Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

You understand that guaranteed income is redistribution via govt (agencies doling the $$$ out), right?

What you really mean is that you think the efficiency of just handing out cash is preferable even though it comes without the political compromise involved in assisting the poor and advancing the interests of food producers and owners of housing.

I do too in the abstract, but I also live in the real world where the fact the food stamps also benefit agribusiness makes them significantly more politically viable.

1. Liar.

2. No one is stopping you from giving those dollars over to a poor person right now. Heck, we're actually subsidizing you to do it.

You know that this does not absolve you of anything, right?

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

You're responding to comments about globalization. So sticking with that, no, your tax preparer isn't going to be in India nor is your wife's nail salon. The former could, but why? The latter can't. There are many other similar businesses.

And of course automation is another reason some of those won't move overseas. Yes, it's going to make literally everything different, but not nearly as quickly as you think.

The professional classes will spend less time reading and drafting documents. But the job of senior lawyers and investment bankers is to hold clients' hand as much as anything. A machine can't do that.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

today is a no-scroll day. I don't remember the article, but if you want to link I'll see.

I have no doubt trade has many effects, but many of them, and an increasing number today, are very positive.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

On a different note, and conceivably of interest only to me, is this (via Matt Levine's email):

One of the drivers of the financial crisis was that the demand for safe assets outstripped supply and so the finance sector tried to create new supplies of safe assets, which weren't, as it turned out. The above suggests to me that the imbalance is structural and that the problem will recur.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber; the thing he's responding to is worth the time too.

Re: Civil Asset Forfeiture
 

http://68.media.tumblr.com/54963d2cb...snvdw1_500.jpg

"It's all grey. It's all subjective."

Brilliant! And you can do this with almost anything? What's your secret?

TM

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

My god, that is some truly atrocious and obtuse writing. I am convinced of nothing other than that the writer is a very serious academic tool who is unlikely to ever convince me of much.

That should be part of a "how not to write" seminar.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Time to raise the debt ceiling and grow the deficit!

Although I guess I had understood that China's savings rate has declined as it's grown more prosperous overall. If that's true, it's a bit of mitigation.

I'm no longer close enough to Wall Street to know whether new products have been created to pose as safe assets the way mortgage and asset-backed products grew a decade ago.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I wasn't that troubled by writing, but I did get bored and stop reading, so...

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

The truly fascinating analysis out of China is really the two Chinas analysis. My understanding is the national savings rate has declined as the core matures (and as they see enormous offshore transfers - 1% of GDP just left the country in foreign transfers last year) but that the current round of fast growth is happening in a lot of the secondary outlying cities that are starting to see the jumps places like Hangzhou and Shanghai saw in the last decade or decade and a half.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

For someone who expends so much effort projecting a hyper-masculine persona, this made me laugh. Perhaps Trump will find it unsettling, as he did when he was upset Spicer was portrayed by a woman on SNL.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/scaram...rticle/2009019

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

love that. thanks for it.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-l...d-steve-bannon

This will not end well.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I believe the term, from Tropic Thunder, is "full retard."

This is becoming a real live Veep.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Any sympathy I might have had for Reince Prebius is tempered by his very real role in causing Trump to be the GOP nominee. Same with Sessions for jumping on the Trump train early. I am waiting for the recess firing of Sessions, Rosenstein and Mueller.

I thought Goldman hired better people than that.....

Re: Civil Asset Forfeiture
 

Sebastian in 1960:

"You're focusing on peripheral social issues while no one addresses the economic issues. The political classes have no enlightened response to wealth inequality. The Man wants to simply let it persist. The Commies think they can remedy it with redistribution. Nothing happens, the problems worsen, their impact frustrates efforts at growth, and we argue about... whether the blacks can eat lunch at Woolworths."

James Brown Thursday on the Daily Dose. "Hot Pants Road":

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

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Legal question for all of you. If POTUS wants to be rid of Mueller, why does he need to wait for a recess? If he wants to name a new AG without Senate confirmation, he needs a recess, but if he simply wants someone can fire Mueller, why can't he fire Sessions and get himself an acting AG who will do that for him?

Someone told me today that he is constrained by DOJ's order of succession. If so, why can't he just change it? eta: Like this, only to name whomever will do what he wants.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I am appalled. I knew it would be bad, but I had no idea it would be this bad. Jesus fucking Christ.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

It's looking a little better now.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Bill Kristol repeatedly calls Trump a jackass on CNN:

http://www.mediaite.com/online/bill-...ut-speech/amp/

I was never a Bill Kristol fan, as he was always a little too neocon for my tastes, but I cannot disagree with him here.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

There are times people's best come out, and times their worst comes out. Bill Kristol's best has been coming out the several months.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

It is so nice to wake up and not have someone trying to take away my healthcare.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

How exactly would the skinny repeal take away your healthcare?

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

In a functioning party, the majority leader personally distorting procedure in this way and failing would lead to a leadership crisis in the party. I bet this won't.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Well, I only had 3 and 1/2 hours to try to figure it out (and I was asleep for about 2 of those) between getting the text of it and the vote, so I'm not entirely sure. It's pretty clear that everyone from BC/BS to the AMA to Graham and McCain believe it would destroy the individual market (thought Graham's words were, I believe, "wreck healthcare") and it also seems likely it would have done severe damage to the employer market. Maybe someone wants to discuss in committee, with some data and analysis, just what harm it would do to those markets. I understand it was written over lunch, so I'd be surprised if its proponents had much information on that.

It does look like it had pretty wide open waivers for EHB - it's not clear to me whether those would extend to allow waiving of lifetime caps or preexisting conditions. That triumvirate of EHB, prohibition on lifetime caps, and allowance of discrimination based on preexisting conditions is the direct and immediate existential threat that has hung over my head since this "process" began.

One point I think everyone should be very conscious of: this entire cluster, including the decision to pass a House bill no one liked and wanted to become law, to not to follow regular order in either the House or Senate, to avoid hearings like the plague, to refuse to discuss substantive policy issues with the other party or in the open, to avoid town halls and public meetings, and to drop bills in the dead of night with votes hours later, isn't Trumpism. This is how the Republican Party has chosen to operate for some time, and Ryan, McConnell, and every Republican Rep participating are the ones responsible.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

The Republican Party mainly exists right now as reaction against majoritarian liberalism to force policy - wherever it is - towards conservatism ends and to protect its members against challenges from the right. It's a party that very well understands that what its most important partisan constituents want is not at all what the public wants.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

In normal times, Dems would be able to just quickly fill the void in the center being left by the Republicans. But apparently the Republicans being abandoned by their party have a visceral dislike of people like me, because I ate a veggie burger last night before making a few last calls to save their healthcare.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

My point is there is a lot of progressive hyperbole out there about how many millions of people will die if Obamacare is repealed, and intellectual dishonesty about how much of that is really people opting out of purchasing ACA-compliant policies.

I think the process sucks, but I don't think it's any worse than "You have to pass the bill to find out what's in it." I find the skinny repeal procedurally pointless, but it was clear that nothing was going to pass when the president doesn't even know or care about any of the details of the plan, or even a basic understanding of what is being proposed. That being said, Republicans suck at getting anything done, but excel at dramatically and spectacularly failing to do anything they promise to get elected. It's quite breathtaking to watch.

If you're not the Chamber of Commerce, they want your vote, not your input.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

In other words, most Republicans are driven more by reaction -- opposition to Democrats -- than by a desire to be in any particular place from a policy perspective.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

There is always a lot of hyperbole everywhere, but you also have a CBO whose head was appointed by a GOP Congress saying that a GOP bill was going to leave a lot of people uninsured. Some because they don't want to have to pay for insurance, and more because they wouldn't be able to.

It's far, far worse than that. The Democrats worked on their healthcare bill for years, with scores of hearings and so on. There were no secrets about it. When Nancy Pelosi said that, she wasn't saying literally that the contents of the bill were a secret:

Vox. If that's too partisan or recent for you, here is Snopes.

Excellent. It's a running con on their voters. They keep putting the con in conservative, and their voters keep falling for it.

douchebags über alles
 

This looks astute from 3000 miles away -- New Yorkers, what say you?

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Who the fuck is this Dennard guy? He needs a good ass-whuppin'.

TM

Re: douchebags über alles
 

Uh...yes. There are plenty of these douchebags in New York. In fact, I'd go so far as to say, these are the guys the term "douchebag" was invented to describe. We've been referring to them this way for 30 years, easily. The description in this article is completely on point.

What it didn't describe is that people constantly laugh at these assholes behind their backs. Even if they knew, they wouldn't care because they value themselves based on the money they make, the cars they drive, and the quality of the bodies of the air-headed women they date. They populate douchey steak houses, strip clubs, bottle service clubs, Vegas and Miami. And they're the guys who use the word, "cunt," when a woman isn't interested. They talk real big, but only fight when there are at least half a dozen of them against two or fewer opponents. They're always the loudest people wherever they are. They keep the wide pin-stripe suit industry in the black. And their watch faces are always bigger than their forearm. They're the fucking worst.

TM

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

The CBO numbers are neither progressive nor hyperbole.

There is nothing dishonest about not seeing the difference between someone choosing not to be insured and someone not being able to be insured when the current policy would keep those people insured.

Except that was never at all true.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

But Dems (see Sanders and Warren on twitter, as one example) are referring to those people being "thrown off" or "kicked off" their insurance or that the bill "takes away" insurance for 16 million, which is not really the case. Some are also literally counting the number of people who will die because of the bill, and I have not yet discerned the source for those numbers.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

True.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

On Thanksgiving, 2013 I was told that I had a stage 4 lymphoma wrapped around my spine that had already crushed most of two vertabrae and that I had one chance in 8 of making it through the six month treatment program I was going to be put on. During those months, I was resuscitated twice as a result of heart failure and also survived a near brush because of kidney failure. After I completed the initial treatment, I then got a two year course of immunotherapy. I am now told I have about one change in 8 (they seem to like the 1/8 odds for me) of have a recurrence within 10 years.

The total bills for this were substantial. If insurance is only available to me with a lifetime cap, that insurance will likely be useless. If insurance companies are allowed to exclude coverage for a preexisting condition, and can define that to include a recurrence of a prior cancer (it's almost certainly still in my body today), the coverage will be useless for my biggest worry. If essential health benefits can exclude some major expenses associated with cancer care, including new secondary and tertiary treatments coming down the pike, or the immunotherapy course I had after the initial cancer (which is not standard protocol but dropped the likelihood of recurrence from north of 50% to 12%), I could have big problems.

The healthcare debate is not a bunch of statistics for me. I'm one of the stats. I look hard at how each bill will affect me. I'm always going to be able to afford insurance, and will always buy the best I can find, but there are provisions that have been advocated in one bill or another that could result in insurance becoming less than fully useful for me. If I were on the policy I was on before Romneycare in Massachusetts, I would have a big problem, and that was a biglaw level insurance policy.

When we hit budget debates, I'll be back to stats, the personal impact on me of what the Rs propose will probably be positive, and I'll be worried about how it affects all of us more broadly and it will be more academic. But the healthcare debate is deeply, deeply personal. Republican proposals have had elements that could, in many very foreseeable circumstances, have some pretty dire consequences for me and my family.

Let me know if you ever want to follow cancer twitter. It has been a very happy place today.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Again, the CBO says those people would remain insured under current law, so yeah, the proposed change in the law would lead to those people being uninsured thus it takes away their insurance.

I'll grant you that they may want to have their insurance taken away, but that's really the crux of this whole thing. In order to get insurance to work the way pretty much everyone wants - covers preexisting conditions, doesn't have lifetime or annual caps, covers the stuff you actually need covered - (nearly) everyone needs to carry insurance even if they'd personally prefer not to.

Which is really the GOP's problem. The numbers "work" for insurance either if you allow it not cover stuff as pre-O-care or if you make everyone pay in. There's no third way other than publicly financed, which they obviously don't want.