Now that Occupy Wall Street has gone mainstream, politicians are going to have to take sides. The Republicans have chosen theirs:
“Greedy union bosses are calling the shots,” the ad’s narrator says, referring to Washington. “They want their payback.”
“They won’t take no for an answer,” the narrator says as shots of protesting workers fill the screen.
Somehow the growing disparity in the US and the recession brought on by the financial industry is the fault of …. unions.
Big business will always tell you that reducing regulations will increase the number of jobs. They won’t tell you about how regulations can increase the number of jobs (a decrease of regulations in the oil industry might increase the number of jobs in the oil industry but reduce the number in the tourism and alternative energy industries). Especially when regulation helps much more than it hurts (via here):
The benefits of the G-SIB framework relate primarily to the reduction in the exposure of the financial system to systemic crises that can have long-lasting effects on the economy. The LEI estimated the benefits of Basel III by multiplying the degree to which it reduces the annual probability of a systemic crisis, by an estimate of the overall cost of a typical crisis in terms of lost output. Drawing on the LEI’s results, the MAG estimated that raising capital ratios on G-SIBs could produce an annual benefit in the order of 0.5% of GDP, while the Basel III and G-SIB proposals combined contribute an annual benefit of up to 2.5% of GDP – many times the costs of the reforms in terms of temporarily slower annual growth.
