Go back to what the western world was doing in the 50’s. High tax and high public spending. In 1950 the US had a top marginal tax rate of 91%. The 50s were great, let’s do that again.
The NTU only goes back to the 1980s and does not actually include any analysis of the 1950s.
Looks like NTU also is positing their stance on the ideology that the 1% are the only ones that create jobs but they are the ones to most likely invest in large corporations. There seems no prospect to help the mom and pop shops or small companies that have stronger solutions beyond what large corporate tunnel vision provides.
My personal taxes keep going up with these "Tax Cuts". I don't expect them to come down with the push for tax cuts for the wealthy. Nor has my income gone up.
Wouldn't buying more local would reduce energy used for transportation of goods and services?
I see less Amazon purchases and deliveries as a net benefit for the majority and a net deficit for the wealthy investors. Wealth that stays more in the community versus being shipped to Wall Street.
The majority definitely benefits from being able to buy cheap Chinese goods and go on cheap Europe trips while $BIGCOMPANY vacuums up money from the rest of the world to prop up the USD. In which other country can a guy cutting hair (out of many examples) afford so many international vacations?
This sounds like you are applying shifting baseline syndrome. [0] [1] [2]
Another way to phrase shifting baseline is when people apply what they experience with an over weighted value. For example, the cost of living has skyrocketed in the USA compared to older generations, with the cost of a home, healthcare, and basic goods and services. Wages have been stagnant while the wealthy keep gaining more and more of economic power. Economic mobility is also quite low compared to 10 or 20 years ago.
Those trips are most likely more cost effective compared to the 1950s because the technology was new and still evolving. Air travel was a luxury and now it is a commodity. Engineers have improved the technology to craft air plains while finding ways to reduce production cost. Cost savings have not be pushed to the working class and are shifted to the wealthy.
If the wage increase of CEOs was linear with your wage. It would be higher and also be less of an economic for burden the masses.
People over value the rare lucky ones as being the average of all. Kind of how a number of Americans are against taxing the wealthy because they believe they are or will become wealthy. It is rare to become wealthy and often those that are lacking in empathy and morals. Just like my Uncle that worked for Arbys, which is a millionaire because he believes and supports the idea that those below him should not be payed a living wage.
At leas I learned from him that those franchises often run on debt because they try and pull out every last dollar into the owner's pockets. He was looking to become the owner but the debt was too great to buy in, as a millionaire.
Is there something intrinsic to the general setup of government spending in the 1950s that makes it incompatible with equal rights for minorities and women? These would seem to be orthogonal issues.
That environment was directly proceeded by WW2, which required massive capital investment to rebuild Europe[1]. In the UK we were still rationing candy and meat during the early 50s[2]. So, I’m not particularly eager to recreate those conditions.
The story of British Leyland is enough to scare anyone w/ even half a brain away from ever allowing British politicians to have even the least bit of influence over a company that competes anywhere near the consumer space.
You mean how it was successfully and profitably-run for over a decade part-nationalised, following its near-collapse as a private company?
Or how in the Thatcher era, the government began to privatise and divest the most valuable parts of the company (and arguably a huge amount of British soft power) for little return to the taxpayer?
Notably it sold Mini to BMW, Leyland to DAF, Jaguar and Land Rover to Ford.
Privately-run Ford nearly went bust in the 2000s and famously had to be bailed out by the US taxpayer, but they sold off Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata in the process.
successfully and profitably-run for over a decade part-nationalised,
"successful" and "profitably run", taking into consideration the recommendation to Tony Benn that the Wilson gov't provide 1.2 billion pound investment; plus the buyout of existing BL shareholders at 1/5 the value of their shares, plus the pre-existing tariff regime, without even touching the product and manufacturing issues that had dogged them since the Austin-Morris days.
Pigs can fly, if given enough thrust...Labor didn't fix BL, it just kept the shambolic structure upright, albeit canted at a weird angle.
Jaguar was privatized in '84 (and nobody at BL was going to pony up money for new models) and only in '90 did Ford purchase it, for as it turned out, way too much. "Nothing wrong with this that a bulldozer couldn't fix" said a Ford exec after first touring the Jaguar plant on Brown's Lane in Coventry.
Neither BMW nor Ford were ever able to make Land Rover work as a reliably profitable company.
Also, Ford was never bailed out in 2008. Alan Mullaly hocked almost all of the company to get liquidity before the crash, which was prescient.
After that, the entirety of the former Ford "Premier Automotive Group" (save for Lincoln) was jettisoned, as it was in the long term a money-loser. Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata, Volvo to Geely, and Aston-Martin to ...some Saudis.
But it was part-nationalised in 1974 following a private-sector failure. It was a big manufacturer, letting it collapse would have led to thousands of jobs lost, but the government went for a 1.2bn buyout instead of simply a cash injection.
It was not badly run in the ‘70s. It had its ups and downs, but ultimately it was very stable. It really started to collapse in the ‘80s. Lots of reasons for this, including a changing market, recession and poor management decisions. Toyota’s lean production processes became a thing and BL failed to evolve, such is the way of business. It was most certainly a mess by the late ‘80s.
Remember, it was part-nationalised: essentially run as a private corporation that the government had a major stake in, not directly run by the government, though of course the govt could not help but meddle and the Thatcher govt was ideologically opposed to such a structure existing.
>following a private-sector failure. It was a big manufacturer, letting it collapse would have led to thousands of jobs lost,
Those jobs are just as lost now, as they would've been 50 years ago. Wouldn't it have been better to fix that problem earlier?
>It was not badly run in the ‘70s.
I'm sorry, I can't credit that. BL was less efficient in 1973 in terms of cars per worker than Renault, Fiat & VW. Per sales, it was even worse, as Fiat wasn't selling Alfa Romeos, Maseratis and Ferraris at the time. To say nothing of Ford, or Toyota.
>It had its ups and downs, but ultimately it was very stable.
A tossed brick descends from its apogee at a steady 9.8m/s^2; and yet we don't call that flying.
>Remember, it was part-nationalised...the govt could not help but meddle and the >Thatcher govt was ideologically opposed to such a structure existing.
So, as best as I can figure, that £1.2 billion was recouped by:
1.) Privatization of Jaguar in '84: £400 million
2.) Sale of Rover group to British Aerospace in '87: £150 million
3.) Merger of Leyland Trucks w/ DAF in '88: unknown, the merged Leyland DAF went bankrupt four or five years later.
So, by '88, the Government was still out £400 million or so on its investment; how much longer do you think they should've kept it up?
Also-I'd love to know which Anglophone government has a record of success with:
1.) A fully nationalized company
2.) That is highly capital intensive
3.) In the consumer-product or durable-goods space
> So, by '88, the Government was still out £400 million or so on its investment
Only if you consider its book value as a measure of success, but the aim of public ownership is not just to buy an asset and make a direct profit on share price. Losing all those workers in one go would have been catastrophic for the economy, it would have had to have bailed out the company in some form if it didn't buy it.
BL secured a lot of well-paying jobs for people who pay tax in the UK AND was profitable for much of its tenure. As a major manufacturer, it strengthened exports, bolstered manufacturing expertise within the country and generated soft power. From the government's point of view, this is certainly worth more than the book value alone.
As I said, it was unable to evolve as a business, it languished, and would have needed more investment and modernisation. It happens to private businesses too. The directors and govt chose to sell off the best bits rather than invest or seek more investment.
I understand the business case for this, but I think it was short-sighted: the long-term loss of a major UK manufacturing industry and soft power brands has not been a good thing for the country, in my opinion.
> Also-I'd love to know which Anglophone government has a record of success with: 1.) A fully nationalized company 2.) That is highly capital intensive 3.) In the consumer-product or durable-goods space
Privatised transport and utilities in the UK have been a very obvious and dismal failure. There have been no successes, as far as I'm aware. They cheap out on paying for critical infrastructure. They have to keep getting bailed out by the government, which is much more inefficient use of taxpayer money, and the profits go to shareholders instead of the taxpayer.
British Rail, British Telecom, Thames Water Authority, Post Office... were they more profitable as government agencies? No. Were there examples of mismanagement? Sure. Did they provide better value to the public? Absolutely.
Nobody paid a 91% tax rate in practice. What a silly thing to focus on, a headline marginal tax rate nobody paid.
The 1950s were great for places like the US, Australia and New Zealand because they were initially fairly unregulated (wartime planning was ended and the market took over) and they weren't destroyed by the war.
The UK had rationing into the mid 50s while its empire crumbled. It was not some heavenly place. Millions left the UK for the new world, including my grandparents, because the UK was in a dire state.
Over the next 20-30 years, the anglosphere became progressively more regulated, more taxed, more controlled, and more unionised. You needed a licence to import a new car. You needed a licence to import magazines. Exchange rates and interest rates were controlled by the government and adjusted for political purposes. Large parts of the economy were run inefficiently by the state as make-work schemes to prop up "full employment" policies that were politically popular but very expensive. The oil shock of the 1970s revealed how bad this scheme of economic management was at responding to changing conditions. When you have thea biggest economy in the world and you were untouched by a war that decimated your competitors it is easy to look good. But the system was not capable of responding to changing conditions because it was largely driven from the top down by bureaucrats and politicians for the sake of implementing their preferred social policies and winning elections respectively.
In the 1980s, this came to a breaking point. This was true everywhere, but the clearest example is not the US or the UK but New Zealand. It nearly went bankrupt trying to maintain completely unsustainable exchange rates for political reasons and there was a small consitutional crisis when the outgoing government refused to implement the incoming government's instructions to lower the exchange rate. The economy was dominated by what were called "Think Big" schemes: government infrastructure projects that made no financial sense but looked good on election posters and "created jobs". Large numbers of businesses did entirely pointless things like assembling Japanese cars from components more expensively than could be done in Japan, because car imports were restricted. Many other examples exist. Agriculture was heavily subsidised by the state.
The new governments in the 1980s (I am talking about the West generally now) did away with much of this rubbish. They lowered trade barriers, reduced or eliminated subsidies, and privatised the elements of the public sector that had no reason to be run by the public sector.
Sometimes when privatised these businesses failed. But that wasn't because they were privatised, it was because they had never made any financial sense in the first place.
The fundamental point is that the 1950s system was the same as the 1960s and 1970s system. If you go back to the 1950s, you also go back to the 1970s. The system was the same, the same incentives would exist, and the result would be similar. Give the economy over to the public sector and in a few years all thought of making what customers want and will pay for is substituted with using economic power to achieve social goals and win elections. We had better make sure we hire more Xs, they deserve more representation, and we better put money into Y, people love to hear about Y, and so on. And before long it is a lumbering inefficient mess.
I mean I think most billionaires would welcome the 1950s tax code. The reduction in their bills would be amazing! The only people paying those number would be our new "middle" class doctors, lawyers, etc people who make a lot of income but limited investments.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2021/04/26/taxing...