If Shakespeare were alive and had recently met Henry Paulson, the question that he might have posed would have been – To $700 Billion or not to $ 700 Billion ? On September 26th, 166 American economists including 3 Nobel Prize winners asked Bush not to go ahead with his “Golden Men” team’s brilliant $ 700 Billion package calling his plan a “subsidy” for business. Robert Lucas, a 1995 Nobel Prize winner and a University of Chicago economist says ``It doesn't seem to me that a lot decisions that we're going to have to live with for a long time have to be made by Friday.'' So is this $ 700 Billion something good? Before pondering on this you must remember, its not only the 300 million US citizens only that will be impacted but rather the ripples will be felt by 6 Billion people across the globe not by this act but rather the outcomes from his actions The US gave almost $ 150 billion of refunds to tax payers in February this year hoping to revive the economy and for all that what Bush Junior got were a couple of months where sales of Wal-Mart picked up. After that? You guessed it right! More freebies! The $ 200 Billion of Fannie and Freddie Mac guarantees, the $ 75 Billion AIG loan and still no change! The recent $280 Billion that was just given a few weeks back, where has that gone? The big banks have swallowed all of it in their coffers to prop up balance sheets but this has not reached the real economy, so why would $700 Billion dollars which is just the total of the all the above figures stand to be any different? You don’t give checks to people who are going to use this money to stock it up in their lockers to feel good about themselves and especially not to those who articulated the entire epic so far which is turning o... ... middle of paper ... ...ting what Marc Faber said in June 2008 and is now a big hit in the forwarding community ''The federal government is sending each of us a $600 rebate. If we spend that money at Wal-Mart, the money goes to China. If we spend it on gasoline it goes to the Arabs. If we buy a computer it will go to India. If we purchase fruit and vegetables it will go to Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala. If we purchase a good car it will go to Germany. If we purchase useless crap it will go to Taiwan and none of it will help the American economy. The only way to keep that money here at home is to spend it on *********** and beer, since these are the only products still produced in US. I've been doing my part." If you haven’t yet found out what the asterisks are google it! ;-) Sushil Thaker- Working with a Big 4 Accouting and Consulting firm Also at http://trashcanresearch.blogspot.com
He says you can always import the stuff and re-export it to other countries and still make a profit. Countries trade with each other when, on their own, they do not have the resources, or capacity to satisfy their own needs and wants. This also benefits a mass amount of people and business by supporting more productive, higher paying jobs. Trade keeps the economy competitive and ensure that there will be business with other countries.
Leading up to the year 1981, America had fallen into a period of “stagflation”, a portmanteau for ‘stagnant economy’ and ‘high inflation’. Characterized by high taxes, high unemployment, high interest rates, and low national spirit, America needed to look to something other than Keynesian economics to pull itself out of this low. During the election of 1980, Ronald Reagan’s campaign focused on a new stream of economic policy. His objective was to turn the economy into “a healthy, vigorous, growing economy [which would provide] equal opportunities for all Americans, with no barriers born of bigotry or discrimination.” Reagan’s policy, later known as ‘Reaganomics’, entailed a four-point plan which cut taxes, reduced government spending, created anti-inflationary policy, and deregulated certain products. Though ‘Reaganomics’ was successful both at controlling “stagflation” and promoting economic growth, it has and always will be an extremely controversial topic regarding the redistribution of wealth.
President Barack Obama signed The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on February 17th, 2009 into law. This Act was an effort to jump-start the economy, and also to save and create millions of jobs in America. Obama selected Vice President Joe Biden to over look the application of the Act, while working with cabinet members, the nations governors, and mayors to make sure the implementation of the Recovery Act are not abrupt, but as efficient and effective as Obama intended. The Recovery Act called for $825 Billion which changed as it moved through Congress. However, in doing this it stirred up a lot of commotion with the Republicans within Congress, who favored a different approach to the economic dilemma. The Recovery Act is essentially an expansionary fiscal policy, in that it wants to increase government spending while decreasing taxes. The Act included $550 Billion to be spent within the first two years of it being implemented, much more than the government spends annually on programs. Which is not including defense and benefit programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Most of the $275 Billion in tax cuts would be going to the middle-income families in the form of $1,000 tax cuts, while businesses and other tax cuts would make up the rest. About $318 Billion would go to states and local governments facing the possibility of layoffs and/or tax increases. Another $102 Billion would be used to help victims of the recession with unemployment insurance, health care, food stamps and job training, jobless aid would also be increased by an extra $25 a week. As we can see the evidence is clear and growing by the day, the Recovery Act is working to soften the greatest economic downfall since the Great Depression and is laying ...
Money Well Spent by Michael Grabell is a book about Michael Grabell posing one crucial question about The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which was the largest economic recovery plan in history. The $825 billion package known as “the stimulus” was five times more expensive than the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Moreover, the recovery plan cost well over a trillion dollars. In addition, one question Michael Grabell posed to himself: was the taxpayers’ money well spent? Therefore, to get his answers he followed the progression of the stimulus projects across the country, scrutinizing how reality and spin often collided.
When we look at just a few of the specifics of our trade with the U.S., we find that:
One reason a person should make a concerted effort is the fact it will help keep American jobs in our own country. How many more empty storefronts must American look at before they realize that we are helping our enemies bring our once proud nation to its knees? Carpenter correctly claims if a person buys American made it will help business, stay in our country where it is needed the most. How many...
Obama begins by acknowledging that progress has been made. There are “six million new jobs… we buy more American cars than we have in five years, and less foreign oil than we have in 20” (Obama). His assurances suggest that the United States economy is recovering and making large strides toward bouncing back from the recession. This starts things off in a positive direction and inspires pride that our nation is on the path to economic recovery. Afterward, he explains that many Americans’ “hard work and dedication have not yet been rewarded” (Obama), because many Americans cannot attain full-time employment. He emphasizes the fact that those in the top one percent income bracket are enjoying the highest profits while lower incomes haven’t increased much at all in over a decade. This appeals to the working class who feel it’s unfair that their hard work goes unrewarded.
The national debt is usually a frightening topic citizens of any country, however, in the United States, twenty trillion dollars of national debt is one of the major fears of the economy. Along with this fear comes every politician claiming to be the person to lower this astronomical debt to ease concerns in the modern American economy. In Hamilton’s Blessing, John Steele Gordon tries to alleviate these concerns by showing a plethora of benefits and good the debt has been able to do throughout the history of the United States. The central premise of the book and the main guideline for John Steele Gordon’s thinking is that the debt was used to save the Union in the 1860’s, the American economy in the 1930’s, and the wellbeing of mankind during
It has long been thought by many that wealthy Americans are the job creators. It’s said that the more money they have the more they can spend, and the more businesses they can start up and hire employes. But this is a misconception because it is the middle class that drives the United States economy. The United State’s economy is a consumer economy 70% to be exact(Rogow 16) but how much stuff does a multimillionaire consume? They may buy a few cars and a couple of houses but the vast majority of the time very wealthy people do not buy multiples of the same things that an average person would buy. Instead they save and invest their vast amounts of money often this money leaves the country and ends up in off shore tax havens instead of circulating through the American economy. Nick Hanauer who was one of the first investors in amazon.com and a mu...
However, there is much skepticism and controversy on whether these work projects significantly abated the dangerously high employment rates and pulled the U.S. out of the Great Depression. The New Deal was a bad deal for America because it only provided opportunities for a few and required too much government spending. The New Deal did not notably benefit the majority of people. Walter Procter, in a letter to FDR, wrote, “The American worker – manual or brain – is not a dumb, brutalized self. He is a man.why should ‘opportunity’ mean only opportunity for the privileged few to exploit the helpless many?”
Franklin Roosevelt’s “optimism and activism that helped restore the badly shaken confidence of the nation” (pg. 467 Out of Many), was addressed in the New Deal, developed to bring about reform to the American standard of living and its low economy. It did not only make an impact during the Great Depression. Although, many of the problems addressed in the New Deal might have been solved, those with the long lasting effect provide enough evidence to illustrate how great a success the role of the New Deal played out in America’s history to make it what it is today.
The federal budget is known as the notorious economic tank from which money is distributed to various programs. The money used every fiscal year, which begins October 1st and ends September 30th the next year, belongs to the people. The government raises this money through taxes and they spend it on national defense, Medicare, and social security. The federal budget is an exercise in making choices, and those options will certainly affect individuals living in the U.S. These choices cause debt to pile up on the government, who is struggling to make it disappear. The deficit and debt of a government gauges how well it is being run and how well it has been run in the past. According to The Economist the national debt is the total outstanding borrowing of a country’s government; it is an accumulation of deficits that has yet to be paid off (Economist, A-Z). The current U.S. federal deficit, as of the 2013 fiscal year, is a monumental $680 billion dollars, adding to an even higher debt. Any attempt to diminish this debt has the consumer footing the bill, but there has to be a different way. There have been requests to increase taxes, to raise revenues for transportation infrastructure, to restrategize the military force or to make defense more affordable (“15 Ways to Rethink the Federal Budget”, Brookings).
The current trade imbalance is caused in large part by intrinsic features of China's labor market and consumer base. The vast majority of China's 1.3 billion people still live in rural areas. China has, by some estimates, a surplus rural labor force of 120 million people, many of whom migrate to industrial centers to look for factory work, and drive down wages. As long as wages are low, the United States will continue to gobble up products made in China, while Chinese consumers will prefer to buy cheaper, homespun alternatives to American products. The rise in trade deficit with China has come at a cost to jobs in the United States, accordin...
In November of 2004, the United States ran a fifty-four billion dollar trade deficit, translating to over 600 billion for the entire year. This deficit is a result of the disparity between the amount of goods that the US imports and the amount it exports. To equalize this deficit in its current account, the American government sells assets from its capital account, often to foreign investors. This phenomenon is seen as a serious threat to the success and continued growth of the nation’s economy, tied in with popular concerns that the United States is losing its competitive and dominant edge in global economics. The traditional economic theory employed to solve this problem calls for a return to mercantile protectionism, through use of tariffs and subsidies to drive up the price of imports and lower the price of exports. Running contrary to this is a second option: increasing domestic savings and lowering government spending. These theories both aim to decrease American dependence upon foreign imports and investment, and ultimately equalize the enormous trade deficit that currently exists.
From the many issues that you find William Shakespeare is asking his audience to wrestle with, select the two you find most significant. Comment on Shakespeare’s refusal to provide simple answers to life’s complex questions, and on the immediate relevance of these issues to those of our own day.