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Debt Ceiling Debacle 2013: It's the End of the World As We Know It and the GOP Feels Fine
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As an Australian, my road warrior gang will be known as the humane one because we just execute bankers. Our worst punishment will be to release them for someone else to find.
a default will make the super rich only kind of sort of rich, the more wealth you have the more (numerically) it will hurt you, it could credibly lead to a pseudo communist revolution in America. I have no idea what they hope to gain
Serfs.
Warren 2020
Mostly they think they'll be fine. See SKFM's explanation of the thought process.
You could basically .gif those posts with a THIS IS WHAT THE SUPER RICH ACTUALLY BELIEVES
Antibiotics, tools, preservable luxury foods (trade goods), dry medicines (especially painkillers and antiseptics), instruction books on mechanics, electronics, maths, carpentry, more tools, seeds, books on basic medicine & surgery, a few kilos of potassium permanganate crystals, a lot of salt, preferrably in waterproof packaging (its surprising how few places have a readily available salt source, and without it, you die), a few solar battery rechargers, a box of rechargable batteries...
You know what, it's probably a much easier and cheaper proposition not to run over that cliff.
It bypasses the need for Congress to approve paying the debt by an accounting trick.
My earlier post was talking about how the wealthy and the economy could still be healthy even without the common worker having much buying power. If we actually default on the US's obligations, no one comes put ok because of global collapse. There would be no good market for any goods or services and so everybody would go down together
Ah, you're right now that I look back over it.
Damn my memory!
I'm not sure how you figure an economy can be healthy when 98% of the population has depressed buying power.
When we came out recession in mid-2009 unemployment was still increasing, consumer confidence was low, etc. maybe we are using different definitions?
If you consider "not being in recession" to be the same thing as "healthy", then yeah. Dramatically different definitions.
Its also about when the bankers and ultra rich started making money again
which is all that really matters
Better stock up on some fish.
I got a little excited when I saw your ship.
We've severely overfished the oceans. Stock up on dog meat and hobo whiskers instead.
We have chosen an economy where capital is king, and so I would say that the most salient indicator of health is people seeing a return on capital investments, and a decrease in capital losses through bankruptcy. Any other measure seems innaccurate to me, since you would not be looking at what our economy is configured for.
Let's say that we used the buying power of the average worker as an indicator of health instead. That would mean that a US company outsourcing production and selling the goods to a strong foreign market is actually hurting the US economy (through layoffs in the US, and by not using the outsourced savings to provide goods in the US at a reduced price) even though the company's revenue is up, and its taxable income is higher. I certainly understand holding this as a political view, but as a measure of the "health "of the economy, it seems doomed to always be inaccurate.
Fed accepts the coin in exchange for 1T in treasury securities that the Fed currently holds. Then the treasury can use those securities to pay bills. Fed does not use the coin for anything, treating it like a loan.
Essentially the treasury is taking out $1 trillion in loans (the coin), but in a way that doesn't count against the debt ceiling.
You could print some online-resources to save on books. If you can't afford the books, even Wikipedia gives you more to work with than not having any instructions.
While you are correct insomuch as how we view our economy today, especially in Washington, I can't help but be reminded of medieval doctors warning of malignant spirits and having too much blood.
And, to be honest, hoping that one day this view is just as archaic.
In real world terms, I would say that measuring our economy ONLY by one of those options while ignoring the other (and several others rarely mentioned) that our view of the "health" of the economy is already doomed to be inaccurate, and at times wildly so.
The recession has been over for a few years now, but the recovery has barely even started for the wide majority of Americans.
That seems like an equally poor indicator, to me. If the transfer of capital overseas, via production costs, exceeds the transfer of capital domestically, via export profits, then the economy is slowly bleeding out. Sure, return on capital investments would be up, but that economy would be anything but healthy. There's also the decreased domestic churn due to the layoffs that wouldn't be helping.
That is the way of recessions. Capital feels them first, but is first to recover. This was a longer recession than most, so it is taking longer than usual for the recovery to extend to labor. There is also the specter of a "new normal" whereby we have recognized and corrected for pre-recession over employment, and so some people may simply never feel recovery, leaving us with the choice of perpetual unemployment or letting these people fall with no net to catch them. @ronya and I disagree here, but I believe that it is a fantasy to believe that everyone who had a job Pre-recession will find one again.
Well yeah. Free trade treaties being what they are, the old economy jobs that were the staple of such regions as the industrial Midwest are going to go bye bye. The US economy tanking as it did merely hastened the process.
What can you call employing more people than are needed to do a job other than over employment?
a counterfactual
Benevolent capitalism.
Could you please elaborate on both this and your prior post?
Your definition is a bit specious. The recession didn't "rebalance" the economy, it taught employers that they can get X amount more effectiveness from their employees while still paying them y amount less money because they don't have options.
Why should the American worker continue to increase productivity if they aren't going to be rewarded? Falling wages (in dollar terms or via inflation) and increased workload seems to be a poor option.
Yup. It's amazing what a workforce will do when it's desperate for work.
Yes, there is a glut of labor relative to jobs. The only solutions to this are regulation , artificial constraints on labor supply (through unions) or irrationality. I think you know which option I prefer.
I'll just leave it with this:
Greed, for lack of a better word, is fuckawful and we need to stop hero worshiping the people who keep pimping it out. And those are far from the only options, nor is that automatically the problem. Though it is convenient for people to think it is.
You are basically arguing for the structural unemployment position as to why we have had high unemployment, as opposed to the cyclical or demand based unemployment explanations. The structural argument you are pushing, whether you realize it or not, has a major flaw in it: there aren't major sectors of the workforce and economy with disproportionately higher unemployment than other sectors, with other sectors facing very low unemployment to the point of a shortage of workers.
The typical case being made for structural unemployment being the problem we are facing now was something along these lines: due to the housing crisis there was a glut of houses built so in the aftermath there would be a wide excess of construction workers who were not educated and not prepared to switch into other sectors that were not hurt. I remember seeing analysis of the unemployment numbers by sectors that showed that this wasn't the case, that across the board unemployment was up without major labor shortages in particular sectors, and the construction workers weren't that far out of line with everyone else.
As there for not being enough jobs, you are leaving out the alternative suggested by those whose theory supports stimulus: raise demand. If there is more demand for goods and services, then there is more demand for people to do jobs to supply those goods and services, which is what will push for increases in hiring. The way you word it in particular it seems to come across that you think there is a sort of macroeconomic stasis, that the current labor dynamics are the way they are because that is the way they have to be. I'm not sure exactly what theoretical reasoning you are using to get to that point, but I'm not following it.
macroeconomics isn't a salad bar. you don't get to pick your favourite bits out of a list of proposed hypotheses and jumble them all together into a pet combination, because macroeconomic theories are not a list of their predictions. They are a model of interactions that generate those predictions. You cannot both credit Thor and Zeus for the lightning, so to speak.
Likewise, if I asked you to explain unemployment and you credited X% of it to "insufficient aggregate demand", then there is only, at most, (100-X)% of it to blame on "insufficient structural adjustment". And if (100-X)% is large, then we should reasonably expect that the economy exhibits all the signs of one where structural adjustment is slow and in disequilibrium, like startlingly high returns to the sunrise industries, or fiscal stimulus whose stimulative impacts are heavily limited to industries directly involved.
Ronya, this is a fantastic phrase.