US Politics: Follow the Money!

[DanteGabriel]

55 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

It Sounds Like Donald Trump Jr. Has a New Girlfriend

https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/donald-trump-jr-dating-fox-host-kimberly-guilfoyle-report.html

 

The father wants to fuck his daughter and the son starts dating a woman who's the same age as, and bears a striking resemblance to, his second stepmother. They really are the family from the Aristocrats joke.

[Shryke]

 

21 hours ago, Triskele said:

Circling back to McCain from the previous thread:

I know that on the left one sees fairly frequently the suggestion that he's a Republican through and through a lot...and I get that up to a point.  Sure, he's hawkish as Hell, so if you're a dove he's not even one of the better Republicans.  But he has bucked the GOP line a lot more than most...a low bar, I suppose, but I also say credit where credit is due.  

McCain is a guy who clearly has some sort of morals that don't align with the Republican party on everything but basically 90% of the time he sells his soul to maintain political power.

[Darth Richard II]

21 minutes ago, Shryke said:

 

McCain is a guy who clearly has some sort of morals that don't align with the Republican party on everything but basically 90% of the time he sells his soul to maintain political power.

Can you sell your soul more than once?

 

Hmmm that's probably a question for the religious thread.

[TrueMetis]

He's splitting it into pieces like Voldemort. I'm not entirely convinced the cancer will kill him.

[DanteGabriel]

1 minute ago, TrueMetis said:

He's splitting it into pieces like Voldemort. I'm not entirely convinced the cancer will kill him.

You'll see, Lindsey Graham is going to start wearing a bulky head wrap soon.

[Yukle]

4 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

He's splitting it into pieces like Voldemort. I'm not entirely convinced the cancer will kill him.

That's a little on the nose, isn't it? You don't have to agree with a politician, but surely that's a bit far.

I reiterate: I don't agree with his political views on most things. But I at least think he did about as well as most people would in the same circumstances.

You needn't like him, but it's not a choice between agreeing and therefore loving someone or disagreeing and therefore vilifying. I don't think McCain sat in his office, rubbing his hands maniacally and plotting the downfall of the poor. He seemed to do his best based on his views.

[Holy Sith!]

Comedians are not the only ones who have found Rudy's behavior to be a bit odd.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/10/politics/rudy-giuliani-law-firm/index.html

Previous observations from Stephen Colbert and John Oliver

 

[DanteGabriel]

22 minutes ago, Yukle said:

That's a little on the nose, isn't it? You don't have to agree with a politician, but surely that's a bit far.

I reiterate: I don't agree with his political views on most things. But I at least think he did about as well as most people would in the same circumstances.

You needn't like him, but it's not a choice between agreeing and therefore loving someone or disagreeing and therefore vilifying. I don't think McCain sat in his office, rubbing his hands maniacally and plotting the downfall of the poor. He seemed to do his best based on his views.

Nah. He's a vainglorious, selfish piece of shit. Read the Taibbi piece I linked earlier.

[Bonnot OG]

37 minutes ago, Yukle said:

That's a little on the nose, isn't it? You don't have to agree with a politician, but surely that's a bit far.

I reiterate: I don't agree with his political views on most things. But I at least think he did about as well as most people would in the same circumstances.

You needn't like him, but it's not a choice between agreeing and therefore loving someone or disagreeing and therefore vilifying. I don't think McCain sat in his office, rubbing his hands maniacally and plotting the downfall of the poor. He seemed to do his best based on his views.

God, what a watered down way to describe his horrendous and greedy politics that resulted in dead bodies both home and in other countries.

His best was still terrible since his views were terrible. 

And no one forced him to be a politician, he decided to do that all on his own. He sure as fuck has had no issue in the past fucking people over and letting them die because of his asinie view of health care not being a human right.

So yea, fuck him and fuck his best and fuck his views. Most of all, screw being an apologist for a dying old man just because he is dying. 

We need to stop treating republicans with kids gloves since their ideology is fucking horrible and bigoted.
 

[King Ned Stark]

9 hours ago, Sword of Doom said:

I'll settle for the brain cancer. 

That statement is obscene, no matter your political leanings.  

[Bonnot OG]

24 minutes ago, King Ned Stark said:

That statement is obscene, no matter your political leanings.  

You know what is even more obscene? Telling a person with brain cancer who, along with their loved one, is pleading with you to help them keep their health insurance / coverage, to move out of state since you do not consider health insurance and the access to healthcare a human right. 


My political leanings are shaped by actual ethics, not money and greed, unlike McCain.


It's amazing how so many Americans are worried about playing nice and just chalk politics up to some thing that has no impact on peoples lives and can't actually kill people. 

 

[OldGimletEye]

Leave it to Republicans to take one data series showing percentages and then take another data series showing raw numbers and then put them on a graph and think they’ve made a point.

Dear lord. What in the hell is wrong with Republican sorts of people?

Quote

The Republicans’ “Jobs Gap” is a meaningless measure that reveals nothing about the job market. It can, and is, easily manipulated to show any outcome you like.

On the other hand, the facts about the current labor market are as follows.

The Republicans “Jobs Gap” measure consists of two disparate series—the labor force participation rate (LFPR) and job openings—with very different scales and no substantive meaning. The commentary around the measure suggests its advocates think the jobs gap shows that people are not taking advantage of labor market opportunities, but the actual data belie that claim.

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Clownwenin' around.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-08/how-federal-reserve-interest-rates-affect-employment-and-wages

Quote

How might price inflation and employment be related today?

One hypothesis is that tighter monetary policy from the Fed, combined with higher short-term real interest rates, limits credit to business, and that hurts job creation and wages. It’s not clear this hypothesis is generally true, as the Fed’s powers over real lending rates to businesses are limited. But let’s explore the hypothetical. Probably we would not want the Fed to be cutting rates and goosing up the supply of credit in a time of near-full employment. The Fed already has used significant asset purchases to lower some short-term interest rates, and a relaxation of that stimulus might make more sense.

Except the argument has been, mainly that the fed should keep a symmetric target, not an asymmetric target. If you believe that long term inflation expectations should be anchored at 2%, then you shouldn’t be afraid if inflation overshoots the 2% target for awhile. If inflation overshoots it’s target, then it means business are setting their next period prices with the expectation that their supply of commodities will equal the demand for them. That means they will hire more labor.

Also, lower interest rates doesn’t just work their the investment channel. But, it also works through the consumption channel, particularly durable goods, as lower interest rates should make buying those goods more attractive.

And then of course, there is the worry that long term inflation expectations will adjust downwards.

Quote

Second, these days more and more economists, especially those with Keynesian sympathies, are insisting that higher legal minimum wages don’t lower employment much, if at all. If higher real wages don’t much hurt employment, we shouldn’t expect lower real wages to much boost employment. This “new wisdom” on minimum wages contradicts Keynesian labor economics and implies inflation won’t much boost employment, if at all.

Okay, I just want to address this because certain sorts of people on the right think they have a real gotcha moment here with liberal and Keynesians sorts of people, and I’ve seen this line of argument before.

The argument is as follows:

1. Keynes argued that a lower real wage would restore aggregate demand.

2. But, lefties are running around saying we need to boost the minimum wage and strengthen worker bargaining power.

Oh, golly, how can this be! They're being incoherent and contradictory!

Well not exactly.

Lets say we have:

Profit = pf(l) – w(f(l))l

subject to:

f(l)<Q, where Q is a demand side constraint.

Then, lets say I set up the usual Kuhn Tucker  Conditions, getting:

pf(l) – w(f(l))l – a[f(l) – Q]

and 

a[f(l) – Q] = 0

If a>0, meaning the demand side constraint binds, then

l(d) = f^-1(Q)

In short, labor demand becomes a function of demand, when the constraint binds.

And the wage equals, when the constraint binds:

w(Q) = pf’(l) – [dw/dl]*l – a f’(l)

If the constraint doesn’t bind (ie a =0), then the wage is set according to the usual condition for monopsony. And if you remove or diminish labor monopsony which will raise wages there is no reason to think that will create unemployment

And then they might want to read what Keynes had to say about the matter. Its right in there in Chapter 19 of the GT.

Once again, conservatives thought they made point. But, yeah, not so much..

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Yes, its true conservative sorts of people. That competitive labor model you're working in, kind of sucks.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-05/supply-and-demand-does-a-poor-job-of-explaining-depressed-wages

Quote

The battle over the effects of minimum wages has been one of the most protracted and bitter fights in the history of empirical economics. Some researchers, such as David Neumark of the University of California-Irvine, continue to insist that pay floors kill jobs, and a few studies find negative effects. But a series of very careful, large-scale studies is finding that the minimum wage is as benign as its advocates have suggested.

 

Quote

The standard framework that economists traditionally used to understand job markets is just supply and demand, the theory taught to every introductory econ student. But since the 1990s, a steady drumbeat of empirical results has led to questions about that simple model’s usefulness.

 

Quote

Textbook writers and instructors should respond by changing the baseline model of labor markets that gets taught in class. Students ought to start with a model of market power, in which a few companies set wages below levels found in a competitive market unless prevented from doing so. That model is about as easy to work with as the traditional supply-and-demand setup, but matches the data much better.

Also, search and matching models are a better description of how labor markets function than the standard competitive model.

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Going cuckoo for the conservatism.

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/10/17340200/poll-republicans-trump-fbi-mueller-witch-hunt

Quote

Only 13 percent of Republicans say that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is a “legitimate investigation.” Fully three-quarters of Republicans agree with President Donald Trump that it’s a “witch hunt.”

 

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The Republican Party. It's the pro torture party.

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/10/17340906/fox-news-mccain-torture-work-songbird-general

Quote

n the annals of bad TV takes, it’s going to be hard to beat the one offered by a Fox Business guest earlier today: Torture works, and he knows tortures works because it made John McCain cough up sensitive information during the years he spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

“It worked on John [McCain],” retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney said during a Thursday appearance on the Fox Business Network. “That’s why they call him ‘Songbird John.’”

McInerney, an avid supporter of President Donald Trump, mentioned McCain in a segment about CIA director nominee Gina Haspel. Here’s why: On Wednesday, the senator vowed to vote against her nomination and recommended his colleagues do the same. (Haspel reportedly oversaw the torture of prisoners after 9/11 and the destruction of nearly 100 videotapes documenting some of the CIA’s more brutal interrogation sessions.)

 

Quote

But perhaps the network needs to apologize for having McInerney on in the first place. This is a man, after all, who falsely insisted that former President Barack Obama wasn’t an American (and that Obama was a secret Muslim).

You have to wonder how such a fuckin' nut job reaches the rank of a three star general.

[Martell Spy]

Three New Findings Show Us How a Universal Basic Income Might Work
In short? Really well.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/05/how-would-a-universal-basic-income-work-really-well-according-to-three-new-studies.html

Quote

we have little evidence of how much money is enough to make a difference and the specific conditions to implement and make it work. But here are three things we do know from recent studies of policies that give cash directly to individuals in Canada, the United States, and Colombia.

 

[Yukle]

18 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

Three New Findings Show Us How a Universal Basic Income Might Work
In short? Really well.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/05/how-would-a-universal-basic-income-work-really-well-according-to-three-new-studies.html

 

It's interesting to note that Finland opted not to expand their current program for UBI. They've still got until the end of 2018 and will release their findings for the pilot group in 2019.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43866700

[TrueMetis]

11 hours ago, Yukle said:

That's a little on the nose, isn't it? You don't have to agree with a politician, but surely that's a bit far.

I reiterate: I don't agree with his political views on most things. But I at least think he did about as well as most people would in the same circumstances.

You needn't like him, but it's not a choice between agreeing and therefore loving someone or disagreeing and therefore vilifying. I don't think McCain sat in his office, rubbing his hands maniacally and plotting the downfall of the poor. He seemed to do his best based on his views.

You attributing far more thought to the joke than I gave it. I don't care about McCain. At all. I saw a opportunity to make a Harry Potter joke and I took it.

[Martell Spy]

56 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

You attributing far more thought to the joke than I gave it. I don't care about McCain. At all. I saw a opportunity to make a Harry Potter joke and I took it.

I regret nothing!

[Zorral]

Again, in the attempt to disentangle racism and financial well-being from the dumbster voter who isn't, or at least claims, not to be the stolid, solid base -- and finding this is really difficult -- a WaPo team has been tracking some of those voters in locations which had the heaviest turn-out for dumbster:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/trump-voters/?utm_term=.98da263b431e

Sometimes nothing tracks at all, such as the section describing the economic hardships of all these people whose families had made a living from farming, who in their's and their parents' generations had moved to factory work -- and then the factories closed -- how they didn't relate to Clinton because of that, yet it was guns they kept asking her about. 

Quote

 

Bustos was keenly aware that one reason Trump had scored well was his ability, in contrast to Clinton, to relate to white, working-class voters. A week earlier, during an interview in her congressional office, she had ticked through the damage over two decades. A plant in Knox County that had gone to Mexico. Jobs lost in Stephenson County through multiple company closings or reductions. A factory that was the lifeblood of a town in Jo Daviess County that had shut down. The steel plant in Whiteside County that was long gone, but whose departure was still felt.

Bustos knew that workers were losing faith in Clinton during the campaign. “You could just feel it,” she said. “You go into these labor halls and guns would always come up. I don’t care where I [would] go, it would be like the first question. . . . Where’s Hillary stand on guns?”

 

I didn't understand that, as well as some other parts.  I mean, what did Hillary's stand or dumbster's stand on guns have to do with closed factories?  Did these voters think that if Hillary was interested in some regulation of the ease of access to obtaining guns this signaled she was in favor of closed factories?

 

[Bonnot OG]

Trump voters are a great lesson in the impact that cognitive dissonance can have in the real world.

[Zorral]

12 minutes ago, Sword of Doom said:

Trump voters are a great lesson in the impact that cognitive dissonance can have in the real world.

Yah, such as this from the report, in response to the investigation into the dumbster's connection to Russia's election meddling of 2016:

Quote

“All these accusations are wonderful, but until you prove something, basically you have accused the president of the United States of being a traitor without any proof coming out,” he said. “That’s why I said, good luck to Democrats. They better make this stick because if it’s just sour grapes, they’re in a world of hurt. The Democratic Party almost might kill itself.”

Yet, no reflection whatsoever of 8 years of dumpster himself and the rethugs howling that Obama wasn't a US citizen, was a muslim, despite mountains of primary documented proof otherwise . . . .

[Maithanet]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

I didn't understand that, as well as some other parts.  I mean, what did Hillary's stand or dumbster's stand on guns have to do with closed factories?  Did these voters think that if Hillary was interested in some regulation of the ease of access to obtaining guns this signaled she was in favor of closed factories?

I think it's that Clinton was unable to make a clear economic message that resonated with people.  There were many reasons for this: many of her policies were continuations of Obama policies, because she knew Democrats wouldn't control Congress and she didn't want to overpromise.  But probably most of all Republicans were able to hijack the narrative with distraction issues like guns and email security.  The WaPo interview shows that while Clinton had a very complex and well thought out economic platform, she failed to deliver the message of that platform to voters in a way that resonated.  All they heard about Clinton was corruption scandals and "more of the same" kinda policies.  It's no surprise that low information voters were turned off by that. 

Now, how anyone could believe that Trump is going to be championing the average American is a separate issue.  But many Americans approached the 2016 election with the mindset of "the economic status quo is unacceptable".  If that's your starting point, a Clinton vote is almost impossible.  Trump isn't much better, and thus I'm sure a lot of people were just dejected and either voted third party or stayed home.  But since many of those voters went for Obama last time, that alone is a win for Trump.