If a company is “too big to fail” the punishment should be that the government bails them out, then breaks it up into smaller parts that are free to fail or succeed naturally without government intervention
Just nationalize them. If the government has to bail them out then then the government just bought them. If a company is too big to fail then it’s too big to be privately owned.
That’s what they did in my country when a bunch of the big banks almost keeled over in 2008/2009. They were temporarily (partly) owned by the state and eventually bought back their rights to operate as a separate business when things were going better again.
That’s actually what the US government did with at least one of our failed companies as well, General Motors.
Should’ve done it to all the banks and house loan companies too imo.
They also gave GM a 45 billion dollar stock swap and GM never paid it back. They paid back the loan but not the stock swap. Every time I hear people brag about how the government saved GM I wonder what amazing things any company could do with not only 45 billion to play with but the government ensuring that no one could take them down for a year.
Give me 45 billion and the full faith and credit of uncle sam, I will create so many jobs.
I don’t want them to be nationalized though, I want them to be able to operate without needing government intervention, basically the exact opposite
Let them keep their control of the company, but give shares of the company to the American people who paid to bail them out.
Everyone gets dividends
Are you just talking about bailouts or regulations in general? Because businesses need to be regulated.
Just bailouts
Nationalize them and turn the former business into a 501:c3. Also fire the entire C-Suite, with cause to prevent any golden parachute payments.
But I was told that the rich leaders take risks!
…right?
Sure they do. With your pension they are bold.
What if we just give every American a portion of the company that we bailed out?
Eventually the average American would own stocks in many different banks.
Eventually the American people will have majority share, at that point we vote on the actions of the bank as if we were the board.
A sovereign fund will be easier to administer. Issuing individual shares to people directly would be an administrative nightmare.
Allow the sovereign fund to acquire the shares, and then we can vote as board members in a national vote, though we’d probably just elect a representative for the fund.
Fuck all this representative bullshit. They never actually represent us.
That sounds like a great plan to have the money squandered.
Maybe the dividend is just applied towards your tax return, that would reduce the complexity of issuing 350k shares. I don’t want politicians getting their grubby hands on the money.
That’s not something that really works with industries that are zero sum games. You can’t have a dozen competing rail companies in a given state because there is only so many paths that a rail system can take, and you need to clear out continuous stretches of land through eminent domain.
If a company provides a vital services and fails, it should be nationalized. If a company does not provide a vital service and fails, it shouldbe allowed to fail and the employees themselves bailed out.
Maybe the government should give the money to the employees and if they feel that the company can make a come back they can invest the money in it. If not they can use the money to move on.
That seems fair. If the powers that be where I work for offered me to invest in the comoany itself I would do that. I bet I would get a better return over an index fund the way business is going. Of course they would find some way to fuck it up and corrupt it.
Not much of a “punishment” to the business to have socialized losses. Oh you’ve mismanaged your ginormous business and it’s going to cause a huge, negative ripple effect on the economy and impact everyone else? Here’s some free money, courtesy of working class taxpayers! Also we’re going to break you up and place no restrictions on how big you can get so that one of your smaller entities can inevitably get enough market share to be in a position to do the same thing a decade later! Huh? Punishment? Oh… Uh… Don’t do that again please, Mr. Business, sir 🥺
Hard to effectively punish entities that feel no pain and are otherwise basically immortal
Best we can really do is mow the grass periodically (which the US gov has been failing to do for a LONG time now, although we’re starting to see anti-trust rumblings in the tech industry now thankfully)
It’s not the best we can do, though. The best we could do would be for workers to own the means of production.
The best we can realistically do in our current time and place, then
Nah, we could definitely start taking back business thru unions and co-ops
or the government should get a significant amount of shares on the company
True in the U.S. Except, of course, in Alaska. Somehow in Alaska, very red state Alaska, home to Sarah Palin, every state resident gets a dividend from the oil revenue. Not that I approve of the reason why considering no one should be making revenue by fossil fuels, but somehow Republicans are fine with that exception. I wish they were pressed on it occasionally.
Conservatives love telling people that winning or losing is a personal failure, and hate government interference, but also love to make life as easy as possible for large corps.
They clearly understand that regulation works, and that governments working to stabilize a country can be really powerful, and then they go and do entirely the wrong shit about while swearing that regulation is evil and governments are evil. It’s all just feelings and whatever they hear first/whatever is oversimplified and yelled.
They’re fine with it because voters would hate to have their free money taken away
Oh, but isn’t it an ‘entitlement?’
That’s the point. It’s entitlement when poor people do it. It’s “the fair share that they deserve” when they do it. If conservatives didn’t have double standards they wouldn’t have standards at all.
I wonder, do the indigenous peoples of Alaska get that?
I believe they do, but I’m not 100% sure.
To be fair, government bailouts are not just free money the government gives large corporations with no attached expectations. When the government bailed out GM, for example, the treasury gave GM $52 billion. $6.7 billion was considered a loan (with interest) which GM has since paid back. The rest was an investment resulting in a 32% ownership of GM by the US Treasury.
There’s also a shit tonne of people and other businesses that rely on a company like GM.
It would be terrible for everyone involved, not just the economy but also for quality of life. Bailouts are bad, but not bailing out is worse. So what do we do? (Sorta) simple, legislation the prevents the amount of risks that banks are allowed to take. My proof is by counter example. The great financial crisis of 2008 was due to deregulation, mainly pushed by Regan era policy. Limits on banks force them to take their due diligence with each loan and decreases the risks of bubbles (crypto, housing, coins, etc.) forming in the first place.
Bailouts are worse. Whatever you subsidize you get more of, so if you subsidize financial mismanagement you get more of the same. It is called a preverse incentive a term I am sure your economics 101 class didn’t mention for a reason. The same reason why preachers don’t mention the stuff about Jesus saying to pay taxes.
It is better to let the banks fall, FDIC the accounts, and make sure the bankruptcy courts make recommendations to the AG office for criminal prosecution.
Besides which there was really no danger of AIG or Goldman folding. They lied about their financial situation. By the time it crashes they had moved all of their toxic assets into pension funds.
And there is a shit ton of people going bankrupt over medication costs, housing costs, and student loan debt. Do you care about those issue as much as you care about giving a car corporation more money to make oversized gas-guzzlers?
The fuck are you getting pissy at me for. Fuck the employees and their families I guess.
I didn’t know this was a binary issue.
People like you are the reason why everyone is so broke. You care about your tribe and no one else. Did your UAW workers get a pay raise? Cool, and fuck everyone else. Give me free money
The fuck are you on about.
With obesity being a big problem, we could always frame UBI as being for individuals too big to fail as well.
I’m ignorant, and maybe I shouldn’t ask this in a meme community, but wouldn’t a UBI become the new $0?
Like all the corporations now know we get x-amount more so now prices are adjusted to take a portion of that across all sectors, and now I’m back to not being about to afford the same things as before? Idk I don’t have an econ degree.
Not really. It’s not magical money that just appears.
It’s redistributed money.
Things may increase in price, not because of greed, but because supply and demand jumped dramatically. Think of all the people who now have money to buy random things like treats or toys.
That’s not a bad thing! Suddenly, companies need to hire more people to increase supply, because people have resources to spend.
Expensive stuff still exists. No matter what. But the bare minimum quality of life increases dramatically.
No because taxation would be adjusted so the average person is no better off.
It’s about raising the lowest earners to a minimum level that they’re able to live on, without making them jump through hoops or prove they are poor or prove they have been looking for work for 40 hours a week or some bullshit.
The way I think about it is by creating a scenario. We give 100% of people $1000 dollars (just for sake of argument). Some people use this for groceries, others for car payments, others for investments. Some people don’t even realize they got that money bc they were so rich. Some people can afford to pay for school supplies for kids. They key point is not everyone is using it for the same thing.
The reason it sounds like it should become the new zero is bc it does happen in some situations. If the government gave everyone that rents $100, then landlords will raise rent by $100 a month later. The main difference between the two is how specific the scope of the money is.
Yes, there would be economic changes (not necessarily downsides) such as higher inflation due to government spending, but also increased GDP which will stimulate the economy drastically. It will lead to higher unemployment, not bc people stop needing to work, but bc they can quit their second job or focus on taking care of kids full time (which that actually doesn’t change unemployment, but it would change the workforce numbers).
I am not an economics major or anything, but I tried to give reasons to explain why we would expect these changes to happen in the real world.
Those corporations would still be competing with each other to be the one we spend that $ at though.
Getting money from the government is like the one thing that’s classy to do if rich, but considered tacky if poor.
How about we stop spending so much money. The US is already in $36 Trillion dollars of dept.
We could easily pay the debt down by taxing millionaires/billionaires appropriately. Or, since it’s totally fine for a country to run a deficit, invest it back in to infrastructure and climate reinforcement.
What if I were to tell you that one of the points of a UBI is to replace welfare programs?
A “universal basic income” shouldn’t be a thing. It encourages laziness and is more government spending which can worsen inflation.
Welfare for corps is cool though
As long as it isn’t forced
Other than all the proof from places that have tried pilot programs that it actually improves productivity, and the fact that government spending only increases inflation if they’re, you know, making inflation with a money printer.
Anything else you feel like being wrong about today?
The US is already in $36 Trillion dollars of dept.
People have said, “the U.S. is already ___ dollars of debt” my entire 46 years as if that means something. What does it mean? Sometimes the economy goes up, sometimes the economy goes down. Debt keeps going up. It doesn’t seem to be changing anything.
Government debt is not the same as individual or corporate debt. Most of the US’s debt comes in the form of issuing Treasury Bonds, and most of the debt is owed to the American people. The US also controls its own money supply in which that debt is denominated.
Also, spending is only part of why debt goes up. A huge portion of the US debt has been created through tax cuts, e.g. the $1.5 trillion Ryan-Trump tax cut for high earners early in Trump’s presidency
Who cares if most of it is owned to rich Americans. If anything it is all worse because you are creating a totally non-thinking investment, an easy way for the rich to keep their money instead of them trying stuff like starting new ventures. Ever heard of the crowding out effect?
Yes the US controls its own money supply in very vague sense of the word “control”. If the fed tried printing it’s way out of debt inflation would cause collapse.
You really like the black and white arguments, don’t you?
Controlling a source of money doesn’t mean the only option is to print so much of it that inflation eats the whole economy.
Let me ask you this: if the US is so bad at managing the debt it owes to its people, how come we have functioned as an economy under that debt for the last several decades?
And you really like downplaying how shit things are.
Let me ask you this: if the US is so bad at managing the debt it owes to its people, how come we have functioned as an economy under that debt for the last several decades?
Let me ask you this: if smoking or being overweight is so bad for your health how come people can do it/be for several decades?
Got it? No? Alright let me break it down. Most of the debt we have was built up starting from 2001. A combination of two wars, tax cuts, defunding the IRS, and bailouts. So it isn’t several decades it’s 2.5. Now in that time period there have been 3 government shutdowns or 1 per 7 years. The current debt to collections ratio is second highest of a nation in the world and every other (ok not Japan) government hovering around that ratio owes money to the IMF which is another way of saying it is easy to erase.
The types of debt the US carries is far from simple with 10s of millions of individual creditors. And unlike Japan the high debts were accumulated in infrastructure, it was not for war or to give the wealthy a tax break. If the Japanese default they will still have their highways, if we default we still can take comfort in turning Iraq into a smouldering pile of rubble.
Our debt is huge, new, complex, and we have nothing to show for it. As long as it remains it grows faster than tax revenues grow to service it. Which means our government runs less efficiently. This is real dollars and cents. Projects don’t happen, food stamps don’t go out, roads don’t get repaired and all the while more and more money is transferred via income taxes to people who are already wealthy enough to buy our debt. Meanwhile the typical ways of getting out of debt remain out of reach. We can’t print money without inflation, we can’t get it forgiven because we don’t have one single major creditor, we can’t raise taxes because that would be unpopular, and we can’t cut anything without sending chaos out there.
But I forgot, since we aren’t immediately in risk of dying we have no risk of it. Have you considered a career in insurance?
^ did not read past the question. Guarantee it’s alarmist garbage about how we’re definitely going to die because of some imaginary numbers were living fine with.
Hey man, get off your high horse a little and I might start taking you seriously.
Yeah reading doesn’t seem to be your thing
It’s not hard to clock a thesis as wrong and ignore the rest of the essay. Pretty arrogant of you to assume the problem is me.
Either way, have fun yelling at people on the internet how wrong they are about something abstract and purely theoretical.
It probably costs much more money for a government to do UBI in the long term.
Not when you factor in the productivity and social harmony of a healthy citizen population.
Until by the next year rent has universally increased by the UBI.
I’m fully in favor of UBI, but unless we can get a government that will actually crack down on price gouging all it will do is funnel right back to the crooks at the top.
Have to start somewhere, and starting with ubi is a lot better then the crooked system in place now.
I’d be fine with starting with it, though people seeing prices rise right after will be really disheartening. I’d rather start with actual legislation to punish price gouging. These companies posting record profits while the rest of us struggle more and more is absurd, and I would want to root out that greed first so any UBI can actually help the people at the bottom.
Of course, I don’t expect the American government to do either of these things. Three Republicans will call it the work of Satan or something crazy like that and the Democrats will say they’re all for it until they actually have the means to do it, then suddenly it’ll be too much to handle.
Yea, just start them. People are so conservative that doing anything different from the status quo scares them, but once we have social policies in place, people like them. Libraries, national parks, paved roads, garbage trucks, conservatives fought against every positive social policy, medicare, but then appreciated them once they were enacted.
I don’t mind people possibly being surprised at inflation if their basic financial expenses are covered.
We haven’t tried it yet, it works as expected in all the trials so far, just do it.
The mechanics of sensible ubi are straightforward: enough money or money/housing to ensure survival, public education, pay more to those who contribute more to society.
Nothing is perfect, but ensuring the health of the population and investing in their success is a much better model for progress and growth than the ridiculous she damaging disparity the states is investing in at the moment.
We need public universal medical with no private option in order to create full price regulation of medical, we don’t want the government doing any more than we have to have them do though, because of corruption and lack of input from the populass. (Well almost no real input) We need the military budget and all the wasteful spending on secretive spy programs and BS to go away. Minimize or dissolve the NSA for example, and direct all that money towards social services, accountability, and a UBI or something near it. With AI exponentially progressing we might want more of a giant divided. Then everyone’s wealth could potentially skyrocket in unison, without the top heavy distribution. So really what I’m saying is we need to own the means of production collectively. Lol
Hope you’re right then. I really wanna see UBI implemented, I’m just worrying it will backfire.
Multiple UBI tests have shown that giving people money on a regular basis lifts them out of poverty and puts more money into the local economy.
And yet I can understand the skepticism and fear. We have not had yet a big scale “experiment” (i.e. a whole country implementing it). It will have bigger yet to resolve implications (e.g. what’s the effect on migration etc.).
(And I’m a big proponent of UBI)
But I think it’s just a matter of time that this will become reality, we’re to rich (in the western world) to fiddle around with “annoyances” like poor people, and I strongly believe that it will increase creativity, innovation and thus also GDP which may be probably the biggest argument for policy makers.
If it needs bailing out, it is not too big to fail.
Then it needs to he nationalized if it fails.
If governments had paid to cover mortgages instead of just hand outs to major corporations the GFC would not have been so bad.
