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On May 06 2016 22:21 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2016 22:18 Gorsameth wrote:On May 06 2016 22:16 xDaunt wrote:
Wow, liberals are finally concerned about the debt? When did this happen? Liberals have often remarked about the debt. They are just not willing to cut social welfare for it and would rather cut in the bloated defense budget. You aren't really serious about the debt if you're only willing to touch the defense budget.
Fixing the debt through cut is just stupid, that's the problem that Republicans don't seem to understand. You contract global demand, thus GDP and fiscal revenue, and the debt do not decrease in the end. Trump at least seems (?) to understand that.
In fact, the logic is so simple that I suspect Republicans to entirely understand it but still argue for spending cut because they defend certain interests.
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On May 06 2016 22:22 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2016 22:16 xDaunt wrote:
Wow, liberals are finally concerned about the debt? When did this happen? Seriously, xDaunt, and with all due respect, get real debt evolution in the US
Don't worry. I'll be the first to throw the GOP under the bus for its role in fiscal irresponsibility. In case you haven't noticed, voters on the right have expressed plenty of displeasure on that point during this election cycle.
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On May 06 2016 22:23 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2016 22:21 xDaunt wrote:On May 06 2016 22:18 Gorsameth wrote:On May 06 2016 22:16 xDaunt wrote:
Wow, liberals are finally concerned about the debt? When did this happen? Liberals have often remarked about the debt. They are just not willing to cut social welfare for it and would rather cut in the bloated defense budget. You aren't really serious about the debt if you're only willing to touch the defense budget. Fixing the debt through cut is just stupid, that's the problem that Republicans don't seem to understand. You contract global demand, thus GDP and fiscal revenue, and the debt do not decrease in the end. Trump at least seems (?) to understand that. In fact, the logic is so simple that I suspect Republicans to entirely understand it but still argue for spending cut because they defend certain interests.
Well, Republican ideology and program is a con job. It consists in exploiting white middle class resentment for the exclusive interest of a class of donors. The only thing the GOP cares about is for said donors to get exponentially richer, and considering their history (and yes, Reagan is very much included) it's hilarious that they even talk about "small government"; they should have the honesty to admit that what they are after is the welfare state, and that they convince white disfranchised people by playing the rhetoric of welfare program benefiting "those people" (namely the black folks). That's pretty much all there is to it.
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On May 06 2016 22:23 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2016 22:21 xDaunt wrote:On May 06 2016 22:18 Gorsameth wrote:On May 06 2016 22:16 xDaunt wrote:
Wow, liberals are finally concerned about the debt? When did this happen? Liberals have often remarked about the debt. They are just not willing to cut social welfare for it and would rather cut in the bloated defense budget. You aren't really serious about the debt if you're only willing to touch the defense budget. Fixing the debt through cut is just stupid, that's the problem that Republicans don't seem to understand. You contract global demand, thus GDP and fiscal revenue, and the debt do not decrease in the end. Trump at least seems (?) to understand that. In fact, the logic is so simple that I suspect Republicans to entirely understand it but still argue for spending cut because they defend certain interests.
I don't think that there are any easy fixes for the debt problem at this point. When the next recession hits (quite possibly this year), our fiscal situation is going to be particularly ugly.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
On May 06 2016 22:13 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2016 22:04 oneofthem wrote:
problem is you are looking at very long standing and fundamental expectations built upon the rule of law and contract. the u.s. could always just credit the accounts with some numbers but to not pay will introduce all kinds of problems.
to renegotiate you need to have some kind of leverage. what's the leverage here? default? Expectations are not entirely based upon rule of law and contract, they're also rationally assessed, they're informed ; all investors in the world know the debt can't rise up infinitly, and won't fix itself in such a low growth and low inflation world economy. They know a change will come in regards to public debt, they just want to make sure the change won't harm them. About the leveradge, you're the US, you have all kind of leveradge. A hot head like Trump could even threaten investors with all kind of legislation. I'm just saying that Trump's plan is not stupid, it's reckless, but not stupid.
the can simply e-print more money. and the fed is the largest bond holder right now so if they want to 'negotiate' just tell the fed to take less but due to the underlying legal construct that would also affect other parties.
this negotiate stuff is so far off reality i dont know what to call it. he probably was thinking about using the military to bully foreign debt holders but someone told him to cut it out
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On May 06 2016 22:27 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2016 22:22 Biff The Understudy wrote:On May 06 2016 22:16 xDaunt wrote:
Wow, liberals are finally concerned about the debt? When did this happen? Seriously, xDaunt, and with all due respect, get real debt evolution in the US Don't worry. I'll be the first to throw the GOP under the bus for its role in fiscal irresponsibility. In case you haven't noticed, voters on the right have expressed plenty of displeasure on that point during this election cycle.
The example of Europe has shown that
1- the debt is really not the main problem right now.
2- trying to reduce the debt through austerity and fiscal tightening in a period of crisis is fucking stupid.
The US has done vastly, vastly better economically than most advanced countries since 2008 precisely because Obama's administration hasn't taken that road. European economies are not only doing horribly, but their debt has even increased faster after the austerity measures.
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On May 06 2016 22:33 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2016 22:27 xDaunt wrote:On May 06 2016 22:22 Biff The Understudy wrote:On May 06 2016 22:16 xDaunt wrote:
Wow, liberals are finally concerned about the debt? When did this happen? Seriously, xDaunt, and with all due respect, get real debt evolution in the US Don't worry. I'll be the first to throw the GOP under the bus for its role in fiscal irresponsibility. In case you haven't noticed, voters on the right have expressed plenty of displeasure on that point during this election cycle. The example of Europe has shown that 1- the debt is really not the main problem right now. 2- trying to reduce the debt through austerity and fiscal tightening in a period of crisis is fucking stupid. The US has done vastly, vastly better economically than most advanced countries since 2008 precisely because Obama's administration hasn't taken that road. European economies are not only doing horribly, but their debt has even increased faster after the austerity measures.
There is an easy solution to the debt and our problems, it's monetizing the deficit, but it's really bad for capital owners and investors so nobody wants it.
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Debt is fine as long as GDP growth outpaces it, we only ever have to service the debt though it's not a bad thing to pay it down
Saying that he'd use the threat of default to pay back bonds at a discount is likely the most dangerous and stupid thing Trumps has said thus far
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On May 06 2016 22:28 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2016 22:23 WhiteDog wrote:On May 06 2016 22:21 xDaunt wrote:On May 06 2016 22:18 Gorsameth wrote:On May 06 2016 22:16 xDaunt wrote:
Wow, liberals are finally concerned about the debt? When did this happen? Liberals have often remarked about the debt. They are just not willing to cut social welfare for it and would rather cut in the bloated defense budget. You aren't really serious about the debt if you're only willing to touch the defense budget. Fixing the debt through cut is just stupid, that's the problem that Republicans don't seem to understand. You contract global demand, thus GDP and fiscal revenue, and the debt do not decrease in the end. Trump at least seems (?) to understand that. In fact, the logic is so simple that I suspect Republicans to entirely understand it but still argue for spending cut because they defend certain interests. Well, Republican ideology and program is a con job. It consists in exploiting white middle class resentment for the exclusive interest of a class of donors. The only thing the GOP cares about is for said donors to get exponentially richer, and considering their history (and yes, Reagan is very much included) it's hilarious that they even talk about "small government"; they should have the honesty to admit that what they are after is the welfare state, and that they convince white disfranchised people by playing the rhetoric of welfare program benefiting "those people" (namely the black folks). That's pretty much all there is to it.
Yes, and like I said, the GOP's day of reckoning has come. Specifically, classical conservativism (and neoconservatism) is truly at risk this election cycle, which is why many of Trump's most vehement opponents are on the right. Hell, I'm not sure how many conservative outlets (National Review and The Weekly Standard) are going to retain their credibility after this election. And I don't think that this is a one-time anomaly. I strongly suspect that we're seeing the beginning of a re-ordering of the political right. Rightly or wrongly, people perceive that conservative spear-headed values such as pure free market economics and foreign policy adventurism have failed. Alternative views are springing up. Some good. Some bad. But regardless, all of these genies that have been let out of the bottle threaten to supplant conservatism.
And before any of you on the left start celebrating conservatism's potential demise, you probably should consider what may replace it and how it will affect your own constituencies -- particularly given that the present trajectory of the Democratic Party is to become the Party of the Sandernista.
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Republican strategist Mary Matalin just changed her party to Libertarian. Never thought I'd see the day.
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Wonder how James Carville feels about that
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On May 06 2016 22:44 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2016 22:28 Biff The Understudy wrote:On May 06 2016 22:23 WhiteDog wrote:On May 06 2016 22:21 xDaunt wrote:On May 06 2016 22:18 Gorsameth wrote:On May 06 2016 22:16 xDaunt wrote:
Wow, liberals are finally concerned about the debt? When did this happen? Liberals have often remarked about the debt. They are just not willing to cut social welfare for it and would rather cut in the bloated defense budget. You aren't really serious about the debt if you're only willing to touch the defense budget. Fixing the debt through cut is just stupid, that's the problem that Republicans don't seem to understand. You contract global demand, thus GDP and fiscal revenue, and the debt do not decrease in the end. Trump at least seems (?) to understand that. In fact, the logic is so simple that I suspect Republicans to entirely understand it but still argue for spending cut because they defend certain interests. Well, Republican ideology and program is a con job. It consists in exploiting white middle class resentment for the exclusive interest of a class of donors. The only thing the GOP cares about is for said donors to get exponentially richer, and considering their history (and yes, Reagan is very much included) it's hilarious that they even talk about "small government"; they should have the honesty to admit that what they are after is the welfare state, and that they convince white disfranchised people by playing the rhetoric of welfare program benefiting "those people" (namely the black folks). That's pretty much all there is to it. Yes, and like I said, the GOP's day of reckoning has come. Specifically, classical conservativism (and neoconservatism) is truly at risk this election cycle, which is why many of Trump's most vehement opponents are on the right. Hell, I'm not sure how many conservative outlets (National Review and The Weekly Standard) are going to retain their credibility after this election. And I don't think that this is a one-time anomaly. I strongly suspect that we're seeing the beginning of a re-ordering of the political right. Rightly or wrongly, people perceive that conservative spear-headed values such as pure free market economics and foreign policy adventurism have failed. Alternative views are springing up. Some good. Some bad. But regardless, all of these genies that have been let out of the bottle threaten to supplant conservatism. And before any of you on the left start celebrating conservatism's potential demise, you probably should consider what may replace it and how it will affect your own constituencies -- particularly given that the present trajectory of the Democratic Party is to become the Party of the Sandernista.
Well, I have a slightly different analysis:
The GOP's con job doesn't really work anymore. As I said there goal has always been to favour an oligarchy of rich donors by exploiting racial resentment. Now what happens is that the creature they have unleashed turns against them, because people stopped believing in the whole thing. So I think the big sequence that started with Reagan is over: Trump is Republican ideology without the con. That's bad.
What's left is a party divided between the elite, that pretend to believe in the same old things, and a base that still buys into their populist racist bullshit but doesn't swallow anymore the part that was really interesting for the establishment (basically the whole reversed Robin Hood idea that has been the cornerstone of Republican programs). We have an angry far right, and con men without anybody to vote for them.
On the left, it looks like the party is going to come back to its fundamentals, and Sanders is a sign that the Democrats will probably shift to the left. That's excellent news IF it doesn't lead to a left wing tea party with people like GH getting busier to repeat populistic argument than think and put proposals on the table. Sanders platform is mostly good news for American politics; what's tragic is his attitude.
The only parallel between the Sanders and the Trump phenomenas are the anti-establishment stuff, which is horrible news for the Republican party, and probably good altogether for the Democrats: the party is meant to represent the people and not the Koch brothers in the first place (again my analysis and why I think the situation is different is that the progressive platform is sincere but corrupted by powerful interests, while the conservative is not and has never been; those interests are the core of their ideology.)
Anyway, so the real big question is whether Ryan and his con men manage to reinvent their ideology and get their voters back (I don't believe in it) or if the Republican voters will keep electing burlesque Mussolinis. I'm on the edge of my seat.
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I also expect the millennials to cool down a little when they age. They will still be left of where the Democrats are now but I expect the "Bernie or Bust" "we didn't win so lets vote Trump and burn the country to the ground" mentality to die down.
But yes the Democrats need to be careful how they go forward so they don't get stuck with their own Tea Party in a 2 decades time.
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On May 06 2016 23:12 Gorsameth wrote:
I also expect the millennials to cool down a little when they age. They will still be left of where the Democrats are now but I expect the "Bernie or Bust" "we didn't win so lets vote Trump and burn the country to the ground" mentality to die down.
But yes the Democrats need to be careful how they go forward so they don't get stuck with their own Tea Party in a 2 decades time.
Yeah, it's not like millennials are all so childish. Tons of people on my FB making it clear they'll do anything to stop trump "Even if she doesn't have my primary vote". Democratic leadership has seen what happens when you don't give credit to fringe movements from the tea party.
On the topic of dumb Bernie or bust kids, I thought I'd take a moment to appreciate this:
+ Show Spoiler +
It's just so disappointing I don't know where to start. When you see shit like this with 10,000 likes on FB, the whole Bernie movement makes so much more sense. It's just complete ignorance, added in with a lot of anger regarding our society. People are so mad that they don't care what reality is. Yeah, $15, no congress required. What a fucking joke.
My favorite thing is going to be reading the sanders subreddit and watching all the posts "But we won the west coast and tons of recent states!! WTF THIS IS LITERALLY THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY" as they lose the popular vote.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
would free college help with understanding cost of living adjustment in setting the minimum wage?
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On May 06 2016 20:38 oneofthem wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2016 14:11 LegalLord wrote:Sure, it was in a bad state before the intervention. Perhaps you're trying to say that that justifies making the whole situation worse? Intervention without a good plan for "the day after" is just adding fuel to the fire. That, at the very least, should be self evident. On May 06 2016 14:06 Sermokala wrote:
I really hate to bring this up but isn't that the same thing everyone says about iraq? that we never had a strategy for what to do after we disposed the dictator and tried democracy building? Somewhat different in that rather than doing very little to replace the old government, in Iraq the US just executed the transition poorly. problem is you think hillary was the spearhead for the intervention when it was the younger people fresh out of school. did you even read the article?
I read the article and found it to be, to put it lightly, a bunch of apologist horseshit that tries to understate her weaknesses. One may wonder, under whose leadership would inexperienced FP planners be allowed to plan a response to a rather complex situation? Said leadership is culpable (and being a bad administrator is far, far worse than being inexperienced at FP, since we're not expecting the president to be an expert at everything).
I'd like to see a more substantive argument than "preventing atrocities" and "read the apologist article." I do agree that shit happens, and that even the best plans sometimes go awry. You have, however, failed to show that that is the case, and that it's not just a fuck up by Obama's administration (a prominent part of which is HRC).
On May 06 2016 20:37 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2016 13:52 LegalLord wrote:On May 06 2016 12:30 oneofthem wrote:
you'd just watch atrocities take place then? what kind of counterfactual are you working with here Libya: Overthrew a pretty bad dictator, turned a nation that was stable by comparison into a black hole. So bad that Obama cited it as one of his worst policy decisions in his tenure as presidency (no shit? but maybe his highly experienced SoS should have used her experience to tell him what would happen when you create a power vacuum). Incidentally, that tends to lead to even more death and atrocities than just choosing to do nothing. Atrocity prevented! I could go on about how stupid many of the decisions she spearheaded were, as there is a lot to criticize that could be seen even before the fact, but if "preventing atrocities" is the best you can come up with to justify stupid FP then I see no point. I don't think the Libya intervention was a great idea, but the narrative is over simplified here. In Syria the West let the regime massacring the opposition, and now the country is utter chaos, and everybody wonders why we didn't do anything. In Libya, the West helped militarily the opposition but said opposition was unable to stabilize the country and everybody wonders why we went there. The situation in both country was not that different. A popular uprising against a dictator with some fundamentalist elements. I don't think we can blame HC for what appears to be a blunder, because the other alternative was maybe worse. I think both Libya and Syria were doomed, and it looks like of the two, Libya is the one doing better.
Libya and Syria were not exactly stable nations in recent history, that much is correct. If you want an example of a potentially stable nation that was pretty badly fucked by US intervention, you should look more at Iraq than at Syria/Libya.
Syria was a nation that the Obama administration was interested in intervening in for a long time. If you don't recall, he pushed strongly for it, and had his rather famous "red line" blunder that failed to garner enough support to allow him to proceed with the bombing. Arguably the reason for that situation is the failure in Libya, but the other failure is to learn from the mistake of Libya.
This is how it's played out a fair number of times, often enough to see that it's a pattern: there's an oppressive dictator, and a lot of resentment that spawns a civil war. Islamists, seeing weakness, flock to that situation and hijack the movement. Soon enough, the genuine discontent turns into a front for jihadist takeover of another nation, bringing even more fucked up instability than there was before (see: funding moderate rebels, and having those rebels fold into ISIS and Al Qaeda). One may wonder if it was better to have a secular dictator after all, who will keep stability for the time being, and to acknowledge that they are just making the best of a highly unstable situation.
Syria is worse off right now for a few reasons that have little to do with whether or not it was right to intervene: the nation is right now in the middle of one of the most active phases of its civil war, it's much smaller and geographically more important (bordering just about every MidEast nation of consequence, except Egypt), and the situation there is being actively exploited by the regional powers nearby in a way that Libya would be much harder to exploit.
Again, it is sometimes true that "shit happens" and that the best of plans goes wrong somehow. That doesn't seem to be what happened, as there is plenty of precedent to learn from. I pin a lot of the blame on HRC because she has had a lot of FP blunders to her name under all of the administrations that she was an active participant in (basically Clinton and on, though I don't hold Bush's failures so strongly against her). I also don't see that she's learned from the blunders, as her FP plans seem to be generally the same as they've always been (strongly interventionist, unwilling to realize when it's best not to mess with an already fragile situation). I'd really like to see this change because it has ended pretty badly so far and it will be worse when she has direct control over the military as commander-in-chief.
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A huge part of the US's debt is on entitlement for seniors. The developed world in general, including the US, most of Europe, Japan, etc. have never really come to terms with our lower fertility rates and longer lifespans. Our retirement benefits formulas are in dire need of adjustment.
On May 06 2016 22:43 ticklishmusic wrote:
Debt is fine as long as GDP growth outpaces it, we only ever have to service the debt though it's not a bad thing to pay it down
Saying that he'd use the threat of default to pay back bonds at a discount is likely the most dangerous and stupid thing Trumps has said thus far
Well, what did we expect? Trump built his empire based on taking advantage of bankruptcy laws.
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It's SO funny to me how the GOP even DARE to use phrases like "real conservatism". They were founded on the principle of welfare for the rich, and now they attack Trump for not being conservative? That's just the height of irony.
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Personally I think Trump is severely conservative.
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You guys aren't paying close enough attention. Trump is very much a deviation from conservative norms.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/k7OyC0j.png)
