degas

walkingaround, does it come down to: pay for it with high taxes or pay for it with slightly less high taxes and debt?

Alec

Usually by high personal taxation.

Neil_Oz

If most Western Europeans accept that relatively high levels of personal taxation are needed to help cushion society's more vulnerable members from the vicissitudes of a market economy, and to provide decent public infrastructure, where's the problem? I get the impression that their middle classes aren't doing it too tough.

Neil_Oz

And the title of this post should have read "Bad news about the AMERICAN dollar for AMERICAN travelers ..." My dollar is doing fine.

alanRow

<<< Did you ever think you would see the day when American automobiles were regarded on the world market as "junk?" >>>

Virtually all US auto's have been junk since the Model T. Witness how few of them have ever sold outside the US

wombat7

Neil, neil, neil
There is only one Dollar!

degas

If most Western Europeans accept that relatively high levels of personal taxation are needed to help cushion society's more vulnerable members from the vicissitudes of a market economy, and to provide decent public infrastructure, where's the problem?

Spoken like a true socialist! You can cushion things for truly vulnerable folks without high taxation. Lower taxes equal higher growth and more personal and government income.

The trouble is wasteful government spending and expanding the defination of "needy" and "vulnerable" until almost anybody gets some sort of government handout. That makes people think: Why work hard if I can work a whole lot less for almost the same payout in the end?

Hal8999

It drives me nuts when people spew out figures as though they were facts and never sight their sources.

Walkinaround said

"The US national debt is the highest in the world.
>>>>>>

not true.

US debt is 37th highest in the world as a % of gdp. many european countries (eg germany, france, italy, austria, belgium, etc) have a much higher debt level than the US....as does japan. italy's level of debt is nearly twice that of america and belgium's is about 50% more."

The facts according to what I can determine from the following source
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications.../2079rank.html

are as follows as a percentage of GDP:

World 60.84
Spain 93.90
USA 71.78
Germany 68.39
France 63.48
Italy 55.34
Australia 50.86
Canada 39.51
Japan 38.38
Netherlands 30.21
Turkey 29.11
UK 25.58
Russia 13.57
Mexico 12.88
Brazil 12.23

Walkingaround,
I invite you to share your sources since they clearly differ from the CIA, which can, presumably do something right, once in a while.

Michael

Degas,

I gather that "true socialist" is meant to be a derogatory term? If so, it is not particularly useful in maintianing any reasonable discussion.

alanRow

Hal8999 what are your figures supposed to represent as they don't support your argument

degas

Micheal, no, it's not meant to be a derogatory term. You can describe someone without being negative. I assume he is proud to be called a socialist.

Michael

Degas,

All terms are contextural. No language exists in a void. "Socialist" and "Communist" are generally considered negative terms in the States, and are used as short-hand to negate someone's arguments. Recently, "liberal" has been used just as sneeringly.

My diapers were pink, and I can tell you that when two socialists got together, there was no agreement as to what socialism is. In my mind, the term is quite useless except as a self-identifying term.

Hal8999

alan,

I don't know how to answer you the figures are a percent of GDP that each nation owes to foreign nations. It clearly shows that Spain is the worst, USA second and so on. Walkinaround claimed among other things that Italy's debt was twice that of America, while the figures show that Italy owes 55% of GDP and USA owes 71% of GDP. If you can't see that these figures support my argument, I can't argue with you.

Sue_xx_yy

http://tinyurl.com/r3zwr

should take one to the CIA world factbook page that ranks the public debt of various world countries as a percentage of GDP.

I don't know what walkinaround used as a source, but the above link gives CIA factbook figures (2005 estimates, page last updated 30 November, 2006, so it is pretty recent.) This page does, in fact, back walkinaround's claim that the US is ranked number 37, and not number 1 (that dubious honour belongs to Malawi.) Debt in US is 64.7 per cent of GDP.

The page lists 127 countries - so hal8999's list is clearly missing a few entries, and thus cannot be reliably used to establish world rank. Hal999's list doesn't "clearly show" anything, except how statistics, if edited, can't be relied upon. (So if you're going to call the kettle black, Hal999, you'd best not be a pot!!)

Meanwhile, if we scan the original, unedited list:

Italy is number 7 at 108.8, or 67 per cent higher than US debt. Not twice as high, but significantly higher.

Japan is number 4 at 158.0 which indeed is over twice that of the US. (Clearly, Japan is not quite so solvent as their auto industry or US debt holding would imply.)

Belgium is number 14, at 94.30, which indeed is about fifty per cent higher, as walkinaround claimed.

As for the others, they are ranked as follows:

Germany: 31
France: 32
Austria: 35

Not much higher, but indeed higher than the US.

(Oh, and Spain is not 'clearly' number 1, it's number 69, at 42.9)

Neil_Oz

I define socialism as public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Any milder definition results in a concept so fuzzy that we all live in countries exhibiting various shades of socialism.
I don't consider myself a socialist.

As for "high" taxes - an absolute and undefined term. I said "relatively high", by which I meant higher than in the US. But then, the only reason American taxes aren't higher is because the Iraq adventure has been financed by monstrous government debt.

"Lower taxes equal higher growth and more personal and government income."

The old and discredited trickle-down theory, used to justify relieving the rich of what little tax burden they carry. It's never been shown to work - but why let facts get in the way of a good story?

Hal8999

Sue,

The figures you cite are for public debt which includes debt to fellow nationals. The figures I used were debt to foreign nations which I did specify. Debt to foreign nations, impacts the value of local currency more than debt to fellow nationals.

I admit my list was not complete, I only used the first 27 countries on each list to determine the most debtladen countries since I didn't feel that countries like Malawi play an important role in this question.

The Japanese government may well owe it's own citizens a large amount of money but it owes relatively little to foreign governments making the yen a much more attractive investment than the US dollar.

Budman

<i>The old and discredited trickle-down theory, used to justify relieving the rich of what little tax burden they carry. It's never been shown to work - but why let facts get in the way of a good story?</i>

Relieving the rich of what little tax burden that carry? The top 1% of wage earners pay over a third of the taxes, and the top 50% of wage earners pay over 96% of income taxes. With the exception of payroll taxes (social security) a lot of people pay no federal income tax at all. How is that fair? Is that a form of redistribution of the wealth? Revenues are way up over projections. Maybe trickle down works? I certainly have more money to spend, and my wife's doing a good job at it.

angethereader

As much as I'd love to go to Europe, it's not going to happen any time soon. To many other places are just so much cheaper.

I also heard an interesting story on NPR on Friday. It was about all the Europeans who are flying to the U.S. to do their Christmas shopping. They interviewed a group from the U.K. who were shopping at the Mall of America.

We traveled to the U.K in 1982 - it was almost 1 lb to 1$. We did do a bit of shopping.

walkinaround

hal... my response was directed toward the assertion that the US has the largest debt in the world. this is not true as sue has sorted for me.

if you wish to look at foreign debt (which is fair enough), this is a much more complicated affair as there are many ways of measuring this (typically it is a measure of foreign investment in the US investments vs american ownership in foreign investments. either way, it's safe to say that the US does NOT have the largest foreign debt in proportion to the size of the economy. for example, by the most relevant measures, australia has a foreign investment deficit (in relation to gdp) that far, far exceeds that of the US. i don't have the figures in front of me so i can't sight (sic) my sources. There is plenty of literature on this topic, much of which is consumable by us laymen.


&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;
making the yen a much more attractive investment than the US dollar.
&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;

I sincerely hope that you are not in the investment business! Overall, US dollar denominated investments and the investment in US assets are by far the most attractive on earth thanks to the greatest transparency and liquidity of any market in history. this is fact, not opinion. i don't mean that they always produce the greatest returns, but that foreign investment in the US has been THE standard for the world and has been for decades. even her sworn enemies around the world bet their reserves on america.

if you think that the yen can even come close, you are sadly misinformed to the point that your assertion is laughable.

RufusTFirefly

I thought in 1982 1 British pound cost in the range of about $1.60 to $1.91 or so. Though by 1983 it was around $1.50 more or less.

In the 1950s and thru the mid 60s, 1 pound cost $2.80.