Rocket Scientist
Member
If all you do is listen to PD, you'd think politics was easy business and compromises and solutions could be shooting out everyone's ass on a daily basis.
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PoliGAF 2013 |OT1| Never mind, Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
- Thread starter ClovingWestbrook
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Aaron Strife
Banned
He's a Clinton fan, which basically means he'd prefer it if Obama caved in advance and sold Republican ideas as a progressive plan, while not actually passing anything and riding a good economy.
TacticalFox88
Banned
That'd be Angry Fork.
speculawyer
Member
They'll never find what they are looking for because it doesn't exist. They are loopy over that issue. FFS, there have been several investigations, hearings, people have been fired/stepped down, etc.
Link
The Autumn Wind
It gives them an excuse to be obstructionist without having to say "Because we hate Obama."
TacticalFox88
Banned
You know, I'm actually surprised no Congressman or Senator has accidentally let that slip out of why they're acting the way they do.
So I got this quote from a link in 'The Newsroom' thread, and it kinda pissed me off:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/newsroom-panel-butts-heads-piers-425790
Everything wrong with the CNN philosophy right here.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/newsroom-panel-butts-heads-piers-425790
Everything wrong with the CNN philosophy right here.
Rocket Scientist
Member
I'm sure there are people who actually feel that way, but I don't know about him.
I'll have to pay more attention.
ClassyPenguin
Banned
So politicians willingly doing what they can to slow down economic recovery for the sake of ideology is dry and boring?
Not as exciting as the FISCAL CLIIIIFFF SHOOOOOWWWDOOOOOWWWWN!!!!!!!!
TacticalFox88
Banned
DEAD HEAT!!!
Black Mamba
Member
in the US? Probably during W Bush's tenure which would explain why private investment was so abysmal. There also might have been some during the mid-90s but the lowering of rates from then on reversed it.
What's important to note about crowding out is that it happens when deficits are high and borrowing pushes up private interest rates. This happens because people want to own gov't debt (it's no-risk) and people don't spend on private investment (thus pushing all rates up to entice). But we haven't seen this because this only works when people want to invest privately to begin with (demand for money is not low) or supply of loanable money isn't high. Right now we have both: little demand and lots of money sitting around (liquidity trap).
The funny thing here is that in this situation gov't spending (and increasing borrowing) crowds-in private investment. Literally does the opposite of what is feared. By spending a lot and having no effect on the interest rates, it can increase confidence and Demand for goods and services (and thus increase private investment).
That said, gov't can crowd out private investment through tax raises. We are seeing this with the payroll tax hike as we speak.
Which is exactly what the stimulus did and what we should be doing now.
There are studies showing examples possible crowding out in non-modernized nations, though. Not very applicable since our money is safe.
Here are 2 studies (1 US and 1 Japan) that demonstrate no crowding out:
http://www.ide.go.jp/English/Publish/Download/Dp/pdf/074.pdf Japan
http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/11808.pdf US (taxes do it, gov't spending doesn't)
Says the woman who had no problems raising payroll tax rates.
I don't want to hear a single GOPer propose lower rates outside of the payroll tax right now. You lost the election, go crawl in a fucking hole.
But to grow the economy you need to lower rates hyuck hyuck
Black Mamba
Member
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-na-gop-medicare-20130303,0,1993497.story
Republicans pushing for:
Lower tax rates
medicare vouchers
less Obamacare (cutting medicaid)
military spending increase
social safety net decrease.
Literally everything Romney ran on and fucking lost. Fucking Christ.
They're still going to push medicare voucher system.
I seriously wish Obama would have a presser at evening where he does this.
"Look, the Republicans are asking us to do everything they ran on last year and lost on. I'm willing to compromise to a point but these people are insane. America, nothing will get done until you vote these clowns out of office. They are intentionally derailing our economy to hurt middle and lower class americans at the expense of the rich. I'm done playing their game. Until you vote them out or they stop being insane, my office is closed.
PS: Paul Ryan, eat a dick"
TacticalFox88
Banned
You know what, I want Obama to call the Republicans "Economic Terrorists" not only for how true it is, BUT just to see the absolutely priceless media reaction.
zero shift
Banned
Neoliberal economics in general is economic terrorism.
Balanced approach.
Sound like a party that have run out of ideas and terrified of their base.
Gracias, yo.
What the hell is up with these guys? It was one thing when the Republicans were deluded into thinking the public totally sided with their policies after the teahadists helped them in the midterms and tried to pass Ryan's original medicare plan. But after having their asses handed to them in 2012, these idiots come up with a new medicare proposal that happens to be (if you can believe it) even worse than the original one?!
What the fuck.
Rocket Scientist
Member
Needs to happen. Never will.
So uh, this keystone thing... It's happening.gif? What the hell is going on.
empty vessel
Member
I don't think you can. Randall Wray: "Investment creates saving. Budget deficits create saving. You need the spending before you get the income that you then decide to save. The second step is to decide what form in which you want to save it. If [it were argued] that treasury debt might be preferred over corporate debt, then weve got a portfolio decision that could mean higher interest rates on corporate bonds. That, of course, depends on Treasurys debt management strategy. However, as we know, budget deficits, all else equal, place downward pressure on overnight interest rates (relieved through government bond sales unless the Fed wants ZIRPzero interest rate policy). So: a) deficits create saving, so cannot reduce the amount that might go into useful private investment; and b) deficits place downward pressure on interest rates, not upward pressure."
See also Bill Mitchell: http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=381 (scroll down to "The Myth of Crowding Out" or just read the whole thing)
ClovingWestbrook
Banned
So I am turning into Diablos but is Obama REALLY considering agreeing to a continuation to run the government at post sequestration levels to avoid a government shutdown?
Doesn't seem too crazy.
Government has been shrinking continuously under Obama anyway. His spending wants have never revolved around government directly.
Depends what you mean by "post sequestration." He's willing to sign a continuing resolution at the same levels as the previous one, which is only reasonable, since he signed the last one. However, such a continuing resolution would not lift the sequester.
ClovingWestbrook
Banned
I understand it wouldn't lift the sequester but he signed the previous one believing (hopefully) that the current sequester wouldn't actually go into effect. Now that it has and social programs are going to be drastically affected I don't see why he is going to sign a continuing resolution that includes such a drastic cut to social programs going forward. It seems like a pretty significant give to the GOP hawks.
speculawyer
Member
How about economic vascillators. Economic inconsistents.
They when nonstop about the deficit but when you want to raise taxes to reduce the deficit they instead insist we CUT taxes . . . which will only make the deficit bigger. WTF? Make up your fucking mind.
speculawyer
Member
I'm getting more & more into Steven Keen's economics.
The entire profession of economics is a big fucking joke. It is more a division of politics than it is social science.
Yes it is, I don't think we can save economics departments, there is too much money invested on keeping them the way they are, but science need to step the fuck up and come up with a better alternative to this shit.
This is too important of a field to keep it a humanity.
p.s.
Would now be a good time to remind people that the noble prize in economics is not a real noble prize but some unrelated shit the central bank of Sweden started giving out ("in memory of Alfred Noble") in the 60s to make economics look like a more serious profession than it really is?
It's always a good time
Rocket Scientist
Member
I didn't know that Nobel stuff. That's sad lol.
So the hate Obama is getting from the far left over austerity is pretty sad at times. I will never understand these people. Sometimes they seem just as clueless about the way the world works as the tea partiers. Instead of trying to push people to vote during midterm elections, they vilify both parties and make it seem like you shouldn't vote for either. It's sad how they are facilitating in part the problems in the house. It's good to criticize but these people are not being constructive, rather destructive. More and more people seem to get sucked into it too.
I'd love to believe that in the long term it could lead to a viable third party but it would mean decades of a weak left and Republican control. God knows what kind of developments could happen while could strengthen trust in conservative ideals. Why not any people prefer the real changes were seeing and fight for the significant changes we could be seeing with dem control instead of shitting all over democrats and hampering progress completely?
So the hate Obama is getting from the far left over austerity is pretty sad at times. I will never understand these people. Sometimes they seem just as clueless about the way the world works as the tea partiers. Instead of trying to push people to vote during midterm elections, they vilify both parties and make it seem like you shouldn't vote for either. It's sad how they are facilitating in part the problems in the house. It's good to criticize but these people are not being constructive, rather destructive. More and more people seem to get sucked into it too.
I'd love to believe that in the long term it could lead to a viable third party but it would mean decades of a weak left and Republican control. God knows what kind of developments could happen while could strengthen trust in conservative ideals. Why not any people prefer the real changes were seeing and fight for the significant changes we could be seeing with dem control instead of shitting all over democrats and hampering progress completely?
speculawyer
Member
Scott Walker really is evil, isn't he?
Squeezing a few more bucks out of poor people to give to rich people does not help the country. It does not produce new products, it does not make things more efficient, it does not grow the economy.
It is simply usury. If Republicans actually gave a shit about the religion they claim to believe they should be up in arms about this immoral behavior. But the religion is just an opiate for the base.
http://news.yahoo.com/wis-gov-wants-rent-own-161157765.html
Squeezing a few more bucks out of poor people to give to rich people does not help the country. It does not produce new products, it does not make things more efficient, it does not grow the economy.
It is simply usury. If Republicans actually gave a shit about the religion they claim to believe they should be up in arms about this immoral behavior. But the religion is just an opiate for the base.
The real historical irony is that the real Noble prize was founded because Alfred Noble felt remorse for making so much profit out of an invention that was used (but not designed) to harm people, and all a sudden we start giving awards in his name to the "greed is good" crowd like Milton Freedman.
Fuck...
Glenn Grothman said something I agree with:
I feel really dirty here. Really really dirty.
TacticalFox88
Banned
It's kind of sad that the Democratic party is pretty much the only reason this country (and subsequently the fucking world for that matter) hasn't gone straight to absolute hell.
But people STILL like to pretend that both sides are equally at fault.
The last I read, over at TPM this weekend, was that Obama was open to adhering to the funding levels agreed to in 2011, as a way to roll back the sequester, rather than using the current post-sequester baseline. But you may be talking about something else which I have not seen. Have a link handy?
NYCmetsfan
Banned
What's the problem with economics? I mean I get a lot of criticisms that it's not a true science but how else are we supposed to study the economy. People like smith and Keynes have helped a lot to understanding how policy affects the real world
ClovingWestbrook
Banned
Was reading this article and it looks like what you said is true about spending being based on 2011 levels. Though this will be interesting:
speculawyer
Member
Because if you ask a question to 3 economists you'll get 5 different answers. Why didn't the economists predict the financial melt-down? You can say "well some did" but what good is that if they are a minority voice? How do you know which ones to listen to?
There are certainly some fundamental concepts in economics that are correct and useful but those are ones that are basically intuitive and no big deal. But when it gets into the complex stuff, they have no clue as to what they are talking about and don't even agree with each other. They are like doctors putting leeches on things for a good bleeding to cure you.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
I don't understand how we elected this piece of shit. I really don't
It's deeper than that, it's not that they disagree, is that they can't agree even about mechanism to resolve those differences.
I know I made that comparison before, but contrast economics with climatology - strong economic interests have tried to subvert both fields.
Now compare the outcomes, for all the money, publicity, fox news histrionics (and Toxic Adam putting fingers in his ears shouting "lalalalala, I can't hear you, we mustn't make rush decisions, the evidence is inconclusive"), there is practically no support for that point of view in the scientific community.
It's not because scientists are better than economists, it's because science provides an objective ways to test theories, and that the antidote to bullshit.
To expand on this, economics in a real world sense is really, really complex. Examining a single economic idea in a vacuum is simple enough; examining that same idea in a real economy is not. If you have a dial in front of you that controls a light next to you, it's easy to tell the impact the dial has on the light. If you have a dial in front of you that you control 10 to the right of you that you don't, and a light at the end of that, those 10 dials may shift when you turn yours, they may shift on their own without any input from you. It's significantly more difficult to see what impact your dial has. (I would also include Chichikov's explanation in here as well, the mechanism to resolve those differences is weak. Would could potentially model the economy, but all sorts of potentially unresolvable differences would come of that).
That's not to say that economics aren't aware of that. I recall in one class, someone asked of the cloth and wine scenario if that speaks to anything outside of maximizing the amount of cloth and wine you have. The answer was no, who knows what that did for employment or the environment of those countries; in a system with the same two countries and more industries, who knows what the exact effects might be on the other existing industries.
ITEP: States with “High Rate” Income Taxes are Still Outperforming No-Tax States
Executive Summary
Executive Summary
- Lawmakers seeking to cut or repeal state personal income taxes often claim that states without such taxes are outperforming the rest of the country, and that their economic growth can be easily replicated in any state that abandons its personal income tax. The
governors of Indiana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, as well as high-ranking officials pushing for income tax repeal in Louisiana and North Carolina, are some of the more influential lawmakers that have used this talking point. But this claim is based on an analysis by supply-side economist Arthur Laffer that is extremely flawed. - In reality, states that levy personal income taxes, including the states with the highest top rates, have seen more economic growth per capita and less decline in their median income level over the last ten years than the nine states that do not tax income. Unemployment rates have been nearly identical across states with and without income taxes.
- Laffer’s claims to the contrary rely on cherry-picking a number of blunt, aggregate measures of economic growth that are closely related to population trends, and incorrectly asserting that tax policy is a leading force behind the migration trends that fuel this growth. Laffer omits measures like median income growth and state unemployment rates in his comparisons of states with and without income taxes, yet selectively cites these measures in other studies when the story they tell fits his preferred narrative.
- More fundamentally, Laffer’s simplistic analysis fails to account for the fact that states without income taxes often choose not to levy such a tax precisely because they possess unusual economic advantages that allow them to raise revenue (and grow their
economies) in ways that other states cannot. In-state analysts and Laffer himself have correctly observed that factors like natural resources, federal military spending, and even favorable climate contribute to state economic growth. Many of these factors are of
great significance in states without income taxes, but while Laffer mentions them in the text of his reports, he makes no effort to control for them in his quantitative analyses. - More careful academic literature that controls for non-tax factors has often found state income taxes to have little, if any, impact on state economic growth.
- The underlying theory that Laffer uses to argue for cutting state income tax rates downplays or even ignores the importance of public investments like education and infrastructure to the success of state economies. It also assumes there is no economic cost in shifting more of the responsibility for paying taxes onto middle and low-income families—the consumers whose purchasing power is central to the success of any economy
NYCmetsfan
Banned
I do see this. I guess I see Economics less as a science and more of like History or Political Science (which again isn't really science).
I see it as something in which someone analyses things and comes to some sort of conclusions. I think I see what you guys are saying which I think is that while it can be useful its being treated like something its not, (it's not science because its not objective and can be replicated)?
Question about taxes. When a business is taxed its only on profit no? So why would taxes discourage someone? You can never "lose" money due to taxes just not make a hypothetical greater amount.
Am i missing something?
Aaron Strife
Banned
because the press gives him a free ride, much like Ron Johnson
TacticalFox88
Banned
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/tax-bills-rich-families-approach-30-year-high
This whole article simply infuriates me.
This whole article simply infuriates me.
Atmospheric science and cosmology are also very difficult to model, that's why we applied the best tool we ever came up with - the scientific method.
I often wonder if the entire existence of the Austrian school of economics can be explained by Hayek failing to understand regression analysis.
No one was ever able to explain to me how taxation on profits impact hiring decisions.
People start saying shit like "risk", but I have tried to apply basic statistical modeling to it and it just doesn't add up.
NYCmetsfan
Banned
Yes god forbid we're going back to Clinton/Bush 1 tax rates.
The idea is that having to pay those taxes will be such an inconvenience that it will stifle the growth of the business.
It falls apart when you realize that people will not stop making money just because they're not making all of the money.
edit: Slightly related, I was having a conversation with someone in a comments sections of an Obamacare article, and he pointed out that he's not starting a "successful business" because he would be forced to provide healthcare to his employees and it would eat up too much of his profits.
Once the exemptions, subsidies, and other benefits small business get through Obamacare, where pointed out. He stuck hard on his original assessment and added that his business would grow past the 50 employee exemption within the first two years. That's how amazing and guaranteed he felt his business idea was, and yet he didn't want to start it "under Obama".
The cherry on top is that he ended the conversation with the fact that he was planning on providing health insurance to his employees anyway. -_-
Agreed. After I hit submit, it occurred to me that scientific models are hard, too. Economics currently lacks the means (or will) to institute a scientific method.
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