DDL on 25/1/2012 at 12:24
I read that list of "constitutional violations" that got posted on the prev page and...I dunno, they almost all seemed like great ideas to me.
And surely there's something hilariously morally bankrupt about claiming "making cigarette manufacturers point out that their products cause cancer" is a direct violation of everything america stands for? I mean, really? Is that the best they can come up with?
Koki on 25/1/2012 at 14:11
I always thought Drowtales was essentially porn.
As such, it cannot be bad.
Rug Burn Junky on 25/1/2012 at 14:16
Quote Posted by scarykitties
Now, I don't pretend to know enough to understand Obama's jobs bill, but I trust my Economics professor, who has a PhD in this kind of thing, when he assures the class that government jobs bills don't really work
You shouldn't, because your professor is just fucking wrong. His view is based on a pretty-much-invalidated concept known as Ricardian Equivalence, which makes some sense at first glance, but doesn't hold up in the real world.
If your argument begins with "I'm not going to pretend I know enough," then it's probably best that you keep your trap shut before you embarrass yourself, as you did here. Nothing you posted is anything but babble.
Understand that?
Mmm'kay, now, run along.
scarykitties on 25/1/2012 at 16:31
Quote Posted by Rug Burn Junky
You shouldn't, because your professor is just fucking wrong. His view is based on a pretty-much-invalidated concept known as Ricardian Equivalence, which makes some sense at first glance, but doesn't hold up in the real world.
If your argument begins with "I'm not going to pretend I know enough," then it's probably best that you keep your trap shut before you embarrass yourself, as you did here. Nothing you posted is anything but babble.
Understand that?
Mmm'kay, now, run along.
No, actually, I'd like to hear you explain why government jobs bills DO work. I'm not going to back down from a smarmy smart-ass just because he can throw terms around.
If you understand it, you can explain it, so let's hear it. Or at the very least, point me to something that will explain why it doesn't work.
By the way, I quickly looked up the Ricardian Equivalence. It deals with government taxation and the way that consumers react monetarily when they owe money. Basically, if someone thinks they will owe more later, they will spend less now. But this isn't so, according to (
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/a-note-on-the-ricardian-equivalence-argument-against-stimulus-slightly-wonkish/) this. In any case, my professor didn't come to this conclusion based on the Ricardian Equivalence. He explained where the money was supposed to go, where it really went, and what the result was. That is, that the money didn't go where it was supposed to and jobs were not created as a result. He didn't use an economic assumption to brush it off flat like that.
So, sorry, but you're wrong, Junky (or in any case haven't sufficiently justified your opposing position). Unless, of course, you can demonstrate how the jobs bill DID create jobs.
You don't remember right. I never liked Drow Tales very much. Too anime-ish.
Quote Posted by DDL
I read that list of "constitutional violations" that got posted on the prev page and...I dunno, they almost all seemed like great ideas to me.
And surely there's something hilariously morally bankrupt about claiming "making cigarette manufacturers point out that their products cause cancer" is a
direct violation of everything america stands for? I mean, really? Is that the best they can come up with?
That wasn't the big one, but regardless of whether or not you think they're good ideas, they're violations of the constitution. I posted it in response to the claim that Obama was like a Constitutional Law Professor. My point is that if he realizes that he's violating the constitution, he doesn't care, so that comparison is just wrong.
Also, just because something may sound like a great idea doesn't actually mean that it works in practice. That's kind of the big flaw of larger federal governments: good ideas can have wide-reaching, unintended consequences because they apply to so many people, it's near-impossible to account for everything that could happen. That's why I personally stand for smaller federal government and greater power to state and local governments, as intended by the Constitution: it allows laws to be more focused so that they only affect the people they are intended for.
EDIT: Regarding the jobs bill, that is the (
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/121xx/doc12185/05-25-ARRA.pdf) 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, there was apparently either (
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2011/07/how-many-jobs-are-needed-over-next-year.html) just enough to halt further unemployment decline for the years following the act, or possibly enough to create an additional 1.5 to 2 million jobs annually, depending on whether you go by low or high estimates of ARRA's results. However, this is an Act that took over 800 billion dollars to put into place, and it's already estimated that its effects declined greatly in the final quarters of 2011 and into 2012, so perhaps the problem isn't so much that the ARRA did
nothing so much as that it was an irresponsible use of those tax dollars when other, better measures could have been taken instead, such as lessening regulation, approving attempts by the energy industry to expand in the United States, etc. That's a matter of debate, but I personally favor lessened federal regulation as a means of stimulating jobs growth, as opposed to expensive taxpayer-dollar spending through stimulus packages.
Rug Burn Junky on 25/1/2012 at 17:34
So let me get this straight, your economics professor isn't making the case that it doesn't work based on economic principles (Ricardian Equivalence) but instead based on shitty Fox News soundbites ("oh noes, its all corrupt liberal graft!")?
And you have the audacity to demand that I waste my time explaining it to you?
Its simple, we are in a demand recession caused by an excessive amount of private debt leaving consumers resource constrained. Normally demand would be increased by lowering interest rates and easing borrowing, but the confluence of a) too much debt on consumer balance sheets, and b) an already-at-zero interest rate means this is impossible. So the most effective way to increase demand is to inject liquidity into the economy in the form of government spending. Government spending increases economic activity thus increasing demand. Increase demand, then corporations have incentive to invest, thus creating jobs. Voila.
Now fuck off.
scarykitties on 25/1/2012 at 17:49
Quote Posted by Rug Burn Junky
So let me get this straight, your economics professor isn't making the case that it doesn't work based on economic principles (Ricardian Equivalence) but instead based on shitty Fox News soundbites ("oh noes, its all corrupt liberal graft!")?
No, you presumptive douchebag. He's basing it off of information from reliable economics sources. He's got a PhD, after all. He knows how to separate valid and invalid sources.
Quote Posted by Rug Burn Junky
And you have the audacity to demand that I waste my time explaining it to you?
When the best response you can come up with is a weak straw man argument, then yes.
Quote Posted by Rug Burn Junky
Its simple, we are in a demand recession caused by an excessive amount of private debt leaving consumers resource constrained. Normally demand would be increased by lowering interest rates and easing borrowing, but the confluence of a) too much debt on consumer balance sheets, and b) an already-at-zero interest rate means this is impossible. So the most effective way to increase demand is to inject liquidity into the economy in the form of government spending. Government spending increases economic activity thus increasing demand. Increase demand, then corporations have incentive to invest, thus creating jobs. Voila.
But by what means does government spending automatically equal increased economic activity? You're making rather large leap here. You're missing the part of what you do with the underpants before you get your profit.
I know that the 2009 jobs bill tried to encourage spending and employment by giving taxpayer money to businesses to encourage more hiring, but what stops the employer from hiring, taking in that bonus money, then turning around and firing off the person that they can't really afford to employ? Is artificially injecting money into the free market
really the "most efficient" way to improve the economy? What about reduced regulation? Surely that can do just as much if not more,
without bribing businesses with taxpayer money?
The problem with government spending is that the money that they spend comes directly from the employed, so it's like inserting an IV your left arm and giving a blood transfusion to your right arm. It's flimsy and artificial. In order to improve the livelihood of people, they need solid employment that comes from businesses genuinely needing employees--not being bribed into letting someone work for a few months. The question then is, what can be done to increase real job growth? Where is job growth being bottlenecked by regulation and where is demand consistently high?
I think that more thought could have been put in the attempted jobs bills and a much more money-efficient solution could have been attempted, but instead Obama knows only how to throw money at problems and not budge an inch.
But thank you for the explanation.
Quote Posted by Rug Burn Junky
Now fuck off.
You know, we could have a perfectly normal discussion if you didn't have to bitch and growl like a bald middle-aged man with penis envy. You don't have to be a sandy cunt to talk, so why don't you grow the fuck up and just respond like someone who doesn't have enormous, pathetic issues that they vent anonymously on the web? It's certainly hard to take anything you say seriously when you feel the need to ejaculate your ego all over every post. I have to wade through all the rancid spunk to get down to any real content.
Phatose on 25/1/2012 at 17:55
...You know, he already put out a pretty damned good explanation in this thread on page 5.
scarykitties on 25/1/2012 at 18:41
Quote Posted by Phatose
...You know, he already put out a pretty damned good explanation in this thread on page 5.
He did address some of this, yes. But he was mostly explaining taxation of different classes and their effects, which is not what we're discussing here.
In this case, we're talking about government spending to decrease unemployment. He claims that this is the "magic bullet", but I feel that there are better means of encouraging job growth that don't waste so much taxpayer money. I'd be curious to her him extrapolate how it is that government stimulus results in optimal job growth, because he hasn't really demonstrated that so far. See (
http://lewrockwell.com/schiff/schiff137.html) this testimony as an example of what I'm talking about.
Also, to quote (
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/magazine/job-creation-campaign-promises.html?pagewanted=all) this.
Quote:
One reason we have so few ideas about job creation is that up until recently, the U.S. economy had been growing so well for so long that few economists spent much time studying it. (They’re trying to make up for it now. See this chart.) With no new theories, Democrats dusted off the big idea from the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes’s view that government can create jobs by spending a lot of money. The stimulus, however, has to be borrowed, and it has to be really, truly huge — probably something like $1.5 or $2 trillion — to fill the gap between where the economy is and where it would be if everyone was spending at pre-recession levels. The goal is to goad consumers into spending again. And President Obama’s jettisoned $400 billion jobs package, hard-core Keynesians argue, is nowhere near what it would take to persuade them.
Many Republicans follow the more fiscally conservative University of Chicago School, which argues that Keynesian stimulus can’t heal a sick economy — only time can. Chicagoans believe that economies can only truly recover on their own and that policy interventions only slow the recovery. It’s a puzzle of modern politics that Republicans have had electoral success with a policy that fundamentally asserts there is nothing the government can do to create jobs any time soon.
I suppose that is the core of RBJ and my differences: I've yet to trust that government spending is the most efficient means of encouraging job growth.
june gloom on 25/1/2012 at 19:07
Quote Posted by scarykitties
You don't remember right. I never liked Drow Tales very much. Too anime-ish.
Quote Posted by scarykitties
No particular reason, except that I never owned any comic books and never really had an urge to pay for any (particularly when there are so many great comics online--for free).
Further, the whole "super-hero" thing always seemed like a Gary Stu concept to me that would stand in the way of the characters really coming alive and their problems really being psychologically real. I could of course be wrong on that point, but what, really, is so special about people with superpowers that makes their stories in any way superior in a philosophical, literary, or psychological sense? It seems rather that such things would hamper all three.
Quote:
Just to let you know, I've reported your harassment to a moderator.
As I've noted in the Community Connections thread, I spent a great deal of my adolescence being pushed around by rude, egotistical individuals. My tolerance for it is short.
never argue with someone who remembers posts and PMs like yours for their humour value
Also, I'm just going to defer to RBJ, because unlike you, he actually knows what the fuck he's talking about. If he tells you to fuck off, it's because he has very little tolerance for ignorant nonsense like what you're spouting out/parroting from your professor, who clearly doesn't know what he's talking about -- and no, having a PhD doesn't mean he does. Also, Jesus Christ your skin is so thin it must be like paper. It's like talking to Jashin only you haven't started calling anyone who disagrees with you "stupid like a woman," so there's that I guess.
