OT: Storm in a Teacup

Business magazine editors are about as good as PhD economists in predicting consequences. In other words, not good at all.

As they say, if you're an economist, how come you aren't rich?

My ancestors were legal immigrants. None were human traffickers, drug dealers, or habitual criminals. They worked. About half of my employees are legal immigrants. Most countries control immigration; why shouldn't the USA too?

The Trump-haters here are 100% emotion. They don't like him. And they make purely emotional attacks on him and on anyone who doesn't join their snarkwagon.

Probably bad electronic designers, too. Design requires *thinking*.

I don't like him, but that's trivial. What matters is what he does. Our tax break will fund equipment and development and employees.

You call that thinking?

Yep. Scary thought, that. I can tell it bothers you, too.

Am 24.08.2018 um 21:49 schrieb John Larkin:

The people who used to live there since 30000 years before might disagree.

G.

Lots of spacecraft are already thermally protected by gold plating or films. Very Trumpish. It doesn't tarnish and has a very low emissivity.

JFK put men on the moon, which I never understood the value of. I never understood the value of the Shuttle or the ISS.

Trump's suggestion for a space force has of course been ridiculed, but it's not irrational. We have an Air Force that is now separate from the Army. There are defense functions related to space, which are not spam-in-a-can PR.

When Trump occasionally does something sensible, his critics immediately harp and whine. That is irrational, which most of them are.

The idea of paying for sex is repulsive. It means that no woman would actually want you. And you chances of getting an STD are enormously increased.

And it's not a good basis for a long-term relationship.

Probably true, but totally irrelevant. Trump's problem is that he aspires t o influence, but can't be bothered understanding the fine detail of the sit uations he wants to influence.

John Larkin seems to lack the capacity to understand that the fine detail e xists, so he is much more sympathetic to Trump pathetic ambitions than he o ught to be, and less conscious of how far short of influential Trump actual ly falls.

His unfortunate personality is one of the reasons he can't get much done. t he fact that he can't be bothered understanding the problems that he thinks he wants to solve is another contributor to his failure, but since John La rkin doesn't understand much either, he doesn't appreciate this.

John Larkin thinks that the cut in the company tax rate to 21% was great ec onomics. Anybody who was worried about the US 35% headline tax rate had eit her paid an lobbyist for a loophole or off-shored their money years ago.

Economics is a special case. Rich people pay economists to lie for them, an d endow professorships for the most useful liars.

John Maynard Keynes parlayed his economic expertise into a personal fortune , and didn't have to lie for anybody. A large bunch of bought-and-paid for economists have resented this ever since.

In general, beginners don't do well. John Larkin admits to two start-ups th at failed before he got lucky. Some 80% of start-ups fail within the first five years, so he isn't that much better than average.

If not properly regulated. Fuel reduction burns tame forest fires, and sens ible government intervention can prevent booms and busts.

Presidents as ill-informed as Trump and Dubbya are ineffective. Better-info rmed leaders can do better.

Cutting banking regulations gave you the sub-prime mortgage crisis(and most of the rest of the world got dragged into the Global Financial Crisis).

Cutting corporate taxes without finding any alternative way of funding gove rnment spending has the same long-term effect as any move into living on cr edit. John Larkin seems to share James Arthur's view that Keynesian deficit

-funded pump-priming spending ought to be be just as valuable to the econom y even when the economy isn't in recession (which is based on the misaprehe nsion that it doesn't work when the economy is in recession).

The US has been poaching talent from other countries for several centuries now.

Most advanced industrial countries have been obliged to institute fat prize s for their best researchers to stop American Universities from poaching th em as soon as they have acquired an international reputation.

Germany started doing this in 1985

The Netherlands followed suit ten years later

Donald Trump's enthusiasm for starting trade wars is much more likely to cr ash the international economy than either the EU or China, which do seem to listen to economists who know what they are talking about (and aren't bein g paid to produce nonsense that appeals very rich people - and people like Trump, who want to be thought to be very rich).

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Trump's long string of business failures is clear evidence of his capacity to mislead an appreciable fraction of the population. Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 68 complained about the effectiveness of ?Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity?. It's sad that wha t he touted as a prescription against people like Trump didn't work, but no t all that surprising since the electoral college was merely an ill-judged bribe to get the smaller states to vote for the US constitution.

In the event Trump failed to persuade three million less voters than Clinto n, but Russian influence in a couple of rust-belt states go him over the l ine by just 77,747 votes. 66,666 would have been neater.

But could be stabilised by people who know what they are doing. The Austral ian economy has now gone 27 years without a recession.

But be undiscriminating enough to buy John Larkin's offerings instead.

You have to pick your business magazines and your Ph.D. economists.

Back in the 1980s Will Hutton wrote an economics column for the Guardian, a nd was chummy with neo-Kenysian university economist.

He made a habit of taking what the UK treasury's monetarist economists were predicting and comparing it with what the university economists were telli ng him.

Six months later he'd follow up with an I-told-you-so piece. Very amusing. Living in England while it's economy was being trashed by Thatcher's silly ideas about economics (which she shared with Ronald Reagan) was less amusin g.

Keynes was.

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The US does control immigration to some extent, but has never been that ent husiastic about controlling migrant workers who will work for lower wages t han US citizens. Now that the US outsources a lot of it's labour-intensive work, the political pressure from capitalists to let in scab labour has dim inished, but there's no sign that Trump's wall will ever be built.

With good reason. But there are perfectly good rational reasons for not app roving of Trump. John Larkin doesn't understand any of them, but he doesn't understand rational argument, and confuses it with an emotional reaction.

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John Larkin confuses the rational exposition of an intellectual case with a n emotional reaction. He can't do rational thinking, so that fact that he c an't recgonise it when he stumbles over it isn't altogether surprisng.

But John Larkin doesn't like thinking. If he could think about the stuff he slings together he'd probably be able realise that it makes more sense to design a transformer for a specific job (and get it wound) than it does to try to shoehorn in some arbitrary transformer (designed for some other job) tha he can buy from a dstributor.

Which isn't much, and a very small proportion of what he promised.

Until the side effects of pushing the US Federal budget even further into d eficit take their toll.

Reagan and Dubbya relied on the Laffer Curve to justify their tax cuts, and it didn't deliver back them.

John Larkin doesn't understand much. He can't recognise denialist propaganda as self-serving lies either.

But Trump didn't articulate any of them and neither have you.

The space force idea wasn't rational and does seem to be entirely spam-in-a-can PR, which does seem to be Donald Trump's stock-in-trade.

Pointing this out is perfectly rational. John Larkin can't recognsie this because he doesn't have a clue what might constitute a rational argument and doesn't ever seem to have produced one here.

The rational objection to a space force, is that anything out in space is totally vulnerable to a nuclear weapon optimised to produce the biggest possible electromagnetic pulse.

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Right, the left is as bad as the right, if you want to say worse than, I won't disagree strongly. (I'm not all that interested in the past blame games, what-about-ism.) Trump lovers are all emotion too. There are few rational voices out there. The national review is all I can read these days, (and only ~1/2 of that.)

I like the corporate tax reform, I wish it could have been more deficit neutral.... And we're still racking up debt... at some point that has to end badly. Short term chaos and deficits can work.

George H. (what happened to the tea party? guess it turned into the "T" party :^)

Right, It was just a joke. I mostly find Trump to be a conman, charlatan, trickster, Zaphod Beeblebrox is perfect. (sorry) I don't mind when he does something good. (I think I'd give 50/50 odds that the D's put up some left-wing wacko, and we get four more years of T.)

George H.

I don't like him primarily because of the things he does. Of secondary importance is the fact he's a loudmouth blowhard "aggressively American" who can only dish out the abuse, and never take it.

As a native New Englander it's my job to dislike blowhard bloviators, which sadly makes one's options for pals in America rather limited, because there are millions of discount-Trumps out there just as bloviatory and about as useful.

Disagree with what?

Read this:

It's a collection of portraits of the "blue wall" people who elected Trump. Many don't like him, but they voted for him because of the effects that they thought he would have on the economy and on the Supreme Court, or because they disliked Hillary a lot more.

It will be really hard to cut spending, and the deficit will really hurt when the feds have to pay real interest on its debt. At zero interest, you can borrow without limits.

The classic fix for govennment debt is inflation, printing money, which amounts to stealing everyone's savings and weaseling on the debt. Buy real estate.

To prove to the Rooskies that it could be done. If you can navigate to the moon and back, dropping a load in Red Square is a trivial exercise.

Something for NASA bureaucrats to spend money on. Once a government agency gets a budget, it's forever.

And being done by the Air Force. I don't see the purpose of even more military bureaucracy.

Worse, no matter what he says, they're on the opposite side. Trump says MS-13 is bad and the Democrats call them choir boys. Lefties _are_ that stupid. All of them.