The Debt Ceiling

Meanwhile, as people cry about the debt, and just how those real middle America folks have it tough, 10 year US bond rates reach 2.5%. So we are talking about the market trusting the US government ability to pay its debt so much, and distrusting everyone else's, that they are essentially willing to let the US government hold their money for 10 years while getting back an amount that doesn't even cover inflation. If there ever was a point in history where a movement's view of reality and actual reality were completely at odds with each other, it's the current Tea party fiasco.

 

Maybe we should just stop paying anyone who gets a pay check from the US Government until this debt is paid off. I'm sure folks located in or around, oh let's say... Nellis AFB would have no problem with that.

 

Call me and mine what you want. It is the substance behind the names that are most important.

I did not know was supposed to be "Obamacare" was offensive, if it is why?
"Tea Bagger" - I am not clear is it better to be a "tea bagger" or to be "tea bagged"? Or, does it depend upon one's mood?
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I believe nietzche to be correct on this point. I know that I am entrenched in my ideology witch is free market capitalism, hence I defend it in the context of being a free market capitalist. However, I am and have always been open to understanding how differing ideologies can and are successful in circumstances different than mine. Until the US defines itself as something different than more or less (and it is becoming less and less) a free market capitalist society I will be entrenched in fighting for that ideology in that context. What do you fight for?
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I believe you. One difference is that when this country has been divided in the past to this extent we have had the luck of leadership whose goal was to try to unite rather than to further divide.

 

The health care reform act is nothing close to what Obama wanted or promised. It's a watered down piece of trash that should be scraped and redone to provide actual health care rather then give aways to big insurance and big pharma. To many calling it Obamacare is insulting.

Tea bagging is the act of putting putting one's balls in another persons mouth. I think I'd prefer to be the bagged rather then the bagger, but many sites state it only applies to male on male contact so in that cased I wouldn't be interested in either.

 

This depends on what the folks in Washington do. So far what has occurred since the 2010 elections has motivated more people to support the Tea Party cause and for the Tea Party to take on a broader message beyond tax policy. Most Tea Party people would much rather live their lives and conduct their business without the added burden of participating in a "movement". If Washington actually moved to fix the tax code and to control spending the Tea Party would in fact fade.
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If the average person does not own sh!t, whose fault is that? Who forces a person to buy a car every 4 or 5 years and never pay it off? Who forces a person to buy a house when they can not afford a 20+ down payment? Who forces a person to not save? Who forces a person to not invest? If a 20 year-old person doesn't have a multi-million dollar net worth by the time they are 50 whose fault is it? Do the numbers, try person A saves $100/month, increasing that savings rate by 5% every 3 months, earning about 5% on savings (doable), for 30 years - and what do you end up with? Instead people will spend that on a cell phone plan, a gym membership, bad beer, or pizza!

 

ace, look. i have spent a long time studying the actually existing history of capitalism. it's one of the basic reasons i find your metaphysics so exasperating. i read the primitive models you invest in and the claims you make about them and i know that you haven't the first idea of the history of the system you're defending in its modern form.

second, i don't find ideological commitments like yours to be either good or interesting. i don't think politics is a matter of simple belief. it is a space of interpretation and argument and the gathering and co-ordination of information. it's possible to be wrong about things. it's better, if you are, to be open to alternatives. were you personally arguing from a different ideological viewpoint--from one that did not rely on erasing so much about the empirical world, discussions would likely go otherwise. there aren't a lot of positions that i think entirely worthless---the kind of supply-side stuff you espouse is one of them.

i approach looking at capitalism in terms of its history. i come at that history with various frameworks. i can lay the frameworks out. i can defend those i think worth defending. i use more than one framework, depending on what i'm trying to make sense of. the relation between/among frames is pragmatic. you want to know at any given point, ask. once upon i time, i expected folk from the right could do the same. some can. some can't. so there are conservatives i can talk with. and there are others. it's just like that.

one of my basic assumptions is that--because it is historically the case---among the most consistent and largest-scale products of modern capitalism is crisis. the biggest single reason that the state is as it is follows from the recurrence and severity of crisis. if you knew anything about the actual history of capitalism, you'd know this. what people like you are proposing---still---even after **any** ethical justification for doing it has been thrown out the window by the record of the application of your ideology---is nothing short of undoing the mechanism that's mitigated capitalist crisis for most of the 20th century. but you offer nothing beyond daydreams about capitalism itself---some fantasy world of small businesses as if that is all there is---which is obviously false.

by looking at the overall history of capitalism as a system, it's hard not to see that the fordist period--from 1945 to the early 1970s---was the only and longest period of stability and growth that capitalism has had. the right set about dismantling that system from the nixon period forward. some of the rationale for that comes from the bitter reactionaries of the hoover period who thought that making a functional capitalism was some kind of communist plot. most of it came out of the surreal world of neo-liberal ideology, particularly once you hit the sustained vileness of margaret thatcher. but the fact is that neo-liberalism did not come to power because of it's economic ideology---it came to power as an aspect of a flight from a lot of factors in the 1970s. but i won't go on about this.

i have political commitments, btw. in some ways, they cross with analytic ones---like capitalism is not a rational system at all. markets don't tend to anything. privileging the interests of capital over all others is a screen for class war. eliminating production from the equation is an excuse to run away from the idea that capitalism is a social system and not just some economic object. social-democracy is far more realistic and sensible than the backwater retro-politics that currently dominate the united states. ideally, i'm well to the left of the social democrats---but pragmatically, now, i probably am one more or less. i think the american empire should be dismantled, but done so in a way that doesn't destroy everything--and that can only happen if you look at reality and not run away from it into some vaporous world of "commitments". i think the national-security state should be dismantled. it's bad for democracy. it's bad for everything. and it's unnecessary. i'm interested in direct democracy as a normative idea. that sort of stuff.

this post is too long....

this is a new space. it'd be nice to push into some other way of talking about politics, i think.

 

Wrong. Life and how individual people make decisions leading to larger trends is not complicated at all. What we control and what we do not control is not complicated at all.

Government spending is the result of taking $1 to spend $1. If government can use that $1 more efficiently than the person they took it from goverment spending might be stimulative. Pretty simple isn't it.

Supply side, or the trickle down part, here is how it works. I own a business. My profit margin is 10%. For every additional dollar I earn, others get $.90 of it. If I do well, others do well. If tax policy harms my ability to do well, I am harmed to the extent of $.10 on every dollar, others are harmed to the extent of $.90 on every dollar. You, government, and everyone else should want "me" (people willing to put capital to work) to do well. Pretty simple isn't it.

The problem with our economy today is - uncertainty or a lack of confidence. I recall when Reagan was elected, agree or disagree with his policies, one thing he immediately did was instill a new level of confidence. Obama has done just the opposite. There is plenty of demand, it is simply pent up demand. All we need is for government to get out of the way, or lead the charge.

There is a role for government and when government does what it does best (i.e. interstate highway system) it creates jobs. Government has gone way beyond doing what it does best.

Off shoring speeds up job creation. We currently exist in a true international economy. Shifting jobs to low cost areas frees up capital to be invested in future growth and higher level jobs. Living standards improve. Costs go down. Consumers gain more disposable income. One problem with chronic unemployment is when people fail to adapt to changing market conditions. Often government policy facilitates this chronic unemployment. For example US auto workers, it has taken decades for US employment in this area to catch up to new market conditions, partly due to government.
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Kinda like telling a professional football player he doesn't know football because you have studied the history of football! I know my style of football, I acknowledge there are other styles and I know the game has evolved. Just because I don't support other styles or because I don't spend time waxing poetically about the way the game was played 50 years ago is of no consequence.

I make a lot of statements some ideologically driven, some not. Be specific!

You mistake or confuse politics with the underlying economic system. Free market capitalist will ignore politics and far too often politicians will use crisis to drive a political agenda.

Free market capitalism does not require the US form of government.
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I know people who are on commission based incomes and their incomes are feast or famine who manage to save. They also manage their lifestyles accordingly recognizing the dramatic changes in their income.

You make excuses for people, I don't. People can save money. When they have adequate savings, they can invest. Investment leads to ownership. ownership leads to real wealth. Oh, here is that concept again. Please, please let's not....

{added} I am over 50 and technically net worth is less than $0, but I do own some stuff and I had savings that has helped me through hard times - and because of that when the economy recovers, I will recover pretty quickly. Again the key for an individual, business or government is controlling spending.

 

SSDF.

The deficit matters, but the way you fix it is with how you spend, not whether or not you pay the bill for what you've already spent. That's the difference between being fiscally responsible and being a deadbeat.

 

If we as a country are 25trilliongetting dollars in debt, who are we in debt to? Ourselves?

 

I

It's a lot closer to 14 T. And most of it is owned to US citizens, Businesses and Institutions.

 

ace, where do you get these stupid analogies? is there some kind of handbook for them?

ridiculous assumptions lead to ridiculous constructions lead to ridiculous conclusions.
you don't even recognize that a social system is not like your world but bigger. your position is not a statement about the world. it's a statement about your inability to deal with complexity.

when you aren't making stupid analogies, you're putting up straw men. you defend your inability to handle complexity as a function of some "real" experience that you juxtapose, by way of cliches, to some "theoretical" view of the world. like you monopolize reality.

but at the same time, your politics are about belief and nothing else. so you can't possibly access reality. you access the results of your religious beliefs.

when pressed, you admit to being entirely ideological. but you can't handle the consequences of your own admissions, so you try to flip them over and say the opposite. it's like you don't remember what you say from one post to the next.

 

Interesting... perhaps the Americans that hold the US debt could just post-pone their payments for the next couple of years. Give themselves some breathing room to pay down some of the other debt.

 

Yes! Brillant! Because if there anything that describes the US anymore it's a willingness for shared sacrifice and putting the country's need before one's self.

/sarcasm

 

The fundamentals are always simple. Generally, that simplicity falls out as more individuals become aggregated. How does budgeting for uncertainty fit in with your plan?

This isn't an argument, this is a statement of belief.

Except that I'm pretty sure, and you can correct me on this, that you don't make enough money to be considered one of the rich folks who'd be affected by any of the recent "tax the rich" proposals. So, you know, whatever. Besides, you don't even care about tax policy beyond wanting to pay less taxes.

And on top of that, how does raising the marginal tax rate on you affect your profit margin? It doesn't. Because you are not your business.

This is bullshit. There are a ton of people who've made a ton of money during the last three years. They don't lack confidence. There are literally trillions of dollars sitting around, waiting to be spent. You don't lose confidence building up those kinds of reserves. There will always be uncertainty in the market. There will always be sectors which don't deserve confidence. You can't simply use "uncertainty" and "lack of confidence" as cover for the fact that supply side as a path to economic prosperity has failed for the vast majority of people.

This is a religious statement.

So you're saying that the rush to outsource jobs away from the United States has sped up job creation here? Oh, no wait, you're saying that offshoring would have sped up job creation if the labor force in the United States wasn't so goddamn lazy and unadaptable. Nice.
An Oh! The Prosperity! Because the cost of a pair of Nikes definitely went down once asian kids started making them and of course all of that money that Sprint has been saving by outsourcing their call centers has been passed along, resulting in lower monthly bills for all of their customers. Tell me again, why would a company that is suddenly saving a bunch of money by moving manufacturing overseas pass off those savings to their customers? What is their incentive?

 

They don't. For example, the airline industry recently had some of their federal taxes/regulations removed. Did the price of airline tickets go down? Of course not.

So, Ace, you only make 10% profit on your business? Well unless your business grosses over $2.5M/year, any of Obama's suggested tax increases wouldn't affect you.

I read an interesting editorial the other day. The premise was that businesses actually hire more people/invest more in the economy when corporate taxes are RAISED, and here's why: businesses pay taxes on profit (simply gross - expenses). When corporate taxes are low, businesses are willing to keep the profit margin high and sit on cash. Conversely, when you raise corporate taxes, businesses are more likely to keep the profit margin lower (by hiring more employees or investing into capital improvements).

 

Any source?