Did someone say Civil War, SIGN ME UP, Its way OVERDUE
I've finally gotten up to speed in this thread, so here goes.
1. No, Maher is not pro-Republican. He's extravagant and a bit of a narcissist with a penchant for a good scandal. But Maher is definitely a liberal, despite his astonishingly lavish praises of some Repubs (Gee, I still can't believe his dithyrambs of DeSantis of all assholes). But that's because of his frustration with Dems, who are too disorganized and let Repubs dictate the narrative in his opinion.
2. America would highly benefit from a strong multiparty system, but that's a wishful thinking. As a centrist, I would love to see nutjobs on the right and the left stay in their own fucking parties. Especially on the right. There are real, certifiable fascists deeply entrenched within the Repub. Party. At least, lefties ain't calling for a civil war.
3. Your argument that Gore would cause the same financial catastrophe as Dubya is laughable. Sorry, that's just nonsensical 100%. I'd love to see the train of thought that led you to this conclusion.
On the other hand, no, don't bother, LOL.
4. You probably came up with this argument to support that claim of Obama being a terrible president, which is also laughable. Because it was fucking Dubya who left him holding the bag, which didn't prevent Obama from turning the country around despite unprecedented, sustained and callous sabotage from the Republicans.
5. Yes, Tooms' view of the Democratic party is a bit idealistic. Mine is more cynical, as I believe that most politicians from both parties are self-serving assholes. That being said, Trump did leave Dems for Repubs because he knew he wouldn't be tolerated by Dems. And assholes like Ramaswamy wouldn't be tolerated either. I guess Repobs attract more ambitious assholes than Dems. I wonder why (no, not really).
6. Finally, I find Toom's economic data references quite convincing while your attempts to counter them are not. And no, I'm not a statistician or economist, but from what I understand neither are you.
So there. Good night!
Civil War 2. 0.
[URL]https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/08/30/trump_they_want_to_restart_covid_hysteria_ahead_of_2024_election_we_will_not_comply.html[/URL]
W is a worthless POS but everyone knows he didn't cause the meltdown of 2008 that was a gift from Bubba!!
With 20-20 Hindsight, Stiglitz concludes that Biden and I had it right. Again.
Gee, I guess this 100 years long "good luck" with Dem economic stewardship vs "bad luck" with Repub economic stewardship continues without interruption. LOL.
So now the 20-20 hindsight of top Nobel Laureate economists has perhaps concluded that Biden's brilliant and masterful understanding that being cornered into dealing with an incompetent Trump / Repub-appointed Fed Chairman during the Great Dem Recovery meant really big stimulus legislation was required in order to offset a whole host of likely miscalculations and missteps by that Fed Chairman that most certainly could plunge us into another prolonged and crippling Great Repub Recession rather than the rapid soft landing recovery from Trump's typically atrocious Repub stewardship results was just a plain ol' "lucky policy mistake", huh?
LOL. OK.
[B]'Really bad economics': Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz explains where the Fed went wrong on inflation.[/B]
[URL]https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/really-bad-economics-nobel-laureate-joseph-stiglitz-explains-where-the-fed-went-wrong-on-inflation/ar-AA1g5C6K[/URL]
[QUOTE]The Federal Reserve "didn't do their homework" and mischaracterized the spike in inflation that has plagued the U.S. economy over the last two years, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
U.S. inflation started to gain pace in early 2021 as the economy emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic, rising from an annual 1.2% in December 2020 to a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022.
The Fed didn't start hiking rates until March 2022 and Chair Jerome Powell repeatedly insisted that inflation was "transitory," indicating that it could be easily tamed.
"The Fed thought the source of the inflation that began in the post-pandemic era was excess demand, and you could understand why they may have thought that if they didn't do their homework," Stiglitz told CNBC's Steve Sedgwick on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum on Thursday night.
Instead, Stiglitz said that the price rises were often driven by other factors, such as a shortage of key components like semiconductor chips.
"In an effort to drag inflation back down toward its 2% target, the Fed has now hiked interest rates 11 times in total to a target range of 5.25%-5.5%, the highest level for more than 22 years.
Considerable progress has been made, with the 12-month headline consumer price index reading falling to just 3.2% on the year in July, and multiple data points suggesting that inflationary pressures have eased considerably.
[b]'Bad economics'[/b]
Although he does not see the aggressive monetary policy tightening of the last 18 months tipping the U.S. economy into recession, Stiglitz suggested there are lessons to be learned from the Fed's assessment of inflationary dynamics.
"It's really bad economics, because the Fed saw that the government had passed this enormous recovery program, and if all that money had been spent, it would have been inflationary, but you have to remember back just a few years ago, there was an enormous amount of uncertainty."
This uncertainty meant that firms were not investing as they ordinarily would have, while consumers did not feel comfortable deploying the pent-up savings accrued during the pandemic meaning total, or aggregate, demand was still below pre-pandemic forecasts", Stiglitz said.
"Why was there inflation? We all know the reason," he added. "Car prices in the beginning went way up why? Was it because we didn't know how to make cars? No, we knew how to make cars. American auto companies forgot to put in orders for chips, and for want of a chip, you can't make a car."
[b]A lucky policy mistake?[/b]
Despite the Fed's rapid raising of interest rates, the U.S. economy has held up surprisingly well, though economists are still divided over whether the tightening of financial conditions will bring about a recession.
Stiglitz suggested that the economic soft landing the Fed has tried to engineer may well come to fruition, but as the result of another lucky policy "mistake," this time from the government in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act.
The IRA, the Biden administration's landmark legislation targeting manufacturing, infrastructure and climate change, was launched just over a year ago and has spurred more than $500 billion in new investment, according to the Treasury.
"When they passed that act, they thought there'd be some companies taking advantage of it and it would cost over 10 years $271 billion. Now the estimates by many sources is well over a trillion dollars," Stiglitz noted.
"That's a big stimulus to the economy that's going to be offsetting the contractionary effects of monetary policy, so we may manage our way through this by luck. The Fed had no idea of the effect of the IRA."
The Fed declined to comment when contacted by CNBC.[/QUOTE]
Douhat one of only a coupe of columnists at NYT worth reading
Ross Douthat.
By Ross Douthat.
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Over the last few weeks Sohrab Ahmari, well known as a leading intellectual exponent of a combative Trumpian conservatism, has been making the rounds explaining why he's giving up on right-wing populism.
That's a slight overstatement; his new book, "Tyranny, Inc. ," on the cruelties of corporate power in America, bears blurbs from leading populist Republicans like Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio. But he describes these figures as "shining exceptions on the right," whose willingness to consider interventionist economic policies contrasts with the broader trend in which populism is "turning into a niche / trashy online-media product," with no policy content beyond resentment of elites.
No doubt Ahmari's liberal readers would respond, it's always been that way! But part of the reason that the "Tyranny, Inc. " author and his circle earned so much attention in the Trump era is that the age of populism really did unsettle economic orthodoxies on the right.
The Trump administration often defaulted, as Ahmari laments, to warmed-over Reaganite policymaking. But Trump's victorious campaign really did kill off, for a time at least, the Tea Party-era emphasis on entitlement reform and hard money. And Trump did follow through on elements of his economic nationalism — while the Biden administration has embraced similar ideas on trade and infrastructure, to the point where it's fair to say that both parties have been reshaped by Trump's '16 campaign.
Meanwhile, a populist intellectual ecosystem exists on the right, through think tanks like American Compass and journals like American Affairs and Ahmari's own Compact, where before the Trump era there was little more than a scattering of gadflies. The Hawley-Rubio-J. The. Vance faction in the Senate is small, but more influential than any past equivalent. And Trump himself, the Republican front-runner, is still making promises — new cities! New tariffs! Flying cars! — that smack more of industrial policy than supply-side economics.
So why is Ahmari despairing of his cause? In part, he's reckoning with forces he probably underestimated before — the folk libertarianism of the G. O. P. 's donor base and the cynicism of its celebrity-industrial complex.
But then Ahmari is also disillusioned because, while remaining socially conservative, he has personally moved farther to the left than some of his fellow populists.
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With its potent anecdotes of corporate malfeasance and its (somewhat overstated) account of the ruthlessness of American economic life, "Tyranny, Inc. " is a book more in the pessimistic spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed" than — well, to take a personal example, than "Grand New Party," the book I co-authored with Reihan Salam 15 years ago making the case for a more populist conservatism. Ahmari sometimes describes his view of American capitalism as close to that of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and there is simply no way to infuse the full Sanders vision into the current Republican coalition; in that sense, he's right to deem himself politically homeless.
Finally, though, Ahmari doesn't always fully reckon with how recent material and cultural changes complicate his argument that cultural renewal depends on economic transformation — that "efforts to change the culture without reforming the economy are futile at best. ".
If so, what should we make of the fact that the American economy was arguably worse, and yet the culture healthier, 10 or 20 years ago than today?
When Barack Obama ran for president, inequality had been rising since the 1980's and the health care safety net had a significant hole. When Trump ran for president, household income had been stagnating since 2000 and economic policymakers had let the unemployment rate stay unnecessarily high.
But today inequality may actually be declining, wages have risen generally and risen faster for the working class, unemployment is extremely low and we are closer to universal health care than we were 20 years ago. Meanwhile, the big Biden-era problem for wage earners has been an inflation spike, which a Bernie Sanders agenda seems ill-equipped to solve.
Yet despite these economic improvements the cultural fabric looks more frayed than ever, with liberals as well as conservatives fretting over the slow fade of church and family, with crime and homelessness returning to American cities while a haze of marijuana settles over twentysomethings, with a spiritual despair shadowing every social rank.
You can blame Covid for deepening this era of bad feelings. You can argue that our social malaise just shows economic improvements haven't gone nearly far enough. And you can pin blame for certain social trends — internet addiction among teenagers, say — on bad actors in big business.
But in terms of priority and urgency, I wonder if Ahmari's harder-edged social conservative side — the anti-pot, anti-porn, anti-crime aspects of his politics, let's say — may actually be more relevant to our situation than the New-Deal-liberal side that's earning him new interest from the left.
Cultural conservatism absolutely needs an economic policy, and corporate power absolutely shapes the culture. But our own social crisis feels a little less economically determined, a little more essentially cultural, in 2023 than at any previous moment in my adult life.
Scumbag Joe Stiglitz and Scumbag Scranton Joe wowww
Gee,
I guess this 100 years long "good luck" with Dem economic stewardship vs "bad luck" with Repub economic stewardship continues without interruption. LOL.
So now the 20-20 hindsight of top Nobel Laureate economists has perhaps concluded that Biden's brilliant and masterful understanding that being cornered into dealing with an incompetent Trump / Repub-appointed Fed Chairman during the Great Dem Recovery meant really big stimulus legislation was required in order to offset a whole host of likely miscalculations and missteps by that Fed Chairman that most certainly could plunge us into another prolonged and crippling Great Repub Recession rather than the rapid soft landing recovery from Trump's typically atrocious Repub stewardship results was just a plain ol' "lucky policy mistake", huh?
'Really bad economics': Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz explains where the Fed went wrong on inflation."
[URL]https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-apologizes-for-racist-gaffe-i-like-all-races-even-the-bad-ones[/URL]
You oughta be ashamed of yourself LMAO.
