Much as I'd like to point out Obama's flaws, accusations that he is Muslim or even overly sympathizes with Islam to me aren't credible.
You don't sit in a Christian church, get married and baptize your children there, all the while listening to the crazed rantings of a racist, reality-challenged spiritual mentor if in your heart you subscribe to a totally different faith.
I don't know who the Democratic counterparts to these two guys would be.
There isn't any Democrat equals, that's why the Republicans are 7 wins for the last 10 elections. Bob Schrum is the most famous Democrat election operative out there AND the architect of that 7 for 10 record. Maybe, they should try recruiting some winners for a change.
Then again, it is not over yet.
Just back from Europe, Land of the Subjects and Home of the Militarily Challenged.
GTF
Since you are so enlightened by the world's political systems, how many of these locales and hellholes have you actually visited, gotten drunk with the folks, discussed politics and health care system; listened to their complaints of the local oppression? The cost of living? Despite the polling data, the denizens of PPRuNe and the like, most folks around the world actually like us. Even covet our lifestyle, but that wouldn't jive with the 10th Commandment.
Now, Obama and Biden have promised, if elected they will give, not loan, but give 50 billion dollars to the UN poverty fund.
What is this poverty fund? I think what you may be referring to is the 0.7% GNP for ODA agreed by all contributing rich-nations nations at the UN in the 1960s. Nordic and Western European nations have been exceding this agreed contribution while the US bettered only Greece in avoiding the bottom of the league table managing to contribute just 0.16%.
So given this was an agreed pledge, one the US has not lived up to, Obama is entirely entitled to say that at the very least, the US will abide by its obligations. Moreover, this isn’t money down the drain. This is infrastructure projects in the very countries that apparently pose such a risk to US security that trillions are being spent on protecting against them. Ever wondered why the Scandinavian nations are so well received by the 3rd world?
Steve Landsburg is a very good economist and writer (Armchair Economics and More Sex is Better Sex), very thoughtful and, as opposed to the hack Krugman, not political.
Quote:
DISPATCH SEPTEMBER 18, 2008
An economist explains why he thinks McCain's economic policies make more sense
BY STEVEN LANDSBURG
Betting on John McCain
My whole life I've been mystified by the concept of the "undecided voter." I've never had any problem choosing my candidates and didn't see how anyone else could either. But this year, I've been genuinely on the fence, partly because I haven't been paying close attention, and partly because there seemed ample reason to dislike all of the options.
But over the past few days, as McCain and Obama have ratcheted up their rhetoric over each others' "disastrous" economic policies, I decided to do a little research. Along the way, I had a few surprises about John McCain's voting record, some but not all of them pleasant. Now I don't think I'm undecided anymore.
Here are some of the things that made my decision easy, and some that made it hard:
1. Free trade and immigration are my top issues, and McCain wins on both.
These are my top issues for several reasons. First, trade is the engine of prosperity not just for the United States but also for the poorest of the world's poor. Nothing matters more than that. Second, the instinct to care about the national origin of your trading partner (or employer, or employee, or landlord, or tenant) is an ugly one, and the instinct to care about the national origin of other people's trading partners—and on that basis to interfere forcibly with other people's voluntary transactions—is even uglier.
Finally, protectionism, like creationism, requires an extraordinary level of willful ignorance. The consensus for free trade among economists is approximately as solid as the consensus for evolution among biologists, and it is a consensus supported by a solid body of both theory and observation. To ignore that consensus betrays a degree of anti-intellectualism that frightens me.
McCain is quite good on this issue, not just in terms of rhetoric (which I've known for a while) but in terms of voting record (which I've just recently researched). Obama, by contrast, promises to be our first explicitly protectionist president since Herbert Hoover. Some intervening presidents (Reagan, Bush I, and to a lesser extent Bush II) have been weak in their commitments to free trade, but none between Hoover and Obama has so explicitly rejected it.
2. McCain is not Bush. This came as a surprise to me. I'd been assuming, in my ill-read, uneducated way, that McCain had been complicit in most of the great travesties of the Bush administration and the execrable Republican Senate. I've learned that's largely untrue. He voted (to my great surprise!) against the prescription drug entitlement, against the Farm Security Bill, against milk subsidies, against Amtrak subsidies, and against highway subsidies.
Obama, by contrast, is in many ways a continuation of Bush. Like Bush (only far more so), Obama is fine with tariffs and subsidies. Like Bush, he wants to send jackbooted thugs into every meatpacking plant in America to rid the American workplace of anyone who happens to have been born on the wrong side of an imaginary line. Like Bush, he wants a more progressive tax code. (It is one of the great myths of 21st century that the Bush tax cuts made the tax code less progressive; the opposite is true. If you are in the bottom 38% of taxpayers, you now pay zero income tax—and therefore have an incentive to support any spending bill that comes down the pike.) Like Bush, he wants more regulation, not less.
3. But there's a lot about economics that McCain just doesn't get. This shows up most significantly in his energy policies. Every economist knows that the best way to discourage carbon emissions (or anything else for that matter) is to tax them. But McCain rejects a carbon tax in favor of one slightly inferior policy (cap and trade) and one grossly inferior policy (direct regulation, such as the CAFE standards for fuel efficiency).
In a world of perfect capital markets and perfect information, a cap-and-trade system (provided the government auctions off the permits rather than giving them away) is exactly equivalent to a carbon tax – same effect on everything down to and including the prices of consumer goods. In the real world we live in, it's inferior for two reasons: First, small firms might find it difficult to raise the necessary capital to buy a permit; this gives an inappropriate advantage to big firms over small ones. Second, I believe it will be harder (for technical reasons I won't go into here) to calculate the efficient number of cap-and-trade permits than to calculate the efficient per-ton carbon tax. Aside from that, the two policies are equivalent in every way. McCain presumably doesn't get this, or he wouldn't have such a strong preference for cap-and-trade.
Worse, he endorses the CAFE standards, which are just a terrible way to control carbon emissions. While a carbon tax gets incentives right at every decision point, fuel efficiency standards give people no incentive, for example, to bike to work instead of drive (in fact, they flip the incentive in the wrong direction). Worse yet, they concentrate brainpower on improving fuel efficiency when there might be far more effective ways to control carbon emissions; with a tax, all innovations are rewarded.
In his support of CAFE standards over carbon taxes, McCain betrays a serious failure to understand how incentives work. The same problem shows up when he thinks you can simply mandate campaign finance limits, as if people who are competing for control of a $15 trillion economy won't be creative enough to find some way to spend hundreds of millions in the effort, no matter how you write your laws.
4. McCain gets health care right. The reason poor Americans get too little health care is that rich Americans get too much. The reason rich Americans get too much is that they're overinsured, and therefore run to the doctor for minor problems. The reason they're overinsured is that employer-provided health benefits aren't taxed, so employers overprovide them.
It has been clear for decades that the single most effective way to control health care costs is to eliminate the tax break for employer-provided health care. According to one careful study by my colleague Charles Phelps (admittedly several years old, but I'm not sure anything relevant has changed), this single reform could reduce health care costs by 40% with essentially no effect on health care outcomes.
Essential as this reform may be, I'd always assumed it was a political non-starter. I was therefore astonished to learn that it's the essence of McCain's health care reform. (At the same time, he would give each individual $2500, and each family $5000, to use for health care.)
I am astonished that I hadn't heard about this, and particularly astonished that Barack Obama hasn't thrust it in my face with a negative spin. Possibly he has and I just wasn't paying attention. In any case, this is just what the doctor ordered, and I am delighted that McCain has put it on the table.
Obama, by contrast, wants poor people to get more medical care without addressing the problem of overuse by rich people. Where is that extra medical care going to come from? If the answer is "nowhere," then a primary effect of the Obama plan must be to raise prices, making doctors and hospitals the big beneficiaries.
Of course, there are other things that matter. Foreign and defense policy might matter more than anything, and if I were sure that one or the other candidate were far wiser about these issues, that might be enough to win my vote. But I have no expertise on these matters and no particular reason to trust my own judgment.
I'm sure I'm right about trade and pretty sure I'm right about taxes and health care, but that's because I've thought long and hard about these issues for decades. It seems to me that we ought to be humble about the things we haven't thought hard about, and for me that includes foreign policy. The best I can do is bet that whoever's getting most of the other stuff right is getting this right too.
The bottom line is that I support John McCain. With trepidation.
business interests come before societies interests
Sunray
Business interests are the property rights of the owners of that business i.e. in America that is likely the stockholders of companies, retirement plans, pensions funds, now, unfortunately government. Do you think the owners should be deprived of the income from their investments? You would not want your income confiscated by Inland Revenue beyond societies; so why should business owners have theirs taken simply because they are "big"? Society has a need for funds for those things that are government's constitutional duties but not anymore.
Here is just one good explanation for why this financial panic has nothing to do with so-called deregulation.
Hindsight regulation
16 Sep 2008 04:44 pm
Andrew writes:
So no responsibility for not recognizing the problem and not doing anythng about it for almost eight years? I'm not an expert but blaming the current meltdown entirely on ... Clinton seems a stretch to me.
But I don't blame it on Clinton. I think that the regulatory steps taken under the Clinton administration were entirely appropriate. To put it more boldly, I don't think that this represents a failure of prospective regulation.
I hope that this will result in deep changes to our regulatory system, starting with unifying the diverse bank regulatory body, and giving them a stronger mandate to watch systemic risk like a hawk. I hope the GSEs will be broken up, stripped of their government guarantee, and regulated like other companies that do the same thing. I hope the central bank will pay more attention to inflation, and less to unemployment.
But that is retrospective. What can I say that Bush, or Clinton, or anyone else, should have done, knowing what they did at the time? I can demand that they be omniscient, but since I'm not willing to hold myself to that standard (nor, I expect, is Andrew), that hardly seems fair.
There are a couple of problems that I don't have answers to yet:
Should the Fed watch asset price bubbles? It's obviously tempting to give a glib yes, but there are deep problems with this. The Fed already has a lot on its plate; adding asset prices would vastly multiply the complexity. And it's not clear we'd be happy with the results. If the Fed is too conservative, it will tamp down growth prophylactically. I'm not confident that regulators can correctly identify the moment that we enter an asset price bubble. And asset price bubbles are really, really hard to pop. I refer you to John Kenneth Galbraith's description of the government's attempts to shut down the 1929 boom.
How should the Federal Reserve have dealt with the river of money flowing into American markets from central banks and savers abroad? This was the primary culprit in the credit expansion, not the Fed--indeed, that's why the yield curve got so funny looking at the end.
What standards should we use for evaluating derivatives? Derivatives don't just create risk; they can also lower it, by allowing firms to hedge. When Robert Shiller tells me that overall they're a good thing for the financial system, I'm inclined to listen.
Is mark-to-market accounting a good idea? A lot of the problem can be traced to the practice of marking all assets to market value at the end of the day. This has advantages, in that it gives investors a better idea of the breakup value of the firm. But it can also touch off downward spirals--they open up balance sheet holes that create ratings downgrades and force asset sales, which further depresses the value of those assets and opens up similar holes at other firms.
Then there are things that I think would have helped, but cannot see where the political will would have come from:
Keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of risky mortgages, and give OFHEO some teeth. Bush and several Republicans tried, and failed, to do this. My preferred solution, an explicit strip of the government guarantee and a supervised breakup, wouldn't even have gotten on the radar. Fannie and Freddie were politically powerful, as were voters who wanted to buy houses.
Regulate mortgage brokers at the federal level. Given the way mortgage funds now flow across state lines, this made sense. But the state governors would have screamed bloody murder. Moreover, no one knew about the fraud when it would have helped--i.e., before most of it happened.
Mandate 20% down payments. Political suicide. Affluent people would continue to borrow downpayments in private family loans, while the poor were shut out of the housing market. Poor neighborhoods would have been devastated by the credit cutoff. House prices would have dropped sharply everywhere.
Change regulatory standards to take more account of small-probability, devastating systemic risk. Nassim Taleb has been talking about this for the last few years. But I didn't hear more than academic interest in this until mid-2007. Most people on the Street really believed that they had gotten better at assessing credit risk.
Unify the bank regulators, including the SEC, into one agency. At least some of this crisis might be traced to the fact that the regional banks who originated many of the bad loans were often regulated by a different body from the investment banks who bought them. It might have been done, I suppose. But each of those agencies has powerful constituencies among their employees, and the firms they regulate. Moreover, the transition process would have involved some ugly internicene warfare that probably would have eroded regulatory effectiveness in the short run.
Mandate contingency plans for the dissolution of large firms, and other unlikely but devastating scenarios. If people had some certainty about the likely outcome of an insolvency, the panic selling wouldn't be so rampant, and people would be more willing to loan money, albeit at a discount. But again, I didn't hear anyone talking about this in, say, 2006. I certainly didn't think of it. Is it reasonable to say that this should have been utmost on the mind of Bush or his advisors, while other big priorities, like trade deals, loomed large?
Make subprime loans illegal. As long as most subprime borrowers are still making their payments, I can't endorse cutting them off to protect the fools. Moreover, this would simply not have been possible, no matter who controlled congress or the presidency. Cutting off subprime loans would have prevented more people from buying homes. The politics of it are terrible.
Make option ARMs or negative amortization loans illegal. Option ARMs are debateable-they're actually useful for people who have uneven income flows, like, er, a lot of journalists. But clearly they were abused, and negative amortization loans are nuts. However, these exotic instruments are only a fraction of the toxic subprime loans. They appeared mostly late in the process, when lenders were scraping the bottom of the barrel to keep the boom going.
Change the way that these securities were accounted for. Most risk models for ABS and MBS were focused on prepayment risk, not default risk, which was assumed to be fairly well known. This assumes a rather stunning level of prescience on the part of regulators or legislators.
Force banks to keep some amount, say 10% of the loans they originated. Spain does this, and its housing market is even more bubbleicious than ours was, believe it or not. It might have made the banks more secure. But there are good reasons to want banks, especially small banks, to have the flexibility to match the durations of their asset portfolios to those of their liabilities. When interest rates skyrocketed in the early eighties, banks were stuck with long-term mortgages at low rates, but forced to offer high interest rates on savings accounts in order to keep business. The result was, ultimately, the S&L crisis. And again, while there may have been someone proposing this somewhere, I didn't see a lot of people talking about it in 2003, when it really might have helped.
Then there are the things that people think would have helped, but which wouldn't have done anything I can see:
Repealing Gramm-Leach-Bliley, or at least the provisions that repealed Glass-Steagall's ban on commercial banks entering other lines of financial business. If this were part of the problem, it would be the commercial banks, not the investment banks, that were in trouble.
Lowering CEO pay. Whaaaaaa? If Dick Fuld had been paid a dollar a year, we'd be in exactly the same mess. Probably worse, because what kind of CEO do you get for a dollar a year?
Raising the Fed Funds rate The MBS money was long money, not overnight funds. And when a bubble is truly going, raising rates may just attract more long money, without deterring speculators who are expecting double-digit annual returns.
Requiring better disclosure of loan terms Disclosure of loan terms is already quite exhaustive, including a term sheet right on top that provides a congressionally mandated summary. You can't make people read things, and the extra disclosure you mandate goes into the "fine print" that people claim they can't read. Moreover, the fundamental problem for most borrowers are things that aren't hard for buyers to understand, like "I have an adjustable rate mortgage"; "Interest rates can go up"; and "My housing payment should not be two-thirds of my gross income".
Changed the neo-liberal "culture" The president and congress are not the parents of Wall Street, and believe me, bankers do not look towards Washington for moral guidance. The "Miasma Theory" of political influence is the last refuge of partisans who know they are full of it.
There are more, but considering all this nonsense is frankly exhausting.
The point is, given what they could reasonably have known then, did regulators act unreasonably? Did legislators ignore politically feasible policy options? I don't see it.
But if you are looking to place regulatory blame, whatever changes you'd care to point to happened on Clinton's watch, not Bush's. You cannot have it both ways--hailing the Clinton genius at economic management (and implying that Obama will bring back those halcyon days), and then claiming that Bush should have trailed around undoing all his work. You most certainly cannot explicitly claim, as Obama did in his speech, that this crisis is the result of the Bush administration's deregulation of the financial markets:
It's really a matter of faulty (or fraudulent) risk assessment and management. Didn't Fannie Mae's Risk Officer resign a year or two back when his realistic reports went into the circular file? (or whatever the digital equivalent is...)
I think we all know that the risk/reward coupling was broken; the executives took all the reward, while the taxpayer took the risk. Whose fault is that? Can you say CONGRESS?
EDIT: It was Freddie Mac's risk guy who resigned, in 2005.
Last edited by barit1 : 22nd September 2008 at 05:08.
GTF
Since you are so enlightened by the world's political systems, how many of these locales and hellholes have you actually visited, gotten drunk with the folks, discussed politics and health care system; listened to their complaints of the local oppression? The cost of living? Despite the polling data, the denizens of PPRuNe and the like, most folks around the world actually like us. Even covet our lifestyle, but that wouldn't jive with the 10th Commandment.
I've been to ZERO GF. Stepped foot in Canada once -- about 40 years ago.
As to getting drunk with them and discussing their systems...
About 3 Englsihmen, 2 Indians, 1 Irishman and a couple of Germans. (Actually lots of Germans over the years.) That doesn't count the two foreign exchange students my family hosted (1 Swede, 1 Taiwanese) nor the Chinese, Nigerians and Beninens (spelling ?) I've broken bread with.
Which adds up to much ado about nothing. They all seem to like us -- a lot -- enough to live here for a while if not permanently.
As to winning the Presidential election -- where you seem to support the theory "This ends justify the means" -- this will do for a response.
Q: Daddy, why did we have to attack Iraq?
A: Because they had weapons of mass destruction honey.
Q: But the inspectors didn't find any weapons of mass destruction.
A: That's because the Iraqis were hiding them.
Q: And that's why we invaded Iraq?
A: Yep. Invasions always work better than inspections.
Q: But after we invaded them, we STILL didn't find any weapons of mass
destruction, did we?
A: That's because the weapons are so well hidden. Don't worry, we'll find something, probably right before the 2008 election.
Q: Why did Iraq want all those weapons of mass destruction?
A: To use them in a war, silly.
Q: I'm confused. If they had all those weapons that they planned to
use in a war, then why didn't they use any of those weapons when we
went to war with them?
A: Well, obviously they didn't want anyone to know they had those weapons, so they chose to die by the thousands rather than defend themselves.
Q: That doesn't make sense Daddy. Why would they choose to die if they had all those big weapons to fight us back with?
A: It's a different culture. It's not supposed to make sense.
Q: I don't know about you, but I don't think they had any of those weapons our government said they did.
A: Well, you know, it doesn't matter whether or not they had those weapons. We had another good reason to invade them anyway.
Q: And what was that?
A: Even if Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, Saddam
Hussein was a cruel dictator, which is another good reason to invade another country.
Q: Why? What does a cruel dictator do that makes it OK to invade his
country?
A: Well, for one thing, he tortured his own people.
Q: Kind of like what they do in China?
A: Don't go comparing China to Iraq. China is a good economic competitor, where millions of people work for slave wages in sweatshops to make U.S. Corporations richer.
Q: So if a country lets its people be exploited for American corporate gain, it's a good country, even if that country tortures people?
A: Right.
Q: Why were people in Iraq being tortured?
A: For political crimes, mostly, like criticizing the government. People who criticized the government in Iraq were sent to prison and tortured.
Q: Isn't that exactly what happens in China?
A: I told you, China is different.
Q: What's the difference between China and Iraq?
A: Well, for one thing, Iraq was ruled by the Ba'ath party, while China is Communist.
Q: Didn't you once tell me Communists were bad?
A: No, just Cuban Communists are bad.
Q: How are the Cuban Communists bad?
A: Well, for one thing, people who criticize the government in Cuba are sent to prison and tortured.
Q: Like in Iraq?A: Exactly.Q: And like in China, too?
A: I told you, China's a good economic competitor. Cuba, on the other hand, is not.
Q: How come Cuba isn't a good economic competitor?
A: Well, you see, back in the early 1960s, our government passed some laws that made it illegal for Americans to trade or do any business with Cuba until they stopped being communists and started being capitalists like us.
Q: But if we got rid of those laws, opened up trade with Cuba, and started doing business with them, wouldn't that help the Cubans become
capitalists?
A: Don't be a smart-ass.
Q: I didn't think I was being one.
A: Well, anyway, they also don't have freedom of religion in Cuba.
Q: Kind of like China and the Falun Gong movement?
A: I told you, stop saying bad things about China. Anyway, Saddam Hussein came to power through a military coup, so he's not really a legitimate leader anyway.
Q: What's a military coup?
A: That's when a military general takes over the government of a country by force, instead of holding free elections like we do in the United States...
Q: Didn't the ruler of Pakistan come to power by a military coup?
A: You mean General Pervez Musharraf? Uh, yeah, he did, but Pakistan is our friend.
Q: Why is Pakistan our friend if their leader is illegitimate?
A: I never said Pervez Musharraf was illegitimate.
Q: Didn't you just say a military general who comes to power by forcibly overthrowing the legitimate government of a nation is an illegitimate leader?
A: Only Saddam Hussein. Pervez Musharraf is our friend, because he helped us invade Afghanistan.
Q: Why did we invade Afghanistan?
A: Because of what they did to us on September 11th.
Q: What did Afghanistan do to us on September 11th?
A: Well, on September 11th, nineteen men, fifteen of them Saudi Arabians, hijacked four airplanes and flew three of them into buildings, killing over 3,000 Americans.
Q: So how did Afghanistan figure into all that?
A: Afghanistan was where those bad men trained, under the oppressive rule of the Taliban..
Q: Aren't the Taliban those bad radical Islamics who chopped off people's heads and hands?
A: Yes, that's exactly who they were. Not only did they chop off people's heads and hands, but they oppressed women, too.
Q: Didn't the Bush administration give the Taliban 43 million dollars back in May of 2001?
A: Yes, but that money was a reward because they did such a good job fighting drugs.
Q: Fighting drugs?
A: Yes, the Taliban were very helpful in stopping people from growing opium poppies.
Q: How did they do such a good job?
A: Simple. If people were caught growing opium poppies, the Taliban would have their hands and heads cut off.
Q: So, when the Taliban cut off people's heads and hands for growing flowers, that was OK, but not if they cut people's heads and hands off for other reasons?
A: Yes. It's OK with us if radical Islamic fundamentalists cut off people's hands for growing flowers, but it's cruel if they cut off people's hands for stealing bread.
Q: Don't they also cut off people's hands and heads in Saudi Arabia?
A: That's different. Afghanistan was ruled by a tyrannical patriarchy that oppressed women and forced them to wear burqas whenever they were in public, with death by stoning as the penalty for women who did not comply.
Q: Don't Saudi women have to wear burqas in public, too?
A: No, Saudi women merely wear a traditional Islamic body covering.
Q: What's the difference?
A: The traditional Islamic covering worn by Saudi women is a modest yet fashionable garment that covers all of a woman's body except for her eyes and fingers. The burqa, on the other hand, is an evil tool of patriarchal oppression that covers all of a woman's body except for her eyes and fingers.
Q: It sounds like the same thing with a different name.
A: Now, don't go comparing Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are our friends.
Q: But I thought you said 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11th were from Saudi Arabia.
A: Yes, but they trained in Afghanistan.
Q: Who trained them?
A: A very bad man named Osama bin Laden.
Q: Was he from Afghanistan?
A: Uh, no, he was from Saudi Arabia too. But he was a bad man, a very bad man.
Q: I seem to recall he was our friend once.
A: Only when we helped him and the mujahadeen repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan back in the 1980s.
Q: Who are the Soviets? Was that the Evil Communist Empire Ronald
Reagan talked about?
A: There are no more Soviets. The Soviet Union broke up in 1990 or thereabouts, and now they have elections and capitalism like us. We call them Russians now..
Q: So the Soviets ? I mean, the Russians ? are now our friends?
A: Well, not really. You see, they were our friends for many years after they stopped being Soviets, but then they decided not to support our invasion of Iraq, so we're mad at them now. We're also mad at the French and the Germans because they didn't help us invade Iraq either.
Q: So the French and Germans are evil, too?
A: Not exactly evil, but just bad enough that we had to rename French fries and French toast to Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast.
Q: Do we always rename foods whenever another country doesn't do that we want them to do?
A: No, we just do that to our friends.. Our enemies, we invade.
Q: But wasn't Iraq one of our friends back in the 1980s?
A: Well, yeah. For a while.
Q: Was Saddam Hussein ruler of Iraq back then?
A: Yes, but at the time he was fighting against Iran, which made him our friend, temporarily.
Q: Why did that make him our friend?
A: Because at that time, Iran was our enemy.
Q: Isn't that when he gassed the Kurds?
A: Yeah, but since he was fighting against Iran at the time, we looked the other way, to show him we were his friend..
Q: So anyone who fights against one of our enemies automatically becomes our friend?
A: Most of the time, yes.
Q: And anyone who fights against one of our friends is automatically an enemy?
A: Sometimes that's true, too. However, if American corporations can profit by selling weapons to both sides at the same time, all the better.
Q: Why?
A: Because war is good for the economy, which means war is good for America Also, since God is on America's side, anyone who opposes war is a godless un-American Communist. Do you understand now why we attacked Iraq?
Q: I think so. We attacked them because God wanted us to, right?
A: Yes.
Q: But how did we know God wanted us to attack Iraq?
A: Well, you see, God personally speaks to George W. Bush and tells him what to do.
Q: So basically, what you're saying is that we attacked Iraq because George W. Bush hears voices in his head?
A: Yes! You finally understand how the world works. Now close your eyes, make yourself comfortable, and go to sleep. Good night.
1) Don't they have copyright laws up there in Quabog ? "Fair use" lets you use some portions but not the whole thing.
2) Do you really need to quote the whole article to make your point ?
It didn't work in this case and besides the authors point -- the exact some point -- has been made by every writer that reads the Republican talking points.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Check out who is in this one.
He's the guy you called a "hack" (chainsaw anyone ?).
Professor Landsburg was an undergraduate at the University of Rochester, but never completed his undergraduate requirements due to his failure to take a physical education course. He was awarded a Masters degree after he enrolled in his own course when he became a professor at the school. Landsburg received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1979.
He also spent time at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.[1][2]
Krugman gained his fame (in the non-academic world) as one of the few authoritative figures to stand up and tell everyone that candidate G.W. Bush's budget figures were a sham -- to quote another Bush ''vodoo economics." Look where we are now.
Did that conversation really occur or did you make it up? Some of the assertions the child made are dated, such as references to Musharref. When did this conversation take place? Before the Iraq war started to wind down? Was it your child? Did you record it?
If you didn't make it up but rather lifted it from some other source, you should attribute it, otherwise someone might think it was your creative writing.
I think, BenThere, the moral of the story is not to try and explain complex problems to children or democrats, they can't handle complex issues and always revert to fairy tales....
Fair enough, on "fair use"; I have taught myself the use of "add a link".
Dismissing the points raised as "Republican talking points" opens up a similar answer for most of your links, as well. Krugman's columns and appearances are entirely devoted to advancing an agenda of liberal, nanny state big-government solutions. I have no problem with him stating his opinions, but they are biased against personal freedom and are pro-government. Additionally, despite his politics, he was an advisor to Enron and, while he opposes private accounts added onto Social Security, he enjoys a TIAA/CREF retirement account through Princeton. Two-faced, perhaps?? My politics, based on a well-defined philosophy of libertarianism and the US Constitution, are opposite yours and his, well his anyway, you refuse to state one, claiming "pragmatism" as philosophy. While I take seriously your experience and knowledge on US ATC issues, your prescriptions for pilots often on target, not so much in the political arena.
Brickie
Also assuming British....
Q: Daddy, why did we thoroughly screw up the Middle East during WWI? Why was Churchill divvying Palestine and Syria in conspiracy with the French? Who was M. Picot and Mr. Sykes? How come our generation has to work with the Yanks to fix it?
A: Go watch TV, please, this is too complicated for you.
Let's say we decided to give the money to households in order to put into equity into their homes. If you figure roughly 140 million households, then that's $5000 per household. If everyone added $5000 to their housing equity, there would be fewer defaults.
But that's silly. Most people already have plenty of housing equity. Only a few people are what I call "home borrowers." A home borrower, as opposed to a home owner, is someone who bought a house with less than a 10 percent down payment. If you did that, you are not a home owner. You are living in a borrowed home. I'm not judging you or criticizing what you did, just putting your situation in perspective.
Anyway, suppose there are 10 million home borrowers out there. Now we give $700 billion to them to use as home equity supplements, meaning that they put the money into their mortgages. That's $70,000 of housing equity per household, and $70,000 less mortgage debt per household. I think we could safely declare the mortgage crisis over. In fact, if you look at it that way, it's clear that we could solve the mortgage crisis for a lot less than $700 billion.
A couple of points:
1. We are not "giving" people anything. We are taking money from taxpayers and spending it on other taxpayers. Again, I feel like I need to say that to keep my libertarian union card.
2. Bernanke and Paulson don't think of what they are doing as charity. It's more like an entrepreneurial business, where they intend to buy what they think are undervalued mortgages assets, which they believe they can finance profitably.
They may be right, but if they took their business plan as written to any bank or VC, they'd be laughed out of the office. The plan is utterly vague, untested, and there is no proof that they have or can find the executive talent needed to run a pilot program of this kind, much less scale it up to $700 billion.
It is a bit like the plan to rescue NOLA apres Katrina; instead of the Feds spending the money, which was reckoned to be $200,000 per resident, give it to each individual and let them decide whether to forfeit the money and remain in NOLA or take the money and run.
If we are going to spend $700 billion on bailing someone out, why not the people who really need it? And, it will undoubtedly be cheaper. Especially after we do means-testing, weed out fraud, etc. The beauty is that government is, at least, out of the capitalist welfare and back into good ole populist welfare.
Quote:
Well, it was under Bill that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act took place with the legislation of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which was embraced by McCain and opposed by Biden (as most Dem. senators)
Nov 4, 1999: After passing both the Senate and House, a conference committee is created to work out differences between the Senate and House versions of the bill. A conference report resolving those differences passed in the Senate, paving the way for enactment of the bill, by roll call vote. The totals were 90 Ayes, 8 Nays, 1 Present/Not Voting.
AZ McCain, John [R] - No Vote
DE Biden, Joseph [D] - Aye
The Australian PM revisits a Nationalising-Lame-Duck...
Orac, I visit this site to read your grasping of straws - I love it!!! A property and retail spending boom fuelled by cheap credit to people that can't afford it, driven by corporate greed, overseen by an incompetent administration in the new millennium is the democrats fault?
I love it!
Deregulate, Deregulate (repeat a x100 times)...[goes to poo]...NATIONALIZE! NATIONALIZE!!!
"Ladies and gentlemen, where are we now? Where are we now?" Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., said to the National Guard Association today, talking about the war in Afghanistan.
"If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where Bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me," Biden said. "Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are."
Biden said that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., "says he’ll follow them to the gates of hell. You don’t have to go to hell. Just go to Pakistan. Just go to that area. That superhighway of terror that exists between Afghanistan and Pakistan."...........
In February 2008, Biden -- along with Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. -- was on a chopper that made an emergency landing in the mountains of Afghanistan.
A snowstorm had forced them down.
No one was injured, and the Associated Press reported at the time that "the senators and their delegation returned to Bagram Air Base in a motor convoy, and left for Turkey.
"The weather closed in on us," Kerry told the AP at the time in a phone interview from Turkey. "It went pretty blind, pretty fast and we were around some pretty dangerous ridges. So the pilot exercised his judgment that we were better off putting down there, and we all agreed...We sat up there and traded stories."
Kerry joked, "We were going to send Biden out to fight the Taliban with snowballs, but we didn't have to do it…Other than getting a little cold, it was fine."
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