President Obama Re-Elected - Page 804

On October 16 2012 11:52 jdseemoreglass wrote:

lol, it's ok. I think it clarified some of our differing perspectives actually. Gravity and power are very analogous.

On October 16 2012 11:50 oneofthem wrote:
i want to apologize for introducing the gravity analogy

On October 16 2012 11:44 jdseemoreglass wrote:

You should post this in blogs. The mods will probably give you some leeway there instead of the general forum. I posted my answers for you though.

On October 16 2012 12:01 sam!zdat wrote:
go here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=17883

blogs are a little button on the left hand side near the bottom that says blogs

On October 16 2012 07:41 Souma wrote:


Yeah, they do hate that there is a viral video insulting their prophet; however, there are underlying factors that cause them to riot and participate in violent protests, just like there are underlying causes as to why the Muslim Brotherhood was formed and is gaining power, and just like there are underlying causes as to why people participate in terrorism.

On October 16 2012 14:45 kmillz wrote:


Wow I love how everyone is trying to paint my post as some ignorant average American citizen who doesn't know shit about Muslims or their culture just because I said one big reason they hate us is that our freedoms allow us to do things that they deem sacrilegious. I didn't say that was the only reason so get off of your high horses and stfu with the "They hate our freedomz!!1" bullshit, I took a year and a half of Arabic and Middle Eastern studies in the military. I learned how to speak, read and write Arabic fluently from actual Arabs and my job title was Arabic Cryptologic Linguist. My only point was that yes there are a lot of things that America does that pisses off Muslims, but I am only saying even if many of those things didn't happen they would already still hate us very much.

On October 16 2012 14:54 sam!zdat wrote:
Sure, those things are just symptoms of some other underlying tension. You gotta look past the symptoms (kerfuffles about the image of the prophet) and ask what is the deep, underlying reason that this tension exists? You're absolutely right - they would hate us even without all of these scandals. Why is that?

(edit: I don't know. I just don't buy "they just hate us." I could offer a hypothesis but that would just be my ideology talking, I don't really know the first thing about it. You could probably guess what I would say.)

On October 16 2012 15:58 zalz wrote:


Dangle a green card in front of their nose and 99% of those rioters would leap at the chance.

America’s Serrata also takes a more explicit form: the tilting of the economic rules in favor of those at the top. The crony capitalism of today’s oligarchs is far subtler than Venice’s. It works in two main ways.

The first is to channel the state’s scarce resources in their own direction. This is the absurdity of Mitt Romney’s comment about the “47 percent” who are “dependent upon government.” The reality is that it is those at the top, particularly the tippy-top, of the economic pyramid who have been most effective at capturing government support — and at getting others to pay for it.

Exhibit A is the bipartisan, $700 billion rescue of Wall Street in 2008. Exhibit B is the crony recovery. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that 93 percent of the income gains from the 2009-10 recovery went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household.

On October 16 2012 18:16 Darknat wrote:
I wish people would stop pretending they know squat about what would be a good tax plan. The average person has no clue what would be a good tax plan. Like the only tax plan I have is where everyone is required to pay taxes but the percent is up to each individual.

To the annoyance of the Romney campaign, members of Washington’s reality-based community have a habit of popping up to point out the many deceptions in the campaign’s blue-sky promises of low taxes and instant growth. The latest is the Joint Committee on Taxation, an obscure but well-respected Congressional panel — currently evenly divided between the parties — that helps lawmakers calculate the effect of their tax plans.

Last month, the committee asked its staff what would happen if Congress repealed the biggest tax deductions and loopholes and used the new revenue to lower tax rates. The staff started adding it up: end all itemized deductions, tax capital gains and dividends as ordinary income, and tax the interest on state and local bonds, along with several other revenue-raisers.

The answer came last week: ending all those deductions would only produce enough revenue to lower tax rates by 4 percent.

Mitt Romney says he can lower tax rates by 20 percent and pay for it by ending deductions. The joint committee’s math makes it clear that that is impossible.

The analysis doesn’t include every possible tax expenditure, leaving out, for example, the tax break employers get for providing health insurance. But because Mr. Romney refuses to raise capital gains taxes and wants to end the estate tax, it is hard to see how he could do much better than 4 percent.

This is why Mr. Romney has refused to say which deductions he would eliminate, just as Representative Paul Ryan refused when asked a direct question in last week’s debate. Specify a deduction, and some pest with a calculator will point out that it doesn’t add up.

Even Fox News isn’t buying it. Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to the Romney campaign, said on Fox News Sunday that Mr. Romney would work out those details later with Congress. As the program’s moderator, Chris Wallace, pointed out, that’s like offering voters the candy of a 20 percent tax cut without mentioning the spinach they will have to eat.

The Romney campaign claims it has six studies proving it can be done, but, on examination, none of the studies actually make that point, or counterbalance the nonpartisan analyses that use real math. Two of the studies, for example, were done by the same Republican economist, Martin Feldstein, an adviser to the Romney campaign, who said it would require ending all deductions for everyone making $100,000 or more. But Mr. Romney has explicitly said he would not do that.

It is increasingly clear that the Romney tax “plan” is not really a plan at all but is instead simply a rhapsody based on old Republican themes that something can be had for nothing. For middle-class taxpayers without the benefit of expensive accountants, the bill always comes due a few years later.

On October 16 2012 18:16 Darknat wrote:
I wish people would stop pretending they know squat about what would be a good tax plan. The average person has no clue what would be a good tax plan. Like the only tax plan I have is where everyone is required to pay taxes but the percent is up to each individual.

Question A: Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill.

Responses weighted by each expert's confidence:
93% Agree
2% Uncertain
4% Disagree

Question B:

Taking into account all of the ARRA’s economic consequences — including the economic costs of raising taxes to pay for the spending, its effects on future spending, and any other likely future effects — the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs.

Responses weighted by each expert's confidence:
60% Agree
26% Uncertain
14% Disagree

On October 16 2012 22:35 paralleluniverse wrote:
http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_cw5O9LNJL1oz4Xi

There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting.

Bryan Caplan points to a piece by Justin Wolfers.

Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn’t reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.

We here at the Cat are the 8 percent.

Let’s look at Caplan’s critique first.

Wolfers says that the panel is “ideologically diverse.” When I asked Kashyap, however, he said that there’s no public data on panel members’ political views. If you casually peruse the list, its members seem to lean heavily Democratic. Dan Klein’s systematic empirics say that the economics profession has Democrat to Republican ratio of 3:1. None of this would be a problem if becoming an economist caused people to join the Democratic party. In my experience, though, most economists picked their party long before they started studying economics.

Okay – so most academic economists are part of the highly educated elite and have political views consistent with that status. Not surprising – both Hayek and Schumpeter have theories of why intellectuals are likely to have left-wing views. Caplan goes on to talk about the stimulus.

My complaint: These results are basically what you’d expect from a non-expert panel with two Democrats for every Republican. What’s the value-added of the IGM’s economic expertise on this question? Hard to see.

Partisan bias seems particularly troubling when the IGM deals with policies that have recently been in the news. When economists analyze events decades in the past, it’s relatively easy to put politics aside and coolly apply abstract economics to concrete cases. When they analyze events they recently lived through, however, objectivity is harder to achieve. This is especially true when they’re personally close to the administrations that adopted the policies they’re now asked to judge.

I’m not convinced – the evidence is in. I’m happy to believe that people could be wrong ex ante, but ex post? Not so much.

Here is an earlier version of a very famous graph.


A model was used to generate two series of estimates in that graph. First the unemployment figures without a stimulus and then the unemployment figures with the stimulus. The red dots reveal what actually happened. The red dots invalidate the model. If you believe – as do 92 percent of leading US economists in the sample believe – that “the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate” then you must also believe that the stock standard Keynesian model that generated both sets of forecasts in the graph is wrong too. Now some argue that the stimulus was too small, but why weren’t those 92 percent of economists saying so at the time? Of course, that simply raises the question; how did they know it was too small at the time? Where is their model and its predictions?