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[mainiac]

Google gave me this:
http://www.monkeybizness.com/

[Frumple]

Let the shitposting commence.

Hey man, it's more on point than you'd think. I've actually rode by one of Jeb's graft cabins up here in north florida. Same for a couple other governors. They like to have little houses out in the middle of the wood/farmlands where they take "vacations" and invite along various political an business supporters. Is a thing.

[mainiac]

I was under the impression those were paid with campaign finances?  Which is a whole other issue but I doubt Graft Miner will be able to suckle at that teat for at least a couple decades and probably more.

[Egan_BW]

we have too many people not doing things
we don't have enough money
therefore employ.people to create wealth

most effective way to employ people to create wealth while ensuring wellness in people is unknown, requires farther analysis

[mainiac]

we have too many people not doing things
we don't have enough money
therefore employ.people to create wealth

most effective way to employ people to create wealth while ensuring wellness in people is unknown, requires farther analysis

Diamond Tier Post 11/10

[Powder Miner]

Spent some time coming up with a unified thesis for you to tear apart, mainiac.

The entitlements are behemoths, and their ever-inflating costs present threats on two fronts: the debt of the country and the general flexibility of the budget, and within the stability and future success of the entitlement programs themselves -- Social Security in particular.

My last big post was spent arguing the latter, and my first loss have been spent arguing the former: they are hardly mutually exclusive issues, and as the entitlements inflate and struggle to hold together themselves, they also drive up debt and ensure that a larger and larger portion of the budget is mandatory and very difficult to touch, meaning that if something is not reduced, crisis is potentially faced both in the benefits received by entitlement recipients but im governmental debt and the state of the future economy.

[Frumple]

I was under the impression those were paid with campaign finances?

I haven't actually paid attention to where the money's coming from, there

Though yeah, even the lower level stuff will probably take a good few years to start milking. Still, if it's a goal it's a goal, I guess. There's worse reasons to go into politics.

[itisnotlogical]

The EU isn't like the US at all, it is separate countries with sovereign governments and the Eurozone isn't one combined economy, just multiple with a lot of tying factors bringing them to cooperate, which is really important to note. Besides, I can hear the constant bickering about the NHS, for example, from here. That said, if an administrative redesign could somehow raise benefits while massively destroying cost, I'd be all for it -- I'm just skeptical it could.

The United States sometimes feels like a collection of separate countries, with how much the Fed and the states clash on certain issues. Maybe I'm just getting a better idea of what it's actually like to live in this country as I wise up and pay more attention, but it seems like every other little thing is an excuse for red states to make a big show of disobeying the federal government, or for pundits and radio hosts to talk about how [insert candidate] is unqualified, Hitler, the Antichrist or all three, or for some neo-Confederates to mumble about wanting a second Civil War again.

[/has nothing intelligent to say about large-scale economic matters]

[Baffler]

The EU isn't like the US at all, it is separate countries with sovereign governments and the Eurozone isn't one combined economy, just multiple with a lot of tying factors bringing them to cooperate, which is really important to note. Besides, I can hear the constant bickering about the NHS, for example, from here. That said, if an administrative redesign could somehow raise benefits while massively destroying cost, I'd be all for it -- I'm just skeptical it could.

The United States sometimes feels like a collection of separate countries, with how much the Fed and the states clash on certain issues. Maybe I'm just getting a better idea of what it's actually like to live in this country as I wise up and pay more attention, but it seems like every other little thing is an excuse for red states to make a big show of disobeying the federal government, or for pundits and radio hosts to talk about how [insert candidate] is unqualified, Hitler, the Antichrist or all three, or for some neo-Confederates to mumble about wanting a second Civil War again.

[/has nothing intelligent to say about large-scale economic matters]

The states clash with each other plenty as well. I'm reminded of some Northeastern states suspending non-essential state travel to Mississippi because of some discriminatory thing or other they passed through their state legislature. We're past the days where state militias would line up on either side of a disputed boundary and shoot up in the air, but the amount of petty bickering that still exists over things like jurisdiction over criminal cases and maintaining bridges that cross river boundaries is astounding.

[mainiac]

Spent some time coming up with a unified thesis for you to tear apart, mainiac.

You should look into professional licencing and real estate views.  You will find that I'm suddenly a lot more amenable to your libertarian outlook on those issues.  As are most liberal economists.

The entitlements are behemoths, and their ever-inflating costs present threats on two fronts: the debt of the country and the general flexibility of the budget, and within the stability and future success of the entitlement programs themselves -- Social Security in particular.

Well the programs are basically financially sound.  It's possible that there is a 10% deficit in the very long run but the trustees are using pessimistic rather then optimistic forecasts.  Sometimes absurdly pessimistic.  For instance there was a big revision between 2013 and 2015:


They were assuming before then that basically the great recession never ends and we never get medical inflation under control.  But the last few years of healthcare cost inflation have been encouraging.  We still are paying more per patient but that's because the average patient is older and thus more expensive.  The cost for a patient is growing more slowly then it has in the past and if this new trend continues, economic growth will make things start to slowly grow more affordable again.  In many ways this is predictable, ridiculous costs can only grow so much before there isn't room for them to grow.  However it also bears mentioning that the costs all started coming under control around the time that a lot of Obamacare cost control mechanisms went into effect.

Now the trust funds probably should be shored up a little bit more.  But the problem is that right now, the motives are highly questionable.  We already shored up the trust fund, then they took that money and shoved it into general revenues and used it to pay for a war.  Why the hell should we trust them with that money again?  So yeah you need somewhere between a 0%-10% adjustment to the trust fund.  But the trust fund has been subsidizing the general government outlays with below market loans for a long time.  It's not unreasonable to say that the general government outlays can subsidize the trust fund a little instead to pay back that below market loan.  Or alternatively, just raise the cap on trust fund income like a lot of people do.  That way high income taxpayers who profited the most from the tax cuts that the trust fund was subsidzing will bear the cost of paying back the trust fund.

[PTTG??]

The funny thing about inflation is it's most bad for people who save wealth as cash. The low and middle income groups generally save wealth as homes or not at all. So long as wages match inflation (a big assumption), the real problem with inflation is people who keep their wealth locked away in bank accounts, where it does nothing useful.

But that all assumes that government spending inevitably causes inflation. Anyone who recalls the trillions of dollars the US created to stabilize the banks would realize there's something wrong with that theory. For government spending to cause inflation, additional spending needs to surpass the capacity of the economy. If the government is simply buying up excess capacity, then the "new" money causes no special disruptions.

All that is why I favor Universal Employment. If you're willing to work, you work for UE, and you get a guaranteed living wage (based off the cost of a given basket of goods), and a laborous public-works job. Maybe it's painting road stripes, maybe it's planting trees, or fixing bridges, or picking trash. The point is it's public works stuff and it's probably the first job you ever have. Unemployment drops to zero and all wages go up, with no inflation. Yeah the government is spending more, but money is imaginary anyway. The government can no more run out of money than Reddit can run out of upvotes.

If you really want to fund it, then get rid of fossil fuel subsidies and put a hefty carbon tax on them instead.

[mainiac]

The funny thing about inflation is it's most bad for people who save wealth as cash.

The people who save most of their money as cash mostly save very little money.  A massive 5% increase in inflation affects your $500 of cash by $25.  The effect of inflation on the cash savings of the poor are insignificant compared to the power of the force the effect on labor markets.

[i2amroy]

The states clash with each other plenty as well. I'm reminded of some Northeastern states suspending non-essential state travel to Mississippi because of some discriminatory thing or other they passed through their state legislature.

Small note on this, this wasn't them saying "oh you, a private citizen, are traveling there? No you're not", it was them saying "state governmental employees, for which the state is paying their travel fees, shall not be allowed to spend our money to travel there through their job unless it is absolutely essential to their job that they go there".

And to be fair sometimes it's actually astounding that the United States has remained as a single country for so long. One of the reasons we have so many countries, after all, is because that ensures that the person who is ruling you and making your laws is more likely to support the same beliefs as you, because their concerns and culture are going to be relatively similar to yours due to their relatively close geographical location. Its one reason why the gigantic empires like the British empire dissolve; people don't like being governed by a body that doesn't understand them or share their cultural values due to distance. Considering that the US is over a third the size of all of Europe congregated into a single country, the fact that the country hasn't crumbled over regional differences says a lot about the combination of government structure and ideals of the country.

[Cruxador]

We're past the days where state militias would line up on either side of a disputed boundary and shoot up in the air,

Only because the militias were (unconstitutionally) nationalized.

And to be fair sometimes it's actually astounding that the United States has remained as a single country for so long.

The US federal government has been around longer than most governments, true. But they really did a number on the country after/during the civil war. And democracy, it turns out, is quite the opiate of the masses. It will probably be multiple generations until we have another civil war.

Its one reason why the gigantic empires like the British empire dissolve; people don't like being governed by a body that doesn't understand them or share their cultural values due to distance. Considering that the US is over a third the size of all of Europe congregated into a single country, the fact that the country hasn't crumbled over regional differences says a lot about the combination of government structure and ideals of the country.

The US has also, until recently, had a totally dominant class of white anglo-germanic people with a culture that very strongly integrates immigrants, and demonizes those who don't integrate. Dixies and yankees diverged, and went to war. Natives have been exterminated. But racism and genocide aren't popular any more - Trump may represent the last gasp of this kind of philosophy as a major part of the zeitgeist, and he can barely hit 30% support. That means more meaningful factions may develop, and we may see a civil war something like the Spanish one, though I can't imagine any fascist warlord successfully dominating such a large area as the US.

[mainiac]

civil war something like the Spanish one

Dibs on Christinos!  Suck it Carlists!