low cost alternative for oil it is coming. Something that tracks inflation is interest rates - Inflation goes up - Interest costs go up - Imagine what that will do for the couple that has a $400,000 mortgage on a $350,000 house and the mortgage renews from 4.5% to 7% - My first mortgage had a 13.5% mortgage and I got a good deal - Those who came of age in the last 25 years have no clue what it was like in the 70's - early 80's - They have experienced only bumps in the economy never lined up at a gas station hoping to get to the pump before the station ran out. Never witnessed monthly price increases on their food bill.