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On October 17 2012 02:14 Klondikebar wrote:Not sure if this needs it's own thread or belongs here but what do people think about the Paul Ryan soup kitchen debacle? Is he really just a showboating asshole or was that taken out of context? I only heard about it from Reddit so obviously I've heard the side of the story that says he's an asshole and I wanna hear what Ryan supporters say about it. Edit context: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/11ke6s/paul_ryans_soup_kitchen_stunt_caught_on_video_5/
every single political little "meet up" or "sit down" is staged, ok he went further than most doing literally nothing. but all the other times you see this on the news its been staged and scripted and that ends up slowing down the workers anyway, none of them are ever helpful at these photo ops. so ye, he took it another step in to stupid land but its not like he did anything new.
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On October 17 2012 02:12 BluePanther wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 02:10 ey215 wrote:On October 17 2012 01:34 Razakel wrote:On October 17 2012 01:33 xDaunt wrote:On October 17 2012 01:32 BluePanther wrote:On October 17 2012 01:26 farvacola wrote:
Woke up primed for tonight's debates, log on to see parallelluniverse laying down some good old fashioned facts, all is well with the world. In other news, not sure how I feel about the Hillary martyrdom bit, although her willingness to do upfront damage control for something that was not brought to her attention is admirable in any case. The only important thing I read into the Hillary situation is that Hillary has no intentions for running in 2016. She's "taking one for the team." She will not be on the 2016 ticket. I wasn't expecting her to run anyway. I don't think she wants it anymore. Who do you expect to run for the Democrats in 2016 if not her? Biden will likely run. If Booker runs and wins against Christie to become Governor of New Jersey I could see him running. I do think it would be better for Booker to wait though. As the family name is huge among the Democrats maybe Andrew Cuomo. I could also see Martin O'Malley running as he's term limited. What about Deval Patrick? I'm sure at least one senator will run but off the top of my head I can't pick a single name. I was also trying to come up with a woman besides Clinton. I actually think it's going to be an outlier. A random governor or even possibly a non-politician. It needs to be someone who isn't directly linked to Obama.
I don't know much about him, but when going through a list of governors Mike Beebe came to mind as well. A hugely popular Democratic governor of a southern state. I can't say I've ever seen him speak though.
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On October 17 2012 02:19 BluePanther wrote:Eh, it's typical. Every politician does this type of stuff. This one was pretty bad, but it's equivalent to the "Obama buying a round of beers" that happened a few months ago. The owner got irritated because his hosting was taken advantage of to his detriment. Photo ops are photo ops.
Yes. Don't fault Ryan, fault a homogenous, superficial culture where politicians feel obligated and pressured to pander to everyone and every position.
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United States6277 Posts
On October 17 2012 02:17 Defacer wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 01:52 BluePanther wrote:On October 17 2012 01:49 sc2superfan101 wrote:
i hope it's not Christie either. he's too moderate, his views on global warming piss me off, and he's abrasive as sandpaper.
great Governor for a place like New Jersey, great speaker for conventions, terrible pick for President, IMO And that's exactly why he'll win. Independent voters such as myself love the guy, and his attitude actually appeals to a lot of voters who want someone in office who isn't a complete suck-up. That "attitude" helps him with far-right voters who wouldn't support him solely on the issues. If he's nominated against the democratic field available for next cycle, he'll win in a landslide. It's like some of the conservatives on this board haven't been paying attention the past couple of weeks. The reason why Romney is winning right now is because he is positioning himself as a moderate. (Personally, I find Romney repulsive and disingenuous after adopting extreme conservative positions for the past year to get to where he is now, but one man's trash is another man's treasure, I suppose.)
What's wrong with Romney positioning to the middle? I like the middle, it's comfortable here 
Seriously though, this is the norm. Politicians pander to the more extreme elements in their party to make it through the primaries, then run to the center for the actual election. The reason you don't see that with Obama in this election is because he didn't have a contested primary.
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On October 17 2012 02:17 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On October 16 2012 23:58 paralleluniverse wrote:On October 16 2012 23:43 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 22:35 paralleluniverse wrote:http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_cw5O9LNJL1oz4XiQuestion 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 There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting. I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio. 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. ![[image loading]](http://catallaxyfiles.com/files/2012/07/US-unemployment-may-2011.jpg) 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? Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey). Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science. Nah. More likely people's pre-existing ideas gravitate them towards different fields. If you believe in government intervention then go study economics. If you believe the opposite than go study finance.
What? A HUGE swath of the Economics profession loathes government intervention. Financiers were the ones who cried for bailouts and tax breaks (government intervention). And, for the record, most Economists are actually more confident in Republican tax/economic policy
http://www.economist.com/node/21564175
You see a lot of economists who vote democrat because they prefer spending on welfare to spending on war. They are for immigration reform. And they want a less hostile foreign policy. They consider all of those things more important than a few percentage points in the tax code.
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On October 17 2012 02:20 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 01:57 BluePanther wrote:On October 17 2012 01:54 sc2superfan101 wrote:On October 17 2012 01:52 BluePanther wrote:On October 17 2012 01:49 sc2superfan101 wrote:
i hope it's not Christie either. he's too moderate, his views on global warming piss me off, and he's abrasive as sandpaper.
great Governor for a place like New Jersey, great speaker for conventions, terrible pick for President, IMO And that's exactly why he'll win. Independent voters such as myself love the guy, and his attitude actually appeals to a lot of voters who want someone in office who isn't a complete suck-up. If he's nominated against the democratic field available for next cycle, he'll win in a landslide. oh I think he would win, and I think he would actually do a fine job, maybe even a great job. but I wonder what it would mean for conservatism. Christie is a relatively conservative moderate, but would nominating/electing him be a sign of a movement toward the center in Republican politics? i can't argue too much with the idea of making a slight shift in that direction, but my natural inclination is to recoil a bit. Conservatism is dying. It's going to be a slow conversion, but it's definitely dying. The old farts in power won't let it happen quickly, but I can assure you (at least in Wisconsin), things are changing. I'm involved in Wisconsin Republican politics. The new wave of future leaders are NOT conservative. It has a much more moderate/libertarian feel to it. Sure, right now we all work on pandering to grandma, but it's not long until that generation dies off and the change can commence. It's coming, mark my words. Let's put it this way: I was at a Romney meeting recently (they got some of these future people together to ask for help on a project here). During happy hour, the discussion did not revolve around traditional marraige and abortion. It revolved around libertarian ideals and how to correctly incorporate them into a Republican structure. The man above scoffs at "Ayn Rand Republican" but I'm not so sure it's a ridiculous description. Is it Objectivism? Absolutely not. But it is an influential view that will shape the future political landscape as some of it's ideas are absorbed into the party ideology. I think the "family first" attitude of Republicans is going to change to a "freedom of the individual" attitude that is currently usually associated to the Democrats. I understand and generally agree with the point that you're making, but saying that "conservatism is dying" is the wrong way to characterize what is happening with the republican party. If you look closely at the arguments that are being made in support of gay marriage and limited abortion rights, they are very much couched in conservative ideology -- ie we shouldn't be giving power to the government to regulate this stuff in the first place. This is very similar to libertarianism, but a little bit different.
Depends who you talk to and in which forum. Their answers may vary. And when you talk to them on a personal level if you get to know them and earn some trust (as in they know you won't sell them out), I think you'll find the answers surprising. There are definitely some younger conservatives out there (Ryan is an example), but a lot more of them just act the part. It's just a convenient out for us to still "fit in".
And what you're describing of state rights. I call that "republicanism", not "conservatism".
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On October 17 2012 02:26 Klondikebar wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 02:17 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On October 16 2012 23:58 paralleluniverse wrote:On October 16 2012 23:43 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 22:35 paralleluniverse wrote:http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_cw5O9LNJL1oz4XiQuestion 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 There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting. I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio. 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? Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey). Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science. Nah. More likely people's pre-existing ideas gravitate them towards different fields. If you believe in government intervention then go study economics. If you believe the opposite than go study finance. What? A HUGE swath of the Economics profession loathes government intervention. Financiers were the ones who cried for bailouts and tax breaks (government intervention). And, for the record, most Economists are actually more confident in Republican tax/economic policy http://www.economist.com/node/21564175You see a lot of economists who vote democrat because they prefer spending on welfare to spending on war. They are for immigration reform. And they want a less hostile foreign policy. They consider all of those things more important than a few percentage points in the tax code.
They vote Democrat but, hmmm... Agree with Republican economic policy, want immigration reform, want less hostile foreign policy and less war spending... Sounds almost... libertarian.
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On October 17 2012 02:30 jdseemoreglass wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 02:26 Klondikebar wrote:On October 17 2012 02:17 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On October 16 2012 23:58 paralleluniverse wrote:On October 16 2012 23:43 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 22:35 paralleluniverse wrote:http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_cw5O9LNJL1oz4XiQuestion 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 There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting. I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio. 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? Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey). Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science. Nah. More likely people's pre-existing ideas gravitate them towards different fields. If you believe in government intervention then go study economics. If you believe the opposite than go study finance. What? A HUGE swath of the Economics profession loathes government intervention. Financiers were the ones who cried for bailouts and tax breaks (government intervention). And, for the record, most Economists are actually more confident in Republican tax/economic policy http://www.economist.com/node/21564175You see a lot of economists who vote democrat because they prefer spending on welfare to spending on war. They are for immigration reform. And they want a less hostile foreign policy. They consider all of those things more important than a few percentage points in the tax code. They vote Democrat but, hmmm... Agree with Republican economic policy, want immigration reform, want less hostile foreign policy and less war spending... Sounds almost... libertarian.
They are mostly libertarian. But libertarians are hardly represented in our two party system. Some might just toss their vote to the libertarian party as a matter of principle. But if you really want to participate in our political process you pretty much have to vote democrat or republican. (and you have to live in Ohio or Florida)
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Ohio, critical to the election hopes of Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, began early in-person voting earlier this month but planned to cut it off on November 2, the Friday before the election, except for members of the military.
The Obama campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the Ohio Democratic Party had sued Ohio officials to restore early voting right up to election day eve. Republicans opposed their efforts, saying a cutoff was needed to reduce voter fraud.
In states that allow voters to cast ballots before election day, early voting and extended voting hours are thought to benefit Democratic candidates because lower-income people, who tend to vote for them, are more likely to work odd hours.
Earlier this month, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a U.S. District Court order that reinstated early voting in the final days before the election. The state had appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court.
In a one-sentence order on Tuesday, the high court denied the state's petition for a stay of the appeals court decision.
Source
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On October 17 2012 02:29 BluePanther wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 02:20 xDaunt wrote:On October 17 2012 01:57 BluePanther wrote:On October 17 2012 01:54 sc2superfan101 wrote:On October 17 2012 01:52 BluePanther wrote:On October 17 2012 01:49 sc2superfan101 wrote:
i hope it's not Christie either. he's too moderate, his views on global warming piss me off, and he's abrasive as sandpaper.
great Governor for a place like New Jersey, great speaker for conventions, terrible pick for President, IMO And that's exactly why he'll win. Independent voters such as myself love the guy, and his attitude actually appeals to a lot of voters who want someone in office who isn't a complete suck-up. If he's nominated against the democratic field available for next cycle, he'll win in a landslide. oh I think he would win, and I think he would actually do a fine job, maybe even a great job. but I wonder what it would mean for conservatism. Christie is a relatively conservative moderate, but would nominating/electing him be a sign of a movement toward the center in Republican politics? i can't argue too much with the idea of making a slight shift in that direction, but my natural inclination is to recoil a bit. Conservatism is dying. It's going to be a slow conversion, but it's definitely dying. The old farts in power won't let it happen quickly, but I can assure you (at least in Wisconsin), things are changing. I'm involved in Wisconsin Republican politics. The new wave of future leaders are NOT conservative. It has a much more moderate/libertarian feel to it. Sure, right now we all work on pandering to grandma, but it's not long until that generation dies off and the change can commence. It's coming, mark my words. Let's put it this way: I was at a Romney meeting recently (they got some of these future people together to ask for help on a project here). During happy hour, the discussion did not revolve around traditional marraige and abortion. It revolved around libertarian ideals and how to correctly incorporate them into a Republican structure. The man above scoffs at "Ayn Rand Republican" but I'm not so sure it's a ridiculous description. Is it Objectivism? Absolutely not. But it is an influential view that will shape the future political landscape as some of it's ideas are absorbed into the party ideology. I think the "family first" attitude of Republicans is going to change to a "freedom of the individual" attitude that is currently usually associated to the Democrats. I understand and generally agree with the point that you're making, but saying that "conservatism is dying" is the wrong way to characterize what is happening with the republican party. If you look closely at the arguments that are being made in support of gay marriage and limited abortion rights, they are very much couched in conservative ideology -- ie we shouldn't be giving power to the government to regulate this stuff in the first place. This is very similar to libertarianism, but a little bit different. Depends who you talk to and in which forum. Their answers may vary. And when you talk to them on a personal level if you get to know them and earn some trust (as in they know you won't sell them out), I think you'll find the answers surprising. There are definitely some younger conservatives out there (Ryan is an example), but a lot more of them just act the part. It's just a convenient out for us to still "fit in". And what you're describing of state rights. I call that "republicanism", not "conservatism".
I'm talking about the younger guys in the republican party. For example, I know the guy who is driving the pro-gay marriage movement within the republican party here in Colorado. If you ask him to intellectually justify gay marriage, he'll use a conservative argument.
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On October 17 2012 02:32 Klondikebar wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 02:30 jdseemoreglass wrote:On October 17 2012 02:26 Klondikebar wrote:On October 17 2012 02:17 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On October 16 2012 23:58 paralleluniverse wrote:On October 16 2012 23:43 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 22:35 paralleluniverse wrote:http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_cw5O9LNJL1oz4XiQuestion 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 There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting. I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio. 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? Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey). Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science. Nah. More likely people's pre-existing ideas gravitate them towards different fields. If you believe in government intervention then go study economics. If you believe the opposite than go study finance. What? A HUGE swath of the Economics profession loathes government intervention. Financiers were the ones who cried for bailouts and tax breaks (government intervention). And, for the record, most Economists are actually more confident in Republican tax/economic policy http://www.economist.com/node/21564175You see a lot of economists who vote democrat because they prefer spending on welfare to spending on war. They are for immigration reform. And they want a less hostile foreign policy. They consider all of those things more important than a few percentage points in the tax code. They vote Democrat but, hmmm... Agree with Republican economic policy, want immigration reform, want less hostile foreign policy and less war spending... Sounds almost... libertarian. They are mostly libertarian. But libertarians are hardly represented in our two party system. Some might just toss their vote to the libertarian party as a matter of principle. But if you really want to participate in our political process you pretty much have to vote democrat or republican. (and you have to live in Ohio or Florida)
Agreed. I'm almost wishing for the day when Republicans can't win a thing and Democrats dominate politics, so that the party finally reforms itself. Right now their "big tent" ideology is downright schizophrenic.
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On October 17 2012 02:34 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 02:29 BluePanther wrote:On October 17 2012 02:20 xDaunt wrote:On October 17 2012 01:57 BluePanther wrote:On October 17 2012 01:54 sc2superfan101 wrote:On October 17 2012 01:52 BluePanther wrote:On October 17 2012 01:49 sc2superfan101 wrote:
i hope it's not Christie either. he's too moderate, his views on global warming piss me off, and he's abrasive as sandpaper.
great Governor for a place like New Jersey, great speaker for conventions, terrible pick for President, IMO And that's exactly why he'll win. Independent voters such as myself love the guy, and his attitude actually appeals to a lot of voters who want someone in office who isn't a complete suck-up. If he's nominated against the democratic field available for next cycle, he'll win in a landslide. oh I think he would win, and I think he would actually do a fine job, maybe even a great job. but I wonder what it would mean for conservatism. Christie is a relatively conservative moderate, but would nominating/electing him be a sign of a movement toward the center in Republican politics? i can't argue too much with the idea of making a slight shift in that direction, but my natural inclination is to recoil a bit. Conservatism is dying. It's going to be a slow conversion, but it's definitely dying. The old farts in power won't let it happen quickly, but I can assure you (at least in Wisconsin), things are changing. I'm involved in Wisconsin Republican politics. The new wave of future leaders are NOT conservative. It has a much more moderate/libertarian feel to it. Sure, right now we all work on pandering to grandma, but it's not long until that generation dies off and the change can commence. It's coming, mark my words. Let's put it this way: I was at a Romney meeting recently (they got some of these future people together to ask for help on a project here). During happy hour, the discussion did not revolve around traditional marraige and abortion. It revolved around libertarian ideals and how to correctly incorporate them into a Republican structure. The man above scoffs at "Ayn Rand Republican" but I'm not so sure it's a ridiculous description. Is it Objectivism? Absolutely not. But it is an influential view that will shape the future political landscape as some of it's ideas are absorbed into the party ideology. I think the "family first" attitude of Republicans is going to change to a "freedom of the individual" attitude that is currently usually associated to the Democrats. I understand and generally agree with the point that you're making, but saying that "conservatism is dying" is the wrong way to characterize what is happening with the republican party. If you look closely at the arguments that are being made in support of gay marriage and limited abortion rights, they are very much couched in conservative ideology -- ie we shouldn't be giving power to the government to regulate this stuff in the first place. This is very similar to libertarianism, but a little bit different. Depends who you talk to and in which forum. Their answers may vary. And when you talk to them on a personal level if you get to know them and earn some trust (as in they know you won't sell them out), I think you'll find the answers surprising. There are definitely some younger conservatives out there (Ryan is an example), but a lot more of them just act the part. It's just a convenient out for us to still "fit in". And what you're describing of state rights. I call that "republicanism", not "conservatism". I'm talking about the younger guys in the republican party. For example, I know the guy who is driving the pro-gay marriage movement within the republican party here in Colorado. If you ask him to intellectually justify gay marriage, he'll use a conservative argument.
I think you're misunderstanding me. I don't consider republican structure arguments (or state's rights) to be "conservativism". State's rights are just simple republicanism, which I think is strong and will remain strong for some time. I see conservatism more from the social aspects, aka, religious involvement in policy or the "family first" attitude with drugs, etc. He may be a republican, but if he's pushing for gay rights I highly doubt he falls into my understanding of a "conservative".
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On October 17 2012 02:00 Souma wrote:Show nested quote +On October 16 2012 14:45 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 07:41 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 07:39 DoubleReed wrote:On October 16 2012 07:38 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 07:33 DoubleReed wrote:On October 16 2012 07:26 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 07:23 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 07:01 sam!zdat wrote:On October 16 2012 06:56 DeepElemBlues wrote:
[quote]
How many dictatorships did we support because they were anti-Communist? How many times did we nod our heads to bad men saying "Our country needs a strong ruler, the people aren't ready to make decisions for themselves, it isn't in our culture" because the strong ruler was against Moscow?
How many times have George Bush and Barack Obama both bent over backwards to say "this isn't a war against Islam," "Islam mustn't be insulted," etc? Supporting dictatorships because of anti-communism is basically exactly what I'm talking about... As for the latter, I think it may be a question of the lady protesting too much. On October 16 2012 06:56 DeepElemBlues wrote:
In fact this fanatical hatred of the US has existed since the US has existed, there's nothing Americans can do about it. It's a big part of the reason why we don't listen to "the rest of the world" Nothing just "exists" all by itself A lesson I've learned in life: when everybody thinks you're an asshole, sometimes it's because you're actually just acting like an asshole I agree to some extent..but our freedoms are a big reason why many hate us. Specifically much of the pre-dominantly muslim parts of the Middle East will mostly always hate us as long as we are free to do all of the things they consider sacrilegious. There is really nothing we can do to change that. 'They hate our freedomz!!1' is one of the most oversimplified explanations of anything I have ever heard of. It exemplifies the ignorance of the typical American on U.S.-Middle East relations. Did you know that Muslims once upon a time were actually incredibly tolerant and would not lift a finger when directly insulted? Yes, well the Muslim Brotherhood has been gaining power in many many countries, including Turkey of all places. They are well funded, well coordinated, and have a lot going for them. They are a lot less racist and divisive then a lot of organizations, because they welcome all Muslims. Look at what is happening in the UK right now: http://tehrantimes.com/world/102400-10000-protest-anti-muslim-video-at-googles-uk-hqThis trend is very troubling. Indeed, it is troubling, but to brush it off simply by saying "They hate our freedomz!!1" is ridiculous. The Muslim Brotherhood was not formed nor has it been gaining power simply because "They hate our freedomz!!1" Well in this case they actually do hate our freedoms... 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. 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. I'm telling you your hypothesis has no basis grounded in reality, unless we are gauging 'hate' very differently. Without all the underlying causes I highly doubt they'd 'hate' us enough to ram airplanes into our buildings, suicide bomb innocent civilians, and assassinate our diplomats. As time passes the younger Muslim generations are beginning to harbor more pro-Western sentiments than their predecessors (even in Iran!). This is because they didn't have to grow up alongside the reality of those 'underlying causes.' So to say that they'd 'hate us very much' regardless of what we did is ludicrous. As long as we don't continue spreading our tyranny throughout the Middle East, we can at least erase a lot of that ill will we rightfully deserve with the passage of time. Drone strikes aren't doing us any favors with Yemen and Pakistan but that's a whole different topic.
Yeah, tell the guy whose job was to deal with Arabs and Muslims his hypothesis has no basis grounded in reality. Because it doesn't fit in with what you already believed. That makes sense.
They sure seem to have no trouble murdering girls who just want to learn how to read, so how does that fit in with your theory?
You've obviously never read Qutb or Zawahiri, guess what they hate us because of our decadent sexualized culture and freedom of religion and expression. And because we're spreading that culture to "their" countries, and we don't recognize "their" right to rule those countries in whatever barbaric ass backwards way they want to.
Who voted terrorists as the One True Spokesgroup for Muslims? Who voted them the One True Rulers of "Muslim" lands?
The reality of the underlying causes is that they're a bunch of racist, xenophobic fascists who murder "their" own people just as brutally and gleefully as they murder Westerners.
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United States6277 Posts
On October 17 2012 02:26 Klondikebar wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 02:17 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On October 16 2012 23:58 paralleluniverse wrote:On October 16 2012 23:43 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 22:35 paralleluniverse wrote:http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_cw5O9LNJL1oz4XiQuestion 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 There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting. I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio. 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? Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey). Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science. Nah. More likely people's pre-existing ideas gravitate them towards different fields. If you believe in government intervention then go study economics. If you believe the opposite than go study finance. What? A HUGE swath of the Economics profession loathes government intervention. Financiers were the ones who cried for bailouts and tax breaks (government intervention). And, for the record, most Economists are actually more confident in Republican tax/economic policy http://www.economist.com/node/21564175You see a lot of economists who vote democrat because they prefer spending on welfare to spending on war. They are for immigration reform. And they want a less hostile foreign policy. They consider all of those things more important than a few percentage points in the tax code.
Most economists favor stimulus to remedy a recession - to clarify I count that as government intervention.
Ofc financiers called for a bailout. Politics fall to the wayside when reality is staring you in the face.
Edit: the survey you linked to favored Obama over Romney on every issue except entitlement reform...
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2nd Worst City in CA8938 Posts
On October 17 2012 02:37 DeepElemBlues wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 02:00 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 14:45 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 07:41 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 07:39 DoubleReed wrote:On October 16 2012 07:38 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 07:33 DoubleReed wrote:On October 16 2012 07:26 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 07:23 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 07:01 sam!zdat wrote:
[quote]
Supporting dictatorships because of anti-communism is basically exactly what I'm talking about...
As for the latter, I think it may be a question of the lady protesting too much.
[quote]
Nothing just "exists" all by itself
A lesson I've learned in life: when everybody thinks you're an asshole, sometimes it's because you're actually just acting like an asshole I agree to some extent..but our freedoms are a big reason why many hate us. Specifically much of the pre-dominantly muslim parts of the Middle East will mostly always hate us as long as we are free to do all of the things they consider sacrilegious. There is really nothing we can do to change that. 'They hate our freedomz!!1' is one of the most oversimplified explanations of anything I have ever heard of. It exemplifies the ignorance of the typical American on U.S.-Middle East relations. Did you know that Muslims once upon a time were actually incredibly tolerant and would not lift a finger when directly insulted? Yes, well the Muslim Brotherhood has been gaining power in many many countries, including Turkey of all places. They are well funded, well coordinated, and have a lot going for them. They are a lot less racist and divisive then a lot of organizations, because they welcome all Muslims. Look at what is happening in the UK right now: http://tehrantimes.com/world/102400-10000-protest-anti-muslim-video-at-googles-uk-hqThis trend is very troubling. Indeed, it is troubling, but to brush it off simply by saying "They hate our freedomz!!1" is ridiculous. The Muslim Brotherhood was not formed nor has it been gaining power simply because "They hate our freedomz!!1" Well in this case they actually do hate our freedoms... 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. 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. I'm telling you your hypothesis has no basis grounded in reality, unless we are gauging 'hate' very differently. Without all the underlying causes I highly doubt they'd 'hate' us enough to ram airplanes into our buildings, suicide bomb innocent civilians, and assassinate our diplomats. As time passes the younger Muslim generations are beginning to harbor more pro-Western sentiments than their predecessors (even in Iran!). This is because they didn't have to grow up alongside the reality of those 'underlying causes.' So to say that they'd 'hate us very much' regardless of what we did is ludicrous. As long as we don't continue spreading our tyranny throughout the Middle East, we can at least erase a lot of that ill will we rightfully deserve with the passage of time. Drone strikes aren't doing us any favors with Yemen and Pakistan but that's a whole different topic. Yeah, tell the guy whose job was to deal with Arabs and Muslims his hypothesis has no basis grounded in reality. Because it doesn't fit in with what you already believed. That makes sense. They sure seem to have no trouble murdering girls who just want to learn how to read, so how does that fit in with your theory? You've obviously never read Qutb or Zawahiri, guess what they hate us because of our decadent sexualized culture and freedom of religion and expression. And because we're spreading that culture to "their" countries, and we don't recognize "their" right to rule those countries in whatever barbaric ass backwards way they want to. Who voted terrorists as the One True Spokesgroup for Muslims? Who voted them the One True Rulers of "Muslim" lands? The reality of the underlying causes is that they're a bunch of racist, xenophobic fascists who murder "their" own people just as brutally and gleefully as they murder Westerners.
Yeah I really don't want to waste time trying to argue with such blind bigotry. Have fun living in your scary world where Muslims are crazy monsters trying to subdue the world under the confines of Sharia Law.
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On October 17 2012 02:37 DeepElemBlues wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 02:00 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 14:45 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 07:41 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 07:39 DoubleReed wrote:On October 16 2012 07:38 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 07:33 DoubleReed wrote:On October 16 2012 07:26 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 07:23 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 07:01 sam!zdat wrote:
[quote]
Supporting dictatorships because of anti-communism is basically exactly what I'm talking about...
As for the latter, I think it may be a question of the lady protesting too much.
[quote]
Nothing just "exists" all by itself
A lesson I've learned in life: when everybody thinks you're an asshole, sometimes it's because you're actually just acting like an asshole I agree to some extent..but our freedoms are a big reason why many hate us. Specifically much of the pre-dominantly muslim parts of the Middle East will mostly always hate us as long as we are free to do all of the things they consider sacrilegious. There is really nothing we can do to change that. 'They hate our freedomz!!1' is one of the most oversimplified explanations of anything I have ever heard of. It exemplifies the ignorance of the typical American on U.S.-Middle East relations. Did you know that Muslims once upon a time were actually incredibly tolerant and would not lift a finger when directly insulted? Yes, well the Muslim Brotherhood has been gaining power in many many countries, including Turkey of all places. They are well funded, well coordinated, and have a lot going for them. They are a lot less racist and divisive then a lot of organizations, because they welcome all Muslims. Look at what is happening in the UK right now: http://tehrantimes.com/world/102400-10000-protest-anti-muslim-video-at-googles-uk-hqThis trend is very troubling. Indeed, it is troubling, but to brush it off simply by saying "They hate our freedomz!!1" is ridiculous. The Muslim Brotherhood was not formed nor has it been gaining power simply because "They hate our freedomz!!1" Well in this case they actually do hate our freedoms... 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. 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. I'm telling you your hypothesis has no basis grounded in reality, unless we are gauging 'hate' very differently. Without all the underlying causes I highly doubt they'd 'hate' us enough to ram airplanes into our buildings, suicide bomb innocent civilians, and assassinate our diplomats. As time passes the younger Muslim generations are beginning to harbor more pro-Western sentiments than their predecessors (even in Iran!). This is because they didn't have to grow up alongside the reality of those 'underlying causes.' So to say that they'd 'hate us very much' regardless of what we did is ludicrous. As long as we don't continue spreading our tyranny throughout the Middle East, we can at least erase a lot of that ill will we rightfully deserve with the passage of time. Drone strikes aren't doing us any favors with Yemen and Pakistan but that's a whole different topic. Yeah, tell the guy whose job was to deal with Arabs and Muslims his hypothesis has no basis grounded in reality. Because it doesn't fit in with what you already believed. That makes sense. They sure seem to have no trouble murdering girls who just want to learn how to read, so how does that fit in with your theory? You've obviously never read Qutb or Zawahiri, guess what they hate us because of our decadent sexualized culture and freedom of religion and expression. And because we're spreading that culture to "their" countries, and we don't recognize "their" right to rule those countries in whatever barbaric ass backwards way they want to. Who voted terrorists as the One True Spokesgroup for Muslims? Who voted them the One True Rulers of "Muslim" lands? The reality of the underlying causes is that they're a bunch of racist, xenophobic fascists who murder "their" own people just as brutally and gleefully as they murder Westerners.
The taliban is like the westboro baptist church in a land where individuals aren't educated enough to see through their bullshit and don't have the bill of rights and a reliable judicial system to protect them when they do.
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On October 17 2012 02:37 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 02:26 Klondikebar wrote:On October 17 2012 02:17 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On October 16 2012 23:58 paralleluniverse wrote:On October 16 2012 23:43 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 22:35 paralleluniverse wrote:http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_cw5O9LNJL1oz4XiQuestion 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 There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting. I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio. 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? Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey). Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science. Nah. More likely people's pre-existing ideas gravitate them towards different fields. If you believe in government intervention then go study economics. If you believe the opposite than go study finance. What? A HUGE swath of the Economics profession loathes government intervention. Financiers were the ones who cried for bailouts and tax breaks (government intervention). And, for the record, most Economists are actually more confident in Republican tax/economic policy http://www.economist.com/node/21564175You see a lot of economists who vote democrat because they prefer spending on welfare to spending on war. They are for immigration reform. And they want a less hostile foreign policy. They consider all of those things more important than a few percentage points in the tax code. Most economists favor stimulus to remedy a recession - to clarify I count that as government intervention. Ofc financiers called for a bailout. Politics fall to the wayside when reality is staring you in the face. Edit: the survey you linked to favored Obama over Romney on every issue except entitlement reform...
Not a single one of the Economists I know favored the stimulus. They are ok with stimulus in theory but they know that in reality an enormous amount of resources will be expended with rent seeking (to the point that the stimulus may even be a net loss for the economy) and the stimulus will not be spent at all efficiently.
Calling for a bailout wasn't putting politics by the wayside...it was exploiting politics to get a big old end of the year bonus.
Entitlement reform is a big deal no? And they are neck and neck in Tax Reform, Fiscal Discipline, and Long Run Growth. The other things are mostly social issues that Republicans have repeatedly effed up and it's no surprise they're still effing them up.
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On October 17 2012 02:44 Souma wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 02:37 DeepElemBlues wrote:On October 17 2012 02:00 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 14:45 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 07:41 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 07:39 DoubleReed wrote:On October 16 2012 07:38 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 07:33 DoubleReed wrote:On October 16 2012 07:26 Souma wrote:On October 16 2012 07:23 kmillz wrote:
[quote]
I agree to some extent..but our freedoms are a big reason why many hate us. Specifically much of the pre-dominantly muslim parts of the Middle East will mostly always hate us as long as we are free to do all of the things they consider sacrilegious. There is really nothing we can do to change that. 'They hate our freedomz!!1' is one of the most oversimplified explanations of anything I have ever heard of. It exemplifies the ignorance of the typical American on U.S.-Middle East relations. Did you know that Muslims once upon a time were actually incredibly tolerant and would not lift a finger when directly insulted? Yes, well the Muslim Brotherhood has been gaining power in many many countries, including Turkey of all places. They are well funded, well coordinated, and have a lot going for them. They are a lot less racist and divisive then a lot of organizations, because they welcome all Muslims. Look at what is happening in the UK right now: http://tehrantimes.com/world/102400-10000-protest-anti-muslim-video-at-googles-uk-hqThis trend is very troubling. Indeed, it is troubling, but to brush it off simply by saying "They hate our freedomz!!1" is ridiculous. The Muslim Brotherhood was not formed nor has it been gaining power simply because "They hate our freedomz!!1" Well in this case they actually do hate our freedoms... 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. 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. I'm telling you your hypothesis has no basis grounded in reality, unless we are gauging 'hate' very differently. Without all the underlying causes I highly doubt they'd 'hate' us enough to ram airplanes into our buildings, suicide bomb innocent civilians, and assassinate our diplomats. As time passes the younger Muslim generations are beginning to harbor more pro-Western sentiments than their predecessors (even in Iran!). This is because they didn't have to grow up alongside the reality of those 'underlying causes.' So to say that they'd 'hate us very much' regardless of what we did is ludicrous. As long as we don't continue spreading our tyranny throughout the Middle East, we can at least erase a lot of that ill will we rightfully deserve with the passage of time. Drone strikes aren't doing us any favors with Yemen and Pakistan but that's a whole different topic. Yeah, tell the guy whose job was to deal with Arabs and Muslims his hypothesis has no basis grounded in reality. Because it doesn't fit in with what you already believed. That makes sense. They sure seem to have no trouble murdering girls who just want to learn how to read, so how does that fit in with your theory? You've obviously never read Qutb or Zawahiri, guess what they hate us because of our decadent sexualized culture and freedom of religion and expression. And because we're spreading that culture to "their" countries, and we don't recognize "their" right to rule those countries in whatever barbaric ass backwards way they want to. Who voted terrorists as the One True Spokesgroup for Muslims? Who voted them the One True Rulers of "Muslim" lands? The reality of the underlying causes is that they're a bunch of racist, xenophobic fascists who murder "their" own people just as brutally and gleefully as they murder Westerners. Yeah I really don't want to waste time trying to argue with such blind bigotry. Have fun living in your scary world where Muslims are crazy monsters trying to subdue the world under the confines of Sharia Law.
To be quite frank, the terrorist factions in the Middle East are pretty much religious bigots, in reverse. The ones who commit violence do so because of very fringe and fanatical beliefs in scripture statements that are (at least in my mind), taken out of context. Terrorist groups believe that everyone should live by THEIR interpretation of the Quran -- which isn't a majority view among religious scholars.
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On October 17 2012 02:48 Klondikebar wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 02:37 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On October 17 2012 02:26 Klondikebar wrote:On October 17 2012 02:17 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On October 16 2012 23:58 paralleluniverse wrote:On October 16 2012 23:43 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 22:35 paralleluniverse wrote:http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_cw5O9LNJL1oz4XiQuestion 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 There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting. I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio. 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? Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey). Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science. Nah. More likely people's pre-existing ideas gravitate them towards different fields. If you believe in government intervention then go study economics. If you believe the opposite than go study finance. What? A HUGE swath of the Economics profession loathes government intervention. Financiers were the ones who cried for bailouts and tax breaks (government intervention). And, for the record, most Economists are actually more confident in Republican tax/economic policy http://www.economist.com/node/21564175You see a lot of economists who vote democrat because they prefer spending on welfare to spending on war. They are for immigration reform. And they want a less hostile foreign policy. They consider all of those things more important than a few percentage points in the tax code. Most economists favor stimulus to remedy a recession - to clarify I count that as government intervention. Ofc financiers called for a bailout. Politics fall to the wayside when reality is staring you in the face. Edit: the survey you linked to favored Obama over Romney on every issue except entitlement reform... Not a single one of the Economists I know favored the stimulus. They are ok with stimulus in theory but they know that in reality an enormous amount of resources will be expended with rent seeking (to the point that the stimulus may even be a net loss for the economy) and the stimulus will not be spent at all efficiently. Calling for a bailout wasn't putting politics by the wayside...it was exploiting politics to get a big old end of the year bonus. Entitlement reform is a big deal no? And they are neck and neck in Tax Reform, Fiscal Discipline, and Long Run Growth. The other things are mostly social issues that Republicans have repeatedly effed up and it's no surprise they're still effing them up.
First off, it would do your argument justice to avoid using phrases such as this; they do very little to help affirm or stabilize your viewpoint in that none of us can possibly be aware of who you know. More to the point, who exactly are you referring to?
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On October 17 2012 02:52 farvacola wrote:Show nested quote +On October 17 2012 02:48 Klondikebar wrote:On October 17 2012 02:37 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On October 17 2012 02:26 Klondikebar wrote:On October 17 2012 02:17 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On October 16 2012 23:58 paralleluniverse wrote:On October 16 2012 23:43 kmillz wrote:On October 16 2012 22:35 paralleluniverse wrote:http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_cw5O9LNJL1oz4XiQuestion 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 There's a lot of results for many questions on that website which I found interesting. I think it is interesting to note that the economics profession has a 3:1 Democrat to Republican ratio. 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? Maybe the reason so many economists lean Democratic is because Democrats have better economic policies? Or maybe it's because Republicans have "cranks and charlatans" (Republican economist Greg Mankiw's words) that believe lower taxes will increase revenue, and crackpots who advocate for the return to a gold standard (which 100% of economist disagree with in this survey). Sort of like how scientist have a democrat ratio of like 9 to 1 (or something ridiculous like that), because Republican's denial of evolution and climate change makes them anti-science. Nah. More likely people's pre-existing ideas gravitate them towards different fields. If you believe in government intervention then go study economics. If you believe the opposite than go study finance. What? A HUGE swath of the Economics profession loathes government intervention. Financiers were the ones who cried for bailouts and tax breaks (government intervention). And, for the record, most Economists are actually more confident in Republican tax/economic policy http://www.economist.com/node/21564175You see a lot of economists who vote democrat because they prefer spending on welfare to spending on war. They are for immigration reform. And they want a less hostile foreign policy. They consider all of those things more important than a few percentage points in the tax code. Most economists favor stimulus to remedy a recession - to clarify I count that as government intervention. Ofc financiers called for a bailout. Politics fall to the wayside when reality is staring you in the face. Edit: the survey you linked to favored Obama over Romney on every issue except entitlement reform... Not a single one of the Economists I know favored the stimulus. They are ok with stimulus in theory but they know that in reality an enormous amount of resources will be expended with rent seeking (to the point that the stimulus may even be a net loss for the economy) and the stimulus will not be spent at all efficiently. Calling for a bailout wasn't putting politics by the wayside...it was exploiting politics to get a big old end of the year bonus. Entitlement reform is a big deal no? And they are neck and neck in Tax Reform, Fiscal Discipline, and Long Run Growth. The other things are mostly social issues that Republicans have repeatedly effed up and it's no surprise they're still effing them up. First off, it would do your argument justice to avoid using phrases such as this; they do very little to help affirm or stabilize your viewpoint in that none of us can possibly be aware of who you know. More to the point, who exactly are you referring to?
Good point. I wasn't really trying to name drop so much as just open my post by essentially saying "nu-uh!"
I'm referring to all of my old Economics professors with whom I still keep in contact as well as the various research Economists I've met through them.
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EPT
