I think what's holding back growth is inequality and the 40 hour work week. Imagine how much economic activity would be generated by fixing those things.
Remember that political changes often don't do what the label says.
Something more concrete and non-code: Americans could start by redistributing some of the money belonging to people who earn 100K or more a year.
You made a more concrete proposal than many ever do - "100K or more". But you're still partly speaking in code.
Now, define "redistributing". Redistributing to who? To those making below 100K? Below 60K? Below 30K? And, how much is going to be lost in bureaucratic overhead? There's very little demand for taking money from those making 100K and using it to hire more bureaucrats making 150K.
Next, define "some". How much are you going to take from someone making 100K? 200K? 1 million? 10 million?
What are you going to do about those who make very little, but have large assets? Nothing, or something? And if something, then what is your definition of "large"?
Finally, what do you mean by "start"? How much further are you going to go?
But now I’m supposed to detail my armchair tax plan/redistribution plan when I started out being a thousand times more specific than you? Sure, seems fair. And then when I answer all of those inquisitive questions, then what? Maybe bring up how taxation is inherently violent? (Well, I have no idea what your politics are like since you are all about expressing them through “air quotes”).
But sure. More concretely I think that specifically SC software engineers who work for data harvesting companies should be taxed pretty heavily. I also think that anyone with an IQ over 115 should get mandatory, shall we say, night courses on socialist/government theory and praxis. And anyone with an IQ above 125 should have to submit their big brains to 100 hours/yearly government-mandated Extracurricular Activities so that those big brains can do something good (less time for SSC (old name) and HN). Like making better government IT infrastructure so that there is less need for bureaucratic overhead (some EU countries have much better government IT which helps to streamline all kinds of services aimed at citizens). Is that specific enough for you?
If you actually found my statement opaque, I shall try to me more clear. It's really easy for politicians to pass something, call it "fixing inequality", and completely ignore that it doesn't actually do anything to fix inequality. If you care about inequality, you don't want something labeled "fixing inequality"; you want something that actually does something about inequality.
For the rest of my point, see Paul Graham's essay Economic Inequality (http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html). He argues that attempting to fix inequality may reduce the creation of new, high-growth companies. That probably isn't the "fix" that we want - it will prevent the creation of a large number of new jobs, for one thing.
I'll ignore the personal attack parts of your second paragraph.
Your third paragraph is far enough out there for me to say that, if you're actually serious, I will oppose you as strenuously as I can.
The New Deal is also something that can happen when the capitalists would rather resolve the situation peacefully than to lose everything.
A New Deal won’t happen now because there aren’t enough actors who are forcing the hand of the capitalist class.
what do you mean that's not what you meant at all
(And I know that's what you're advocating from a different comment you just made about the New Deal.)
In a free market, the best allocators of resources are rewarded with more resources to continue allocating; the worse allocators are punished by losing their capacity to allocate. This is called capitalism.
Contrast that to a system where goverment eliminates inequality: Government allocates resources, meaning the worst people, people who are best at graft and pull, are rewarded. This is a disaster. We can already see this happening in the US. One egregious offender is the Dept. of Homeland Security which is siphoning off more and more national resources and growing like a cancer. The university system (which is in reality Federally managed) is an egregious offender. The medical system (which is Federally managed but run for profit through graft) is an egregious offender.
The latter system---the system of "government management," where the government doesn't let people receive unequal rewards for unequal success---is a path straight to the butcher's block.
My local DMV provides dramatically better customer service than most private companies I've interacted with lately. Government entities are also required to at least pretend to account for efficiency, whereas private companies have an unknown - but known to be massive - amount of waste, corruption, and outright fraud.
In any case, nobody is seriously advocating for a full socialist/government-planned economy. Looking at basic workers' rights and throwing a fit about OMG SOCIALISM is such a ludicrous level of libertarian delusion it borders on self-parody. In reality, it is very well known - by psychology, by statistics, and by empiricism - that societies that don't allow the most powerful to make unchecked decisions based on their current level of resources do better than those who do.
There are a few pretty obvious reasons why this is true. First, "currently having resources" is not a good indicator of skill in resource allocation. Second, there are problems of misaligned value functions - what is "efficient" for one actor may be extremely inefficient for society as a whole, requiring action by a government (or some equivalently collective entity) to properly account for externalities. Third, mismatched negotiating power (because employees must agree to some employment or else starve) mean that even those actually party to any given agreement might not be maximizing their own resource allocation by doing so. And fourth (not finally, but finally off the top of my head), there are problems of diversification in the face of uncertainty - resource-havers can take maximum-expected-value actions even when they have low probability of payoff (e.g., risky business ventures that will pay off 10x 20% of the time but go bankrupt the other 80% of the time), because they can afford to make those bets enough times to even out the variance; non-resource-havers must settle for lower-expected-value but lower-variance options, which limits their success even with perfectly skillful allocation.
You're also setting up a straw man with the comment about workers' rights. A call for the government to "fix inequality" with something like the New Deal is not a call for workers' rights. It's implicitly a call for the government to run much more of the economy than it already does. There is no other way to achieve the stated objective in the stated way.
Playing the old "fit about socialism" card is not impressive. I never used the word "socialism" because it's a slippery word that leads to low quality discussion. It's beside the point. Is every argument against government management magically defeated by the "OMG SOCIALISM" sarcasm that left wing people always trot out like this?
Also, probably needless to say, I disagree with your analysis.
edit: I will respond to the following:
> In reality, it is very well known - by psychology, by statistics, and by empiricism - that societies that don't allow the most powerful to make unchecked decisions based on their current level of resources do better than those who do.
That's simply not true that this is "very well known." And you are conflating political power (which is what we call "power") with economic power (which isn't what we normally call "power"). The power of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet is limited mostly to doing good or just losing their money. That has nothing to do with the power weilded by, say, the Dept. of Homeland Security, or the American medical insurance industry (which gets its power through regulatory graft backed by political power and ultimately force). Forceful power, i.e. "power," is just not comparable to the "power" one gets by voluntarily trading with others.
It's silly to say your non sequitur is "well known" by "psychology" or "statistics" (what do those have to do with it, anyway) or "empiricism." That's nothing like my saying that something is "well known" to history. 20th century history is straightforward and direct (and relevant) in a way that psychology and statistics are not. We have tried big government management many times and it always fails. Look at the many communist countries that actually stayed communist (i.e. China doesn't count, but it's a shit show anyway). Look at fascist-nationalist command economies like the Nazis and today's Russians. Those societies and economies evidently do not work. (I would add, look at the outcome of the New Deal, but that is more nuanced.) There is no way a psychology paper could have that kind of evidentiary power.
When you say it: just spitting facts, being no-nonsense.
When someone else uses the same device to say the opposite: vile sarcasm which is not on-point or even funny since it is obviously false (you hold the opposite opinion so of course it is: it is self-evident).
Using the "same device" would be saying, "I think the opposite is self-evident..." and then elaborating.
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Sarcasm is when you repeat something without negating it, but indicating that you really think the opposite (negation). Saying “private sector management doesn’t work” and meaning it is not sarcasm.
"a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain"
I think the response I'm complaining about is satirical, so I think it matches sarcasm by this definition.
Anyway, even if hadn't been sarcasm, technically, it seems mocking and unkind. And it's not a big deal, but I think my response of "I don't appreciate that" was pretty tit for tat.
Where were you in 2008?
The government doesn't have a mechanism to self-regulate. Democracy was supposed to regulate the government, and probably can in small societies, or perhaps if formulated the correct way. American democracy definitely doesn't regulate government, and it doesn't self-regulate, so it's a system that's out of control.
You see the same mechanisms (plus others) in many societies in the 20th century. I don't see any evidence or reason to think the government can manage the economy. And a big part of the causal explanation is what I've stated above. Another is that the government isn't omniscient; it doesn't have enough information. Market solutions don't need to be omniscient and price serves to carry information.
As an aside, fun fact: Did you know that in the US, price controls are used by a government committee to set the price of the fundamental good, which is the US dollar? That does a lot to disrupt price as a signal of information. People think in the US we don't have government price fixing, and they are wrong. (I use the US as a pet example but I guess the above is basically true everywhere.)
China, on the other hand, as compared to the west, likes centrally planning things, but they can only lean on that opposing ideal so hard before they'd fail too, for reasons you have pointed out. Both approaches have yielded different mixes of central planning and bottom-up self-organization, and they're both necessarily mixes.