I would change the word “champion” to “hallmark” in the last sentence, second paragraph.
I am not a liberal biased prof...so I give it an B+ just to keep you pushing forward.
Nice job
“English 121” looks like a freshman level English class. Given that, I would give you an “A.” This would be solid work for an upper-level economics class....
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From an academic-rigor standpoint, I would say the paper is somewhat lacking. I realize it may primarily be because of length constraints, but, two main points:
1. You seem to confuse economic and political systems, and use them interchangeably. It’s possible to have a “fairly capitalist” system in which the government still strongly controls personal freedom but permits fairly open markets. China is increasingly an example of this, where they now allow private property ownership and private (and foreign) businesses, but have wound down a significant number of their state-owned enterprises (SEOs), while they continue to maintain tight political control of the country and tightly curtail personal freedom. Compare that with many countries in Western Europe that allow free press, voting, private property, etc., but also prop up a large number of SEOs. “Completely Planned-economies” have been shown to fail almost universally in practice, so that’s a valid assertion, but the degree of economic autonomy does not necessarily imply the degree of political/personal autonomy in a country.
2. You don’t do a very thorough job of handling the nuance of the way modern countries are run, and where they fall on the economic “spectrum” between “socialism” and “capitalism.” The former USSR was one of the only examples of an economy dominated by SEOs, but essentially all countries have always had SEOs to one degree or another. Even in the free-wheeling days of the 1800’s in the US, the government owned canals, roads, bridges, dams, etc., along with running public services like water, waste management/disposal, and to some degree education (and universities). Modern europe has countries at just about every point on the spectrum (in terms of domination of their economy by SEOs).
3. You make the assertion that lower taxes *always* equate to higher government income through increased economy activity. This is true over a range of taxation levels (and types of taxes), but from an academic standpoint, is not strictly true. Dropping taxes from the current ~30% to 1% would decrease revenue, dropping them further to .1% of .01% would decrease revenue further. For your assertion to be true, in the 30%-to-1% case for instance, the GDP would have to increase from the current ~$13 Trillion to $390 Trillion, which would obviously not be the case. This might be the case if you drop it from ~30%.
4. Additionally, your assertion that strictly lowering taxes would lead to a resurgence in manufacturing in the US ignores that taxes is only a single component of doing business in the US. As long as you’re not allowed to dump toxic chemicals in public waterways, for instance, that will always pose an additional cost on doing business here compared to, say, Mexico, China, or many parts of Africa or South America. Additionally, you don’t mention the extremely large differential in the cost of labor in the US vs. foreign manufacturing hubs (especially in a “full employment” situation which drives up wages extremely quickly). Say it costs a factory $40k to employ a worker in the US, and 25% of that cost is taxes (10K). In a zero-tax scenario, it still costs that company $30k to employ a worker at a reasonable standard of living in the US. Now if it costs them $10k to employ a worker in China, the cost of transportation of the final goods would have to cost $20k+ for the output of the worker to make up that price. Unless oil prices go to $200/barrel (and countries like China stop subsidizing oil), the cost of transportation will continue to be dominated by the cost-of-labor differential due to our different standards of living.
But hey, it’s a college paper, revise revise revise!
I agree... nice essay