American Economics Thread

[PiSigma]

You're right but the whole US government is a Ponzi scheme. Social Security Insurance is only one component and please look at the state of the infrastructure: New Orleans protection against water, Oroville dam and Washington DC metro are just three of many thousands of systems screaming for maintenance.

Which government programming is NOT a ponzi scheme? Look at Canada's Canadian pension plan. There is no way there will any money left in it by the time I retire. It and many other programs were designed during the boomer years assuming an ever growth of population and thus more taxes. Once population stabilize and the senior population grows, we all get shafted.

 

[solarz]

Which government programming is NOT a ponzi scheme? Look at Canada's Canadian pension plan. There is no way there will any money left in it by the time I retire. It and many other programs were designed during the boomer years assuming an ever growth of population and thus more taxes. Once population stabilize and the senior population grows, we all get shafted.

That's what immigration is for.

 

[delft]

That's what immigration is for.

But when there are immigrants EU and UK panic.

 

[B.I.B.]

That's what immigration is for.

Unless it's a well planned and implemented immigration policy, with the accompanying spend of billions of dollars in infrastructure, immigration can create its own set of problems very quickly.
NZ has had a fairly open immigration, however it has now become an election issue with calls to reduce or stop immigration.
Instead of using immigrants as a tax replacement source we should be encouraging our current people to have larger families.

 

[solarz]

Unless it's a well planned and implemented immigration policy, with the accompanying spend of billions of dollars in infrastructure, immigration can create its own set of problems very quickly.
NZ has had a fairly open immigration, however it has now become an election issue with calls to reduce or stop immigration.
Instead of using immigrants as a tax replacement source we should be encouraging our current people to have larger families.

Infrastructure projects that benefit immigrants are projects that benefit everyone. Immigration is not about tax replacement. Taxes are only one benefit of immigration. Immigration is about importing human resources in a country where human resources are dwindling.

Encouraging larger families is just ineffective. Societies with high living standards will have less children, that is almost a law of sociology. No amount of government policy will go against human nature. On the other hand, a society with high living standards is a magnet for immigration.

Countries that are attractive to immigrants have several advantages. First, they are able to quickly replenish or grow their population. Second, they are able to pick and choose the people they receive, allowing them to retain a higher percentage of skilled and talented people.

However, in order to benefit from immigration, governments need to treat immigrants as a source of wealth. If governments treat immigrants as a burden, segregating them (directly or indirectly through various policies) into economic ghettos, then yes, immigration will be a problem.

Immigrants are just people who want a better life for them and their families. If you let them pursue that goal, everyone benefits. If you work to deny them, then they will become problems.

 

[B.I.B.]

Infrastructure projects that benefit immigrants are projects that benefit everyone. Immigration is not about tax replacement. Taxes are only one benefit of immigration. Immigration is about importing human resources in a country where human resources are dwindling.

Encouraging larger families is just ineffective. Societies with high living standards will have less children, that is almost a law of sociology. No amount of government policy will go against human nature. On the other hand, a society with high living standards is a magnet for immigration.

How can you be having a human resource problem when Canada is having an unemployment rate of 7%?
It seems to me that Canda has a similar problem to NZ.......mismanagement.
Three decades earlier our government decided tertiary education was the way forward instead of learning a trade.
We now have a surplus of lawyers/ Social science, and an all assortment of others that are jobless, rather than trade and technicians which we have to import.

Or we have a situation where the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing for example

We are essentially a country whose wealth comes from farming.To ensure a steady supply of agriculture savvy workers, there are farm colleges who provide us with a steady stream of applicants.However no one told these aspirant farm cadets that by farm employment law they are subjected to being drug tested and a positive test bars them from farm work.So if one is a regular partaker of recreation drugs, farming is not for them.We now have a situation of thousands of kids, heavily in debt from the costs of course training who can't get a job

to make up for this shortfall, the NZ farmers federation imported thousands of supposedly qualified farm hands from the Phillipines. Unfortunately their skills did not match what their diploma said they had.
We employ three of these farm graduates and it took a great deal of time getting them up to speed.
The annoying thing though, is their tendency to insist they can do a task when they can't, and get unwanted opinions about big bad China and the SCS.

 

[PiSigma]

How can you be having a human resource problem when Canada is having an unemployment rate of 7%?
It seems to me that Canda has a similar problem to NZ.......mismanagement.
Three decades earlier our government decided tertiary education was the way forward instead of learning a trade.
We now have a surplus of lawyers/ Social science, and an all assortment of others that are jobless, rather than trade and technicians which we have to import.

Or we have a situation where the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing for example

We are essentially a country whose wealth comes from farming.To ensure a steady supply of agriculture savvy workers, there are farm colleges who provide us with a steady stream of applicants.However no one told these aspirant farm cadets that by farm employment law they are subjected to being drug tested and a positive test bars them from farm work.So if one is a regular partaker of recreation drugs, farming is not for them.We now have a situation of thousands of kids, heavily in debt from the costs of course training who can't get a job

to make up for this shortfall, the NZ farmers federation imported thousands of supposedly qualified farm hands from the Phillipines. Unfortunately their skills did not match what their diploma said they had.
We employ three of these farm graduates and it took a great deal of time getting them up to speed.
The annoying thing though, is their tendency to insist they can do a task when they can't, and get unwanted opinions about big bad China and the SCS.

You are exactly right. The government kept on saying we need more STEM students and there are not enough talent. Yet, there are tens of thousands of engineers that are unemployed because their jobs have been shipped off to "qualified" people in India.

I normally end up spending 4x the time it would take myself to do to fix the work I get back from India. How is that for efficiency! And of course once the budget and schedule both gets meaningless, the guys here in Canada gets the blame because we don't think subpar quality work from India is good enough.

And then government complain and don't know why all these new grads from engineering with 20k student debt can't find any work.

 

[delft]

UK has a big problem with immigration. For example a large part of the staff of the National Health Service is foreign: qualified doctors from for example India and Pakistan, nurses from Poland and the Philippines. When the staff will not be replenished in future with foreigners the costs of training will rise considerably.

 

[B.I.B.]

UK has a big problem with immigration. For example a large part of the staff of the National Health Service is foreign: qualified doctors from for example India and Pakistan, nurses from Poland and the Philippines. When the staff will not be replenished in future with foreigners the costs of training will rise considerably.

I have always felt that too much too much state funding gets channeled in the wrong direction. We have open access to university which means anyone over the age of 21 has the right to go to university. Consequently, there is an abundance of people with flakey degrees in the social sciences and such like.We can provide more medical personel at no extra cost by cutting back enrollment in these courses.
What do we get fromt social academics?.........stuff like this

"In a world-first a

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river has been granted the same legal rights as a human being".

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"

Great, the next time the river breaks its banks, the affected people can sue the river for damages because the river is now a human being, with accompanying responsibilities.

 

[Blackstone]

Japan has to manage their comprehensive relations with US and China to keep sufficient friction between Washington and Beijing, but not so much where it becomes overheated and leads to escalating tensions.

Events in the DPRK have driven Washington and Beijing closer together, and personal relations between Trump and Xi are framed by Trump as very good. Given that, I thought Tokyo would at least pay lip service to reducing trade surplus with the US. I was wrong; the Abe administration seems to prefer playing hardball on trade. Interesting development.

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Japan has rejected a strong U.S. request to hold bilateral trade talks to rectify the trade imbalance between the two countries, sources said.

With the goal of reducing the U.S. trade deficit with Japan, Washington last week asked Tokyo to put bilateral trade talks on the agenda of the Japan-U.S. economic dialogue scheduled to start on April 18, sources of both governments said.

The U.S. officials did not mention which sectors would be subject to the trade talks, but a U.S. government source said cars and agriculture would be the main topics if bilateral negotiations start.

However, a Japanese government official said, “Japan has no intention of holding bilateral talks with the United States to conclude a trade agreement.”

In the first meeting of the economic dialogue, Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence are expected to discuss the agenda of the dialogue.

There is a possibility that Japan will eventually agree to hold bilateral trade talks under strong U.S. pressure, the sources said.