U.S. Politics: Russian Around

[Cas Stark]

2 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

Why Is McConnell Rushing Through a Trumpcare Bill Everybody Hates?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/03/why-is-mcconnell-rushing-through-a-bill-everybody-hates.html

 

Because they're stupid.  All they would have to say is that the original bill was rushed through without proper vetting and research and they're not going to make the same mistake.   Voila, they buy themselves six months at least.

[Zorral]

Such a smart person . . . in order to fund his beautiful wall that is to protect the USA . . . cut funding to . . . National Guard, FEMA and Homeland Security.

Do people still wonder how this fellow went bankrupt with a casino?

Washington Post -- pay wall:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/to-fund-border-wall-trump-administration-weighs-cuts-to-coast-guard-airport-security/2017/03/07/ba4a8e5c-036f-11e7-ad5b-d22680e18d10_story.html?

What it's like at State these days:

Quote

The State of Trump's State Department by  Julia Ioffe 11:22 AM ET March 1, 2017
Anxiety and listless days as a foreign-policy bureaucracy confronts the possibility of radical change

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/03/state-department-trump/517965/?utm_source=twb

Catastrophe everywhere on looks with open eyes.

 

 

[Swordfish]

1 hour ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Well, you know, it's really more the party of Calvin.  And that makes more sense..  

I have always been firmly in the Hobbs camp, FWIW.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

16 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Because they're stupid.  All they would have to say is that the original bill was rushed through without proper vetting and research and they're not going to make the same mistake.   Voila, they buy themselves six months at least.

Also keep in mind he has very little recent experience with actually having to do his job. The last 8 years have all been obstructionism, not governance for this Senate. I think it's going to take awhile for them to effectively switch gears. 

[Cas Stark]

8 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Also keep in mind he has very little recent experience with actually having to do his job. The last 8 years have all been obstructionism, not governance for this Senate. I think it's going to take awhile for them to effectively switch gears. 

Because They're Stupid.  I get that no one, including Donald Trump, expected him to win, so of course the GOP wasn't prepared for a "Republican" president and a GOP Congress.

But, then, if you aren't stupid, you realize that putting together a lame brained, worse than the first ACA, hodgepodge of BS, is worse than doing nothing.  It's not rocket science.  Any PR person could have told them the answer is to say: we want to get it right, not the like the Democrats, wink, wink.  We're going to take our time, seek input, blah, blah, blah.  You have bought yourself MONTHS to get your shit together and also give yourself a shield to hold off the media.  It's unbelievable to me how stupid both parties in the US have become, from top to bottom, with few exceptions.

ETA going slow, and being deliberate about it would have also sent a message that they were acting with a good faith desire to improve the program, and had not been politcally posturing all of these years.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

1 minute ago, Cas Stark said:

Because They're Stupid.  I get that no one, including Donald Trump, expected him to win, so of course the GOP wasn't prepared for a "Republican" president and a GOP Congress.

But, then, if you aren't stupid, you realize that putting together a lame brained, worse than the first ACA, hodgepodge of BS, is worse than doing nothing.  It's not rocket science.  Any PR person could have told them the answer is to say: we want to get it right, not the like the Democrats, wink, wink.  We're going to take our time, seek input, blah, blah, blah.  You have bought yourself MONTHS to get your shit together and also give yourself a shield to hold off the media.  It's unbelievable to me how stupid both parties in the US have become, from top to bottom, with few exceptions.

Yeah, I agree. I'm not making excuses for them. Honestly even the stalling for more time would be an indicator of their stupidity and laziness. You've had the better part of eight years to do more than just talk shit about the ACA. That they have no viable alternative after bleating about how terrible this legislation is can't be excused.  

[Cas Stark]

1 minute ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Yeah, I agree. I'm not making excuses for them. Honestly even the stalling for more time would be an indicator of their stupidity and laziness. You've had the better part of eight years to do more than just talk shit about the ACA. That they have no viable alternative after bleating about how terrible this legislation is can't be excused.  

Well, the Democrats weren't too together on ACA, after having lobbied for universal health care for 30 years, LOL, so I am willing to give them a pass on not having such massive legislation all ready to go, with the votes to pass it, etc.  Congress doesn't really work like that.  But what they are doing is the absolute worst, most stupid, most destructive, destructive of everything including their chances in 2018, that they could have chosen.  Ramming through a bad bill to say 'we kept our promise' is, did I mention stupid yet?  LOL.

[Maithanet]

33 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

Why Is McConnell Rushing Through a Trumpcare Bill Everybody Hates?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/03/why-is-mcconnell-rushing-through-a-bill-everybody-hates.html

The day after election day I predicted that Republicans would prefer to try and repeal Obamacare and fail, rather than take ownership of the US Healthcare mess.  It looks like that is coming to pass.  They'll try, they'll blame Democrats for failing, and they'll hammer the Democrats for how terrible Obamacare is in 2018. 

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, Maithanet said:

I just assumed you meant that Republicans are playing Calvinball at this point.

You made me smile.

[OldGimletEye]

57 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

LOL.  Okay, this strikes me as an awfully hostile answer for no reason I can think of, so I will bow out of the economic discussion with the statement that we can agree to disagree on some of this.

I tell you where the hostility comes from. It comes from because the argument you made is similar to the Republican and conservative nonsense we've heard for about 8 years.

And it's always, "watch out for inflation!!!". Inflation is just around the corner!!!! And the fact of the matter is that the FED for years has had trouble hitting it's inflation target. And the fact of matter is that a bit of higher inflation was exactly what we needed to push the real rate of interest down.

Even back in 2010, a bunch of conservative wingnuts wrote to Beranke telling that he'd better watch it or inflation man! And they were all wrong, after being told they were wrong. And, I've, yet to hear any of them admit they were wrong, except for maybe people like John Cochrane who is now running around pushing neo-fisherian nonsense.

And you had people like Newt Gingrich running around saying that if Obama just did it like "Ronnie did it!!", not realizing that what the Federal Funds rate looked like back when "Ronnie did it!!!" and the present circumstances and ignoring the fact that many smart people have gone to great lengths to point out how devastating financial crises are.

And then you have people like John Taylor insisting that we follow the "Taylor Rule", though back in 1993 or so, I believe, Taylor himself said the Taylor rule should serve as a guide and not as hard constraint. But, you know, I guess some people decided to play team Republican. 

Last quarter's core PCE was somwthing like 1.2%, so I have no idea where this the FED should have raised rates sooner comes from.

The frickin Republican Party was wrong in 1929 and it got it wrong in 2008 and it's been spewing nonsense ever since.
So, I'd hope, one could understand, along with the Republican Party's other bullshit, I'm quite hostile to too it and hostile to it's arguments. Quite hostile indeed.

[Ormond]

59 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Such a smart person . . . in order to fund his beautiful wall that is to protect the USA . . . cut funding to . . . National Guard, FEMA and Homeland Security.

Do people still wonder how this fellow went bankrupt with a casino?

Washington Post -- pay wall:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/to-fund-border-wall-trump-administration-weighs-cuts-to-coast-guard-airport-security/2017/03/07/ba4a8e5c-036f-11e7-ad5b-d22680e18d10_story.html?

 

A very important point to bring up -- but just to point out, the Coast Guard is NOT the same thing as the National Guard. It's the former where the cuts are proposed. 

[Martell Spy]

Quote

Because They're Stupid.  I get that no one, including Donald Trump, expected him to win, so of course the GOP wasn't prepared for a "Republican" president and a GOP Congress.

 

Given both their healthcare plan and how they are going about passing it, stupidity is certainly a valid theory about why this is all going on. However, there was a reason for the quick timeline. First, the Republicans want to use reconciliation twice, so that Democrats can't block anything in the Senate. Second, they also want to make their tax cuts for the rich be nearly permanent and hard to get rid of. To do this, they need to get the Obamacare repeal done first. This all creates this accelerated timeline for everything. And yes, makes them look stupid, because it's a difficult effort already without these timelines.

I don't know all the technical specifics, but if you remember how the Bush tax cuts expired, that is what the Republicans are trying to avoid here. They want the tax cuts to be very hard for Democrats to ever get rid of. And to get there involves first doing the Obamacare repeal. If they fail, then they'll have to settle for tax cuts that expire after ten years like the Bush tax cuts.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

No working people do not lose from inflation if their wages are increasing and they are employed. And the way the their wages increase is by the FED meeting its inflation target and keeping labor markets tight and eliminating output gaps.

Guess some people never have heard of liquidity traps.

The FED kept rates for too low for too long.

What a flamin bullshit argument. Under this bullshit, more people would have been unemployed and there would be more downward pressure on wage growth.

And it is one of the biggest pieces of trash to come out of Republican Party. Good thing the Republican Party's advice was ignored on this matter.

 If the FED had raised rates earlier, it would have created more unemployment and put downward pressure on wages. With out fiscal support, there was nothing else left to do.

As far as the poor old people on fixed incomes go. You know, it's not like we were running inflation beyond the normal 2% target that those people have expected for a long time. And many of those poor old fixed income people are wealthy bond holders. 

Isn't part of the question whether wage growth keeps up with inflation?  I actually think we are currently in a place where monetary policy (which has been our saving grace for 40 years) may have reached the end of what it can really do.  I'm not saying that it's useless - it's not - but I don't know that adjusting interest rates one way or another will do much to solve the structural economic problems we are facing right now.

[James Arryn]

In the future, when tricklenomics takes it's rightful place alongside alchemy and phrenology, this is going to look even more idiotic than it does now.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

 

1 hour ago, Swordfish said:

I have always been firmly in the Hobbs camp, FWIW.

He's clearly the brains of the business.

[OldGimletEye]

18 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Isn't part of the question whether wage growth keeps up with inflation?  I actually think we are currently in a place where monetary policy (which has been our saving grace for 40 years) may have reached the end of what it can really do.  I'm not saying that it's useless - it's not - but I don't know that adjusting interest rates one way or another will do much to solve the structural economic problems we are facing right now.

Were still under under our inflation target. That suggest to me that there is still some slack in labor markets. And wage growth is tepid. That too suggest that there is still some slack in labor markets. There is still some slack in the economy.

I agree that there are "structural problems", but tight labor markets are the first defense in keeping steady wage growth. Plus you know, more people get employed.

Also, you know, if the FED wants to keep long term expectations of inflation being at 2% and its been under 2% for awhile, it kind of stands to reason that it needs to keep inflation above 2% for awhile, if people aren't going to revise their expectations downward. At least I don't think it should worry that much if it overshoots it a bit.

Though, I think your financial instability argument is a better argument, than the old "watch out for inflation!!" argument. I'll address it here a bit later.

[Cas Stark]

13 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

Given both their healthcare plan and how they are going about passing it, stupidity is certainly a valid theory about why this is all going on. However, there was a reason for the quick timeline. First, the Republicans want to use reconciliation twice, so that Democrats can't block anything in the Senate. Second, they also want to make their tax cuts for the rich be nearly permanent and hard to get rid of. To do this, they need to get the Obamacare repeal done first. This all creates this accelerated timeline for everything. And yes, makes them look stupid, because it's a difficult effort already without these timelines.

I don't know all the technical specifics, but if you remember how the Bush tax cuts expired, that is what the Republicans are trying to avoid here. They want the tax cuts to be very hard for Democrats to ever get rid of. And to get there involves first doing the Obamacare repeal. If they fail, then they'll have to settle for tax cuts that expire after ten years like the Bush tax cuts.

That makes some sense, but it's still stupid, because they can fight the battle on tax cuts again in 10 years.  Plus, everyone who makes over $40K wants a tax cut, as long as you position it as a "middle class" tax cut, then it's not going to be that difficult, especially with a majority as they have in Congress. But, if they were to do a FUCKING DECENT JOB on ACA, that would prove that they were in earnest about the ACA talking points all this time, would prevent all of this easily preventable criticism and recrimination.  Also, if they wanted to do it via reconcilliation, which I admit I had forgotten about, then they should have been working on this behind closed doors months ago, just on the off chance that Trump would win.  Pushing through a bad bill is what made ACA so vulnerable in the first place.  

[denstorebog]

 

Donald Trump's Obamacare replacement officially named 'World's Greatest Healthcare Plan of 2017’

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-healthcare-plan-worlds-greatest-2017-obamacare-repeal-replace-a7618861.html

What the fuck is this shit.

[James Arryn]

1 minute ago, denstorebog said:

 

Donald Trump's Obamacare replacement officially named 'World's Greatest Healthcare Plan of 2017’

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-healthcare-plan-worlds-greatest-2017-obamacare-repeal-replace-a7618861.html

What the fuck is this shit.

We're getting seriously Orwellian.

[denstorebog]

Just now, James Arryn said:

We're getting seriously Orwellian.

As with everything that comes out of the administration, I *want* to laugh it off as Trump's ego and stupidity. But he's just surrounded by too many smart, manipulative people for *anything* (except his nightly tweets) to not have some nefarious purpose.