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United States22883 Posts
On January 31 2009 03:21 Savio wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2009 02:57 L wrote:If the government had taken that $400 and just given it to the family, they would have recienved $400 worth of benefit. Or 400$ worth of booze and drugs. Food stamps aren't designed to provide maximum economic stimulus, they're designed to put food on the table and keep kids from starving, which in turn makes them less likely to kneecap people for their daily bread, which in turn makes them less likely to suck up a gigantic wad of tax dollars sitting in prison. The liberal assumption is always that government knows better than you what you need. It is also that government loves your children more than you do and will take better care of them. Under these assumptions, policies like this are created. Also, the idea the food stamp users are generally crack heads or drunks is simply false.
What? For the most part, the government tries to operate on the assumption that there are problems which the market cannot fix or for which there is no market, outliers, and tries to address them. There is no market to help poor people. There is no market to develop medicine for rare diseases instead of cancer. Up until recently, and arguably even still, there is no market to develop cleaner emissions. There was no market for a national highway system or the internet until they were actually developed.
If you took purely an economist's view, there would be no development of any sort of AIDS treatment in the 1980s because it was so costly and because breast cancer was far more widespread and was far more profitable. Instead, we took the religious right's view and decided there would be little development of any sort of AIDS treatment in the 1980s because faggots are sodomites and are going to hell. Isn't that right, Mrs. Reagan?
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On January 31 2009 03:21 Savio wrote:
The liberal assumption is always that government knows better than you what you need. It is also that government loves your children more than you do and will take better care of them.
The conservative assumption is always that this is the liberal assumption.
It's not.
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haha actually what Savio described as "liberal assumption" is the exact opposite of what we call "liberal" here in France :D
Must be language barrier...
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
Japan's manufacturing industry across the boards is getting RAPED right now b/c of (a) low demand, but moreso b/c of the federal bank's complacency leading to the ridiculous exchange rate.
The Yen is so strong right now that anything pertaining to exports is doing horrendously. Facilities is 70% down, Semiconductors are 50% down, and automobiles are 40% down.
Unless the fed over there takes action and gets the Yen:Dollar rate to 100Yen : 1 dollar or so, that country is going back into the shitter.
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On January 31 2009 07:33 oneofthem wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2009 03:21 Savio wrote:On January 31 2009 02:57 L wrote:If the government had taken that $400 and just given it to the family, they would have recienved $400 worth of benefit. Or 400$ worth of booze and drugs. Food stamps aren't designed to provide maximum economic stimulus, they're designed to put food on the table and keep kids from starving, which in turn makes them less likely to kneecap people for their daily bread, which in turn makes them less likely to suck up a gigantic wad of tax dollars sitting in prison. The liberal assumption is always that government knows better than you what you need. It is also that government loves your children more than you do and will take better care of them. Under these assumptions, policies like this are created. Also, the idea the food stamp users are generally crack heads or drunks is simply false. hahahhahaha are you serious
No. Essentially what I am saying is the liberals are more ok with increasing taxes and spending which doesn't mean that overall spending changes by much, it just means that who is spending the money is different. With big government, government chooses how your money gets spent, and in small government, that is less so.
I was also saying that the assumption that was put forward--that we should give people food stamps instead of money since you can't control what they spend the money on--is more of a liberal idea. As is the idea that you should just provide them with health care instead of money since they might not spend that money on what you want them to spend it on (health care).
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On January 31 2009 08:43 Jibba wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2009 03:21 Savio wrote:On January 31 2009 02:57 L wrote:If the government had taken that $400 and just given it to the family, they would have recienved $400 worth of benefit. Or 400$ worth of booze and drugs. Food stamps aren't designed to provide maximum economic stimulus, they're designed to put food on the table and keep kids from starving, which in turn makes them less likely to kneecap people for their daily bread, which in turn makes them less likely to suck up a gigantic wad of tax dollars sitting in prison. The liberal assumption is always that government knows better than you what you need. It is also that government loves your children more than you do and will take better care of them. Under these assumptions, policies like this are created. Also, the idea the food stamp users are generally crack heads or drunks is simply false. What? For the most part, the government tries to operate on the assumption that there are problems which the market cannot fix or for which there is no market, outliers, and tries to address them. There is no market to help poor people. There is no market to develop medicine for rare diseases instead of cancer. Up until recently, and arguably even still, there is no market to develop cleaner emissions. There was no market for a national highway system or the internet until they were actually developed. If you took purely an economist's view, there would be no development of any sort of AIDS treatment in the 1980s because it was so costly and because breast cancer was far more widespread and was far more profitable. Instead, we took the religious right's view and decided there would be little development of any sort of AIDS treatment in the 1980s because faggots are sodomites and are going to hell. Isn't that right, Mrs. Reagan?
You are wrong about the "economists view". When there is no functioning market (as in some of the cases you listed), or if there is failure of the market (negative externalities like pollution or monopoly), then by the economists view, the government should step in. But if you were reading the whole exchange I was having when I made this comment, you would know that we were talking about food. There definitely IS a market for food.
My argument is that we should give poor people money rather than food stamps because it is more efficient (read my posts explaining the proof for this). Food stamps are an inherently inefficient program. I was not arguing that we shouldn't help the poor, but that we should give them the money that it costs to provide food stamps so there is not lost benefit.
My comment was in response to someone who said we shouldn't give them money because they might spend it on things that we (the government) don't want them to spend it on. I said that was a liberal mindset.
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Many poor people would buy garbage food if you gave them money or even worse save this money to buy alcohol or drugs. That would make even more fat/drunk/drug addicts people.
That why food stamps might not be the worse solution.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
you realize that these things are easier to pass under the auspice of specific needs rather than direct transfers right. funny seeing a republican arguing for such a silly thing like that
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
i havent read a word he's written but I know I'm right!
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
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On January 31 2009 02:50 Savio wrote:Show nested quote +On January 30 2009 18:32 Choros wrote:On January 30 2009 12:12 Savio wrote:On January 30 2009 11:20 ToSs.Bag wrote:On January 30 2009 07:53 Savio wrote:
So essentially what you (oneofthem) are saying is that in the long run, we would benefit from subsidizing education more. That may be true, but for the short term (getting out of the current recession, which is what this is all about), I think that you will not see effects from higher education spending. Bush doubled the federal government spending on education and that had no measurable positive effect.
What I say is that we should be clear about what bills the government is passing. If we want to just set up a long term education infrastructure, then lets do it, but don't call that a stimulus bill that will get us out of the current recession. Pass a stimulus bill that makes jobs NOW, and then when things have calmed down, and government revenues are rising again due to economic growth, then lets build the long term infrastructure. Or you could do it earlier, but keep the bills separate so the American people know what they are getting. It is obvious that with teachers unions with no effect, the lack of choices and incentives for good teachers, the American economy will take forever to come around unless something is done. It all comes down to where the motivation comes from.... Why does America have shitty public schools: Bad incentives for good teachers, bad incentives for schools to get enrollments, and bad incentives for students to do well on the whole. However, America does have great Universities, as do most countries, but why do they do better? Their incentives to be the best are to be highly accredited professionals and contributors to their subject are a lot higher. Professors make decent money, but This however can make instructors seem distant and too busy to help their students (huge class sizes) So we are "getting there" but throwing money at a school to not have good education incentives and not giving it to the important people (teachers). Budget isn't a huge concern, but reform in the education system to be more like countries such as Finland and other EU states is what it will end up being about. Teachers Unions are to blame for the lack of incentives to teach well. Think about what the "job" of a union is....It is to "protect" its members right? Unions inherently seek to: 1. Raise salaries of current teachers 2. Inhibit the firing of union members 3. Lighten the teaching load or burden (make life easier) 4. Raise members benefits But because of #1, schools can't afford to hire more teachers so the teacher/student ratio rises. Because of #2, bad teachers can not be easily replaced by better teachers. Because of #3, school systems (who already can't fire bad teachers), lose the ability to pressure teachers into improving. So because of our unions we end up with lower quality, expensive teachers...and not enough of them. American universities do better than our grade schools because GUESS WHAT...there are no unions messing up the system! That is also one reason why foreign car companies are doing better than our "big 3". Unions were needed once, but their time is over and they are only holding our car companies back, and our education. My biggest fear from this new democratic administration is that they will pass laws trying to strengthen unions. Its good politics for them since unions are democratic powerhouses, but it is bad for America. So its because of the unions schools are in a bad shape? got nothing to do with the Republicans dramatically reducing education spending then I suppose. Dude, what are you even talking about? I already stated in this thread that Bush doubled federal spending on education. He increased it more than Clinton did. So what are you even talking about? Its like you have these preconceived ideas in your head and cling to them regardless of what you learn. See my quote... EDIT: Also, Bush's education spending increase is something that I disagree with him on. He doubles federal spending and there was no measurable benefit as far as I am aware. It just goes to show that throwing money at schools does not make them better. Private schools on the other hand have always outperformed public schools...but then again....private schools generally aren't unionized. That's a big difference, just like the difference between American car manufacturers and Japanese ones operating in the US.
This is something people do all the time to hide the facts, the fact that people use nominal rather than real highlights distorts statistics, it is a simple case of missleading statistics to further Republican objectives whilst they cut real education spending where it was needed they boosted it where it was not then claimed how good they were.
What you need to recognise that the defining factor about whether increased spending will work is where you put it, Bush poured money into upper class universities, there are Unis in America earning around a billion dollars plus in revenue today which in its own right is not a problem but it becomes one when people like you say that because Bush gave rich universities billions that means that we should not give run down public schools more money. I find it confusing how every one in the world seem to be much more keenly aware of the real problems in America but Americans themselves are in a state of denial.
Edit: I am sure Clinton would have actually increased spending to appropriate levels if the Republicans did not control both houses of congress forcibly imposing their incompetent policies upon him.
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On January 31 2009 10:43 oneofthem wrote:
you realize that these things are easier to pass under the auspice of specific needs rather than direct transfers right. funny seeing a republican arguing for such a silly thing like that
obviously when u consider the retroactive effects of fiscal transfer during periods of political reconciliation, we must act in a postbehavioral fashion so as to contain the sociological externalities of unchecked executive action. unbelievable that a gentleman of your intellectual caliber could forget an elementary detail like that.
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On January 31 2009 10:04 thedeadhaji wrote:
Japan's manufacturing industry across the boards is getting RAPED right now b/c of (a) low demand, but moreso b/c of the federal bank's complacency leading to the ridiculous exchange rate.
The Yen is so strong right now that anything pertaining to exports is doing horrendously. Facilities is 70% down, Semiconductors are 50% down, and automobiles are 40% down.
Unless the fed over there takes action and gets the Yen:Dollar rate to 100Yen : 1 dollar or so, that country is going back into the shitter.
Japan has an absolutely terrible social security system, when I found that out it became clear to me why Japan has been in such great trouble for so long. They pour money into investment infrastructure and cash handouts to stimulate short term demand but you would think a decade later that they would recognise that short term demand is not going to actually fix their problems at all, they must create permanent incomes for individuals in order to restore the economy, unemployment benefits are a really good way to do this (but you need to do more than just that).
Unfortunately the Japanese seem to miss understand how to actually deal with their problems, they are reducing welfare spending at this very moment. There going to get whats coming to them just like America I suspect....
BTW: The Yen is so bad now because they have been constantly increasing their money supply to restore the economy but have totally failed to actually get that money where it needs to be.
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On January 31 2009 05:21 MoltkeWarding wrote:Show nested quote +Anyway, I think it's a little inane to argue just on theory and ignore the empirical evidence, so I'll repeat the fact that since the inception of the fed and monetary policy, the severity and duration of recessions in the US have been considerably weaker. Refer to the chart posted earlier of GDP growth during the past century, and you get the gist. If the free market were so accurate, why has government intervention considerably accelerated the rate of growth? Empirical evidence would be taking the living standards of a middle-class American family in the 1950s and comparing it with today. The cardinal question is: are American households that much wealthier than they were fifty years ago? By looking at GDP per capita numbers, one would be under the impression that the living standard of the average American has been raised twenty-five fold since 1950, and one hundred and sixty-fold since 1908. Empirically, this would be nonsense. The GDP growth you represented depends on 1) Government accurately calculating inflation, which is inherently problematic even if we gave them the benefit of the doubt. The US government, for example, factors in qualitative deflators when calculating its rate of inflation, whereas the German government does not, hence giving Germany a higher figure vis-a-vis the US every year. The basket of goods against which inflation is measured is arbitrarily chosen by the government, and is modified when necessary to produce target numbers 2) GDP does not calculate the productive value of an economy. If an American lives an unhealthy lifestyle, and smokes and eats in McDonalds every year, his spending in those industries are added to the GDP, and then when he is treated for heart disease and lung cancer, those are again added to the GDP. If Americans spend a trillion dollars on military spending, this is added to the GDP despite it having zero or a negative effect on the living standards of the American people. 3) GDP figures can bubble like the present US GDP based on the US dollar, a currency which is overvalued in the marketplace. If the USD falls 50% in value, the US's GDP falls in terms of every other currency, and every other country's GDP rises in proportion to the USA's. Hence nearly every country recorded vast gains in their GDPs measured in USD in the year 2008 despite many having no growth. Therefore let's take the reports of the US' growth valued in dollars with a grain of salt. Let's take a history the US's GDP valued in Gold as a point of comparison: US average wages valued in Gold: US Home prices valued in Gold: Crude Oil prices valued in Gold: The historical value of the DOW valued in Gold:
You know, taking commodities as a comparison point isn't entirely accurate either. Nowadays, commodities are practically as liquid as cash. Plus, if you take the historical perspective, the way commodities have been treated has also changed drastically in the last hundred years (abolishing of gold standard, OPEC embargoing, etc). The fact of the matter is that it is near impossible to truly accurately gauge the well being of a family in 1900 with a family today, but emperical evidence does tend to provide a basic framework to use.
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On January 31 2009 10:32 Boblion wrote:
Many poor people would buy garbage food if you gave them money or even worse save this money to buy alcohol or drugs. That would make even more fat/drunk/drug addicts people.
That why food stamps might not be the worse solution.
A lot of people who are not on food stamps buy drugs. Should we tax them more and then provide them with their needs?
I am willing to bet that the few who would buy drugs would be less of a problem than the millions losing potential benefit (that is every person on food stamps in every state, every month).
EDIT: besides, what is to keep them from spending the money they would have spent on food and spending THAT on drugs instead? Food stamps do NOT solve that problem. I still have yet to hear a good explanation for why food stamps is better than giving someone straight up money.
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Changes in the price of gold do significantly account for the discrepancy between GDP by gold and GDP by the dollar. Naturally, investors sell their gold and move to stocks in a bull market. Between 96 and 2000, when the tech bubble grew, the price of gold fell by 25%. I'm not entirely sure how to do the math here, but if my back of the envelope work is right, that reduces the growth shown in your GDP chart considerably. Compare:
Price of gold (not adjusted for inflation):
Particularly, compare price fluctuations during the 1995-2005 bubble and crash, during which the value of an ounce of gold depreciated from $450-$300 with GDP growth depicted below.
Further, your account doesn't significantly differ from official accounts. The best graph I could find only depicts velocity of money, but the growth rate chart earlier indicates pretty much the same thing, just without the same visual impact. This chart resembles your graph because money supply, like the value of gold, has gained steadily since the crash in 2000. GDP appears to have continuously fallen during official boom times because the price of gold was gaining at the same time. (I am not denying that the growth of gold is not itself an indicator of a bubble, but it suggests the severity is not so strong as you suggest.)
Finally, Moltke's GDP-to-gold graphs don't cover the entire 20th century, which kind of defeats the purpose of posting the graph in the first place, which I assume is to make the point that volatility has only increased since we started messing with the money supply. My analysis above indicates that if there is any excess volatility according to your data, it can be accounted for largely by fluctuations in the price of gold. And do you really think the price of an arbitrary commodity is a better indicator than official US data? The whole point of compiling that kind of information is because there are no sufficiently accurate natural indicators.
I also don't understand the point of posting dozens of graphs describing bubbles we already knew existed using the dollar. If the point was to impress, it obviously worked on some posters. If you like I could show you the same patterns on oil futures and housing priced in dollars.
Thus, it still stands that even according to the value of gold, growth has been comparatively stable since the Fed kicked in. It's not true that real per capita wealth has remained stagnant. Your argument only makes this appear to be true because it doesn't take into account changes in the price of gold. Granted, you'd also have to take inflation under consideration, but I don't have the data nor the math wizardry to figure that one out. Yet other empirical measures indicate a general growth in per capita wealth: the number of autos owned per household, for example. How do you account for such discrepancies?
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Some other thoughts:
Even if per capita wages have remained stagnant, that can be accounted for by downward pressures from global trade, the downward trend of organized labor, and most importantly -- population growth.
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Actually, probably another good addition to indicators is to look at the gini coefficient (wealth disparity). Could probably argue that conditions did improve because we slowly converged to a huge middle class throughout the 20th century while simultaneously increasing per capita wealth.
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United States22883 Posts
On January 31 2009 10:22 Savio wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2009 08:43 Jibba wrote:On January 31 2009 03:21 Savio wrote:On January 31 2009 02:57 L wrote:If the government had taken that $400 and just given it to the family, they would have recienved $400 worth of benefit. Or 400$ worth of booze and drugs. Food stamps aren't designed to provide maximum economic stimulus, they're designed to put food on the table and keep kids from starving, which in turn makes them less likely to kneecap people for their daily bread, which in turn makes them less likely to suck up a gigantic wad of tax dollars sitting in prison. The liberal assumption is always that government knows better than you what you need. It is also that government loves your children more than you do and will take better care of them. Under these assumptions, policies like this are created. Also, the idea the food stamp users are generally crack heads or drunks is simply false. What? For the most part, the government tries to operate on the assumption that there are problems which the market cannot fix or for which there is no market, outliers, and tries to address them. There is no market to help poor people. There is no market to develop medicine for rare diseases instead of cancer. Up until recently, and arguably even still, there is no market to develop cleaner emissions. There was no market for a national highway system or the internet until they were actually developed. If you took purely an economist's view, there would be no development of any sort of AIDS treatment in the 1980s because it was so costly and because breast cancer was far more widespread and was far more profitable. Instead, we took the religious right's view and decided there would be little development of any sort of AIDS treatment in the 1980s because faggots are sodomites and are going to hell. Isn't that right, Mrs. Reagan? You are wrong about the "economists view". When there is no functioning market (as in some of the cases you listed), or if there is failure of the market (negative externalities like pollution or monopoly), then by the economists view, the government should step in. But if you were reading the whole exchange I was having when I made this comment, you would know that we were talking about food. There definitely IS a market for food. My argument is that we should give poor people money rather than food stamps because it is more efficient (read my posts explaining the proof for this). Food stamps are an inherently inefficient program. I was not arguing that we shouldn't help the poor, but that we should give them the money that it costs to provide food stamps so there is not lost benefit. My comment was in response to someone who said we shouldn't give them money because they might spend it on things that we (the government) don't want them to spend it on. I said that was a liberal mindset.
You might be right on this. There's obviously the risk that they'll "abuse" the money, but abuse in this case is fairly relative and the same could be said for other things. The USDA did a research report on it and their conclusion was that cash instead of stamp programs cause a downturn in food spending, hurting the agriculture industry. I haven't looked at the report, but it wouldn't surprise me if they inaccurately account for the actual amount of food purchased and I'm not sure how they came to their "15% towards non-food items" figure.
It strikes me that in writing the Welfare Reform Act (1996), the food stamp program was virtually unchanged. It'd be interesting to take a look at the votes on it and see who was trading what.
It actually come out of the House Budget committee from John Kasich (R-OH.) Every act is written by staffers and lobbyists, but it doesn't seem like he has much of a connection to agriculture, since he's mostly about finance. Maybe it was just overlooked or they had serious moral concerns.
EDIT: Seriously, I fucking hate you Savio for making me do public policy analysis on the weekend.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/fanrr12/fanrr12d.pdf
http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/31002/1/21010174.pdf
http://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecolet/v67y2000i1p75-85.html
http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9092(199511)77:4<960:ATAEEO>2.0.CO;2-O&cookieSet=1
http://www.myoops.org/twocw/mit/NR/rdonlyres/Economics/14-03Intermediate-Applied-MicroeconomicsFall2000/3C72A0B4-5946-4E0C-B695-5C5C3D64F03F/0/lec71.pdf
1.6 Conclusions
1. Are recipients “distorted?” That is, do they indeed spend more on food than they other-wise would without food stamps?
Yes they are. About 7 cents is wasted on the dollar.
2. What share of food stamps are sold onto the black market? And at what price?
About 3.5 percent of food stamps are trafficked illegally.• They sell at 50 to 60 percent at face value.
3. Does cash versus in-kind have any effect on nutrition?
• Does reduce calories.• Not clear it harms nutrition. (Jibba's note: Within the lecture, he specifies that cash-out vs stamp has no effect on alcohol or cig spending)
4. How costly are cash versus in-kind programs to administer?
Cash versus EBT: EBT is about $2.16 more expensive per person per month thansending checks.• Nationally, that’s about $200 million per year.• Retailers also spend about $260 million per year to administer EBT.• Plus the cost of the underground market (harder to assess)
Other considerations:• Political economy:
— Food stamps have political support that welfare does not have because they are notviewed as a handout
— They have lobbying clout because they are administered by the Department of Agri-culture and the Farm lobby seems to believe that food stamps are ultimately spenton farm products
— and so Farmers view it as their subsidy too
— Possible that cashing out the program would help recipients in the short run, harmthem in the long run
I'm lazy so I'm going to trust these results from the Whitmore study, Whitmore being an assistant prof at Chicago's public policy school.
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