• Moderators, please send me a PM if you are unable to access mod permissions. Thanks, Habsy.

OT: American Politics

a note to my journalist pals, who got involved in this scandal. If your source lied to you, they are not actually a source. They are a con artist, and you are their victim. It means you don’t have to protect them any more. They are not a source. When you get lied to, when you are a tool of somebody else’s deception, when you get lied to, the person lying to you is no longer a source. They are news. Their lie to you is, itself, news, and can you report that news.
Click to expand...

This.
 
theREALkoreaboy said:
You read the part about how debt as a percentage of GDP is double what it was in 2007, and the part about how serious a problem that's going to be once interest rates return to historic norms, right? You read those parts?
Click to expand...

Interest payments as a share of GDP could double and they would be no greater than the Reagan Bush years... were those crisis years? Not to mention that a) the globe is in a low-inflation-and-interest-rate environment for the foreseeable future and that tax revenues as a share of GDP are at a post WW2 low, there is tonnes of fiscal room to ramp up revenues. The US could easily address it's current fiscal situation, the only problem they have is the political idiocy of right wing asshats who are delusional ideologues and deadbeats.

The bigger point of course, is that governments are supposed to intervene when the economy basically collapsed in a zero lower bound environment (due to disorderly private sector winding of debt) and borrow at very low interest rates. The alternative, something the right never talks about, would have been a disaster. You only see one small part of the balance sheet and scream like monkeys. (BTW, the Fed has $3T in assets, which will earn interest for the US government.)

From a cost benefit perspective, the run up of debt was the right thing to do. It is not the source of future fiscal pressures, those a driven entirely by demographics and only going to be an issue after 2030. On the other hand, if the US gov't hadn't intervened (that includes TARP) the economic consequences would have been dire.

Apart form the Japanese, the Americans did a decent job of managing this crisis. And they did far better than the idiots in Euro who took the path of austerity and view economics as a ridiculous Lutheran morality play where sinners must pay for the excesses of private credit markets.

The only people who think this is a problem are brain dead ideological bozos such as yourself and grumpy hedge fund managers who lost billions because they don't understand economics and who hate Ben Bernanke because he understands the lessons of the 1930s.
 
Last edited:
lecoqsportif said:
Interest payments as a share of GDP could double and they would be no greater than the Reagan Bush years... were those crisis years? Not to mention that a) the globe is in a low-inflation-and-interest-rate environment for the foreseeable future and that tax revenues as a share of GDP are at a post WW2 low, there is tonnes of fiscal room to ramp up revenues. The US could easily address it's current fiscal situation, the only problem they have is the political idiocy of right wing asshats who are delusional ideologues and deadbeats.

The bigger point of course, is that governments are supposed to intervene when the economy basically collapsed in a zero lower bound environment (due to disorderly private sector winding of debt) and borrow at very low interest rates. The alternative, something the right never talks about, would have been a disaster. You only see one small part of the balance sheet and scream like monkeys. (BTW, the Fed has $3T in assets, which will earn interest for the US government.)

From a cost benefit perspective, the run up of debt was the right thing to do. It is not the source of future fiscal pressures, those a driven entirely by demographics and only going to be an issue after 2030. On the other hand, if the US gov't hadn't intervened (that includes TARP) the economic consequences would have been dire.

Apart form the Japanese, the Americans did a decent job of managing this crisis. And they did far better than the idiots in Euro who took the path of austerity and view economics as a ridiculous Lutheran morality play where sinners must pay for the excesses of private credit markets.

The only people who think this is a problem are brain dead ideological bozos such as yourself and grumpy hedge fund managers who lost billions because they don't understand economics and who hate Ben Bernanke because he understands the lessons of the 1930s.
Click to expand...

notice... no comment about the fact that the deficit is down to 600bn, and expected to fall to 300bn two years from now?

that's what we want, right? deficit reduction.

the debt is there regardless. and you can't start reducing the debt until you eliminate deficits....... which is happening.
 
theREALkoreaboy said:
Right. No story about Benghazi. Move along. These aren't the butchered diplomats you're looking for.....
Click to expand...

phony outrage. yes, you're just upset that diplomats were killed. nothing to do with politics. everything to do with those poor diplomats and a cover up that still, 8 months later, lacks a smoking gun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist_attacks_on_U.S._diplomatic_facilities

these attacks happen. yes, in libya there was some intelligence/security failure. of course, nobody has denied that. do you think obama and his administration is happy about what happened? do you think they have done anything other than try and address why the failure occurred in hopes of it not happening again?

but, **** me, there's an alleged cover up -- of what, nobody can really articulate -- and every few weeks new damning evidence is set to be released, and yet none of it is any more damning than the fact that a shitty thing happened, everybody was upset about it, it shouldn't have happened and the administration was guarded in what it said publicly in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

but, of course, go ahead and keep railing about benghazi. the fact that dozens of other attacks on american embassies/facilities have occurred without this outrage be damned.
 
theREALkoreaboy said:
You guys aren't trying to claim credit for a reduced deficit after fighting the sequester tooth and nail, are you?
Click to expand...

why don't you just read some of these very good articles posted from credible news sources (i,e, reuters) rather than wash/rinse/repeat of the hannity talking points?
 
mbow30 said:
phony outrage. yes, you're just upset that diplomats were killed. nothing to do with politics. everything to do with those poor diplomats and a cover up that still, 8 months later, lacks a smoking gun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist_attacks_on_U.S._diplomatic_facilities

these attacks happen. yes, in libya there was some intelligence/security failure. of course, nobody has denied that. do you think obama and his administration is happy about what happened? do you think they have done anything other than try and address why the failure occurred in hopes of it not happening again?

but, **** me, there's an alleged cover up -- of what, nobody can really articulate -- and every few weeks new damning evidence is set to be released, and yet none of it is any more damning than the fact that a shitty thing happened, everybody was upset about it, it shouldn't have happened and the administration was guarded in what it said publicly in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

but, of course, go ahead and keep railing about benghazi. the fact that dozens of other attacks on american embassies/facilities have occurred without this outrage be damned.
Click to expand...

Yes, I am damn upset that an American embassy was the target of an organized assault and that the ambassador was murdered. Those are very, very serious actions. And I am also very upset that the instinctive response of the people in charge was to lie about this and try to make up a story about why it happened to actually shift the blame to their own domestic political opponents. It was some racist nut bar right winger that caused this. And Hillary even had the gall to say to family of the dead ambassador that "don't worry, we'll get the person that made the video that did this".
 
theREALkoreaboy said:
I did respond to those "very good articles"' and pointed out that they identified the debt as a serious problem, still.
Click to expand...

the debt is a huge problem but

(1) we can't raise taxes

and

(2)...since interest rates are bound to go up eventually, we're screwed either way.

ok

got it.
 
theREALkoreaboy said:
You guys aren't trying to claim credit for a reduced deficit after fighting the sequester tooth and nail, are you?
Click to expand...

There is no "credit" to be had, it is what it is. You really do have a bizarre/demented view of how things work. Believe or not, this is not a team sport.

The deficit, and its eventual reduction, was based entirely on cyclical factors. It comes and it goes. That's the point, there was and is no "fiscal crisis".

In fact, from an economic point of view, the deficit is probably decreasing too quickly. It provides no benefit from interest rate relief (because they are already at zero) and it's a drag on economic growth and employment. Private household balance sheets, the fundamental cause of the slack in the economy, are too weak to support sufficient business investment or private credit expansion to bring employment/population ratio back to where it was prior to the crisis. Government spending is still required to stabilize basic economic fundamentals and shift problematic private debt to benign public debt.

Oh, and before you bleat on with your ideological gibberish about the "size of government", if I think a scenario calls for fiscal tightening then that's what I'll argue (as I have many time re: health care costs). Policy instruments are means to end, not an end themselves. Unlike you, I think different diagnosis calls for different solutions. But then that's the difference between ideological nutbarism and a reality-based perspective.
 
Last edited:
No. Wrong. Absolutely, dangerously, recklessly wrong. The debt isn't due to "cyclical factors". The debt is due to increasingly entrenched, worsening, and persistent STRUCTURAL problems associated with an ever-expanding state. It isn't like the financial crash was what made the debt suddenly appear. The debt has been growing and accelerating as successive generations of politicians try to win elections by buying voters with their own money. Every political stripe is guilty of it (Ws drug entitlement program was a terrible decision, for example), but those from the left are far more guilty because there is absolutely no push from them to stem or reverse it. In fact, they base their entire electoral strategy on expanding it.

Deficit spending is the crack cocaine of modern politics. We're hooked. Unless we have some sort of controls or BBAs built in to permanently cap the relative size of the state, it will continue. This isn't a trifling cyclical problem. This is a calcified structural disaster that has to be fixed soon.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top