Tea Party Economics!

Unabogie said:
I just cannot process what makes a person believe that the poorest among us make too much while the richest among us make too little.
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... and that the rich who inherited their fortune are somehow getting shafted. I have respect for people who have made themselves a fortune, but the ones who inherited it merely won in the pedigree lottery.
 
easycruise said:
And your suggestion is more Keynesian economics I suppose? If so, how's that working out for you? Has it ever worked out for you?
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Actually I'd prefer moving our economic structure to actually be the consumer-driven model that capitalism is supposed to be, as opposed to the top-down mercantilism that stifles capitalism and yet the know-nothing TP-ers stupidly insist will work if we just do it just a little bit more.

Taxes are lower than they've been in 40 years, yet median average income for the 95% of the population has gone down over the last 10 years. In other words: we already know how your trickle-down mercantilism works out, so there's no damned good reason to continue a demonstrably stupid behavior.
 
This morning, on the Diane Rehm show (the weekly news roundup) they were discussing the fact that certain Tea Party types were mightily incensed that there was no cost-of-living increase in Social Security this year....
While at the same time wishing for "smaller government", "lower taxes", and so forth...

I thought cognitive dissonance was supposed to be painful.
 
timhau said:
... and that the rich who inherited their fortune are somehow getting shafted. I have respect for people who have made themselves a fortune, but the ones who inherited it merely won in the pedigree lottery.
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...their fortune that is specifically exempt from capital gains tax, and is largely untaxed profits. We need a landed gentry in this country to lead us surfs.

Daredelvis
 
Crossbow said:
Tea Party Economics!

John Raese who is running for the now open seat in the Senate for the state of West Virginia (due to the recent death of Senator Robert Byrd), who is a Republican, who is a multi-millionare, who is a proud supporter of the 'Tea Party', and who was recently endorsed by Sara Palin, now says that the minimum wage is "arhaic" and it should be abolished.

Raese also says that the federal Department of Energy, the federal Department of Education, and the Internal Revenue Service should be abolished as well.

Check it out yourself at:

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201010121023

By the way, Raese has never held an elected office and this makes his fourth run for a major political office (governor twice, and senator twice). Also, there are any number of other whacky things that Raese has said as well.
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Sounds good to me. How's the second year in a row of $1 trillion deficits doin' for you and your economics?

With brainiacs like that in charge, I say blow it all away and start over.
 
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Beerina said:
Sounds good to me. How's the second year in a row of $1 trillion deficits doin' for you and your economics?

With brainiacs like that in charge, I say blow it all away and start over.
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We'd already been running a deficit for five or six years to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Why is it suddenly a problem now that it's in the trillions?
 
johnny karate said:
We'd already been running a deficit for five or six years to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Why is it suddenly a problem now that it's in the trillions?
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Trillion is scarier sounding than billion?
 
Beerina said:
Sounds good to me. How's the second year in a row of $1 trillion deficits doin' for you and your economics?

With brainiacs like that in charge, I say blow it all away and start over.
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Are you aware that more than half of that trillion was built up over the last administration? I love it when short-term-memory arguments like this are made, because it displays succinctly just how lacking in sensibility and reason the complaints against Obama really are. Our current president's attempts to fix the train wreck of the last administration's economic policies have people pissed off because they pushed the bill that last quarter or third of the way past the Magic Number, despite the fact that it's the last administration that drove the economy off that cliff into record debt in the first place.

Most funny is that the supposed solution from the Tea Party folks is to cut taxes, which actually increase our deficits in the first place-- yes, the Bush "tax cuts" contributed to the deficit, not the other way around.
 
drkitten said:
Yes, and there are also many studies that have shown cigarette smoking to be actively good for your health. The second group of reports were generally written by tobacco lobbyist think tanks, the first group of reports by anti-government think tanks. The NCPA is a good example -- by it's own admission, "The NCPA's goal is to develop and promote private alternatives to government regulation and control," irrespective of whether those alternatives are actually safe and effective, because government is bad, m'kay?

Neither group of studies has any actual credibility.
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I guess you couldn't be bothered to read the links where the studies quoted have nothing to do with the NCPA. From the link...

""A study of the 27 percent increase in 1990-91 by economists Donald Deere, Kevin Murphy and Finis Welch, published in the American Economic Review (May 1995), found that this action reduced employment for all teen-agers by 7.3 percent and for black teen-agers by 10 percent.""

I guess you consider the Federal Reserve a kooky right-wing outfit..

""In a study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Kenneth Couch translated these conclusions into raw numbers.

* At the low end of the range, at least 90,000 teen-age jobs were lost in 1996 and another 63,000 jobs were lost in 1997.
* At the high end, job losses may have equaled 268,000 in 1996 and 189,000 in 1997.
* Couch estimates that a $1 rise in the minimum wage will further reduce teen-age employment by at least 145,000 and possibly as many as 436,000 jobs. ""

and.....those labor economists are all notorious right-wingnuts according to you?

""The minimum wage unambiguously reduces employment. The September 1998 issue of the Journal of Economic Literature, an official publication of the American Economic Association, contains a survey of labor economists asked to estimate the impact of raising the minimum wage. The average effect was estimated at minus .21 percent, meaning that a 10 percent rise in the minimum wage will reduce youth employment by 2.1 percent.""

and that bastion of right-wing conservative thought known as Cornell University....

""Increases in the minimum wage add almost nothing to the incomes of poor families. There are two reasons. First, employment losses reduce the incomes of some workers more than the higher minimum wage increases the incomes of others. Second, the vast bulk of those affected by the minimum wage, especially teen-agers, live in families that are not poor. A study by economists Richard Burkhauser and Martha Harrison found that 80 percent of the net benefits of the last minimum wage increase went to families well above the poverty level. ""

and that other bastion of right wingers known as the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California-Irvine...

""Similar results have been found by economists Neumark, Schweitzer and Wascher. ""

Reading is fundamental. Perhaps you should try it before posting?
 
GreNME said:
Are you aware that more than half of that trillion was built up over the last administration? I love it when short-term-memory arguments like this are made, because it displays succinctly just how lacking in sensibility and reason the complaints against Obama really are. Our current president's attempts to fix the train wreck of the last administration's economic policies have people pissed off because they pushed the bill that last quarter or third of the way past the Magic Number, despite the fact that it's the last administration that drove the economy off that cliff into record debt in the first place.
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Wow, just wow. That's revisionist history along with a glaring basic misunderstanding of how government works.

Here's Steve Moore from the WSJ...

"" During a recent press conference, President Obama blamed George W. Bush for the nation's fiscal condition. "When I walked in," he declared, "wrapped in a nice bow was a $1.3 trillion deficit sitting right there on my doorstep." Earlier this year he asserted that "we came in with $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade."

Neither statement is correct, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). True enough, the outgoing Bush administration bequeathed big deficits to Mr. Obama. The expected 2009 deficit was $1.19 trillion, not $1.3 trillion, however—and the actual deficit for 2009 came in at $1.41 trillion, meaning that the new president added some $220 billion to the total.

...""

Edited by LashL: 
Snipped for compliance with Rule 4. Please do not post lengthy cut and paste tracts from elsewhere; instead, post a short snippet and a link to the source.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703882404575519784046288058.html

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Most funny is that the supposed solution from the Tea Party folks is to cut taxes, which actually increase our deficits in the first place-- yes, the Bush "tax cuts" contributed to the deficit, not the other way around.
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Oh dear, it looks like you've never heard of dynamic scoring either, nor the high corporate taxes in the US, nor the proper definition of the Bush tax cuts and why they were temporary.
 
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easycruise said:
Today, Mr. Obama and Democrats in Congress love to talk about how Mr. Bush turned a $200 billion Clinton surplus into a $1 trillion deficit. Indeed he did, though they ignore the 9/11 terrorist attacks that happened less than a year after Mr. Bush became president. Those attacks were fiscal game-changers, jolting the economy to a temporary standstill and requiring unplanned spending for homeland security and antiterrorism efforts.
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From fiscal year 2002 through fiscal year 2008, the accumulated shortfall of U.S. budgets was $2.13 trillion. All of those were delivered during President Bush's terms in office. Through 2006 there was a Republican majority in Congress, by which time the accumulated budget shortfall had reached $1.51 trillion.
 
drkitten said:
It's astonishing how many poor Republicans can be persuaded to vote against their own best interests.

Indeed, the entire population of Alaska seems to qualify -- Alaska's economy is utterly dependent upon federal handouts and earmarks, and yet that seems to be one of the hotbeds of anti-earmark, anti-pork barrel sentiment.
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Whoa there Bubba.
1- There is a healthy minority here that do not "qualify" as poor Republicans voting against their own interests.
2 -Your characterization of our economy is a bit below your usual standards of accuracy.
3 - We do have our share of utter nitwits, but not that more than anywhere else. See Texas for details.
 
easycruise said:
Ahem. Many studies have shown the minimum wage to be a job killer.
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Maybe you're right. Maybe what we need is a maximum wage, say $2million yearly. Set up a re-industrialization fund and let people shelter short-term high year earnings (like sports or movie contracts or lottery winnings) there.

And I agree with Raese that the Dept. of Education and the Dept. of Energy should be abolished. The states should run their own affairs in these areas and then compete against other states for getting businesses to locate there and remain there and bring jobs.
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Sure, teach creationism and supply-side ecconomics as established science and let WVa cover NYC in soot from slave-wage factories like the Chinese do.

And your suggestion is more Keynesian economics I suppose? If so, how's that working out for you? Has it ever worked out for you?
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It has always worked better than the idiotic supply-side crap. We let the rich keep more of their money and they used it to build factories off-shore. That must end.
 
easycruise said:
Ahem. Many studies have shown the minimum wage to be a job killer.
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Yes, minimum wage and trade unions tend to kill jobs that most western societies don't really want anyway. Better to put the unemployed in education programmes to gain more skilled labor. Having a lot of working poor can't be good in the long run.
 
easycruise said:
Wow, just wow. That's revisionist history along with a glaring basic misunderstanding of how government works.
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:dl:

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Yup, revisionist history. It's just a coinky-dink that the worst deficits have been under a certain type of economic behavior. While it's more of a novelty to say that doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results is insanity, the fact is that doing so is stupid economic policy.

The fact is that both the Democratic and Republican parties are highly mercantilist, and Tea Party economics are just an extreme form of Republican protectionist economics. For all the teabagging exclamations of "free market, free market" in their screeching, all they want is more top-down, gold-bugging, "laissez-faire" (but only for producers) economics that doesn't do a thing for the actual market (which is the consumer) while engaging in all the same protectionist ("Buy American") nonsense they claim to be against.

Maybe you as a bright and shining individual don't subscribe to protectionist mercantilism as a description, but I'm not really interested in debating with your beliefs. I prefer to debate reality-- and the reality is that while Smith had valid points, Keynes also had valid points and the most valid point is that our current economic system is not the same as those of the times of the two sides of the argument. That means we have to figure out what works now, not 100 or 200 years ago. Welcome to the 21st century, where 18th, 19th, and early 20th century economic models are becoming less and less applicable. Whether you like it or not we're in a global economy, brown folk from our southern borders aren't a terrorist threat, and calling political opponents Communo-fascist-nazi-atheists isn't the hallmark of a rational debate.
 
GreNME said:
Yup, revisionist history. It's just a coinky-dink that the worst deficits have been under a certain type of economic behavior.
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Your chart proves that you are indeed revising history. Did you even notice that your chart is 5 years old and the projection for 2006 was way off?

I repeat..quoting Steve Moore..""Congress controls the purse strings. When Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Reid rose to their present jobs in January 2007, the deficit was $161 billion. It had been on a downward trajectory from $413 billion in 2004. Three years later, the Pelosi-Reid Congress had added $1.2 trillion to the deficit.""

Yes, it turned out to be $161, not $260. Nice sleight-of-hand there. You got caught, though. Care to provide a more up to date graph including the Obama deficits? You don't dare show that graph, do you?

grenme said:
The fact is that both the Democratic and Republican parties are highly mercantilist, and Tea Party economics are just an extreme form of Republican protectionist economics.
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Wrong. Who's blocking all the free trade pacts with such countries as Columbia? That would be the Democrats. Why? Because they are beholden to their labor union constituency. Who, BTW, are the other reason for the minimum wage hikes, as the base union wage is based on a precentage increase above the minimum wage.

Grenme said:
That means we have to figure out what works now, not 100 or 200 years ago. Welcome to the 21st century, where 18th, 19th, and early 20th century economic models are becoming less and less applicable. Whether you like it or not we're in a global economy, brown folk from our southern borders aren't a terrorist threat, and calling political opponents Communo-fascist-nazi-atheists isn't the hallmark of a rational debate.
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Tell that to Obama. He's doing all of that in his own uneducated way. The man is clueless. Imagine trying FDR's WPA infrastructure "shovel-ready projects" in today's economic model. The Japanese tried that recently and failed. Obama obviously didn't learn from that, and because he actually tried it, we can now use your words directed towards him...

""While it's more of a novelty to say that doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results is insanity, the fact is that doing so is stupid economic policy.""

Yep, you pretty much sum it up..Obama and the Democrats are insane and have a stupid economic policy.
 
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