I'm sure you'll get right on that.
 

Just to connect two different things you're saying, whatever concern you have about privity (with another private company being required by the government), there's no apparent reason why that concern should goes away if you can opt out of the market entirely. So you should care just as passionately that the government forces you to buy auto insurance from a private company instead of nationalizing that industry and providing it itself with no compelled privity.

"My name's Pitt...
 

And your ass ain't talking its way out of this shit."

https://seekingalpha.com/article/406...pension-crisis

Re: "My name's Pitt...
 

I think think tanks like AEI ought to keep track of their record on prognostications.

Theory: the more ideologically hide-bound the think tank, the less reliable their projections.

Re: "My name's Pitt...
 

That's 19% of 2016 GDP over 75 years. It's an issue, but not the apocalypse some are selling you.

Basically, well-managed municipalities (generally blue) will figure out how to pay for it while those expecting poorly-managed (generally red) to cover them will be screwed unless we get a Dem controlled future Congress to kick in.

And, of course, immigration would help but we're going the wrong way there.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Re: "My name's Pitt...
 

Scroll down to "Public Playground." http://www.mauldineconomics.com/fron...aring-pensions

I agree, however, that this will be a location-based crisis. It's going to be pretty wild because we'll see municipalities bordering each other facing highly disparate futures. The family a few blocks away could be subject to staggering property tax increases, while you see none. Be interesting how this impacts property values at the municipal and state levels.

Also, in most of the Mid Atlantic at least, there is no more room to increase property taxes. This is proven by the fact that these states have for many years now relaxed laws on gaming and casinos in an effort to raise revenue. That's typically something states only engage in when they have no other sources of revenue.

There's also a considerable political debate in Mid Atlantic states about enhance sales and personal income taxes to relax property taxes. That's not indicative of a climate, or capacity, to absorb property tax increases needed to fund pension shortfalls.

Re: I'm sure you'll get right on that.
 

It's that exact inability to opt out that creates the forced privity. If one can opt out, he has not been forced into anything.

I'm not concerned for the guy who complains that he must buy auto insurance in order to drive. If he doesn't like that, he can download Uber, or take the bus. The guy being told he must buy a certain form of expansive health care plan, simply because he's alive and has the means to do so, has no choice. He's being told he must contract with private entities.

Re: "My name's Pitt...
 

Re shooting the messenger, an empirical analysis of a recent, lurid example: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/o...talk.html?_r=0

Re: "My name's Pitt...
 

Why?

But since I did, let's take a look at some of this:
This is fun. Take an unsourced, high-end estimate of today's number (btw, that's still only 30ish% of today's GDP, and presumably must be a long-term projection) and then project a future bear market onto it without considering the offsetting future bull market. Economics!

Why are we assuming a relationship between total spending and pension spending? How is that comparison even relevant?

Also, a very big chunk of that spending increase is inflation, why not control for it? Right, because we're not even attempting rational analysis, this is hype mode.

A more sober way of stating this is: of course pension liabilities look bad in a persistent super-low interest rate environment. because they're traditional heavily invested in fixed income assets. They'll look better if we ever get to more "normal" interest rates (may not be any time soon) and/or if pension funds manage to get better returns from equities. And again, it's super weird to only focus on the downside risk of equities without considering the upside too.

I'm pretty sure we have empirical evidence that this isn't true, in that relatively high tax municipalities aren't having trouble finding residents or shoppers. Regardless, if this is a problem everywhere, everywhere will have to have higher taxes.

I don't think the local fallout will be as interesting as you think. There will be some jostling among adjacent suburbs, maybe, but high-tax cities will still be high-tax cities with lots of other reasons people will want to be there.

Re: I'm sure you'll get right on that.
 

Your auto insurance tyranny is forcing people to do business with a private ride-sharing corporation! Worse yet, some bus companies are corporations too!

Re: "My name's Pitt...
 

Murray is the ultimate example of the way Ivies engage in affirmative action to benefit white conservative academics. People have been explaining logic 101 to him for forty years, and he still ignores it whenever he has the opportunity to spew racist or sexist bile. Every school has one of these, a conservative academic who does total shit work but who they keep around because he is high profile and lets them say they have a conservative. Every school has one, I should say, Harvard keeps one or two in every school.

Conservatives should hate this. This, combined with the anti-intellectual fervor of places like Fox, is part of why there is so little quality conservative scholarship these days - I mean, where is the Milton Friedman or Bill Buckley of the current generation? Instead there is "public intellectual" (god I hate that phrase) Bill O'Reilly and Harvard Professor (he always leads with the Harvard) Charles Murray, spewing illogical bile.

Re: I'm sure you'll get right on that.
 

Uber is like Juicero, but for cars.

Re: "My name's Pitt...
 

I don't know or much care about the argument he offered to underpin The Bell Curve. There's no reason to read that book, as one can ascertain from simply meeting enough people the notion any certain group is natively smarter or dumber than another is a preposterous generalization. We're in agreement his "controversial" argument there is actually just sensationalist tripe.

I think the reason we see no more Buckleys is because we've moved from a society of discourse to one of advocacy. Everyone has an opinion he's clamoring to spout, and the attention span of the audience is akin to that of gnats. Buckley and Vidal would get .0000043% in ratings today. "TL;DW!"

Buckley harrumphed a lot, but he allowed a guy with contrary point to get in his licks, and he'd acknowledge where someone found a flaw in his argument. That shit ain't happening anymore because nobody gives a fuck about discourse. Nobody wants a back and forth where they have to adjust their points. People want to advocate. The dumb fucks don't realize - the only way you make an argument bulletproof is to allow the other side to batter it, and to drop the parts of it which opponents prove to be flawed.

And the only way to shut up a guy like Murray is to put him to his proofs. Sure, that risks merely assisting him in honing his sophistry. But throwing a shit fit at his speech? That's just giving him $100k in new speaking fees. Self-defeating advocacy.

I also think a better way to assess ideas, or public statements, or art, is to distance them from the source. Bill Cosby's funny comedy bits aren't suddenly awful because he's a rapist. Eric Clapton's lunatic racist speech about Enoch Powell in the '70s doesn't soil the beauty of Layla and Assorted Love Songs. In this same regard, I can remain a fan of Murray's concept for paring the regulatory state in We the People while concluding he's a deplorable sensationalist elsewhere.

Re: "My name's Pitt...
 

It is not worth putting Murray through his proofs because he doesn't care how wrong he is or whether he can try to make it right. It's just a waste of time. He deserves only ridicule. When he is ready to listen, he can call, until then, it's a waste of time. Yeah, I wouldn't bother to protest his speech myself, since he is playing for the notoriety.

There is lots of perfectly civil discourse in all kinds of avenues these days, but it ends when a right winger walks in the room talking politics.

Re: "My name's Pitt...
 

You keep using the term "shooting the messenger" to describe instances where people disregard or criticize otherwise valid information because they do not like who is delivering the information. But shooting the messenger means to attack the person delivering the information, not because of anything about the person, or even because you feel that the person ascribes to or is somehow to blame for the information, but simply because you don't like the information delivered by that person. So, for example, Charles Murray is attacked (in your example) not because of actual merits his more recent ideas, but because people hate him because of the bell curve book. This is not shooting the messenger. An example of shooting the messenger would be attacking the postman who delivered the copy of the bell curve book because you don't like the book.

Cymande has a message. but don't shoot them. Their message is one of funk and harmony. The Daily Dose is "The Message":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO91BtMIciU