cruise ships

the

une...

Read Obama's 2013 budget. I gave you the link. 13 =3D 3 years of stimulus so far, plus 10 more in Obama's projections.

Obama is not withdrawing the stimulus ever--the spending substantially only goes up.

That's how you've been duped. The headline figures are being manipulated, pretty transparently.

"Real" unemployment meaning the number of people who are actually unemployed.

Per Obama, you weren't unemployed all those years when you told us here that you were. Were you lying?

The dexterity of the invisible hand made those graphs possible, to everyone, for free.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

e the

be

ly

=3Dune...

That he's got to project his budget over ten years is scarcely evidence that he expects that the economy is still going to be in recession and in need of stimulus spending in ten years time. It's a moronic rhetorical trick, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself, but history shows that you are - in fact - a shameless liar.

Once you've found a way of making sense of a set of numbers that fits the argument you want to make, the idea that you interpretation is hare-brained nonsense doesn't enter your head.

He can only withdraw the stimulus once the economy recovers - and predicting when a recovery will happen is rather difficult. The right- wing nit-wit economists you favour don't recognise the difficulty - they will predict immediate recovery as soon as the budget is balanced, but their record for making predictions of events that actually happen is abysmal. If they predicted that the sun was going to rise tomorrow, sensible people would buy extra candles.

From time to time. The January figures reflect business hiring more people, which is a good thing and an unambiguous sign of some recovery.

ou

The US statistics collectors were not interested in whether I was unemployed in the Netherlands. Since I was getting unemployment benefit fro the whole time, it's hard to imagine that I would have been excluded from any statistic reflecting unemployment in the Netherlands at the time.

Perhaps, but it didn't regulate the economy into running smoothly, did it. Looking at the economy as device with feedback, it clearly needs a somewhat more sophisticated feedback mechanism than it has got at the moment, while you hammer on about the unrestrained free market being the best of all possible economic regulators, which happens to be unrealistic, if consistent with your crack-pot political philosophy.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

ime the

l be

ably

y=3Dune...

I'll assume you're kidding. His ten-year budget is *exactly* a projection of what he proposes to do, and what effect he expects this to have.

I look up the numbers first, then conclude. You?

Where in the projections does the spending drop by one stimulus quantum? Answer: never. Where does it go down at all? Answer: never, it only goes up.

Anyway, this game of you making stuff up, me educating you piecemeal, then you bloviating more contrived ignorant protest is boring.

I live here, and I've been following this stuff for years. If you want to talk about it, maybe you should educate yourself first.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

The point was that Obama's methodology wouldn't have accepted you or your commonsense understanding of "unemployment" during a lengthy period where you had no work and, therefore, reasonably considered yourself unemployed. Further, after taking you off the tally, Obama would've counted this as an improvement in the economy.

It's inconsistent for you to defend Obama's method today--that conflicts with what you yourself reported w.r.t. your own situation.

IOW, somebody's lying, but I didn't mean you.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

prime the

ill be

h's

umably

t_y=3Dune...

He's not going to be president in five years - whatever happens - so the last five years can't be a projection of what he intends to do then. Could you re-engage your brain and concoct a claim that has some connection to reality?

Depends on the numbers. Sometimes I need to look them up, sometimes I don't. Sometimes they agree with my expectations, sometimes not which can affect what I post.

The only way the numbers affect you conclusions is in the way you phrase "republicans good, democrats bad".

How does a projection change direction? In reality, spending is going to be adjusted to match the actual condition of the economy, but a projection is an extrapolation from now, not a prophecy, no matter how much you'd like it to be a prophecy.

Your idea of "education" is a trifle bizarre. Pretending that a ten year projection is some kind of prophecy would probably strike even you as an idiotic contrivance if you weren't using it to try and make one of your wholly artificial rhetorical points.

Accusing me of bloviating a "contrived and ignorant protest" is a trifle ironic - it's you who has magically reinterpreted a ten year projection into some kind of prophecy - conveniently ignoring the fact that after five years the authors won't be in a position to influence the further development of the economy, and that nobody has much of an idea what the economy will actually be doing in five years - let alone ten.

Face it. You made a moronic rhetorical point, and I called you on it. You are too stupid to realise how obvious your sleigh of hand actually was and are now trying to bluff it out.

Paying close attention to every detail that can be paraphrased as "republicans good, democrats bad" and ignoring any content beyond that.

If I wanted to say things that would find favour with you, the kind of education I'd need would be in the blind spots and inflexible prejudices of right-wing nitwits. If I was to believe the kind of rubbish you'd peddle, I'd need something closer to the kind of ideological re-education that the Chinese and Cambodians offered to their university educated populations in forced labour camps.

You claim to understand economics, but proceed to tell us that Keynes got it wrong ... There are academics who've got it wrong in useful and productive ways - Linus Pauling comes to mind - but Keynes was a great deal more than a mere academic, and amongst other things, a successful private investor.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The Dutch system was - at the time - unusually generous, and was subsequently reformed.

Obama's methodology is not something he invented or introduced. Margaret Thatcher was doing exactly the same thing in the UK when I was working there. and most government unemployment statistics confine themselves to counting people who are actively seeking work and have some possibility of getting it. Claiming that this approach is specific to Obama is either stupid or mendacious - if you are as sophisticated about economic statistics as you claim, it has to be both.

If you want to ignore the fact that the US economy is recovering - despite the best efforts of the Tea Party nitwits in Congress - just bury your head in the sand. Trying to devalue the recent fall in US unemployment by claiming that Obama has changed the ground rules recently in order to create the appearance of an improvement needs a little more evidence than you seem to be able to muster, despite your amazing ability to get statistics to support your argument (usually by doing something rather dishonest).

Unemployment statistics aren't lies, but you do have to understand how they are put together.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

^^^^^ piss into the wind much

?-((

ying

I'm not a big class-envy guy so I was too lazy to look it up, but I stumbled on this and you were right--Berkshire Hathaway pays 29% effective rate (when they pay, that is).

So, the 17% Buffett pays on wages, dividends, and cap gains is on top of that, and his overall effective rate is over 40%, federal, plus state, etc.

There's even a little tidbit at the end of that for Bill, re: number of millionaires that paid no tax.

James