That’s not right. It’s not even wrong.
From Wikipedia:
— Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), as quoted by R. Peierls
Peierls (1960) writes of Pauli, “… a friend showed him the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli’s views. Pauli remarked sadly ‘That’s not right. It’s not even wrong'”. (Peierls R (1960). “Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, 1900-1958”. Biographical memoirs of fellows of the Royal Society 5: 174-92. Royal Society (Great Britain))
Pauli won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945: “At this stage of the development of atomic theory, Wolfgang Pauli made a decisive contribution through his discovery in 1925 of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle. The 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Pauli for this discovery.”
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Morgan,
Wholly agree.
Further, who cares if you are “getting richer faster than me”?
It is folly to measure one’s prosperity by the size of another man’s wallet.
Watch your own wallet and its growth (or decline) and do not fall into the envy of your neighbors wallet.
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The observation that a greater measurement of wealth/income inequality precedes disaster, is a textbook example of the spurious relationship. Whenever a correlation is detected, there are four distinctly different possibilities to be seriously considered:
1. a causes b
2. b causes a
3. There is an as-yet-undetected c, causing both a and b
4. Sheer coincidence
The spurious relationship is c, but Ed and James exuberantly embrace an agenda which finds a to be convenient. So they end up not doing that much thinking. The inequality must have preceded the Depression, so it cannot be pondered even for a millisecond that some other causative agent might have brought them both about.
If this were a serious conversation, I would offer that it was unchecked speculative investing, rather than unchecked capitalism per se, that caused both wealth inequality and the economic wreckage in the Great Depression. In fact it’s rather far-fetched to look at any other cause with what we just saw take place in 2008. In both cases, a “bubble” collapsed. Well, you can’t have a bubble without having an abundance of volume lacking in mass, so in both cases this “wealth” that was distributed disproportionately, was not real wealth, but funny-money. In that sense, Ed has a point, there was a toxic effect taking place that people were trading with a great abundance of “wealth.” But he’s wrong in thinking the problem was that there were so few people in possession of it; we know from our recent experience the damage is done by the phony nature of that wealth.
People are being compensated for providing no useful service, for producing no goods, for not risking any capital. What our liberals consistently fail to see is that prices, wages, rates, fees etc. are all messages. For very few people to be rewarded disproportionately, does not screw up that messaging system. For the government to act in an unconstitutional way using a non-enumerated power to “redistribute,” screws up the messaging. And, of course, people being compensated for services/production/capital risk that never actually took place, also screws up the messaging.
I would further add, we know beyond any doubt that a school of economic thought is wrong when it ducks & hides behind the “I never said A what I said was B” in such an increasingly neurotic and knee-jerk manner that it persists in this, as James K. is now doing, even when A and B are identical; he’s now saying “I never said rich people are evil and we should hurt them, what I’m saying is rich people are evil and we should hurt them.” Arguing with liberals is like giving a cat a pill, and it’s also like playing chess; you don’t actually jump the King, and the liberal will never concede he might have been mistaken, even on the tiny insignificant points. So the game is won by the equivalent of “check and mate,” which in this case is what James K. did, argue “I never said A what I said was identical to A which is different because I say so.”
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Futureboy,
You claimed about Ed not reading your posts, so please do not infect yourself with Ed’s disease
To repeat:
Investing into productive enterprises helps productivity but is not a necessity for productivity – example, you can labor by your own effort with your own hands on your own time, independent of my capital.
Do you or do you not believe you can be productive independent of my capital?
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And presumably improved productivity is achieved by fairy dust since investment can have no part of it?
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Futureboy
Remove the blinders, sir.
Whether government money is provided directly by handout
or
by subsidy
or
by artificial credit manipulated by artificial rates of interest
…the consequence is the same.
It matters little how the economy is distorted – it is the distortion that creates the recession.
Twisting a distorted economy into more distortion to fix the distortions of the past does not undistort the economy but make the boom/crack up cycle worse
Sir, it is not that different
Sadly, no.
Economic investment does NOT make an economy grow – that is your theory and it is wrong!
One merely needs to contemplate that if you invested in digging holes in the ocean with your shovel – you investing in the labor of thousands, and supplied them with your investment of shovels, that no economic growth would occur
Economic growth is a consequence of productivity
Investing into productive enterprises helps productivity but is not a necessity for productivity – example, you can labor by your own effort with your own hands on your own time, independent of my capital.
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Ed,
This betrays your economic alchemical beliefs.
Economic growth is created increases in productivity under Say’s Law.
Products buy Products
Producers sell their goods to other Producers
This fundamental understanding of the law of Economics gives light to why your Socialist prescriptions for economic recovery will fail – and equally to why the Mercantilist prescriptions will fail too.
If you want economic recovery, increase of productivity is the means.
Supply and demand are outcomes or “consequences” of productivity, not a cause.
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“The Rep’s ending the recession, by more government spending is no different then the Obama plan of increasing government spending…. your only discourse between yourself and Ed is where such spending is made…”
That would only make sense if Sarah Palin (or I) had said that the pipelines/reactors coyuld only be built with government money. Nobody did say that because the economic system in the US is different from that of the USSR where only state investment existed.
You appear to be suffering a severe diconnection from reality.
(Actually I don’t know anybody credible who says the economy can grow without somebody investing – perhaps youi could explain how this miracle is achieved?)
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Futureboy,
The Rep’s ending the recession, by more government spending is no different then the Obama plan of increasing government spending…. your only discourse between yourself and Ed is where such spending is made…
The outcome, however, would be precisely the same:
Would not have worked
Keynesian economic theory of government spending is fundamentally wrong – indeed, it is the cause of the boom/crack up business cycle because it violently mis-allocates economic resources.
It does not matter whether government spending takes the form of “pipelines” or “food stamps” – the economic resource of capital is shunted from the productive part of the society and into the parasitical part of society.
You cannot grow wealth by destroying it.
Recessions occur as a means to reallocate economic resources out of areas of the economy that could not be sustained except by artificial infusions of capital and back into areas of the economy that are productive.
Yes, that means unproductive businesses -who wholly depended upon artificial credit expansion- will close, people will get fired, inventory of unwanted goods will pile up – and all of this must be cleared at fire sale prices – this is a recession.
But attempting to mitigate the cure of poor economics, that is avoiding the recession, by repeating a further dose of poison, that being MORE government spending and artificial credit, will only deepen the boom/crackup cycle until one day, extreme amounts of government spending and effectively zero percent loans will have no effect, and the recession that follows will fall into a deep depression potentially for decades.
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Futureboy,
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This is the remark which Ed, if he is not a wholly corrupt lying Nazi did not see and to which he subsequently replied, several times:
” futureboy says:
October 12, 2011 at 8:19 am
While accepting your claim that I have not answered your question about how to get out of recession as the pinnacle of honesty to which you ever aspire Ed I must point out that it is a lie. See my post
October 10, 2011 at 8:36 am
“Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we’re going to lay more pipelines and build more nuclear plants”
Sarah Palin”
Which is why every single Obama supporter here who is not wholly corrupt has dissociated themselves from that liar – granted that is nobody but then that is what one would expect from whiolly corrupt, lying, thjieving, fascist parasites like the Demonazis .
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Gee, sorry, we missed your proposal.
Please, either show us where you laid that out, or lay it out again, so we can see what it is you think will work.
It’s probably dead in the water, since she quit that line of work even before she could get embarrassed in Iowa or New Hampshire — but we need a lighter note here.
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Flakey is, of course, lying – I have made a very specific proposal of how to get out of recession – Sarah Palin’s. It cannot be honestly claimed the Democrat leaders are unaware of what she suggested. None of them and none of their creatures here have attempted to dispute it in any way.
Ef is, of course, lying – “both Keynes and Milton Friedman agree that government intervention to stimulate the economy ” is a lie. Both said that this would be a sensible course where the government had previously run an overly deflationary policy (ie previously printed to little money). That obviously does not apply here.
James says what I say is untrue because it is “insane”. He makes no attempt to give this any factual backing and is, of course, lying.
James makes an attempt to equate the Republicans with fascism. He is, od course, lying and shows he knows nothing of either ideology. Since he has gone there I feel it approriate to point out that his own corrupt Femonazi party has been guilty of war crimes, mas murder, genocide, erhnic cleansing and the dissection of at least 1800 living people, in Kosovo, all for the purpose of promoting the racial policy of their mentor, Adolf Hitler.
Morgan, as normal, makes inteligent points the Demonazis refuse to answer with anything but invective and smoke blowing.
I still await any Obama supporter, (anywhere in the world not just the current liara) explain why Palin’s very simple promise would not have, long ago, got America out of recession if the Democrats were not opposed to doing so.
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By the way, more money in the hands of investors won’t help with the mortgage crisis, either. We know that, after the failure of the Bush Bailouts (with which Obama agreed, of course). We all had high hopes it would work. But the banks — properly, many say — demand that people who keep mortgages have jobs. Odd. No matter how high the tax cuts are, those unemployed people can’t use the tax cuts to buy a job.
Do you know what the prime rate is today?
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Hey, Morgan, when did you pick “a?” You accuse me of not picking “a.” When did I do that?
You offered an oversimplified, cliche-dependent generalization that was off the mark, and claimed it as a winning argument. Again. I called you on it.
Regret you missed it.
Of course we want to encourage investment. You either haven’t had enough coffee this year to wake up to the fact that investors are not investing no matter how much extra cash they have on hand, or you’ve turned into a troll.
With official unemployment at about 9%, giving tax cuts won’t encourage investment. We’re suffering badly on the demand side of the economy. Increasing supply won’t help, can’t help. It’s rather simple, really. Demand must be there before investors will invest to increase supply.
So, if you want to encourage investment, you’ve got to do more than provide more of the surplus of money on the investment side that is not being invested, waiting for demand to develop.
Economics involves demand as well as supply. There is not even a working hypothesis for how the “supply-side” economics you advocate would work. Laffer never wrote it up for publication. Several economists say he can’t because there are no data to show it works. It’s rational and reasonable to understand that, had the hypothesis worked at any time since Laffer got Reagan’s ear and we tried the experiment on a massive scale, Laffer would have written the paper (road to Nobel, you know). But he didn’t.
You keep acting as if there were some substance to Grover Norquist, that he’s not really a jingoist witch doctor.
I think sometimes that supply-siders are so daft that they won’t get it until someone resurrects the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and you all get hauled up and asked to name names of your associates. “Morgan, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Supply-Side Advocates?” They’ll revive the now-oddly-aptly-named “Red Channels” publication, checking to see if you’ve ever been to a Tea Party meeting or written a letter to an editor (oh, the internet archives will be gold for them). The FBI will search every pumpkin in your pumpkin patch. You’ll protest, “But Rep. HUAC, at long last, have you no decency?” But it will fall on deaf ears, again.
Under our Constitution, there is no penalty for being wrong on policy. There’s no penalty for getting hundreds or thousands of others to follow the wrong policy into Hornswoggle Gulch. That’s why Ayn Rand was atheist — there’s no way to dissuade her from the wrong, disastrous economic path if there’s not even God watching to weigh her leading the parade to disaster, in the afterlife.
I wish conservatives had souls, and would pay attention to Nobel Memorial Prizes in economics. Several times in the past two decades those awards have gone to economists who argue, contrary to Adam Smith, that people don’t always invest rationally. The truth is, people get scared to invest, and they don’t invest at all. When that happens, increasing the supply of investment money doesn’t help. Krugman keeps pointing out that the sign of the need for more investment money is rising interest rates. Conservatives seem congenitally incapable of reading the newspaper.
Do you know what the prime rate is today, Morgan? If it’s less than 5%, your hypothesis that tax cuts for the rich will work, is wrong, if you rely on Milton Friedman’s, Freidrich von Hayek’s, or Ludwig von Mises’s free market economics theory. In Ronald Reagan’s terms, if the prime rate is less than 5%, your argument is intellectually bankrupt. I’d add that it’s morally bankrupt, too — Brother’s Keeper and Widows-and-Orphans clauses.
Do you know what the prime rate is today?
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So in other words, leftists can claim a “legitimate” victory if, and only if, the other side bears all of the burden for proving things.
Meanwhile, I seem to have beaten Mr. “Got a Claim?” at his own game here. I tell ya, if it didn’t cost us so many trillions of dollars in red ink, it would almost be adorable the way the modern leftists go through these motions of rational, principled, fact-based discussions on things. Socrates would say “just what do these people think they’re trying to pull here?”
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To quote:
“How about you supply something solid to discredit what futureboy said, in a substantial way, rather than coming up with artificial rules about why it should be discarded before it’s seriously considered?”
How about you two come up with something solid to prove what you’re both trying to say in a substantial way rather then engaging in mealy mouthed chicken sh– dickless wonder bullsh–?
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Morgan writes:
Let’s see. Investing is something we want to:
a. Encourage
b. Discourage
My answer is a. Pretty simple. Defense complete.
No sh– sherlock. Here’s the problem. You and your side have no damn clue what “encouraging investing” actually entails. Because it sure as hell isn’t “lowering taxes on the rich and cutting government spending” because that’s never, not once, encouraged investment.
Because if your side knew how to encourage investments, the years 2001 to the present wouldn’t be the United State’s version of Japan’s Lost Decade.
The infrastructure in this country is falling apart. Does your side want to fix it? No, of course not. So the infrastructure gets worse and worse and companies will continue running to other countries where the country in question isn’t falling apart because the government is being blocked by a bunch of know-nothing’s and do-nothing ideologues.
The people have less and less money to spend because the vast majority of the money is going to the smallest minority group in the country (i.e. the ridiculously rich) so companies have no reason to invest here because no one is able to buy anything here.
Most companies need an educated workforce but your party wants to tear the public school system apart depriving this country of its greatest asset…its educated populace. Which means companies will invest elsewhere where they still value education.
You are a simple minded buffoon being fooled by even more simple minded buffoons, Morgan. And the proof of that buffoonery? You accuse Ed of making stuff up when your bedbuddy Futureboy is the one that conjured the claim that Obama is a fascist and that the Democrats want to suppress the economic recovery even though that would be political suicide for them.
And all you and Futureboy are doing is “You’re wrong” while making no attempt to prove we are wrong or that you’re right.
Sorry..in a debate the person making the claim has to prove they are right…
And futureboy simply can’t back up what he says. Which is why he and you keep on doing this bullsh– “You haven’t proven us wrong” nonsense.
Sorry, that’s not how debate works. Try again.
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“How about you supply something solid to discredit what futureboy said, in a substantial way, rather than coming up with artificial rules about why it should be discarded before it’s seriously considered?”
I have, he keeps maintaining that Democrats know how to stop the recession. It a claimed fact he says over and over again. I think it straight up discredits the idea by asking him to substantiate the statement as fact. Not once have you or Futureboy have tried to do so, you mince around the idea or pick on little things like I said Government instead of a Democrat in charge of the Government. It simply all goes to show the weakness of your case.
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Yes, when you make up crap it’s easy to win.
When did I pick b., Ed? Date? Time?
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But, Morgan, silly and shallow answers work equally well anywhere. You said:
Let’s see, reducing unemployment to 5% is something we want to
a. Encourage
b. Discourage.
Your answer remains “b.” Why?
Saving America’s economy is something we want to
a. Encourage
b. Discourage
Most of us choose “a.” but you choose “b.” Again, why?
Defense complete. Tea Party loses.
Maybe we should just declare victory in Afghanistan and come home, too, eh?
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Oh please try defending rich paying a lower tax rate then you do, Morgan…
Oh, this is so easy.
Preferential treatment of investment income…
Let’s see. Investing is something we want to:
a. Encourage
b. Discourage
My answer is a. Pretty simple. Defense complete.
Not only has your challenge been answered, but you’ve helped to support exactly what I was saying. Another piece of evidence to bolster the “liberals don’t seem to want people to be prosperous” theory.
What if you could snap your fingers, and half of the investors in this country suddenly decided not to invest? What would happen to your economy then?
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Oh please try defending rich paying a lower tax rate then you do, Morgan:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-12/one-fourth-of-millionaires-may-break-buffett-rule-study-says.html
About 25 percent of millionaires in the U.S. pay federal taxes at lower effective rates than a significant portion of middle-income taxpayers, according to a legislative analysis.
Preferential treatment of investment income and the reduced impact of payroll taxes on high earners lets about 94,500 millionaires pay taxes at a lower rate than 10.4 million “moderate-income taxpayers,” representing about 10 percent of those making less than $100,000 a year, according to the report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service dated Oct. 7.
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I’ll describe the conservative plan in a neat, object-oriented way, with goals, observations and plans of attack. But as soon as it deviates from what the liberals want to do, I’ll stop.
1. Start with the objective that we want people to be prosperous.
STOP.
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It’s not like lowering taxes on the rich and businesses is going to fix the economy, child. We already have the lowest taxes in 60 years. And 2/3rds of corporations pay no federal income taxes. The corporations and the rich are sitting on mountains of cash and not creating jobs. Giving them more money is not going to change that situation. We tried your party’s solution for the last 30 years, Morgan and futureboy, and the result is the poor are getting poorer, the middle class is stagnant if not shrinking, and the rich are getting ever richer. For near 40 years the poor and the middle class were seeing their income grow at a higher percentage then the rich…well over 100% growth. Since 1979 the rich have seen their incomes grow from 100+% to near 400%. The poor and the middle class? They’ve seen their incomes either shrink about 5% on the low end or grow at best 10% on the high end. But there you sit thinking the rich should get all the money, stupidly not realize that money they’re getting….is coming out of your pocket.
It is your party that doesn’t have the solutions…it is your party that is simply the party of no..the party of suppressing the economy, the party of killing the middle class.
The party of fascism.
For you to be right the economy would have to have had been catastrophic from 1947-1979…you know..when taxes on the rich were around the 90% range.
Except it wasn’t.
And you can spin whatever you want but we both know damn well you will come up with absolutely no facts to prove me wrong.
And since Futureboy wants to play that game…since you will come up with no facts that by itself proves me right.
And all because you two want to stupidly pretend that what the government taxes from the rich in taxes doesn’t somehow end up back in the economy.
Want to fix the economy? Then put the money in the hands of the poor and the middle class….and not the rich.
Oh and the simple proof that we’re right, Futureboy, is this. We got out of the Great Depression not by cutting government spending and cutting taxes on the rich..we got out of the Great Depression by massive government spending. Because simply put, child, when the people aren’t spending and when the corporations aren’t spending, the government is the only thing left.
It’s called “priming the pump.”
But since you two want to pretend you have the solutions to fix the economy…lay them out. And prove that they’ll work because if you say “cut taxes on the rich” or “cut regulations” all we have to do to prove you wrong is say the words “2001-2009.”
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Again, Morgan and futureboy, the claim that the Democrats are intentionally suppressing the economy is insane. You’re claiming that they’re doing something that will intentionally make them LESS likely to win reelection.
But suppressing the economy and blaming it on the Democrats, since they’re the ones that hold the White House, would be, from the Republican standpoint, a good idea.
If you want to claim that the Republicans are oh so for restoring the economy…then what are their solutions? What’s their plan?
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Actually, the person who changed the argument was you, when you changed it from the democrat party to the government.
You seem to be jumping through hoops to find technical flaws in the arguments presented, which on further inspection, turn out not to hold up because you failed to discern what you were “grading” when you found the false-flaw. It’s almost like you went through a bad experience with one of your professors and have this lusting for projecting it on to others.
How about you supply something solid to discredit what futureboy said, in a substantial way, rather than coming up with artificial rules about why it should be discarded before it’s seriously considered?
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So the argument has changed and he quietly dropped the suppression part, because it the weakest part of it, but again he say it is fact that they know how to fix the economy but refuse to do so. Well show me this fact, prove to me this fact. I seen no evidence for this at all so far.
You go on about what liberal like to do, what you think they think like, but no nowhere do either of you actually prove this basic statement is a fact like he still claims.
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Futureboy at 10/12, 6:27am:
However by doing so he effectively acknowledges that he knows there can be no reasoned or honest dispute of the fact that the “Democrat” party knows perfectly well how to get out of recession and into fast growth but prefer to continue their current thieving parasitism.
You’ve lost track of the argument, Flakey. So your analogy does fail, you just don’t know it. I’m sure we can find some evidence that government has, by its nature, failed here & there to do what it could to revive the economy, but that would be OT.
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“If only the analogy applied. You see, we don’t have any evidence, whatsoever, to even suggest there is a teapot on the opposite side of the sun.”
Show me the evidence that the Government “knows” how to fix the economy and is suppressing it. Until that time the analogy stands.
Even if I agree with you about trends of behaviour as you argue in your post you still fail to address this basic point.
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Ed has the OTHER non-answer, the Nixon answer: “I shall not dignify that with a response.”
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Certainly it is clear from responses here that they have no [answer to] the accusation that they know how to end recession and deliberately choose otherwise.
So Flakey has one answer…the non-answer…”your accusation is to be discarded before I even have a chance to answer it because it is non-falsifiable.” He then proceeds to re-explain the problems with non-falsifiability as if we had not just now been examining that very thing. Like a teapot orbiting the sun exactly 180 degrees from Earth.
If only the analogy applied. You see, we don’t have any evidence, whatsoever, to even suggest there is a teapot on the opposite side of the sun. I suppose you could also say we haven’t much evidence to indicate liberals know what they’re doing…but as far as their being ideologically opposed to a strong economy, we have that one-liner question I posed a little earlier. Do we want people to be wealthy. There is a very strong track record to suggest the left-wing answer to this is toward the negative. We had that “decade of greed” in which a lot of people became wealthier, and it isn’t too difficult to infer from the opinions offered that the liberal reaction to this particular era is not a positive one. It’s already been opined in this particular thread that things were much better before that, although there was economic misery all around and not too many wealthy people.
If we have a “moderate” liberal who does want people to be wealthier, just retains some concerns about all or most of the people enjoying the prosperity and not just a tiny few among us…and that moderate-liberal lives through a time where the increasing prosperity is so enjoyed by only a tiny few, while everyone else suffers…I would expect his reaction to such an era to have a distinct overtone of “nice job but.” He would acknowledge at least some parts of the policies at work, to have had a beneficial effect. He wouldn’t deplore that era as some kind of pinnacle of evil, some model of what not to do, the way our “real” liberals do. This is a definable indication, and more than merely suggestive evidence, that modern liberals deplore individual achievement and they deplore the accumulation of individual wealth. There is also a pattern to clearly indicate this. It is interrupted, in cases like Leonardo DiCaprio and Roseanne Barr and Warren Buffett…but the exceptions prove the rule, since it seems whenever liberals approve of (or fail to condemn) an individual managing to snag a disproportionate share of wealth, when you inspect such isolated situations a little while you find that particular individual has done something to advance their agenda. So the statistical trend is unmistakable: Modern liberals are behaving exactly as if individuals may be granted a soft sort of “license” to make money & take it home, on the condition that those individuals must do something first to help the cause; this support for the liberal cause is treated like some Pigovian income tax. This trend is most durable. If the support has been forthcoming, no liberals will deplore this generation of individual wealth, and if it has not been, the scolding will be swift, vituperative, and reliable as a sunrise.
Your teapot-analogy fails, Flakey.
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That’s a total hoax. No answer is appropriate to tell you how stupid AND obnoxious such a question is. Still waiting, by the way, for you to explain why you’re not telling the truth about that asteroid.
Theory on making the depression less damaging is quite clear — both Keynes and Milton Friedman agree that government intervention to stimulate the economy and create jobs is the short term answer.
Of course, Republicans made it clear they did not want to do that and wanted tax cuts instead. Sadly, Obama caved — took half a stimulus but gave full tax cuts.
One thing we can say for certain is that tax cuts have failed miserably to stimulate the economy since 2001, and there is not a shred of evidence continuing current tax cuts will do anything but hurt people and damage the nation.
Other than that, no, I don’t know what the magic solution is, other than a Satanic Rapture that would take the Tea Party Republicans and their allies out of the picture, leaving us to do what is right and necessary to save the nation.
Is that what Futureboy asks? Would Morgan agree? We could accomplish much good simply making that clear and campaigning to change the Republican Kill America First policies, if they would agree to Futureboy’s proposal, or what appears to be his proposal.
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Again future boy you are avoiding the point. How can some one even begin to prove something like that. It is the tea pot in space argument. How can you disprove there a tea pot orbiting the sun 180 degrees from the orbit of the Earth.
It is easy to make the claim, because you know that it is unanswerable. Any attempt to answer you can wave off as opinion, presumptions, and probabilities, and not proof as you demand.
So if you want to be regarded seriously show us the evidence that your question is a true one. Show us the evidence you have that the Democrats are holding back the solution.
The other part that has me querulous though is if the Democrats know this information why are the republicans not blasting this, 24/7, all over the airwaves?
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Good points Morgan.
I personaly would like to be rich and I suspect most people do. Certainly at one time that is what socialists did, I believe sincerely, say they wanted. No political philosopher, not even Adam Smith, was more supportive of economic expansion as Marx – who saw it as changing society. At that time socialists & the left could hionestly claim, by intent if not achievemnt, to support progress and thus be “Progressive”. Nowadays, with the “greens” admitted as part of the “left” they have largely given up on growing economies and can no longer honestly claim to be “progressive”. I think this is largely due to a generation who are ignorant of history and know only that the USSR failed economically and so “leftists” must endorse economic failure.
Certainly it is clear from responses here that they have no answerto the accusation that they know how to end recession and deliberately choose otherwise.
Regarding falsifiability – my view is that there probably is no theory which is entirely unfalsifiable. Even the multiverse theory has some support from the 2 slit experiment and some abstruse astronomical stuff. The reality is merely that supporters of “unfalsifiable” theories refuse to accept any evidence they don’t like. This applies to creationists refusing to look at DNA and to “Democrats” refusing to acknowledge that an unemployment rate above 8% falsifies Obama’s claim that, if we spent those trillions, it would go under 8%.
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With regard to these phrases like “get out of the recession” and “improve the economy,” the suggestion from awhile ago that things were just wonderful prior to 1980 is a trifle unsettling, and helps to substantiate what I’ve been saying for awhile, that we have a fundamental disagreement on the goal. Maybe it’s past high time someone just came out and jotted down the question:
Do we want people to be wealthy?
Another thing worth pointing out is that, with a quick glance through the search engines, one will see futureboy is completely correct in further defining the Pauli quote referenced in the title of this post, as an indictment against unfalsifiability. And this goes to the heart of something else I’ve been saying for awhile: Progessive policies, particularly the ones that are applied to our nation’s economy, fit this. Obama made it all look falsifiable and therefore legitimate, when He said pass this stimulus and we’ll keep unemployment under eight percent. It looked falsifiable, but now we know it never was, since unemployment has found a natural home in the Obama era at something just north of nine. If we were dealing with a falsifiable model, we would then say, regardless of ideological prejudices, “Okay we gave that a fair shot and it didn’t work.”
So the Pauli quote actually applies, best of all, to economic policies from the left. It’s always Bush’s fault. If disaster follows the implementation of leftist policies, well shoot, it was gonna do that anyway, and we should be glad we did it or things would be even worse. In my lifetime, this has happened three or four times now. Aw gee, our policies didn’t produce this fustercluck, they tapered down the disastrous effects of what those other guys did.
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While accepting your claim that I have not answered your question about how to get out of recession as the pinnacle of honesty to which you ever aspire Ed I must point out that it is a lie. See my post
October 10, 2011 at 8:36 am
“Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we’re going to lay more pipelines and build more nuclear plants”
Sarah Palin
Obviously every single “Democrast” supporter who is not a wholly corrupt lyinmg faascist parasite and wishes it known that Ed does not represent him will wssociate themselves from him publicly – over to you James, lets see whether you are or aren’t.
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Futureboy demonstrates once again why those who study and master an issue will forever command the dilettantes who claim to have knowledge, but whose vessels are empty.
Cat got your fingers, Futureboy? Why don’t you tell what you claim to know?
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James defends the Democrat wish to make half the economy state spending by saying we need “some taxes, at least”. The difference and therfore the inherent dishonestyof making such a claim, is obvious.
Ed’s response to my post can’t be called an answer because it makes not attempt to answer the question made.
However by doing so he effectively acknowledges that he knows there can be no reasoned or honest dispute of the fact that the “Democrat” party knows perfectly well how to get out of recession and into fast growth but prefer to continue their current thieving parasitism. He therby also acknowledges that his party and since he supports it, heimself, are wholly and completely corrupt and dishonest.
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But then you supported all the efforts to take away the opportunities to prosper for the all but the high-income groups who benefited from the wealth transfer programs of the past decade plus. Sometimes I think you get close to making sense, Morgan, then I realize you’re looking through the telescope backwards and through a mirror.
If you think Congressional gridlock a la Boehner and Teabaggers is the solution, then your solution of getting rid of the current ticket would make sense. Gridlock is the problem, though, not the solution. Government that doesn’t work is never the solution, especially in our mixed economy that depends on free-enterprise protecting regulation to make it work for prosperity at the most basic levels.
I don’t think anyone here has called only for taxing the rich, nor has anyone called for confiscatory tax schemes on anyone. You, however, have called for economic programs that make it quite probable government will fail at basic levels.
How can you define failure as success? Looking Glass world.
Fair taxes worked in the past, and they will work in the future. In an economy that bestows astonishing largesse on people, it is fair to ask those beneficiaries to shoulder a burden proportionately larger on those with the most goods, especially when the government policies gave them the goods. Welfare for the rich only is unfair, and ultimately unsustainable.
Safety net programs for those crunched by economic changes may be a high price, but they are the price for civilization these days. Any rational person looking at the world economy would notice that we must have governmental programs that encourage the creation of jobs for younger people joining the workforce, those on whom we must count to support the financing of government with their taxes over the ensuing 40 years or so of their productive worklife. Otherwise we become like the Palestinian refugee camps, or the Tunisian municipal governments.
Immediate woes of our economy demand governmental intervention to create stimulus, coupled with some long-term reforms. Manufacturing will not come back without government aid you appear reluctant to provide, but our economy cannot survive without a healthy manufacturing sector. While government should not endeavor to pick the ultimate winners in economic races, anyone could learn from the Japanese example that even when government does it wrong by designating certain companies to be winners, with enough competitive rules to keep things relatively fair, that will at least boost the industry of those companies (Honda and Nissan were not supposed to be big car companies; but there was not enough demand for the engines Honda produced, and so Honda created new products to use the engineering acumen and industrial output, putting Honda successfully and competitively into everything from lawnmowers to autos). What’s wrong with a little stronger nationalistic bent on regulation? Sweatshops and child labor are bad stuff; it does our economy little good in the long run to convert jobs in the U.S. into sweatshop/child labor jobs in Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Honduras or China, as policy. If you agree that government shouldn’t pick winners, why do you advocate policies that hobble American workers, thereby picking foreign manufacturers as the winners?
Economic success in the modern world requires strong government support for its people to be competitive, and that requires some taxes, at least. Oliver Wendell Holmes was right. What do you have against civilization?
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James K.,
I am indebted to you for helping to prove my point.
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To quote:
Alternately he may have some evidence that none of the figures of crime, pregnancy etc are in any way influenced by the number of Mexican immigrants. Another alternative is that mere facts are of no interest to sucg “Democrats”.
You have any evidence that those figures of crime, pregnancy, etc are because of Mexican immigrants?
Or are you going to prove that you have no interest in facts?
Child, I’m a former Republican. I know the playbook at least as good as you do.
Sorry, you don’t get to whine about facts when you have yet to produce any. And then there is the fact that you show a deliberate distortion of facts from the start. You know…like when you claimed Obama was a fascist?
Because surely a person of intelligence, as you claim to be, would understand that fascism was a product of right wing extremism.
As I said…I’m a former Republican. I know the Republican play book and I have absolutely no problem in using it to bash you, Morgan and whoever else over and over and over again. Play time is over, time for you to run home to mother whining like a little ***** because your so called “tactics” don’t work here.
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To quote:
Despite all the previous verbiage it seems that indeed no “Democrst” can dispute, precisely and with evidence, that their thieving party leaders know perfectly well how to end recession and are not deliberastely refusing to do so.
You mean besides the same policies that got us out of the Great Depression with a bit of tweaking? Because it sure as sh– wasn’t austerity that did so.
Tell me, child, can you prove, precisely and with evidence, that your thieving party leaders know how to end the recession and are not deliberately refusing to do so?
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So, please tell us — how can we end the current recession? Why are you so shy about telling us how?
If you’re asking me, I’ll take the last one first: I’d strongly prefer to live in an economy that is “broken” rather than one that’s fixed according to the way progressives want things fixed. Most people would agree with that, after observing first-hand that James K. thinks things were working so much better prior to 1980. In fact, I hope that’s the slogan for next year’s campaigning: “Vote democrat, we need to get things back to the way they were before 1980.” Not sure who’d vote for that. I suppose there are more people around who were born after 1980…
Regarding the first question, well obviously we’re going to need two answers, one for democrats and one for real people. As I’ve said many times before, if we define a strong economy as one in which people can prosper, we’re going to have to say it’s perfectly okay for people to prosper and it’s not the role of government to come take their prosperity away. Good news is, to get to that crucial first step, we only need two more people to lose their jobs: Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Now, how do we fix the economy to make democrats/liberals/progressives happy? I’ve explained that too. It applies particularly well here.
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So, please tell us — how can we end the current recession? Why are you so shy about telling us how?
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Futureboy I would like you to dispute precisely and with evidence, that the Repbulican thieving party leaders know perfectly well how Aliens will destroy the earth in 2012 and are deliberately refusing to stop them doing so.
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Well, well.
Despite all the previous verbiage it seems that indeed no “Democrst” can dispute, precisely and with evidence, that their thieving party leaders know perfectly well how to end recession and are not deliberastely refusing to do so.
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Just to answer the stupid accusation that we want to “sieze all the wealth” I reply with Ms. Warren’s quote:
If you’re quoting me, the quote’s not accurate.
There is no need to have accusations flying back & forth about “You’re saying I said A when all I said was B.” It isn’t that complicated of a disagreement. One side says when the market determines some individuals should end up with a vastly greater abundance of personal property than other individuals, government has a role to play in evening this out, should enough people get ticked about it, even though it’s not an enumerated power in our Constitution. The other side says the market should have the final say on that, and whoever wants to get mad about it can get just as mad as they wanna get.
And as is always the case, the side that wants to invent a brand-new enumerated power that doesn’t exist, lacks the confidence to defend its own statements without a whole lot of knee-jerk “I never said A what I said was B” defense, and switching the subject to who’s a better person than who. They can’t actually discuss anything.
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“Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we’re going to lay more pipelines and build more nuclear plants”
Sarah Palin
This is just one of a number of options, all involving reducing government parasitism.
Perhaps Ed will be the very first “Democrast” to explain precisely why that woyuldn’t have worked had they not won the last election. Several have said they don’t want it but nobody, so far, has said it wouldn’t have worked.
I note you also deny that Mexican immigration has had any negative effect on employment or crime or pregnancy or indeed anything. I won’t argue the point as it indictates your level of connection to planet Earth. Any “Democrat” with a slightly greater connection, assuming such exist, will surely want to point out how foolish you are.
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Really? How can we get out of the recession — and, since political wisdom and history teach us that recessions tend to de-elect incumbents, can you tell use, first, how can we get out of this recession, and second, why any incumbent would not do that?
Empty barrel indeed. You who profess “not to be” Republican, “not to be” anti-American, and “know-it-all.” (See? I can use scare quotes, too!)
Seriously. If you have the answers, lay out the plan. Provide some evidence other than “everyone knows” (especially since that’s rarely accurate; Kin Hubbard said, what gets us into trouble isn’t what we don’t know, but what we know that ain’t so).
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Crime is down in Texas border cities, significantly greater than any drops elsewhere in Texas. Teenage pregnancies in Texas tend to increase the farther north of the border you go.
Are you saying that Texans corrupt immigrants? That would support the conclusions of several studies that show that immigrant groups take years to adjust to the “morality” of the United States, sometimes as much as a generation. Until that milestone is reached, crime and violence are much lower among immigrant groups than among people born in the country.
Again, you’d profit from some time spent actually studying the issue instead of repeating old Rush Limbaugh, probably-intoxicant-induced rants, or the squallings of the Tea Party, which appear mostly to be based on watching too much TV.
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“Empty barrels make the most noise” – and in that vein I would ask James if he is being so politically incorrect as to say that it is better not to be located near the Mexican bnorder. Alternately he may have some evidence that none of the figures of crime, pregnancy etc are in any way influenced by the number of Mexican immigrants. Another alternative is that mere facts are of no interest to sucg “Democrats”.
I note, however, that in all their replies neither have made any attempt to dispute that the “Democrats” do know how to get out of recession but for purely ideological reasons, refuse to use them.
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That’s four-in-a-row from Ed, followed by three-in-a-row from James.
We’d better concede this fight, futureboy. They’ve really beaten us good this time.
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Just to answer the stupid accusation that we want to “sieze all the wealth” I reply with Ms. Warren’s quote:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you!
But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea — God bless. Keep a big hunk of it.
But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
That and the fact that up until 1980 the four lower tax quintiles (meaning everyone but the rich) were seeing their share of the wealth increase faster then the top quintile (i.e. the rich) but since 1980 the rich have seen their share of the wealth increase at 100+% with the richest 1% seeing their wealth increase at a near 300% level while the rest of us have stagnated or seen our share of the wealth decrease.
Sorry, child, it is the rich and your party that has been “seizing the wealth.” We want our money back now. We aren’t trying to steal their money..they’ve succeeding in stealing our money. They are the thieves, child.
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Lets see which state you and Morgan would rather live in.
Would you rather live in a state that had these stats:
Unemployment: 8.4%
Poverty rate: 15.8%
Uninsured (medical) rate: 27.1%
8th graders at or above average the NAEP test for math: 78%
8th graders at or above average the NAEP test for reading: 73%
Violent crime rate: 511 per 100,000 people
Murder rate: 5.4 per 100,000 people
Divorce rate: 5.4 per 1,000
Teen pregnancy: 88 per 1,000
Or would you rather live in this state:
Unemployment: 7.6%
Poverty rate: 10%
Uninsured (medical) rate: 5.3%
8th graders at or above average the NAEP test for math: 85%
8th graders at or above average the NAEP test for reading: 83%
Violent crime rate: 432 per 100,000 people
Murder rate: 2.6 per 100,000 people
Divorce rate: 1.8 per 1,000
Teen pregnancy: 49 per 1,000
So which one would you and Morgan prefer to live in?
Oh and just to answer your curiosity. The first state is Texas. The second state is Massachusetts. Or as your party likes to call it “Taxachusetts”
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To quote:
Since you blame everything in Texas on Republicans you clearly blame the fact that 1/4 of all the jobs created in the USA are in Texas on them too.
Did Texas create 1/4 of the jobs? Yeah more or less.
Most of those jobs are low wage no benefit jobs. So don’t go crowing there too much.
Curious isn’t it that every time your party crows about Rick Perry’s supposed job creation record you all conveniently ignore that fact. 80% suck to 20% good is not something to be proud of.
But then your side also conveniently ignores the fact that George W Bush had the worst job creation rate of any President in at least the last 100 years. The one and only President who, during his term(s) in offce, watched more jobs disappear in the United States then were created.
But please continue cheering on a party that wants to give the rich another round of tax cuts while raising the taxes that you, me, Ed, Morgan, and every other middle class and poor person pays. Oh and lets not forget your party’s abject desire to make damn sure that no company in this country pays any federal taxes whatsoever despite the fact that every US company uses resources provided by the US government in order to exist.
~~~~~
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/201302/20110821/taxes-payroll-tax-payroll-tax-reduction-republicans-democrats-boehner-obama-tea-party.htm
Tea Party-dominated Congressional Republicans have made a name for themselves by opposing taxes, but it turns out the caucus does favor increasing a tax that takes a disproportionate amount of income from workers and the poor — a payroll tax increase that President Barack Obama opposes
Most Congressional Republicans stridently opposed increasing taxes in Washington’s last two battles — over the federal budget in April and the U.S. debt ceiling in August. Further, the opposition to taxes by Tea Party faction members was even more adamant: Tea Party members opposed even “revenue increases” — changes to the tax code that would have eliminated certain tax loop holes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
But don’t worry, I’m not holding my breath on you figuring out that your party is acting directly against your own interests.
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Fascinating that my post of Pauli’s quote provokes so much ire from the conservative side. It’s almost as if they see themselves being targeted by Pauli, who was referring to a paper in physics.
What do they know about their being wrong that I have missed?
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And heaven knows, America needs more lawn mowers, roofers, and burger flippers.
But that was then. With teacher layoffs alone, Texas is sacrificing its nation-leading anemic job-making machine so that Gov. Perry can claim a balanced budget, in order to out point Herman Cain in the ScroogeStakes.
Oh, I exaggerate. But only slightly, and probably against the favor of the truth.
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Your accusations that I wish to seize all wealth are accurate only so far as you are Marie Antoinette.
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I got your point perfectly James – and merely pointed oput you were lying, something you have now admitted.
Perhaps you will now admit that your claim that your socialist pal Mussolini, being on the left, couldn’t possibly have been a fascist, once again, represents the dissociation between “Democrats” and honesty.
Since you blame everything in Texas on Republicans you clearly blame the fact that 1/4 of all the jobs created in the USA are in Texas on them too.
As I say – “Democrat” politicians know perfectly well how to create jobs – they just don’t want to unless they are more jobs as political parasites, like their own.
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Wow, did my point go sailing right over your pointed head, futureboy.
The point I was making is that it is the Republicans who are trying their damndest to deepen and extend the recession.
As for “fascist” sorry dimwit…to be a fascist you have to be on the right wing side of the spectrum. That would make you and your party far closer to fascists then Obama and the rest of the Democrats.
Don’t play games you simply don’t have the intelligence to win, little boy.
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Now what party was it that fought tooth and nail to preserve the tax breaks that US companies get for shipping jobs overseas?
Oh wait…that’s right…the Republicans.
What party was that proposed taking $150 million dollars from Texas’ schools in order to give Big Oil a tax break?
Oh wait..that’s right…the Republicans.
What party was it that cut the budget to Texas’ firefighters by more then half while Texas is facing the worst wildfires in decades?
Oh wait..that’s right…the Republicans.
What party is bound and determined to keep the economy in the dumps in the belief that it will hand them the entirety of Congress and the White House next year?
Oh wait…that’s right..the Republicans.
Sorry, futureboy, why would Obama and the Democrats want the recession to continue? That only lessens their chances of holding on to power next year. And as for “powergrabs” gee..what do you think your party is doing in trying to rewrite election laws in order to make sure that your party has a better chance of winning?
You and your little bedmate there Morgan are out of your heads delusional. And you’re borderline insane if you think the Republicans 1: serve your interests and 2: give a damn whether you live or die.
If you want to be a blind and stupid slave to the people that your own party is selling you out to..go right ahead. But quit trying to destroy the country in the process.
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James you know perfectly well that Obama is a “Democrat”. Your claim to believe he is a Republican merely representsc the very closest to honest thec “Democrats” get. Why a disgusting, corrupt lying lot of fascist racist child rapist organleggers they all are.
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See, in the 1930s democrats did not achieve enough of a monopoly on government power to prevent their own, generations later, from looking back on it and saying “look at all the wreckage those Republicans caused.” Nothing is ever their fault. If they didn’t own the problem in the 1930s, they never will.
You need to be very careful about crediting Ed with honesty. He’s not completely ignorant about the Wagner Act of 1935, he’s just leaving it unmentioned because it suits the point he’s trying to make: Progressive policies work all of the time, except when they don’t, which is only because the opposition had not been sufficiently silenced. To save the economy, we have to destroy it — nobody can keep their own money, unless mob-rule says, through the government, that the amount of money that person is keeping is sufficiently modest as to not cause offense.
It’s a completely different world. In mine, when you start legislating how much money people are allowed to keep, and you naturally have to taper that amount downward whenever the situation becomes incrementally bleaker…that’s what I call destroying an economy. In Ed’s world, that’s how you save it. It’s just like those environmentalist caricatures of hunters saying “we have to save the herd by thinning it,” with the exception that the hunters make some kind of logical sense when they say that.
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I’m saying it boldly and clearly: Tax cuts failed to save the economy in all of those cases, and failed to either lessen the depression or create jobs.
Got a whit of evidence to support your case? No, of course not — not in the realm of reality.
You appear to be advocating that we repeat the errors of 1936, when the Republicans campaigned against Roosevelt arguing that the Depression was over, and that government programs to put the economy back on its feet were too costly and must be cut. Sadly, Roosevelt agreed to reduce federal spending — and our economy spiraled right back into depression.
2011 is a lot more like 1936 than anyone wishes. We can’t afford to cut spending and cut government now. History tells us that such policies benefit the Joe Stalins and Osama bin Ladens of the world, but not Americans.
When do you guys stand up for America for a change, instead of trying to tear it down? You claim to like capitalism, but only when it hurts workers. That’s not capitalism, it’s serfdom. We need a new edition of Hayek: The Crocodile Tear Capitalist’s Road to Serfdom.
Well, who is advocating a jobs program? Not Republicans. Who advocates spending more on education to set the nation right? Not Republicans — they’ve been fighting to kill education in Wisconsin, Texas, South Carolina, California and other places. Who advocates we need strong industries in alternative energy sources, other than coal and oil? Not Republicans.
You’re projecting, futureboy, and it’s ugly. What gives you the gall to call yours self “futureboy” when you advocate taking us back to the Czarist past?
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You two couldn’t name a single thing the Republicans have done in the last 2 years to try and end the recession if you tried.
Oh wait…there was that proposal to lift restrictions on the importation of exotic snakes.
And of course there was the proposal to raise taxes on the poor and the middle class by raising the payroll tax. Curious that you two have such objections to raising taxes on the rich when they have all the money but you have no apparent objection at all to your own party proposing to raise your own taxes.
Oh yes….those would sure end the recession.
As for your stupid belief that cutting taxes improves the economy then have fun explaining how come the economy sucks so much when taxes are at their lowest point in 60 years. Then you can have fun explaining why the economy did so much better before Bush 2.0 lowered taxes on the rich.
Oh and then you can explain how the economy of the United States also did better when taxes on the rich were at 90+%.
For the near 40 years that we listened to the Republican delusion that is “Cut taxes on the rich and everyone will benefit” the only ones getting ahead are the rich. The rest of us? We’ve been barely staying afloat when before 1980 the greatest percentage gains to wealth was not to the rich…but to the poor and middle class. Since then? The rich have seen their wealth increase nearly 300% while ours as either flatlined or decreased.
Those are facts. Have fun choking
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To quote:
Next he will be telling us some other outrageous lie like saying Obama nad his party aren’t deliberately deepning recession and don’t know they could get out of it in days if they weren’t lying thieving power hungry parasites.
I didn’t know Obama was a republican.
Apparently, child, the outrageous liar is you and Morgan.
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Ed is, of course, representing the very highest stamdard of honesty to which most “Democrats” aspire in calaiming he did not say that cutting taxes for the rish was tried “in the U.S. in 1929-1941”. If not tried he is obviously lying to say it failed.
Next he will be telling us some other outrageous lie like saying Obama nad his party aren’t deliberately deepning recession and don’t know they could get out of it in days if they weren’t lying thieving power hungry parasites.
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There you go again, inventing a response that wasn’t there, and then blaming it on others. Do conservatives ever have a Come-to-the-deity-of-their-choice meeting with the man in the mirror, to accept responsibility for what they say and do?
Actually, that’s the point. Try a thousand times, we’re going to screw up a thousand times; so the question isn’t whether or not we become perfect, it’s one of did we try as hard as we could’ve, did we prioritize things properly, and were we honest with ourselves about the efforts we’ve made.
Regarding the “There you go again”: I’ve made the observation before that when liberals indulge in this knee-jerk defense of “I didn’t say A what I said was B,” very often they betray their lack of understanding about how things work, which is the case here. “I said NOTHING about blowing up the car, I merely suggested using a Bic lighter to see if the tank has any gas in it.” Reagan did to the economy exactly what we’re supposed to be wanting done to it. Revenues from taxes increased, the opposition protests “Oh no, if you measure revenues as a proportion of GDP they didn’t rise.” RIGHT. Revenues increased and the GDP increased. The economy got “embiggened,” exactly the goal.
And here’s Ed Darrell holding it aloft as a model of what we do not want. Here’s Morgan saying, okay so noted, Ed & crew are trying to avoid repeating what Reagan did…and Ed takes the knee-jerk defense mechanism approach of INeverSaidThat. Well gee. We don’t want tax cuts, we don’t want the economy to get any bigger, or if we do there must be some meaningful difference between that goal, and what Reagan did.
It’s looking more and more like liberalism has no plan to make the economy any bigger or stronger or better, no plan for the economy at all, no policy ideas, it only exists in 2011 as a protocol by which some people can criticize other people on the Internet.
One thing’s for sure: If it’s a worldview that’s supposed to make me feel bad or guilty about making money, it’s completely failed. Like I said, Bush 5% unemployment Obama 9%. Or to make it even simpler: If our economy is going to allow to prosper…people are going to have to prosper.
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There you go again, inventing a response that wasn’t there, and then blaming it on others. Do conservatives ever have a Come-to-the-deity-of-their-choice meeting with the man in the mirror, to accept responsibility for what they say and do?
Expand real GDP — great idea. But right at this moment, we have a serious problem keeping our economy from collapsing due to lack of demand, because unemployment is high, underemployment is high, and people are nervous. We need government action — because banks can’t do it, it appears — to stimulate demand by putting earnings in the hands of consumers. The rich stay rich, but the poor and middle class get more money to spend, which will stimulate companies to expand, which may pull us out of a Great Depression that will make 1933 look like the Feast of Ortolans.
Your case is dead. It’s been resting since 1933, R.I.P. Progressive ideas are much more conducive to a prosperous economy than the Regressive Economics you advocate. Secretary Andrew Mellon was wrong in 1929, 1930 and 1932, and he remains wrong today. Progressive ideas don’t work miracles, but at least they don’t shoot the horse that pulls the cart, and toss Grandma to the bears.
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Okay, so now it comes out: Expansion of the real gross domestic product, like what we saw in the wake of the Reagan tax cuts, is something we’re going to be trying to avoid as we seek the most effective tax policy?
I said earlier progressive ideas aren’t conducive to a prosperous economy because they aren’t supposed to be. I rest my case.
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I don’t know about that. We tried tax cuts in 1928, 1929, 1932, and 1936, all with disaster. We tried tax cuts with Reagan, and they didn’t work to boost jobs. We had eight years of worse-than-Obama’s job growth after the Bush tax cuts.
Yet, here you are, arguing we should do it again, do it harder, do it more.
What’s that old print shop definition of insanity?
Oh, but you forgot that, with assurances from the Republicans that this time it’ll work, trust us, ignore history, Obama crippled the economy by extending the Bush tax cuts. 9% unemployment is the natural product of the tax cuts, economists agree (even the non-Keynesians).
So, no, it’s not a good idea to wait for the adherents to admit that your ideas don’t work.
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Now now Ed, you know perfectly well I’m completely in favor of a higher tax on Warren Buffett. I don’t know if it’s constitutional to pass a tax that applies to one particular person, but if they can make that gel then more power to ’em, I say.
Perhaps a good way to test an idea is not so much “when we try it, does it work?”; but rather, when we try it, and it doesn’t work, and its adherents are confronted with the plain fact that it didn’t work, do they react by explaining how it works as if that hasn’t been explained yet…and then insisting it be done again, bigger this time.
Unemployment 5% under Bush, 9% under Obama. There’s just no getting around it, progressive ideas are not conducive to economic prosperity. They aren’t supposed to be.
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You can see, Futureboy, you and your colleague in tentacles are running out of arguments and logic.
The progressive tax system provides economic opportunity, which is the root of our well-managed free enterprise economic system. Among the best things it does is provide inexpensive, widespread education to highly technical competence for most people, roads, a mail system, bridges, ship docks and shipping canals, flood control, emergency aid, national defense, hope, etc., etc. As Jeffrey Sachs makes clear, it’s the stuff that buys civilization.
Self-proclaimed small-future libertarians like to grouse about America as Morgan does, but it was a good idea and we ought to fight to keep it, even if it means Morgan has to pay a bit more in taxes. Warren Buffet would be happy to pay a lot more — but Buffet understands his entire fortune stands on a foundation of freedoms won by the progressive tax system we used to enjoy and should enjoy again.
The title of Sachs’s book is The Price of Civilization, a play on a quote from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in one of his more lucid and stunning insights on how the world works.
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You can see, futureboy, our host takes great pride in his ability to argue a point logically but it’s all just a big smokescreen. In the end, his syllogism ends up being one of 1. We need a more progressive tax system because 2. I demand it, gosh darn it!
Yes, a few people have most of the wealth. They’re the ones who created it. The outrage, at least in my view, has to do with the people who just make deals and do nothing else…become part of that “wealthiest tenth of a percent” without designing or producing so much as a damn bottle cap. But as for the inequitable “distribution,” that’s just the way things work. Nearly all of the heat in my car is concentrated in the combustion chambers of the engine — that’s what makes it move. So unfair. An disproportionate segment of the thrust behind an airplane, is concentrated on the engines. When I light a matchstick, nearly all the heat in the match is concentrated on the 5% near one of the ends. When I turn on a lamp in a dark room, a disproportionate quantity of the light in the room is near the bulb. It’s just not right! But that’s how it works. That is how things go. Something moves and drags all the rest.
I still don’t know what “fair share” is. It looks like I’ve found one individual who says it would be “fair” if the top 1% paid 50% of the taxes collected from income…predicated on the notion that the top 1% are getting 50% of the reported AGI. As I already pointed out, if that’s the rule — you pay a share roughly equal to the portion you, let’s go ahead and use the word incorrectly, “took” — then we’ve got a lot of people at the other end getting away with murder, taking all this money in the form of benefits (which they really are “taking” since they’re not putting anything back) and we need a more regressive tax system so we can get THEM to pay their fair share.
Everyone screaming for justice against the rich people, is going to have to go along with that point as well, or else they’ll have to admit the obvious, that they’re motivated by primitive jealousy and not any sophisticated longing for so-called “justice.”
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How can something I did not address — that is, something I did NOT write — be turned into a false claim?
The question you seem to be looking for is, did FDR raise taxes on the rich?
I don’t think anyone here has addressed that in any form. Certainly the question has not be disposed of here. Is it even relevant?
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Wd’s acknowledgement that FDE did promote higher taxes on the rich October 7, 2011 at 4:51 pm
seems to accept that my statement that no remotely honest Democrat could support Ed’s claim that FGR cut taxes on the rich October 7, 2011 at 11:21 am
Perhaps he will now acknowledge that his political theories have indeed been falsified by reality bringing them up to the level of merely wrong. My guess is not.
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Before I do any more damage to what Sachs said, let me urge you to view his interview, here:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/content/11925
Not that it will persuade Morgan or Alan; but rational, thinking and caring Americans, will want the facts and Sachs’s views. See especially at about 4:50 into the interview (about 10 minutes total).
Except, if you read the thing, FactCheck points out that the reason the top 1% pays more taxes now than a decade ago is because they are now capturing a much larger share of income than before. The principle, regardless the exact percentage, is that those who accumulate great wealth by living in this society should pay a great share of the tax burden for keeping this society going.
No, they are not due a tax cut. Tax rates are below the 1950s.
No, the super-rich are NOT due a tax cut. Out of fairness, and American fairplay.
Yeah, if you assume the top 1% own the corporations and give them credit for all corporate taxes — but that is rather an odd way to account. What about the millions of people who work in those corporations? Shouldn’t they get credit for the taxes paid by the corporation for the products and services they produce?
It’s a sloppy, unfair comparison NTU gives — taxes are lower in the U.S. than any other industrialized nation, and much lower than those nations that are doing well in the current economic climate (Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark come to mind).
We’re not taxing wealth. We’re taxing income. Actually, we do have a kind of wealth tax in the U.S. — property taxes, to support public schools. In Texas and several other states, property taxes have been slashed to encourage wealthy to buy more land . . . and that’s part of the reason that Texas schools are being cut $4 billion (with growing student populations . . . can anyone find any sanity there?).
No. A progressive tax system doesn’t raise taxes on the poor to be “fair” to the rich, by making the poor pay a similar percentage.
The poor do not get $1 million of benefits from living here, and they shouldn’t pay the same taxes as the guy who takes home $1 million.
Why should the widow with very little income pay the same proportion of taxes as the millionaire? Do we not have the common sense to understand the widow has living expenses, or that the millionaire’s basic living expenses are not much greater? A progressive tax system builds the things that make nations work — schools, trains, roads, institutions.
Then, inexplicably, Morgan leaps to insanity:
50% would probably be too high, which is why you picked it, of course.
Why not fair taxes?
In the past decade, we’ve used our tax system to transfer nearly $2 trillion from the poor and middle class, to the very rich. That’s unfair. Let’s get some of that back, and use it to the advantage of poor and middle class — which of course, makes the wealthy, wealthier. Who is it who buys the gasoline to get to work, anyway?
We should have healthy schools. Property taxes have proven relatively fair for that purpose over 200 years — let’s continue that system, eh? Schools give us an educated public, or civilization. Surely there is some value there that the rich get from having civilization, right?
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According to the logic of Ed Darrell, and the facts gathered by FactCheck.org via the Congressional Budget Office, that top one percent is due for one hell of a tax cut because we’re way too progressive right now, or as of May 2008, anyway.
There are different ways to measure this. The National Taxpayers Union computed that the top one percent was paying 38 percent rather than 27 percent, which comes closer to your desired goal of 50 percent…of course you based that on this Sachs statement about how much they’re getting, which I’m having trouble finding any support for that. But I’m curious — if we’re taxing people based on how much wealth they get, doesn’t that mean we should implement my idea of making sure at least $1 or $10 or maybe $50 is collected every year from everybody? The poor in this country are eligible for aid, usually from all levels of government, which of course means they “get.” If it’s only proper that the wealthy should be taxed at a higher rate because the rate at which they’re taxed fails to rise to their proportion of the take…a proposition that doesn’t seem to be supported by the evidence, but let’s let that one go…then such a rule would have to apply to the other end of the spectrum as well.
But let’s just ignore ALL of that. Let’s just do it, tax the top 1% at 50% or more. They would be paying their fair share, then, right? No more of that particular complaint?
I’ve got a feeling that to satisfy the progressive angst about the tax system not being sufficiently punitive & progressive, we’d have to establish a “wealth tax” in addition to the income tax, something this country does not currently have.
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More progressive than now.
Jeffrey Sachs talks about the top 1% of earners in our nation getting nearly 50% of the income. That would suggest that the top 1% should be paying significantly more than 50% of the income taxes, in a progressive system designed to lessen the effect of income taxes on the poorest members of society.
How close are we to that sort of equity*?
* Meaning, how close are we to the top 1%, top 20%, whatever, paying a progressive, significantly larger share of taxes than their share of income. If I misheard Sachs, use the real figures.
Tea Partiers used to be fond of saying that “50% of the people in this country pay no taxes at all.” They kinda slowed down when it was pointed out that included a very large number of people making more than $1 million a year. Millionaires get the advantages of living in a nation that lets them get to be millionaires and stay there. That’s worth a lot more than a nation that won’t let you go to school, won’t help you find a job, and won’t pay your medical care though it’s more expensive to deny the care.
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TeaPartyPatriots.org.
Among other things, they link to CATO’s carping about the Department of Education, endorsing ending most of ED’s work; they carp about HUD the same way; they endorse the unfounded griping of Sen. Tom “Somalia-Here-We-Come” Coburn.
Is there any qualitative or quantitative difference between what Coburn and TPP advocate, and Somalia? I can’t see any.
Heck, they even endorse CATO’s odd claims about Steve Jobs being a great, anti-government entrepreneur, ignoring Jobs’s reliance on government-produced innovation like the internet, solid state electronics, and computing itself (you’ve never heard of Grace Moore, I’ll wager).
Is there anyplace anyone who claims to be Tea Party ever tries to distinguish themselves from Somalia?
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And what is this fair share that the rich should be paying?
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No remotely honest person would try to confuse a jobs stimulus with what happened in Germany in 1923. Hyperinflation caused by an intentional devaluing of the money is not what we experience now — in fact, inflation is close to zero, too low for successful free marketry.
FDR was right: The rich should carry their fair share of the economic burden, and the rich should not get more than their fair share of economic benefits of an expanding economy, nor keep more than their fair share of economic benefits in a contracting economy.
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Our job growth rate right now is at the level of the George W. Bush administration. That’s the problem. Not awesome, disastrous.
And, left over from Bush and the Bush economic collapse. Current rates favor the Republican War on America and War on the Middle Class, but they do nothing for the good of the nation.
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Obviously since that “stimulus” is what the Democrats have repeatedly done no remotely honest person could claim that is not what they wanted to do.
Equally no remotely honest person could claim that taxes on the rich dropped under FDR or that Germany in 1923 did not practice a “stimulus” policy of printing money, unsuccessfully.
Fortunarely for Ed and any other member of that party of war criminals, who are not willing to dissociate themselve from him, remote links to honesty are not a consideration.
I note there is still no attempt to produce falsifiability standards for CAGW which would allow it to be defended as reaching the height of accuacy to worthy of being called wrong. Obviously that will not in any way constrain the ecofascists.
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I wish we had some “anemic job growth” from straight out of the George W. Bush administration right now, that would be completely awesome.
Unemployment somewhere around 5%, gas $1.83 a gallon…
Got a source for the Tea Party being for “Somali style government”? How about for abolishing the census. I just called you out for playing the “I said A but I never said B” card while simultaneously reading a bunch of nonsense into the other side’s argument…and you just did it again. Just can’t stop, huh?
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That’s not the “Democrats’ theory.” Instead, take a look at Jeffrey Sachs’s new book, The Price of Civilization, for a better idea of what Democrats favor — strong government rather than Somali-style government, building for the future as Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln urged especially in any area of education and science advancement, and rational tax policies designed to keep America strong rather than erode our essential foundations. If we do that, we have enough money for stimulus programs that prevent disaster in the immediate future. We desperately need such a stimulus now because the Republican assaults on America’s roads and bridges, schools, public parks, education and general welfare programs will cause increases in unemployment of up to 100,000 job losses per month starting last month and running for several years.
That beats the Republicans’ solidly disproven hypothesis that making rich people richer will, in the long run, help out poor people. That didn’t work in Germany in 1923, in the U.S. in 1929-1941, nor during the Bush administration, in which the foundations of our current economic mess were laid and firmed up with programs like tax cuts for the wealthy, which caused anemic job growth and stagnation in education and high-tech industries.
Global warming is theory indeed, and not hypothesis.
But those who are not even wrong probably couldn’t see the forest for the trees, and will deny the trees.
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A theory is “not even wrong” if it is unfalsifiable, or when it has some political tonage where there is no sort of evidence supporters will accept as disproving it. Thus the Democrat’s theory that all that is needed to get out of recession is just government printing and spending more or the theory that we are experiencing catastrophic global warmingare both “not even wrong” since neither snow not not failing “stimulses will ever deter the lying idiots who push them.
Or perhaps Ed can say what would?
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Whom the gods destroy they first steal the sense of humor from, in order to make it easier to make ’em mad.
Pauli didn’t say anything about the Tea Party. He was speaking of something that was glib, had the right words, and sounded about right — but was completely wrong.
That’s something Tea Party people specialize in. “We support the Constitution, but not a census.” “We need to cut spending to make jobs” (while proposing cuts of 1.8 million jobs).
Sounds right, dead wrong.
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Oh yeah that’s right, that’s your other double-standard Ed; the “I never said” card. You get to play that one. And then you get to read all kinds of wild nonsense into what the opposition said…
Never said I had an issue with Paul’s equations. Although it looks like your point is that he had a serious issue with the Tea Party? Can you provide the necessary citation?
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You think Pauli was wrong, Morgan? If you got the physics chops, show us the equations.
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…my only criterion is that the citations be accurate and valid…
Quite right, Ed, as long as YOU get the final word on what’s “accurate and valid.”
I said before you’re my poster-child “Thing I Know #330 guy,” and I was right.
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[…] A mostly encore post. […]
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The best citation to the quote is listed in the post.
I’ve never heard it attributed to Feynman, but my recollection is that Feynman once cited the quote himself in a video interview, or in an essay. Feynman knew the players.
Heck, misattributing it to Feynman — another thing to track down!
Feynman said plenty of good stuff on his own. His “Cargo Cult Science” lecture is a classic, though I’ve not been able to verify much of it. It’s such a good idea that even if the account is fictional, the circumstances are real, and the lecture is True, if not precisely accurate.
So are most of the derivations of Pauli’s quote.
Update: Check out this blog, Not Even Wrong, and this fellow’s explanation of the quote.
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I once read a very nice account of Bohr’s concept of complimentarity – the idea that a profound truth is a truth whose exact opposite is a profound truth. Sure wish I could cite the book as reference right now, but I am not making this up:
Someone thought that they’d outsmarted the great man and asked him what the complimentarity of Truth was. Through someone translating, Bohr didn’t skip a beat and replied, “Beauty.”
BTW – I really have been told all of my life that “not even wrong” was a quote by Feynman. Is the attribution to Pauli definitive and correct? Do we know? Any references or clarifications GREATLY appreciated.
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Cao, go ahead and cite Wikipedia; my only criterion is that the citations be accurate and valid, as opposed to Gordon Edwards’ & Steven Milloy’s bizarre claim that eagles were not injured by DDT, when 1,000 studies showed they were, and when the recovery of the eagle charts exactly with either the end of DDT spraying or the residual DDT in eagle body fat.
It’s not the source, it’s the accuracy.
Do I think what is impressive? This is a blog about history, often. I cite history. What’s your problem with that? Do you have a problem with Pauli, too? (I’m not sure why you’re posting in this thread . . . you’re welcome to do so, I just don’t know why you are.)
PTJ is right: I invoke Godwin’s Law.
As if that would work.
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My sympathies, Ed, you seem to have had a troll walk in, and one rather obnoxious, petty and lowly endowed with reasoning abilities at that.
I read their rather dubious blog entries and all I saw was a mean-spirited low-caliber refutation that centered on attacking you as a person with petty personal remarks (the give-away is always when the person recommends therapy, and attacks the bad bad “leftists”).
This person is also guilty of the very things s/he accuses you of, by claiming to know better than the WHO, as here:
The argument is over, Ed; this person raised the Hitler and Nazis card, in desperation and in place of a valid argument, of course. “(P)lease shut up” is not a point that addresses Ed’s argument.
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Speaking of which, I guess I was right about comparing you with socialist nazis of the Hitler’s stormtrooper stripe….LOL
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If you think that’s impressive, you’re wrong. It’s rather stupid, but it figures that someone who doesn’t speak English would say it.
So you are allowed to cite Wikipedia and I’m not. I’m wondering why that is.
Could it be a double standard?
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Do a Google search of images for Pauli, you’ll find a photo of Pauli and Bohr playing with a child’s top.
Gotta love ’em, indeed.
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Got to love those quantum physicists. One of my favourites comes from Niels Bohr, who said, “The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also true. ”
Also: ” … the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth. “
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