Re: How...
 

careful. when the Germans experience financial pain across several years things tend to end up badly.

Re: How...
 

Perhaps that's why the ECB is interested in tightening when only Germany is showing any need for it.

-- breaking --
 

New video of the PB.

Re: -- breaking --
 

Ty, it looks like you beat Hank there, 2 to 1.

Re: How...
 

Germany's model is like GE/GE Capital's. Half the people/companies in Europe buying what Germany's making couldn't afford it if not for the German financing provided for its purchase. That could work in better time. Now, it's a perpetual bailout machine.

Not that he always makes sense
 

Bill Gross is still hawking the "discredited" Keynes. Clearly he really needs to stop reading economists and start reading the business press:

TPM

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Newt continues to shed staff. http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news...own-?GT1=43001

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

"Appearing this morning on the Laura Ingraham radio program, Gingrich laid out plans for a stepped-up campaign effort in Iowa and noted that he will soon deliver a speech about inefficiency in the Environmental Protection Agency."

I'm sure that EPA speech will turn things around for him.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Are federal taxes high or low? Low.

This is why Romney can't win
 

I do not believe that Romney really believes that federal disaster relief spending is immoral (when deficit-financed), but he thinks the extreme libertarian/Tea Party view is the right thing for him to say to help his electoral chances.

To me that's good reason to question his judgment (does he really think that sells?) and demonstrates to voters that he is truly the king of calculated flip flopping.

On liberatarianism
 

This is really an excellent article, at least to a reader who hasn't read much of the writings of scholars of that school.

I think rather few words could have been used, however, to undermine the central Nozickian premise, stated in the article as: "Taking the earnings of n hours of labor is like taking n hours from the person."

It's always been difficult for me to understand how a person that purportedly believes in markets can buy this proposition. To do so requires abandonment of market theory. That is, this proposition can only be true if in the absence of taxation the wage value of n would be the same. But I can't see how that could be right. Income taxation should shift the labor supply curve to the left, thus requiring higher wages.

Thus you only get to the immorality of taxation by making unrealistic assumptions (this is only one, obviously) about ideal state.

Then again, a fair number of these people think the most extreme form of hard dollar policy, i.e. gold, is the way to do too, so I guess one shouldn't be surprised.

ETA: I didn't realize until after posting this how appropriate it is as a follow up to the immediately prior post.

More of the same
 

Taibbi on Bachmann is worth a read, if only for his usual entertaining style and insight.

Re: More of the same
 

1. If he thinks Anoka is tiny, he'd need a whole new vocabulary for the town where I grew up.

2. I'd never heard of Regent Law School until this week when a lawyer I know told me she went there. I went to an evangelical Christian college and loved it, but my criteria for law school was whether it would help me get a decent job after graduation without being excessively in debt.

3. I think I might be more afraid of Bachmann than I was of Palin.

Re: On liberatarianism
 

The problem is wages are controlled by factors beyond mere taxation. I agree with you that income taxes cause wage increases. This is pretty well documented. The difficulty arises in those taxes being spent based on projections of consistent increases in wages going forward, and increased tax revenues from them. Other factors beyond taxes can cause wage stagnation, or depression (competition from cheaper foreign labor, most notably). So while the wages stay flat, or drop, the taxes, pegged to wage growth assumptions, outstrip them. In this regard, taxes fuck workers.*

And as a result, you get people offering, and believing in purist forms of ideology. Like any other political concept, Libertarianism has good and bad points to it. To believe whole hog, unyieldingly, in Conservatism, Liberalism, or Libertarianism is to display willful ignorance, or cognitive deficiency... Or to demonstrate one is, like the professor at issue in this article, a hopelessly disconnected ivory tower fool.
__________________

*And isn't this the problem with all govt spending? It never contracts in concert with actual revenue. It's always pegged to projections that are almost always overly generous, creating a debt overhang in recession. There's always some statutory scheme in place, or some intractability in the type of spending being done ("We're half way through the stadium construction! We can't cut the budget now just because the economy has collapsed!")

Government doesn't seek or attract the brightest or the creative. It attracts drones and opportunists, and compels them to follow the status quo. Nobody ever says, "Hey... Maybe we should cut spending a bit here in advance of an economic rough patch experts see coming." It just rolls along, spending based on rote projections assuming the most possible money available for the most important special interests and voting blocs it serves.

Ask yourself, have you ever heard of any taxing body decreasing spending in advance of imminent adverse economic conditions? Govt never curbs anything until it's too late - until it's in crisis and has to borrow up to its chin to cover what it's promised. And now it can't do that anymore, which it descibes as a "crisis." I'd label it something else: The long overdue calling of a line of credit that should never have been extended so far in the first place.

Re: On liberatarianism
 

I don't disagree with any of that. I disagree with the absurd utopian assumption that taxation is theft or coerced labor because a person "has to work" for some period of time to pay his taxes. That is literally wrong, and, as I said, implies an abandonment of the market.

It can be a useful illustration, but it isn't the underpinning of a moral philosophy.

I think two of these are flexible labels that are applied to different sets of policy prescriptions over time. The third is better compared to communism in that it purports to contain a soup-to-nuts moral philosophy that's Keynes summed up nicely as "An extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam."

Precisely because it's not meant to. It would be strange indeed to have unemployment benefits and social safety net programs that contract with revenue.

The problem with government spending is that it doesn't contract, or stay flat, as revenue exceeds expenditures. Our political system only allows imbalance in one direction.

The debt overhang to be concerned with is that accumulated during the expansion. Before W, we tended not to do too much of that.

Almost by definition, experts, in the collective, do not see the rough patch coming.

Who is the "it" in this sentence? Because it surely should not be the treasury, whose only obstacle to borrowing is an asinine bit of legislation and a dysfunctional political system.

Again, who is calling what?

Re: On liberatarianism
 

Not as I apply it. I think Libertarianism can, for a reasonable person, be tempered to meet the pragmatic realities at hand. Taxation is Theft sounds like an absurdity to me. How the hell else would we have roads? Police? Libertarianism only succeeds as an argument of degree. I don't think anyone needs to listen to an absolutist Libertarian. He's clearly batshit crazy.

SS, thank God, follows inflation, which is a quasi-revenue peg. Why can't all other spending flex and contract similarly?

I'm with you on the second point. But it's not the problem. It's one half of the the problem, the other half of which is failure to contract with revenue decreases. Keeping surpluses for rainy days would be a nice cure all. But in some instances, such as the structural mess we're facing at the moment, they'd have been exhausted. Why not allow commensurate cuts as well? Small incremental ones along the way are surely preferable to the big emergency cuts we're seeing at present.

Bullshit. The housing collapse was called as early as 2004. The problem is the experts in the government don't want to rock the boat by agreeing with anyone whose projections aren't rosy, and support the narrative the current administration is doing a bang up job on the economy.

The Treasury. And the legislative obstacle is immaterial. If the argument back to me is, "We can borrow at historically low rates!" let's agree to leave this point untouched. I don't want to get into a protracted discussion of the bond market, and the fundamental madness of the "As long as we can borrow cheap, we're fine!" position. That argument only gets ugly, as I have no way of listing all the myriad angles from which it can be proven absurd, and I become frustrated anyone even attempts to raise it. For good reason.

Reality, elementary notions of what is required to remain solvent, what is required to operate a republic that doesn't start with "Banana," are calling the govt's credit card.

Re: On liberatarianism
 

I agree with that, but I'm not sure I can distill "Liberalism" or "Conservatism" to a batshit crazy core in the same way. And to the extent that you can, I don't think many people who call themselves liberal or conservative really believe that batshit core, while it seems many libertarians do. Which was my point.

Because people get unemployment benefits when they are unemployed. And sign up for Medicaid when they are eligible (i.e., when they are unemployed). And by definition revenues go down when more people are unemployed.

Beyond automatic stabilizers, do you really want to lay off soldiers because the economy turned bad? Do you really think that pro-cyclical lay offs of federal workers is the way to go?

The only way that makes sense is if you start with a priori belief that government needs to be cut and you can't squander the opportunity to reach your primary goal. But economically the "best" time to cut spending is when revenue is growing. It's also probably the hardest though.

Because they make the problem worse.

ETA: But you could do the inverse I guess, requiring cuts as revenue grows. At least in fantasy land.

So you are abandoning the market then too? And you're cherry picking with hindsight the commentators who "called it" while ignoring all of the commentators (and the money) that argued the other side?

Bull. Shit. The Treasury has no problem borrowing. That's true even if you think rates are going to go up (in the direction of normal levels) sometime soon (which they aren't).

There's no "myriad ways" to prove that the treasure is close to becoming unable to borrow. You're confusing your policy preference with market reality.

Really? What else is stopping the treasury from borrowing then?

Re: On liberatarianism
 

The bureaucratic drones you're talking about in the first few sentences here aren't the people who decide how much the government taxes or spends. Legislatures do that. IMHO, there are some responsible legislatures, but you don't hear about them because they don't make headlines for doing a good job.

And I think that it's a mistake to blame government's fiscal irresponsibility on the personal characteristics of those attracted to legislative office. We get irresponsible government because voters are too easily seduced by irresponsible candidates. To take a current example, watch the GOP at the federal level flirt with defaulting on federal debts, debts resulting from tax cuts they voted for a few months ago. It's completely batshit crazy.

Re: On liberatarianism
 

Government attracts people who want to govern, and the first step in that process is getting elected. The way to get elected is to promise your people that you'll bring home the bacon for them and that the other guy's ox is going to get gored. Nobody who ever went to Congress, from Newt Gingrich to Senator Byrd (hi Hank!), did it without bringing his folks a little something something. They ain't cutting shit unless it's someone else's shit.

Maybe you think that political appointees running government programs should be the ones to make a decision to cut spending. Play it out as far as the phone call to the White House saying "I think we really need to cut Medicare / SS payments, because whoo boy are the books looking bad" and you can probably gather why that doesn't happen so much either.

The debate right now is about what it's always about, i.e., whose ox is gonna get gored. As usual, those who will get it hardest will be the ones who don't vote as part of an identifiable and easily-mobilized block (e.g., not "seniors") and those who don't make massive campaign contributions. Sometimes you sound like you're baffled by the fact that "government" and "politics" are so closely linked.

Re: On liberatarianism
 

I'm not sure there is any debate right now, or for that matter much going on except a bunch of people either trying to do nothing until the next election (when they think having done nothing will give them an advantage) or waiting for things to get better on their own.

Re: On liberatarianism
 

Sure, but isn't there a "raise the debt ceiling" thing going on right now? One side saying taxes can't possibly be raised on anyone and the other saying that it's ok to fuck old and poor people, but only just a little? I'd like to see what happens if they don't get that sorted out. Gold will be worth its weight in ammunition and I'll be cashing out my 401k for five cents on the dollar to move cross-country to RT's zombie-proof bunker.

(Not intended to anyone on this board, but a rant that maybe some will get because they read the same blogs I do.)

I don't give a fuck about what Robert Nozick really meant in Anarchy, State and Utopia and later believed, no matter how many seminars you high falutin bloggers had with the man when he was alive. I hated that fucking book in college. I hated the book in graduate school. I spent enough months reading it and analyzing it and writing fucking papers on it that I think I've done enough time with Nozick.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

So noted.

Blow up the Republican Party.
 

Felix Salmon:

Re: Blow up the Republican Party.
 

so if you accept that obama is right, then the R's are wrong? powerful stuff Ty/ It 's great you're back!

Re: Blow up the Republican Party.
 

I don't get how that follows from what Salmon said. Powerful stuff, Hank. Don't change, babe.

P.S. I think Obama made a colossal mistake in striking the deal with them last fall to cut taxes without getting their agreement to raise the debt limit. What was he thinking?

eata:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-cont.../bush-cuts.png

Re: Blow up the Republican Party.
 

I think we all know that what's going to happen is some trivia cuts that sounds good but mean nothing coupled with a debt ceiling increase.

Maybe that's fine. Maybe we don't need to act yet. But I wish we would.

Re: Blow up the Republican Party.
 

You really don't aspire to anything other than assjack status?

Re: Blow up the Republican Party.
 

Obama seems to think that spending reductions are needed. That makes no sense economically, but it make sense politically and it makes sense out of Obama's actions.

Re: Blow up the Republican Party.
 

dude, the moment i said you believe in faith unless you can explain 1) how life started and 2) how single cell organisms developed organ systems. and you replied that of course there were answers and you believed in those answers, you labeled yourself the complete ass jack. you're all ass jacks. I should try to talk to you lot like you actually look at shit intelligently? I'm one of three people here that vote regularly for both parties, I won't listen to your matrixed ass.

no offense,

edit: annotation: outside your little circle jerk you guys are all silly ass jacks. offense intended.

adder is a dimwit, his bulb isn't brightly lit
 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-...html?ir=Travel

and living in Detroit boycotting is near impossible- I suppose the same was true of Montgomery's bus riders?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Re: Blow up the Republican Party.
 

All these years and you still don't know what a hypothesis is.

Re: adder is a dimwit, his bulb isn't brightly lit
 

You get your facts from World Net Daily and I'm the dimwit?

David Kopel on Volokh present evidence that discrimination against Jews isn't Saudi policy, but a bit confusingly gets to the outrage anyway because he's heard that you can't have been to Israel but can't confirm that.

Re: adder is a dimwit, his bulb isn't brightly lit
 

you can call me ill-informed all you want, but don't you dare question Rep. Fred Grandy.

HR Policies
 

So al Qaeda had one pay rate for single men, a higher one for married men, and a salary supplement for each additional wife after the first.

Why can't everyone adopt family-centric policies like this?

Re: HR Policies
 

How did their mid-level associates rate them? Word is the IRA is going to be doing another round of layoffs, and I'm looking to transition to a "lifestyle" terrorist organization.

Re: HR Policies
 

aQ is a younger organization - you'd at least be of counsel there. But the latest mid-level reviews showed a lot of excitement over the increasing opportunities for partnership due to unexpected partner attrition.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Re: HR Policies
 

careful. aq demands that its peeps do what they say they'll do. say if ironhead commits to being somewhere, then his wife tells him he can't. like has happened in the past, aq will kill him.