Cont: The Biden Presidency (3)

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Sherkeu said:
Most of the people I am thinking of would not be known to you or the public at large. Most of the people I am thinking of have an incentive to make the majority of the US more prosperous, not poor or victimized. Rising tides raising all the boats...and all that.

If the US political elites today are polarizing and both moving to more and more govt control and making corrupt deals to keep power (like the disaster in Venezuela), then there may many back room discussions on what could be done to prevent it.

Probably won't happen. We will just plod along in decline.
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Oh dear non-existent god! The old rising tide and boats trope. Just quoting that almost on its own disqualifies you from having anything serious to say about the world. That and trickle down economics...
 
The Republican Party should announce its "Why child labor is awesome" platform in about 5 minutes.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
Yes, but the reason wasn't that they were command economies.
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Yes, it is. Command economies always fail because economies are too complex for decision making to be so centralized. And note that government regulations of stuff like worker safety doesn't constitute command economies.

Command economies also require authoritarian governments, but authoritarian governments that allow market economies can do fairly well economically. So authoritarian government is not the source of failure for command economies.
 
Parsman said:
Oh dear non-existent god! The old rising tide and boats trope. Just quoting that almost on its own disqualifies you from having anything serious to say about the world. That and trickle down economics...
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I disagree, it refers to a lot of money being widely available as opposed to being cooped up in a few containers. Having a large sea to float boats/fortunes on rather than all the water/money being locked up in a couple tanks. The stimulus checks were an attempt to raise the level of the sea, and it did lift quite a few boats.
 
Ziggurat said:
Yes, it is. Command economies always fail because economies are too complex for decision making to be so centralized. And note that government regulations of stuff like worker safety doesn't constitute command economies.

Command economies also require authoritarian governments, but authoritarian governments that allow market economies can do fairly well economically. So authoritarian government is not the source of failure for command economies.
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Chile disagrees with you. But then again Pinochet was approaching capitalism from only a slightly different angle to Andropov.
 
 
Silly Green Monkey said:
I disagree, it refers to a lot of money being widely available as opposed to being cooped up in a few containers. Having a large sea to float boats/fortunes on rather than all the water/money being locked up in a couple tanks. The stimulus checks were an attempt to raise the level of the sea, and it did lift quite a few boats.
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It's that the phrase has become inexorably intertwined with policies that encourage massive accumulation of wealth. It is an alarmingly stupid assumption that the latter leads to the former, but that's a reality of US discourse today.

Conservatives have done an incredible job as to this sort of thing. That their failed policies are the only real solution to the problems the policies create. Too many poor people? The fix is to let rich people exploit them even more. Too much crime because people don't trust the police? Give the police more guns and less oversight. Education struggling because teachers are micromanaged and underfunded? Restrict them even more and divert funding to Jesus.

It's wild, and too many people who should know better fall into this sort of thing to some degree.
 
Suddenly said:
It's that the phrase has become inexorably intertwined with policies that encourage massive accumulation of wealth. It is an alarmingly stupid assumption that the latter leads to the former, but that's a reality of US discourse today.

Conservatives have done an incredible job as to this sort of thing. That their failed policies are the only real solution to the problems the policies create. Too many poor people? The fix is to let rich people exploit them even more. Too much crime because people don't trust the police? Give the police more guns and less oversight. Education struggling because teachers are micromanaged and underfunded? Restrict them even more and divert funding to Jesus.

It's wild, and too many people who should know better fall into this sort of thing to some degree.
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Well, it is trivially true that a rising tide raises all ships. But when only the rich are able to buy ships and stay afloat, that leaves a LOT of people on the dock and shore with wet feet. :D
 
Hellbound said:
Well, it is trivially true that a rising tide raises all ships. But when only the rich are able to buy ships and stay afloat, that leaves a LOT of people on the dock and shore with wet feet. :D
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Yeah. The rising tide raises all ships, but it drowns people who don't even have a raft.

You can quote me on that.
 
pgwenthold said:
Yeah. The rising tide raises all ships, but it drowns people who don't even have a raft.

You can quote me on that.
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Wrong mindset.

"If they were too lazy to buy a boat or at least learn to swim they deserve to drown. Swimming is free. I used to swim at my parents' country club when I was a kid and it's not hard. We can't coddle these people."
 
Well... Trump Judges doing insane things because politics are being reviewed by Trump Judges who really like doing insane things because politics. What could go wrong?

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to take up a case that could threaten the existence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and potentially the status of numerous other federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve.

A panel of three Trump appointees on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last fall that the agency's funding is unconstitutional because the CFPB gets its money from the Federal Reserve, which in turn is funded by bank fees.

Although the agency reports regularly to Congress and is routinely audited, the Fifth Circuit ruled that is not enough. The CFPB's money has to be appropriated annually by Congress or the agency, or else everything it does is unconstitutional, the lower courts said.

The CFPB is not the only agency funded this way. The Federal Reserve itself is funded not by Congress but by banking fees. The U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Mint, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which protects bank depositors, and more, are also not funded by annual congressional appropriations.

In its brief to the Supreme Court, the Biden administration noted that even programs like Social Security and Medicare are paid for by mandatory spending, not annual appropriations.

"This marks the first time in our nation's history that any court has held that Congress violated the Appropriations Clause by enacting a law authorizing spending," wrote the Biden administration's Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar.
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Aridas said:
Well... Trump Judges doing insane things because politics are being reviewed by Trump Judges who really like doing insane things because politics. What could go wrong?
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The CFPB is not the only agency funded this way. The Federal Reserve itself is funded not by Congress but by banking fees. The U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Mint, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which protects bank depositors, and more, are also not funded by annual congressional appropriations.

Dear god, if Congress has to appropriate funds for that every year and the GoP plays games.... what a fantastic way to cause a bank run.
 
Ziggurat said:
Yes, it is. Command economies always fail because economies are too complex for decision making to be so centralized. And note that government regulations of stuff like worker safety doesn't constitute command economies.

Command economies also require authoritarian governments, but authoritarian governments that allow market economies can do fairly well economically. So authoritarian government is not the source of failure for command economies.
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This.
The problem is this is counter intuitive On the face of it, a central authoratiy should be a better manager then a somewhat chaotic market forces, but time and time again that has been proven that this is not the case.
But the lure seems irrestible. " Total Socialism is a great idea...it is just the right people have not tried it yer".
 
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Roger Ramjets said:
Yes, but the reason wasn't that they were command economies.
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I'm not convinced of this, but it's hard to tell because it's hard to imagine how a command economy can exist without an authoritarian government. And that means that the commanding is done by a powerful elite whose interests are not necessarily those of the population, both due to corruption and to skewed interests, and whose output is judged by standards other than supply and demand.

Or so a certain amount of writing I've seen by those who have lived in such economies suggests. In the Soviet Union, there were lots of rockets, and more opportunity for women to be engineers, but they had to smuggle in tampons.

In theory, a command economy could be run successfully by a non-corrupt and benevolent dictatorship, but does such a thing exist, and can it persist?
 
That link says there's a "tizzy" about it and gives a link to its own source, a separate article at another website saying there's a "blaze" about it. But where is the tizzy/blaze actually happening? They conspicuously don't link to that.

That's exactly what it would look like if this were just another round of the Tan Suit Uproar Myth.
 
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