june gloom on 26/1/2012 at 00:23

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@scaredofpussy: Of course I don't strike you as intelligent. It's because you're stupid. We've been over this.

And not only do you not understand the meaning of hypocrisy, but your supposed "sarcasm" is misplaced. I know English is your first language, motherfucker, so I'm going to assume you don't understand what "not scoring any points" meant because you're a sheltered, unsocialized shut-in, which explains your lack of knowledge, your haughty posting style and the way you flip out every time someone's a little rude to you.

Rug Burn Junky on 26/1/2012 at 01:16

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Yes, the mockery is necessary, allow me to illustrate. Let’s first get the laughable and repeated “he has a PhD” appeal to authority out of the way, color me unimpressed. There have been a fair number of PhD’s, particularly at Freshwater insttutions, that get this sort of stuff horribly wrong. There’s a whole minority economics school of thought that’s spent the last 30 years determined to close themselves in a bubble and ignore what’s being done in the field at large.

But, fair enough, he’s educated, which is why I gave him the benefit of the doubt that he was making the technical argument:

You counter this by, well, this is the first part where you go loopy. You first tell me that Ricardian equivalence is wrong (confuckingratulations Sherlock, THAT was my point.) and then say that no, he wasn’t making that technical point about the economics, he was making a point about the implementation:

Now, let’s unpack this. The original contention you made is that in the abstract, “government jobs bills don’t work” which would require an economics explanation such as a form of R.E. but this particular argument is not saying that, it’s saying that this particular one was poorly designed and implemented. That’s not an economic policy argument, it’s an-after-the-fact-criticism of the implementation.
Here’s the thing. Even if the dispute in the first place were about the implementation and not the theory, I’m familiar with this line of argumentation. Why? Because it’s been circulating as an attempt to paint Obama as guilty of crony capitalism. It’s conflating a number of things (TARP and the Stimulus, balance sheet liquidity versus cash reserves versus profit) but more importantly, it’s just factually inaccurate and patently untrue. Half of the stimulus were given as tax cuts – suboptimal, but demanded by the same conservitards who complained that it didn’t work – and a healthy portion of the rest went to states and localities to plug the gaps in their budgets and prevent layoffs (yes, during a recession, preventing layoffs counts as alleviating unemployment).

But here’s the really, really fucking retarded part. After expressly pointing to arguments about Ricardian Equivalence and saying A) Ricardian Equivalence is incorrect, and B) you (and your professor) are not basing your argument off of ricardian equivalence, you MAKE AN ARGUMENT DIRECTLY BASED ON RICARDIAN EQUIVALENCE:
When you directly contradict yourself like that, while continuing to cling to a position based on a paradigm that is simultaneously at odds with reality and over your head, you don’t deserve politeness or civility.

jay pettitt on 26/1/2012 at 02:05

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Yeah, they're also going to places not like Cylindra. Infact I'm going hazard that the Cylindra thing isn't typical - either of Government investment or of Solar tech firms. I'm sure Fox News made a meal of it, but lets at least agree a Fox News knickers-in-a-twist-o-meter isn't basis for sound policy making. I'm also going to hazard that Cylindra wasn't the first investment ever in the history of investments that went the wrong way. And I'm also going to accuse you of bias. In that and everything else.

I kinda threw my last post together in a hurry as I had to go out, but was thinking It'd be nice to make a better job of responding to your guy's 'testimony'.

But first let me quote the granddaddy of capitalism, Mr Adam Smith. Because it's painfully apparent that nearly every free-marketeer and libertarian that claims to channel the spirit of Smith never actually got more than a third of the way through Wealth of Nations.



Smith knew two things. That capitalism and specialisation would make the collective experience of societies richer, but make the experience of individuals poorer. As a remedy, he advocated liberal government intervention of every kind as a moral necessity.

Lets burst more bubbles. Ron Paul fans should look away now, but the ideas that regulation places costly burdens on industry and that the solution is deregulation are based on pretty basic economic fallacies.

Regulators aren't in a position to know themselves how much a regulation will cost an industry. So the costs are based on estimates presented by affected Industries. But Industry has no incentive to prepare proper estimates, and it is in their interest to overstate rather than understate the cost of regulations. The result is that costs are almost always overstated.

New regulations are hard won. They're subject to Cost Benefit Analysis, lengthy consultation processes, Judicial review, delay, court challenges and so on and so forth. However de-regulation is rarely subject to Cost Benefit Analysis, rarely goes out to public consultation and is rarely challenged.

Your friend Peter Schiff is recommending that, without any scrutiny, you gaily toss out hard won regulations only to have to repeat decades of hard fight to regain them later - probably watered down. He wants you to suffer a double whammy of the regulation/deregulation fallacy.

I agree with him that there are far more profound problems with teh economy than a recession/depression (I'm a hippy so I'll go much further than suggest both the US and UK are too reliant on debt to fuel growth - both tragically undervalue young people for example). But he's assuming a deregulatory agenda is a magical cure-all without doing the legwork to show how it'll do anything other than leave US citizens impoverished.

Also, I'm not sure a deregulation agenda is timely.

Oh for gods sake I just read RBJs post and it seems you're saying that money (a store of value) only comes from the private sector and governments just kinda circulate it like blood and probably spill it quite a bit.

The economy is not the private sector. It's the whole lot. Value is not a measure of profit, it's net worth of assets. The Private Sector is (hopefully) profit making, which the public sector ain't (for ideological reasons) - but the private bit is not the only value adding sector. Schools and other public goods add value too. Good management of said public goods prevents their value from decaying over time. You be muddling value with profit. Not the same thing.

Also, something about fiscal multipliers. Whatever they are.

scarykitties on 26/1/2012 at 02:51

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Hm, I see. So my understanding was flawed; stimulus DOES assist in job growth and deregulation isn't the ideal means of creating jobs.

Well, I'm glad to have been better educated on the subject. I'm curious, though; what part of this whole creates such complication that people far more learned in this than myself get this wrong as well? What part confuses people most?

And out of curiosity, to RBJ and jay, since they are the more knowledgeable, who would you two recommend for President? Even if Obama's jobs policy wasn't as bad as I had been led to believe and his lack of regulation wasn't a flaw on his part, isn't there something to say for Obamacare?

This past Christmas, I spent time with my uncle, who works for an large insurance firm in Florida, and met a friend of the family who is educated as a lawyer and whose family sells chemotherapy products as well as blood plasma, so he is familiar with pharmaceuticals. Both claim that Obamacare will be a nail in the coffin. Here's how I understand it from what I have been told...

First of all, on a basic level, Obamacare has ensured that there is a sudden influx of demand for health care, since the government is footing the bill for many who otherwise wouldn't have gotten healthcare. This sudden increase in demand, without an increase in supply (that is, there is no sudden influx of pharmaceuticals, doctors, surgeons, etc.) results in an increase in price (as can be demonstrated with a demand curve). This increased cost is not fully covered by the government, so some of the bill is footed by insurance companies and hospitals, which pass that cost on to consumers.

This results in a sudden increase in insurance premiums and health care costs, along with a shortage of pharmaceuticals and doctors (that is, the doctors are in more demand than ever, so it is harder to get in to see one because so many more people are able to make regular visits). The increased price of insurance causes fewer and fewer businesses to be able (or willing) to offer insurance to their workers. This creates a larger worker base that lack health insurance and must depend on the government system, creating a self-depreciating cycle to the point that nearly everyone is on Obamacare, creating a strain as the supply for pharmaceuticals and healthcare can't keep up with demand.

Normally, this would mean business expansion to bring supply up to meet the demand, but due to (something), pharmaceuticals are apparently becoming too expensive to be worthwhile to produce (this is according to the lawyer whose family works with pharmaceuticals). Additionally, certain healthcare procedures that are particularly expensive are performed less and less often because they are not cost effective anymore, leading to a decrease in quality of healthcare.

Additionally, since so much of the cost is being footed by the health care industry, the salary of healthcare professionals (doctors, surgeons, etc.) is being decreased, leading to many healthcare professionals retiring early to get out of the industry before it slumps. So not only is there a healthcare, healthcare procedure, and pharmaceutical shortage, but there is also a shortage of experienced doctors. The old are replaced by individuals fresh out of medical school without nearly so much experience, potentially leading to another decrease in quality care.

Overall, it sounds like an absolute mess. Since you two understand economics, is this a correct estimate of the potential repercussions of Obamacare, or is it not nearly so grim? Who would YOU vote in as President, assuming that the most important factor of selecting our next President is his economic policy?

Fafhrd on 26/1/2012 at 05:18

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No. For one, there is no publicly funded option in the Affordable Care Act, so the government isn't footing the bill for anyone to get health care (other than Medicare/Medicaid, and iirc they might have expanded the eligibility pool for those, but I'm not sure), so the idea that 'nearly everyone will be on Obamacare' is a bald-faced lie.

The ACA is primarily regulatory in nature. It sets clear rules for coverage, doing away with the ability of insurers to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions, or drop coverage for no reason, increasing the age that children can be on their parents' health coverage, and setting requirements for how much of the premiums goes to care. Prior to ACA the majority of your health insurance premiums frequently went to administrative fees and other bullshit, and was not used for paying your doctor, or for your medicine, etc.

The mandate insures that the amount of people paying into the health insurance system is large enough that premiums will go down, not up, as health insurance premiums and taxes will no longer be covering emergency care for the uninsured.

It sounds like your family members bought fully into the Fox News Death Panels hysteria over the ACA, without doing any actual research into what it is.