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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (151011)	9/6/2002 6:26:53 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1586426

Ted I say - "I didn't say anything about the unemployment rate in the US at this time except that it was normally lower then the unemployment rate in Europe." and you reply with "it was the German unemployment rate that was the lower of the two." Can you understand why that doesn't really respond to what I said or do I have to explain it? Tim, you said that that the US rate is "normally lower" than Germany's. If you mean since 1992, then that statement is right. However if you look at a longer time frame, then its incorrect.........Germany's unemployment rate was lower for most of the years between the 1960's to the 1990s. However, that began to change around 1992 because of two very unique occurrences..............one was the unification of Germany and the other was the reduction of the US's unemployment rate below 6% which had never happened since WWII. In fact, most economists up until the 90s didn't think the latter was possible. My point was that if you consider a lower unemployment rate to be important, than you need to know that Germany was the one with the better rate for a long time.......and that's in spite of the socialist leanings of its economic model. For European unemployment rates look at kc.frb.org chart one particuarly post 1983. This is no where near an accurate viewing of Germany's economy. The German economy since the 60's has been the engine to drive Europe and was heads and shoulders above the other economies. To show an European average 'in lieu of' does the German economy a disservice. Also I notice that your response is from a reply to an article that is arguing the opposite of the letter writer's claim, and the letter does not include the date from the article. I didn't read the letter very closely but I agree with the position it takes.......however, I was more interested in the facts presented in the text and used the link to validate the unemployment rates. Why is the exact date important? The article was written sometime in 6/97. Tim, there is no way you know that.....Clinton would have had some control over a Dem. controlled Congress and most likely, would have gotten the legislation passed. And no matter who thought up the reform......to the victor go the spoils. The Republicans had been pushing welfare reform since before Clinton was a governor, then Clinton comes in and has a Democratic congress and doesn't get it passed or I think even try to. Then the Republicans get elected with welfare reform was one of their main themes and it does get passed, and you give Clinton credit. Yeah that really makes a lot of sense. Let me see here........Clinton is president, he proposes welfare reform and gets it passed but giving him credit makes no sense. Even if Clinton plagiarized the Rep. welfare reforms word for word, why should he not get credit. One can have a great idea and if you do nada with it, all it is is a great idea. Coming up with the idea is about 1/4 of the work......getting it implemented and making it work is the hard part. Besides, what makes you think the people around Clinton were deficient when it came to welfare reform. Donna Shalala talked about welfare reform when I took a class from her and I believe that was before the Reps. put together their reform package. And its not like the Reps didn't have the opportunity to put it into place.......Reagan and Bush Sr. were president sequentially from 1980 to 1992........that's 12 years. How many years did the Reps. need? Besides, did you ever think it might not have been high on their agendas? That's true.......but we are talking socialism, not communism. Socialism can be a hybrid of capitalism and communism. I think what you are calling communism would be called socialism by Marx. Communism was supposed to be the theoretical (as in it never actually happened) advance state where everything was owned in common by the people and no government or only minimal government was necessary because the working people would be enlightened and share according to people's needs while producing according to their abilities. Socialism was supposed to be the in between state where the government controlled most of the means of production. The hybrid that is in Europe is a hybrid between socialism and capitalism. The so called "mixed economy". Some describe the European models as a hybrid between capitalism and communism. In fact, according to Websters, one of three definitions for socialism is as follows and I quote: "A stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by an unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done." And your opinion would be fine if you had the facts but you seem to have learned everything about socialism/communism from 1950's cold war propaganda. I do have the facts. The more socialism is put in to a countries economic system (at least past a tolerable minor amount) the less successful that economy has been. The predominantly socialist systems fell apart because they where economic basket cases. They were not socialist nor communist countries........they were dictatorships in which the wealth and production were controlled by the dictators on top, and not the people as Marx intended. To my knowledge we have not seen a communist economic model in play with the exception of the kibbutzim. In some cases (Eastern Europe and USSR) the governments fell apart, in others (Peoples Republic of China) the Communist Party stayed in power of a nominally socialist/communist government but allowed a lot of capitalism in to the system. Even if less extreme cases, when economies reduced the amount of socialism (such as the US under Reagan, and the UK under Thatcher) they unleashed a lot of growth and greater economic success. And in mainland Western Europe while there was no real major market reform there was a halt of the gradual drift to more and more socialism as the countries realized that it was unsupportable. Again, you are falling trap to post WWII propaganda. Every effort was made to discredit communism because of the military threat presented by Russia and China which pretended to be nations based on a communistic economic model, and because communism is a serious threat to the basic tenets of capitalism and to those who are at the top of the capitalist economic structure. No country based on a non communistic eco. models wants their people to fully get Marx's theory or they might have a revolution on their hands. Marx intent was take out the greed and depravation that common with most existing economic models. Naturally, the upper classes were aghast at such a concept and every effort was made to demean the model and invalidate it. Its a very powerful concept that is way, way ahead of its time. We will have to evolve into the concept. <As for where I get my opinions from 1 - It isn't really relevant to the issue, and 2 - It is mostly from my own reasoning, to the extent it is from others it is from the writings of people like Adam Smith, Hayek, and Friedman. Where you get your opinions is important......if its not based on fact, then there's no point in arguing IMO. ted