OT: About America in this NG

I don't think so, though his adherents might. More like pretender Obama, cat's paw Obama, talking head Obama, Manchurian President Obama, etc.,

?-)

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Just exactly what will be promised and never delivered.

?-((

This is how the catholic has done it for thousands of years, why stop now.

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That's part of the problem today. In general, Obama seeks to take what people produce, and make decisions for them. That's "Obama's- size-fits-all."

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I'd be upset if they'd prevented progress or solutions to our problems, and I'd oppose that. What I see is that they've prevented more pointless spending--only some--and thereby saved us slightly from progressive fiscal calamity, our greatest present danger.

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Okay, what out-of-the-box way--please include figures--would you suggest to close the budget deficit and pay down the debt? Or, would you? If not, why wouldn't the debt service be a burden for all? How much extra tax would you collect, from whom, or how much would you cut?

And, if the nation runs out of credit how do we help anyone, even ourselves?

I've done all those calculations. The deficit's currently around $1.1 trillion out of $3.5 trillion spent. Obama's tax-hike on the top brackets pulls in $35 billion a year--it's nothing. His Obamacare tax on $250K+ ups that to perhaps $80 billion a year, not even 1/12th of the deficit.

It's not possible to fund Obama's programs by taxing the rich--they don't have enough money to take. To fund his spending he'd have to double everyone's income tax.

So, he's cut nothing save defense, and is now set to tour the nation promoting this trivial tax--on capital and capitalism (on seed corn, as it were)--as if it were a solution.

You see, the numbers matter. They matter a great deal--we're spending wayyy beyond our means. That's a sketch of why and how I believe as I believe. I'm interested in your solutions.

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Cheers, 
James Arthur

Oh, those Sociology departments! The favorite refuge for marxist academics. It's shame that poor taxpayers have to fund those parasites.

Just don't give him any ideas. But even if he tried that, it would not work unless you assume that making such big tax increase would leave everything else the same. Unfortunately many tax-happy democrats think that way.

Naturally. I was using CBO-style "static scoring," assuming people's behavior wouldn't change. In real life, people would shelter income, make trusts, transfer assets, and stop doing things that are heavily taxed. If we doubled the income tax we'd be way on the right-hand side of the Laffer curve--revenue and GDP would go down. Jobs too.

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Cheers, 
James Arthur

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"hands-off"

Try rereading your first paragraph. And for that matter the tone of the second paragraph. Both say STATISM over reality quite clearly.

Nor have you properly responded to my charge of tourist guide views of poor neighborhoods. I have lived there, complete with nearby sounds of gunfire for years at a time.

?-)

Moderate Obama, who never planned to do any of the interesting things the right-wing nitwits want to frighten everybody by claiming that he wants to.

The US political system does keep the executive heavily constrained by Congress, particularly when the opposition party has a majority.

That's his job, amongst other things. Combining the role of ceremonial head of state with that of being the real head of state does waste a lot of time that a real head of state could spend more usefully.

The Manchurian Candidate was a pretty silly novel and it got made into an even sillier film. The kind of nitwit that believes that Obama was born in Kenya and is a Muslim could probably believe that he took a few months off to get brainwashed as well, but that would take dyed-in- the-wool imbecility.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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James Arthur can manage the polite, even if he doesn't have much idea of what might be involved in discussion; he is into delivering that same old load of right wing propaganda at every possible opportunity.

James Arthur doesn't seem fond of Obama. The Obama he complains about doesn't seem to have much in common with the one that inhabits the White House, but he's a convenient straw man.

What James Arthur opposes is political power for Democrats. Admittedly the Democrats he claims to be opposing are rather scary - if largely imaginary - figures.

James Arthur version of "The End is Nigh". If he were carrying an actual placard, he'd be on his third by now.

James Arthur thinks inside a very small box, usually labelled "flat earth economics".

Good question, but probably looking a little further into the future than is useful or helpful.

Inside the very small box labelled flat earth economics.

This rather ignores the point of using the deficit to fund Keynesian stimulus spending, which does work (though James Arthur can't - or won't understand this) and will eventually get the economy back to normal growth. It's 2% at the moment

If it got to 3% the Keynesian stimulus would get scaled back rapidly. to avoid over-heating the economy, but since James Arthur treats the stimulus as the irrational products of deluded minds, he's not expecting this to happen.

Or start collecting corporation tax from all those companies that have their own private legislative loop-holes. The nominal US corporate tax rate is one of the highest in the world, but the actual yield from corporate taxation is relatively low.

If he can fool enough of the people, it will be. Keynes crucial insight was that markets are irrational and the economy can be fooled back into growth. This is much too complicated for whatever James Arthur uses instead of a mind, but it happens to work.

Or would be, if the spending wasn't aimed a get rid of the need for stimulus spending. Expensive as it is, it's much cheaper than letting the economy shrink at 6% per year, as it did during the Great Depression, and in the first quarter after the sub-prime mortgage crisis started to bite.

Actually, he isn't, His be-all and end-all is to see the Republican Party in power, because he believes that they can do no wrong.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Fortunately for krw, who has trouble processing complicated ideas.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Then he'll complain about being paid to go away. ...and won't.

You don't need "out of the box" thinking. Just roll back the federal government to pre-Obama size (or even pre-Bush II, if you think I'm picking on Obummer). That's not going to happen, so how about abolishing "base-line budgeting"? Do the penny plan (every department takes a $.01 shave per year for six years)? Come on! You can't shave

1%? No, the fact is that the Democrats want to spend 8%-10% more PER YEAR. ...FOREVER!

We already have. What do you think QE-forever is all about?

Party poop.

No doubt. He's not known for doing anything right. :(

They weren't Marxist until the got their research revealed how society actually works - and fails.

It's an occupational risk of the profession. I've still got happy memories of the way an an American economist who'd been working on the pioneering Melbourne Poverty Survey in the early 1980's dismantled some right-wing nitwit chemist at a party who had told us all that the poor were poor because they were feckless. The - substantial - sample that she'd worked on turned out to have been poor because they were unlucky - typically, their car would break down and fixing it would use up the money they should have used to pay their hospital benefits that month, just before somebody got sick ...

That was Melbourne, which was pretty prosperous and unemployment rates were then around 1%.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Works for me.

A modification of the penny plan would optimize that quickly: cut 1%, etc., then wait and see if something's really missed. If so, restore that cut, but continue with others.

That's an adaptive filter, trending toward some sort of quasi local optimum. Way better than piling on, forever. The difference between government offices and dinosaurs is that dinosaurs died off after they went extinct.

Yep. The Barack-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate exploded spending, and 2010 kept them from growing it even more. Thank heaven.

I'm not the one who needs educating. Well, actually maybe I do--Paul wants to help people, and I do too. He's mad at republicans for stopping (delaying) a disaster; I don't understand Paul's objection.

Numbers matter. Out-of-the-box is fine, if it adds up. Fairy dust doesn't cut it.

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Cheers, 
James Arthur

[snip]

It is because, as Bill Sloman has tried to explain, government spending is an effective way to stimulate the economy. It is similar to a company spending borrowed money to retool their production line and engage in some serious design engineering and purchase parts and materials for a new product. So you go into debt for a couple of years and then spend more on advertising and then after a little more time it starts selling and the profits recoup the expenditures over the next couple of years and then it becomes an efficient source of revenue over the long term.

Businesses can do this, too, but they are inhibited by their emotionally

charged assessment of the economic outlook and consumer confidence, and until recently they have been holding back. The Republican prophets of doom and gloom adversely affect the high rollers who cling to the "new old school" business plans which mostly involve games with money rather than the "really old school" way of developing a new product and then hiring a work force to produce and sell it for a good old fashioned profit benefitting the local economy in the US. Money gamers like Romney just play the system and use accounting tricks, loopholes, downsizing, and "rape, pillage, slash and burn and get out quick" tactics for personal and crony gains and amassing of wealth.

In such an environment, only the government can increase expenditure on things like public services and infrastructure improvement that involves

hiring local labor and purchasing local resources, which really just transfers the money to businesses and people who may be currently unemployed or inactive, and it is like kicking a flywheel or setting a snowball loose, which improves the measureable economic indicators such as employment and GDP. Some businesses have already taken advantage of some of the stimulus already offered, and hopefully other businesses will take the hint and start their own expansion. But businesses need to think more in terms of projects that will benefit local workers and suppliers, rather than looking only at the bottom line which may be most easily attained by offshore shenanigans.

And I don't believe for a minute that an additional tax on the rich, who

make $250k and more as *taxable* income, will make them unwilling to hire people and otherwise lose jobs. These people just do whatever benefits their own immense wealth, and that means mostly playing games on the stock market and indirect investment in whatever looks like a quick easy gain. Most of them, like Romney, only know how to juggle books and debts and "funny money", and probably have no idea about the actual working of a factory or a high technology enterprise. His "successes" involved retail stores and he made them more profitable by cutting jobs and benefits and making deals with overseas companies, so the top management and shareholders made money, but the workers, not so much.

If you can't understand this, or simply use knee-jerk antagonism and far-right-whine dogma to dismiss it without even attempting to analyze the concepts, then I can only conclude that the conservative brain-washers have done their job admirably well, and fortunately there is still a majority of us who have not taken the narcotic cocktail of those who still wish for a return to the fairy tale environment that vanished in the light of reality in 2008.

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Josephkk reveals that he hasn't been paying attention. I certainly wasn't devoting much time to job-seeking in my last few years in the Netherlands - I did apply for occasional jobs where there was an unusually good match between my skills and the job advertised, but never even got a reaction, let alone a rejection, after I'd turned 65.

Now that we are settling into Sydney I've been trying a bit harder. The situation isn't much more promising, but at least I got invited to traipse across town to talk to an employment agency, who didn't like my chances of getting any regular electronics work, but thought that I might have a chance at the occasional quasi-academic job in a university spin-off, and promised to keep my CV on their books for that - fairly remote - eventuality.

I've also traipsed across town to talk to a contract engineering business who does design work for odd-start-ups and and for people who want something more complicated than their in-house talent can handle, and got the same kind of message - with the difference that the contract engineering house has a couple of consultants that they call on from time to time, and I looked very much like that kind of resource. There was no suggestion that they might pay anybody a retainer, or make sure that their computer-aided design tool-kit lined up with the one in use at the contract engineering shop, and I didn't get the feeling that it would have been worth my while to push, so it's not exactly likely to come to anything.

Josephkk may have more elevated ideas of what constitutes looking for work - and might even share John Larkin's idea that I should canvas a whole lot of firms (presumably gleaned from the yellow pages of the telephone book) in the hope of turning up something, but I'm not that desperate, and frankly doubt that it would be a productive way of spending my time.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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There are cheaper ways of getting people to go away.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney