The Glade 4.0

Not into sashimi then?

I used to prefer sashimi to sushi actually but I don't like that kind of bad economic spewing fish.

_________________
"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

You're such a Mr burns =P

What a fool I've been! Here I've been struggling financially when the answer is to max all of my credit cards with the understanding that at some point in the future that money will come from somewhere!

I'm off to buy a Bentley!

_________________

If you are to believe certain parties, that is exactly the course of action you should take. Of course, a Bentley is rather apropos, considering that durable goods quality is the first casualty of demand side economic policy.

_________________

Ketchup....catsup....ketchup....catsup........

_________________
"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

It's tomato sauce... damn yankies

Personally, if you're gonna waste government money on a car... I'd go with this one... bentleys are so ... old men cars..

Pagani's are only a few letters removed from being an overpriced sandwich.

_________________
"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

But it's such a pretty over priced sandmich... 0.0
plus it's the government money, so the over priced argument is moot >=D
and it's just so pretttyyyyyy..... *stare*

_________________
"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Hopwin - if our Macroeconomy were a household, your outlook would apply. But it isn't. Our Macroeconomy is *significantly* more complex than that.

When spending goes down, the government steps in and spends in order to bring it out of a recession. When average prices begin to rise the government can then cut spending and raise taxes in order to pull heat out of the inflationary period. The goal is to minimize the damage and suffering and to keep us as close to full employment GDP as possible. The business cycle is there, it isn't going away, and starving a starving person isn't going to help him at all.

If you were a government, Hopwin, and your goal was to lower unemployment and get your economy going again, you would be remiss to not max out your credit cards and spend as much as you needed to spend to get out of the recession and back on to a path of growth. You would also be remiss to not cut spending and raise taxes when the economy overheated and inflation set in.

A country's economy cannot be intelligently or practically run like the economy of an individual's household. It's not the same thing, and that sort of thinking is going to spiral us back into recession. It happened in 1937 just the same. The New Deal policies were working, the deficit hawks stepped in and screamed about the deficit, so the spending programs were cut, and then we slipped right back into recession.

_________________


It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

This is the only thing that you said that had merit and its merit was both unintentional and lost on you: "A country's economy cannot be intelligently or practically run"

_________________
"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

History is littered with the corpses of empires similarly run.

_________________
"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Evidently Monty has /hidecorpse on.

_________________
"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

What is this even supposed to mean?



The problem isn't the recession. The recession is the reaction any market has to an inflationary part of the cycle. The inflationary part of the cycle happens when businesses that aren't actually in demand are propped up by things such as artificially low interest rates (i.e. rates set by a central banking system and not in the market) or incenvization, such as tax credits for purchasing certain objects, or subsidizing industry in any number of ways such as 0 interest loans to said industry, tariffs, price fixing, tax incentives for consumers of that industry etc.

If an industry cannot survive on the merit of simple supply and demand, it needs to be able to be scaled back because the lack of demand for it is the markets way of indicating that people simply don't need that good. If it's propped up, then it cannot react quickly, which would actually be the minimization of damage. When it is artificially kept aloft, it increases the eventual consequences. Without all that interference in the market, entities in the market cannot forecast what the actual demand is for their product, which means businesses make malinvestment and leads to actual wealth destruction, unemployment, etc.

I like this example: if a huge circus comes to town, and a restaurateur is not aware that the increased patronage is only temporary, he may erroneously hire more permanent staff, invest in increasing kitchen space etc. Now, when the circus pulls up its tent and leaves, he's left with the result of his malinvestment: too much kitchen space and staff compared to what he needs and the debt or loss of capital associated with it. The circus and his being unaware of it is analogous to artificial meddling of the forces I outlined above.



We can make it smaller, more transitional and less painful. We have to understand that certain businesses aren't going to be able to make it, certain people are going to get fired and face hard times, but we can't make it better by trying to make it more painful.



That can't create real jobs, because real jobs must come from enterprise that generates real wealth. What is decided by real wealth is what the market decides. No person can estimate this, because an economy is millions of microscopic interactions occurring simultaneously. If what you were saying is true, we could just pay people to dig holes in the ground and others to fill them up and we'd all be completely employed.

Now, you might say "we, obviously that's not a useful job, we'll give them useful jobs" but that is the flaw in that logic: we can't know what wealth producing jobs are. Only other millions of consumers together, in the aggregate can know. And as I said, no one person is smart enough to predict it.

Now, I'm realistic - government can do stuff like infrastructure in the interim, as we shift back to letting the market direct these resources. But ultimately, to optimize the economy, and push the PPF to the upper right boundary, we must let the market allocate these resources. The reallocation is painful, yes, but it's already too late not to let it happen. The malinvestment has already been made during the boom. We already have a ton of debt and lots of worthless kitchen space to show for it (worthless bonds fundamentally structured as illiquid debt, trinkets and luxury items that don't are not fundamental to objects we actually need to afford like paying for our own medical bills and food etc.)



No, the recession is unavoidable. If you prick a hot air balloon, you cannot pump more air into it keep it inflated. The smartest thing to do is let it deflate while we were low in altitude (too late now), patch it, and be on our way. As it is, you are rushing air into because you are so afraid to go down (like I said, it's too late now, we are too high) but not realizing that you can only keep it aloft so long while we are starting to go over a cliff.

If you don't think "a country's economy cannot be intelligently or practically run like the economy of an individual's household", then why on earth are you for centrally planned economic policy?

_________________
"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Really? I am unfamiliar with any empire that practiced demand side economics as laid out by Kaynes that subsequently died.



Recession is the downward turn in the business cycle, and it absolutely is the problem. Recession causes real suffering for real people. As Kaynes said - in the long run, we are all dead. It could be that the market would eventually work itself out to be flat again, but that's not good enough for those of us who have to deal with the ramifications of the downward turn in the cycle. It's lazy economics to look at a downturn and say "no matter how long it takes, and no matter how much damage it does, we must do nothing and let the market work this out for itself." Recessions and high unemployment, when left alone, generally become long term problems that perpetuate themselves.




Which is just more irrational "invisible hand" stuff. The market is driven by people's choices. People's choices are rarely based on rationality. The market is not rational, it is not fast to respond. In fact, it's very slow to change course on it's own, which leads to nasty and persistent downturns.

Drawing a micro analogy to a macro problem (in the case of your circus analogy) is the issue here. As I said before, you can't look at running the government like running the household. It's shortsighted and foolish to do so. It's not a household. It's millions of households, and businesses, and foreign interests, etc etc. The biggest problem with the economics of "do nothing" is that it tries to apply micro solutions to macro problems.

I never argued that recession was unavoidable. What I argued is that government has a role in correcting both recession and inflation, and needs to do so vigorously.

_________________


It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Whose Kaynes?

Woah deja vu.

_________________
"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

If this was true, then managed economies should be more efficient, and more robust. Infact, the more managed the economy, the more efficient and more robust it should be. If you are correct we should all be soviets. For you, I suggest reading I, Pencil.

_________________

Ezekiel 23:19-20 

"I'mma let you finish, but the Austrians had the best economic theories of all time! OF ALL TIME!!"

_________________

Holy shitsnacks!

Recession is not the problem. Recession is the consequence of an inflationary price bubble, which is the problem. That's like telling a person with a bulging artery in his head that his problem is the headache. Your suffering statement is just an appeal to emotion - even if a depression does indeed cause those things, it doesn't reinforce or have anything to do with the characteristics and causes of a depression.

If you maxed out your credit cards to buy a new wardrobe, the problem wouldn't be "I am loaded up with debt with no real good investment to show for it" (unless maybe your career was as a fashion model or something that you could turn a profit from having said wardrobe). That is the consequence of the problem. The problem was you decided to take on debt for no real reason. The consequence is the debt itself. The problem was the choice.



So what? Some people say cucumbers taste better pickled. What the **** does this have to do with anything?



If it's not good enough, then perhaps we shouldn't have embraced a centrally planned economic policy in the first place that caused us to malinvest in areas that didn't actually produce wealth and jobs that supported those areas.

It's not "good enough" for us to have to deal with gravity either, but the fact is, we do. Your argument is just an appeal to emotions against reality.



Generally they do? Are you just trying to leave a backdoor to escape this ridiculous argument you've constructed around yourself? It has nothing to do with "lazy". Economics is a school of study behavior. It does not postulate what policy (or lack thereof) should be implemented. It simply studies the consequence of different action.






I don't know how you can even begin to rectify the heinous inconsistencies in your argument. First, you state that the market is driven by people's choices. This is fundamental statement which means an economic system is just the summation of millions of microscopic transactions happening at a rate far too fast to understand in a scope of that detail. Yet later you call it a "macro" problem? What do you even mean by "macro" problem? Do you even know? If it's a "macro" problem, how do you reconcile this viewpoint with the fact that you are declaring the market is a comprised of individual components which ultimately drive its total behavior?

How are people's choices rarely based of rational? Everything is rationalized to the individual, that is the definition of rationalization - it's how individuals make choices. You might mean logic. And that statement doesn't even matter. It doesn't matter how "rational" an economic system behaves. Economics simply studies how it behaves, without some special regard to some absolute framework of "rational" reasoning.

The funniest thing you've said is dismissing the "invisible hand" which is really just a colloquialism for saying that the market is the summation of millions of different entities' interactions, or as you put it "market is driven by people's choices." You are just slinging sledgehammer in the dark - you don't understand what you are arguing against (because you never studied it or what you are arguing for), but you are lashing out at it based on syntax only. You hear "invisible market", so you attack it, then go on to make a statement synonymous with it.



I'm not arguing that the government should run anything, like a household or otherwise. You are. And again, you go on to say it's millions of interactions, which I am at a complete loss for how you are trying to reconcile this with the statement with your "macroeconomic" argument. The only thing I can guess is you are getting confused that things of large scale cannot be analyzed by studying the individual components. Well, I have news for you. Anything that is defined by the summation of the interactions of all its inclusive components (fluid mechanics, material mechanics, economics etc.) is and must be analyzed in such a way.

There are no such thing as "micro" solutions, which is completely where you are missing the point. There is no such thing as a "macro" problem, either. As I've stated already several times, and you have agreed with by way of your very own words, the economy is the summation of millions of interactions.

There is no school of economics of "do nothing". There is a school of economics that believes that the summation of interactions drives the behavior of economy as a whole, which you seem to agree with. As I stated above, economics does not try to understand what policy is best - it tries to understand what are the consequences of different types of actions. It studies a natural system - the system of humans interacting.

Your statement of the problem being "trying to apply'"micro' solutions to a macro problem" is almost embarrassing in its naivety. You simply see two words, that in your mind are antonyms, and therefore assume they must somehow be incompatible, or diametrically opposed.

_________________
"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

If the government had run a surplus instead of massive deficit spending during the "boom," which is exactly what Keynes actually advocated, then the stimulus would have actually worked, as the money would already have been taken out of the economy during the good times, rather than now when the government just redistributes it by borrowing it from one person and giving it to another.

How can the government run a "surplus" during a boom? That's impossible. In order for a boom to occur, it has to be funded by entities being able to leverage themselves with cheap credit or over-appraised assets, which does not happen without an artificially cheap central banking system.

Keynes is advocating foolishness.

If I advocate that if only we had magical boxes that could summon whatever we wanted during a boom, then there wouldn't be any bust, does that mean me some sort of economic visionary? The **** soothsayer of economic wisdom??

_________________
"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Wait, you're actually saying that it is impossible for the government to run a surplus, ever?

Is that what I said? Do you know how to read? I hate to be a dick, but **** read what I wrote.

_________________
"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

I read what you wrote. You said that the government cannot run a surplus during a boom. Ok, you didn't outright SAY that, but you're using Socratic irony to convey exactly that point. And since if the government can't run a surplus during a boom, they most certainly can't during a bust, when their incomes are massively lower, so I can only conclude that you're saying they can't run one at all.