You mean savings accounts kept in banks, as deposits? The deposits that count towards a bank's reserve requirements, allowing them to loan out more money to the person who needs a loan to start a small business? The deposits wherein increasing supply reduces the price to borrow money, reducing the interest rates paid for that small business loan? Are you talking about those savings accounts?
Ah yes, the "money always circulates" argument. As long as money moves to another person or company, there is no problem with where it goes. Of course, this leaves out two things. First, if money going to the rich finds its way to the poor eventually, why not just give money to the poor in the first place? Second, the rich have the ability to spend money on things that contribute nothing to the economy, keeping money circulating in a section of the economy that does not contribute to growth. Real estate, art and collectables, stocks, buying and selling of these things doesn't really help the economy.
Pretty much every economist who has actually looked at the stimulative effect of giving money to the rich versus giving moeny to the poor has shown that if your goal is to stimulate the economy, getting money into the hands of the poor is much better.
You're talking about the high risk/high reward investments that, if they pan out, provide the major productivity gains, the major improvements in people's lives, and the greatest increases in wealth production. Companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft (and many, many more) have vastly improved our lives in many ways. Or else money tossed down the toilet in some 'great idea' that wasn't really as great as investors thought. It's a good thing that 1) it's the people who have excess to their needs who are doing this type of investment in case the investment doesn't pan out, and 2) that we have people making these kinds of investments so that the big breakthroughs happen.
I sure hope so. Think about it. We want capital investment to try to find new ways to solve problems and new ways to improve our lives, but that investment is risky. It is ideal for those who have excess to their means to be the ones funding those risky investments.
The biggest economic innovation of the last decade was the development of the CDO. That was a winner.
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding something. Conservatives aren't the ones obsessed with the rich. Many conservatives would be more than happy to treat the rich exactly the same as anyone else. You want to implement a tax code with no loopholes that taxes everyone equally as a percentage of income (what could possibly be more equal than that), most conservatives would be all for it. You want to drop all class warfare rhetoric, where the amount of money someone has saved or the level of their income is treated completely irrelevant to the judging the quality of their character, you won't hear any complaints from conservatives. No, it is the liberals who have a hardon for the rich. Liberals claim to love the poor (in a condescending way) and hate the rich. Conservatives simply don't see how a person's bank statement is in any way indicative of that person's character.
If conservatives want everyone treated fairly, why are they opposed to eliminating the cap on payroll taxes? In the US, we have payroll and sales taxes, which are regressive, and the income tax, which is progressive. Add them up and we already have a pretty much flat tax rate. Nevertheless, conservatives are only pushing for flattening the income tax in the interest of "fairness".
I can't speak for all liberals, but I don't hate the rich. I hope to become one myself someday. But I do care about the poor and working class. Right now, the poor and working class are hurting, and the rich are doing fine. We should work on getting the poor and working class a fair shake before we start seeing what we can do for the rich.
The problem conservatives have with unemployment benefits is the same problem they have with many other entitlements; an aversion to people living off of society if those people are able to support themselves. That's why conservatives don't generally mind unemployment benefits as a means to ease the shock of a job loss and to help ease the transition to a new job, but the longer those benefits are extended, the more uncomfortable conservatives get. We know that people, on average, don't try as hard to find a new job when they have UI benefits. We also know that they don't work as hard if they feel that they can fall back on them. (I just had a discussion not 3 hours ago in my living room with someone who works part time about how she isn't going to do something her manager wants her to do, and how she hopes, as a consequence, that they will lay her off so that she can collect her full unemployment benefits because she still has X thousand dollars to drawn upon.) It's always a balance between 1) providing a safety net for those who truly need it, and 2) allowing people to leech off of society and thereby reducing economic growth.
After a certain point, quality of life becomes an issue. My mother once told me that I should "bleed in the gut" working at a job. To her, you had to make sacrifice after sacrifice for your paycheck. I explained that that sounded like a horrible way to live. Americans are obsessed with hard work and make a fetish out of it. We end up working long hours for low pay and low benefits. But why? Why can't we live in a world where we don't have to work so hard to pay the bills?
Frankly the European approach to work and life seems better. individuals don't make as much money, but they don't have to work as hard, and a lot of benefits are provided by the state so they don't have to pay as much for things that American workers do. American workers on the other hand keep working harder and harder, becoming more and more productive, and yet our paychecks don't seem to be reflecting that.
Limiting unemployment benefits is just anouther way for employers to keep people working in jobs that they hate or else force them to enter the labor pool right away after losing a job and help keep wages down.
