Re: Ah, Change
 

Come on, we were inured to it over the past 5 years. Anyway, let's embrace, comrade:

http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/pub/t...=512&logo=logo

Re: Ah, Change
 

Sad but true. The lefties should thank W, he gave us the platform. I will have to point this out to the self-identified socialists that I hang out with (and who owe me money-I may as well write it down now).

I hate to say it, but, in part I blame Reagan. I was very vocal in 1984 that Bush I should be dumped, for obvious reasons. If Reagan had exhibited some real conviction, no Bush 41, and W probably dies in the gutter, assphixxxated on his own vomit, at Mardi Gras in the late 80s.


eta: is that a real newsweek cover?

Re: Pork?
 

I think federally subsidized-to-free pork products would be the most effective stimulus of this country, because it would further marginalize the wan and emaciated vegetarian crowd that hates America and makes us weak -- it's spitting in their faces with a big gob of bacon fat. Plus, it would shorten lifespans of the elderly and cull the herd (hi, Less!) at the back end where healthcare costs are more expensive. You can't treat dead at any price. Win win win, net-net-net.

Re: Pork?
 

I recently went to a Japanese noodle shop in the International District here. I had the pork noodle dish, which is noodles, some pork in a porkie broth. They offer the option to "pork it up", which has 3 levels of adding extra pork phat to the broth. Pork Rich, Extra Porky, Super Porky. I went extra porky.

Is that an example of the type of stimulation that you are referencing?

Re: Ah, Change
 

Yes. On newsstands everywhere!

(I couldn't quickly find a non-watermarked version . . . )

Re: Pork?
 

Did the broth reach around?

Re: Ah, Change
 

Your solution seeks the same end with different, perhaps less effective, means.

In any stimulus structure, the goal would always be to stabilize housing, without which the banking system will remain in a precarious situation and credit markets will remain hesitant. The politicians won't admit that we're trying to keep the bubble alive (houses are still generally overpriced) because they can't say it out loud, but it's exactly what we're trying to do. Hire people and pay them so they can resume paying their mortgages. Penske says just give the borrowers who need it money. You say put them in jobs so they can create the money themselves, mostly for multiplier effect purposes.

I tend to agree with your approach, but I can also see Penske's. The stimulus we have appears to be larded with a lot of shit that won't do much for job creation.

Re: Pork?
 

Atticus for Congress!

Re: Ah, Change
 

Apparently not. His unprecedented deficit spending has only whetted the Dems appetite. And now we are treating the DTs with 151.

Re: Ah, Change
 

I don't think that's true. The bill is absolutely intended to incentivize economic activity. Otherwise, why would we even do it? Why else would it be called a stimulus?

Conservatives don't have a problem with the govt creating economic activity. They have a problem with the likelihood that the multiplier effect from this govt spending will be minimal and too late. I'm not sure the latter is a fair criticism, since any economic rebound trailing a stimulus would be later than what we'd ideally like.

But if you think we're not trying to incentivize private money to come into the market and replace the govt's temporary spending in this package down the road, I think you've fundamentally misunderstood how this thing is supposed to work.

Re: Ah, Change
 

I had a snifter of Bookers, up, at 1:00 last night, after a handful of vodkas and Sierra Nevadas.

Given the results I'm feeling today, I can say with absolute certainty that treating anything with liquor in excess of 120 proof is unwise.

Re: Ah, Change
 

Cato's actually quite reputable, you know that. It's nothing like LGF.

Re: Ah, Change
 

You need 3/4 of a day of feeling like shit. Our economy needs 3/4 of a year.

Re: Ah, Change
 

We're about to get 24 more months of it.

Re: Pork?
 

Before you go and form the exploratory committee, you should know I voted to fund a $30MM study of Nancy Pelosi's mouse, but that was because I thought it was an adorable euphemism for her vagina. Imagine my surprise to discover that the proper euphemism is "federally designated wetlands."

Re: Pork?
 

did she have plastic surgery there too?

Re: Ah, Change
 

The point of the bill is to stimulate the economy by having the government engage in economic activity. Republicans (like the guy whose quote I was responding to) who say that the spending will not create incentives to engage in economic activity are missing the point, perhaps because -- like Michael Steele -- they're locked into a mindset where they can't think about the government creating jobs by hiring people directly.

Re: Ah, Change
 

If by this you mean that housing will do better in a healthier economy, guilty as charged, but at that letter of generality you're describing everyone on the board.

There is a difference between stabilizing a market and pumping government funds into it to inflate prices, and the latter is what Penske was suggesting.

Re: Ah, Change
 

There's an argument that sustaining what's left of the bubble will stimulate the economy. That what Penske seems to be advocating is the fastest track to the ultimate common goal. The flaw in that, of course, is we're merely stimulating a short time burst in consumer activity. It buys us a few years of deferment but does little to avoid the inevitable reckoning.

As I said, I don't agree with that thinking. But from what I've read about the stimulus, the multiplier effect is not going to be as grand as anticipated. And the cost of sustaining the new programs being implemented is going to be problematic down the road. You can't shut down new programs overnight.

As to alternatives, however, I don't have any. I happen to believe that our standard of living is unrealistic for a country of our size while the cost of foreign labor remains what it is. There's little need to examine all the specifics, but I think the real root concern of serious economists hasn't changed much since the seventies. We can't afford what we promise. And it isn't because of our policies. What we want is simply impossible. Something beyond Utopian.

I think it's an Anchilles Heel in the "American Dream." The idea was that everyone would have a chance to make whatever he could of himself. Never was fair, but still, there were enough exceptions to make us think we lived in a classless society. And this, I think, engendered the belief that we were entitled to certain baseline standards of living simply because we were Americans. Baselines which are economically impossible to sustain for a lot of our labor force while competing in a global economy.

The odd silver lining may be that as we sag for an indefinite future, the ripple effect will so damage emerging markets that their precarious progression toward a society like ours, with a robust middle class, etc... will be thrown off track for the next thirty of forty years. That we'll be able to get back up after this a lot more quickly than they will, and this window will buy a decade or so respite for otherwise prohibitively expensive pools of labor in this country. Enough so that we'll be able to cover a lot more of the massive entitlement spending we're facing than many anticipate right now.

I don't know, though. If were in something like private equity right now, I'd throw my money into emerging markets. The regulatory climate we're about to have in this country keeps the investment safe, but I think will lead to a future of decreased margins.

Re: Ah, Change
 

Reading the NYT this morning, I thought of a smart assed PB post, about whether it wasn't somewhat impressive that "Bush's recession" was able to stall the economies of the whole world. But then, the kinder gentler Hank prevailed with a thoughtful question: given that economies are skidding basically everywhere, can we spend our way out of it on our own?

Re: Ah, Change
 

The conundrum is that by slowing developing nations' progression, you depress their labor costs, which makes the ultimate issue at the root of the middle and lower middle classes' problems here even worse: What company would ever want to build shit here when foreign labor is so much cheaper?*

*Other than Japanese auto makers who've discovered that hiring non-union workers in depressed areas of the South is cheaper than building at home and shipping boatloads of their SUVs over here.

Re: mango
 

It was more of an internal sensation.......but I do think it moved.

Re: Ah, Change
 

"In my opinion the sophisticated Keynesian view is still that the stimulus won't work."
- Tyler Cowen

Re: Ah, Change
 

Reading his blog, which I had not done before, he quotes a guy who hits it dead-on:

"Fiscal stimulus will not have much effect as long as the financial system is deleveraging."

That is my euphemistic hangover, and the stimulus is just creating debt and programs that won't go away.*

*except through inflation

Re: Ah, Change
 

His blog is one of my faves.

Re: We will never agree on this and therefore it is pointless to talk about!
 

I suspect most don't only look stupid.

Re: We will never agree on this and therefore it is pointless to talk about!
 

Hi!!

Re: We will never agree on this and therefore it is pointless to talk about!
 

I'm opposed to the bill.

Re: Ah, Change
 

Hmmm, that plan sounds vaguely familiar. Where have I seen something like that before?

Re: Ah, Change
 

I'm not one of the deep thinkers on the board, but I don't blame Bush for the recession. I blame him for fucking up every project he undertook, but I don't think the housing bubble and other various and sundry elements of the mélange were on him.

I do blame the latter half of the 20th century, for creating a culture in which the price of things is totally decoupled from their cost and/or value, to the extent that "value" became "whatever somebody already up to their ears in debt would be willing to take on to finance the purchase of said item in the hope of flipping it to another sucker willing to take on still more debt." I realize there is no way in a capitalist economy to prevent such behavior, and that perhaps I can't come up with a better definition of "value" than the one about which I'm complaining, but I think a bunch of people should look in the fucking mirror when they wonder why they can't pay their bills.

Maybe bank regulation would be the answer, to prevent lenders from simply using the income streams from old refi loans to fund the new ones, a la Countrywide. Maybe it would have made sense to have banks show a balance sheet of actual deposits to bear some relationship to loans. Maybe the correction is more than in the lending markets anyway, and the whole economy needed to take a huge dump. I don't know, and I'm sure Slave will point out where my understanding of banking is lacking.

But I do think it's stupid to blame the former president for what we're experiencing. This was a long time coming. Bush may have fiddled while Rome was burning, but I don't believe if he had proposed bold action to avert this crisis (other than tax rebate window dressing, as he did) that he would have been taken seriously. A year ago people were saying we were in for six bad months; now they're saying it will take five years to correct, if we're lucky. Who was saying that a year ago and being taken seriously, and would we have elected such a man as our president?

Re: Ah, Change
 

Ultimately, the only way to get out of this mess is to spend our way out of it. What needs to change is the definition of "we" and "spend."

The U.S alone can't spend enough at home to bring us out of the crapper. We need to spend globally, or we need to sepnd domestically on things that will have a global distribution and multiplier effect. The U.S is the world's biggest consumer, so it will have to buy goods from all over to get the global economy on track.

Note that this does not mean oil, which has no multiplier, given that the money just goes into the hands of potentates and thieves who have too much money already. It also doen't mean liquor and whores sold to U.S. troops behind closed doors in Dubai and Bangkok, or wherever they go when they get R&R in the Middle East.

"Spend" is going to have to once again get re-acquainted with the cash in our pockets. More debt piled on top of bad debt just means an even bigger fall in ten years, when the bottom falls out again. This means we aregoing to have to get used to (i) a lower standard of living for most of us; and (ii) we are going to have to welcome the sovereign wealth funds from places like China and Qatar.

I'm not talking about sinking to a subsistence level or anything. I mean that a garbageman who makes $60,000/year ($70,000 with O/T) is going to have to move out of Lake Forest and back to Mundelein. The "middle-class" (hi Sebby!) Jr. VP is going to have to rent a house down the shore instead of owning a 4-bedroom in Cape May.

Basically, what it means is that Mario Batatli and Charlie Trotter are going to have to find a source for Halal meat, junior traders are going to have to buy their first Porsche second-hand, and chiropractors are going to have to change their business plans to accomodate the shrinking number of people whose bad sacrals are due to the 4-inch thick wad of credit cards in their wallets.

Re: Ah, Change
 

Dude, the upper middle wasn't buying anything on the Avalon-to-Cape May strip in the past ten years. The market was beyond ludicrous and is still in suspension of disbelief, even as its been falling like a stone.

By the way, there's a little flaw in your thinking I have to point out. There's no cash around, and a lot of people aren't getting jobs back after this, and a lot more are going to be working for 1/2 to 2/3 of what they received before. I don't see how these people do any real spending above the non-discretionary sans credit.

And we're not going to just accept a lower standard of living. People are going to start demanding more redistribution. I don't think the narrative will be "America binged into the hole" in two years. It's going to be "Wall Street binged us all into the hole." Expect to see calls for protectionist policies and Democrats placating some of them. Expect to see regressive tax policies. Michael Kinsley, who's usually an amusing douchebag with some witty asides, penned a piece last week saying we ought to take Social Security away from older people who can afford to retire without it. I don't expect too many people to take such policies seriously now, but if we roll into a period of protracted malaise, I can see similar types of policies getting traction.

Re: Ah, Change
 

I suspect they will be what is typically called progressive, actually.

Of course we should, but that doesn't have much to do with the current situation. This one of the simplest and cleanest ways to fix the ponzi scheme. It is a welfare program, not a pension, and the sooner we stop pretending otherwise the better.

Re: Ah, Change
 

Take yours and mine, yes. We have enough time to plan ahead. But we can't take it away from people who banked on having it to compliment their savings. We can't take the pensioner in Florida who is only able to afford his lifestyle with the addition of SS and change the rules on him. Uncle Sam can't step in and say, "Yeah, Bob, I know you slugged it out for forty years and put a couple kids through college and sucked it up to have this retirement, but guess what? You're living too well and, well, other folks didn't do what you did and they have less, and we're going to give that money you were counting on to them." There's a bit of a promissory estoppel issue these.

But as to me, take it. If I need it when I'm that old, fuck it. I'll be better off taking the leap from a balcony somewhere. I'll have been a right idiot and deserve none of it.

Re: Ah, Change
 

By the way, if we did that, you would see the largest wave of clandestine early wealth transfers in history. The structures employed would be countless, and as impossible to stop as the transfers where people deplete the estates of elderly relatives to get Uncle Sam to pick up the tab for their nursing home care.

Re: Ah, Change
 

imagine if Bush had allowed people to invest in the stock market with theirs?

Re: Ah, Change
 

I suppose there's a chance I would vote for a congressman who promised to convert all the money I'm currently estimated to receive from SS into a specialized form of welfare for the elderly, but I'm pretty sure the only reason I'm even remotely receptive to this is that I am a closet socialist and have a government pension that will guarantee a dotage of comfort if not luxury.

If I were 25-55 and relying solely or in part on SS plus a 401k to make my retirement possible, I don't think I would be so receptive.

The party that converts SS to a true social safety net had better have a gameplan for accomplishing the rest of its legislative agenda before the next congressional election.

Re: Ah, Change
 

The problem we have now relates for more to health care costs than to the aspects of Social Security that have been bothering conservatives since the Great Depression:

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/wp...tlements_1.png

CBO

This is the biggest reason to do something about health care. (Which is why we'll see conservatives lining up to support Obama there, right?)

Re: Ah, Change
 

It's going to happen, and before we retire. Anybody under 50 who is expecting Social Security to not become needs-based before they start drawing on it is bound to be disappointed.

It was never more than a sanctioned Ponzi scheme and the problem with Ponzi schemes is that the bottom of the pyramid has to be larger than the top. Even if we set aside the fact that Congress has raided it so many times, it's never going to be able to make up the shortfall without massive inflation or massive borrowing, there's still the problem that we have a shrinking pool of contributors and a growing pool of recipients.

Re: Ah, Change
 

it won't be "need" based. It will be "cut out the wealthier, who've paid more into all these years." There will be some phase out like there is with several deductions, but they won't cut out everyone who doesn't "need" it. Political suicide.