Why do conservatives in America usually make an economy worse?

[Hardkill]

If conservatives tend to be more pragmatic, more fiscally responsible, more disciplined, and more successful than liberals are when it comes to doing a job, running a business, managing finances, etc. then why have conservatives in power in the US such as Trump almost always have made the economic worse if not much worse than it was before they entered into office?

On the other hand, why have liberals in power such as FDR almost always made the economy so much better for the entire country than it was before they entered into office?

[Guest Tobia]

@Hardkill First thing you have to ask is: better for whom?

GDP may grow, corporations may earn record profits (they did under Trump, actually) but it does not mean that working people are doing well.

No FDR-like figures have been president since his death.

No administration in many decades, liberal or conservative, has improved the lives of working people in any significant way.

The differences between Obama's economic policies and Trump's policies are minor, in both cases working people have been abandoned.

Obama, Trump, Biden...The surface is different but the substance is always the same corporate oligarchy

 

[Tanz]

@Hardkill The economy is an artificial mechanism that the fed creates.  They control the printing of money and interest rates.  When the rates are low companies take up debt and also create debt in consumers through mortgages and selling cars.  

Right or Left wing doesn't matter, however, rates are typically lower when there are Democrats in power.  

The problem is how money is being used and less of which party is in charge.  

[Leo Gura]

Conservatives tend to give more power to the status quo, which results in rich people getting richer and hollowing out the middle class.

Edited August 21, 2023 by Leo Gura

[sholomar]

Human nature. People have principles that they talk about and then they have their actual behavior which tends to be whatever benefits them at any given time. Here in my red area supposed "free market capitalists" will line the city councils in small towns and prevent competition from entering the town that conflicts with their existing businesses.

Most conservatives aren't fiscal conservatives anymore, they are modern monetary theorists, who want to pump up stonk and real estate bubbles because it pads their net worth and allows them to work less. Modern society is all about "making your money work for you" until too many people try this and it becomes unsustainable. The top end up becoming financial parasites in the end because they use their wealth to buy up everything, but that doesn't mean marxism or authoritarian dictatorships solve this problem... usually the top down corruption is far worse the less checks and balances you have. CCP/China is a great example of top down corruption.

Basically, we are fighting human nature. The strong will subjugate the weak given no checks on their behavior. That is evolution. That is natural selection. It's not pretty, it just is... something you accept because you are here, in this reality, incarnating as this species, on this planet.

Edited August 21, 2023 by sholomar

[Hardkill]

17 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Conservatives tend to give more power to the status quo, which results in rich people getting richer and hollowing out the middle class.

Right, but it's not just that. Conservatives' policies in the US have led to the worst recessions in US history including the Great Depression and the 2008 financial crises and so on. Their deregulation policies have cause several banking crises, housing market bubbles, more inside trading, and destabilize many other parts of the US economy. Furthermore, their tax cuts and excess spending on military warfare that cause ballooning deficits and have never helped out any one other than rich and corporations. Actually, the recessions they have caused have caused the rich and corporations to lose so much of their own money in the long-run. 

You've talked before about how conservative values include being responsible, dutiful, practical, getting your house in order, managing finances well, success, and having a strong and well functioning economy, preserving the survival of your society, and successful. Yet, why have conservatives virtually all the time have been so incompetent, irresponsible, and disastrous with managing the economy?

Edited August 21, 2023 by Hardkill

[Hardkill]

19 hours ago, Tobia said:

@Hardkill First thing you have to ask is: better for whom?

GDP may grow, corporations may earn record profits (they did under Trump, actually) but it does not mean that working people are doing well.

No FDR-like figures have been president since his death.

No administration in many decades, liberal or conservative, has improved the lives of working people in any significant way.

The differences between Obama's economic policies and Trump's policies are minor, in both cases working people have been abandoned.

Obama, Trump, Biden...The surface is different but the substance is always the same corporate oligarchy

 

Democrats in power have almost always caused much greater net job gains than Republicans have. The policies of Republicans have usually caused historic recessions. Also, Democrats do some kind of tax increase on the rich and corporations whereas Republicans do major tax cuts for their wealthy donors and corporations. Yes, both Democrats and Republicans have neglected the working-class for way too long. However, you can't say that Democrats haven't significantly improved the quality of the economy overall. Obamacare greatly improved the entire country's healthcare system. Biden and the Democrats last year were finally able to get Medicare to start to negotiate prescription drug prices and have passed laws that have been creating several million good paying jobs for the working class, while most Republicans in Congress opposed all of those measures. I can say more about how Democrats have always been significantly better for the economy than Republicans.

[Schizophonia]

Source ?

[Leo Gura]

6 hours ago, Hardkill said:

You've talked before about how conservative values include being responsible, dutiful, practical, getting your house in order, managing finances well, success, and having a strong and well functioning economy, preserving the survival of your society, and successful. Yet, why have conservatives virtually all the time have been so incompetent, irresponsible, and disastrous with managing the economy?

As I said, conservative policy tends to serve those in power, which leads to stuff like deregulation which then leads to collapses.

In practice conservatives have little integrity and are not principled. All their morals and discipline files out of the window once they gain power. It just becomes one big self-dealing exercise. But of course liberals are also guilty of this, just less so.

Being a conservative with actual integrity is a very rare thing. And such people get drowned out by all the fake conservative posers like Trump. Being a high-integrity conservative is very difficult.

Edited August 22, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Hardkill]

3 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

As I said, conservative policy tends to serve those in power, which leads to stuff like deregulation which then leads to collapses.

In practice conservatives have little integrity and are not principled. All their morals and discipline files out of the window once they gain power. It just becomes one big self-dealing exercise. But of course liberals are also guilty of this, just less so.

Being a conservative with actual integrity is a very rare thing. And such people get drowned out by all the fake conservative posers like Trump. Being a high-integrity conservative is very difficult.

The utter hypocrisy.....

Yes, conservatism is about maintaining the status quo, but why does that have to lead to a tendency to serve those in power? Why can't maintaining the status quo more often mean that you govern your society as a leader who exudes qualities of high-integrity according to traditional societal norms and religion?

Edited August 22, 2023 by Hardkill

[Leo Gura]

9 hours ago, Hardkill said:

why does that have to lead to a tendency to serve those in power?

Because to improve society requires taking power away from people who have hoarded it. Which requires upsetting the current order.

Progress always threatens the existing order. Conservatives tend to be those who benefit the most from the existing order.

Edited August 22, 2023 by Leo Gura

[ryandesreu]

They use trickle down which doesn't work for the country as a whole. It is a scam for the rich. 

 

[UnlovingGod]

It´s quite simple. If you give a billionaire 100 million dollars more, he´ll spend nothing into the economy. You give one hundred thousand people, who have an average income, 1 thousand dollars, they´ll spend almost all of it. Moneyflow equals economic growth.

Edited August 23, 2023 by UnlovingGod

[Leo Gura]

3 minutes ago, UnlovingGod said:

If you give a billionaire 100 million dollars more, he´ll spend nothing into the economy.

That's not correct. Millionaires and billions use capital to build businesses, make investments, and create jobs. You're thinking in term of only consumer goods which is very limited.

The point of having millions and billions is to use it to do projects that could not be done any other way, not to buy cars and yachts. And this is very important for the advancement of the economy and technology.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Leo Gura

[UnlovingGod]

Figure 2 Weizen =  Wheat, Mehl = Flour, Erzeugerpreise = producer prices , Börsenpreis = Exchangeprice in the stock marketFigure 3 Kaffee = Coffee, Öl = Oil, Nickel = Nickel, Weizen = Wheat

50 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

That's not correct. Millionaires and billions use capital to build businesses, make investments, and create jobs. You're thinking in term of only consumer goods which is very limited.

The point of having millions and billions is to use it to do projects that could not be done any other way.

Well, yeah of course. But when someone has 50.000.000.000 and you give him 0.002 percent more money, it´s non essential. And the essential problem is, that this low amount of money will be invested in the stock market or real estate market, that accounts for the unreal inflation in those sectors.

Or in Art pieces, which explains, why those cost so much.

I´m not speaking about any millionaire. I mean, they don´t really account to the wealth inequality, even if you´ve got 100 million dollars. It´s not like billionaires do not have enough money to invest in stuff. I mean the trend over the last 40 years was, that they got more and more money. I respect Elon and those Tech Gurus in some sort, that at least they invest their stuff. But I mean Warren Buffet? Bernard Arnault? They are literally just inflating the market.

There was a really interesting article, that discusses how speculations in the stock market do account for the inflation not only of the stock, but of the products, that you buy in store. https://www.fspiecker.de/2023/08/01/steigende-preise-wie-sich-spekulanten-die-taschen-fuellen/#more-2134 It´s in german, but I´ll translate it in english. 

Influence of Speculators

A clearly identifiable exogenous trigger for the formation of expectations opens the door to speculation. And so, it appears that many financial market participants entered the wheat business, leading to a price bubble – stock prices surged by almost 50 percent between February 23 and March 7, 2022.

The bubble partially burst when, in July 2022, an agreement between Russia and Ukraine mediated by the United Nations and Turkey allowed grain exports from three Ukrainian ports via the Black Sea again – prices collapsed by nearly 20 percent within three weeks.

Hence, everything suggests that it's not producer prices that determine stock prices, but rather the opposite – stock prices determine producer prices. Real events do indeed change real economic scarcities. However, financial market actors amplify these scarcities through their demand behavior, thus driving the price development.

Figure 2

The dominance of financial markets over real economic markets can also be demonstrated using additional data for other commodities that are not suspected to face the same real economic constraints and risks as wheat.

In Figure 3, the stock prices of an energy commodity (oil), a metal commodity (nickel), a luxury goods commodity (coffee), and the previously shown food commodity wheat are depicted. All prices show similar and extreme developments between 2021 and today. The high correlation between such diverse commodities is strong evidence that it's not actual real economic scarcity conditions that determine the majority of price movements, but rather demand based on speculative motives.

Figure 3

Edited August 23, 2023 by UnlovingGod

[Hello from Russia]

12 minutes ago, UnlovingGod said:

But I mean Warren Buffet? Bernard Arnault? They are literally just inflating the market.

Well, thanks to them there is a coca cola in 99.99% stores in the world. Wouldn't happen without them I guess

[UnlovingGod]

12 minutes ago, Hello from Russia said:

Well, thanks to them there is a coca cola in 99.99% stores in the world. Wouldn't happen without them I guess

Warren Buffet started to invest in Coca Cola in 1988. I don´t know when and where Coca Cola was introduced, but I´m quite sure it was already quite popular all over the world back then.

The revolutionary tecnologies, that Coca Cola brought were also invented way back then. I would even suggest that the most influentual things Coca Cola brought, was their marketing strategies. Because Henry Ford invented the Assembly-line work.

Edited August 23, 2023 by UnlovingGod

[Hardkill]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

That's not correct. Millionaires and billions use capital to build businesses, make investments, and create jobs. You're thinking in term of only consumer goods which is very limited.

The point of having millions and billions is to use it to do projects that could not be done any other way, not to buy cars and yachts. And this is very important for the advancement of the economy and technology.

Up to a certain point.

Otherwise, Reaganomics would've worked in the long-run.

[Leo Gura]

33 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

Otherwise, Reaganomics would've worked in the long-run.

In a certain sense it did by getting you lots of cheap products in stores at mass scale.

Of course it doesn't solve wealth inequality.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Hardkill]

28 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

In a certain sense it did by getting you lots of cheap products in stores at mass scale.

Interesting. I never thought you would say that Reaganomics had any positives. 

Yeah, the increase in the amount of free-trade and globalization of the economic did cause stores to sell products at a significantly cheaper rate. 

However, top economists on from both the left-wing and the center say that Reaganomics failed miserably. The major tax cuts passed by Reagan, Bush, and Trump didn't really do jack squat to boost the economy in any significant way. As you know, the fat cats at the top have been keep way too much of the wealth for themselves. We also know that decades of deregulation of the economy lead to banking crises in the 80s, 2008 financial crisis, and another kind of banking crisis this year. Furthermore, we don't need to go over how the influence of Reaganomics has destroyed labor unions over the past four decades, has continually increased economic inequality, increase in the excessive amount of monopolies, lead to greater amounts of corporate lobbying, more inside trading, and so on and so forth. Milton Friedman and all of those Chicago School economists were big fools. 

The only reason Reagan was perceived by most Americans in the 80s as having done such an amazing job of managing the economy was really because he actually inherited an economy that was already on its way out of the terrible period of stagflation and the early 80s recession. The Federal Reserve, under the leadership of Paul Volcker, during the early 80s was the one who finally saved the country from stagflation and then gradually got it out of the Volcker shock recession afterwards.

I hope that Bidenomics really succeeds in causing the beginning of the end of neoliberalism.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Hardkill