U.S. Politics: One NothingBurger with 100% Mos-Cow, Side of Orange Slices and a Banana Daiquiri, Please

[The Anti-Targ]

20 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

No question about that. It's the one thing Trump and Putin undoubtebly share: wanting to fragment the EU to restore their influence over isolated nations.

Which might mean that on some level, the EU is working better than it seems. The EU has both been able to resist some economic demands from the US while expanding to the East. Now both the US and Russia would rather have it disintegrate so they can reassert traditional spheres of influence.

The weaker the US becomes and the scarier Russia becomes the less likely it is for the EU to fall apart of the volition of it's own member countries or citizens. Doesn't mean it won't come to grief largely from external factors, but I would think a Russian resurgence would be a strong motivator for most of the EU to want to stay under the EU umbrella.

Russia may be overplaying its hand by seeking to ruin the USA and the EU at the same time.

[all swedes are racist]

good news!

janet yellen doesn't believe we'll see another economic collapse in our lifetime

bad news is she has inside information we are all going to be dead within the next 18 months

(tagging @OldGimletEye for serious response)

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

Well they say it's a confidence thing...  right?  

 

 

Right?

 

 

RIGHT?!?!!?

[all swedes are racist]

23 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Well they say it's a confidence thing...  right?  

 

 

Right?

 

 

RIGHT?!?!!?

"confidence"

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

In God We Trust. All others must pay cash.

[Altherion]

18 hours ago, dmc515 said:

First, there have been many recent reports that they did indeed at least try to hack our voting machines, where have you been?  Second, there's literally mountains of proof the Russians had everything to do with it, hell Trump not only agreed with this but encouraged it - I'll remember til the day that I die last July when I was sitting at an airport bar and saw a major party presidential candidate encourage a foreign entity to illegally acquire information on his opponent.

I'll start with your second point because multiple people have made the first one and I want to consolidate the text. The "mountains of proof" link does not present any actual proof -- it's just a summary of various claims by various entities including the intelligence agencies, the Obama and Trump administrations and the Russian. As far as I know, no proof has been made available to the public. The DHS and the FBI issued a joint report which presents a mix of generic techniques and something that aspires to be circumstantial evidence. Of course, it is possible that the intelligence community would rather not make the evidence public to protect sources or methodology, but right now we only have their word for it and given their obvious antipathy towards Trump, their word is suspect.

As to Trump's amusing appeal to Russia last summer, he was not encouraging a foreign entity to acquire information on his opponent -- by that time the information did not exist in the US. He was urging them to return the information to us if they had already acquired it in the past.

Regarding the first point and also:

17 hours ago, IamMe90 said:

Also, not only did they attempt to hack voting machines, but this has been widely accessible information for at least a month. Except you don't believe anything that comes out of our intelligence community so I guess you can just hand wave that away.

If you read the linked article and the original Intercept piece that it links to, nobody got anywhere near the voting machines. The sum total of the actual damage done is that the account of one employee at a company that writes software for voter registration was compromised via phishing (i.e. the same trick of sending an email asking for account information that got Podesta). This account was used to send Word documents with malware to a long list of people including election officials, but, given that none of these were stupid (or at least they had decent spam filters), this went nowhere.

As the Intercept article points out, there is potential here for disrupting an election or compromising the results. However, in this specific instance, neither Russia nor anyone got anywhere close to doing so. Phishing is the bread and butter of computer attacks -- it is used by both amateurs and professionals and every corporation or government of note is subject to many such attacks per month. The fact that one person in a company making software for voting fell for it and then proceeded to spam election officials (with no effect) doesn't amount to anyone hacking the voting machines.

20 hours ago, dmc515 said:

Third, intelligence agencies don't "overtly oppose" any administration unless there's a very good reason to.  Last time I can think of that the president was so adversarial to such agencies was Kennedy.  Obviously that turned out very bad, but that was because JFK fundamentally disagreed with the "domino effect" ideology at the time.  The intelligence agencies have no ideological conflict with Trump, largely because he has no discernible ideology.  Their public confrontation is because he's dangerously incompetent, and those around him can use that to their benefit in such a way that constitutes treason.

I don't agree with this. As with most bureaucratic entities, they are extremely sensitive to being slimmed down. Thus, "very good reason" can be simply that he does not give them the deference that they're used to and even vague mention of their powers being reduced (as far as I can tell, he has not done anything yet) is enough to provoke them.

Consolidating some more:

21 hours ago, dmc515 said:

Fourth, it most certainly was false information the Russians were propagating.  A student of mine documented many of the fake stories that were posted on Facebook last fall.  Be happy to share her paper, and how a 19 year old has a better understanding of the world than you do.  

19 hours ago, IamMe90 said:

What the hell? The phrase "fake news" experienced a major resurgence in use precisely because the Russians hand tailored a huge amount of factually wrong "news articles" into American citizens' social media feeds to influence the outcome of the election. I'm confused. Do you think that the only thing that the Russians are accused of doing is releasing DNC emails? I can't possibly imagine that you're that... not-well read. I don't know how else to phrase it. You seem to be demonstrating willful ignorance.

I am aware of the "fake news" on social networks, but I do not believe that its impact on the election was of the same magnitude as the release of emails from the DNC and from Podesta. There was a whole lot of information of various degrees of falseness floating around during the election (some even made it onto these forums) and I very much doubt that it changed people's minds (at least not on average). The DNC and Podesta emails received a great deal more coverage, most people accepted them as truth and they acted in only one direction rather than stochastically. The "fake news" is a second order effect and I very much doubt that Russia was behind the lion's share of it.

21 hours ago, dmc515 said:

Finally, yes, this is worth all the fuss.  Because a foreign entity blatantly tried to influence the outcome of the election to our highest office.  If you do not think that's worth fussing about, you don't understand why this country is so great.

All sorts of entities, both foreign and domestic blatantly try to influence the outcome of the US Presidential election. The foreign ones range from leaders of foreign countries preemptively commenting on the plans of presidential candidates when the latter touch their countries to random Macedonians who spread stories of dubious veracity not because they care about the outcome, but because this gets them paid. Why do you care so much about just one of these foreign entities?

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

47 minutes ago, Altherion said:

 Of course, it is possible that the intelligence community would rather not make the evidence public to protect sources or methodology, but right now we only have their word for it and given their obvious antipathy towards Trump, their word is suspect.

As to Trump's amusing appeal to Russia last summer, he was not encouraging a foreign entity to acquire information on his opponent -- by that time the information did not exist in the US. He was urging them to return the information to us if they had already acquired it in the past.

Regarding the first point and also:

If you read the linked article and the original Intercept piece that it links to, nobody got anywhere near the voting machines. 

Most of this information and investigation was collected and conducted during the election campaigns, before Trump took office. I don't there was any significant bias against Trump by the Intelligence agencies prior to him taking office. 

To the second bit, Trump was requesting that a foreign power continue to interfere in our election process to his advantage. How your parsing of this changes anything escapes me.

To the last, the fact is an attempt was made. Whether or not it was successful should make it no less alarming. 

[Altherion]

On 7/8/2017 at 7:22 AM, Rippounet said:

But for many services this is actually not true. Everyone needs justice, healthcare and education at least, and a whole lot of other services (like infrastructure, bureaucracy, regulations...) will often turn out to be unavoidable in one's life.  The idea that there is a theoretical "choice" not to use the services currently provided by the government in most Western countries is pure fantasy.
And of course, the problem of turning to the private sector for any services that are really vital (like healthcare) is that they will systematically screw over the poor and the weak (the 99%) to make as much profit as possible. Because of course, it's laughable to believe the private sector really cares about the greater good.
I think the US is the only Western country where so many people genuinely believe that individuals should have a "choice" about getting someting like healthcare. And I mean no offense, but such sheer stupidity is the result of decades (at least) of propaganda. At the heart of it is a philosophical confusion about the definition of the "natural" rights of individuals. But I digress. The point is, there is no such theoretical choice. And even if there was, one could still have a "public option" for many services. I challenge you to come up with a solid reason why one should trust the private sector more than government for any vital service.

I don't get your point here.

I am not saying that the private sector is the solution to all of these issues. Clearly, some issues (e.g. justice) must be taken care of by the government and others (e.g. health care) are much more efficient when they are taken care of by the government. My argument was that the interactions of US citizens with the US government are almost entirely negative.

On 7/8/2017 at 7:22 AM, Rippounet said:

It depends how you define the key word and phrase the question. Since the private sector is relatively new in human history, I would argue that almost all human endeavors and progress happened thanks to government. In my eyes, civilisation itself exists because of government.

This is a matter of semantics. One can likewise argue that the large corporations of today which make up the bulk of the so-called "private sector" are in fact a part of "government".

5 hours ago, Rippounet said:

I think you know very well this isn't true. It's almost like you're begging someone to say that you can't possibly believe that.

I am describing how it is supposed to work in theory; I do know that it is not true (or at least not entirely true) in practice. You are correct about finding a new job and the rest: some people who are lucky or very good can do it, but not everyone can.

5 hours ago, Rippounet said:

But it's interesting, because this is kind-of-a "classic" conservative-liberal divide along the lines of "what is the worst evil?" Is economic oppression worse or is government oppression worse? History -as well as the news- show us that both are terrible. There's just no words to describe just how awful it is when the pendulum swings too far one way or the other -but we all have examples in mind.
This is why liberals, historically, have fought both. Some versions of what we call "conservatism" today are really just "old-style" liberalism. It's also why not that long ago you still had liberal Republicans, or why someone like Churchill could go from being a liberal-democrat in his early career to being an anti-communist conservative in just a few decades. Liberalism was always supposed to be about protecting liberty and fighting oppression regardless of where the oppression is coming from. The reason why modern liberals support government action/intervention is because they believe economic oppression has become the main problem again ; conservatives meanwhile are still fighting the "old fight" against government abuse, which unfortunately isn't that outdated, even in today's Western societies (just look at the surveillance societies we live in).
Take away the semantics, and you realize that on a deeper level most liberals and conservatives (that is, true conservatives) actually tend to have similar principles as far as political philosophy is concerned.

It is difficult to fight both at the same time: what do you use as a power base? Also, I think you are mixing up the European definition of liberalism and the American one. American liberals have a set of positions on race and several cultural issues which are either not as controversial or as prominent in Europe. As a result, a substantial fraction of the American population views the liberals as the oppressors -- and not without cause.

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

I'll start with your second point because multiple people have made the first one and I want to consolidate the text. The "mountains of proof" link does not present any actual proof -- it's just a summary of various claims by various entities including the intelligence agencies, the Obama and Trump administrations and the Russian. As far as I know, no proof has been made available to the public. The DHS and the FBI issued a joint report which presents a mix of generic techniques and something that aspires to be circumstantial evidence. Of course, it is possible that the intelligence community would rather not make the evidence public to protect sources or methodology, but right now we only have their word for it and given their obvious antipathy towards Trump, their word is suspect.

The problem with this analysis is that the first report came from Obama, and at that point there was little indication that Trump was even going to be POTUS (it happened about a week before PussyGrab, and at the time Clinton was up +6). 

Your idea would make sense if this was all post-election. It wasn't and isn't. 

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

I don't agree with this. As with most bureaucratic entities, they are extremely sensitive to being slimmed down. Thus, "very good reason" can be simply that he does not give them the deference that they're used to and even vague mention of their powers being reduced (as far as I can tell, he has not done anything yet) is enough to provoke them. 

Again, there was no sign in October that the intelligence agencies would have to be 'going to war' with Trump for any reason, and also no indication that Trump would actually want to slim them down (save, perhaps, the FBI, which was the organization that was least committal to the Russian information).

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

I am aware of the "fake news" on social networks, but I do not believe that its impact on the election was of the same magnitude as the release of emails from the DNC and from Podesta. There was a whole lot of information of various degrees of falseness floating around during the election (some even made it onto these forums) and I very much doubt that it changed people's minds (at least not on average). The DNC and Podesta emails received a great deal more coverage, most people accepted them as truth and they acted in only one direction rather than stochastically. The "fake news" is a second order effect and I very much doubt that Russia was behind the lion's share of it.

And...that was caused by Russian hackers, who released to a known Russian dumping ground for dissemination.

 

[OldGimletEye]

On 7/9/2017 at 11:21 PM, commiedore said:

good news!

janet yellen doesn't believe we'll see another economic collapse in our lifetime

bad news is she has inside information we are all going to be dead within the next 18 months

(tagging @OldGimletEye for serious response)

 

No I don’t think we’ll see another during Yellen’s lifetime.

I’m just right around three decades younger than Yellen, and there is a good chance there won’t be another during my lifetime. A lot of this depends on whether Jeb Hensarling’s Financial Bomb Act gets passed though.

And I don’t know when the next one will happen.

What I do know is that we will have another. Also what I know is that they are devastating if not properly handled. I also know that for the kids that were entering the job market, whether they were just graduating from college, vocational school, or high school, during the Great Recession, will be permanently affected for the rest of their lives. Many of them eventually will likely find jobs, but there is quite of bit of research out there that shows one’s lifetime earnings depends, quite a bit, on the state of the business cycle when they were entering the job market. I also know that the people that lost jobs are permanently affected. They too will likely never recover completely.

For me, what will be particularly infuriating is that well won’t learn the lessons of the Great Recession, I think. And it won’t because there was nothing to learn. I think serious people that study this stuff have learned a lot. But, it will be because of political choice we’ve made.  Before the Great Recession, we did know quite a few things. We knew them from the Great Depression, yet we did not  implement them effectively. Largely because certain sorts of people had an ideological interest in denying those lessons. Certain sorts of people, like Amity Schlaes, saw it as opportunity to re-fight the battles they lost in the 1930s. I think certain sorts of people were terrified that Dubya would go down like Hoover and Obama like FDR, shifting the center of politics to the left for decades and that prospect terrified them, causing them to go the full Hayek, and forgetting about things like Milton Friedman’s A Monetary History of the United States, a work which certain sorts of people used to admire and espouse. And  I think certain sorts of people have been largely successful, not in the substance or technocratic merits of the debate, but politically.

And now we have people like Jaime Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein running around saying,”hey guys could ya ease up on the equity capital requirements!”.  Though the answer should be a loud and clear “hell, no” (along with being given the bird) they’ll will probably get their way. And it’s quite likely that we won’t give the the FED both the microprudential and macroprudential tools to deal with potential financial crises, leaving them only monetary policy, which is terrible, as that tool should be used mainly to stabilize aggregate demand.

In short, I don’t think we’ll see another for awhile. But, also think we won’t be as prepared for the next one as we ought to be and the next generations caught in the next one will suffer for it terribly. And that should be infuriating.

[Red Tiger]

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

No I don’t think we’ll see another during Yellen’s lifetime.

I’m just right around three decades younger than Yellen, and there is a good chance there won’t be another during my lifetime.

Ehhh (1:32)

[OldGimletEye]

On 7/10/2017 at 6:28 AM, Red Tiger said:

Ehhh (1:32)

I'm as Minsky as the next guy. But, not all financial crises are equal. I think the question put to Yellen was, "like the Great Recession". We'll probably have smaller ones. But, a big one like the Great Recession or the Great Depression or the Panic of 1907 is in our future at some point.

[Red Tiger]

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

I'm as Minsky as the next guy. But, not all financial crises are equal. I think the question put to Yellen was, "like the Great Recession". We'll probably have smaller ones. But, a big one like the Great Recession or the Great Depression or the Panic of 1907 is in our future at some point.

Yeah I can agree with that.

[Tywin et al.]

12 hours ago, Nasty LongRider said:

 

Trump’s Son Met With Russian Lawyer After Being Promised Damaging Information on Clinton

July 9, 2017

 

 

This story is picking up a lot of steam. Methinks that Mueller will want a word. 

[OldGimletEye]

Today in:

Debunking Conservative and Tory flim flam, United States and Britain edition:
 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/austerity-arguments-debunked-gdp-recession-a7831461.html

Quote

“Britain never really experienced austerity”

This cockroach was offered by no less than the former chief civil servant at the Treasury, Sir Nicholas Macpherson, in a column for the Financial Times last month.

“Whereas Ireland managed to reduce its gross public debt from 86 per cent to 75 per cent of national income between 2010 and 2016, Britain’s public debt carried on rising: from 76 per cent to 89 per cent,” he pointed out. “In short, Britain never experienced austerity”.

I thought this kind of nonsense got debunked in E. Cary Brown's 1950s paper. Evidently not.

Continuing on:

Quote

As Simon Wren-Lewis of Oxford University points out, this confuses levels with rates of change. In other words, it’s possible for a fiscal consolidation to be taking place – even a very severe one with serious social impacts  – while a country’s national stock of debt relative to its GDP continues to rise.

Yep. And Spain has about a 100% debt/GDP ratio, right about now, and it sure in the hell did do a lot of unnecessary austerity, getting 25% unemployment in the process. For my money, that is likely the most tragic case of austerity in recent years.

When the whole financial crises started Spain had about a 40% debt/GDP ratio. It had plenty of fiscal room to maneuver and the ECB should have committed to buying it's bonds without question. But Spain was forced to go down into another route, with tragic consequences.

You did a heck of job there Conservatives!!! And this time, I think we should all stand up and give conservatives a big round of applause. Good one! Good one!

Quote

Another version of this “what austerity?” argument cites the fact that total UK public spending in both cash and even inflation-adjusted terms is higher than it was in 2010. What this ignores is the fact that as a share of GDP, public spending has fallen significantly from 45 per cent to 39 per cent.

This is akin to old dumb ass Thomas Sowell arguing that the Reagan tax  cuts increased tax revenues.

Quote

In her response to Jeremy Corbyn in the House of Commons last week Theresa May resurrected the argument that the UK would turn into Greece, with spiralling interest rates and a fiscal crisis, if she acceded to Labour demands for higher public spending.

Once you account for hysteresis effects and fiscal multipliers, austerity likely makes long term debt sustainability worse not better.

Quote

Further, the European Central Bank was failing to stand behind struggling member countries in the way that the Bank of England clearly stood behind the UK and still stands behind it today. And indeed, the massive spending cuts imposed by the rest of the eurozone and the IMF on Greece, as the price of its bailout, made the country’s budget crisis worse, not better.

No wonder many hate the Euro. I don't blame them.

Quote

Claims that a fiscal crisis is just around the corner, by their nature, can never be comprehensively proved wrong. Yet what we can say there is zero evidence from the behaviour of financial markets from recent years to support this alarmism in relation to the UK.

It's hard for me to comment completely on the UK position as I don't understand their position as well as the US's.

But once, again, that debt we got under the financial crises? Meh, mostly.

That debt and further debt could have been borrowed under the condition NGDP > R. In the long run it simply goes vamoose.

Where things potentially get scary, at least according to the CBO, is when NGDP < R in 2045 or so, meaning the path of deficits won't converge to some level. But a lot of that has to do with our sorry ass overpriced healthcare system. Fix that and lot of the problem goes away.

Quote

We heard this familiar canard from Philip Hammond in a speech to the CBI where he claimed “borrowing to fund consumption is merely passing the bill to the next generation”.

It’s spurious because the younger generation are already suffering the impact of a chronically weak economy, made feebler by excessive austerity. The average incomes of people in the twenties are still more than 5 per cent below where they were ten years earlier.

Yeah, I'm not real sure why the current generation has to be thrown under the bus. Throw in hysteresis effects and future generations are not likely to be made better off because of austerity. Secondly, even if their were no hysteresis effects, future generations are likely to be materially more wealthy than the current generation, so their is welfare gains to be had, by transferring some of that future wealth to current generations.

And:

https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2017/07/measuring-impact-of-austerity.html

Quote

The speed and extent to which austerity was applied after the Great Recession was very unusual: the textbook says secure the recovery first, allow interest rates to rise, and then worry about government debt. There was no economic justification for switching to austerity so quickly after 2010: the motivation (as in the UK) was entirely political. It produced the slowest US recovery in output since WWII. (This is a very useful resource in comparing US upswings.) As I showed here using simple calculations, if total government spending from 2011 had remained neutral instead of becoming sharply contractionary, US output could easily have got close to capacity (as measured by the CBO) by 2013.

Well thanks conservatives. You fucked over everyone, on both sides of the pond! Good job!!!

[Channel4s-JonSnow]

Why should public spending increase as a share of GDP? If public spending has technically gone up then how can there be austerity? Or do we genuinely expect public spending to increase every single year?

[OldGimletEye]

On 7/10/2017 at 9:47 AM, Channel4s-JonSnow said:

Why should public spending increase as a share of GDP? If public spending has technically gone up then how can there be austerity? Or do we genuinely expect public spending to increase every single year?

Seriously, did you read the links I posted? It explains it. If you cant read, I can’t help you.

And as far as, “do we expect public spending to go up every year?”

Yes, we do. That’s what you’d expect as a nation gets larger.

The real question is: given interest rates, nominal rates of growth, what kind of deficits do we want to average in order to hit some kind of debt/GDP ratio. And of course the state of the business cycle matters.

[Tywin et al.]

I'd encourage all my fellow U.S. posters, especially those that thought that Trump would raise America's standing in the world, to check out the foreign press. The fallout after the G20 (now apparently G19+1) is an absolute disaster. 

[Maithanet]

23 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

This story is picking up a lot of steam. Methinks that Mueller will want a word. 

I am repeatedly astonished at how bad Trump and Associates are at managing scandals.  It's like they have a playbook that consists of:

1.  Damaging stories that come out which rely on "unnamed sources"

2.  Attack story as illegitimate due to unnamed sources.

3.  Confirm story is true in your own statement. 

 

It happened again yesterday.  In his own statement, DTJ says:

Quote

"It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,”

Does he think this is ok?  Because he just admitted that he is willing to play ball with a Russian agent to gain potentially damaging political information.  Is he totally unaware of how that would (at the very least) expose him to blackmail by the Russians? 

[Ice Queen]

14 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

The Russians are either a lot less competent and keeping things covered up, or part of their master plan is to undermine both major parties, or the Trump team is so hamfisted that even though the Russians wanted to keep their aevil schemes secret the Trump side couldn't reciprocate with equal secrecy, or FAKE NEWS!

I'm inclined to go with Russia being keen to severely weaken the US's international influence, and hence step 1 was to see Trump elected and Step 2 is to completely undermine the Trump presidency on the international stage. I assume step 3 is to turn all the former soviet states west of Russia into Russian client states and Step 4 is to become a superpower without equal. Or maybe there are a couple more steps before that which need to be done. I'm sure they are keen for the EU to collapse. They must have a bit of concern about China's power and influence too.

Have you ever read Dugin's The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia? It really looks like this is Putin's playbook and well worth a read.