The Truth About The 1%

• believer

  

  sleeper;1582043 wrote:I believe we should lower taxes of the 1% substantially and increase taxes on the bottom half who pay nothing. Also, if you don't pay taxes you don't get a vote.

  Seems fair enough....
• Manhattan Buckeye

  Also, I haven't had time to read all of the posts because I had to, you know, work this morning. But Paul Krugman is the biggest fraud of frauds who ever lived. He ruined the Nobel Prize (as if Gore and Obama didn't) and would be ruining the NYT if they weren't already doing it to themselves.
  
  He changes his "economic" mind completely based on politics. He's nothing but a DEM stooge.
• BoatShoes

  Manhattan Buckeye;1582207 wrote:And the money comes from where? China?
  
  edit - it is a good thing I am attracted to Asian women, they are going to own us under Boatshoes and the current administration policies. I will be happy to be a sex slave.

  Estimates of the cost of such programs range from 1%-3% of GDP. Cheaper than the current costs of our major social insurance programs and the military. Even if we did not have Monetary Sovereignty these would be "affordable". Asking "where is the money going to come from" in our country is like asking a Casino where it gets its gaming tokens.
  
  The suggestion that China "owns" the United States because we give them electrons in deposit accounts at our Central Bank that they voluntarily choose to put into Treasury Securities which are just different accounts at our central bank is utterly ridiculous. The Chinese walk through smog every day just to make stuff for us while we surround them with Aircraft Carriers.
  
  We get real wealth and they get electrons.
  
  If men from Mars are watching it is clear who "owns" the other and it ain't the Chinese owning us. Our citizens are much better off working as Mickey Mouse when they plug their dollars into Disney Land than they would be if we were wearing masks in factories sending all of our real output to the Chinese while they surrounded us with aircraft carriers.
  
  Only in this day an age can people think getting the real wealth of the world in exchange for numbers on a spreadsheet in Washington D.C. is a bad thing.
  
  If the Zombie apocalypse happens, who won the deal??? The people who got electrons or the people who got real stuff shipped over in containers? It is a no-brainer.
  
  In any other trade, giving up less than you gain is good. In the old days we'd have to give them gold if they wanted but not anymore.
• BoatShoes

  Manhattan Buckeye;1582209 wrote:Also, I haven't had time to read all of the posts because I had to, you know, work this morning. But Paul Krugman is the biggest fraud of frauds who ever lived. He ruined the Nobel Prize (as if Gore and Obama didn't) and would be ruining the NYT if they weren't already doing it to themselves.
  
  He changes his "economic" mind completely based on politics. He's nothing but a DEM stooge.

  I remember that I once explained this to you. The New Keynesian prescription for the right thing to do changes depending on the economic scenario. Should a football team call the same play regardless of what is happening on defense? No, of course not.
  
  New Keynesians like Krugman and Larry Summers oppose deficit spending when interest rates are above zero. Interest rates have been at zero since before Obama came into office. Now is the time to run a deficit causing tax cut or deficit causing spending increase, depending on your politics.
• BoatShoes

  
  
  Indeed, all of these people making our luxury electronics that we use for leisure are the ones who are getting the better end of the deal!
  
  It'd be funny if so many people didn't actually believe this shit and use these beliefs to undermine our own prosperity because they have obsolete and erroneous beliefs about U.S. Treasury Securities.
• Manhattan Buckeye

  "New Keynesians like Krugman and Larry Summers oppose deficit spending when interest rates are above zero."
  
  Krugman and Summers have differed hugely - Summers left the administration, Krugman has his face so far up Obama's butt he's in his small intestine.
• gut

  BoatShoes;1582171 wrote:Like I have said in other posts. Growing the economy through asset prices is not the best option.

  So why are we having a discussion at this point?
  
  Have the last two recessions not been the result of asset bubbles? Do you even read what you write?
• BoatShoes

  gut;1583319 wrote:So why are we having a discussion at this point?
  
  Have the last two recessions not been the result of asset bubbles? Do you even read what you write?

  We are having the discussion because it is either depression like you want from tight money and tight fiscal policies as happened in Europe where they had tight money and tight fiscal policies or at least manageable growing wealth through expansionary monetary policy in the face of tight fiscal policies. The Federal Reserve and/or Congress can always stop the collapse of nominal GDP that results when asset bubbles "pop" but they simply fail to do so.
  
  Your policy prescriptions were tried in Europe and they did worse than we did and still are. I'd rather do a large deficit causing tax cut and not rely on unconventional monetary policy but since we can't have that because of erroneous fears of U.S. Treasury Securities, expansionary monetary policy that risks asset bubbles is better than a depression.
• BoatShoes

  Manhattan Buckeye;1583317 wrote:"New Keynesians like Krugman and Larry Summers oppose deficit spending when interest rates are above zero."
  
  Krugman and Summers have differed hugely - Summers left the administration, Krugman has his face so far up Obama's butt he's in his small intestine.

  Larry Summers was Obama's favored choice for chairman of the Federal Reserve. They have not differed hugely at all. In fact, Summers wrote a paper advocating just for the same kind of expansionary fiscal policy that Krugman advocated for.
  
  http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Projects/BPEA/Spring%202012/2012a_DeLong.pdf
  
  And, that is the second time you've used the smoking small intestine joke. You can do better than that.
• BoatShoes

  gut;1583319 wrote:So why are we having a discussion at this point?
  
  Have the last two recessions not been the result of asset bubbles? Do you even read what you write?

  Gut's ideas: We should not do ZIRP, QE, Forward Guidance or Deficit Causing Fiscal Stimulus. This was tried in Europe. Depression has resulted.
  
  Market Monetarist ideas: We should do Tight Fiscal because FED can always keep economy growing with expansionary monetary policy if it wants and can always overcome reductions in demand from cutting spending and raising taxes. Basically tried this in America this past year and it has worked better than I thought it would. Win for the Monetarists.
  
  Boatshoes Ideas: Either Cut Taxes or Increase Spending or Both. I don't care just do it some way. There is always a level of Deficit/Increase in Private Sector Net Financial Assets that will result in full employment and output. Hasn't been tried so I'd much rather do what the Milton Friedman people say we should do than the hard money/tight fiscal policy people say we should do that has failed miserably across the pond if I have to choose.
• Manhattan Buckeye

  BoatShoes;1583352 wrote:Larry Summers was Obama's favored choice for chairman of the Federal Reserve. They have not differed hugely at all. In fact, Summers wrote a paper advocating just for the same kind of expansionary fiscal policy that Krugman advocated for.
  
  http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Projects/BPEA/Spring%202012/2012a_DeLong.pdf
  
  And, that is the second time you've used the smoking small intestine joke. You can do better than that.

  If it works, why change? At this point is is hilarious that anyone is remotely defending this incompetent administration, yet the bootlickers like Krugman, Maher and Stewart are doubling down on their idiocy and Obama is making his supporters look like complete fools.
• believer

  

  Manhattan Buckeye;1583560 wrote:If it works, why change? At this point is is hilarious that anyone is remotely defending this incompetent administration, yet the bootlickers like Krugman, Maher and Stewart are doubling down on their idiocy. Obama supporters are complete fools.

  
  fify
• gut

  BoatShoes;1583356 wrote:Gut's ideas: We should not do ZIRP, QE, Forward Guidance or Deficit Causing Fiscal Stimulus. This was tried in Europe. Depression has resulted.

  Why do you continue to make such false equivalencies.
  
  I didn't say we shouldn't do ZIRP - most people have struggled to see any economic benefit beyond inflating asset prices (which, gee, has only been the main cause of the last TWO recessions).
  
  Forward guidance? LMFAO. But the really funny part is even when you try to win debates by falsely attributing things I didn't say, you STILL step all over it because you just have no clue what you are talking about
  
  SEVEN trillion in accumulated deficits, plus another FOUR trillion in fiscal stimulus (not even counting ZIRP). And yet Boatshoes and Paul Krugman think this isn't enough. How badly had Obama booted the economy if $11T can't do more than produce a tremendously disappointing recovery?
  
  Do you have any idea how much $11T is? That's like 70% of annual GDP. And, oh, the multiplier effect. Can't forget about the multiplier effect - how in the world have we not had like 20%+ annual growth?
  
  Austerity imposed depression?!? Lets just stop the silliness:
  
• BoatShoes

  gut;1583597 wrote:Why do you continue to make such false equivalencies.
  
  I didn't say we shouldn't do ZIRP - most people have struggled to see any economic benefit beyond inflating asset prices (which, gee, has only been the main cause of the last TWO recessions).
  
  Forward guidance? LMFAO. But the really funny part is even when you try to win debates by falsely attributing things I didn't say, you STILL step all over it because you just have no clue what you are talking about
  
  SEVEN trillion in accumulated deficits, plus another FOUR trillion in fiscal stimulus (not even counting ZIRP). And yet Boatshoes and Paul Krugman think this isn't enough. How badly had Obama booted the economy if $11T can't do more than produce a tremendously disappointing recovery?
  
  Do you have any idea how much $11T is? That's like 70% of annual GDP. And, oh, the multiplier effect. Can't forget about the multiplier effect - how in the world have we not had like 20%+ annual growth?
  
  Austerity imposed depression?!? Lets just stop the silliness:
  

  Lol compare that to the United States which has had expansionary monetary policy and mildly expansionary fiscal policy until 2013.
  
  
  
  
  What else would call what is happening in Italy by comparison other than depression when the United States has had a "tremendously disappointing recovery"???
  
  And Again it is not just me and Paul Krugman calling for more expansionary fiscal or monetary policy but also the Libertarian Monetarist heirs to Milton Friedman.
  
  The only way our recovery gets better is even more expansionary monetary policy or even more expansionary fiscal policy. You clearly want neither. If we'd taken your advice, that meager recovery in the United States would look a lot more like Italy.
• BoatShoes

  Monetarists don't think QEIII and Forward Guidance have only pumped up asset prices. They believe that it was the difference between positive growth in the U.S. in 2013 in the face of tax raises and spending cuts and negative growth as happened in, for example, Italy. They were right and I was wrong.
• BoatShoes

  Manhattan Buckeye;1583560 wrote:If it works, why change? At this point is is hilarious that anyone is remotely defending this incompetent administration, yet the bootlickers like Krugman, Maher and Stewart are doubling down on their idiocy and Obama is making his supporters look like complete fools.

  This post exhibits why the Right wingers will continue to lose. Most of America is unhappy with the Obama Administration but they don't think they are miserably incompetent bumbling fools (which they aren't) and everyone who might mildly support them are "bootlickers". It's not hard to see why, when an allegedly bumbling fool like Obummer gets 300 electoral votes the people who read Drudge, Breitbart, Zero Hedge and the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page are completely shocked when the rest of the world doesn't think Obummer and Co. are destroying the world as we know it.
• Manhattan Buckeye

  No they are, and anyone from Mars or wherever is looking at the Earth, my guess is that they are wondering who is making things, and who is using their currency to buy them based on funny money. At some point our currency will take a hit. We can't have people graduating from college with 6 figures of debt and our government running trillions of dollars of debt (which China and Japan owns) and not expect something bad to happen.
  
  America has a lot of things going for it positively. We have the world's greatest military historically, we have a wealth of natural resources, and we are still awesome agriculturally. What we aren't good at is dealing with the rent-seekers and making things other countries want to buy. And we've let the inmates run the asylum with more and more debt and less production. The US isn't going anywhere, there isn't going to be a Red Dawn situation where we are being invaded by the Chinese. But they can, and already have (unless you are too stupid to realize it) affect our quality of life, which can result in a fractured society. We are already there.
• gut

  BoatShoes;1583610 wrote: And Again it is not just me and Paul Krugman calling for more expansionary fiscal or monetary policy but also the Libertarian Monetarist heirs to Milton Friedman.
  
  The only way our recovery gets better is even more expansionary monetary policy or even more expansionary fiscal policy. You clearly want neither. If we'd taken your advice, that meager recovery in the United States would look a lot more like Italy.

  Those growth rates in Italy are nothing close to a depression, not even as severe as the 2008 recession. Just another example of you throwing around terms and talking points that you don't understand.
  
  We've averaged about 2.0% real growth in this "recovery". Good recoveries, especially off such a sharp recession, historically average over 4%. Do you not know these numbers, or were you being intentionally obtuse? Historical AVERAGE growth I think is a little over 3%, so what do you call a recovery that isn't even managing to match the historical average growth rates?
  
  
• gut

  BoatShoes;1583617 wrote:Monetarists don't think QEIII and Forward Guidance have only pumped up asset prices.

  The SF Fed basically confirmed what most market analysts had already known - that the economic growth resulting from QE were minimal (an admission nothing short of astonishing coming from a branch of the Fed). Then again, it was not surprising to many who observed the same ginormously underwhelming effects in Japan.
  
  It's comical that you have a chance to be right for once, but can't stay out of your own way.
• believer

  

  gut;1583636 wrote:...so what do you call a recovery that isn't even managing to match the historical average growth rates?

  ummmm....stagnation?
• BoatShoes

  gut;1583636 wrote:Those growth rates in Italy are nothing close to a depression, not even as severe as the 2008 recession. Just another example of you throwing around terms and talking points that you don't understand.
  
  We've averaged about 2.0% real growth in this "recovery". Good recoveries, especially off such a sharp recession, historically average over 4%. Do you not know these numbers, or were you being intentionally obtuse? Historical AVERAGE growth I think is a little over 3%, so what do you call a recovery that isn't even managing to match the historical average growth rates?
  
  

  Gut, Depression itself has nothing to do with just growth rates. For instance, in the graph you provide here the United States had high growth in part of the great depression but still had incredibly high levels of unemployment. If anything the term has more to do with unemployment. Europe is in essentially a depression and the United States is in a "lesser depression" as it has been called.
  
  I don't know why it is so hard for you to understand.
  
  I have acknowledged that the recovery has been poor. I wouldn't even call it a "recovery" per se.
  
  I have pointed out that it would be worse if we took the advice of the hard money/tight fiscal types....and you even provided a country that exhibited those characteristics. How nice of you.
  
  I have argued that the "recovery" would be better if Congress passed a large deficit causing tax cut.
  
  I argued that would risk a recession if we allowed the sequester to happen and taxes to go up. Monetarists said "No, don't worry, QEIII and Forward Guidance will allow the United States to grow and increase employment even in the face of huge tax increases and big cuts in spending". They were right I was wrong.
  
  Bottom line is this. You point out, correctly, that our recovery is meager at best. The way forward to a better recovery is either 1). More Fiscal Stimulus, 2). More Monetary Stimulus or 3). Both.
  
  Choose.
• BoatShoes

  gut;1583642 wrote:The SF Fed basically confirmed what most market analysts had already known - that the economic growth resulting from QE were minimal (an admission nothing short of astonishing coming from a branch of the Fed). Then again, it was not surprising to many who observed the same ginormously underwhelming effects in Japan.
  
  It's comical that you have a chance to be right for once, but can't stay out of your own way.

  So I tracked down what you're talking about with regard to the SF FED and you're years behind. Their analysis was with regard to QEII which did not have the level of forward guidance the Friedman people really wanted. They got much more of it with QEIII and that successfully caused growth in the face of fiscal consolidation in 2013. A pretty good call on their part. Mind you, Steve Williamson, the President of the San Francisco FED supported QE III precisely with the added harpoon of better Forward Guidance.
  

  In November 2010, the Fed’s policy committee, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), announced a program to purchase $600 billion of long-term Treasury securities, the second of a series of large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs). The program’s goal was to boost economic growth and put inflation at levels more consistent with the Fed’s maximum employment and price stability mandate. In Chen, Cúrdia, and Ferrero (2012), we estimate that the second LSAP program, known as QE2, added about 0.13 percentage point to real GDP growth in late 2010 and 0.03 percentage point to inflation.
  Our analysis suggests that forward guidance is essential for quantitative easing to be effective. Without forward guidance, QE2 would have added only 0.04 percentage point to GDP growth and 0.02 to inflation. Under conventional monetary policy, higher economic growth and inflation would usually lead the Fed to raise interest rates, offsetting the effects of LSAPs. Forward guidance during QE2 mitigated that factor by making it clear that the federal funds rate was not likely to increase.

  Mind you, I am not "right" on this. I cannot justifiably claim to have been a monetarist who made the call that QEIII and Forward guidance was going to be effective but it appears to have been the case. You should seriously consider looking into some of their ideas. Most of them are libertarians and/or conservatives and think that the right kind of monetary policy could permanently put a stake in the heart of Keynesianism.
  
  I think they are right in the sense that it appears Monetary Policy can work but it's more much difficult. A lot easier to just cut taxes until full employment is achieved rather than rely on the quasi-shamanism of Forward Guidance.
• BoatShoes

  Manhattan Buckeye;1583624 wrote:No they are, and anyone from Mars or wherever is looking at the Earth, my guess is that they are wondering who is making things, and who is using their currency to buy them based on funny money. At some point our currency will take a hit. We can't have people graduating from college with 6 figures of debt and our government running trillions of dollars of debt (which China and Japan owns) and not expect something bad to happen.
  
  America has a lot of things going for it positively. We have the world's greatest military historically, we have a wealth of natural resources, and we are still awesome agriculturally. What we aren't good at is dealing with the rent-seekers and making things other countries want to buy. And we've let the inmates run the asylum with more and more debt and less production. The US isn't going anywhere, there isn't going to be a Red Dawn situation where we are being invaded by the Chinese. But they can, and already have (unless you are too stupid to realize it) affect our quality of life, which can result in a fractured society. We are already there.

  The Chinese make all of our luxury items in de-facto slavery-like conditions in exchange for electrons at our central bank. It's not even a question that we're winning. Hope this helps.
  
  Why we would want to transfer more of our real product to other countries when we can instead get the wealth of the world transferred here is absurd.
  
  The only way the Chinese deciding to devalue their currency so they can be our slaves is for the better.
  
  Outstanding U.S. Treasuries are not "debt". They're just savings accounts for the Chinese to plug their dollars in so they don't have to buy up corporate bonds or nice ocean front property instead with the dollars we give them in exchange for their wealth. They're just a tool to manage the money supply and nothing to be afraid of. Indeed, they are nothing like the 6 figure personal debts that burden millions of ordinary Americans that are currency-users are not the sole monopoly currency issuer.
  
  There is nothing analogous between U.S. Treasury securities and outstanding student loan debt. Nothing whatsoever. Indeed, it's silly to even refer to U.S. treasury securities as "debt". Every Member Bank has a Reserve Account at the FED and those all receive interest now and yet nobody freaks out about the total outstanding amount of monetary base and acts like we can't pay that interest! It's so silly! Treasury Securities are just dollar denominated accounts at the FED just like Reserve Accounts! Neither are a burden in anyway whatsoever!
• believer

  

  Photo of Chinese slave making Mericun luxury items:
  
  
• Manhattan Buckeye

  "Outstanding U.S. Treasuries are not "debt"."
  
  Explain your strange definition of "debt." I know Isadore is a troll, but do you actually believe the BS you are peddling here?