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(R) Trisha Calvarese
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August 21, 2010 05:07 PM UTC
95 Comments
If you are going to invest money in a business and take on additional risk you have to look at the return on, and return of, your investment and compare that to the risk of inaction.
Tax rates are scheduled to increase in a few months. The debt in unsustainable. There seems to be no political will to cut expenses and something has to give. There is a lot of uncertainty out there. It is tough to evaluate risk with all the uncertainty.
We will have an idea in a few months whether we will get the political will to cut expenses or whether we will continue to act in ways which will keep money on the sidelines.
Right now it is impossible to tell so jobs will not be created in the private sector and that is the ultimate solution to the problem. If the perception after this fall’s election is that there has been no change, then the economy will not change either.
I very much doubt that any businessman would invest money in his business or in a new business in response to Washington cutting spending. A person invests in a business when there are signs of demand. How in the world would the only group that is spending money right now cutting it be a good reason to invest? The consumers aren’t going to start spending freely if Washington cuts spending either. Quite the opposite given that many of them are getting relief or jobs due to spending.
If there is a change due to the fall elections I would expect investment and the economy to falter due to the paralysis and uncertainty that would result from divided government.
That is exactly the right analysis. We’re are in a period of reduced demand with the only leg of our economy holding things together at the moment is public spending. We take that leg out, we are all in for a real world of hurt.
Hint to you sporto … your boy in DC is demanding more peoples (investors) dollars in the form of new taxes to feed his spending habit.
The demand outcome in this case results in a lower supply of private sector investment.
Democrats … diverting private investment for more government growth.
the article even states that taxes aren’t stopping hiring. These companies are sitting on mountains of cash. They just don’t want to spend or invest it.
In fact, this could still be part of the right-wing machine doing it’s best to destroy this great nation to regain control of the political levers of power. Because unlike your previous post, most companies are actually run by reactionary conservatives such as yourself and they may be punishing us for electing Obama and the Democrats. They they could have their graft back too!
Just sayin’ yo!
its the investment fear your party has put in place … the general poplation is fearful.
Capital is not Dem or Repub … its partiless you soft spongehead.
….and yes your so right … its all about that vast right wing conspiracy.
it isn’t actually controlled by people, it just thinks for itself. Brilliant analysis there moron.
The cutting of spending, if it happens, would send a signal. Out of control spending has already sent a signal.
If I had a business making widgets and the demand goes up, do I hire someone to make more widgets?
How much will it cost me?
How much will my taxes be going up on the marginal profit?
Will I be liable for additional expense for health insurance?
What other taxes and fees are coming down the pike that I have not factored in?
Is it really worth it?
Those are just some of the questions that a business person needs to answer and right now there are more questions than answers.
has been curtailed. Not eliminated. Many $ will continue to be spent, many of them for mercenaries.
Health care costs are something that screams for control. The best control would be universal coverage, and yes, with tax for those Cadillac programs.
I get your spending rant, but how are we going to pay for all this nonsense?
If people knew that, they could make investment decisions which would grow jobs. Until then, we have no job market. Pretending we don’t have to pay for it, is not working.
well, maybe I just don’t get it.
So, if the majority of businesses are small businesses in Colorado, and the road to recovery involves helping them create jobs and expand, then why, for god’s sake.
Are the politicians (hmm please don’t include me here, but I am running)
1. Advocating a system that is essentially destroying small businesses on all fronts (DEMS)
2. Promoting senseless bailouts, which are blank checks to who knows where (REPS & DEMS)
3. Ignoring the Strictest Illegal immigration enforcement mandates possible (REPS & DEMS)
4. Failing to promote attacking fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement versus cutting, reducing or impacting “entitlements” (REP & DEMS)
5. Pushing for elimination of assistance in various ways for American’s Needy (Non-Illegals) (REP & too some extent DEMS)
6. Continuing a process of two-party bickering, division, opposition and simple insanity (REPS & DEMS)
And you think the American public is clueless, or can be driven like “Sheep”?
Using phrases like, the “Debt is Unsustainable,” offers nothing but rhetoric, which to most Americans who are: say those who are currently unemployed, under-employed, not on the radar, or just simply not making it, the hope of failure and economic crisis.
Both REPS and DEMS are failing to bring forward “common sense” solutions. No one needs to wonder why the American public is frankly pissed off, mad as hell, and who knows if they are gonna take it to the voting booths but apparently they are.
since you’re running, maybe you could be more specific than your broad generalizations above about waste, fraud and abuse. Tell us exactly where the waste, fraus and abuse is and exactly how much you can save from eliminating all of it?
Talk about tired rhetoric, the right has been pushing this meme for thirty years that all levels of our government are rife with incompetence at best and corruption at worst and that it is costing us untold sums of money every year.
And yest, we have tireless public servants at all levels of government whose only role is to root out these very things, and I think they do a pretty damned good job of it in most cases. This is why we see so many people brought up on charges of corruption and sent to lengthy prison terms for violating our exiting good government laws.
But not according to the propagandists on the right.
I agree,
Look at the new Denver Post on the Buck N’ Bennet Balance the Budget Amendment show.
Thats there solution, cough.
Look, fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement has to be taken seriously. How is simple.
Unemployment Benefits extension will be again on the radar right before the election.
Ok… lets look at fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement in a nutshell.
fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement –> welfare state = “illegal immigration.”
fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement —>
smaller government through regulatory streamlining, centralized buying (purchasing) across all agencies, ministerial accountability versus discretionary (waste & mismanagement), this is just a few.
fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement–>
(Private sector oversight – where enforcement is nowhere to be found)
fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement–>
I love cooperative federalism (whoops government) but when the federal agencies don’t do the oversight it fails. Don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe in “consent decrees” as the ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) as methods to reduce endless, lengthy and costly litigation.
fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement –>
(all others I just didn’t want to, or failed to mention)
Trillions,
Want a item by item breakdown and reasons why? I can always write up more details, maybe I should. I am rather enjoying the B&B (REP&DEM) plans, rofl.
You know the one… the….
Ill-fated Buck N’ Bennet Balance the Budget Amendment Show, that will do what?
so, here’s what I took away from this:
-The economy is bad because consumers aren’t spending.
-Consumers aren’t spending because either they have no jobs or are worried about their long term employment prospects.
-Companies are actually doing fairly well, making tons of profits and sitting on hoards of cash. They are just not investing and not hiring because of depressed consumer demand.
-So until consumers get jobs and start spending the wages like drunken sailors, those companies won’t hire them!
So this is what a death spiral looks and feels like. Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecies.
I think we will see the economy stabilize at it’s present level. What is very scary about that is Congress & Obama seem ok with that (based on their actions as opposed to their words) and we may be moving to a permanent condition of 17% true unemployment/underemployment and a declining middle class.
Empires rarely go out with a bang, they generally decline with a whimper.
because the reality IMHO is more grim. We are on the edge of a deflationary death spiral. While the MSM pounds us with dire warnings about our “unsustainable” debt levels (btw, private debt is actually declining and private savings are actually up, exactly the opposite of what we need right now…) we may get enough of a change in the government in November that reducing federal expenditures across the board becomes a real possibility.
If and when that happens, the third leg of the economy gets taken out and we will not remain static. Then there is no demand for goods and services from any corner, and the house of cards comes crashing down.
But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong. (props to Dennis Miller…)
its all the fault of those corporate board room types like Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, Reed Hundt, Laura Tyson, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Jamie Gorelick, Robert Rubin, ….. and the 33% of every board that is registered Democrat.
All part of the vast right wing conspiracy I tell you!!!
Boards do not actually run companies like that. Day-to-day management decisions are left to, well, management! It would be asinine for boards to have a level of control as granular as that. Boards operate at a strategic level, not operational.
in corporate America is shitting on your brilliant industrial policies?
but not in Congress where the representation is significantly higher?
C’mon Libertad you’re smarter than that. This comment is worthy of BJ but not you.
The economy that refuses to budge (much) is the consumer economy: more stuff in the garage bought with loans. Consumers have no more cashola, they can’t afford the loans they have, and they’re worried about their income, assuming they still have any.
On the other hand, there is a clear need for modernizing the economic infrastructure, starting with transportation and energy. These are not exactly consumer projects, although consumers depend on these things and use them, but they are traditionally areas in which governments have played a role (“common good” and all that).
If only we could get over the Cash Flow Is Everything point of view, see that government, like any other common human endeavor, can make investments, then we could as a society get on with the work that is needed–in many cases is long overdue–and create jobs at the same time. As things stand, we are paralyzed by the notion that all government spending is bad and therefore must be brought to a dead halt at the behest of half-baked, unsophisticated theories of moralistic finance foisted upon us by the right wing.
exactly right frame JO. Why can’t our side frame this debate as one about making investments for the future? We always hear the frame about saddling the future with debt. What about showing some positive results of past investments, from the much touted interstate highway system, but even more current such as the Internet or major pharmaceutical advancements.
The list of tangible benefits of publicly financed investments is tremendously long, but you’d never know it from the sound of crickets on our side when the other side talks about the debt.
when you outsource or import cheap labor for everything and produce nothing but card houses of phony fragile wealth and consumer appetite built on credit and debt. When it crashes the spending has to end and spending way more than we could ever really afford comes to a screeching halt with nothing to replace it as an economic engine.
Even looser credit will only help to a limited extent since most can’t afford a higher debt load than they are fighting their way out of already. This creates a chicken v egg situation in which businesses can’t afford to expand and create jobs without customers and clients coming through the doors with money to spend and we can’t create more of those with without creating more jobs.
In this type of situation the government really is one of the best potential sources of large scale job creation. As with half-assed health care reform, half-assed stimulus just won’t do the trick. We need massive shovel ready projects to create enough jobs to give businesses paying customers and, by the way, infrastructure nation wide really needs extensive work badly. Consumerism as the foundation of an economy with nothing solid to back it up, fueled by an insane level of unsecured debt, shell games and ponzi schemes, is what got us here. We have to come up with something solid to get us out.
Unfortunately the days of wars, really massive government spending stimulus programs, doing the trick are over too. Unlike WWII, the depression buster, Iraq/Afghanistan were put on credit while slashed taxes were never raised to pay for it; an historic first.
Besides that, the lion’s share goes to private contractors who are costing us many times over what used to be done by our own military, taking unemployed young men off the streets in droves via the draft and employing huge numbers in war supporting manufacturing. Those days are gone. War is now just another huge drain, not a stimulus. With the anti-tax anti-government mind set so firmly entrenched it’s hard to see any solution to the conundrum in the foreseeable future.
especially about that last paragraph. I was in the military when they first started outsourcing non-essential tasks like laundry and kitchen work. The list of non-essential grew and grew until as we saw in Iraq we were hiring mercenaries for essentially combat functions!
How did we ever get so far astray? I really do blame Reagan for starting all this.
Elect conservatives.
The fact that we Dems can’t rebuild the house does not mean you bring back the people who burned it down.
That’s the comment of the week, right there. Cons are dreaming if they think every independent voter is just itching to bring those liars and wreckers back.
Come on David, you’re usually more fair than that.
and they’re still throwing gasoline on it
After you say something liberals have done right.
If he does that, the liberals will finally have done something right.
When you graduate from being a fucking idiot.
We’re all waiting. Send announcements.
when you become my boss. Fat chance of that happening, do you even have an undergraduate degree?
You do know that Bill Ritter (and the Democratic-controlled state legislature) cut government spending the last two years far more than any Republican governor of Colorado ever has, right? And you’re applauding the Democrats for that?
Getting BJ to admit we Dems have done something right could destroy the space-time continuum 🙂
Just that it was more than any Republican in history. There are still many such as myself who think we’ve fallen hook, line and sinker for the Republican mantra that cutting spending is always the only correct solution to government current account issues.
Mill levy freeze? Unconstitutional tax and fee increases? Please.
When did this start?
Whose idea was it to require banks to lend money to people that could not afford to buy houses?
Plenty of blame to go around but Dodd and Frank have more than most.
The subprime loans were they McGuffin. Yes that was what everyone worked from, but was really deadly was the combination of slicing them up and then derivatives that were bets against the notes. It was that additional paper that made this recession so deadly.
Removing the restrictions (primarily Glass-Stegall) on what banks could do, having no authority over derivatives, and letting banks way over-leverage themselves are the real culprits.
And that was a bipartisan effort all along. Both parties deserve major blame. And the Congess we have today deserves blame too for not fully addressing the problem. The banks can still pull a lot of the same stuff.
It’s sad that we’ve got an economy built upon a requirement that citizens buy disposable crap they don’t need in order to fuel jobs for other citizens to be able to buy crap they don’t need either.
During this downturn, people are learning they don’t need crap. And they certainly don’t need so much crap bought on credit.
I know this is overly simplistic and certain to fail. However, what I am hinting is that we need to think about more than “growing” the economy. Especially about increasing demand for crap.
One woman’s crap is another’s new pair of pumps. One man’s new laptop is the next’s piece of crap from China.
After producing enough food to eat, an economy soon enters the realm of “disposable income.” Subsistence is not the be-all and end-all.
What a person does with the money s/he earns is up to him/her. But working is, or ought to be, everyone’s RIGHT, and it is the OBLIGATION of a government of, by, and for the people to see to it that everyone is provided a job.
Those glossy campaigns designed to turn human “wants” into consumer “needs” have us all drooling dockside for that next shipload of crap.
But the manufacturing of that new (and dearly needed) pair of
crappumps has an impact on my life. So, as long as you are willing to, and actually do, pay the full costs of the production of the crap you “need,” then all I can say is “Go nuts!”However, if you ask others to subsidize the costs of your new crap, then we get to have some say.
Deal?
then the world economy will go into a permanent depression. We have become so efficient at production that a gigantic chunk of jobs is dependent on people purchasing luxuries.
can afford to buy luxuries then it sucks to be us, doesn’t it? Our old healthy economy was mainly composed of a big broad prosperous middle class, the result of lots of decent paying jobs with decent benefits for average people, buying lots of pretty ordinary stuff.
My parents’ generation were little kids during the depression, grew to adulthood during WWII and created a booming economy even though they were very careful with their money compared to us. They may not have bought a lot of luxury goods but they saved, built wealth, invested and bought plenty of meat and potatoes stuff with some extras. That’s what we used to have and it was the economic engine that fueled the world. But the basis was good jobs for average citizens, not a tiny ultra wealthy minority, as wealthy many times over as the average American, with a shrinking, backsliding middle and growing poor.
Where we’re headed is back to the gilded age economy with a tiny elite purchasing luxury items, not enough to create jobs for the masses and what jobs they do create mainly elsewhere, and average citizens leading tough lives barely making ends meet and no credit line piggy banks to keep buying stuff.
It just isn’t going to work anymore. If we can’t make some fundamental changes we’re just going to keep right on sliding downhill and increased wealth will mean only what it’s always meant under third world regimes; better lives only for the tiny elite and the small class of relatively well paid professionals who serve them. That accounts for a couple percentage points. Sucks to be everybody else.
And my worry is Congress has enough people (from both parties) that are favoring the rich that we may not be able to turn things around.
Those who didn’t grow up in the 50’s or 60’s cannot understand the optimism we had back then despite the Cold War.
The creation of the Middle Class came with what Krugman and others have called The Great Compression, others might call it income redistribution. Tax policies, social policies, limited immigration to not undercut wages, and a mindset from living through the Depression and WWII, that together we can do fucking anything.
Our income distribution is actually AT 1929 levels.
The plutocrats and corporatists and their millions of shills (think Libertad and Beej for local color) should be shitting in their pants with glee for reversing the New Deal in only 30 or so years.
The middle class in America is as large or larger than it has ever been in our history, you idiot. Globally, we are looking at an unprecidented rise of the middle class that will have an incredible run rate for the next 10-20 years.
We also have a much higher standard of living than ever before, with advances in technology, medicine, and engineering moving forward at spped unimaginable just fifty years ago.
Further, I believe that the productive members of our society will keep this train going, in spite of Obama’s impending tax hikes next year.
Because that’s exactly what I said, DavidThi.
I agree that we don’t need so much crap, especially the disposable kind.
I think that we need American manufacturers who make products that last. Too often now products last a year when the supposedly same product used to last 10 years. Quality should be an option without being out of reach of the pocketbook. Lots less that would need to hit the landfills also.
When it will be obsolete in 3?
….none of my phones have become obsolete except because of ATT dropping TDMA service. Otherwise, all still good on one network or another. The old TDMA phone is still perfectly good in Mexico, along with it’s secondary AMPS service!
It is WE who decide we MUST have streaming video to…to…to…be entertained? Or not wait until you are at a computer?
Not me. At one time I was pretty far in front of the curve, but now I couldn’t care less. I guess I might care about some things if I were still a business man, but I still doubt it about most of the current features of the phones.
and it still work great (although battery life is starting to slip now). Obsolescence if a very vague concept these days. Can’t live without the latest faddish toy from Apple or Google. For shame!
But it’s expensive. Crap may be disposable, but it also tends to be cheap. No one is forced to buy it.
disposable crap is “cheap.”
We’ve been trained to believe that the “price” on an item actually reflects the true cost of producing (and disposing of) the item.
We are well trained. We believe things we know to be lies.
Then, when the county asks to raise our taxes because the landfill must be expanded, we will complain about the “inefficiencies” of government.
In reality, the manufacturer and purchaser of the crap got away with not having to pay the true costs. The rest of us have been forced into subsidizing that transaction.
Those of us who are doing the subsidizing deserve to have some say into what is crap and what the purchaser ought to pay for the privilege of purchasing that crap.
(And I haven’t even gotten to the externalization of the costs of pollution and toxic spills.)
Our economy is completely effed up because it depends upon citizens having an unquenchable desire to purchase crap. On credit. And thinking better of ourselves for doing so.
Happy Sunday.
Did he finally decide to get on with knocking doors and walking the JeffCo peoples precinct represented by Jim Kerr?
but there I find thinkers I can align myself with, because they’re fact based. This “campfire” article appeared about the same time as David’s question:
http://campfire.theoildrum.com…
He’s like the Club of Rome group that predicted worldwide shortages of 10 essential minerals, 9 of which are cheaper today (oil has gone up). Medium and long term the future is more automation, not less.
Of course, since 1968, or 1972 when The Limits of Growth was published (Especially since the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798 wrote “An Essay on the Principle of Population”), much has changed! Did you read the 2008 Graham Turner piece from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia called “A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality”? It examined the past thirty years with the predictions made in 1972 and found that changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book’s predictions of economic and societal collapse in the 21st century.
As I’ve said before, I don’t subscribe to the Boomer Doomer mentality, but I do believe that politics, power, and money are getting in the way of addressing critical issues that need to be addressed.
Food, water, and other essential resources have noticably been either degraded or depleted. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_depletion). Population continues to rise rapidly. Whether one chooses to argue the science or not, temperatures, especially ocean temperatures and its subsequent acidification, pose significant problems on many varied fronts.
Congratulations by the way, on your company’s improving performance! I’ll be in the land of your sister in September, and am looking for a sailing source on Kaua’i. Any suggestions?
But we always have. And we find a way to muddle through. Best example, think of the horseshit problem we would have in cities if the automobile had not been invented.
It’s just we externalized the problem to the Gulf and switched out horseshit for crude.
would have limited the growth of our cities. We’ve removed many limitations so much as to now affect the viability of the world to adapt to the stresses we put on it. That’s progress,huh?
And David, this idea that we always “muddle through” is a very short-sighted attitude and really glosses over broader historical trends. The collapse of civilizations is an ancient and rewcurring phenomenon in human history and we ignore that at our own great peril.
We aim for better but muddle through is generally the best we achieve.
the very memory ogf our vaunted civilizations is wiped from the mind of every human being on Earth for hundreds if not thousands of years. Our current civilization is not immune.
http://www.trendsresearch.com/…
I have some almost good ideas, but when I think about them too much, big obstacles get in the way.
Someone did a diary a while back on the idea of a GI Bill for the unemployed. I almost like the idea, but I see it creating an educated workforce for jobs that don’t exist.
I almost like the idea of encouraging entrepreneurship. If you can’t find a job, create your own! But that requires most people to take on risky debt which no one wants to do.
JO’s idea would work if half this country didn’t think that the government’s sole purpose is to steal American’s money. I believe it’s politically impossible for the government to responsibly invest in new, large scale projects.
Maybe a mix of the 3? Subsidize education and small businesses that work toward improving our infrastructure. That sounds familiar though, wasn’t infrastructure improvement part of the shovel ready stimulus?
Hell.
Public schools for the Baby Boom generation and the interstate highway system to name two.
Regional fast rail for another.
It’s politically impossible now. To responsibly invest in large projects, government would have to raise taxes.
Every school bond issue that passes is proof of that.
It seems that as you move up in size and scope with government, people start getting more mistrustful:
Local = Generally OK to pay for
Districts = Generally OK to pay for
County = Maybe ok to pay for
State = They’re probably just stealing my money
Federal = Keep your grubby hands off my money!
It’s not something I agree with. I’d rather JO’s idea takes off. I’d support raising taxes to improve our infrastructure and create jobs, I just don’t think it could happen on a state or federal level.
and a great one? Hard to say sometimes. Maybe even just a matter of timing in many cases.
But I agree with your comment on David’s GI bill. What’s the point if we have armies of highly educated people today who can’t get a job that would syustain them because they have ot compete against extremely low-wage workers in other countries.
This is also one of the larger unaddressed issues in our education reform debate in general- how do you motivate poor and lower working class children to study hard and work to advance their education when in their world there is no opportunity presented for those who do work hard in school. Of course, that is a very complex an ddifficult to solve issue and doesn’t resolve to nice sound-bites about holding teachers accountable for student performance.
We didn’t need all this college educated people. What good wouldmit do. Boy did it pay off.
I have no idea why/how it would pay off. But history shows that it would be gigantic. And think of what the history books would say of the Congressperson who sponsored it (hint, hint).
is to no one’s advantage. The circumstances at the end of WWII were very different than today in almost every conceivable way. What worked then does not really mean it will work today.
If it wouldn’t this time, that would be the anomaly.
which you could point to that makes such an unequivocal claim.
Is a better educated society better than a lesser educated one? I could agfree to that, sure. Does it lead ipso facto to better employment? That is a conclusion which would be tenuous at best and likely largely unrelated once all other factors are removed.
I am pretty sure that Russia under the Tsars and under communism was much more highly educated a society than ours has ever been. But they did not enjoy robust jobs markets as a result of all that literacy and education.
I’d be very interested in seeing anything authoritative that you could produce in support of this assertion.
a quick Wiki search indicates Russia has a 99.4% literacy rate, compared to the US at 99%.
OK, maybe that was a stretch statement about being more highly educated than us, but I still don’t see that there is inherently a direct correlation between higher education and the creation of jobs for those with the degrees.
I still say the demotivator for many in our poor and working classes regarding the pursuit of education is the lack of jobs available to them even if they did struggle all those years to attain an education.
I’ll agree that education alone was not enough to help Russia under communism. But with that said, I do think comparing various communist countries during the cold war that you’ll find better education meant a better economy within the group.
so how do we get a sufficient solution which acknowledges that eductaion is one part of the puzzle, but we need to address the other pieces as well.
I still think a “Manhattan Project”-like approach to creating modern infrstructures for our energy and transportation needs would have a huge effect. It would require the educated population that your GI Bill would provide and would enable a robust growth in our economy for decades to come.
Historically, the U.S. has won the economic war against other countries with our ability to innovate. Most new innovations are introduced by small start-ups. The major hurdle for start-ups is capital and marketing resources (getting product known, partnerships, sales channels).
The U.S. government could help start-ups by eliminating corporate and personal taxes for two years for all individuals involved with the start-up. They could also help by broadcasting information about start-ups involved in the program – thus, assisting with their marketing challenges (getting the word out helps with new funding and possible partnerships).
I’ve spent most of my professional life in start-ups. Eliminating taxes the first couple of years doesn’t do squat, because start-ups lose money for the first couple of years. You could also set the tax rate to 100% for the first 2 years and still have no impact.
The big issue is that most founders know how to do 1 thing, be it development, marketing, sales, or operations. But they are clueless on the other three, and many times don’t realize that they are clueless.
So help in the other areas is key. There are a lot of programs in place from both the feds (Small Business Administration), the state, local governments, and the universities. The trick is getting across to people they need to make use of these programs.
I too have spent most of my career in start-ups. Have you used the SBA – it is worthless, most other Fed/State programs are worthless also.
My point is to provide meaningful support to foster and grow innovative ideas. If personal and corporate taxes were eliminated for program participants – it could only help the participants.
The SBA is good for basics, mostly for people who have never managed a small company. The various advisory programs out there are a mixed bag, some really good, some useful, and some a total waste of time.
1. Having an intact economic infrastructure in 1945.
2. Having a well-endowed set of natural resources occupied/possessed by aboriginal peoples in period 1745-1895.
that just sounds so dirty!
🙂
came directly from government funded basic research and development investment. Certainly this has been true for the past half century or more. The days of an Edison or Bell tinkering in their shop on their own are mostly gone. Technology is tto complex to do things that way much. Even the great stories of the PC industry garage businesses are also by-products of this R&D investment by the government.
Remember, taxes are investments. If we fail to invest in our future, we will doom ourselves to our eventual demise as a great nation in the world.
“Vision”….
What better way to turn around our nation, then to create some “Vision.”
Mine, of course is the “Unaffiliated” as the solution to the Insanity we call our two party system, hence my tagline, “Stop the Insanity.”
But, I am sure there are more. Heck, someone do a diary post on “Vision.”
A few of the most notable suspects –> Space, Sea, Alternative Energies (minus solar & wind), Intellectual, Global systems for Peace (whatever that is, entails), Affordable Housing – dealing with Urban blight, …..ok your turns?
I see, will keep an Eye out for your next comment, if I see it coming. Just be clear about it. I lake focus sometimes. On and On,
I’ve got to say, at least you’re a sport.