US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6314

Jill Stein, the Green party’s candidate in the US presidential election, has formally filed a motion for a recount in Wisconsin on Friday as her funding effort for counting the votes again in three states passed $5m.

Her campaign team said it would formally file in Wisconsin before the 5pm ET deadline to do so; the recount motion deadlines for the other two states are next week. Less than half an hour before the deadline, the Wisconsin elections commission confirmed it had received the recount petition.

On November 26 2016 07:02 ChristianS wrote:

I think you have it a little mixed up, if I'm understanding you correctly. If the minimum wage is above the equilibrium wage, there's a shortage of jobs, not a shortage of laborers. So in that state employers can easily find workers, it just might not be worth it at that price.

If I understood LL correctly, his hypothetical claim was that based on economic theory, we should lower wages so workers will be willing to work more hours. This is presumably a hypothetical in which employers can't find enough workers at the current wage. In this scenario I'd say the economic theory probably predicts that workers will be even less willing to provide labor based on the Law of Supply, but there's some reason to think this might be an exception because at subsistence level people might exhibit anti-law of supply behavior because they need to meet the bare minimum to survive. In the US that might be questionable though; even the poor here aren't always at "subsistence level," they often have stuff like TVs and cell phones that they might rather give up than work 90+ hour weeks.

On November 26 2016 07:25 chocorush wrote:


Yes, I had the wording mixed up, in that more workers want to work when the wage is higher, which I feel was clear given the context. This is talking about aggregate supply and demand though, not the choices of an individual worker, because when given the entirety of the workforce, the income and substitution effects don't really apply.

It doesn't really makes sense to say "employers can't find enough workers at the current wage". If it is profitable to produce more goods, they would naturally pay more so that they can find enough workers to produce the equilibrium quantity because nothing forces them to pay minimum wage. The only time when the minimum wage affects the margins that determine quantity produced is when the minimum wage is artificially higher than the equilibrium wage.

It might be easier to think of it the opposite way. What happens when we increase the minimum wage? Suppliers that are already hiring at that level now have a condition where the marginal cost to produce a unit has increased. Assuming that demand for the good being sold remains constant, this necessarily results in an increase in the unit price, and a decrease in quantity produced in order to maximize profits, which means that less labor is needed to be purchased by supplier. If the supplier was already hiring at above the minimum wage, the amount of people they hire does not change.

WASHINGTON ― Donald Trump thinks Republican leaders “love” him, but he may soon find that these warm feelings won’t necessarily translate into unflinching support from Congress.

Some of the most conservative GOP lawmakers, long used to splitting with their party leaders when they deem their actions to be insufficiently conservative, are signaling even before Trump takes office that the incoming president’s agenda could run into roadblocks.

In the House, conservatives are already saying that any proposed infrastructure bill would have to be offset with cuts to win their support.

“If Trump doesn’t find a way to pay for it, then I think the majority of us ― if not all of us ― are going to vote against it,” Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) said, speaking of Trump’s yet-to-be proposed, potentially trillion-dollar infrastructure bill.

“He’s going to have to come here with some proposals,” Labrador said last week. “And we’re going to agree with some proposals; we’re going to disagree with other proposals.”

If conservatives hold the line on a spending bill, perhaps insisting on at least partial offsets, that could imperil the fragile support of Democrats, who are already on the fence about going along with any portion of Trump’s agenda. Partial offsets for such a large spending project would likely come at the expense of programs that Democrats prefer, and if Trump simply offers up a bill that includes no cuts in order to pay for his infrastructure investments, Democrats would still have the power to join hard-line Republicans and sink the legislation.

It’s a coalition that could emerge soon to stymie Trump: Democrats who think Trump’s plans go too far and conservatives who don’t think they go far enough ― or just aren’t conservative at all.

Conservatives do seem willing to give Trump some leeway. After all, he won partly by casting aside traditional Republican rhetoric on fiscal restraint and promising to bring jobs back to Rust Belt areas. But the Republicans who have spent their congressional careers sounding the alarm on debt and deficits seem unlikely to blindly support Trump’s agenda.

“I don’t think anybody expects him to balance the budget the day he gets in, so he’s got to have some runway for that,” conservative Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said last week.

Massie, who recently remarked that Trump wasn’t elected king, suggested that the “fair question” in judging Trump’s budgetary plans is whether the deficit would increase. (The government is currently running at about a $600 billion shortfall every year, with those deficits projected to increase to about $1.5 trillion a year in a decade.)

If Trump increased the deficit, Massie said, “then I think that’s a very dangerous thing, especially for the conservative base.”

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) noted that Congress is due to increase the debt ceiling again some time this spring, though the Treasury could use some accounting tricks to probably get the government to the fall. Jordan said he had voted to raise the debt ceiling before when Republicans put forward plans to systematically address debt.

“I’m willing to increase the debt ceiling, if we’re putting in place structural changes that actually get to the problem,” Jordan said.

These sorts of early demands, suggesting that conservatives won’t moderate with a Republican in the White House, could seriously harm Trump’s ability to enact his agenda.

On November 26 2016 07:36 ChristianS wrote:

Edit: accidentally hit post.

I don't think we're disagreeing here, I was saying higher wages increase labor supply, and lower wages decrease it unless we're in some weird subsistence level exception. LL was the one who (if I understood correctly) was arguing that one could just as resolutely say lowering the minimum wage would increase the labor supply, as an analogy to argue predictions from economic theory aren't worth that much.

Edit2: just to try to be as clear as possible, I interpreted LL's point to mean that minimum wage would stop employers from being able to find enough workers, even if they would happily pay the current wage or maybe even a higher one. This was based on an assumed inverted law of supply where workers are more willing to work at lower wages, not less. That was what I was saying is not predicted by economic theory - the opposite in fact. But if that were the case employers couldn't just pay more, because supposedly that would reduce the labor supply even more.

On November 26 2016 08:18 chocorush wrote:



You're mixing up several concepts that aren't interchangeable. If you increase wages, the quantity of labor that will be supplied increases. However, the amount of actual labor that is supplied can only be as much as the quantity of labor demanded. When the wage is increased artificially, this results in a smaller amount of labor done across the entire economy - a minimum wage sufficiently high results in employers paying less to their workers in total. Less goods produced means less hours worked to produce these goods. The wage increase is good for the people that keep their work, but the loss of labor has to come directly from people either getting their hours cut or losing their jobs. Whether or not this effect is "good" is a value debate and not proven by the laws of economics, despite the quantifiable change in total productivity.

This is looking at the labor market as a whole. If you want to look at the behavior of an individual, things are very different. The labor market doesn't really have a concept of income effect or substitution effect, this is just a generalization based on the observation that there are always people out there willing to work for the money. If you look at an individual's own analysis, he is balancing the value of his time, and the value of his consumption.

If you cut his wages, all other things being equal, the amount of consumption he has will go down. Assuming that he was at an equilibrium point before, this displacement means that the quantity of consumption and leisure will change as a response to the change in the relative worth of his time. How he adjusts depends on the income effect where he will want to increase his income so that he can consume closer to what he was doing before, which pushes the amount of leisure downward. This is counteracted by the substitution effect, where each hour of leisure he sacrificed results in less consumption. We can't tell how much he will ultimately choose to work without knowing which effect is stronger.

Given "normal" conditions, the result of such a loss of income, which doesn't even have to be in a survival state, consumption will usually tend to decrease some, and the leisure time will tend to decrease some, as neither consumption nor leisure tend to be inelastic. It would certainly be strange to see leisure actually increase.

“The challenge of articulating a constructive nationalism is absolutely essential now to how the right comes back,” Levin, editor of National Affairs magazine, told me in late October.

I recoiled. The word’s negative connotations are obvious. But my surprise that Levin would endorse any form of nationalism was the result of my not paying attention.

Levin had written over the summer that the Brexit vote in the U.K. suggested “that globalism is not the future and nationalism is not the past.” Reihan Salam, executive editor of National Review, who also writes for Slate, and the New York Times’ Ross Douthat called over the summer for the right to move toward a “pan-ethnic nationalism.” And Salam has been writing about a need to revive a form of American nationalism for the last few years.

Yet still, I remarked to Levin, why use a term weighed down by an association with nativism, xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism? Especially since Trump’s candidacy attracted support from explicitly racist figures such as David Duke, as well as the slightly more nebulous but still menacing alt-right movement, nationalism seemed like a highly problematic label. In the current moment, many people hear the term and automatically think “white nationalism.”

In addition, nationalism is generally a reaction against globalism, a word often used by radical fringe figures and groups who traffic in anti-Semitic conspiracies. Trump himself in mid-October was denounced by the Anti-Defamation League when he said his campaign was a threat to the “global power structure” and that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.”

Isaiah Berlin called nationalism a pathological expression of national consciousness. Aggressive nationalism caused terrible harm in the 20th century -- but Berlin's point was that national consciousness (or some functional equivalent) is not just less harmful than the pathological form, it's also valuable in its own right. It might even be essential in building a just, compassionate and well-ordered society.

One day, perhaps, a worldwide Marxist-Lennonist utopia will be achieved -- "imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do, nothing to kill or die for," and so forth. For the moment, public policy is shaped by and for nation-states. At that level, almost any collective initiative, including measures to civilize capitalism and protect the weak and unlucky, asks some to sacrifice in service of the greater good. This joint enterprise is likely to be more effective, and can certainly be more ambitious, if citizens are bound together by history, or by settled culture and values held in common -- that is, by national consciousness.

I'm a believer in American exceptionalism, and the core of that idea is the possibility of devising a nation based on principles, as opposed to inheriting a nation based on ethnic loyalty, historical accident or religion. National consciousness based on a commitment to the liberal principles written into the Constitution seems to me nothing but admirable. But it's still national consciousness -- it still involves, or ought to involve, a measure of pride and patriotism. If you want to perfect the union, you're going to need both.

It's true, of course, that the United States has often fallen far short of its founding principles. It continues to live with the consequences of slavery. But national consciousness -- including the idea that the country is bound by those founding ideas -- has often been a means to grapple with that legacy and slowly put matters right.

Identity-group politics now poses a growing challenge to national consciousness. It emphasizes what divides Americans over what unites them. In its angriest forms, it goes so far as to deplore what unites Americans (the idea of America and what it stands for) as so much hypocrisy or self-delusion. This least-compromising form of identity-group politics is self-defeating. It attacks the social solidarity that success will demand -- the sense of obligation that Americans feel toward their fellow Americans.

By partnering, conservatives can help a President Trump decentralize power. ‘It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” Calvin Coolidge once said. With a unified federal government soon to be in Republican hands, however, maybe we can do a bit of both. But how? While congressional Republicans tend to identify as conservatives, President-elect Donald Trump is a populist. Many observers, including some Republicans, see this as an un-squareable circle.

I disagree. For all the challenges a President Trump may present conservatives during his term, his populism need not be one of them. Far from contradictory, conservatism and populism complement each other in ways that can change history — as did the most successful populist in recent decades, Ronald Reagan.

The chief political weakness of conservatism is its difficulty identifying problems that are appropriate for political correction. Conservatism’s view of human nature and history teaches us that problems are inevitable in this world and that attempts to use government to solve them often only make things worse.

This insight actually makes us good at finding solutions. At our best, conservatives craft policy reforms that empower bottom-up, trial-and-error problem-solving and the institutions that facilitate it, such as markets and civil society. At our worst, though, we can seem indifferent to suffering and injustice because we overlook problems that require our action or resign ourselves to their insolvability.

Populists, on the other hand, have an uncanny knack for identifying social problems. It’s when pressed for solutions that populists tend to reveal their characteristic weakness. Unable to draw on a coherent philosophy, populists can tend toward inconsistent or unserious proposals.

The rough terms of a successful partnership seem obvious. Populism identifies the problems; conservatism develops the solutions; and President Trump oversees the process with a veto pen that keeps everyone honest. Call it “principled populism”: an authentic conservatism focused on solving the problems that face working Americans in a fracturing society and globalizing economy.

On November 26 2016 00:17 LegalLord wrote:

Keep in mind that economists are not without an agenda. As whitedoge has mentioned here before, a lot of the time all you need to do to understand what the general conclusion of economists will be is to follow the path of their funding. And the results can be that they give good analysis that sheds some light on issues, but at the same time is noticeably incomplete. Not to mention that economics is imprecise and even economists all have a large share of incorrect predictions. So they should be taken with a grain of salt, always.

Specifically, the economists of prominence tend to focus towards US business interests, which absolutely benefit from the global economy, while underemphasizing the issues related to rural development. It's easy to say "we should just find a way to compensate the economic losers while continuing with globalist development." It's a whole different story to actually implement it.

So yes, there is valid reason to be skeptical of the economic merits of Trump's policy suggestions, because a lot of them are deeply flawed. It appears that some people knocked some sense into him on the Paris Accords at the very least. However, "economists say you're wrong" is not a statement that should be considered without a proper level of skepticism. They have their own agendas they are pushing.

On November 26 2016 11:49 zlefin wrote:
Hmm, inferiority complex, that makes a lot of sense, hurray armchair psychology!

I'm sure there's plenty of ways of doing exceptionalism.
though I haven't thought about it that much; I'm sure we could find some bad and good manifestations of american exceptionalism.

On November 26 2016 11:38 Introvert wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
On a similar but not entirely related note, there was this from senator Mike Lee the other day. it's interesting because he was vocal about his issues with Trump and never endorsed.



Read the rest at NRO

Question: Did I hear you correctly? Excess funds will be used for candidate recruitment?

Martin: Yes. Not for for candidate recruitment, for candidate schools… even before this, the commitment was to help fund schools around the country.

Question: [partly unintelligible] …when speaking to a Democratic donor who, let's say, says "We're giving you money because we want a better understanding of the process, but we're not comfortable with their money go to recruiting Green Party members."

Martin: Well, but that's their decision. We have already collected enough money to do these filings. We've collected over $4 million since Wednesday. That'll cover our filings in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. So I'm not saying, do not donate to the Green Party, I'm saying it's a matter of your own judgment, but what I'm saying is, this is our commitment, and was our commitment prior to this issue of recall.

On November 26 2016 12:10 LegalLord wrote:

My qualified defense of Trump has always been, "he doesn't really know what he's doing but somehow he cuts deep at some of the big and underappreciated issues of our time." On a first look he's a buffoon. But if you look closer he's a buffoon who somehow knows what his base wants better than any of the establishment folk that opposed him. There is something to be learned from his rise and while I myself didn't want him as president (I voted Clinton, albeit with much difficulty, and I couldn't say I felt like I lost any more for her loss than I would have for her victory) I can see that it's not just stupid people who voted for him. Since we have him as our next president, people would be wise to understand the issues that got him elected and apply the necessary change.

It is definitely notable that the academic consensus is so strong against Trump but if it isn't a qualified opposition then I suspect groupthink at play. On certain political issues (e.g. political organizations that provide funding for academic research, such as the EU) academics have a consensus based on self-interest.

On November 26 2016 15:02 LegalLord wrote:

That one certainly hits close to home.

I wonder if it would actually lead to any policy changes. I suppose it does have some rather notable symbolic significance that could lead the US to take a "turn over a new leaf" approach to Cuba. It's long overdue.

On November 26 2016 15:02 LegalLord wrote:

That one certainly hits close to home.

I wonder if it would actually lead to any policy changes. I suppose it does have some rather notable symbolic significance that could lead the US to take a "turn over a new leaf" approach to Cuba. It's long overdue.