I agree with Ron Paul on a lot of issues, but getting rid of Saddam was the right thing to do.
Well, I'd agree with you if we could have replaced Hussein with a thriving democracy, but I'm not so sure that a failing state on the brink of civil war and anarchy is a victory we should be cheering for.
Peter: "Egon, this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole through your head. Remember that?"
Egon: "That would have worked if you hadn't stopped me."
I saw a few posts that talked about the state paying Alaskans every year. The one to two grand paid by the state PFD does not provide much help to a middle income family trying to buy a home when a vacant 1.5 acre lot in Anchorage sells for about $750,000 (just went on the market a few days ago).
Not that it would cover a $750K home, but comparing the PFD to zero dollars isn't really a valid comparison. Compare the payout Alaskans get from the permanent fund to the negative payout people in other states get from their states in the form of taxes. The spread is definitely larger than $1-2K.
Others have answered fairly well, but it boils down to a few major things:
1) It allows us to use locally-produced fossil fuels rather than foreign fossil fuels.
2) Power plants are set up so they run at very high efficiency. Cars run at whatever efficiency they happen to be running at for the task they're doing.
3) Probably most importantly, when cars stop using fossil fuel and start using electricity, they're able to use any sort of power source out there as long as it can be converted to electricity. As our central generators become greener, so do our cars. Automatically. Think of it like software: Why duplicate the "convert resources into usable energy" functionality when you can put it in a centralized place that can be upgraded without disturbing the rest of the system? Electric cars are the reusable code of the automotive world. Whatever your infrastructure, they can tap in to it as long as you can give them the electricity they need.
In real dollars. But those dollars can bring a much higher standard of living than in the past, even with more dollars. Therefore the poor are richer, even though they numerically have less money.
That's a meaningful critique of inflation over longer timespans, but not over a short (and very recent) timespan like the one I'm pointing out. We faced a very real downturn during the window on the graph that I was pointing out, and I don't think that there's a reasonable argument to be made otherwise that really syncs up with the data, unless one wants to argue that the availability of polyphonic ring tones for cell phones "evens out" the income loss.
More interesting is the distribution of income loss over the different percentiles. Looking at the years 2000 and 2003, we can see that everybody lost roughly the same amount of household (roughly $1000-2000), but if we look at it as a percentage of overall income, it's easy to see how lower income brackets took a noticeable hit, especially when you consider what percentage of their income they consume. The difference is more than 6% for the people in the 20th percentile. My guess is that increased availability of video game consoles and other high tech items isn't getting that back for them. Basically yes, it's true that overall we're on an upward trend, but the idea that the gap between the rich and poor is accelerating due to an across-the-board increase of wealth isn't accurate.
What, rich people just let money sit in their pocket without doing anything with it? I think you'll find they invest it, or spend it. Worker income has not shrunk, it's in fact higher than ever. That is if you define income in terms of wealth, i.e. goods and services acquired, rather than numerical income.
Actually, in real dollars, median income has been declining over the past few years. We're still better off than just about any other time in our history, and we're on an uptick, but we're not at our highest point unless you're measuring some other variable.
Except that, the PNAC had posted this sort of thing way back before even Bush was elected. In fact, that is the very basis of the charge that Bush "lied about the war". He was out to bring democracy to Iraq all along, regardless of their involvement with 9/11 and WMD, and just used both as an excuse to goad the public into buying it.
Well, I don't think it's so simple as wanting to be altruistic and make the Middle East a better place so much as it was the appeal in having a stable, USA-friendly country to use to project power to the region. I don't hold that against them, given that it's their job to look out for the interests of the US and that international politics is a cynical and heartless game, but my eye twitches a bit when people describe it as some sort of charitable rescue. People who get misty-eyed over the idea that Bush and company where riding in to rescue the people of Iraq are clearly missing the point. There are a lot of people the world who needed more rescuing than the Iraqis did, but there were none who were quite so strategically valuable to rescue.
So, Bush lied for the greater good. So what. I think it was the right thing to do.
Well, typically the "lying for the greater good" excuse works better if your plan doesn't turn out to be a total disaster, but I can understand what you're saying. My problem is that it's an example of a very disturbing trend in our leadership. It's possible to be a successful leader by being a really smart guy with slick policies who tricks people into going along with them. As long as you're a top-flight executive who is always right, things will work out OK. I don't see that as strong leadership, though. A real leader leads by showing his people the right path and convincing them to follow it. A populace that knows where it's going and why is healthier and more able to govern itself than one that relies on fast talking leaders to fool them into making the right decisions. People become more cohesive and make better decisions when they're active participants than when they're willing dupes.
I suppose it's a necessary product of sound-bite politics. The people who get elected are the ones who can use the fewest words to get people worked up, not the ones who can articulate sensible ideas and rally people behind them. That's a sad place for us to be, but based on the primary debates, I don't think it's going to change any time soon. The only people who are willing to lay out what they really believe and why they believe it are also the people who are least likely to be elected and most likely to do crazy things if they were (e.g. Ron Paul).
The money in the stock market goes to anyone invested in it. And even if it did all go to bankers, what do you think they're all doing with it?
Not that I buy too deeply into the "rich folk against the rest of us" rhetoric that people throw around here, but it's important to remember that the stock market is definitely not an indication of economic health as a whole. For example, we've been watching median household income decrease over the past several years, which means that things like a booming stock market are changing the overall distribution of income rather than making everybody better off. There are a lot of ways to measure how well we're doing as a society, and I think that just looking at stock market numbers is one of the more naive methods.
The report you refer to, doesn't actually claim that Al Qaeda is as strong as it was in 2001. It appears to say instead that Al Qaeda will probably be at least as dangerous in the US as it was in 2001. That is a different claim.
Given that Al Qaeda's strength comes entirely from its ability to be dangerous, exactly what is the distinction between being strong and being dangerous?
Establish solvency? Simply taking a program whose income doesn't keep up with its obligations and changing where the money goes without changing the income or obligations doesn't really do anything for solvency. Certainly, it was reform to make the program work differently, but that doesn't really equal a solution to the problem that we can't pay our bills.
President Bush is a master at saying, "Here's a problem that we all agree is bad, and here is something that I would like to do," and getting people believe that the second part will solve the first problem when it really won't. It's just checking something off of the checklist of "Things George Bush wants to do" and using a legitimate problem as an excuse (but never actually claiming that the proposed policy solves the problem--that's a leap we have to make). "9/11 was bad, and I want to invade Iraq" and "Social security is slowly running out of money, and I want to privatize it" are two classic examples. We can debate the merits of those actions on their own, but it should be understood in advance that they're not there to solve the problems; they're just policy decisions of their own that happen to tie loosely to a known problem.
Well, if it were balanced out by cutting pork barrel, and undesireable social programs spending, it would be a better idea.
I'd be interested in seeing what percentage of our overall budget goes to bizarre earmarks for peoples' pet projects. It's probably enough to pay for some really good social services or a tasty tax cut.
But, raising taxes slows down the economy, and lowers incoming revenue actually.
I'm not sure that it's exactly what you mean, but I want to point out right now that the fact that an increased tax burden can slow down the economy doesn't mean that lowering taxes will necessarily result in increased revenue in the long run. This is kind of an article of faith for a number of people, and I think it should be pointed out that there's really no reason for it to be true (or false). Your overall point is taken, but anybody who tries the "lower taxes == higher revenue" line is probably selling something.
Well, I suppose I'd have no moral compunctions about not paying taxes if I didn't use roads, benefit from national defense, enjoy protection from criminals or do a number of other things we all do, but I suppose that's just me.
Do you even know what tax evasion is? It's lying in order to not pay taxes. Dont' lie and you'll never commit tax evasion, even if you don't pay them anything. Think about that for a long time before replying. How can you not lie and not pay?
Not entirely related but also interesting is that people frequently display intransitive preferences. By that I mean that they prefer A over B and B over C, but they also prefer C over A. This is a serious annoyance in economic theory. Attempting to model human behavior based on rational decisions is a tough nut to crack when people can't really settle on an internally consistent set of preferences and beliefs.
It's a two way street. Financial companies are supposed to be doing their research on who they loan money to. The fact is, people were (and still are) being offered way more credit than they can afford. Sure, they're often stupid to take it (making $35K a year and buying a $500K home with practically no money down isn't exactly the brightest long term choice), but the problem is that the lenders who are making that credit available are essentially playing with other peoples' money by bundling questionable debt into marketable securities and selling it off.
The reality is that there are some loans that you can make that you'll never recoup, with or without bankruptcy laws. Financial institutions are supposed to try to avoid making those loans. The fact that they were too stupid to do so is part of the problem. They want to play in the high-risk high-reward market of questionable loans but they don't want to actually take on the risk. That's understandable, but it's a wish that shouldn't be granted. I certainly agree that bankruptcy is used by many as a replacement for responsible behavior, but setting up the law to protect lenders from their own irresponsible decisions is more troubling to me.
Well now there's a distinction. Maybe he could get together with the country's foremost phlogiston chemist, Lysenkoist evolutionary biologist, heliocentric astronomer and Aristotlean physicist to form MIT Lite wherein you could study toward an advanced degree in discarded ideas from the leading lights in each field. Oh yeah, probably should include Marxist economists as well although that's a contradiction in terms.
Do feel free to suggest your own (obviously far superior) macroeconomic synthesis for us to enjoy. You do know that neo-Keynesian economics is decidedly not on the trash heap of history, yes?
Oh please. I live in rural, *RURAL* Michigan. I have a package from Charter cable that gives me 5Mbs down, 512 kbs up, way too many cable channels, and great phone service for $109 including fees and taxes. I chose this service over DSL and wireless broadband; since I made my choice, cellular broadband has also been introduced. Oh, BTW, the service is great.
Well, bensafrickingenius has broadband. I guess we can just about close the book on that one. Good job everybody. That's a wrap.
Hint: The question is "What percentage of Americans have access to competitive broadband?" not "Do I personally have access to competitive broadband?"
I don't know if he's a fruit, but he is well known as a left-wing crank. I suggest if he really thinks this idea has some merit get someone with credibility to front it instead of him. Since all but likewise left-wing cranks write this guy off. (Note: the same goes for right-wing cranks. If Ann Coulter had something to say about technology, and got in some crazy dig about Democrats, I'd say yeah yeah whatever to that too.)
I can't figure this one out. Are you seriously putting a guy who has taught economics at Stanford, Yale, and MIT and worked on the White House Council of Economic Advisers on the same plane as Ann Coulter? Sure, he pisses people off because he has opinions, but you can't seriously be putting his analysis in the same trash bin as somebody who simply says the most outrageous thing she can think of in order to sell books, can you?
I'm not 100% sure if this is an issue of socialist R&D pushing out private R&D, or an issue that basic R&D is too far ahead of useful applications in time to be effectively covered by I.P. laws, or simply an issue (like surface roads) of too many transaction fees to effectively do basic R&D privately on a massive scale.
That's the key. While pure research drives our long term innovation, engaging in it for its own sake is a very risky proposition for a company. By its very nature, pure research doesn't promise anything in terms of results, so an investor has to put an extremely high risk premium on the investment. The result is that you have to have a potential for colossal profits in order for it to be worth the risk. Otherwise, the prudent thing for a profit seeking firm is to take its research money and put it into something with a more predictable yield.
It makes sense for government to step in here because the risks of research investment and the benefits of its results are spread across the population as a whole (much like an insurance scheme), so research that would have been profitable but could not be done because it was seen as too risky actually gets done. It's a definite net win. We pay for the winners and the losers in research, but the winners outnumber the losers, so we all win. If we had to select one particular research investment (like a private firm would), we'd never do it because the likelihood of ending up with nothing is too high.
I was just pointing out a trend over the past few decades or so. For example, violence in schools going up as they got rid of prayer in schools, and then the moment of silence after the pledge of allegiance, and now I'm not even sure they do the pledge anymore.
You might also want to look at the alarming trend between a lack of pirates on the high seas and global warming.
As a former H1B worker (well, E3 actually but same kinda thing) I disagree that auctioning off H1Bs is a solution in the broader interest of the IT economy, as it will seriously impact on smaller players. What you will see is all of the H1Bs going to the big companies and the smaller ones squeezed out of the bidding war.
How is this any different than what happens with talented employees in general? Whenever there's a scarce resource, the people who can pay the most win. As it stands, assigning them randomly is ludicrous given that it could produce outcomes like sending somebody like you (who has a very rare, specialized skill that employers would be willing to pay handsomely for) packing when less valuable talent gets to stay. How does that make any sense at all?
Not a bad idea. But I think your numbers are low. It costs about one year's salary to replace most professional IT workers, or so I've heard. That's the total cost including advertising, recruiting time, interview time, relocation, and the time it takes to learn the company's systems. So some programmer who's making 70k will cost about that much to hire. This is one reason contractors can be competitive. I suspect the price of H1Bs would have to be quite high to discourage companies like Microsoft and Google from using them to force down salaries.
Nobody is denying that any increase in the labor pool will generally bid down salaries. It's a necessary product of increased supply. The key point right now is that people are paranoid about significantly lowered salaries due to employers paying a lot less to a certain class of workers. Setting the price of a visa for one of those workers based on the market value of that worker over an American worker should generally wipe out that pay differential. If, for example, employers could save an average of $50K by going with a foreign worker (assuming the skill set was exactly the same as an American worker), the price of a visa would end up settling around $50K (again, assuming there are American workers who are just as good). Nobody would pay $55K for a visa, and if the visa cost less than $50K, demand for them should increase the price until it's no longer a profitable way of gaming the system.
This sort of thing works in all sorts of situations and it seems quite well suited to this one. It also has the tremendously nice side effect that we're guaranteed to get visas to the people who are the most financially valuable to our industries. If Google wants to hire a supergenius who is worth an extra $400K off the top, they can pay $400K to guarantee that he gets a visa. Other systems may send that guy home, even though according to the market, he's one of the most valuable pieces of foreign talent out there. Any lottery system will be good at producing cheaper labor but not particularly good at getting us the best labor, which was the point of the program to begin with.
AFAIK, H1B visas have to be paid the same as other employees, and extensive documentation is required to show that this criteria is met.
I don't totally disagree with you on this point, but it's not usually difficult to manipulate systems like the one you're describing and get away with whatever you need to. Auctioning off the visas would (at least, market wide on average) do away with any incentive to hire H1Bs simply for salary reasons. Sure, there'd still be the decrease that comes with an increase in supply, but if there were any systematic underpayment going on, it would be accounted for in additional costs for the visas. We could then do away with any unnecessary salary documentation and investigation.
Yea, the article is junk but so is the H1B quota system. It seems like the simple solution is for the government to auction off H1B's.
I strongly agree with this for a number of reasons:
1) Any incentive to go with foreign workers simply to save money would be immediately eliminated as the market would almost certainly equilibrate wages instantly.
2) We get the most marketable talent (meaning, the people companies were willing to pay the most to sponsor) rather than the luckiest people. There's no reason to send a guy home just because he got unlucky if he's brilliant enough than an employer would shell out $500K to get a visa for him.
3) Data on the market clearing price would give us a very clear idea of how far behind / ahead we really are in producing marketable talent. If the market price is insanely high, nobody can really argue that it was all about cheap labor. Likewise, if the price bottoms out, it's hard to argue that there's a meaningful shortage of talent.
It seems like this would solve a lot of problems. Another possibility might be an aftermarket for visas that companies could trade all year long, giving us usable market statistics. I'm not sure about the particulars of that one, though, as we may end up with hedge funds and such gaming the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Peter: "Egon, this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole through your head. Remember that?"
Egon: "That would have worked if you hadn't stopped me."
Maybe we shouldn't have let him drill the hole.
Others have answered fairly well, but it boils down to a few major things:
1) It allows us to use locally-produced fossil fuels rather than foreign fossil fuels.
2) Power plants are set up so they run at very high efficiency. Cars run at whatever efficiency they happen to be running at for the task they're doing.
3) Probably most importantly, when cars stop using fossil fuel and start using electricity, they're able to use any sort of power source out there as long as it can be converted to electricity. As our central generators become greener, so do our cars. Automatically. Think of it like software: Why duplicate the "convert resources into usable energy" functionality when you can put it in a centralized place that can be upgraded without disturbing the rest of the system? Electric cars are the reusable code of the automotive world. Whatever your infrastructure, they can tap in to it as long as you can give them the electricity they need.
More interesting is the distribution of income loss over the different percentiles. Looking at the years 2000 and 2003, we can see that everybody lost roughly the same amount of household (roughly $1000-2000), but if we look at it as a percentage of overall income, it's easy to see how lower income brackets took a noticeable hit, especially when you consider what percentage of their income they consume. The difference is more than 6% for the people in the 20th percentile. My guess is that increased availability of video game consoles and other high tech items isn't getting that back for them. Basically yes, it's true that overall we're on an upward trend, but the idea that the gap between the rich and poor is accelerating due to an across-the-board increase of wealth isn't accurate.
Well, typically the "lying for the greater good" excuse works better if your plan doesn't turn out to be a total disaster, but I can understand what you're saying. My problem is that it's an example of a very disturbing trend in our leadership. It's possible to be a successful leader by being a really smart guy with slick policies who tricks people into going along with them. As long as you're a top-flight executive who is always right, things will work out OK. I don't see that as strong leadership, though. A real leader leads by showing his people the right path and convincing them to follow it. A populace that knows where it's going and why is healthier and more able to govern itself than one that relies on fast talking leaders to fool them into making the right decisions. People become more cohesive and make better decisions when they're active participants than when they're willing dupes.
I suppose it's a necessary product of sound-bite politics. The people who get elected are the ones who can use the fewest words to get people worked up, not the ones who can articulate sensible ideas and rally people behind them. That's a sad place for us to be, but based on the primary debates, I don't think it's going to change any time soon. The only people who are willing to lay out what they really believe and why they believe it are also the people who are least likely to be elected and most likely to do crazy things if they were (e.g. Ron Paul).
Establish solvency? Simply taking a program whose income doesn't keep up with its obligations and changing where the money goes without changing the income or obligations doesn't really do anything for solvency. Certainly, it was reform to make the program work differently, but that doesn't really equal a solution to the problem that we can't pay our bills.
President Bush is a master at saying, "Here's a problem that we all agree is bad, and here is something that I would like to do," and getting people believe that the second part will solve the first problem when it really won't. It's just checking something off of the checklist of "Things George Bush wants to do" and using a legitimate problem as an excuse (but never actually claiming that the proposed policy solves the problem--that's a leap we have to make). "9/11 was bad, and I want to invade Iraq" and "Social security is slowly running out of money, and I want to privatize it" are two classic examples. We can debate the merits of those actions on their own, but it should be understood in advance that they're not there to solve the problems; they're just policy decisions of their own that happen to tie loosely to a known problem.
Frankly, I'm more curious about what value you place on your local fire department.
Not entirely related but also interesting is that people frequently display intransitive preferences. By that I mean that they prefer A over B and B over C, but they also prefer C over A. This is a serious annoyance in economic theory. Attempting to model human behavior based on rational decisions is a tough nut to crack when people can't really settle on an internally consistent set of preferences and beliefs.
It's a two way street. Financial companies are supposed to be doing their research on who they loan money to. The fact is, people were (and still are) being offered way more credit than they can afford. Sure, they're often stupid to take it (making $35K a year and buying a $500K home with practically no money down isn't exactly the brightest long term choice), but the problem is that the lenders who are making that credit available are essentially playing with other peoples' money by bundling questionable debt into marketable securities and selling it off.
The reality is that there are some loans that you can make that you'll never recoup, with or without bankruptcy laws. Financial institutions are supposed to try to avoid making those loans. The fact that they were too stupid to do so is part of the problem. They want to play in the high-risk high-reward market of questionable loans but they don't want to actually take on the risk. That's understandable, but it's a wish that shouldn't be granted. I certainly agree that bankruptcy is used by many as a replacement for responsible behavior, but setting up the law to protect lenders from their own irresponsible decisions is more troubling to me.
Hint: The question is "What percentage of Americans have access to competitive broadband?" not "Do I personally have access to competitive broadband?"
It makes sense for government to step in here because the risks of research investment and the benefits of its results are spread across the population as a whole (much like an insurance scheme), so research that would have been profitable but could not be done because it was seen as too risky actually gets done. It's a definite net win. We pay for the winners and the losers in research, but the winners outnumber the losers, so we all win. If we had to select one particular research investment (like a private firm would), we'd never do it because the likelihood of ending up with nothing is too high.
This sort of thing works in all sorts of situations and it seems quite well suited to this one. It also has the tremendously nice side effect that we're guaranteed to get visas to the people who are the most financially valuable to our industries. If Google wants to hire a supergenius who is worth an extra $400K off the top, they can pay $400K to guarantee that he gets a visa. Other systems may send that guy home, even though according to the market, he's one of the most valuable pieces of foreign talent out there. Any lottery system will be good at producing cheaper labor but not particularly good at getting us the best labor, which was the point of the program to begin with.
1) Any incentive to go with foreign workers simply to save money would be immediately eliminated as the market would almost certainly equilibrate wages instantly.
2) We get the most marketable talent (meaning, the people companies were willing to pay the most to sponsor) rather than the luckiest people. There's no reason to send a guy home just because he got unlucky if he's brilliant enough than an employer would shell out $500K to get a visa for him.
3) Data on the market clearing price would give us a very clear idea of how far behind / ahead we really are in producing marketable talent. If the market price is insanely high, nobody can really argue that it was all about cheap labor. Likewise, if the price bottoms out, it's hard to argue that there's a meaningful shortage of talent.
It seems like this would solve a lot of problems. Another possibility might be an aftermarket for visas that companies could trade all year long, giving us usable market statistics. I'm not sure about the particulars of that one, though, as we may end up with hedge funds and such gaming the system.