Many argue about the need to protect/boost agriculture and industry. Those are declining areas of the economy, especially when it comes to jobs.
Yet little advocacy for making it cheaper to buy services and more expensive to buy goods? Even though most workers are employed in the service sector, and have been for some time.
@LeoSammallahti I find it unclear what you are getting at outside of the lobbying power of big ag/industry. Advocacy for cheaper services, but more expensive goods? Does that benefit the service worker?
I am similarly unsure of the intention here. Leo, are you making a lightweight economy argument, that the service sector permits economic growth with less resource use, while combining that with the observation that we're mostly a service sector economy anyway so why not?
I don't have a clear opinion one way or another on the idea of services stimulus (which I think is what you are arguing for), but I do think that if we intelligently redesigned agriculture and industry there would be more small scale production of necessary goods, which I think would tend to shift the job market away from services.
@LeoSammallahti @dynamic Services cheaper equals lower salaries for service workers or cost of overhead reductions. I assume goods means nonessential goods or the service worker gets a possible double negative impact.
For a concrete example, if Finland would do like NZ and abolish all agricultural subsidies & tariffs, it would mean we could give an average of 1225 euro tax cut for every wage-earner every year, and we could do it progressively.
Wage earners would now have more money to spend, and it would be cheaper to hire someone to do something for you.
How would this be "trickle down" or reduce salaries for service workers?
I generally support the kind of policy that you're arguing for, but I would also support reallocating farm subsidies away from industrialized agriculture and toward small farms with sustainable practices, making farms less economically risky while also making healthier and more environmentally friendly food available to a larger number of consumers.
@dynamic @LeoSammallahti A lot of exciting data from studies on indigenous farming practices these days.
I think (at least in the USA) if one could disconnect the nostalgia of the idea of the small farmer from the minds of voters when talking about ag subsidies and insert the picture of the industrial ag behemoth, then more progress would be made toward ag reform.
I think an interesting framing would be to channel that nostalgia toward looking at where the farmers displaced by the Dust Bowl ended up. (Not that we shouldn't be looking at indigenous practices too.)
@lwriemen @LeoSammallahti
There's been a fair amount of public conversation about the fact that "farm subsidies" aren't so much for farmers as for the industries that use commodity crops as feedstock. Even the farmers who produce subsidized corn and soy are continually economically vulnerable.