US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3497

On March 30 2016 14:13 cLutZ wrote:


This is what I would call the "theory of compounding victories" which, although I am generally on the side of criminal justice reform, really pisses me off just from an argument standpoint.

For example, in California and elsewhere recently, they argued death row was cruel and unusual because it took so long to get executed. But it only takes so long because previous victories by anti-death penalty advocates.

The same is true for felons, who never regained voting rights in the past because they never lived long enough (in general) to get off parole, or were simply executed summarily for crimes we no longer execute for. These developments in no way are indicative that felons are now more worthy to vote than they were in the past.

The re-enfranchisement lobby is misplaced as it should be low priority (aside from its obvious partisan strategies) with things like eliminating certain crimes and retroactively expunging records for those crimes being an actual solution to real problems, rather than a strategy to win elections.

On March 30 2016 15:13 IgnE wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +

Breivik on being locked up according to wikipedia:

"I must admit this is the worst thing that could have happened to me as it is the ultimate humiliation. To send a political activist to a mental hospital is more sadistic and evil than to kill him! It is a fate worse than death."

On March 30 2016 03:00 Ghanburighan wrote:
The idea that we ought to increase the 2 percent central bank target is interesting for discussion. I hope you don't mind if I pull it apart from the rest of the discussion.

First, a few things need to be set aside. This isn't a political decision, but is done by the central bank, which is an apolitical institution (in fact, if there's an inkling that the central bank is no longer independent, people start losing confidence in the management of the economy which leads to FDI running off, and suchlike). That doesn't mean that it might not be a good idea for central bank governors to consider.

The trade off is generally between those that own property and those that do not. It's not simple though. As I understand, generally speaking the biggest winners are people with few savings and price-adjusted income (take someone who takes out bank loans to rent out apartments to other people: their loan loses value quickly, while they can increase rent reasonably often). The greatest losers are those with little income that live off their savings (old people). I don't know how to calculate the impact though, for example, I don't know how much larger the trade off would be from changing it from 2% to 3%.

There are many ripple effects to take into account. Let's start with some: bank loans will have higher interest rates. As bank loans will lose value quicker as the price of money depreciates, banks must ask for higher interest rates to make it worthwhile to give out loans. These can become prohibitive and slow down financial markets in that people cannot afford the interest rates. This is a problem for both private individuals and companies (and banks themselves).

One danger is that the people who are most likely to suffer ill effects are the most vulnerable. With high inflation, the cost of basic goods increases, so people who cannot scale back consumption suffer the most. Poor people spend more of their income on basic necessities such as rent, food, commutes, etc; costs you cannot live without easily. So their real income would decrease unless there's fast wage growth. This is generally unfortunate for competitiveness as companies would need to be able to quickly and frequently increase their revenue to keep up. If they hit a hitch, they'll lose competitiveness. Companies in countries with less inflation might be more inclined to innovate and spend on research and development because their loss of competitiveness isn't quite as quick.

This isn't to say that there aren't merits to this. For a country that is behind its neighbors in terms of wages and a general level of living standards might prefer such a shake-up. I don't quite see how this would apply to the US, though.

Also, with higher inflation and resulting wage growth, exports become relatively more difficult to sell as your labour and manufacture costs as a whole increase, requiring you to either cut profits to remain competitive (see the point about R&D above) or to increase your prices. On the reverse, imports become more desirable as you can buy them relatively cheaply. This will probably skew your trade balance. As the US already exports a great deal less than it imports (Source), this might be a problem.

I hope this serves as an introduction to the discussion. There's a great deal more to this topic but I ran out of time. I would also be glad if someone provided a way to quantify the effects.

On March 30 2016 17:32 OuchyDathurts wrote:
Every Norwegian I've ever talked to have all said Breivik might only have the 20 year sentence but he'll never get out again. He'll be put into a psych unit or something and won't ever get out.

On March 30 2016 14:14 SK.Testie wrote:
Side note:
Do you feel Breivik should be able to walk free again? Y/N/Death.

On March 30 2016 18:00 Ghanburighan wrote:
Any "source" for those reports that isn't "r/bernieforlife"