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I certainly have considered that particular table, and while I don't understand in the same way that you do - which is as a blanket endorsement of your right-wing political opinions - I think I've extracted a few salient points which are reality-based.
Since James Arthur can always find a way to interpret statistics to mean what he wants them to mean, he's presumably including himself amongst that "many". He wants to depict me as being more susceptible to prejudice and "gut feelings" than he is, but I think he is deluding himself - one of his favourite activities.
His theory that Democrat politicians coerced the American banking system into making the ninja loans that precipitated the sub-prime mortgage crisis is a particularly fine example of self-delusion.
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He may just have been a bit too ready to take American Enterprise Institute fellow Peter J. Wallison at his word, but he has never explicitly cited Wallison's ill-founded opinions and was presumably following his own ill-informed prejudices.
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krw lacks the wit to realise that Ken S. Tucker has just invented a particularly ridiculous straw man, and wants to invent another of his own. Ben Bernake may not be infallible on matters of financial faith and doctrine, but he is much better informed than the dimmest of our righ-wing nitwits.
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Ken S. Tucker suffers from obvious cognitive deficits. Nothing I've ever posted has ever suggested that any government can get by without collecting taxes - they are an essential feature of any organised society, whence Benjamin Franklin's famous comment "nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
Keynesian deficit-financed stimulus spending can usefully be financed by selling bonds - the logic is that a recession driven by a failure of investor confidence can be reversed by the government borrowing the money that is not being invested by nervous investors and investing it themselves in measures that increase economic activity.
Paradoxically, during a recession, the most efficient way for the government to invest this borrowed money is in giving it to people who are poor enough that they can be relied to spend it immediately, but twits like Ken S. Tucker and James Arthur can't follow the reasoning that explains and justifies this slightly unexpected conclusion. Because they don't appreciate what is being done, and why, they imagine that if Keynesian deficit-financed pump priming is a good idea during a recession, it's proponents will want to keep on doing it when the recession is over and the economy is running close to capacity, at a time when such an investment would have entirely negative effects.
This is simply mindless extrapolation, but neither of them has the wit to realise how ridiculous this makes them look.
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As if the growth of the US GDP inflation since 2008 hadn't been affected by the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the bursting of the house-price bubble. The Fed's policy since then has been to minimise the consequences of that disaster, and they've done a fair job - the author's implicit claim is that anything short of perfect compensation represents a failure of competence, which is a trifle unrealistic.
Whoever wrote that has to be a deluded idiot in the James Arthur class.
to know how many filers receive more in refunds than they made in payments?
(SOI)(okay, it's really Statistics, but statists was pretty close).
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That story's largely deprecated. The framing's wrong and subprime wasn't enough financial mass to kill the whole system like what happened. All the offsetting insurance products should have taken a 5% blow like that, had all actual subprime failed at once. The thing quickly spread to *NON*-subprime which has been the dominant mode since early 2009...
Sumner and other people are quite seriously accusing low money growth and low GDP growth for *causing* the subprime crisis. I think they may be right.
The point is that for public choice reasons, and reasons of political expediency, Ben bernanke has not been able to practice the very economic theory he wrote on when he was an academic...
*Sigh*. Sumner. et al, are making the point that real GDP as the steering star for central bankers is flawed, and that most macroeconomists believe that nominal GDP is a better measure.
That is all this is. But you'd have to read more than one article to know that, so...
Sumner's point in that post is that Bernanke knows this, but cannot act in that manner because of architectural problems with the Fed itself.
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By whom?
It may suit you to think that. The sub-prime mortgage crisis was the outward and visible sign of the bursting of the US housing market bubble, which has dropped the value of the average US house from $300,000 to about $250,000.
In Europe, the main effect of the crisis was to wreck any number of banks who'd bought securitised mortgage packages which suddenly weren't worth anything.
Invoking "low money growth" and "low GDP growth" as the "real" source of the crisis is bizarre. Crises do draw out kooks and Sumner does seem to be offering himself an alternative economist - albeit a bit too alternative to deserve serious attention.
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That's the usual difference between theory and practice.
Their flaw seems to lie in fixing on a single "steering star". The economy is a complicated system, and over-simplifications tend to be a misleading as they are seductive.
Perhaps.But if he actually had some expectation that Bernanke could have kept the NGDP stable through the sub-prime mortgage crisis, he'd be a complete fruitcake.
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Sumner for one. I put a link in below.
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If you'll *carefully* evaluate the sequence of events, the now-standard explanation 1) doesn't explain much and 2) doesn't fit the timeline very well.
Precisely.
That's not what he is saying. I won't quote months' worth of blog posts to counter this, just read the blog and decide for yourself. Remember, he's saying the *cause* of the various crises ( there have been several ) was weak money supply ( by measurement of NGDP ) .
FWIW, he's saying that weak NGDP and money growth tracks back to the
2000 time frame. If you take out Americans liquidating home equity, it fits the observed data.
The bottom line is that "depressions are always monetary phenomena".
Our resident retarded commie from Slomania, recommends,
"giving it to people who are poor enough"
So tax the workers, (pay or go to Jail), to make people poor enough to raise taxes to give to the "poor enough", collected by very well paid govmonk workers, whose job growth depends on increasing the number of "poor enough".
Notice two things: first, he agrees it's redistribution, but now says robbing people is justified because they benefit disproportionately.
Collecting his arguments, robbing the rich makes them richer, but it's good 'cause it leaves everyone better off.
Perverse. So, he's for increasing the income gap, among other things.
Second, in his vision, the non-rich are a permanent disadvantaged class, dependent on their betters for support. And, cleaning out the hard-working producers to give the poor cigarette money makes everyone better off. Bizarre. You'd think they'd be better off with jobs.
So I cite an article about a gang-member collecting unemployment in prison (by fraud), and Bill denounces this, when he should be praising its wonderful stimulative effect. After all, if someone spending money that isn't theirs stimulates the economy, why is the prisoner's good-faith effort any less stimulative than some other slacker's? Is the prisoner's unemployment check any different than anyone else's? Do the goods he buys lack some magic Keynesian power?
Ken S. Tucker is retarded enough to still be using "commie" as a term of abuse. Communism is as dead as Senator Joe McCarthy, but Ken S. Tucker lost the capacity to acquire new ideas back when both were still flourishing.
It's not "my" recommendation - it's the most effective way of dispensing Keynesian pump-priming stimulus money, and as such it's pure economics 101.
You miss the point - as usual. Getting stimulus money by raising taxes is obviously self-defeating - as even you seem to have noticed, though you lack to the wit to realise the implication - and in fact the cash for stimulus spending is borrowed from investors who would otherwise leave it in the bank or under the mattress.
That's a technical question that I'm happy to leave to economists. I've already provided the operational definition, which is "poor enough that they can be relied on to spend it immediately, thus stimulating the economy, rather than putting it in the bank or under the mattress wher it isn't doing anything useful".
Granting your cognitive deficits, I have gone to trouble of spelling it out again, with extra detail, just for you.
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There's been an bull running around in the economic china shop, but Sumner wants to put the blame for the damage on the people controlling the money supply - he's a monetarist, and he's not comfortable with any other kind of explanation.
Fundamentalist Christians will probably want to blame gay marriage ...
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"Carefully" in this context means "while wearing a set on monetarist blinkers that exclude the now standard explanations". To misquote Sherlock Holmes, if you exclude the probable and plausible explanations you may well end up thinking that something quite unlikely is the "true" explanation.
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Monetarist fruitcakes do say this sort of thing more or less non-stop. Back in the 1980's the British Treasury was full of them, and Will Hutton used to analyse their predictions in The Guardian from time to time, and six months later publish his "I told you so" follow-up. Monetarists are about as useful as astrologers, and Regan seemed to have a weakness for both. Thatcher - at that stage - still had enough sense to skip the astrologers, but her Altzheimer's came on later than Regan's.
And if it didn't you have to invent some other way to get his silly ideas to looked as if they lined up with reality.
Obviously, but monetarists don't have anything useful to say about them, or anything else for that matter. But for some reason, their advice always sounds good to people with loads of money, who endow chairs for them at universities that ought to know better.
As much as any other tax-funded government organised activity. It's not "redistribution" for the sake of redistribution, but just one more collective action that is paid for by society as a whole.
I haven't agreed that anybody is being robbed - taxpayers are going to end up paying for stimulus spending, just like they pay for a whole lot of other collective activities, but that doesn't mean that they are being robbed. The whole thing is perfectly legal, just like the tax avoidance practised by Mitt Romney and Warren Buffett.
Actually traducing -
It is perverse to call the process robbery
How? Stimulus spending stops the rich and poor from getting poorer - which is what would otherwise happen in a recession - but doesn't seem to do much for the income gap either way.
Wrong. Stimulus spending is directed at the poor because they can be relied on to spend pretty much everything they get. It serves no useful purpose when the economy isn't in recession, so it's not permanent, and by getting the economy out of recession it maximises the chances of the poor finding real work.
James Arthur seems to be turning the crank on his anti-socialist propaganda machine, which needs to be reprogrammed to accommodate the fact that social security is a safety net, not a hammock. Socialism is all about supporting people so that they can become useful and independent participants in the community, not sustaining a useless class of impoverished parasites at the bottom to match an equally illusory class of wealthy parasites at the top.
Deficit-funded stimulus spending isn't collected from hard-working producers, but borrowed from investors at a time when they don't feel brave enough to invest it in anything productive. The tax-paying public eventually pays the interest on the money that has been borrowed, but the aim of deficit-funded stimulus spending is to get more of the public into a state where they earn enough to pay taxes.
It's a subtle distinction, but crucial - if you ripped off the stimulus money from people who would otherwise be spending it, you'd be doing something completely pointless and redundant.
James Arthur's quest for rhetorical impact has destroyed any rational basis his argument might have had
That's what stimulus spending is designed to generate. Set your mind back to the Great Depression, 1933 and 25% unemployment. Roosevelt's New Deal got people back to work.
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James Arthur does like his straw men. Since he doesn't really understand what Keynesian stimulus spending is intended to stimulate, he does have some difficulty in appreciating what actually counts as useful stimulus spending.
James Arthur might like to reflect on the particular bits of the economy most likely to be stimulated by money being collected by the relatives of imprisoned gang members. It's more likely to stimulate some Central American black economy than to multiply tax-generating economic activity within the US.
James Arthur's not very bright. and his particular set of preconceptions don't direct those ideas that he can manage to generate into any kind of appreciation of the real world.
Barack 0bama described it as "spreading the wealth around," as doing it "for fairness" even when it lowers revenue, and "at some point haven't you made enough money?"
That sure sounds like it's stealing for its own sake.
I don't think you can really conclude that -- I'd say both are a combination of destructive and constructive, it's just that the ratios and specific resources destroyed or created are different. (This gets fuzzy quickly because it's hard to put prices on emotions -- "the workers generally feel safe and happy" or whatever -- yet these intangibles significantly influence the success of your economy.)
Yeah, in the limiting case of socialism I certainly agree.
However, the limiting case of capitalism is pretty bad as well. Hence the reason just about every reasonably free country in the world today has a mix of capitalism and socialism; it's just the ratio that changes and there'll never be universal agreement on where the best balance point is.
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