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James Arthur "understands" the numbers only in ways that fit his right- wing ideology, and consequently can't actually understand why I object to his arbitary decision to lump the interest on the US national debt into the costs of social social services. It's an amazingly blinkered world view.

The defence does depend on understanding Keynesian economics - a skill which James Arthur couldn't conceivably master, even in an discussion of how a hypothetical economic theory would work out in a hypothetical economy. His cast-in-concrete world view wouldn't allow it.

Since Obama's defence of the current budget deficit in primarily in terms of "pump-priming" spending and the Keynesian multiplier, which don't actually register on James Arthur's pre-programmed brain, James Arthur doesn't process them as any kind of defence, but discards them as meaningless noise - not that the right-wing media which James Arthur favours spend many column inches reporting Keynesian heresies, even if they come from the preisent of the United States.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I certainly don't "understand" them in the way you do, and since your "analysis" includes tricks like adding the entire interest on the national debt to the social security budget, nobody in their right mind would understand them as anything more than ideologically driven gibberish.

Very rarely, and only after persistent prodding. Your numbers actually appear to be harvested from the more bizarre extremes of the right- wing press, and you don't post your original sources because you do have enough residual sense to know that nobody who doesn't share your comically extreme views would take them seriously.

Lumping all the interest on the national debt into the social security budget is an "engineering approximation"? It's actually an ideologically based re-interpretation of reality, on the lines of the US habit of confusing socialism with communism.

Compare the progression of the GDP over the last couple of years with the progression of the GDP after the 1929 stock market crash. Your idiot bankers perturbed the economic system in 2007 quite as drastically as the 1929 stock market crash, but the Keynesian deficit financed "pump-priming" prevented a re-un of the Great Depression. The remedy worked, but you can't see that it worked, any more than Hoover could have seen that deficit financing could have ameliorated the consequences of the 1929 crash. In his case, it was because Keynes hadn't articulated his ideas at the point, in your case it is because you reject Keynes' economic insights, and stick to the economic equivalent of the phlogiston theory which has been hard-wired into your brain.

Sure. We know it looks that way to you, and that you see the current unemployment statistics as comparable with those in the depths of the Great Depression - it a bizarre way of looking at the world, but you have persuaded yourself that it is the only valid point of view, and that anybody who doesn't share your cognitive defects is out of touch with reality.

Your income tax take is roughly 30% of income. Most advanced industrial countries take rather more - at 45%. France takes 50%. You are correct to the extent that raising just income tax wouldn't solve your - short term - problem

Unfortunately for your argument, income tax isn't the only source of government revenue. The French treasury gets more from value-added-tax (sales tax with a college education) than from any other source, and your corporate tax take isn't much less than your personal tax take

if I'm interpretig table 672 correctly. There are other taxes that you could raise. It wouldn't do your economy any good, any more than the same prescription applied to Greece isn't doing their economy any good, but it would avoid bankruptcy.

Or raise other taxes ...

One hopes that the people working out how to make thse payments aren't quite a blinkered as you are.

Real calculations covering more of the real possibilities would be even more complex - I'm not surprised that you are unwilling to reveal your own calculations, since experience will have shown you that your "engineering approximations" look like more ideologicaly driven misinterpretations to objective observers.

The US national goverment tax take isn't the national income. Your national income is actually the GDP, which is about $14 trillion dollars. Your banker would happily give you a $42 trillion mortage, based on that income. You'd have to spend less of your income on silly toys if you were to pay off that kind of loan, by reducing - say - your defence expenditure to the sum spent by your two closest rivals, rather than spending as much as the next ten countries down the pecking order spend together, and perhaps give up paying half again as much per head for health care as France and Germany (which buys them universal health care just as good as the health care you only provide for the fully insured).

Of course, if you were serious about getting your house in order, you'd eliminate that kind of frivolous expenditure. You aren't a sub- prime mortgage, you are a bunch of spoilt brats who are squandering a magnificent legacy by self-indulgent spending.

Your balance of payments deficit is pretty much what you have to pay for the oil you import to sustain an energy-extravagant life-style that is not sustainable - there's only so much oil, and we've already burned enough of it generate significant (and increasing) anthropogenic global warming. Grown-ups would worry about that. Your corporate leaders are spending quite a lot of money on propaganda designed to stop people worrying about anthropogenic global warming, which is childishly imprudent.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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In terms that James Arthur is willing to understand. His approach to economics is blinkered - he ignores anything published since Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" and is selective about what he takes from that. If he were a physicist he'd be trying to explain the atom bombs in terms that Lord Kelvin would have understood.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and if your technological education is severely retarded, most of modern engineering looks like magic to you.

James Arthur doesn't understand Keynesian economics and avoids acknowledging this as due to either stupidity or ignorance by denying its validity - his ideological objections to Keynesian economics look more like brain-washed ignorance than stupidity, but it doesn't really matter. Since he doesn't understand it - and has ideological objections to even trying - it naturally looks like magic to him.

The rest of the world knows better.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Not all of it.

Scarcely wasted, unless you have active objections to helping your fellow citizens.

The governments that you have elected aren't - formally - robbers. I have argued that the government is merely the biggest protection racket in town, but they do deliver useful services. Libertarians and conservative argue that they don't deliver these services as efficiently as private enterprise, but Enron has reminded us that private enterprise can't be relied on to manage natural monopolies to the advantage of the customer, as if that hadn't been found out in the Victorian era (which gave us the first anti-tsut legisalation).

Maybe, but granting James Arthur divorce from economic reality, I wouldn't get too worried.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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And your business model is?

Natural monopolies don't work well - for the consumer - if they end up in private hands.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Not that the poor ever did, or ever will. If they've got enough disposable income to be able to save, they aren't poor.

Quite a few people never started saving. In general, investment is a better destination for your disposable income, if you've got any.

On universal education, for example?

Early retirement isn't actually perverse, if you aren't actually up to the job. A blanket catagorisation like this really is perverse, but an ideologically driven nitwit like James Arthur isn't going to notice this kind of fine distinction.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Actually Bismark, but he was a right-winger, so James Arthur has repressed that, along with many other inconvenient facts.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Gee, James, that business you had where you've said it floundered due to far too much regulation/taxation by the government... you weren't designing a time machine to go back and convince FDR to cap his leadership aspirations at the level of Boy Scout troop leader rather than the presidency, were you? :-)

The theory, in short, is that economies have a gain >1, and that a small injection (which is actually a lossy re-allocation) multiplies regeneratively, a perpetual motion machine. It's basically the theory that a capacitor will charge itself as long as you give it that first push.

As an aside, you're misapplying Keynes anyhow. Per Krugman, Keynes proposed it short-term and only short-term. Long-term, the robbing of Peter discourages Peter, leaving less and less for Paul. Keynes proposed the former--foolishly--but we're doing the latter. Krugman says so too, that it's too late to work, yet we continue.

But please, explain it to us in gains, investments, and numbers.

-- Cheers,

James Arthur

It's more "advanced" to take more of what people earn? How is socialized everything a bargain if France takes so much, yet it's still sinking in debt?

Corporate income tax is spelled out directly in your earlier cite, $191B in FY2010.

That document, Obama's document, assumes

- increasing collections by 53% over three years [*],

- increasing personal income taxes by 57%, and

- increasing corporate income taxes by 222% over the next three years.

There simply isn't enough money. Read the statistical tables "by size of adjusted income." Do the math.

If we confiscate the entire income of people earning more than $200k (a total additional revenue of $1,517B in FY2008, a bubble year) , it doesn't pay for Obama's spending.

There isn't enough money!! Confiscating the entire income of the "rich" doesn't pay the deficit, much less the debt. It's not an infinite moocher's well.

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Wrong. The proper measure of a loan is the ability of the borrower to repay. Namely, the _borrower's_ ability to repay depends on the _borrower's_ income. The bank doesn't ask what the company he works for grosses, it asks what _he_ makes. The government doesn't make $14T in income to pay its debts, it has $2.1T a year (presently).

It's extremely tedious to argue with someone so full of wrong numbers and wrong information. I give up, for now anyway.

-- Cheers,

James Arthur

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It doesn't matter because they're not _your_ bonds. Even if redeemed, it's not your money, it's the government's money, to spend as they please.

And, who pays the revenue to repay the bonds anyhow? You do.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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It didn't flounder, I just spent a quarter of my 100-hour week working on their crap. Without them I could've worked more productively in 75 hours and gotten some sleep too. It's startups that suffer most.

If I had a time machine? I'd definitely talk to FDR...

-- Cheers,

James Arthur

An anology that ignores the fact that a capacitor is passive, essentially linear component, while the economy involves the itneractions of a lot of human beings who are neither passive nor linear. The antiquated economic idiocy of postulating a perfect, self- optimising market does involve assuming they have perfect knowledge and always behave rationally, and presumably James Arthur find himself able to believe that.

It isn't about robbing Paul, but about encouraging him to lend the pile of cash he's got stashed under the mattress against the day that the economy revives.

Only two silly opinions in one short sentence? There may be hope for you yet.

And where did he say that? He regularly gets re-printed in the papers I read - translated into Dutch in the Dutch ones - and I can't recall seeing any such claim from him. Granting your problems with selective attention and limited comprehension, you may think that something he said agrees with one of your delusions, but - granting your history - we need to see what he actually said.

Wasted on you.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

If you weren't quite as silly as you are, you'd be aware that "advanced industrial countries" means the US, Germany, France, the UK, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and so forth, as opposed to developing industrial countries like Poland an Brasil.

It refers to the state of industrial development, rather than their economic arrangements

France is scarcely sinking into debt. It's still recovering from the effects of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, like almost everybody else, but nobody is getting worried about the stae of the French economy.

I cite quite a few urls. Which one did you have in mind?

The GDP is some 14 trillion dollars. There is enough money. Taking enough of it to balance the budget today - which you seem to think is necessary for some bizarre ideological reason - would drive you back into depression (as a similar intiative drove the US economy back into recession in 1937, after FDR's program had got it back on the rails) back the money is obviously there.

Why are you fixated on personal incomes? Corporations make money too, and hand it out in ways that don't get registered as personal income - its called tax avoidance.

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You keep on repeating this ill-informed assumption. Try to think what I might mean about "raising other taxes", rather than re-iterating your original mistake.

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It isn't the government that borrows the money, but the nation as a whole. The government merely serves as your agent, as you'd be aware if you thought about what you were saying.

It's equally tedious to argue with someone who misinterprets the information he has by forcing it into an ideological strait-jacket that has nothing to do with reality.

I'm well aware that I can't change your mind - for all practical purposes you haven't got a mind but rather a finite state machine that churns out pre-programmed responses triggered by largely irrelevant cues in the text you are responding to - but I can expose you as a mindless automaton.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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But it's his government. He voted for it, and - in the end - they've got to keep him and all the other voters tolerably happy.

Of course. It's his governemnt, after all - and yours.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Along with all the other right-wing nitwits who persuaded him to cut back on the economic stimulation prematurely, leading to the 1937-1938 recession.

James Arthur's economic opinions do seem to be pretty much the same as Hoover's - perhaps a little more antiquated and almost certainly less well-informed - so he couldn't expected to be any more effective than Hoover and his colleagues in preventing FDR from rescuing the US economy.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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You don't see the absurdity of that? That his Social Security amounts to: he's the one who has to pay himself back, so the gov't can make good on his retirement money that a) they took, b) he trusted, c) they squandered?

-- Cheers,

James Arthur

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No, I don't. And you wouldn't either, if your brain wasn't full of idiotic right-wing economic delusions. =A0

Very few Social Security systems are fully funded - the Dutch pension system is one of the exceptions. The rest pay today's pensioners with what they collect from today's workers. This may strike you as absurd, but the rest of the world seems to think it works fine.

The money being paid to today's pensioners can't be said to be "squandered". Feeding and housing people who are too old or too sick to work has always been seen as a perfectly respectable way of spending money -

neither wasteful nor extravagant.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

No Bill, THINK! You're eagerly assimilating all the assets, but leaving out the liabilities. If you want beat down all our citizens (and enterprises) together into one amorphous, Borg-like, undifferentiated obedient tribute-paying mass for harvest, you have to count _all_their_debts_ too.

consumer debt: $2.4T (2010) mortgage debt: $13.8T (2011)

That's $16.2T just with consumers. (That's without even considering the other creditworthiness factors, such as the govt's equivalents of living expenses, or the fact that we're not making a 20% down payment and borrowing against a secure, tangible asset.)

But wait, you also have to count state and local gov't debt, the indebtedness of corporations, all their bond issuances, obligations, etc.

And, if you as a socialist consider gov't social programs as obligations--which you do--you have to count those unfunded liabilities as debt. That heaps tens and tens more trillions on for Social Security and Medicare alone, for public pensions (federal, state, and local), and on and on.

This site has a decent snapshot of some of those factors:

(It also has the BLS' "U6" unemployment figure, the one you keep saying I invented. I didn't.)

We *are* a sub-prime mortgage. The fact is we're not going pay, so I guess I see your point--why not borrow more money from you Europeans? You fell for it the first time...

-- Cheers,

James Arthur