U.S. Politics: And a Happy "Shithole" Year

[OldGimletEye]

Whatever one thinks about the whole issue of immigration, really DACA should be done deal by now. It's terrible that it hasn't been resolved by now.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/14/16890728/trump-daca-dead

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If the president is still looking for a deal on DACA — the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has protected hundreds of thousands of young adult unauthorized immigrants from deportation and allowed them to work legally in America since 2012 — his Twitter feed isn’t showing it.

 

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In an appearance on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Flake again defended Democrats in negotiations on DACA. “One thing I do take big issue with the president on is he is saying that Democrats aren’t moving forward in good faith,” he said. “I can tell you I’ve been negotiating and working with Democrats on immigration for 17 years and on this issue, on DACA or on the DREAM Act for a number of years, and the Democrats are negotiating in good faith.”

 

Not even Bannon can withstand the power of our "libertarian" overlords.

http://ritholtz.com/2018/01/breitbart-communications-arm-mercer-empire/

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Breitbart Is the Communications Arm of the Mercer Empire

 

FED Watch:

http://www.epi.org/blog/the-search-for-the-next-president-of-the-new-york-federal-reserve-is-a-big-deal/

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Those hoping to chart a new course in economic policy that delivers real gains, not just cynical rhetoric, to American workers have been closely following electoral politics throughout the country. But elections aren’t the only way change can happen. A case in point is the search currently underway to replace William Dudley as the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

 

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Why has Fed often ridden the economy’s brakes too hard in recent decades? Mostly because they have a loud backseat driver that is terrified of any unexpected inflation: the nation’s financial sector. Unexpected inflation decreases the value of financial assets and transfers resources from creditors to debtors. Wealthy households and creditors—the prime clien

 

[GAROVORKIN]

1 hour ago, Morpheus said:

The mooch said the same thing about Trump last week, “the least racist”. We are dealing with 7 year olds who genuinely think adding superlatives automatically strengthens an argument. The Trump administration is the internet made flesh, fuck the facts they are the most bestest bigly, MAGA. He is a bot uploaded with the personality of 4chan.

I find Im watching far less news then I used to.  

[GAROVORKIN]

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

Whatever one thinks about the whole issue of immigration, really DACA should be done deal by now. It's terrible that it hasn't been resolved by now.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/14/16890728/trump-daca-dead

 

 

Not even Bannon can withstand the power of our "libertarian" overlords.

http://ritholtz.com/2018/01/breitbart-communications-arm-mercer-empire/

 

FED Watch:

http://www.epi.org/blog/the-search-for-the-next-president-of-the-new-york-federal-reserve-is-a-big-deal/

 

 

They will come up a solution on DACA which which will make possible for the Dreamers to stay which would be a good thing. 

Bannon  is the author of own difficulties and down fall . Hm, I think there is Hollywood  movie in there somewhere .

The next New York Federal Reserve  President should be policy man and not a businessman. 

[Jace, Extat]

18 minutes ago, GAROVORKIN said:

I find Im watching far less news then I used to.  

People who can't accept the truth often need to hide from it. Is it a wonder that when even Fox starts to question the madness that you simply tune out?

And let us make clear that Fox's questioning of said madness is tepid at best.

[LongRider]

So lets review how much the new tax 'reform' has helped Walmart and how they have 'trickled down' the tax savings.

*Announces it will raise it's base pay to $11.00 per hour

*Announces a one time bonus of up to $1000.00.  The bonus is on a sliding scale however and to receive the largest bonus, an employee must have 20 years of service.  The average bonus is expected to under $200.00.

*When these were announced, Walmart also was closing 63 Sam's Club stores, affecting approx. 9400 employees, many who found out they were out of a job on Thursday, 1/11 when they arrived for work only to discover that they were locked out.

*Walmart is also announcing that it is removing about 3500 co-managers, a salaried management position, and will be adding more assistant managers, a lower paid position.  The laid off co-managers will, however, be able to apply for the assistant manager position as there will be approx. 1700 new openings.

*It's unclear how much Walmart will benefit from the tax 'reform' as that hasn't been officially announced that I could find.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-12/trump-s-lame-excuse-for-avoiding-london

http://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-suddenly-closes-sams-club-stores-2018-1

[LongRider]

Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!  (going bye bye)

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INDIANAPOLIS – Another wave of layoffs at the Carrier plant left 215 people unemployed Thursday, despite President Trump’s campaign promises to help keep American workers at the company. 

It was raining as dozens of employees channeled out of the Carrier parking lot during the 4:30 p.m. shift change. A police officer from the sheriff’s department wearing a bright yellow vest stepped out of his unmarked car, its lights flashing, to direct many of the cars away for the final time.

One of these workers was 44-year-old operator Renee Elliott, who said Wednesday the loss felt like a divorce from her tight-knit co-workers. 

“If you didn’t eat lunch, someone made sure you did,” Elliott said.

Carrier, a company that creates heating, air-conditioning and refrigeration technology, announced in February 2016 that it would close its Indianapolis plant and move operations to Mexico. Since then, at least 500 people have lost their jobs.

Then-President-elect Trump came to Indianapolis on Dec. 1, 2016, to highlight a Carrier agreement that required the plant remain open for 10 years and save 800 furnace manufacturing jobs in exchange for $7 million in tax cuts. 

http://www.idsnews.com/article/2018/01/215-carrier-jobs-cut-in-latest-wave-of-layoffs

[OldGimletEye]

Ozimek is hardly wild eyed left winger. He's in fact center right. But he is right here.It's time for the CEO Business Clowntable crowd, and Jamie Dimon, to admit they were wrong, along with other certain sorts of people.

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Like many economists, my thinking has changed significantly in light of the Great Recession. The profession has churned out countless articles about what we got wrong ad how our understanding of the macroeconomy has changed, and there has been a general reckoning for economists who believed in the Great Moderation, v-shaped recoveries, and the ability of normal monetary policy to counteract recessions. But we are owed another reckoning. Those who believed that unemployment was structural and workers were never coming back need to stand up, admit their theories got it wrong, and explain how their thinking has changed. The labor market bears were wrong, and their theories need to change.

 

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The Wall Street Journal covered this report in a piece titled "Long-Term Unemployment Casts Doubt on Fed’s Ability to Help". This piece was written in September of 2011, when the unemployment rate was 9%. It is 4.1% today.

Always read the WSJ with extreme caution.

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Another example is Casey Mulligan, who wrote in 2013 that it is "unlikely that labor market activity will return even near to its prerecession levels as long as the ACA’s work disincentives remain in place".

Since 2008, Mulligan has been a real, real, conservative clown. And wrong just about everything. Mulligan's "conservative errors" was based on the fact he was working in an RBC model of the economy. Had that model been correct, you'd would have seen inflation and wage pressures, but that's not what happened. Since Mulligan had no plausible answers, he just grasped for straws and blamed the ACA. Sorry ass conservatives are going to sorry ass.

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For the past few years, people have looked to a decline in worker quality as an explanation for high unemployment and predicted things would not get better. Not only has unemployment fallen, but other wider measures of slack have improved as well. While there are no doubt structural problems in the labor market and things we should do to address this, the extent to which these factors were either permanent or resistant to cyclical improvement was clearly exaggerated. The profession needs a reckoning on this issue to ensure that the same mistakes are not repeated in the next recession. Labor market bears were wrong, and they should talk more about that before pivoting eagerly to the remaining structural problems we do have.

There is a reason I'm disequlibrium Keynesian. I know damn well prices don't clear markets (not quickly at least), unlike say, people like, Casey Mulligan.

[GAROVORKIN]

1 hour ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

People who can't accept the truth often need to hide from it. Is it a wonder that when even Fox starts to question the madness that you simply tune out?

And let us make clear that Fox's questioning of said madness is tepid at best.

We no longer have journalists,  instead we have media  talking head personalities who are  little more then cyphers script readers . All they do is broadcast the political line of whatever media outlet they happen to work for.  They worship ratings success .

 

 

[OldGimletEye]

Yes, Trump is the Pied Piper and the Republican Party, like a bunch of mindless lemmings, is following him off a cliff.

When this ends, there will be no escape for the Republican Party. There will be no out. They will not be able to deny Trump three times. They went all in.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/defend-trump-republican-target-dick-durbin

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Last week, the president was at the center of an international incident following behind-the-scenes comments in which Trump referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” during a meeting with a bipartisan group of lawmakers. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) confirmed the accounts, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told a colleague that the reports on the controversy were basically correct.

To defend Trump, Republicans again needed to find a villain. They appear to have settled on Durbin.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) appeared on Fox News the other day, for example, and suggested that, regardless of what Trump said, the Illinois Democrat is responsible for “undermining trust” by alerting the public to the president’s comments. House Chief Deputy Whip Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) pushed a similar line.

 

[Ormond]

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

Ozimek is hardly wild eyed left winger. He's in fact center right. But he is right here.It's time for the CEO Business Clowntable crowd, and Jamie Dimon, to admit they were wrong, along with other certain sorts of people.

 

Always read the WSJ with extreme caution.

Since 2008, Mulligan has been a real, real, conservative clown. And wrong just about everything. Mulligan's "conservative errors" was based on the fact he was working in an RBC model of the economy. Had that model been correct, you'd would have seen inflation and wage pressures, but that's not what happened. Since Mulligan had no plausible answers, he just grasped for straws and blamed the ACA. Sorry ass conservatives are going to sorry ass.

There is a reason I'm disequlibrium Keynesian. I know damn well prices don't clear markets (not quickly at least), unlike say, people like, Casey Mulligan.

This is a serious question and not by any means an attempt to defend the economists who predict long term high unemployment. 

But as this board's expert on economics, do you have any idea how much of the fall in unemployment could be from older workers who feel they were forced to retire before they really wanted to, and so have dropped out of the labor force completely and wouldn't be counted in unemployment statistics? We are now at a point where about half of the Baby Boomers would be 62 or older, and I am wondering if a lot of people who are laid off when they are older, or whose working conditions change for the worse, just retire earlier than planned because of the perception that age discrimination would make it extremely difficult for them to find a new job anyway. I know younger people often complain that older Boomers in highly educated professions like college professor don't retire soon enough, but that might not be the cause in blue collar or even lesser skilled white collar professions. (I have a friend who was a bachelor's degree level social worker who this happened to last year -- his job conditions got very stressful because of some changes his agency implemented due to new rules from the state government, so he retired suddenly at age 63, three years before he had planned to.)

[DanteGabriel]

1 hour ago, GAROVORKIN said:

We no longer have journalists,  instead we have media  talking head personalities who are  little more then cyphers script readers . All they do is broadcast the political line of whatever media outlet they happen to work for.  They worship ratings success .

 

 

There are good journalists out there doing good work. They're just a little harder to find. It's not surprising you'd wave your hands and say "they all suck" and stop paying attention (mirrors your lazy attitude to politics) so you can continue to issue proclamations based on your own discerning analysis of the scent of your own farts, though.

[Martell Spy]

If Trump Fires Mueller, Republicans Won’t Object

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/if-trump-fires-mueller-republicans-are-ready-to-defend-him.html

[OldGimletEye]

On 1/15/2018 at 10:20 AM, Ormond said:

This is a serious question and not by any means an attempt to defend the economists who predict long term high unemployment. 

But as this board's expert on economics, do you have any idea how much of the fall in unemployment could be from older workers who feel they were forced to retire before they really wanted to, and so have dropped out of the labor force completely and wouldn't be counted in unemployment statistics? We are now at a point where about half of the Baby Boomers would be 62 or older, and I am wondering if a lot of people who are laid off when they are older, or whose working conditions change for the worse, just retire earlier than planned because of the perception that age discrimination would make it extremely difficult for them to find a new job anyway. I know younger people often complain that older Boomers in highly educated professions like college professor don't retire soon enough, but that might not be the cause in blue collar or even lesser skilled white collar professions. (I have a friend who was a bachelor's degree level social worker who this happened to last year -- his job conditions got very stressful because of some changes his agency implemented due to new rules from the state government, so he retired suddenly at age 63, three years before he had planned to.)

I don’t have the precise numbers in front of me. I’ll see if I can find something to quantify the problem and post it later.

But, for now I have a few comments. We know two things. One is if you were unemployed for over six months, you faced significant headwinds getting back in the labor market. Employers simply discriminated against people unemployed for that period of time, even if they had good experience. Secondly, age discrimination is significant.

If you happened to be over 40 and lost your job during the Great Recession, you likely faced severe headwinds because of your age and because there was a good chance you’d hit the critical six month mark. I’m quite sure that many people caught in that situation just gave up and dropped out of the labor market. This is of course why the U3 unemployment statistic isn’t the only one to look at.

And if course if you were one of those people, and faced a long bout of unemployment, and are just getting back into the labor market, then there is probably a good chance you’ll never be able to retire, as you probably burned through most of your financial resources and now your in your 50s or 60s and maybe have few years left you can work. 

People of course can complain about some of these people not retiring, but many of them don’t have a choice. It’s either work until they drop dead or eat cat food.

And even though, labor markets are tightening and marginalized people are getting a chance to get back into the labor force, this is one reason why I’m still on the war path about this issue. It did not have to be this painful and protracted. Unfortunately, people like me who know this wasn’t mainly a “structural” problem, for the most part, had to deal with people like Casey Mulligan who made up structural fairy tales, along with the CEO Business Clowntable crowd who pushed this narrative. And then we had to deal with inflation fear mongering, gold bugism, Poor Savers!, and asset mispricing concern trolling.

[LongRider]

3 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

And if course if you were one of those people, and faced a long bout of unemployment, and are just getting back into the labor market, then there is probably a good chance you’ll never be able to retire, as you probably burned through most of your financial resources and now your in your 50s or 60s and maybe have few years left you can work.

Why yes, I'm living this dream right now.  Retirement?  what's that sez this 61 year old.  

edt; miss this part of OGE's quote "People of course can complain about some of these people not retiring, but many of them don’t have a choice. It’s either work until they drop dead or eat cat food."

Yup, yup, and yup.

[Mexal]

1 hour ago, GAROVORKIN said:

We no longer have journalists,  instead we have media  talking head personalities who are  little more then cyphers script readers . All they do is broadcast the political line of whatever media outlet they happen to work for.  They worship ratings success .

Sure, on cable news. Read a newspaper. Journalists exist.

[LongRider]

Remember when Michelle Obama was so embarrassed when all those porn stars talked about their NDA's with Barrack?  Yeah, me neither.

 

[LongRider]

"We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now."  Martin Luther King, Jr.

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day.   His "I Have a Dream" speech still matters. 

 

[DanteGabriel]

2 minutes ago, Nasty LongRider said:

Remember when Michelle Obama was so embarrassed when all those porn stars talked about their NDA's with Barrack?  Yeah, me neither.

 

Remember when Evangelical Christians thought character and moral standing mattered in leaders?

[Mindwalker]

All this lying, forgetting, and re-remembering what Trump did (not) say reminds me of Orwell's "1984", when all of the sudden alliances of the superpower changed and everyone insisted it had always been that way... And that's only after a couple of (very typical) Trump's remarks, horrible as they are... What will they do after he does launch a missile first, or kills a little child in public, I wonder...

[OldGimletEye]

22 hours ago, Mindwalker said:

All this lying, forgetting, and re-remembering what Trump did (not) say reminds mer of Orwell's "1984", when all of the sudden alliances of the superpower changed and everyone insisted it had always been that way...

1984 was supposed to be a warning. Not a "how to" guide.