That's why there's CPI and Core CPI. They're different. CPI includes them and core CPI doesn't. CPI is for measuring the cost of living. Core CPI is more useful for looking at inflationary trends. For example, if the CPI skyrockets and core CPI stays stable, it's extremely likely that the CPI will drop back down to track with core over the medium run. If the core CPI starts increasing, it's good evidence that there's a real upward trend.
Basically, policymakers care about the current CPI and where the CPI is likely to trend in the future. Economists tend to care more about the core CPI data.
LOL. You are hillarious. McDonalds is the number 1 fast food restaurant. I don't think they need to get an edge over anyone, much less Burger King (who is ranked #5, and has less than 1/4 the sales of McDonalds). They've already demonstrated the market is willing to pay current pricing, so they have no reason to lower prices. Any savings will go into the pockets of shareholders.
That's true. For a while. McDonald's would pocket the difference in increased profts until Burger King figured out the same cost reducing trick. Then they'd start to compete wtih each other on price until they reached another stable equilibrium. No company is charitable enough to pass on savings to the customer until there's some competition, but once there is, you can be the customer sees a piece of it.
It's knowing and shaping what your company makes. That's great for a top boss, especially in a consumer products company where the boss should understand the product as well as anybody else. Sure, if you make surgical equipment and lasers and jet engines, the CEO has to delegate that stuff, but a company like Apple? Of course not. Micromanaging would be if Jobs was bugging people about how it was implemented and getting his hands all over the engineering process.
I worked for a company where the CEO was not a tech guy, but he had a vision for the device we were supposed to make. He played with the prototypes constantly and shaped the final device. He knew the market he wanted to go for, and he made his vision happen. He was all over products and marketing and managing customers, but he delegated financial operations and the engineering process to experts. It was a big success, and a great place to work because we all felt like we knew what we were shooting for, and we knew where we fit as part of the overall big picture. We could all imagine what the company would be selling, we knew why it was going to be great, and none of us was surprised when we saw the final result. It was a blast.
A few mergers and acquisitions later and we were part of a big operation. The CEO had no idea what we made or how it worked. In fact, you could go well down the management chain before you found anybody who had any opinion about what the company should be making. The CEO devoted himself to financial engineering and delegated "stuff the company does" to his underlings. We lasted about a year. It's very hard to be inspired by upper management when their "pep talk" is all about financials and nothing about the things your team makes and where they fit in the vision for the company.
What you're really saying is that rather than hoarding the medium of exchange, you're stuck loaning it out or investing it directly so it can be used productively to grow the economy. That doesn't sound like much of a tragedy.
The flip side to your ideal world with constant deflation is that it gets kind of hard to borrow money to start a new business. If the deflation is constant, you have to make sure that your investment pays off more than simply having your potential lender roll around naked in it. If it's unpredictable (which Bitcoin sure as hell is and probably always will be), you could simply be ruined because the real value of your nominal debt skyrocketed unexpectedly.
If people want to use Bitcoin for exhange, I'm all for it, but it just isn't fit to be a major currency.
Slightly off-topic: the goal of the Federal Reserve -- the target of its policies -- is for the U.S. dollar to experience inflation of 2% per year [wsj.com]. Not 4%, not 0%, but 2%. Can anyone explain why? I've always thought a target of 0% would make more sense.
Because for all of the costs attached to inflation, the costs attached to deflation are worse. The Fed can't guarantee that it will always hit its target, so it leaves some margin of error. There are other problems, but the most basic one is that some prices (wages, specifically) are "sticky" and don't revise downward easily. It's easier to work on the assumption that prices and wages will slowly rise than to try to sell people on a wage cut when prices drop.
If prices adjusted in either direction without friction and it was possible to keep inflation pegged at exactly some rate to avoid unexpected changes, it wouldn't really matter what the rate was or whether it was positive or negative. The known future inflation would just be built into all contracts and prices woud slew along as necessary. But long term contracts are negotiated with inflation expectations built in, and it's hard to get sellers to cut prices, so mild, gentle inflation is where we're at.
Even though they were covered by the appropriations, the Executive branch shouldn't have risked default by entered into those contracts before the debt was authorized by Congress.
You're suggesting impoundment, which the President hasn't been able to do for 40 years or so. If it's appropriated, it must be spent unless the President has permission from Congress not to spend it. It keeps the President from having a practical line item veto by simply not opting to spend certain appropriated funds. The fundamental problem is the same--Congress has appropriated money and not raised the revenue, so the idea that the President has the duty (or power) to fix that is silly. The debt is simply an unavoidable result of accounting. It can't be legislated away, and Congress has no choice but to raise the limit sooner or later.
There are very good economic reasons to avoid balanced budget amendments as they're usually written (many of them being very similar to why the debt ceiling is a catastrophically bad idea), but something requiring Congress to approve debt at appropriation time would make good sense. Of course, that's typically how it was done until some geniuses realized that they could split the process so they could grandstand and then some even bigger geniuses realized that they could use the process to create an artificial crisis and then demand payment for "fixing" it.
If they get their way and learn that they can extract arbitrary concessions for as payment for creating and then fixing an artificial financial crisis, we're just going to make financial panics a regular part of our political process. A line has to be drawn somewhere. I'm sick of hearing what amounts to, "Well, he shouldn't have blown all of those people up, but the bank really should have been better about listening to his ransom requests." You're not supposed to blow people up. We should all just agree on that and move forward negotating things we actually disagree on.
1) Congress screwed their own staff over, in the same way that they screwed all the rest of us over, because they couldn't be bothered to read and debate the bill before they passed it. So the Executive is going to fix their little 'oopsie' for them (illegally, I feel); for us? Not so much.
I'm really not sure you understand how this works. They didn't "screw all the rest of us" the same way. They completely eliminated health benefits for a certain class of employee. They didn't go to your employer and say, "It's illegal to provide health plans to your employees. Also, when you cut their health care, you can't pay them in cash to compensate. You just have to lose them when they decide to quit." That *is* what they did to themselves. Leaving it unpatched will just cause the typicall fallout of a massive wage cut: They lose good people, and crappy people stay behind and become crappier.
2) Employers are already making negative changes to their health coverage (or their projected health care coverage liabilities) and I think it's reasonable to assume this is going to continue if not accelerate. UPS cut off working spouse coverage with no change in compensation. On top of that, there are too many stories to list of companies that are cutting back working hours to avoid having to pay up under the law and that's certainly a cut in compensation.
That's a trend that has been happening for years, and it's part of the reason health care exchanges are a good idea. But that doesn't change the fact that a year of your labor is worth $X on the open market. That $X comes in the sum of $A in cash plus $B in benefits. Benefits have been getting more expensive, so holding $B constant to maintaint market prices, benefits (not their market price--just the value of what you get) will fall. If you change the actual market value of $B, $A is still going to have to change, unless market conditions dictate a change in overall wages.
The one case where what you're describing *could* be true is if they started taxing us on the $B in benefits. Right now, for ridiculous historical reasons, we get $B tax free. If they convert $B in healthcare to $B in cash, we pay taxes on it, so it's really $B * (1-T) where T is the marginal tax rate on the money. But they're not doing that (even though they really should).
The current proposal on the table, by the way, is to delay implementation by a year.
Right. And then they'll allow it to go forward as planned. They won't precipitate another crisis and then trade resolving it for another year delay or repeal. Totally on the up-and-up. They especially won't do that after they realize that Obama will give them anything they want in exchange for their not tanking the economy. No precedent here at all.
Something that the POTUS has already done selectively (and illegally) for special interest groups that support him. Why should big businesses get a break on the ACA but not everyone else?
Let's see the legal challenge. The act appears to give the feds substantial regulatory leeway. Where are you getting your legal information? You don't think that the President can juts declare a delay in the law without the law giving him the power to do so, do you? Given the number of legal challenges the ACA has faced, don't you think somebody would take the executive to court over that and publicly hand his ass to him?
Obama and the Democrats wouldn't be in this situation in the first place if they had merely refrained from spending money which they hadn't even legally been approved to borrow yet.
Errr, that's kind of the job of Congress. They set taxes and spending. That means that they also set the deficit. The debt ceiling is just Congress asserting that it also has the right to legisliate the running sum of the deficits it has already incurred. Doesn't work that way. It's like saying that I plan to lose weight by not having eaten potato chips for the past few years. Sure, I've actually eaten them, but if I insist on not having eaten them, my problem is fixed.
The debt ceiling is basically a ceremony that allows minority members of Congress to bitch and moan and grandstand and blame the majority for fecklessness (see Obama's opposition to it when he was a Senator). It's not actually a policy tool because it tries to do something that's mathematically impossible. But they've been putting on this show for the rubes long enough that the rubes are starting to get agitated and get themselves elected to Congress. They don't seem to realize that the debt ceiling is a pretty light show for their amusement and not an actual lever that you can push and make somthing worthwhile happen. It's time to repeal it.
Errr, what? Are you suggesting that emloyers all over the place are going to be abile to dump health plans without offering something else to compensate? Because that sort of flies in the face of basic economics.
Look, the value of your compensation package is set by supply and demand. If an employer takes away something as valuable as health insurance, they'll have to make it up somehow or they won't be paying the market price. The same thing will happen if the Republicans get their way on this bizarre policy. Their staff has a market price, and if they stop paying it, they're going to lose a lot of good people. You can't unilaterally say, "I'm going to cut your pay by $15K a year" and suspend the laws of supply and demand unless you're the only employer on Earth.
Wake me when market wages drop by $15K a year across the board without some shift in labor supply or demand.
1) Forget the fact that it was passed within the bounds of normal constitutional lawmaking. The Democrats used dirty parliamentary tricks to defeat other dirty parliamentary tricks!
2) It's been upheld by the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court is wrong.
Therefore, a single house of Congress should be allowed to unilaterally ram through a law that repeals it. Because the Constitution.
If North Korea sent us a list of demands to be met or they would nuke Seoul, that would still be the correct response. If he caved, it would set a precedent that NK could get concessions any time it wanted just by threatening catastrophe. The right response is to refuse any concessions at all, tell them exactly what will happen if they go forward, and then cross your fingers and pray that they aren't that stupid.
The debt ceiling is the same game. Both sides agree that it must be raised, but one side thinks it should receive "concessions" in order to do it. That's not negotiation. Negotiation is where one side gets something they want in exchange for giving the other side something they want. The debt ceiling is unilateral blackmail at best, hostage taking at worst.
I'm generally OK with government shutdowns as part of the negotiation process because it makes cuts and funding "real" and we see who really cares. But the reason Obama can't negotiate on this one is because if he caves, the Republicans will think they have carte blanche to demand whatever they want when the debt ceiling debate hapens. That can't be allowed, ever. The debt ceiling just needs to be raised. Neither side should get a ransom for doing it.
Of course, maybe if the Democrats had not passed this law in an overtly partisan manner.
Yes, the passed a law by getting a majority of both houses to pass it, the President to sign it, and the Supreme Court to uphold it. The monsters!
On the other hand, we have one house using its ability to precipitate potential economic catastrophe trying to unilaterially force through another law that repeals it. Totally reasonable and just as the founders intended.
The latest House bill, which the chamber backed on a 228-201 vote, would have delayed the law's individual mandate while prohibiting lawmakers, their staff and top administration officials from getting government subsidies for their health care.
There's some detail missing here. The subsidies issue is important: The Republicans thought that they could deal a blow to the ACA by requiring that government staffers use the exchanges. Democrats said, "OK, fine." But the problem is that you can't dump somebody's health plan and not give them some extra cash--it's just a massive pay cut. So extra cash was allocated to make up for dropping the health plan. The Republicans are now calling this a "subsidy" instead of a "wage" and are trying to do away with it to prove that the ACA sucks.
Half of me wants them to succeed. See how well they do when their staff suddenly receives a huge and arbitrary pay cut. My guess is that it will not go well.
We already went through this debt ceiling scare tactic back in 2011. We defaulted, everyone freaked out, and the U.S. lost its AAA credit rating.........and then nothing happened, and everything was fine.
We didn't default. We talked about defaulting. The way crazy people do. The markets twiched but returned to normal. I really think that most people don't understand the types of consequences we'd be facing if there was a major run on US debt. It has the potential to be a serious economic catastrophe, depending on how big the panic is.
Obama was elected because the republicans put up a poor candidates against him.
Yeah, the Republicans seem to have a shortage of good candidates these days. I'm not sure expaining why they're consistently losing elections should make us any more willing to give them power, though.
The case you bring up is interesting, because as far as I can tell, it's one of the cases that JREF shouldn't have been at all concerned about losing. Putting myself in their position:
Would I bet $1M that a dowser would fail? I'd have to think about it. It's extremely unlikely that he'd succeed, but I suppose it's vaguely possible that there's something in physics that we don't understand that could cause me to lose the bet.
In this case, would I bet $1M that the guy needs food and water to survive? In a heartbeat. I can't imagine JREF feeling threatened by the possibility of success and having to weasel out of it. That's especially true given the fact that they do run all sorts of tests on other far more likely phenomena (like dowsing and psychics). The notion that they're not afraid of a dowser but they're terrified that this nutbar is a perpetual motion machine who just might beat them seems ludicrous to me.
It's also pretty easy to see that Randi (and probably lots of the JREF staff) are abrasive people who may heap scorn on you before the test is done. I don't think that's how I would run things, but it's hardly evidence that they're rigging the game. So, given the choice between the notion that they're just arrogant and sometimes rude and the possibility that they're genuinely afraid that one particular nutcase has an ace in the hole, I know which one seems more likely.
I suppose the third possibility is that they were afraid that the guy would go into testing and die on their watch. That would make me a little bit nervous in their position. If the guy is sufficiently crazy, they have a choice between getting flak for ending the test "early" or getting flack for letting a crazy person die.
I think the main point is that there are other places in the world that have genocide, torture, slavery, and all sorts of terrible things going on. The place we invaded happened to be the one that was strategically important, and I didn't see any evidence that they were just the first in line before we solved all of those other problems.
Of course, I don't buy into the notion that we wanted to go in and "steal" the oil. It's perfectly reasonable to have a strong interest in the stability of the unstable region that produces your energy supply. In fact, if our leadership wasn't interested in the Middle East for the oil, they'd be ignoring their duties. When people from certain countries bitch that we're only interested in their oil, I often can't help but think, "Yeah, it's a real shame that we don't hang out with repressive backward thugocracies more often... just for the company."
Depending on how you look at it, stopping a monstrous regime is either icing on the cake or a good excuse for doing what you wanted to do anyway. Still, I don't think that we should make any mistake about whether or not energy security was the major reason we went in. Without oil, it's pretty easy just to add Iraq to the list of countries we don't bother with because they're murderous dictatorships, unstable hellholes with constant tribal warfare and genocide, or whatever else.
Of course, it also doesn't hurt that dowsing using rods for drugs in schools amounts to essentially a random search, increasing the probability that you'll get caught with contraband even though there is zero correlation between the rod's response and actual contraband. Administrators could say, "We roll the dice, and if they come up snake eyes, you get searched," and end up with a pretty good drop in drug activity. Then again, people would be up in arms about that.
If you complain they call you "unreasonable" and close the claim.
Do you have some actual examples of unreasonable changes they've demanded? Every time somebody points me toward historical examples, it usually ends up with the claimant demanding that JREF front a bunch of money to pay for something. I'm interested in which case you're thinking of.
In the last few years they have made it really hard to apply for the challenge requiring that you have media exposure before they even consider your application.
There's a simpler explanation for that, and it doesn't require malice: When you offer a million dollars to any kook who thinks he has magic powers, you're going to have to invest a LOT of resources in figuring out which ones are legitimate and which ones are people who just need medical help.
I think that Doug Stanhope made kind of the same observation when he said something like, "You can't keep weapons off of planes. You can't even keep weapons out of prison, and in prison they're allowed to check for weapons in your ass."
The government's reaction, in 1999 was to change the federal regulations — instead of making it easier for the banks to fight off the undue pressures.
Imagine you're a lender. The government tells you that you have to make a certain number of loans that you know will be unprofitable. Do you:
a) Make the bare minimum number of those loans.
b) Lever up and make as many of those loans as you possibly can, looking under every rock and behind every tree to find somebody who will borrow?
When it became possible to off-load the bad securities to Fannie Mae, the banks did make tons of money.
You do realize that during the exact time frame you're talking about, the GSEs lost market share to "non-bank lenders," right? The hallmark of the better part of the last decade was traditional institutions losing market share with the rise of nontraditional issuers (who, of course, were also not subject to the CRA).
I don't think you understand logic. The only purely rational stance to take in the total absence of proof or disproof of God is agnosticism. Taking a stance in any direction is a leap of faith which requires an assumption not grounded in logic.
I'm not so sure about that. Is the only rational stance in the absence of proof or disproof of unicorns to withold judgment? Is, "Invisible aliens that shave my beard every 10 seconds but grow it back so quickly that it's undetectible don't exist," such an irrational thing to say? At what point to you step over the boundary between wisely reserving judgement due to lack of evidence and believing that it's not possible to know anything at all?
Bertrand Russell had it nailed: When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.
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That's why there's CPI and Core CPI. They're different. CPI includes them and core CPI doesn't. CPI is for measuring the cost of living. Core CPI is more useful for looking at inflationary trends. For example, if the CPI skyrockets and core CPI stays stable, it's extremely likely that the CPI will drop back down to track with core over the medium run. If the core CPI starts increasing, it's good evidence that there's a real upward trend.
Basically, policymakers care about the current CPI and where the CPI is likely to trend in the future. Economists tend to care more about the core CPI data.
That's true. For a while. McDonald's would pocket the difference in increased profts until Burger King figured out the same cost reducing trick. Then they'd start to compete wtih each other on price until they reached another stable equilibrium. No company is charitable enough to pass on savings to the customer until there's some competition, but once there is, you can be the customer sees a piece of it.
It's knowing and shaping what your company makes. That's great for a top boss, especially in a consumer products company where the boss should understand the product as well as anybody else. Sure, if you make surgical equipment and lasers and jet engines, the CEO has to delegate that stuff, but a company like Apple? Of course not. Micromanaging would be if Jobs was bugging people about how it was implemented and getting his hands all over the engineering process.
I worked for a company where the CEO was not a tech guy, but he had a vision for the device we were supposed to make. He played with the prototypes constantly and shaped the final device. He knew the market he wanted to go for, and he made his vision happen. He was all over products and marketing and managing customers, but he delegated financial operations and the engineering process to experts. It was a big success, and a great place to work because we all felt like we knew what we were shooting for, and we knew where we fit as part of the overall big picture. We could all imagine what the company would be selling, we knew why it was going to be great, and none of us was surprised when we saw the final result. It was a blast.
A few mergers and acquisitions later and we were part of a big operation. The CEO had no idea what we made or how it worked. In fact, you could go well down the management chain before you found anybody who had any opinion about what the company should be making. The CEO devoted himself to financial engineering and delegated "stuff the company does" to his underlings. We lasted about a year. It's very hard to be inspired by upper management when their "pep talk" is all about financials and nothing about the things your team makes and where they fit in the vision for the company.
What you're really saying is that rather than hoarding the medium of exchange, you're stuck loaning it out or investing it directly so it can be used productively to grow the economy. That doesn't sound like much of a tragedy.
The flip side to your ideal world with constant deflation is that it gets kind of hard to borrow money to start a new business. If the deflation is constant, you have to make sure that your investment pays off more than simply having your potential lender roll around naked in it. If it's unpredictable (which Bitcoin sure as hell is and probably always will be), you could simply be ruined because the real value of your nominal debt skyrocketed unexpectedly.
If people want to use Bitcoin for exhange, I'm all for it, but it just isn't fit to be a major currency.
Because for all of the costs attached to inflation, the costs attached to deflation are worse. The Fed can't guarantee that it will always hit its target, so it leaves some margin of error. There are other problems, but the most basic one is that some prices (wages, specifically) are "sticky" and don't revise downward easily. It's easier to work on the assumption that prices and wages will slowly rise than to try to sell people on a wage cut when prices drop.
If prices adjusted in either direction without friction and it was possible to keep inflation pegged at exactly some rate to avoid unexpected changes, it wouldn't really matter what the rate was or whether it was positive or negative. The known future inflation would just be built into all contracts and prices woud slew along as necessary. But long term contracts are negotiated with inflation expectations built in, and it's hard to get sellers to cut prices, so mild, gentle inflation is where we're at.
You're suggesting impoundment, which the President hasn't been able to do for 40 years or so. If it's appropriated, it must be spent unless the President has permission from Congress not to spend it. It keeps the President from having a practical line item veto by simply not opting to spend certain appropriated funds. The fundamental problem is the same--Congress has appropriated money and not raised the revenue, so the idea that the President has the duty (or power) to fix that is silly. The debt is simply an unavoidable result of accounting. It can't be legislated away, and Congress has no choice but to raise the limit sooner or later.
There are very good economic reasons to avoid balanced budget amendments as they're usually written (many of them being very similar to why the debt ceiling is a catastrophically bad idea), but something requiring Congress to approve debt at appropriation time would make good sense. Of course, that's typically how it was done until some geniuses realized that they could split the process so they could grandstand and then some even bigger geniuses realized that they could use the process to create an artificial crisis and then demand payment for "fixing" it.
If they get their way and learn that they can extract arbitrary concessions for as payment for creating and then fixing an artificial financial crisis, we're just going to make financial panics a regular part of our political process. A line has to be drawn somewhere. I'm sick of hearing what amounts to, "Well, he shouldn't have blown all of those people up, but the bank really should have been better about listening to his ransom requests." You're not supposed to blow people up. We should all just agree on that and move forward negotating things we actually disagree on.
I'm really not sure you understand how this works. They didn't "screw all the rest of us" the same way. They completely eliminated health benefits for a certain class of employee. They didn't go to your employer and say, "It's illegal to provide health plans to your employees. Also, when you cut their health care, you can't pay them in cash to compensate. You just have to lose them when they decide to quit." That *is* what they did to themselves. Leaving it unpatched will just cause the typicall fallout of a massive wage cut: They lose good people, and crappy people stay behind and become crappier.
That's a trend that has been happening for years, and it's part of the reason health care exchanges are a good idea. But that doesn't change the fact that a year of your labor is worth $X on the open market. That $X comes in the sum of $A in cash plus $B in benefits. Benefits have been getting more expensive, so holding $B constant to maintaint market prices, benefits (not their market price--just the value of what you get) will fall. If you change the actual market value of $B, $A is still going to have to change, unless market conditions dictate a change in overall wages.
The one case where what you're describing *could* be true is if they started taxing us on the $B in benefits. Right now, for ridiculous historical reasons, we get $B tax free. If they convert $B in healthcare to $B in cash, we pay taxes on it, so it's really $B * (1-T) where T is the marginal tax rate on the money. But they're not doing that (even though they really should).
Right. And then they'll allow it to go forward as planned. They won't precipitate another crisis and then trade resolving it for another year delay or repeal. Totally on the up-and-up. They especially won't do that after they realize that Obama will give them anything they want in exchange for their not tanking the economy. No precedent here at all.
Let's see the legal challenge. The act appears to give the feds substantial regulatory leeway. Where are you getting your legal information? You don't think that the President can juts declare a delay in the law without the law giving him the power to do so, do you? Given the number of legal challenges the ACA has faced, don't you think somebody would take the executive to court over that and publicly hand his ass to him?
Errr, that's kind of the job of Congress. They set taxes and spending. That means that they also set the deficit. The debt ceiling is just Congress asserting that it also has the right to legisliate the running sum of the deficits it has already incurred. Doesn't work that way. It's like saying that I plan to lose weight by not having eaten potato chips for the past few years. Sure, I've actually eaten them, but if I insist on not having eaten them, my problem is fixed.
The debt ceiling is basically a ceremony that allows minority members of Congress to bitch and moan and grandstand and blame the majority for fecklessness (see Obama's opposition to it when he was a Senator). It's not actually a policy tool because it tries to do something that's mathematically impossible. But they've been putting on this show for the rubes long enough that the rubes are starting to get agitated and get themselves elected to Congress. They don't seem to realize that the debt ceiling is a pretty light show for their amusement and not an actual lever that you can push and make somthing worthwhile happen. It's time to repeal it.
Errr, what? Are you suggesting that emloyers all over the place are going to be abile to dump health plans without offering something else to compensate? Because that sort of flies in the face of basic economics.
Look, the value of your compensation package is set by supply and demand. If an employer takes away something as valuable as health insurance, they'll have to make it up somehow or they won't be paying the market price. The same thing will happen if the Republicans get their way on this bizarre policy. Their staff has a market price, and if they stop paying it, they're going to lose a lot of good people. You can't unilaterally say, "I'm going to cut your pay by $15K a year" and suspend the laws of supply and demand unless you're the only employer on Earth.
Wake me when market wages drop by $15K a year across the board without some shift in labor supply or demand.
So, the short version of this is:
1) Forget the fact that it was passed within the bounds of normal constitutional lawmaking. The Democrats used dirty parliamentary tricks to defeat other dirty parliamentary tricks!
2) It's been upheld by the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court is wrong.
Therefore, a single house of Congress should be allowed to unilaterally ram through a law that repeals it. Because the Constitution.
If North Korea sent us a list of demands to be met or they would nuke Seoul, that would still be the correct response. If he caved, it would set a precedent that NK could get concessions any time it wanted just by threatening catastrophe. The right response is to refuse any concessions at all, tell them exactly what will happen if they go forward, and then cross your fingers and pray that they aren't that stupid.
The debt ceiling is the same game. Both sides agree that it must be raised, but one side thinks it should receive "concessions" in order to do it. That's not negotiation. Negotiation is where one side gets something they want in exchange for giving the other side something they want. The debt ceiling is unilateral blackmail at best, hostage taking at worst.
I'm generally OK with government shutdowns as part of the negotiation process because it makes cuts and funding "real" and we see who really cares. But the reason Obama can't negotiate on this one is because if he caves, the Republicans will think they have carte blanche to demand whatever they want when the debt ceiling debate hapens. That can't be allowed, ever. The debt ceiling just needs to be raised. Neither side should get a ransom for doing it.
Yes, the passed a law by getting a majority of both houses to pass it, the President to sign it, and the Supreme Court to uphold it. The monsters!
On the other hand, we have one house using its ability to precipitate potential economic catastrophe trying to unilaterially force through another law that repeals it. Totally reasonable and just as the founders intended.
There's some detail missing here. The subsidies issue is important: The Republicans thought that they could deal a blow to the ACA by requiring that government staffers use the exchanges. Democrats said, "OK, fine." But the problem is that you can't dump somebody's health plan and not give them some extra cash--it's just a massive pay cut. So extra cash was allocated to make up for dropping the health plan. The Republicans are now calling this a "subsidy" instead of a "wage" and are trying to do away with it to prove that the ACA sucks.
Half of me wants them to succeed. See how well they do when their staff suddenly receives a huge and arbitrary pay cut. My guess is that it will not go well.
We didn't default. We talked about defaulting. The way crazy people do. The markets twiched but returned to normal. I really think that most people don't understand the types of consequences we'd be facing if there was a major run on US debt. It has the potential to be a serious economic catastrophe, depending on how big the panic is.
Yes, I remember them pushing hard for that tax hike.
Yeah, the Republicans seem to have a shortage of good candidates these days. I'm not sure expaining why they're consistently losing elections should make us any more willing to give them power, though.
The case you bring up is interesting, because as far as I can tell, it's one of the cases that JREF shouldn't have been at all concerned about losing. Putting myself in their position:
Would I bet $1M that a dowser would fail? I'd have to think about it. It's extremely unlikely that he'd succeed, but I suppose it's vaguely possible that there's something in physics that we don't understand that could cause me to lose the bet.
In this case, would I bet $1M that the guy needs food and water to survive? In a heartbeat. I can't imagine JREF feeling threatened by the possibility of success and having to weasel out of it. That's especially true given the fact that they do run all sorts of tests on other far more likely phenomena (like dowsing and psychics). The notion that they're not afraid of a dowser but they're terrified that this nutbar is a perpetual motion machine who just might beat them seems ludicrous to me.
It's also pretty easy to see that Randi (and probably lots of the JREF staff) are abrasive people who may heap scorn on you before the test is done. I don't think that's how I would run things, but it's hardly evidence that they're rigging the game. So, given the choice between the notion that they're just arrogant and sometimes rude and the possibility that they're genuinely afraid that one particular nutcase has an ace in the hole, I know which one seems more likely.
I suppose the third possibility is that they were afraid that the guy would go into testing and die on their watch. That would make me a little bit nervous in their position. If the guy is sufficiently crazy, they have a choice between getting flak for ending the test "early" or getting flack for letting a crazy person die.
I think the main point is that there are other places in the world that have genocide, torture, slavery, and all sorts of terrible things going on. The place we invaded happened to be the one that was strategically important, and I didn't see any evidence that they were just the first in line before we solved all of those other problems.
Of course, I don't buy into the notion that we wanted to go in and "steal" the oil. It's perfectly reasonable to have a strong interest in the stability of the unstable region that produces your energy supply. In fact, if our leadership wasn't interested in the Middle East for the oil, they'd be ignoring their duties. When people from certain countries bitch that we're only interested in their oil, I often can't help but think, "Yeah, it's a real shame that we don't hang out with repressive backward thugocracies more often... just for the company."
Depending on how you look at it, stopping a monstrous regime is either icing on the cake or a good excuse for doing what you wanted to do anyway. Still, I don't think that we should make any mistake about whether or not energy security was the major reason we went in. Without oil, it's pretty easy just to add Iraq to the list of countries we don't bother with because they're murderous dictatorships, unstable hellholes with constant tribal warfare and genocide, or whatever else.
Of course, it also doesn't hurt that dowsing using rods for drugs in schools amounts to essentially a random search, increasing the probability that you'll get caught with contraband even though there is zero correlation between the rod's response and actual contraband. Administrators could say, "We roll the dice, and if they come up snake eyes, you get searched," and end up with a pretty good drop in drug activity. Then again, people would be up in arms about that.
Do you have some actual examples of unreasonable changes they've demanded? Every time somebody points me toward historical examples, it usually ends up with the claimant demanding that JREF front a bunch of money to pay for something. I'm interested in which case you're thinking of.
There's a simpler explanation for that, and it doesn't require malice: When you offer a million dollars to any kook who thinks he has magic powers, you're going to have to invest a LOT of resources in figuring out which ones are legitimate and which ones are people who just need medical help.
I think that Doug Stanhope made kind of the same observation when he said something like, "You can't keep weapons off of planes. You can't even keep weapons out of prison, and in prison they're allowed to check for weapons in your ass."
Imagine you're a lender. The government tells you that you have to make a certain number of loans that you know will be unprofitable. Do you:
a) Make the bare minimum number of those loans.
b) Lever up and make as many of those loans as you possibly can, looking under every rock and behind every tree to find somebody who will borrow?
You do realize that during the exact time frame you're talking about, the GSEs lost market share to "non-bank lenders," right? The hallmark of the better part of the last decade was traditional institutions losing market share with the rise of nontraditional issuers (who, of course, were also not subject to the CRA).
Yes, I'm sure that the leadership at NPR are living in opulent splendor.
I'm not so sure about that. Is the only rational stance in the absence of proof or disproof of unicorns to withold judgment? Is, "Invisible aliens that shave my beard every 10 seconds but grow it back so quickly that it's undetectible don't exist," such an irrational thing to say? At what point to you step over the boundary between wisely reserving judgement due to lack of evidence and believing that it's not possible to know anything at all?
Bertrand Russell had it nailed: When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.