economics: good news

Crudely, about HALF of the US people are on some kind of welfare..

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The current administration is doing what it can, but it's stuck with a Republican majority in Congress who really didn't want the economy to recover until after the presidential elections.

So who predicted it. And where.

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rong.

And the banks didn't check. Oddly enough, the home loans to people in low income neighbourhoods were checked, as they were supposed to be to qualify for the extra Federal money, and thiose loans haven't been going bad.

Not as large as a rerun of the Great Depression would have done. Ergo, Obama should never have signed off on the stimulus package in 2009.

In reality, his administration has worked hard to minimise the number of people needing foods stamps. but the Republican majority in congress since 2010 has had other priorities.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Where is Woody Guffrie when we need him :-)

--
M0WYM 
www.radiowymsey.org 

Sales @ radiowymsey 
http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Sales-At-Radio-Wymsey/

For the truly excellent reason that it isn't true. Even James Arthur only makes the claim on the basis of his fundamental fallacy - "Republicans good, Democrats bad".

--
Bill Sloman, Sydeny

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward" 
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com 
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

Yes, we finally have Marx's "reserve army of the unemployed", thoughtfully furnished by socialist policies.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

to

To destroy jobs?

Nonsense.

Many did, including myself. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to foresee the damage that a skim-off-the-top tax will inevitably do. And now it does. The president still appears not to understand, as evidenced in a recent interview.

In workgroups. And on LinkedIn.

[...]

It has most certainly not.

[...]

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

[...]

You have already forgotten what happened in places like Portugal where people did stop lending and interest rates skyrocketed as a consequence?

Bill, don't get me wrong but you are constantly engaging in ad-hominem attacks. That is generally seen as a sign that the writer has run out of real arguments and is flailing. It does not exude professionalism.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

The real way you can tell that Slowman is losing it... he failed to take my name in vain >:-} ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

attacks. That is generally seen as a sign that the writer has run out of real arguments and is flailing. It does not exude professionalism.

It's probably difficult to refrain when others are doing much worse. Notable examples are Jim Thompson and Michael Terrell. They are, IMO, fair game for retaliation in kind, although anyone resorting to such childish name-calling instantly loses respect and credibility. It is, as you say, a sign of being out of ammo, and does nothing to advance their POV.

There is generally a grain or two of truth or validity to everyone's assertions, and political (and economic) debates are similar to those about religion where there is no way to prove or disprove the beliefs being offered. It is impossible to influence a closed mind, and repeated attempts to do so accomplish nothing, especially when the arguments are endless repeats of the same information.

Paul

Almost everyone has apparently forgotten stagflation, the s+l fiasco, the dot.com bust, the real estate boom/bust, the auto industry crash, the student loan mess, and a few other crashes. The tablet/phone apps bust is next, followed by the city/state unfunded-pension crisis and the Federal government debt/inflation crisis.

Who predicted them? Not many economists or politicians. I did.

I was just thinking about all those absurd Bob Dylan songs,

Today the college kids seem beaten down, wondering if they can get jobs, wondering if they can ever pay their loans, wondering if mom and dad will let them move back in and live in the basement and maybe give them a small allowance. The times have sure'a changed.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com 

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom laser drivers and controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

Sloman is Dr Doom, seriously and maybe clinically depressed. He lacks the intelligence, or the guts, to do the things that would make him feel better and be useful. His constant pontificating and insulting hurts mostly himself, making him even more gloomy.

It's sad how dumb smart people can be.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com 

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom laser drivers and controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

Portugal - like Spain and Greece - was coping with the legacy of a right-wing authoritarian regime. Salazar wasn't as obnoxious as Franco or the Greek colonels, but he wasn't great on economic development, and Portugal didn't have a lot of resources to develop when he finally died.Like Spain and Greece, Portugal exploited their climate and their beaches to build up tourism, but that's a luxury trade, and the numbers went right down in reaction to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, leaving them with lots of fixed costs and a lot less income. People do stop lending under those circumstances, and interest rates do skyrocket. Nobody expects another sub-prime mortgage crisis - which isn't saying much since very few anticipated the one in 2008 - but there's no obvious bubble around to burst.

Strictly speaking, I'm making frequent references to James Arthur's silly ideas. Since he never changes them nor defends them in any rational way, it's inappropriate to treat him as human - he's acting exactly like a pre-programmed propaganda robot, and these aren't ad hominum attacks but spam warnings.

I've got no shortage of real arguments, but James won't engage with any of them. As far as he is concerned the authors of the Federalist papers were revealing their deepest convictions, rather than churning out political propaganda, and nobody has the right to differ with these sacred texts. He's even sillier on economics, and no less fanatically convinced.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Larkin is vying with Jim Thompson for being out of touch with reality.

How would John Larkin know that?

By which he means that I'm sceptical about the the plan he advanced in which I was to ingratiate myself with potential customers by offering to take on small projects for free. I fact I'm quietly poking around in Sydney to see if I can identify any potential customers - unlike him, I've not been selling stuff into the local market for twenty-odd years, and I've not got a clue who does what.

even more gloomy.

John Larkin is a sensitive soul. He appreciates any suggestion that he's not 100% right as an insult, and the consequent correction as pontificating.

As John Larkin reminds us frequently. He's not so much dumb as ignorant, but he doesn't seem able to learn enough to avoid posting the same fatuous ignorance over and over again. It could be that his vanity prevents him from admitting that he's wrong, but that does betray a depressing lack of insight.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

All of them small, and relatively painless. The sub-prime mortgage crash of 2008 was huge, comparable with the stock market crash of

1929, and bigger than 1973 oil-price rise, which quadrupled the price of oil within about a year.

Right. Just like you are right about anthropogenic global warming.

It's 1933 all over again. At least we haven't had Hoover in charge for the past four years, so the GDP hasn't shrunk by 25%, but while deficit-funded Keynesian stimulus can keep the economy running, and even expanding slowly, seeing all that money evaporate when the property price bubble burst has left a lot of people remarkably unwilling to invest in expanding their businesses.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Every policy has it's side-effects. I'd be very surprised if whatever it is you are complaining about destroyed jobs in the economy as a whole, as opposed to within the bit of it whith which you are intimately familiar.

      ... but it's stuck with a

It's difficult to see their behaviour any other way. If they do drive you over this fiscal cliff on New Years Day, I'll have to accept that they were sincerely demented rather than being destructively obstructive for party political reasons, but that would make them even more dangerous and destructive than I'd imagined.

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The advantage of a skim-off tax is that accountants can't make it go away, by organising that none of a group of companies operating in a range of countries with high corporate taxes will ever make a profit, while the sole member of the group that operates in a tax haven will make enormous profits by buying stuff cheap from one company and selling it on to another company for a much higher price. You've got to change the part numbers in the tax haven, otherwise it's a bit too obvious to work, but it remains a very profitable exercise.

Cite.

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Cite?

In fact, if we were take your proposition seriously, what he should have done is fail to sign off the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of

2009. He signed it, and his administration have kept it running.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

on

It *is* printing money, they're just hiding it in their piggy-banks. [sic]

It looks like a variation on "financial repression" (term of art: financial institutions forced to finance a government).

Stashing it hides the inflationary effects. Paying interest and raising capitalization requirements captures it, preventing it doing any of the good (increased loan availability) advertised as the rationale for doing it.

It's a pretext. The fact is, they can't finance Barack's overspending at rates we can afford--no one's loaning us the money. So, the fed's buying treasuries, and hiding the effects.

James Arthur

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You still had 4.6% unemployment at the peak of the property price bubble, when every house builder was putting up house that nobody was going to buy after 2008

That's a perfectly adequate reserve army of the unemployed - in the

1950's Australia got by with about 1% unemployment. And the laissez- faire policies that led to unemployment rising to 10% were those of that arch socialist George W. Bush Jnr, who did warn about the risks of the property price bubble but was much too laissez-faire to actually do anything about it.

Nobody who wasn't a card-carrying right-wing nitwit would describe Barack Obama as a socialist, but it's his policies that have reduced unemployment back to 7.9%.

I know you find it difficult to acknowledge that you have ever got anything wrong, but this ought to be an exception.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Perhaps, but it's a lot less damaging than letting the economy shrink at 6% per year, as it did during the Great Depression.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney