From: "jim blair" Subject: It Depends on HOW YOU SAY IT! "Environmentalists changed the word jungle to rain forest, because no one would give them money to save a jungle. Same with swamps and wetlands." --George Carlin It Depends on HOW you SAY IT There are many "facts", proposals, or situations that sound quite different when they are simply said differently. Rather like describing the glass as being half full rather than half empty. I will give some examples: you can think of many others. On GERMANY & JAPAN Paying their Way Michael Coburn has posted several times the logical sounding proposition that Germany and Japan can compete more effectively with US firms in part because we are taxed to provide a military establishment that protects them as well as us. This is true, and it sounds reasonable to say that they should shoulder a larger share of the burden of their defense. But it sounds different when you say it this way: the world needs a united rearmed Germany and a re-militarized Japan. Now I don't want to be accused of xenophobia or German/Jap bashing. I know that a thousand years of Samurai tradition are wiped out by 50 years of democracy, and that Germans are now and forever peace loving democrats who would never revert to their Nazi, Prussian, Teutonic Knights or Vandal past. In this post, I am not advocating or criticizing the views presented, just pointing out that by SAYING them differently, they evoke a different response. US CHILD NEGLECT I read that forty percent of US children live in poverty. This sound different if you say that 40% of children are born to (mostly single) women who can't afford to raise them. AFDC pays single teenage girls who have babies and drop out of school. But we would not want a program which pays single teenage girls TO have babies and drop out of school. DEVELOPING OUR OWN RESOURCES Back in the 1960's there was much debate over a tax deduction for the petroleum industry call the "oil depletion allowance". The purpose was to encourage the drilling for oil in the US. It sounded reasonable to say that rather than becoming dependent on foreign sources, US companies should "develop our own resources." But oil is not like, say electricity, where there is no fixed amount and more can be generated. Although the people talk about "producing" oil, there IS a fixed amount of petroleum and it is not produced but EXTRACTED. And it sounds less convincing to support a policy of "deplete our own petroleum first". SOCIAL SECURITY: Retirement Plan or Tax and Spend? It sounds reasonable for people to put money aside for their retirement. If social security is said to be forcing people to do this, it sounds reasonable. But if you call it a tax that is coupled with a welfare program, neither the tax nor the spending makes any sense. It is a flat tax that applies to only the first $80,000 of earned income with no exemptions, and the benefits are mostly to the rich with no relation to need. PRAGMATIC vs DOGMATIC? Adrian Teo wrote: > "Economic policy must be pragmatic and not dogmatic." Do you >support this view and do you think that such flexibility is encouraged >by economic theory? > > -- > Adrian Teo Wei Min a.k.a. Strawberry Monster > E-mail : > Ecstasy : http://home.pacific.net.sg/~adrteo Hi, Although this sounds like a reasonable question, I think that it is actually meaningless. By that, I mean "pragmatic" and "dogmatic" are subjective concepts. While I am flexible and pragmatic, YOU waffle and are inconsistant. And while I stand by principle and am willing to stick with a sound policy until it shows positive results, YOU are bull-headed and dogmatic, unwilling to change course when your policy is not working. PRO-CHOICE and PRO-LIFE Surveys show that most Americans don't think that a mother should be able to murder her unborn baby, but do think that a woman should be able to terminate an unintended pregnancy. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION or RACIAL PREFFERENCES? The recent success of Proposition 209 in California, and the failure of the same measure in Houston Texas, reflect what several polls have shown. Most Americans do want to have laws to provide "affirmative action to help racial minorities". But only if they do not contain any "racial preferences", or "discriminate for against anyone on the basis of race". DISCOUNT or SURCHARGE? The credit card industry is the lobbying to have the differentials between cash and credit prices labeled "cash discounts" rather than "credit surcharges." INTERNATIONAL TRADE: NATIONS or PEOPLE? It sounds bad to say that in a typical recent year Japan buys only $50 billion worth of goods from us while we buy $90 billion from them. We have a balance -of -trade problem. But lets look at those numbers differently. Japan and the USA don't buy and sell these goods. People do. And Japan has only 123 million people to 260 million in the USA. We could say that the "average" Hiroshi in Japan buys $407 worth of goods made in the US, while the "average" Joe in the US buys only $346 worth of goods made in Japan. While Joe buys mostly electronics and cars, Hiroshi buys Madonna CD's , watches US movies and flies in US made planes. (I must confess that I don't understand international trade. But if the Japanese live in small houses eating mostly rice, and must commute great distances to work long hours at high stress jobs to make TV's and VCR's for us to watch while relaxing, the EXPERTS tell me this is BAD for us and GOOD for them: they are taking advantage of us. Mickey Kantor thinks we should force them to buy more US cars. Does this mean we will have to watch more Godzilla movies?) INTERNATIONAL TRADE: Tradegap: Countries or Products? A recent report indicates that the US trade deficit for May 97 is up, to $10.2 billion. This is BAD. There was an account of the report in USA TODAY Monday July 21, 97. The news story deals with the balance with several countries: The China deficit is the biggest at $3.8 billion (up from the month before), while the Japan deficit had dropped to $3.6 billion. This is a lot of misdirected thinking, even though most economists look at the trade picture this country-by-country way. See for example Lester Thurow's "The FUTURE of CAPITALISM" (or the review of it on my web page). Near the end of the USA TODAY story is the significant item: the foreign oil bill for May was $5.3 billion. Over half of the trade deficit is because of the oil we import. Just that the oil comes from several different countries, so our deficit with any ONE of them is not so big. Why is this "product" view more meaningful than the country-balance view? Consider that you keep a "balance-of-trade" record, and use the place-by-place method: the analog of the country-by-country approach. You discover that you have a trade deficit with just about everyone. All the stores where you shop, and all the places you go. Movie theaters, restaurants, etc. Your only trade surplus is with your employer, but fortunately that is big enough to (barely) cover the sum of all the deficits. But now say that you are running a monthly "trade deficit", like the USA. So you want to know why. Lets say your REAL problem is that you are spending a LOT of money (relative to your income) on fancy designer clothes. You might notice in your record that there are large monthly expenditures in each of several yuppie boutiques. You could "solve" your boutique problem by spending just as much on clothes, but buying them from more DIFFERENT stores, so your deficit from any one store was not especially big. Less than groceries, for example. But instead of places, you list expenses in terms of product type. All food (or clothes, entertainment, etc) are added no matter where you spent the money. Now it becomes clear what your total clothes budget is, and you can decide what to do about it. The same, I claim, with the trade deficit: it is the kind of products and not the country of origin that is important. Countries like England and Japan will "discover" that they import raw materials and export manufactured products. Most undeveloped countries will discover the reverse: they export raw materials and import finished goods. From and to which particular countries is of lesser importance. The USA will "discover" that our trade imbalance is not because of China or Japan: it is (mostly) because we burn oil faster than we can produce it. Once we learn this, what sense does it make for the federal government to continue its multi-billion dollar subsidy to cars and trucks? THE JEWISH SETTLEMENTS IN GAZA There is a debate in Israel over the Sharon plan to withdraw from all of the Jewish settlements in Gaza and from some on the west bank. Both supporters and opponents of the unilateral withdrawal have called for a referendum on the issue. But supporters want the question on the ballot to read "do you support the plan of the Prime Minister to withdraw from Gaza and selected west bank settlements?" Sounds objective? The opponents want the question to read "should land that God gave to Israel be surrendered to Hamas terrorists?" That's enough to make me anti-Semantic. Check out my web page: book reviews, essays, newsgroup threads, the Politically Incorrect Zone, and my life as a Virgin Island tour guide. ,,,,,,, ____________________ooo__(_O O_)__ooo_________________________ (_) Jim Blair (jeblair@facstaff.wisc.edu) University of Wisconsin, Madison "This message is brought to you using biodegradable binary bits and 100 % recycled bandwidth." >Hi Jim: > >Just dropping a line to say I like your text mentioned above. > >I'm also a "balance freak" (after discovering that 3000 years ago > the Chinese in the I-Ching invented that already, and Carl Jung >promoted it "recently" by a foreword in Richard Wilhelm's translation >(translated again to English...;-) You wonder what's left over;-( > Also: > "It all depends on how you see it" (and from which distance) > >-- >Ciao, Nico Benschop, >benschop@iae.nl -- http://www.iae.nl/users/benschop > Feel free to browse there... > Hi, Glad you like my "Say It" file. There is probably other things on my web page that would interest you. "It all depends on how you say it" "It all depends on how you see it" No conflict here, since you "call then like you see them". THE THREE UMPS So before closing I must add the famous baseball umpire story. 3 umpires are having a beer and discussing their philosophy of the game. Ump #1: "I call them like I see them". Ump #2: "I call them like they ARE". Ump #3 (who REALLY understands the game): They ain't nothing, until I call them. AND FINALLY: Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation: I have preferences. You have biases. He/She has prejudices.