Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

I would have thought that your parents would be retired, and that changes in income taxes wouldn't really affect them. Which tax increases are cutting into their lifestyle?

Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

That was my question too, as I have no idea with whom he has been talking as I've seen exactly no one take the position he ascribed to the left pole.

Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

You're right. I do not see Obama at a pole. Nor do I see Boehner at one. I see Liberals and Tea Partiers, and people profess an affinity for their views, at the poles.

What circles do I travel in where people say dumb Right Wing and Liberal shit? The same ones in which you travel. I can't count the number of upper middle class people I know who believe cutting waste and fraud, and fixing welfare and "handouts" alone (whatever that involves) would balance the budget. I don't know on what basis they reach these conclusions because when I ask, they refuse to provide anything even approaching specifics. The best they offer is a dumb rant on the "47% who pay no taxes."

On the Liberal side, I hear over and over:

1. Money's cheap. We can keep borrowing indefinitely (Larry Summers' nonsense [and the kind of thing only a person who assumed Summers is brilliant because he ran a school would parrot]).
2. Austerity doesn't work and is cruel! (This is true, but nor does indefinite borrowing, which will inevitably be far more cruel.)
3. If we fixed tax the tax system alone, we could balance budget. (This is true, technically, and would require monstrous middle class tax increases that would savage exactly the people these Liberals want to protect.)

When confronted on these issues, like their Right Wing comrades, these Liberals will go off on some rant about wealth inequality, or TARP, or some other non-response that sort of sounds like a response.

Both groups are annoying as hell because they argue about 10% of the budget as though it were the whole enchilada. With liberals, it's all about getting the rich to pay a fair share, nevermind taxes on the $250k and up crowd only would have provided $60-100 billion per year. With RWingers, it's all about welfare and fraud and waste - again, @$50-80 billion a year. I want to slap both across the face and say, "What about defense? The fucking 80,000 lb gorilla in the corner?"

Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

I see, so on one side, people believe things that are simply untrue and this is the same as the other side believing things that are true, but which you view as undesirable.

Yeah, total equivalence, dude.

Money is cheap, and we've seen nothing to suggest that we're near borrowing capacity, especially as money stays cheap in a sluggish economy. Austerity does not work, and worse, is counter-productive.

There is nothing cruel about borrowing within our capacity to do so.

I don't hear anyone saying 3. I hear people saying that the extent that closing long term deficits is a priority (it shouldn't be a particularly high priority as long term projections are completely unreliable), we need revenue in addition to spending cuts.

ETA: By the way, probably the most delusional (but not uncommon) view out there is that long term budgets deficits will be closed via Washington policy making. No matter what happens with spending or revenue, what will drive deficits over the next 75 years is growth or a lack thereof.

Which, by the way, is what underlies what Summers is saying.

And if you think Larry Summers isn't brilliant, you don't know what you are talking about. And running Harvard has nothing to do with that.

Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

here is my cocktail party chit chat:

"this is some nice single malt."
"yeah, you know about small batch bourbons, doncha?"
"huh? hey do you think Debbie's tits are real?"

Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/sla...e568-large.png

FOX News, present company excluded, are a bunch of idiots.

Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

"Present company"? Does Hank work for FNC or something?

Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

huh?

Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

I'm thinking someone else. He wouldn't have excluded Hank.

Is that what happened to Spanky?

Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

Tedious.

Your initial comments are too dull, and too much a misrepresentation of what I said, to warrant significant reply. Suffice it to say, I have no objection to borrowing, and don't see it as undesirable. I see it as unsustainable, but this is of little matter, as it's all we can politically do, and probably all we will do. Your theory that it is harmless will be tested. Because that growth you foresee making it okay? That isn't coming. Friedman's generally an idiot, but he was right: The world is flat. At least the developed world, in terms of growth for the foreseeable future.

Regarding Summers, this blowhard lardass has never been anything but a fucking academic. His sole endeavor in the private sector was to consult for a few hedge funds (Read: Provide insight, via connections accrued in government positions). Is he brilliant? Certainly, the guy is a genius. A genius who's never worked outside a govt institution, or a university. (And a person, I might add with amusement, who's been a staunch opponent of regulation.) His intelligence is exactly the kind of disconnected-from-how-things-work-on-the-ground thinking that runs this and many other countries into the Law of Unintended Consequences over and over.

For excellent reason, I have never viewed any person who teaches about business, or any other profession or trade, but has never actually worked in the private sector, as anything but a lightweight. An adjunct deserves respect, as he practices the thing about which he professes. A retired practitioner of what he teaches also deserves to taken seriously, as he's made his bona fides. A guy who's never done anything but teach? Sorry. As smart as he might be on paper, it's madness to accept anything he says without skepticism.

Academics in policy positions are huge part of what's wrong with our government. If you've never worked with the low level nuts and bolts of the thing upon which you pontificate, you're a perennial student, and a neophyte of the worst kind (no, a World Bank position awarded to you based on some paper you wrote does not overcome this, nor does a Sec of Treasury position). This applies even to guys like Summers, who were wise enough to counsel that we should be careful in applying regulations.

You don't like hear this, of course. But you know it's true. Everybody who's actually done a thing knows it's true. Everyone who's spent a couple hours drinking with people who've spent their lives exclusively in govt or academics knows it's true. George Bernard Shaw's line about those who teach and nothing else may as well be a law of physics.

Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

Much of your rant is on point, but here you show the achilles heal. Why not be skeptical about anything anyone says?

I spent last night with a bunch of kids with an idea, their three technology teachers, and a room full of entrepreneurs, ranging from the experienced failures to mindboggling outrageous successes; it was a mentorship program set up by the entrepreneurs. Those teachers, who had never run a business before, contributed a lot, and are fantastic. But the key job of our young budding entrepreneurs is to apply skepticism to every idea, no matter who contributed it, and cull the ones worth working on.

Looking at the entrepreneurs, as a group, most of them were too ADHD to focus on teaching a coherent year long course. Many of them weren't built for teaching, and there's a reason they're not doing it full time.

Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

You sound like someone who has never worked with people from big business.

Or someone who impressed by people who regurgitate the policy insights of the WSJ.

By the way, if you are right and there will never be an growth again, all the entitlement cuts in the world aren't going to save us.

Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

Exactly. Those entrepreneurs may be geniuses. Or the they might be lucky. Most likely it's some combination of both, with their genius aspects being fairly narrow and limited tithe field of their success.

Worshipping a Taleb, for example, for his business success, is just nonsense, which his writings (mostly repurposing the work of others) suggest is exactly what he should be telling people if only his ego didn't get in the way.

Re: Pepper sprayed for public safety.
 

You sound like the sort of person who is responsible for the lack of innovation in big business. TBTF directly accrues from big business relying on academic musings. Bureaucratic stagnancy and herding accrue from the same people being taught the same things and implementing them the same way. Hence, when one pension plan gets hammered in the market, twenty others get assfucked the same exact way. Why? Because everybody does the same thing - the same thing they were taught.

Look at the robots with whom you've worked. We will all follow the same growth model and it will work indefin-- Oh, shit. It's not working. Something happened that we didn't forecast. Oh, no. Somebody hire someone to write a paper on it.

I've worked with shitloads of big businesses. I've also represented state agencies. From where do you think I reach my conclusions?

You seem to think that because everybody is doing the same stale fucking thing and running into each other, that means the thing is right. There is some wisdom in that. I recall being taken aside and told, "Play the politics, dumbass. It creates more billables. If you come up with a solution early, what the fuck does that get us?" I understand it's a game. And in those instances, I played. But it isn't right, or good for society. And it isn't objectively intelligent to argue in favor of such bloated systems.

I'm not impressed by the WSJ. I think it's a hack right wing paper. Nor am I impressed by the NYTimes. I simply have an affinity for people who actually know what the fuck they're doing, rather than people jerking each other off with hypotheticals, and theories. If you'd like me to cut it down to its meaner angles, look at these boards and ask yourself who you'd want with you in a foxhole. You want Larry Summers? Or do you want a guy who's actually been tested? A guy who's lived by practical application of his skills?

You sound like someone who's shuffled papers around bueaucratic organizations his whole life. You sound like someone who hasn't first chaired anything. You sound like the voice on the other end of the endless conference calls I took who said he'd "Talk to a partner and get back to me."

Smart's cheap. Thrown out of your job on your ass, ask yourself - are you meat on the street? If you know in your heart you are, you're part of the problem. An effective economy would weed out your genes. You're the drag side of the 80/20 rule - a cost that ought to go.