Realistically, the money the rich save with the Bush tax cuts doesn’t go towards “fancy doodads”- that might actually help stimulate the economy (but not enough to justify the unfairness of it all). It’s going towards savings and safe investment, which is why the rest of us don’t benefit from it.

And how on earth does Jon Kyl justify arguing that the payroll cut “has not stimulated job creation” after a year of stagnant numbers, compared to the “job creating” Bush tax cuts which were introduced when unemployment rates were half what they are now?

Amanda,
Surprise. They don’t care about us. They care about money and power. The TeaCorp Inc. crowd doesn’t even want us to vote.
Once you realize their “principles” are greed and ego, you stop being bothered by seeming hypocrisy. They are actually very consistent.
In the words of the late, great George Carlin,
“They don’t care about you…At all!”
Mutt50

Yeah, it’s funny how that whole “tax cuts help create jobs” meme dies a quick death when the tax cuts are being proposed for middle and working class folks. I guess a tax cut can only create a job when the size of the cut is enough to pay an entire year’s salary for a new maid of chauffeur.

I guess a tax cut can only create a job when the size of the cut is enough to pay an entire year’s salary for a new maid of chauffeur.

They go for this in two directions: one is to keep cutting rich folks’ taxes so they have more money left over for…whatever it is that rich folks don’t have enough of, and the other is to build their policies around keeping the 99% as insecure, docile, ignorant and unable to control the terms of their lives as possible, so that they will provide the 1% with more and more cheap labor.

For $39k, that backpack should carry *me* where I’m going.

This garbage is straight out of Reagan’s playbook.  His big income tax cuts were followed by the largest tax increase in American history: the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) of 1982, which included a massive payroll tax hike.

This isn’t about cutting taxes, it’s about shifting them from the rich onto everyone else.  Then blaming average Americans for not bootstrapping themselves out from under the increased burden.

I always assumed that when conservatives talk about jobs, it’s an abbreviation for “billionaire handjobs”, kinda like how some kids refer to pizza as ‘za, or parents as ‘rents. When I say “I” there, I mean the 13-year old in me has always assumed that. When you look at their statements in that context, it makes more sense.

It makes even more sense though if you look at it in the context that they are sociopathic lying bags of shit.

One arguement that really needs to be hammered on is that companies don’t create jobs - people create jobs. People buy things, which drives demand up, and companies respond by increasing supply, and the increase in production results in further hiring. A little oversimplified, but it got my conservative relatives to reconsider supply-side economics over Thanksgiving.

@Alyson Miers

They go for this in two directions: one is to keep cutting rich folks’ taxes so they have more money left over for…whatever it is that rich folks don’t have enough of…

Ah, but if you cut taxes for the rich, the rich give you lots and lots of campaign contributions in return, which results in a cushy Rep/Senator/Governor job for you and perks for your friends and family as well, maybe even the White House for your lazy, ignorant son (see; Shrub).

Whereas, if you cut taxes for the middle class and poor, they spend it on frivolous things like food, medical care, clothing, and shelter.  Where’s the cut for you in that?

@5, I looked at the pic after your comment and was disappointed.  I was hoping for a tiny SUV that you strap to your back by it’s little roof.  Then you can drive away when you roll on your back like a turtle (guess I was inspired by McConnell’s picture).  At least now I have a business idea…

Jimmy’s argument is really effective.
While conservatives go on and on about supply and demand, the simple question about “What if there’s no demand?” trips them up.

It’s the same when they make the grand statement “No one is ‘entitled’ to a job!” I ask, “Then people should be starving in the streets? Because that’s what people who can’t work do.”

The Republicans don’t even bother trying to hide it anymore. The rise of the Teanuts combined with the Barnum & Bailey Fox News Spin Machine has convinced them that they can just go all out with their true selves and get away with it. The extent to which this strategy has worked is monumentally depressing.

Fortunately, their willingness to buy their own bullshit has caused enough overreach to create backlash in Ohio and Wisconsin and some pretty serious rumblings in Florida and Maine. But Republicans still seem oblivious to it, and they’re staying tight inside their own echo chamber. Gov. Kasich proudly proclaimed recently that he doesn’t read newspapers in Ohio because he doesn’t find them “uplifting,” which goes some way toward explaining why he thought he could get away with union busting.

“People buy things, which drives demand up, and companies respond by increasing supply, and the increase in production results in further hiring. A little oversimplified, but it got my conservative relatives to reconsider supply-side economics over Thanksgiving.”

“Supply-Side” economics was correctly called “Voodoo Economics” by then-presidential-candidate George H. W. Bush back in the day.  It was gimmicks and sleight-of-hand from the beginning.  There were the morons (who were True Believers, all evidence to the contrary) and there were the cynical manipulators (who knew it was nothing but crap, of use only to get the proles to behave as desired).  It always had a sheen of religious belief that served to distract from its empty bag of proven effectiveness.

I knew it was a game back in the early 1980’s.  But I disliked Reagan and his whole team from the beginning, so my opinion about such things was dismissed out of hand.  All too many Americans were lining up to drink the koolaid in the wake of Carter’s perceived failure.

None of the leading lights of “Supply-Side” economics was/is worthy to wash John Maynard Keynes’ dirty jock-strap.  If we had listened to the tragically-late Keynes’ philosophical offspring, like John Kenneth Galbraith, at the time, we would be an entirely different, and better, country than the nearly ungovernable economic and political mess we’ve actually become…

McConnel is couching this in Boehnerian (“Job creators are on strike!”) terms: This tax rebate money is not going to ‘create jobs’ because it will not go to the rich who, you know ‘create jobs.’

More of the hostage taking mentality and the bribe-think that now underlies everything the Senate does.

Bribes = free speech = incumbent power!

Saying all that, what Obama’s nifty rebate is doing is…

DEFUNDING THE NEW DEAL.

Right? FICA money goes to SS and Medicare. Decreasing its revenue is going to be used as an excuse to ‘privatize’ it - meaning you will be forced to deal with parasites of wall street who will, with all dispatch, ‘create wealth’ out of it - (for themselves silly!)

Mark my words.

I’m a big Stirling Newberry fan. His take on this is that basically all the ‘stimulus’ will go into boosting demand for petroleum, so most of this princely sum of $1000 per family will go to your local gas station.

$1000 ‘per family’ is a small price to pay to retain the New Deal.

You know, I’ve been in front-line, dealing-with-the-public jobs my whole life, and even a loser like me can tell you that I’ve never held a job created by a rich person.  Of course, I’ve never been an investment banker, a yacht salesman, or a Congressperson.

  So why the hell is it that everyone who wants to be a condescending jackass to some customer service schlub understands instinctively what all our professional economists and elected officials have forgotten, “Hey, buddy, I’m the customer, I PAY YOUR SALARY!”

It would be nice if there were a meaningful alternative to the Republican party.

Occupy.

Bravo

This would be a good time for someone in the Democratic party to tell middle class Americans that the Republicans want to raise their taxes - using the Republican definition of raising taxes (i.e., returning those taxes to their previous rates).

zyxek, its worse. When the rich save they save and invest their money, they do so in away that is risky towards most other people.

One arguement that really needs to be hammered on is that companies don’t create jobs - people create jobs. People buy things, which drives demand up, and companies respond by increasing supply, and the increase in production results in further hiring. A little oversimplified, but it got my conservative relatives to reconsider supply-side economics over Thanksgiving.

Freaking Warner Brothers Cartoons made that point ages ago. They did several “educational” (re: propaganda) ones wrapped up in some minor physical comedy. In one, European mouse visits his American cousin and is astonished at the level of prosperity, followed by a simplistic description of a free market, but one point that was hit on is that the whole system depends on people having jobs and a good wage so they could pay for stuff to make the system work.

Of course, that was before the amount of money you could make by not actually producing something but by moving money around became truly obscene.

This article I feel leaves out a couple of extra points that could be made about this topic.

First, one of the current Republican talking points is “broadening the tax base” to include “the 47% who don’t pay taxes.”  Or, in shorter words, raise taxes on the working class.

Then there’s also how letting the Bush tax cuts expire is “raising taxes,” whereas letting the payroll tax cut expire isn’t so.  I.e., it’s ok if working class people’s taxes go up, but not if wealthy people’s do.

cynickal @ 10:
“Jimmy’s argument is really effective.
While conservatives go on and on about supply and demand, the simple question about “What if there’s no demand?” trips them up.”

I don’t see why it would trip them up.  All I do is think about the Apple Newton and the Apple iPhone.

All of the supply in the world was not going to create demand for the Newton.  It got discontinued and Apple was forced to come up with a better product.  But, there was no demand for the iPhone until there was a supply.  That is what got the cycle going.

The simple answer to your question: the supplier stops supplying or goes out of business.

-Jut

What about the business side of the payroll tax cuts? There is (or was) a program put in place in late 2009 that exempted business from paying their part of the payroll taxes for hiring people who are receiving unemployment benefits.

This is smart supply side economics. Instead of cutting taxes for businesses and hoping they hire unemployed people, it’s cutting taxes for business that actually hire unemployed people.

So, is the business side of this tax cut on the block too?

First, one of the current Republican talking points is “broadening the tax base” to include “the 47% who don’t pay taxes.”  Or, in shorter words, raise taxes on the working class.

Go take a look at the XKCD poster on money.

In the middle of the “Billions” section is an infographic breaking down US household income.  It breaks down income into quintiles - the first quintile goes to the top 1.3%, the next to the next 8%, the middle quintile to the next 16% of the population, the second to last quintile to the next 23%, and the last quinitle to the bottom 50% or so of the population.

Let’s stress that - a bit over 50% of the US population share out 20% of the household income between them (roughly your 47%), with 80% going to the other 50%.  And if you look at the graphic, that bottom 50% do pay taxes - state AND federal, roughly half as much proportionately as the top 1.3%.

$1000 = a month’s pay.

That’s how many real people live, GOP goatfuckers.

@21- “All of the supply in the world was not going to create demand for the Newton.  It got discontinued and Apple was forced to come up with a better product.  But, there was no demand for the iPhone until there was a supply.  That is what got the cycle going.”
That’s when you start getting more detailed, and ask what keeps the cycle going.

That’s the ugliest backpack I’ve ever seen, and I can tell without even knowing the dimensions that it would be a struggle to fit more than a bottle of water, a makeup bag and your wallet in there. But hey, that’s all the space the target demographic needs, I guess.

Jimmy @ 25:
“That’s when you start getting more detailed, and ask what keeps the cycle going.”

The profit motive. 

Apple could decide that it wants to discontinue the iPhone, despite demand.  But, they want profit, so they try to increase supply.  This creates a demand for labor.  If there is not an adequate supply of the labor, they raise their wages to attract workers.  Why?

The profit motive.

Disney does this all the time: they release their movies for “a limited time” every couple of years.  I suppose they do this to create a “false scarcity.”  They don’t want Cinderella sitting on the shelf every day all year long (along with all of their other movies); so, they release them at intervals, spend their advertising (which they would not do if all of their movies were out all the time) and rake in the dough.  They create a supply to meet the demand.

But supply and demand go hand in hand. There was no demand for a personal computer early on; but Jobs supplied them with it and showed them why they needed to have it.  Demand followed.

-Jut

@27 - but the profit in profit motive requires people having money to spend. Man cannot live on iPhones alone.

That’s the ugliest backpack I’ve ever seen, and I can tell without even knowing the dimensions that it would be a struggle to fit more than a bottle of water, a makeup bag and your wallet in there. But hey, that’s all the space the target demographic needs, I guess.

That’s what their personal assistants are for, carrying all their crap around.  Job creation!

Realistically, the money the rich save with the Bush tax cuts doesn’t go towards “fancy doodads”- that might actually help stimulate the economy (but not enough to justify the unfairness of it all). It’s going towards savings and safe investment, which is why the rest of us don’t benefit from it.

It’s only ‘safe’ investment to the extent that the excessive risk is socialized by taxpayer bailouts instead of being properly borne by the risk-takers.  We’ve reached a point where our oligarchs are so rich they effectively do just play with their money instead of actually producing anything useful.

And of course Republicans want the poor to subsidize the rich; the basic impulse of political conservatism is hierarchical social order, and in an otherwise [ostensibly] free society, the only way to really secure privilege is to systematically strip the less-privileged of any stability they might enjoy.  As a bonus, insecure poor or middle-class people are easier to badger into organized religion as a reliable source of comfort when few others exist—that’s the basic symbiotic relationship between the wealthy & the Bible-thumpers.  For neo-feudalism to be properly implemented you need amoral aristocrats, self-righteous gentry, controlling clergy, and a whole slew of frightened & generally compliant peasants.

Of course, austerity measures mean governments will sell off state-owned assets at firesale prices - just when the richest elite are looking for places to sink their money.

Funny how that works out…

whatever it is that rich folks don’t have enough of

...That would bemore.

$1000 ‘per family’ is a small price to pay to retain the New Deal.

...And a surtax on millionaires is just too expensive?  I was against the tax holiday, but until unemployment goes down, I’m totally against ending it.  Millionaires aren’t a shrinking group - their income is still rising, their numbers are still increasing - so taxing them makes sense.

There was no demand for a personal computer early on; but Jobs supplied them with it and showed them why they needed to have it.

Actually, no.  He built it, but there was no demand for it.  He lost his company.  Sorry, the 80s happened.  The company faltered and he eventually got it back.  Second chances and persevering vision for the win.

But the Lisa and the Newton did happen - products can’t exist without demand.

Comment #33: AnonymousDog on 11/30 at 07:39 PM

You failed Econ 101, please stay for summer school.

All the items you listed do expand the economy.  But none with a bigger bang per buck than paying taxes - when those taxes are spent on social programs, as they will be.

Even in your so-called insult, the unionized employee is more likely to spend more of every dollar they earn than anyone in the top 1%.  Hence, expanding the economy.

Like I said, you failed your Economics course.  Go back for a refund.

Government creates nothing, it only fucks things up. Full stop.

Get off the Internet, hypocrite.

“Get off the Internet, hypocrite.”

Yeah, but those who decry the Big Bad Ebil Gummint! always make an exception for the Department of War, under whose auspices the nascent Internet was created.

What I want to know is how those who swill the “Eliminate all government!” koolaid expect things to work. 

Company towns where they own you, your family, and you’re in permanent debt peonage?

Genuine monopolies controlling every product and resource, which are powerful enough to prevent themselves from ever facing unwanted competition?

Children working in factories to bring enough pennies home to feed themselves and/or their family with overpriced goods from the Company Store? 

People missing fingers and limbs (or flat out dead) because The Company which de facto owns them is not bound to make anything safe for its workers?

Why don’t those who assert that government is always the problem and is never a solution just come out and say that they wish to live in Charles Dickens’ world?  That the age of Big Monopoly Railroads and Standard Oil are what they have a hankerin’ for?  That even though they’d like to think they would live like a Rockefeller, they’re okay with being treated by Capital like a Dixie Cup — used for a short while and thrown away.  That human beings, including themselves, are a resource that (deservedly) has even less value than any machine, tool, factory, or money.  That a movie like Metropolis describes the kind of world they’d like to live in.

More importantly, they should admit that they believe everything their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers fought and often died for — union representation, a government that could break up monopolies, OSHA, the EPA, the FDA, public schools and an educated population, laws that keep Wall Street from turning the country into their casino, etc., etc., etc. — was all wrong, that they were stupid to try and create a world with some tiny degree of safety and security that was a decent place to raise families, where people could buy a home, where their kids could trade blue-collar roots for white collar success, where morality was more important than capital, where we could be individuals instead of drones.

Admit that the idea of America that Americans have believed and tried to put into effect is not a place they want to live in…

I’ve been getting increasingly angry at the ridiculous political “discussions” America has been having about our economy.  The issue is not recession or growth (that would be the normal business cycle of capitalism), but rather that our economy is stagnated.  We are in the midst of a depression that is threatening to become the new norm of our country.  The economy during the Great Depression hummed along just fine (from the standpoint of a sociopath): Workers’ wages were abysmal because of the huge surplus of barely employed and unemployed workers.  And those with money were able to continue spending lavishly, albeit with less flair than during the boom times.  That’s exactly where we find ourselves today.  The only reason we came out of the Great Depression is because most people bankrupted on their debt during the 30s; we enforced savings on the populace during WWII; and gave away free or nearly free money to servicemen via the GI Bill.  A new jubilee would be our best first step towards ending this depression.

And yeah, I do know this thread is supposed to be about tax cuts, but even zero (federal income) taxes would not make a dent in most Americans’ debt.

“Money going to your dentist… expands the economy a lot more than paying taxes.”

But… taxes are HOW money gets to my dentist…

Oh wait, I forget this is a US blog sometimes

Oh Jesus Christ, are the Republicans ever handing a gun to the Democrats to shoot them with. Use it! Use it!

$39K backpack.

Thirty. Nine. Thousand. Dollar. Backpack

PRAYING FOR NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST IN ONE SECOND

I always like MikeEss’s posts, but #37 is especially good.  I wish I had the guts to send/say it directly to my conservative relatives.  Nicely done.

Government creates nothing, it only fucks things up. Full stop.

You know what the difference is between Amanda’s statement and your lame attempt at re-purposing it?  She goes on to show what, in fact, the Republicans are doing.  Their MAJOR, PUBLIC positions are in favor of cutting taxes on the rich and raising them on the not-rich (see also sacundim @20).  This is not hidden; it’s right there to be seen, and Amanda highlights it.

You, on the other hand, make a statement in a snit, trying to show how clever you are, but actually demonstrating that you are ignorant of all the ways in which government in the US has made things better.  A few were mentioned by MikeEss, and I’m sure the rest of the commenters here could spend the rest of the night listing more.

Government creates nothing, it only fucks things up. Full stop.

Hoover Dam. Provides power to three states. Will most likely outlast HUMANITY. Private enterprise could never build something on such a scale.

What I want to know is how those who swill the “Eliminate all government!” koolaid expect things to work.
Company towns where they own you, your family, and you’re in permanent debt peonage?
...

None of that will actually happen, because of Free-Market Capitalism, Rugged Individualism and a general embrace of Freedom™.  Silly.

/sarcasm

Yeah, people who believe that crap—really, it’s the one trait common to conservatives and libertarians—have way too high an opinion of their own character and abilities IME.  Look at the red states and how they guzzle federal money like cheap beer.

But, there was no demand for the iPhone until there was a supply.

Forgetting the hullabaloo when Apple announced the damn thing, the gradual shrinking of home computers from desktops to laptops to notebooks combined with the massive expansion of features your basic cell phone was expected to have seem like a pretty cleat indication of demand for what is essentially a computer in your pocket. If you want to spin that line of bull about wondrous technology that fell from the skies completing us in a way no one could have predicted at least pick something that was really an actual unpredicted game changer instead of a device people had being cooling their heels on for years, just waiting for the hardware that could make it happen.

Here’s a clue: if you use the correct term, Democratic Party, people might not catch on to your trolling as fast.  Or, at the very least, we won’t like down at you quite as much while we snark.  We really do appreciate the effort to use an adjective where one should be.

I think everyone should be in favor of the payroll tax holiday. Businesses that hire lots of lower wage workers face a huge payroll tax burden. This burden was increased on businesses during the Reagan administration even as the upper income tax brackets were cut. It’s like they said “We’ll let management make more money but screw you for hiring workers.” The Obama payroll tax holiday is a partial reversal of this policy. It lessens the burden on businesses that actually want to hire people. I think that’s the best type of supply side tax cut you’ll find.

Furthermore, I am sure a lot of us faced a bit of sticker shock on our last two tax form filings until we completed the “Making Work Pay” worksheet the last two years. Lower and middle income Americans got a pretty substantial tax break the last two years. I got about 900 and 770 dollars cut from my tax obligation the last two years.

If we can get every American who used the “Making Work Pay” form to get an extra 450-1200 dollars in their pocket to vote for Obama, the election is in the bag. Businesses like Wal-Mart, who have made millions from the payroll holiday should back Obama too.

The Democrat party wants to take your money and give it to unionized public employees who will vote Democrat.

So this is what right wingers screech now that even the dumbest of them have figured out that it doesn’t help them to use racial slurs in public? Huh. It doesn’t really work, since the argument you’re using it for is stupid in and of itself. What do unionized public employees do with the money they’re paid? They spend it on rent, bills, goods, that sort of thing. The kind of thing that actually makes the economy work.

Right wingers hate unionized employees because they drive wages up. Actually, rich people hate unionized employees because they drive wages up. Right wingers hate unionized employees because they’re stupid and Fox/Rush told them to on behalf of the rich.

The Democrat party wants to take your money and give it to unionized public employees who will vote Democrat.

And the Republican party wants to take your money and give it to CEOs and financiers who will vote in their best interest while at the same time filling their coffers with the redistributed wealth they’ve received from the poor.  Your point?

“Right wingers hate unionized employees because they’re stupid and Fox/Rush told them to on behalf of the rich.”

...and the key to success among wingnuts is to do what you’re told — and then later convince yourself it was your own idea all along…

scrumby @ 46: If you want to spin that line of bull about wondrous technology that fell from the skies completing us in a way no one could have predicted at least pick something that was really an actual unpredicted game changer instead of a device people had being cooling their heels on for years, just waiting for the hardware that could make it happen.

Okay, technology does not fall from the sky and, by your reasoning there is no real invention.

The airplane?  Oh, people have been wanting to fly since caveman days.  They were just waiting for the right time to retire their dirigibles!

The printing press?  No, that was just the logical extension of the pencil!

The automobile? No, they called that a “horseless wagon” for a reason!

Atomic energy?  No, that’s just evil!

The telephone?  No, that is just a fulfillment of the human desire to yell really, really loudly so someone can hear you from way far away!

The camera?  No, that’s just “Drawing made easier!”

No original ideas here!

-Jut

What’s particularly annoying about this is that when the economy shrinks, even rich people have less money than they otherwise would. But they’re apparently happy with that as long as poor people have even less.

JutGory: And how long did it take for any one of those inventions to become commonplace?  Home computers were rare until the mid-90s, when the cost and difficulty of use came down enough to make them accessible to the average person. The telephone needs a certain infrastructure in place to be of any use—if it wasn’t also usable for internet who knows how far along that would be today. All those inventions had to be shown to be of use before the demand came up enough to make them very profitable (and airplanes still don’t seem to be there).

There’s also the cost of manufacture to consider. People don’t just need to want something—they need to be willing (and able) to spend enough money to cover the cost to supply them with it. Materials, labour, shipping…if people won’t pay, or can’t afford, a price that covers these costs, you’re sunk.

The iPhone was created when people had money and was spending it in crap phones, then the iPhone appeared and people began spending the money in iPhones instead of more crap phones.

This time is not that there’s no demand because we don’t know yet how awesome Toyota’s new car is. There’s no demand because people are broke. A lot of people are sweating blood to pay rent or mortgage (plus those who are now homeless because of it), a lot of people are living reasonably well day-to-day but can’t afford any big expenses. So people who can’t afford stuff won’t buy it for obvious reasons, and people who can barely afford stuff will keep the money instead because things are bad and it’s not the right time to go around wasting the few bucks they have in random junk. Hence lack of demand and stagnant economy.

Jutglory:

Each invention is just a small improvement over what was previously available and then people spreading that improvement into new fields.  Then someone makes another small improvement.  Rinse, repeat.

There was never any huge leap, it only looks that way in retrospect because we think about how much we like the Internet now and not how annoying it was to wait 7 minutes for a page to load and then find out it was just someone’s love letter to their dog with a cute border of running dogs. Etc. 

Citation: 20 something hours of James Burke documentaries.

“There was never any huge leap, it only looks that way in retrospect…”

If the Wright Brothers hadn’t “invented” the airplane, there were dozens/hundreds of other people who were working along the same lines and one or more of them would be credited instead.

If Gottlieb Daimler hadn’t “invented” the automobile, one of the many other people who were actively doing doing similar stuff would have done it instead.

If Edison had not “invented” the incandescent light bulb, someone else would have.

Same for Marconi and the radio (many believe now that Tesla should have been given credit for the radio from the beginning), same for the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb (we all know the Germans had been working feverishly to to the same thing), same for the computer (which has so many parents over such a long time it’s astounding), same for Philo Farnsworth and the TV, same for Goddard and the rocket, etc.

Science and man’s understanding of the world have a trajectory all their own, and the fallout from gaining this knowledge inevitably leads to invention.  It’s what human beings do.  We could no more stop it than you can stop a non-deaf child from learning to speak (no ableist intention on my part).  It’s hard-wired into our DNA — which, BTW, would eventually have been found and accurately described whether Watson and Crick were involved or not…

$39K backpack.

Thirty. Nine. Thousand. Dollar. Backpack

PRAYING FOR NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST IN ONE SECOND

That seems excessive. The number of people truly responsible for the existence of such a thing could probably be dealt with effectively via guillotine.

But the society that allows such things couldn’t.

And, how about stupid inventions:

Pet rocks?  Come on, how is that even an improvement on a real rock.  And, before they existed, nobody wanted them.

Beanie Babies?  There was not some great demand for these until there was a supply.

And, how about the Snuggie?  It is not as if people were going around saying, “I need a blanket with sleeves, or maybe a robe I can wear backwards.  Why won’t someone make one of these for me?”  No, some marketing genius put sleeves on a blanket and made tons of money because people saw it and decided they wanted it.

Granted, if they hadn’t, the guy may have ended up broke.  I am sure there are a lot more failed inventions than successful ones.  It occurs when someone supplies something that people don’t demand.

-Jut

There is a lot of confusion on this thread between aggregate demand and individual demand. It really doesn’t matter if people are buying pet rocks are jet packs—the economy grows when people buy shit. Right now, businesses have lots of excess reserves because people are either to afraid to spend money because of uncertain futures, too poor to buy more than what they already are because of job lay-offs and wealth-loss because of housing etc, or unable to buy what they want because credit is not available.

If some new product that everyone wants is invented, but consumers are still in such dire straights, then money spent on new gadget would just be money not spent on something else.

Right now, unemployment is high, wages are stagnant, and people have lost a lot of wealth. This is a demand side crisis that needs demand side stimulus.

Supply side crises usually involve rampant inflation because people have money they want to spend, but inventors/entrepeneurs, etc do not have the resources or incentives to go out and provide more goods and services to be purchased so all the extra money is used up-bidding existing goods.

And, how about the Snuggie?  It is not as if people were going around saying, “I need a blanket with sleeves, or maybe a robe I can wear backwards.  Why won’t someone make one of these for me?”  No, some marketing genius put sleeves on a blanket and made tons of money because people saw it and decided they wanted it.

Man, did you pick a bad example there.

You know why the Snuggie was invented? For people in wheelchairs. A regular blanket is annoying if you’re trying to wheel yourself around, and unlike most people, someone in a wheelchair might find it a tad inconvenient to simply put more clothes as opposed to having a blanket they could use. So it was created to answer a very specific demand for a small group, and then some marketing people got a hold of it.

If the Wright Brothers hadn’t “invented” the airplane, there were dozens/hundreds of other people who were working along the same lines and one or more of them would be credited instead.

It’s called Steam Engine Time: very, very few inventions simply come out of nowhere, and you’ll often find out that a bunch of people were working on the same thing around the same time. The airplane is a good example: even if the Wrights had a rock drop on them prior to Kitty Hawk, it was pretty much inevitable that powered flight would have been developed in the first few years of the 20th century. There were too many people working on it separately.

As for the iPhone: came out in 2007. The first cell phone recognized as a smartphone came out in 1996 or 1997 (the term was first used in 1997) when people wanted to combined the functions of their cell phones and PDAs. Digital cameras were in their process of takeover at the time, so adding a camera function was an obvious feature, as it eliminated yet another device (you know, because people demanded to have to carry less around with them). Add more powerful tech in smaller packages, and people’s demand for convenient internet access and voila. Apple might have marketed it better or made improvements some specific functions that people found appealing, but there was clearly a demand already (as the sales for all the other smartphones preceding it and which continue to exist demonstrated).

Okay, technology does not fall from the sky and, by your reasoning there is no real invention.

The airplane?  Oh, people have been wanting to fly since caveman days.  They were just waiting for the right time to retire their dirigibles!

The printing press?  No, that was just the logical extension of the pencil!

The automobile? No, they called that a “horseless wagon” for a reason!

Atomic energy?  No, that’s just evil!

The telephone?  No, that is just a fulfillment of the human desire to yell really, really loudly so someone can hear you from way far away!

The camera?  No, that’s just “Drawing made easier!”

No original ideas here!

I don’t exactly remember people lining up to purchase the first Gutenberg Bibles or take a flight to Jersey in a biplane. No one wanted the Newton and Jobs spent the next few decades not only honing his product but along with other in the PC

Fucking tiny keyboard typos! Anyway…

Jobs spent the next few decades not only honing his product, but along with Nokia, Nintendo,and everyone else in the communications tech business, building a market for hand-held computers. The demand existed before the device.

@3, 4: I had the very weird experience this week of explaining to a low income Vietnamese student in SaiGon that in the US, most people do their own basic home repair, housework, cooking, laundry, et al.  She just could not fathom it.  My spouse has his own business and I am engineer, that we did not have a maid, and maybe a driver, just boggled her as it is standard for a middle class family to have at least one live in servant (often an older woman whose children are grown).  Pay for a maid is a room, meals and about $50/month if an agency is used; typically less pay if informal recruiting/hiring is done or the maid is somehow a relative.

scrumby: “I don’t exactly remember people lining up to purchase the first Gutenberg Bibles.”

I don’t either, but I had not been norn yet.  But, as far as that goes, I would not be surprised if people did want to buy a much cheaper product that could be easily produced.  That is supply and demand.

The printing press was only one of the most revolutionary inventions in the last 1000 years.  And, you might be right: they did not want the Bible; they wanted the damned printing press.  That was what was in demand.  Is it any wonder why it became part of the First Amendment?  It was really, really, REALLY important to have and lots of people wanted it.

-Jut

Gutenberg found printing to be profitable from the beginning, although it wasn’t the Bibles that accomplished that end:

Gutenberg’s workshop was set up at Hof Humbrecht, a property belonging to a distant relative. It is not clear when Gutenberg conceived the Bible project, but for this he borrowed another 800 guilders from Fust, and work commenced in 1452. At the same time, the press was also printing other, more lucrative texts (possibly Latin grammars). There is also some speculation that there may have been two presses, one for the pedestrian texts, and one for the Bible. One of the profit-making enterprises of the new press was the printing of thousands of indulgences for the church, documented from 1454–55.

In 1455 Gutenberg published his 42-line Bible, known as the Gutenberg Bible. About 180 were printed, most on paper and some on vellum.
[edit] Court case

Sometime in 1455, there was a dispute between Gutenberg and Fust, and Fust demanded his money back, accusing Gutenberg of misusing the funds. Meanwhile the expenses of the Bible project had proliferated, and Gutenberg’s debt now exceeded 2,000 guilders. Fust sued at the archbishop’s court. A November 1455 legal document records that there was a partnership for a “project of the books,” the funds for which Gutenberg had used for other purposes, according to Fust. The court decided in favor of Fust, giving him control over the Bible printing workshop and half of all printed Bibles.

Thus Gutenberg was effectively bankrupt, but it appears he retained (or re-started) a small printing shop, and participated in the printing of a Bible in the town of Bamberg around 1459, for which he at least supplied the type. But since his printed books never carry his name or a date, it is difficult to be certain, and there is consequently a considerable amount of scholarly literature on this subject. It is also possible that the large Catholicon dictionary, 300 copies of 754 pages, printed in Mainz in 1460, may have been executed in his workshop.

Meanwhile, the Fust–Schöffer shop was the first in Europe to bring out a book with the printer’s name and date, the Mainz Psalter of August 1457, and while proudly proclaiming the mechanical process by which it had been produced, it made no mention of Gutenberg.