OT: Higher taxes..

The state's stupid. They should have confiscated the winnings. She shouldn't be allowed to play the lottery (or buy alcohol) if she's on the dole.

It needs it.

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It shows exactly that, but it's no basis for arguing about policies that are supposed to be applied to all welfare recipients.

Because you haven't a clue about what might constitute useful evidence.

Not at all. I'm just tired of people who waste bandwidth posting irrelevant detail. I know that this kind of story confirms all your favourite prejudices, but it really doesn't tell us anything about welfare recipients in general.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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You are stupid. If they went around arbitrarily ripping off lottery winnings, nobody would bother buying lottery tickets. From a more general point of view, it wouldn't makes sense to exempt people on welfare from the rule of law.

Sadly, locking her up in a poorhouse and forcing her to pick oakum all day - the Victorian solution - seems to have fallen out of favour. Your could try to revive that approach, but your prisons are already over-crowded and it keeping people locked up seems to be more expensive than keeping them on welfare.

Scarcely. Watching you and amdx make idiots of yourselves puts me at risk of over-estimating my own competence.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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What - precisely - does he want to do "for fairness" even though it lowers revenue? Does he think that whatever it is actually will lower revenue, or is this just your opinion about the effect of whatever it is he was actually talking about?

We know you like using the words "steal" and "rob" but the fact that you don't like perfectly legal government activities doesn't give you the right to characterise them as criminal, no matter how much you dislike them.

Whether you like it or not, you live in a society where your actions affect other people, and they have a right to compel you to act in a way that helps everybody else, even if you don't happen to believe in helping everybody else in that particular way.

In this particular case, there's no compulsion.

People with money that could be invested, who don't want to invest it

- which happens to be bad for the economy - are being invited to lend that money (against an attractive rate of invest and good expectations of eventual repayment) to the government so that it can invest it in reviving a flagging economy. This does involve increasing the national debt - which you find objectionable - but it also offers the prospect of getting the economy working close to full capacity rather sooner than any of the approaches that you are prepared to contemplate.

Basically, you want to impose your irrational religious belief in the untrammelled free market on everybody else, but your constitution says that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ....".

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That's your interpretation. Socialism is actually about providing a effective social safety net - one that's more effective and - in the short term - marginally more expensive than the current US example. It's proponents don't see it as pitting any part of society against any other, but rather as optimising the level of support for the poorest members of society so that they can end up making more of a contribution to society than they do in the US today.

One of the side effects of US social policy is a very high incarceration rate

and it costs you money to keep 743 out of every 100,000 of your inhabitants in jail. Russia is of course second, with 577 per 100,000 which you may be dim enough to imagine to be an example of how badly socialism works, but since Russia never embraced actual socialism, but rather communism, which failed precisely because it didn't spend enough on the poorest members of society, it's no counter-example.

Or out-lobbying them to got a bigger and better personal tax loophole.

Right. Socialism has completely destroyed Germany, France and Sweden - once thriving societies that are now smoking ruins.

Germany being your prize example?

As unrealistic claims go, this one has to be more than usually off the wall. Since you do seem to be dim enough to confuse communism - which failed - with modern European socialism, which is a spectacular success - this may reflect the fact that your ideological convictions blind you to real world facts.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Only if you confuse communism with socialism. Modern European socialism provides a better standard of living than US-style capitalism and seems to find it necessary to incarcerate only about

100 per 100,000 of the population, where the US incarcerates 743 per 100,000. It would seem that a rather larger proportion of the US population is dissatisfied with the way the country is run, which does have implications for its long-term political stability.

Socialism isn't the antithesis of capitalism, it accepts it - in fact fervently embraces it - as the default mechanism for directing investment, but recognises that capitalism focuses on short-term advantage, which means that some aspects of the economy would languish if left to profit-seeking capitalist entrepreneurs. Government- directed investment in social security, education and public health is less well-directed than capitalist investment in areas where the rewards from investment are more immediate, but it pays off a lot better than no investment at all.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I'm not begging anybody to solve it. There are plenty of perfectly effective solutions around - Keynesian deficit-financed stimulus spending has been going on during recessions since the mid-1930's when Keynes first formalised the idea - and it would be silly for me to try and describe what everybody has been doing for more than half a century. There's a whole lot of technical expertise available on the subject, and even Ken S. Tucker could find it if he actually looked for it.

Ken S Tucker reminds us - once again - that he suffered some kind of serious brain injury sometime in the late 1950's or early 1960's and hasn't learned anything new since then. Ken S. Tucker's capacity to learn is as dead as Senator McCarthy, possibly for the same reason.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

And your evidence is?

That's your opinion. Their opinions might be different.

And nobody actually cares why they can be relied on to spend the money

- if you want to stimulate an economy out of recession, it's the spending that is important, rather than the justifications for spending the money.

And since you are a right-wing nitwit, I do have to remind your that deficit-financed stimulus spending is strictly a tool to get an economy out of recession. Once the economy is running at anything close to full capacity, further stimulus becomes a very bad idea. All it can then do is generate inflation, which doesn't do anybody any good.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

We all make a calculation as to whether to work extra hours, or to spend that time with friends and family, books, hobbies, etc.

As you work more and have less free time, each hour becomes more valuable to you, yet yields less and less due to taxes. At some point the curves cross over.

The more they take, the less we work.

That's destructive of enterprise, ambition, and jobs of course.

Under socialism the workers' security is less, not more. There are fewer jobs, and the worker is made dependent on the efforts of others for part of their sustenance.

There's a cultural element too--we're making a culture that encourages dependency and unearned entitlement. E.g. Mike's link to the Michigan lottery-winner who still feels she needs and deserves food stamps.

How? If markets are fair, everyone gets their chance. The success of the rich guy means jobs for the rest. Everyone benefits.

Some level of charity isn't a problem.

The problem is that so many are now depending on fewer and fewer. And, the many are demanding more. That's unstable.

James

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The "socialism" doesn't provide anything at all, merely parcels out what was made by other people, and other means.

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Naturally. Parasites don't intentionally kill their host. That's accidental / incidental.

[...]

James Arthur

[...]

Mike's a thoughtful, hard-working self-employed guy who pulls his own weight and more, and feels the weight of people who don't. He gets it. You don't have to remind him of anything.

James

But this explanation at least has the rough causality right. Otherwise, there's no mechanism to say why Bear and Lehman just suddenly exploded.

In my own case, had the standard explanations held up very well*, we wouldn't need the alternatives.

*specifically, read "The Big Short". It paints a nice bright line around the "why" of it.

Unlikely??? We've got major deflationary stuff happening, and we have historical examples of how that is. The signalling inherent in the banking systems is misfiring.

I think people confuse Monetarists with some sort of Utopian ... thing, when they're really just addressing the most common historical basis for economic crises we know of.

So you didn't see it coming, either?

*Despair*.

"Inflation since July 2008 has been the lowest since the mid-1950s, and way below the Fed?s target. NGDP growth has been the lowest since Herbert Hoover was president. If you average those two metrics, it?s the lowest since the 1930s. Since Bernanke believes these are the proper metrics for judging the stance of monetary policy, he obviously believes the Fed has run an ultra-contractionary monetary policy since July 2008, right before the severe phase of the debt crisis."

So the Monetarist story is that the Great Depression was caused by bad behavior under the gold standard and *this* depression is caused by similar bad behavior under fiat money.

So readapting the signaling regime of central banks to a more empirically supportable control system isn't "anything useful"?

It's not even that difficult to find the fallacy underlying both labor-economic/Keynes and the Hayek view - one makes a fetish of labor, the other a fetish of money itself.

I'm being unfair to the Hayekians, but that's the implication of it. They're essentially Stoic about it. Long as there's no hyperinflation, they're happy.

People with loads of money want deflationary money regimes. This is about the public choice problems inherent in central banks. Nothing more.

-- Les Cargill

No mechanism that a monetarist will take seriously. Less blinkered observers don't seem to run into this problem.

I own - and have read - "The Big Short". For me the take-away message was that pretty much everybody involved was ridiculously stupid. On page 17 of the introduction Michael Lewis reports Meridith Whitney as saying that Wall Street bankers weren't corrupt, just stupid.

You don't need to invoke the gross national product to explain why stupid people screwed up the US economy. That's what stupid people do. The Tea Party has obvious ambitions in the same direction and seem quite stupid enough to put them into practice if anybody is silly enough to give them the chance.

The banking system is full of idiots who think they know about banking, and think that is all they need to know. There's no "signalling" in the banking system, merely exchanges of misinformation

- "information" coming from people who don't know what they are talking about, and given to people who wouldn't know what to do with any real information if any ever chanced to get into the system.

The system isn't misfiring, it's just twitching.

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In times past the same people would have been advising sacrificing more domestic animals to the gods.

It was your housing price bubble. If it had been going on in the Netherlands, my hockey team would have been telling me to buy houses, as they told me to buy shares when the most recent share market bubble was about to burst, about a decade ago. You don't need to know much to know when a bubble has turned into a pyramid swindle, and is about to burst, because every last sucker has already been roped in.

Almost certainly not. If it's based on monetarist insights, it isn't going to work, which fatally impairs its utility.

That was probably worth saying.

That wasn't. Did you have a specific "public choice problem" in mind.

-- BillSloman, Nijmegen

If he was actually all that thoughtful and hard-working, he wouldn't be wasting his valuable time posting nonsense here.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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That's not socialism as such, but government in general. If you don't want a government, fine - but don't object to socialism because it uses the government to improve aspects of society that private enterprise doesn't see any immediate profit in tidying up.

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Except that socialism doesn't make the host sicker, but healthier. It's synergy, rather than parasitism.

Tell us again how it is wrecking the German economy - which is exporting more stuff than the US, despite the fact that US has roughly four times the population. If that's what being parasitized does for you, you could do with a few more parasites (of the right sort of course - you are already over-supplied with bankers).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Ignoring monetarism outright seems beyond odd. You're the first I've run into... Bottom line, nothing else explains what we've seen short of massive nationalization of large swaths of the economy.

We really don't want to do that. The Knowlege Problem is quite real.

Right. And you can't fix stupid ( regulation won't work ). You need market discipline.

The Tea Party doesn't have anything to say on the subject other than noting that there were a lot of public choice problems.

Dear Lord...

When the *publicly stated goals* of the Fed are not being met, and the fed shrugs and does the same because of governance issues, then there is a problem. This problem explains why this cycle can't adequately be explained by Austrian or Keynesian economics.

Even Krugman's rants ultimately come from a market monetarist perspective ( and he's actually *used* that directly in his writing ).

I don't claim monetarism as an ultimate, just a delta-improvement with much better predictive power, and we're simply not using it.

I myself noted we really didn't have adequate nominal GDP growth as early as 1998. I thought at the time this was a measurement problem because all the growth was in equities.

That's not what this is. The whole idea is to accommodate the 1.04% trend in GDP growth with increases in the money supply. They're just measuring that wrong with things like market baskets of goods.

but why bubbles rather than work? The underlying substrate forced people into speculation instead of having good-paying work. Because the money supply has been managed with a deflationary bias for political reasons for a decade plus now.

SO so far all we know is "Sloman doesn't like Monetarism". I also happen to know that Monetarism is *the* synthesis of pure Austrian and pure Keynes. It's flawed ( all of it is flawed ) but them's breaks.

Well?

Yes. Lack of intellectual independence from the politics of fear, a voting structure that requires unanimous-ness amongst all fed governors and a political climate of Apocalyptic expectation.

-- les Cargill

Untrammeled? You weren't able to understand our most basic tax form. Our "untrammels" would bury you.

Yet the President has recently opined that his health-regulation law allows= him to prohibit Catholic beliefs.

The President also recently appointed four czars without confirmation, another flat-out violation.

Nor is he allowed to compel commerce under the Constitution, yet Obamacare does.

James Arthur

Here's where he says he'd raise it even if it lowers revenue, but not higher than Clinton's 28%. He currently wants to tax capital gains as ordinary income, i.e, over 38%.

Society has no right to compel one person to labor for another.

Obama has little ability to tax me. I'd just stop working, like you.

Oh, so we're back to that lie.

An absolutely idiotic chain of falsehoods, a fabrication.

Okay, given that, you'll enjoy this:

--
Cheers,
James Arthur

Yeah, well... I'd like to see any group of more than about 100 people living together where you aren't compelled to labor at least a bit for "the common good."

The U.S. has had an income tax since 1812, you know. I really doubt there's any way to get that ship back into the harbor at this point...

Even most churches require that you labor for them (the congregation) if you wish to remain a member.