BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

Jump to content

  • 1107 Pages +
  • « First
  • 618
  • 619
  • 620
  • 621
  • 622
  • Last »
  • You cannot start a new topic
  • You cannot reply to this topic

Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?

#12381 User is offline   johnu 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 5,030
  • Joined: 2008-September-10
  • Gender:Male

Posted 2019-March-20, 22:43

 johnu, on 2019-March-20, 14:13, said:

More Three-Card Monte from the Manchurian President,

Trump: Mueller report 'ridiculous' but should be released

Quote

"Let it come out, let people see it," Trump told reporters as he left the White House on Wednesday for a trip to Ohio. "Let's see whether or not it's legit."


Dennison is virtually guaranteed to have told AG Barr to not release any details of the upcoming Mueller report, and to fight all the way to the Supreme Court to avoid having to release any of the damaging details that are sure to be in the report.

Dennison is setting up to blame Barr for not releasing any details about the Mueller report while trying to make himself look good for publicly advocating for its release. We've seen this hundreds of times from Dennison before. Do the opposite of what you are advocating no matter how obvious the lies are. Dennison is a master gaslighter for at least the 35-40% who support him no matter what. For the other 60-65% of the people, he is just a pathological liar.


How can you not take Dennison at his word that he wants to have the Mueller report release. It will be that totally independent AG Barr's fault for overruling the president and keeping the report secret. Damn that Barr.

Dennison is the most transparent president in history. He's going to release an unprecedented 50 years of personal tax returns, as soon as the IRS finishes their audit. And the White House is cooperating 100% with House Committees investigating Dennison and the White House.

White House ignores House panels’ requests for documents, Democrats say
0

#12382 User is online   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,284
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2019-March-20, 22:57

To the supporters of Individual-1, when you are in the middle of the "greatest economy in history" the yield curve does not look like this.

Looks like recession right about election day, 2020.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
0

#12383 User is offline   johnu 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 5,030
  • Joined: 2008-September-10
  • Gender:Male

Posted 2019-March-20, 23:54

John McCain offends Dennison by not thanking him for his funeral help.

Months After John McCain’s Death, Trump Keeps Feud With Him Alive

The Snowflake Manchurian President is very upset with McCain and may take him off the White House Christmas card list.

Quote

He said he gave Mr. McCain “the funeral he wanted, and I didn’t get ‘thank you,’” exaggerating the role he played in honoring the senator’s death four days before his 82nd birthday.

McCain offered no comment to Dennison's claim that he didn't thank the Snowflake in Chief.
0

#12384 User is online   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,284
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2019-March-21, 08:27

The attack on McCain shows the extreme pettiness and vindictiveness of this president. He keeps making it harder and harder for his followers to fend off the label "deplorables".
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
0

#12385 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2019-March-21, 18:21

Quote of the day from Matt Yglesias:

Quote

Trump could launch a nuclear attack on a foreign country while also making disparaging remarks about John McCain and the two topics would get roughly equal press coverage.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#12386 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2019-March-21, 18:29

:onadrehc ot egassem detpyrcne koobecaF a si sihT

Quote

.gnillort fo esucca ylsuoires reve dluow I taht ibuhs dna t_eneleh ,tuodessap ,mwa ,grebnek retfa nosrep tsal eht era uoY

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#12387 User is online   kenberg 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 11,223
  • Joined: 2004-September-22
  • Location:Northern Maryland

Posted 2019-March-22, 07:54

 cherdano, on 2019-March-20, 21:47, said:

Believe it or not, I wasn't trolling, I was genuinely curious.

I don't think we actually disagree on anything. I think reparations would be the right thing to do in an ideal world, but probably counter-productive in the actual world we live in, and a dangerous topic for Democratic presidential candidates.

I was just a bit surprised that no one arguing against reparations took redlining on. If the federal government for decades, and not too long ago, spent money supporting wealth-building for group A but not group B, then it would seem adequate to now spend a bit of money supporting wealth-building for group B. And (mostly - I lived in the US for 6 years and am just visiting there for a few months) from the outside, it just seems like such a no-brainer.


This will take a bit, bear with me. I decided to do a little arithmetic. What would be a reasonable amount for reparations. 5K would seem like a joke. So I figured maybe 50K. Watching Erin Brokovitch (ok, maybe not exact history) I saw that some family fot around 3mil from PG and E so 50K must be rock bottom minimum. Then I looked up the African Americam population,it's 40 ,illion plus or minus depending on definitions. So that works out to about 2 trillion. But we have to adjust that. We can't have a child that is born in, say, 2020 getting 50K and a child born in 2021 getting nothing so it has to project a bit into the future. So I figured maybe 3 to 4 trillion..
Then I asked myself: What would forty acres and a mule be worth today? It can't be forty acres of desert, let's say forty aces of decent farmland.So I put that into Google. Up came an article from the Atlanta Black Star:
http://tinyurl.com/y2m7n3ox
They did the calculation and came to 6.4 trillion, but others place it higher. 59 trillion by one estimate.
So: My estimate got roughly into the ballpark but really it's significantly lower than the estimates of others who have thought about this.

Now, and this is important, as near as I can tell the Atlanta Black Star is completely serious about this. To me, this means that anyone who advocates reparations needs to be clear as to what he really means. Are these amounts, whether it's my 3-4 trillion, or the Star's 6.4 trillion. or the 50 to 60 trillion of others, what they are suggesting? If not, then what are they suggesting? If they are suggesting 5K, I really do not think that would be taken seriously by anyone as a suitable reparation. I am fine with spending money to advance opportunity and education, I am not only fine with it I strongly advocate it and I believe everyone should be able to see how this would be good for us all. But if we are going to speak of reparations, then we need to be clear about just what we mean. Clearly the editors of the Star have a pretty hefty amount in mind, and they are not the only ones. And they aren't kidding. The politicians who blithely advocate reparations without further clarification are the ones that I think are kidding.

I'll close with a reference to a humorous/sarcastic/bitter poem that I heard read live some 50 years ago:
http://www.carliname...-acres-and-mule
Ken
0

#12388 User is online   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,284
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2019-March-22, 09:05

Bloomberg is now chiming in

Quote

A closely watched section of the Treasury yield curve on Friday turned negative for the first time since the crisis more than a decade ago, underscoring concern about a possible economic slump and the prospect that the Federal Reserve will have to cut interest rates.

The gap between the 3-month and 10-year yields vanished on Friday as a surge of buying pushed long-end rates sharply lower. Inversion is widely considered a reliable harbinger of recession in the U.S. The 10-year slipped to as low as 2.439 percent.


What was that Individual-1 said a couple of days ago? Best economy in history? What a doofus.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
0

#12389 User is online   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,284
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2019-March-22, 09:18

Quote

By Jeet Heer
March 22, 2019 9:00 am
Reports that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump haven’t been complying with security and record keeping regulations naturally provokes Democrats to cry hypocrisy, given the outsized attention Hillary Clinton’s emails received in the 2016 election. But as eagle-eyed blogger Marcy Wheeler notes, the power couple is merely the most public manifestation of a much more pervasive problem.


Wheeler calls attention to a piquant detail in a Politico report about comments made by House oversight and reform chairman Elijah Cummings about former national security advisor K.T. McFarland:

Cummings also told Cipollone that the committee obtained a document showing that McFarland was using an AOL.com account to conduct official White House business. Cummings said the document shows that McFarland was in communication with Tom Barrack, a longtime Trump confidant and the chairman of the president’s Inaugural Committee, about transferring “sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.”

So, to be clear: a senior White House official was communicating about a super-sensitive issue on an AOL.com account.
(my emphasis)
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
0

#12390 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2019-March-22, 09:56

From The Electoral College’s Real Problem: It’s Biased Toward the Big Battlegrounds by Nate Cohn at NYT:

Quote

...The true quirkiness of the Electoral College comes from how states award their votes, not how many votes each state has: It’s (largely) winner-take-all.

This is the feature that defines the character of American presidential elections. A candidate who narrowly wins the tipping-point states will win the presidency, regardless of the margin of victory in the rest of the country. That means there’s no incentive for candidates to campaign in any noncompetitive state, whether it’s a populous one like California or the opposite, like North Dakota.

The winner-take-all bias that elevates the battleground states overruns all of the other biases. If the big states were close and competitive, the big states would decide our elections — as they did until fairly recently. In 1888, another time there was a split between the popular vote and the Electoral College, the candidate who prevailed (Benjamin Harrison) swept the nation’s largest states — including its largest, New York, by one percentage point.

What’s so interesting is that this defining feature is largely unintended.

It’s not specified in the Constitution. Most states didn’t award their electors on a winner-take-all basis in the first presidential elections, and even today there are two states that do not: Nebraska and Maine, which award some electoral votes by congressional district.

If states chose to, they could devise an electoral system that better reflected the popular vote. They could award their electors in proportion to the statewide popular vote, or to the winner of the national popular vote, as some states have sought to do through an interstate compact.

No states have moved to do this on their own, for the same reason they drifted to winner-take-all in the first place: Anything else dilutes their power and takes votes away from their favored candidates.

The winner-take-all system has essentially nothing to do with the reasons the founders created the Electoral College, like their concern about investing the masses with the power to pick the president. All of the states now award their electoral votes based on the votes of citizens, rather than on the votes of the state legislatures, as many once did.

The real debate is about regionalism

Just because the winner-take-all system is unintended doesn’t mean there isn’t an argument for it. The main, principled argument for it is that it discourages regionalism and encourages a candidate to appeal broadly throughout the country, rather than to a single region.

Although this doesn’t always work, it sometimes does. The 1888 election again offers a useful example. That year, Democrats won the popular vote by disenfranchising Republican black voters and running up the score in the Deep South, where they won by 70 percent to 26 percent. Republicans overcame that with some narrow victories in big states and more victories over all.

Republicans make a similar claim today about the 2016 election: They argue that Democrats won the popular vote because of their big margin in California, and that the Electoral College properly protected the rest of the country against an imperial California or New York.

But that is not what happened. Mr. Trump’s victory in the Electoral College was mainly because of impressive strength in the traditional battlegrounds, not lopsided and inefficient Democratic strength in their regional bastions. Indeed, Mr. Trump did just as well in his base states — call them Appalachafornia — as Mrs. Clinton did in California.

Mr. Trump’s electoral victory was a product of two factors. One was essentially an accident of state lines. The 2016 results could be flipped just by giving the Florida Panhandle to Alabama and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Wisconsin. It’s not clear that there was anything about the distribution of Mrs. Clinton’s support that inevitably put it at a disadvantage in a winner-take-all system.

The second is that the traditional battlegrounds are whiter and less educated than the country as a whole. Mrs. Clinton’s gains came in well-educated and diverse states that tend to be less competitive, including red states like Arizona, Texas and Utah.

If these trends continue, it’s possible that the dynamics of the 2016 election could reverse themselves. Additional Republican gains among white working-class voters could go largely unrewarded, now that they’ve flipped nearly all of the mostly white battlegrounds. One day, Democratic gains in the Sun Belt might flip states like Texas, Georgia and Arizona.

America today is not as divided as it was before the Civil War or after. But even if the Electoral College is supposed to discourage regionalism, it can do little to erode it once it takes hold, since it offers no incentive for a candidate to appeal to a place he or she can’t win. In fact, there is no reason that Mr. Trump, who has complained about how he did in California, needs to put his name on the ballot there at all.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#12391 User is online   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,284
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2019-March-22, 14:20

Quote

Indonesia’s National Airline Seeks to Cancel Order of Boeing Max 8s


Obviously, this is the fault of the Federal Reserve! Perhaps to save the business Individual-1 will make this plane the new Air Force 1.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
0

#12392 User is offline   cherdano 

  • 5555
  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 9,519
  • Joined: 2003-September-04
  • Gender:Male

Posted 2019-March-23, 02:11

I promise this will be my last post on this topic.

After the German reunification, the German government levied a 5.5% surcharge on all wealth and income taxes in order to finance the costs associated to the reunification, mostly in the form of transfers to finance pensions and unemployment insurance payments in former East Germany. The total costs have been estimated to be around 2 trillion Euros. (German GDP is less than 1/5th of US GDP.)

So I guess such payments are for divorce settlements. Or the opposite. But under absolutely no circumstances they could be appropriate in the current US situation. Because it would cost someone money.
The easiest way to count losers is to line up the people who talk about loser count, and count them. -Kieran Dyke
0

#12393 User is online   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,284
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2019-March-23, 10:16

Does this describe Individual-1?

Quote

Demagoguery specifically refers to a politician who rises to power by exploiting
“popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power” (MerriamWebster Online Dictionary, 2010). Luthin (1954) described a demagogue as:

Quote

A politician skilled in oratory, flattery, and invective; evasive in discussing vital
issues; promising everything to everybody; appealing to the passions rather than
the reason of the public; and arousing racial, religious, and class prejudices -- a
man whose lust for power without recourse to principle leads him to seek to
become a master of the masses. (p. 3).


If so, why are you still a believer?
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
0

#12394 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2019-March-23, 14:12

From Pete Buttigieg’s Quiet Rebellion (Feb 2019) by Benjamin Wallace-Wells at the New Yorker:

Quote

Last week, Pete Buttigieg, the young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who recently announced that he is exploring a Presidential candidacy, arrived in New York to meet the press. First up, on Thursday, was an interview on “CBS This Morning,” where the show’s hosts seemed slightly impatient, like college-admissions officers who had been asked to interview a benefactor’s son. Norah O’Donnell positioned her eyebrows skeptically. “You’re thirty-seven, you represent a town of a hundred and two thousand people—did I get that right? What qualifies you to be President of the United States?” Buttigieg, who has pale skin, thick brown hair, and a formal manner, gave a self-deprecating laugh. “I know that I’m the youngest person in this conversation, but I think that the experience of leading a city through a transformation is really relevant right now,” he said. “Things are changing tectonically in our country, and we can’t just keep doing what we’ve been doing. We can’t nibble around the edges of a system that no longer works.” John Dickerson pointed out that other Democratic candidates were proposing very big ideas—Medicare for All, the abolition of private health insurance—and asked, “What is your idea that is so big that nobody would mistake it for nibbling around the edges?” Buttigieg answered, “Well, first of all, we’ve got to repair our democracy. The Electoral College needs to go, because it’s made our society less and less democratic.” He went on in this vein, suggesting that electoral reform was essential, and promising that other policies, on security and health care, would follow. Viewers were left with the image of an impressive and fluent young politician, whose presence in the Presidential race, and on their screens, had never really been explained.

A few hours later, I met Buttigieg in a busy restaurant in the basement of Rockefeller Center, where the windows looked out at the ice-skating rink. He had taken off his sports coat for an appearance on “The View,” but put it back on for lunch, and he arrived carrying an enormous backpack over his left shoulder. “The View” had gone much better. The hosts were intrigued by the idea that Buttigieg, who came out three and a half years ago, could be the first gay President, and by his campaign’s main theme, which he calls intergenerational justice—he believes that millennials are suffering from their elders’ short-term thinking on climate change, economics, and other issues. Whoopi Goldberg wondered whether such a case could be made without alienating older Americans, and Buttigieg watched her intently, absorbing the criticism. “I think we really hit on something with this idea of intergenerational justice,” Buttigieg told me. “I think the trick for us—and this was a big part of what Whoopi Goldberg was asking about—is there should be a way to make a generational case without this all being about generational conflict. And I think there’s a way to do it.”

Buttigieg, who attended Harvard, studied philosophy, politics, and economics (P.P.E.) at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and did a tour in Afghanistan as a naval reservist, can seem like an “old person’s idea of a young person,” as Michael Kinsley once said of Al Gore. Certainly, against the image of the millennial left, and of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Buttigieg appears to be a more prosaic political character—he has a habit of giving answers in numbered sequence, and he uses phrases like “pathway to peace.” But, in his own understated way, he is suggesting a sharp break with the past. If you thought in terms of the effects of public policy on millennials, he said, you began to see generational imbalances everywhere. The victims of school shootings suffered because of the gun liberties given to older Americans. Cutting taxes for the richest Americans meant that young people, inevitably, would have to pay the bill. Climate policy, he said, was the deepest example of the imbalance, but the Iraq War was perhaps the most tangible. “There’s this romantic idea that’s built up around war,” he said. “But the pragmatic view is there are tons of people of my generation who have lost their lives, lost their marriages, or lost their health as a consequence of being sent to wars which could have been avoided.” Then he quoted, happily, from “Lawrence of Arabia”: “The virtues of war are the virtues of young men—courage and hope for the future. The vices of peace are the vices of old men—mistrust and caution.”

For much of his life, Buttigieg has been giving those around him the impression of extreme promise. Both of his parents were professors at Notre Dame, and he grew up in South Bend, near the campus. His father, Joe, was a translator of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci and a scholar of James Joyce. His mother, Anne Montgomery, is a linguist. At Harvard, Buttigieg was the student president of the Institute of Politics, a role sought by the most ambitious of the exceptionally ambitious, but he could also suggest a more inquisitive nature. His close friend Nathaniel Myers recalled that Buttigieg had become entranced by the Norwegian novel “Naïve. Super,” by Erlend Loe, taught himself the language to translate another work by the author, and then started periodically attending a Norwegian church in Chicago to keep up. He plays piano, and has sat in with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra and Ben Folds. He was elected mayor of South Bend, in 2011, when he was twenty-nine, and only came out in advance of his reëlection campaign, when he was thirty-three. His wedding, to Chasten Glezman, who was a Montessori middle-school teacher, was broadcast live online.

In 2015, Buttigieg gave a speech at Harvard, and David Axelrod, President Obama’s longtime chief strategist, was in the audience. The speech, Axelrod told me this week, was moving and thoughtful, and he noticed that, though Buttigieg had notes, he rarely consulted them. What struck him was a familiar kind of talent. “His story is an incredible story,” Axelrod said, “but more impressive than the story is the guy. At a time when people are aching for hope and a path forward that we can all walk, he is a relentlessly positive person.”

The following year, Frank Bruni wrote a column proposing Buttigieg as “the first gay President.” In an interview with David Remnick, Obama included Buttigieg on a short list of gifted rising Democrats. “If I told you he was anything other than a long shot, you’d hang up the phone,” Axelrod said, of the Presidential race, but he emphasized the possibility that, as he put it, lightning could strike. “The practical political point is it’s hard to see where he’s going in Indiana. If it doesn’t work out, if there’s a Democratic President looking for talent, I know Pete well enough to know he’s going to be high on the list, and higher for having run.” At the very least, Axelrod said, Buttigieg was likely to emerge from this as “an interesting voice from his generation.”

Part of the paradox of Buttigieg’s candidacy is that he has placed himself in a performative role, without the benefit of a performative personality. “He is reserved, and maybe that’s a hindrance,” Axelrod told me. Chasten Glezman, his husband, told a reporter that Buttigieg is “still coming out of some shells.” In our conversation, he seemed most practiced when talking about policy but most alive when discussing James Joyce. When I asked how he had made the decision to run for President, he brightened, and said that, though he wasn’t a Catholic, he made use of the “Ignatian process of discernment.” He pictured a world in which he became President—perhaps shy of using the word, he referred to it only as “the end state”—and then considered whether it gave him a feeling of “fulfillment or desolation.” Fulfillment, it turned out.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
1

#12395 User is online   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,284
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2019-March-23, 15:10

By Zach Carter

Quote

For years, the economic commentariat has enjoyed a running joke: Stephen Moore.

Moore, you see, has made a career of advancing various right-wing political priorities by dressing up as an economist and saying things about money and numbers in print and on TV. Unfortunately, almost nothing he says is true.

Moore is so bad that an editor at the Kansas City Star once refused to run literally anything he ever wrote, because a piece Moore had previously published in the paper was so littered with basic factual errors. He’s a living embodiment of the worst elements of the economics profession ― a man who doesn’t care about the truth, abuses statistics, makes outlandish predictions, smears his opponents and never pays any professional price.

Moore is constantly, laughably wrong. In 1993, he said President Bill Clinton’s slight income tax increase for the wealthiest Americans would “torpedo” the economy. In 2009, he warned that federal budget deficits and the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates were a recipe for hyperinflation, and then doubled down on that prediction. In 2010, he said surging prices would send the price of gold to $2,000 an ounce, as investors fled the worthless dollar for precious metals. None of these things ever happened. He spent much of 2018 applauding President Donald Trump’s supposed efforts to “shoot for” zero tariffs, while Trump actually imposed hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs.

Moore, unscathed, has bounced from the Cato Institute to the Club for Growth to the Heritage Foundation, happily absorbing the excess capital of conservative think-tank donors in the market for a white guy with the courage to advocate tax cuts. On Friday, in what would be the economist’s greatest, most frightening achievement, Trump announced that he will nominate Moore to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.

The Fed is an important institution, responsible for managing the American economy to ensure “maximum employment” and “reasonable price stability.” As the most powerful bank regulator in the country, it’s also responsible for preventing a financial crisis. There are a lot of problems with the way the Fed currently operates, but none of them will be solved by adding a clown to the board of governors.

Prior to the Trump presidency, Moore’s most prominent policymaking experience was a disastrous tax experiment in Kansas. Along with conservative economist Art Laffer, Moore helped then-Gov. Sam Brownback ® design a program to slash income taxes on the richest families in the state and eliminate taxes altogether for partnerships, LLCs, S-corporations and sole proprietorships ― essentially small businesses, but also hedge funds, law firms, doctors, people with book deals and other varieties of wealthy persons.

Moore predicted the tax cuts would bring an “immediate and lasting boost” to the state’s economy. Instead, they created a disaster. As the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities has detailed, Kansas state revenues fell $700 million overnight, the state’s credit rating was downgraded, and Brownback began slashing basic social services to balance the budget. Job growth stalled out at less than half the national average. To salvage the state budget, lawmakers cut education funding so severely that some schools began to close early, and the state’s Supreme Court ruled that the government was violating the state constitution. After five years of economic misfortune, Kansas’ conservative legislature reversed the tax cuts in 2017. The whole experiment is almost universally regarded as a calamity.

It’s not exactly a secret that the political operatives who hire economists in Washington don’t actually care if economists get things right. They care if economists are willing to say the right things, support party policy and speak the language of prestigious professionals to at least give that policy the pretense of legitimacy.

But typically economists at least pretend to care about things other than, say, raw partisan advantage. When Congress was considering Trump’s tax cuts in late 2017, Moore ― who never saw a tax cut he didn’t like ― was enthusiastic. But the reasons he gave to Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur didn’t have much to do with economic performance.

“It’s death to Democrats,” Moore crowed. “They go after state and local taxes, which weakens public employee unions. They go after university endowments, and universities have become playpens of the left. And getting rid of the [individual] mandate is to eventually dismantle Obamacare” ― by sparking “a death spiral” for the law, he enthused.

Moore’s nomination to the Fed, then, will be proof that conservative donors don’t have to keep bothering with the charade of independent expertise any more. If a hack like Stephen Moore can land a job at the Fed, why keep funding all these think tanks and policy shops?

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
0

#12396 User is offline   andrei 

  • PipPipPipPip
  • Group: Full Members
  • Posts: 331
  • Joined: 2008-March-31

Posted 2019-March-23, 17:36

Do you know RM report is out?

You have waited so long for it, it seems you are celebrating now.
Don't argue with a fool. He has a rested brain
Before internet age you had a suspicion there are lots of "not-so-smart" people on the planet. Now you even know their names.
0

#12397 User is offline   Al_U_Card 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,080
  • Joined: 2005-May-16
  • Gender:Male

Posted 2019-March-23, 20:07

 andrei, on 2019-March-23, 17:36, said:

Do you know RM report is out?

You have waited so long for it, it seems you are celebrating now.

Shhhhh! Is sobbing a form of celebration?
The Grand Design, reflected in the face of Chaos...it's a fluke!
0

#12398 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2019-March-23, 21:25

re: Stephen Moore, Greg Mankiw, who headed the Council of Economic Advisers under former President George W. Bush, used an economy of words to express his view on Moore's Fed nomination:

Quote

Steve is a perfectly amiable guy, but he does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job. It is time for Senators to do their job. Mr. Moore should not be confirmed.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
1

#12399 User is offline   cherdano 

  • 5555
  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 9,519
  • Joined: 2003-September-04
  • Gender:Male

Posted 2019-March-23, 22:33

 andrei, on 2019-March-23, 17:36, said:

Do you know RM report is out?

It is? Can you provide a link?
The easiest way to count losers is to line up the people who talk about loser count, and count them. -Kieran Dyke
2

#12400 User is online   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,284
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2019-March-24, 04:45

Quote

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump
The deficits under @BarackObama are the highest in America's history. Why is he bankrupting our country?

89
3:22 PM - Aug 1, 2012


But now a NEW record: B-)

Quote

February’s federal budget deficit was the largest ever on record, according to figures released by the Treasury Department Friday. President Donald Trump promised during his campaign that he would balance the budget in eight years.

The total debt surpassed $22 trillion for the first time ever in February — $2 trillion higher than when Trump took office.


Gee, I wonder what happened. Surely just bad luck.

Quote

The massive shortfall is being attributed to a 20 percent drop in corporate revenue and increased federal spending. The Trump administration slashed corporate taxes in his new 2017 tax law from 35 percent to 21 percent. Trump’s tax-cut package cost the government $1.5 trillion.


Well, maybe not.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
0

  • 1107 Pages +
  • « First
  • 618
  • 619
  • 620
  • 621
  • 622
  • Last »
  • You cannot start a new topic
  • You cannot reply to this topic

317 User(s) are reading this topic
4 members, 313 guests, 0 anonymous users

  1. Google,
  2. Winstonm,
  3. StevenG,
  4. mike777,
  5. PrecisionL