US Politics Mega-thread - Page 453

On September 18 2013 14:36 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

But now you have a bunch of unemployed construction workers and under utilized construction firms who are no longer buying as many goods and services.

Before they can be redeployed they can cause supply/demand to fall throughout the greater economy as 'gluts' in their would be demand appear.

Edit: Construction guys like trucks but don't buy when unemployed. Now you have a glut of trucks on dealer's lots. The dealer cuts prices / cancels orders. Now everyone in the entire supply chain can't buy as many trucks either and the cycle reinforces itself.

WASHINGTON -- House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) vowed Wednesday to push ahead with a bill to defund Obamacare or shut down the government -- an effort that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) panned as an "absurd" ploy inspired by tea party "anarchists."

With Congress facing a Sept. 30 deadline to figure out how to keep paying for the federal government, Boehner said in a Capitol Hill news conference that defunding President Barack Obama's health care reform was a key part of that effort.

"We're going to continue to do everything we can to repeal the president's failed health care law," Boehner said. "This week, the House will pass the CR [continuing resolution] that locks the sequester savings in and defunds Obamacare."

Many mainstream Republicans have repeatedly slammed such an approach as "stupid," and Boehner himself has tried to avoid linking Obamacare to a potential government shutdown. But after a summer break in which tea party leaders toured the country pushing for the defunding bid -- and Boehner failed to find a compromise -- the Republican House leader has decided to push ahead.

"We've got a lot of divergent opinions in the caucus," Boehner acknowledged, but suggested that tea party demands were still leading the way. "I was here in the Gingrich era. He had a little plaque that was in his office. It's a management model: 'Listen, learn, help and lead.' We listened to our colleagues over the last week. We have a plan that they're happy with. We're going forward."

But Obama is expected to veto any bill that defunds his signature domestic accomplishment, and Reid has insisted such a measure would not pass the Senate, guaranteeing an upcoming government shutdown.

On September 18 2013 15:51 Myrddraal wrote:


I'm pretty sure by constant trade he didn't mean constant trade within each sector, but overall there will always be trade. I'm not necessarily saying that I agree with him, but to disprove what he is saying with an example, you would need to show how something could cause a glut in all sectors at once.

Besides, wouldn't your skyscraper example only result in a glut if there was a glut in the construction industry before the skyscraper was built, or if for some other reason while it was being built there became less demand for construction?

On September 16 2013 11:08 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

You have some numbers wrong. There's over 2mm incarcerated Americans (only 250,000 would be awesome).


Link

~ 5% are in private prisons.

On September 16 2013 11:32 aksfjh wrote:
As for you rubes arguing that the graphs show the "same thing," no, they don't. The first is very potentially misleading. That it happens to not be nearly as misleading as it could be is no saving grace for it. Showing it as per-capita (or something similar) is the correct approach to gauge increase incarceration RATES.

At a packed public hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) compared the war on drugs to the racist policies of the Jim Crow era.

"If I told you that one out of three African-American males is forbidden by law from voting, you might think I was talking about Jim Crow 50 years ago," Paul said. "Yet today, a third of African-American males are still prevented from voting because of the war on drugs."

"The majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white," he said, "but three-fourths of all people in prison for drug offenses are African American or Latino."

Paul was arguing against mandatory minimum sentencing laws, which require judges and prosecutors to impose severe penalties against those convicted of low-level drug crimes.

A growing number of conservatives have criticized such laws in recent years. At the hearing, Marc Levin, the policy director of the Right on Crime Initiative at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative group that advocates for prison reforms, noted that Texas has reduced its prison population and crime rate while expanding its use of recidivism-reducing programs and other alternatives to incarceration.

Brett Tolman, a former federal prosecutor in Utah, testified that the threat of long mandatory minimum sentences has not led to the identification of high-level leaders of drug organizations by low-level offenders. "Kingpins are smarter than that," he explained. "They insulate themselves so the 'mules' and street-corner dealers either do not know who they are or do not have enough information to lead to their discovery, let alone prosecution."

Paul and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) are the authors of the Justice Safety Valve Act of 2013, which would allow judges to deliver sentences that deviate from the mandatory minimums in certain cases.

On September 19 2013 04:49 sam!zdat wrote:
seriously jonny?

it doesn't do anything real, but it inflates asset prices. So if they stop it the asset prices will go down and all the rentiers will be sad and we will have to actually confront the fact that our economy is broken as fuck

On September 19 2013 05:13 sam!zdat wrote:
yes it's on paper that's the point

the purpose of QE is to make it seem like we aren't fucked. Thing is we have to pay banks for the privilege of lying to ourselves about this. Basically we are manufacturing a bubble intentionally because our 'economy' runs on bubbles

is rand paul trying to get me to like him or smth? Weird