It sounds like they're running it like a business.
This eventually leads to competitors taking over and those business failing, which usually results in people losing their jobs.
When governments get equally incapable, and competitors take over, it tends to be a lot more violent.
It's important to note that "eventually" usually takes so long that it might as well be forever.
If only that fairytale were true. In the real world bloated inefficient companies bribe government, install themselves into government agencies directly (regulatory capture), and hire lobbyists to write laws which protect them from pesky upstarts through unchecked anti-competitive practices and anti-consumer regulation allowing them to stay wealthy and in power forever while killing off innovation and progress.
Comments like this always seem to lead to calls to give the government greater power to rein in those companies.
I'm not claiming these abuses don't exist. But there's no reason not to also look at them as the government getting a lot better at taking advantage of companies, to protect their offices. If you look at it in this context, it should be clear that increasing regulatory authority is far from a solution: it's actually counter-productive, creating tools to facilitate ever-greater abuses.
IBM's stock price is 10 times what it was in 1991. What the hell have they even done in that time?
They don't have to be whatever you think is "industry leading in computing", because apparently just once being worth something was enough to enrich an entire generation of management while the rest of us struggle.
>Ford
Despite decades of failure that led to their struggles in 2008 and an increase in energy costs, they didn't die, and despite then selling several lines of cars that had serious defects that should no longer happen, they abandoned selling anything other than overpriced trucks and are STILL doing just fine.
>Sears
Sears was murdered to enrich a few already wealthy people. At no point did it do worse business.
Do you know which companies you didn't even mention that do not support your claim? All the gigantic conglomerates that own you.
From Disney owning a giant chunk of all media and setting national IP policy, to Sysco being one of the only food service companies because they ate all the other ones so now every restaurant is stuck selling the same food as most prisons, to Nestle owning most of the grocery store so they can sell you water that they pumped out of your aquifer for crazy rates while complaining they couldn't be profitable without slave labor, to Dupont poisoning the entire earth, to fossil fuel companies that set national energy policy, to most farming in the US being beholden to a single legal entity, to the vast majority of "Brands" in the US just being a label change of a product they did not design.
You seem to be under this absurd notion that as long as the brand name on a couple consumer items changes occasionally (due to the kinds of technological innovations that we will never see again and cannot be predicted or relied upon), everything is fine?
You can argue that it's overall bad for the economy, but I think you're missing the arguement.
The escalation in costs have come from: - Incentives around US News College rankings (and the amenities that drive the rankings) - Administrative (non-teaching, non-research) bloat
Research is definitely in need of reform though, but not sure these outcomes are actually causal or even corrilated.
Hey, good point. We should really bring back that 90% top tax bracket rate to get the government back to being financially solvent again.
It's a spending problem. You're anchoring on a talking point with out actually running numbers.
Don't believe me, run the numbers yourself.
From what I can see, taxation as GDP percentage was never really under 10% since 1950, while big cuts to the top tax rate happened in the 60s and 80s (and the federal budget was continuously in the red since mid 70s basically, with one brief exception before 2000).
Just to add some empiricism to the conversation
Fiscal Year Tariffs/Customs Individual Income Corporate Income Top Marginal Rate Receipts (% GDP)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1928 14.0% (approx) DNF DNF 25.0% DNF
1935 8.4% 14.6% 14.7% 63.0% 5.1%
1940 6.1% 13.6% 18.3% 81.1% 6.7%
1944 0.9% 45.0% 33.9% 94.0% 20.5%
1952 1.2% (approx) 42.2% 32.1% 92.0% 19.0%
1960 1.3% (approx) 42.0% 23.0% 91.0% 17.8%
1970 1.1% (approx) 46.0% 18.0% 71.8% 17.9%
1980 0.8% (approx) 47.0% 12.0% 70.0% 18.9%
1990 1.3% (approx) 45.0% 9.0% 28.0% 17.8%
2000 1.1% (approx) 49.0% 11.0% 39.6% 20.0%
2010 1.2% (approx) 41.0% 9.0% 35.0% 14.6%
2015 1.3% (approx) 47.0% 10.0% 39.6% 17.6%
2019 2.0% (approx) 50.0% 7.0% 37.0% 16.3%
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DNF=Did not find
- Tariffs fell from ≈14% of receipts in 1928 to <1% by WWII -> income taxes replaced trade duties.
- Individual income taxes overtook all other sources after 1943
- Corporate shares peaked during war mobilization (~⅓ of revenue in 1944–52).
- Top marginal tax rate was surprisingly not too corrilated to government revenue.
(REALLY wish HN did basic markdown formatting)
Yes. Which is interesting, but also makes sense if you assume that a frequent goal is to shift the tax allocation between wealth classes (adjustments to top rate would be somewhat compensated by other changes).
I think it is always too easy to find arguments for almost any position in data like this, because the overall picture changes dramatically over just a few decades; wealth/income percentiles become qualitatively different as GDP grows ("workers class" pre WW2 is quite different from the same income percentile now) and the data is noisy too, so if you squint you can interpret almost anything in there.
In a perfect world, we would have twenty identical Americas with fixed tax policies, and be able to compare their development over decades; what we have is instead a bunch of different nations radically changing their behavior basically every time a different government comes into power, and many conclusions are inevitably just educated guesswork.
I do think, however, that empiricism is a better framework for grounding outcomes in reality than pure ideology. Pure ideology (either way) is usually just confirms biases by cherry picking data.