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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
Top GOP officials and senators say White House chaos and impulsiveness are crippling efforts to expand the Republican Senate majority in 2018, unraveling long-laid plans and needlessly jeopardizing incumbents.
There's a widespread sense of exasperation with the president, interviews with nearly two dozen senior Republicans reveal, and deep frustration with an administration they believe doesn’t fully grasp what it will take to preserve the narrow majority or add to it.
The most recent flash point involves Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, who was attacked by a White House-sanctioned outside group after announcing his opposition to the now stalled Obamacare repeal bill. Heller, the most endangered GOP incumbent up for reelection in 2018, was initially targeted with a surprise $1 million digital, TV and radio assault — an act of political retaliation that stunned senators and other top GOP officials.
The TV and radio commercials, produced by America First Policies — which is staffed by a number of Trump’s top campaign aides — accused Heller of refusing to keep his “promise” to dismantle Obamacare.
The offensive reflected Trump’s mounting frustration with Capitol Hill Republicans who refuse to advance his stymied legislative agenda and was designed to send a loud message that it’s time to get on board. Yet it infuriated Majority Leader Mitch McConnell himself, who privately fumed that it would make it harder to get Heller’s support for the legislation. Some McConnell allies reached out to the organization directly to express their displeasure and to plead with it to cease the attacks, reasoning that it could badly hurt Heller’s already challenging reelection bid.
“I share the administration’s frustration on members wavering on repeal, but the answer is not to attack the most vulnerable member of the conference,” said Rob Jesmer, a former National Republican Senatorial Committee executive director.
By Tuesday evening, after several senators complained directly to the president about the anti-Heller ads during a meeting earlier in the day at the White House, the group decided to stop airing the spots. Heller himself brought up the commercials during the meeting, a spokesman for the senator confirmed.
"It was a responsible decision that I'm hopeful leads to a good working relationship going forward," said Josh Holmes, a former McConnell chief of staff.
McConnell has also been stewing about another race: the Alabama Senate primary, which has turned into a personal priority for the majority leader. For weeks, McConnell and top political aides had been asking the Republican National Committee to release coordinated funding to help newly appointed Sen. Luther Strange, who is trying to fend off a large field of GOP primary opponents in a late summer special election. The NRSC and another McConnell-allied group, Senate Leadership Fund, are already aggressively boosting the Alabama senator.
Yet after weeks of requests, no RNC expenditures have been granted, and Senate Republican strategists began to wonder whether the requests had simply been lost in a bureaucratic logjam — or worse, whether the anti-establishment president was reluctant to have the national party wade into a contested primary.
The lack of commitment caused so much consternation that McConnell and Strange brought the matter directly to the White House, asking for the administration to approve of the funding. Strange has talked directly to Trump about it, according to two sources briefed on the matter. McConnell personally lobbied chief of staff Reince Priebus, a former RNC chief of staff who remains plugged into the committee’s operations.
As of Tuesday morning, however, according to an RNC official, the national party still hadn’t given final approval.
In Arizona, where Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, a Trump critic, is facing a difficult reelection, Trump-fueled primary worries are intensifying. Prior to the 2016 election, Trump vented openly about Flake’s criticism of him — at one point, backstage before a campaign rally in Arizona, telling top aides animatedly that he wanted to find a Republican opponent to challenge the senator in 2018, according to two people familiar with the exchange. The administration’s anger at Flake has flared anew amid his criticism of the president’s decision to fire former FBI Director James Comey.
Flake has already drawn a Trump-friendly primary opponent in former state Sen. Kelli Ward, and two other allies of the president — Trump 2016 campaign COO Jeff DeWit and former state GOP chair Robert Graham — could also try to unseat him.
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At the rate things are heading, Republicans need not worry - Democrats are remarkably inept at launching any form of electoral challenge in their current form and show no inclination towards change.
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Safest prediction possible. One of two sides will fail to accomplish a thing due to being stupid. If wrong, just claim that the other side was more stupid, but the side you predicted was also stupid.
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On June 28 2017 08:22 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On June 28 2017 08:19 IgnE wrote:On June 28 2017 05:32 KwarK wrote:On June 28 2017 05:14 zlefin wrote:On June 28 2017 05:09 KwarK wrote:
As someone who has a significant portion of my salary mandated into a pension scheme against my will I would be pretty pissed if I was subsequently told I wasn't getting all of it. 23% of my pretax salary gets put into a pension before I even think about the rest of my retirement savings etc. There is no mathematical way that a well managed pension fund couldn't balance that, given compound gains expected over 30 years.
I'm not relying upon it but that is an earned benefit, I should be able to expect to rely upon it. On the one hand I feel like there should be Federally issued standards to ensure that pensions cannot promise more than they can fund with contributions but on the other, I certainly wouldn't want pension funds to be run the same way the SSA is. What I really want is my employer to offer me a 401k instead (or whatever the Republican privatized pension offer turns out to be) but they discriminate the retirement plans available based on job title here because fuck them. fortunately, the situation in illinois doesn't sound like the former worry; and more like the latter situation. sadly; promises with pension plans without considering the long term costs seems to be commonplace. And yet I looked up the actuarial reports on my pension plan and it turns out we're also underfunded. Which is insane. There is no mathematical explanation for this. must be fraud, kwark. better start investigating One thing that the actuary monkeys often do is presume unreasonably high rates of return on the pensions' investments for years. This often leads to many years of rosy reports when things actually aren't going so hot.
They can work with any presumed rate of return they want,this is not regulated?
That does seem odd to me,in Europe insurance companys and pension funds have to work with a set presumed return rate that I think is set every year and based on the official interest rate.
But ya, the pension funds had risk free return rates of 5%+ for decades (yield on usa bonds up till a few years ago). Now they have to invest the premiums they get at a much lower rate so they will get a much lower return on the money that is coming in now.
And just to give you an idea of the potential magnitude of the shortage:you need 5 times more money to make the same return with 1% interest rate as you need with 5% interest rate (actual shortage will be much less because there is also a safing component). Europe has the same issue as the usa with pensions btw.
It is one of the ways in which the fed and ecb program to buy out bond holders at near 0% interest negatively effects almost everyone.
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And again, threaten, disparaging and attacking the only serves make people push back more. Trump's tactics of bullying will never be effective, because the press doesn't answer to anyone but their readers/viewers. It is also pretty rich coming from the daughter of a governor. How many reporters there got their job because they were the offspring of an elected official?
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That paper you linked suggests that GDP is a cap and that equity returns sometimes (often) dip below it. What does that suggest about the last ten years?
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United States43277 Posts
On June 28 2017 12:56 IgnE wrote:That paper you linked suggests that GDP is a cap and that equity returns sometimes (often) dip below it. What does that suggest about the last ten years?
Not at all. Look at the graphs. They clearly show instances of equity returns exceeding GDP growth. GDP growth is a national measure, equity returns is not.
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On June 28 2017 13:22 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On June 28 2017 12:56 IgnE wrote:That paper you linked suggests that GDP is a cap and that equity returns sometimes (often) dip below it. What does that suggest about the last ten years? Not at all. Look at the graphs. They clearly show instances of equity returns exceeding GDP growth. GDP growth is a national measure, equity returns is not.
According to the data in that paper only four of the countries studied (Sweden, Denmark Switzerland, and the Check Republic) have had equity growth > gdp growth over the long term. They also conjecture (but using japan as an example..) that this can only happen when future gdp growth is priced into the stock and that if something happens that dampens long term investor optimism equity will stop growing and remain flat until gdp catches up. They dont really supply much data or analysis in favor of this thesis though.
But yeah, I dont think the paper supports the notion that long term gdp growth may be slower than long term equity growth in general.. the counter examples are small and insignificant economies, whos major companies most likely make most of their profits outside of the country.
More relevantly the S&P500 annualized (real) returns over the last 90 years (using this data set http://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-data ) are 2.55% . which is significantly lower than the 4-5% you demanded of the pension manager.
Though I guess if we start counting in 1995 wwhich perhaps is more relevant we get annuiazed returns of 5.2% instead which is cwhat you needed.
I wonder why the returns became so much higher over the last 20 years.
sidenote: why do ecconomists get away with such crappy data presentation????? I slave for hours and hours trying to get figures just right for my papers, and these guys just spread similar data accross several figures in entirely different formats just to ensure that interpretation is as annoying as possible. wtf.
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United States43277 Posts
On June 28 2017 13:44 KlaCkoN wrote:Show nested quote +On June 28 2017 13:22 KwarK wrote:On June 28 2017 12:56 IgnE wrote:That paper you linked suggests that GDP is a cap and that equity returns sometimes (often) dip below it. What does that suggest about the last ten years? Not at all. Look at the graphs. They clearly show instances of equity returns exceeding GDP growth. GDP growth is a national measure, equity returns is not. According to the data in that paper only three of the countries studied (Sweden, Denmark Switzerland, and the Check Republic) have had equity growth > gdp growth over the long term. They also conjecture (but using japan as an example..) that this can only happen when future gdp growth is priced into the stock and that if something happens that dampens long term investor optimism equity will stop growing and remain flat until gdp catches up. They dont really supply much data or analysis in favor of this thesis though. But yeah, I dont think the paper supports the notion that long term gdp growth may be slower than long term equity growth in general.. the counter examples are small and insignificant economies, whos major companies most likely make most of their profits outside of the country. More relevantly the S&P500 annualized (real) returns over the last 90 years (using this data set http://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-data ) are 2.55% . which is significantly lower than the 4-5% you demanded of the pension manager.
That doesn't include dividends as far as I can tell. Returns not including dividends is not returns.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/WR0tNgJ.png)
https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
Reinvesting internally rather than issuing dividends is actually a very recent trend. For most of America's history businesses were required to make consistent and substantial dividends to reward their stockholders. Rewarding through increased value of equity, which is what you are measuring, is measuring the wrong thing.
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Yeah, dividends are part of total returns. That changes it from like 2.5 to about 6.8% annualized over the 90 year period.
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On June 28 2017 13:47 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On June 28 2017 13:44 KlaCkoN wrote:On June 28 2017 13:22 KwarK wrote:On June 28 2017 12:56 IgnE wrote:That paper you linked suggests that GDP is a cap and that equity returns sometimes (often) dip below it. What does that suggest about the last ten years? Not at all. Look at the graphs. They clearly show instances of equity returns exceeding GDP growth. GDP growth is a national measure, equity returns is not. According to the data in that paper only three of the countries studied (Sweden, Denmark Switzerland, and the Check Republic) have had equity growth > gdp growth over the long term. They also conjecture (but using japan as an example..) that this can only happen when future gdp growth is priced into the stock and that if something happens that dampens long term investor optimism equity will stop growing and remain flat until gdp catches up. They dont really supply much data or analysis in favor of this thesis though. But yeah, I dont think the paper supports the notion that long term gdp growth may be slower than long term equity growth in general.. the counter examples are small and insignificant economies, whos major companies most likely make most of their profits outside of the country. More relevantly the S&P500 annualized (real) returns over the last 90 years (using this data set http://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-data ) are 2.55% . which is significantly lower than the 4-5% you demanded of the pension manager. Reinvesting internally rather than issuing dividends is actually a very recent trend. For most of America's history businesses were required to make consistent and substantial dividends to reward their stockholders. Rewarding through increased value of equity, which is what you are measuring, is measuring the wrong thing.
lol good point, cheers.
probably says something bad about my skill with money to not think about that xd.
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The paper seems to suggest that instances where equity returns were greater than GDP either had built into the prices an expected future return (that didn't eventually materialize, as seen in the case of Japan where equity returns dipped below GDP), or as Klackon points out, were small economies where national GDP is too small to account for multinational businesses. I don't want to dwell on it, because it's just one weird paper, but I will further note that the paper also seems to suggest that the possibility of long-term ER>GDP is a contrarian, unorthodox opinion without (any?) theoretical basis, and for which it doesn't present a strong case. But it's just one paper, and the data sucks, sure.
It just seems very odd to me that you can be so sure about mathematical necessities ("And yet I looked up the actuarial reports on my pension plan and it turns out we're also underfunded. Which is insane. There is no mathematical explanation for this.") and yet are quite blithely content to assume that 10 years of sub 3% growth in the world's largest economy portends nothing about the long-term future of index funds. I may have more to say after my dive into economics and capitalist theory this summer but to me that looks fishy.
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You're adjusting equity returns against inflation but not adjusting GDP growth against inflation. The S&P500 has returned more like 11% over the past 100 years.
The paper is comparing EPS growth to GDP growth, earnings per share is not the same thing as total equity return. They even say in the paper they're not accounting for changes in price to earnings ratio.
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United States43277 Posts
On June 28 2017 13:59 IgnE wrote:
It just seems very odd to me that you can be so sure about mathematical necessities ("And yet I looked up the actuarial reports on my pension plan and it turns out we're also underfunded. Which is insane. There is no mathematical explanation for this.") and yet are quite blithely content to assume that 10 years of sub 3% growth in the world's largest economy portends nothing about the long-term future of index funds. I may have more to say after my dive into economics and capitalist theory this summer but to me that looks fishy.
With regard to my "And yet I looked up the actuarial reports on my pension plan and it turns out we're also underfunded. Which is insane. There is no mathematical explanation for this.", as already noted, I looked into it and modeled a number of scenarios after posting that. There is a mathematical explanation for it, I didn't know what it was at the time of posting, I created a model that output a handful of different scenarios when given a few variables such as rates of return, inflation, life expectancy and so forth. And then I played with it a bit. In most of the scenarios it should not possibly be underfunded at 23% contributions, especially in the scenario specific to me in which I will get basically nothing from my contributions. But there are a number of situations, which I mentioned and explained while retracting the post you're criticizing, in which the payouts would exceed the contributions + growth. And depending upon the weighting (how many people were in those scenarios) it could potentially be underfunded.
TLDR: My assumption was wrong, but I already explored my original claim, made a model and attempted to reconcile my assumption with reality to find out what I was missing. I was missing stuff, and have said what that stuff may have been.
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On June 28 2017 14:09 TheFish7 wrote:
You're adjusting equity returns against inflation but not adjusting GDP growth against inflation. The S&P500 has returned more like 11% over the past 100 years.
The paper is comparing EPS growth to GDP growth, earnings per share is not the same thing as total equity return. They even say in the paper they're not accounting for changes in price to earnings ratio.
Now im more confused lol, how do you get to 11%
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On June 28 2017 10:30 KwarK wrote:
The issue with the quote is that it accepts that treating nigg thugs gentlemen of an urban persuasion worse is fine but it shouldn't happen to a police officer. This man was "one of the good ones" and didn't deserve to be treated like a normal black.
Yes, this is racism at its most explicit. What does it help that nobody is allowed to even whisper the word "nigger" when attitutedes like this is on full display? The n-word battle is a mere distraction from the real problems.
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'I disagree completely' jezus christ
When playboy has to stand up for journalism it's a dark timeline. This fake news thing is getting pretty serious. It's leading people to a post factual society where the one who shouts loudest is deemed correct even if he is clearly wrong. The worst thing is Trump won't hold himself accountable to anything. No real domestic press conference for months now. When can they ask him about his brilliant made-in-30-days IS defeating plan?
I like how he keeps saying no help from the democrats when they wouldn't even share what bill they were creating with the democratic senators, so how can they help lol. Or the insinuation that Obama didn't want to get it right.
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On June 28 2017 19:46 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:'I disagree completely' jezus christ When playboy has to stand up for journalism it's a dark timeline. This fake news thing is getting pretty serious. It's leading people to a post factual society where the one who shouts loudest is deemed correct even if he is clearly wrong. The worst thing is Trump won't hold himself accountable to anything. No real domestic press conference for months now. When can they ask him about his brilliant 30 day IS defeating plan?+ Show Spoiler +I like how he keeps saying no help from the democrats when they wouldn't even share what bill they were creating with the democratic senators, so how can they help lol. Or the insinuation that Obama didn't want to get it right.
The way you're phrasing the bit that I highlighted is possibly the result of dishonest media, or just you being dishonest. I'm not entirely 100% on this anymore, because I have also often heard the way you phrased it being repeated in various forms of media. Nonetheless, I'm going to say that I'm pretty sure Trump said he'd order the Pentagon make a plan to defeat ISIS, and that plan would be presented to him after 30 days. He (as far as I know) never explicitly stated that his administration would actually defeat ISIS as an entity in 30 days.
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EPT![[image loading]](https://goo.gl/images/zyicGW)
