If these people did not know what was going on, they are not professionals, they are just a schmuck who is being paid too much. To say that the computer models did not anticipate their stupidity is just denial.
Why not question their competence? After all, economists don't seem to know what the hell they're doing lately. All of the bailout solutions that were demanded have flopped thus far. Perhaps one good thing will come out of this... people will realize economists, of all stripes, are vastly overrated in their ability to actually understand how this massive world economy works. Because you've got hundreds of PhD's, some with Nobels, that can't agree on jack shit.
Whomever thinks self-regulation will ever work for the benefit of the public needs their head examined.
Does the phrase "Fox guarding the hen house" ring a bell to anyone?
Tell me, being that the root of this whole mess are subprime loans, were you this concerned when some Congressmen tried to enact new regulations on Fannie and Freddie, and others blocked it, citing such economic justifications as "racism" and "fairness"? Because it's in the Constitution that everyone gets a house, you know.
Recent statistics show Baghdad today is safer than Detroit.
You have completely lost your grip on reality.
And yet you didn't dispute his point... that there were more murders in Detroit than there were in Baghdad for the same time period.
Look, I love the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" quote from Twain too, but facts are facts... you had a better chance of being mowed down in Detroit than you did in Baghdad. I've got a college buddy that's a law enforcement officer in Detroit, and he jokes about the Iraq/Detroit comparison all the time.
"Really? Preach it brother - Name Names of those conservative economists that were screaming about the problems, yet being ignored by the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress!"
It didn't even take a degree in economics to see this coming, my mental giant of a friend. Bush tried to implement reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to get a grip on the subprime mess in 2003. These reforms (including new regulations, for you lovers of beauracracy out there) were shot down when, surprise surprise, Democrats stonewalled them. In hearing, Barney Frank in particular said he saw no subprime problem at all, that it was alllll a racist attempt to keep poor people from the American Dream of home ownership. And this is according to a bastion of Republican advocacy.
"Because I never heard anything from any of them - possibly they were too busy talking about how lowering taxes on the wealthy was going to generate an economic boom, the likes of which the world has never seen."
Or, maybe because you had your head so far up your ass (or in Indymedia... same thing) that you never noticed anyone else yelling about the problem lo these many years.
Where was your fanboy-ism for the Nobel when the Austrian School types were winning it?
What's plainly idiotic about your post is that despite Krugman's other political views, the work in which he won his Nobel for advocated for free trade heavily. He was in part rejected for a job in the first Clinton Administration because he thought their early protectionist views were disastrous, and he lobbied for free trade policies in the 90's.
I'm no fan of the man, and he does advocate some uncomfortably nanny-state views on some subjects, but in economics, the very theories that the man won his prize for laid some of the very foundation for "Reaganomics", as you like to put it.
Economics, a fine scholarly field, is not a science, as much as some economists would like to pretend with their crude algebra and stats.
This is one of the things that makes Krugman in particular so insufferable about his profession. He places far too much importance on it in relation to it's actual value. Like all social sciences... sociology, psychology, political science... economics is not a hard science. It's a genuine field of study that uses some math and some science to reach conclusions, but also depends upon human behavior, which is not easily quantified, and cannot be quantified with any scientifc certainty or accuracy in many cases.
This doesn't mean the fields are of no importance... they certainly are... but they're not pure science, and I have a hard time with calling some a political "scientist" or a social "scientist".
"Whine all you want about the Nobel Committee having a political agenda. Right is right. And Krugman was right"
You act like Krugman was the only one warning us about the housing bubble, when he was one of many, a lot of them being the very people he despises. It's not like Krugman was the first one to go "Hey, this thing is gonna burst".
The guy isn't only anti-Bush, he's an arrogant douchenozzle to anyone that disagrees with him on anything. In Krugman's world, if you don't agree with him... be it economics, politics, whatever... you're not just wrong, you're an idiot. He's a very, very bright man, but he also holds too high an opinion of himself in every regard. He also takes the status of his field far too seriously, often indicating that economics is the most important field of study in the world. Medical doctors, physicists, and engineers would probably beg to differ.
All that said, even though he hasn't done any real research in decades, even his enemies admit that he deserves the prize for his groundbreaking work in the late 70's. When standard Keynesian economists were saying that Stagflation couldn't possibly really exist, Krugman was one of a handful of guys that said "Yes it can, and here's how". He's a pioneer in many theories that are the bedrock of free trade work. You wouldn't know it from his rambling against Bush and Co. today, but he was on the outs with the Clinton crowd because he was too free-trade for them.
Well there went my hope that they'd finally offer us two-buttons.
*sighs*
There is nothing I hate more than having to use a trackpad as a click-button. You try to move the cursor and open up half a dozen links accidentally.
I nearly sent back my Dell until we found drivers that let me turn that feature off.:(
Steve...YOUR A TWIT!!!
Is anyone else actually looking forward to the day that Steve Jobs retires? Every computer Apple now makes either looks like a hunk of metal and glass or a cheese grater; its brutalist architecture for the PC, and it's just as ugly on computers as it is on buildings.
It's also painfully obvious that he doesn't give a rat-fuck about what end users want; note the number of mouse buttons on the new laptops.
Jobs built, and then re-built, this company into what it is, but I'm tired of all the computer models being his personal art project. You can expect excellence in design from Apple without this depressing, Bauhaus case design that Apple seems addicted to now. We're getting German worker housing in a PC, and paying a premium for it. Apple computers used to be beautiful and original. I love my eMac... it's instantly recognizable as an Apple with its white plastic and round curves. Now all of Apple's computers are dark, gun-metal slabs. I seriously wonder if Jobs and Ive spend all their time shooting heroin and listening to Goth music in the dark now.
Yay! People rediscover the advantages of thin clients! How long until they rediscover the downsides...
I first got the computer bug seriously when I was in college, and took some courses requiring the use of dumb terminals in our computer center... they were running off a DEC minicomputer running Unix, and I was hooked. I learned to do a lot using those old green and orange screen terminals, and to this day, I wonder if most businesses wouldn't be incredibly more productive if they went back to simple no-GUI dumb terminals... with text email and Lynx browsers.
Think about it. How many employees now blow off hours at a time during the workday by playing solitaire, going to MySpace, releasing the latest trojan into their LAN via email attachments...
Even with a GUI terminal, if it was stripped down and wasn't Windows based (and had drastically limited Internet access), I think a lot more would get done around offices.
"Giving the super wealthy more money is not socialism."
So now confiscating less of their earnings is now "giving them money"? What kind of Marxist bullshit is that?
If you want to make the case for so-called "progressive" taxation, fine, but drop this shitty notion that it's the government's money in the first place. It's not. Money is property, and last time I checked, we still have property rights in this country.
"A bit of history: in the mid 1980s, Ronald Reagan came into office with the idea to slash income taxes, particularly for people who were "important" to the economy, i.e., very wealthy."
The wealthy are important to the economy. The wealthy and the upper-Middle class business owners are the engine of American prosperity. How many poor people ever offered you a job?
So let's cut this bullshit right now that wealthy = villain.
"At the time there was some belief on the Republican side that cutting taxes would magically produce new economic activity that would pay for the reduced tax cuts. Unfortunately, that never really happened and the nation started to go deep into debt."
Except that increased economic activity did "pay for" the tax cuts. The problem is that Congress increased spending by huge amounts, negating any savings, especially increases in entitlements which, by law cannot be touched during budget cuts. To this day, the biggest item in our budget is not defense (which is one of the few things the Constitution explicitly says should be paid for by taxation), but those damned entitlements. And when the Baby boomers start their retirement peak, we're going to be in a world of crap that makes the current crisis look tame.
"The surplus was ended by Bush and cronies deciding to spend it all on a huge, unnecessary tax refund, most of which went to the extremely rich."
Yeah, and the crash of the dot com bubble had absolutely nothing to do with that.
Lots of very smart people... Warren Buffett among them... warned us for a couple of years that the dot com boom wasn't sustainable, that you can't make money when you don't actually have anything to sell.
The dot com movement was the vaporware of economic booms, all promise and no production. Just like the housing bubble that has now burst was a product of massive numbers of people being given loans when they had no credit and no assets.
The "surplus" of the late 90's and early 2000's was nothing but an illusion that popped. It was based on fake wealth from fake products. You shouldn't mourn it's absence.
Well, I didn't think he won. I don't think anyone with any intelligence thought he won, either. Although it proves that P.T. Barnum knew what he was talking about.
I think it proves you're one of those people Pauline Kael made famous when she said "I don't see how Nixon could have possibly won. No one I know voted for him"
I don't understand why the parent was modded troll. He's telling the truth.
Wikipedia is an absolute gift on matters of knowledge in most ways, but its very strength in things like science and math articles are its very weakness in political pages... anyone, including trolls, can edit them. It's kind of hard to write a troll on, say, polynomials. It's all too common to do it to politicians.
And he's right about the US media becoming like the British media. There are no "neutral" media outlets anymore, if indeed they ever existed in the first place. Much as the UK has red papers and Tory papers, US news outlets now all have a bias of some kind. Fox is well known for tending to the right, CNN trended left in the early 90's (that one was a shame, as they were the only truly unbiased news outlet in America during the late 80's). NBC has gone so blatantly to the left that we call it's cable outlet "MSDNC".
I have paid zero in income tax through various legitimate and less-than-legitimate methods over the last 4 years..
I'll remember that while my neighbors are trying to survive an upstate New York Winter on HEAP, Food Stamps, a Medicaid HMO and SSI.
Perhaps you and Joe Biden need to read something...
""Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands." " - Judge Learned Hand
"My point is, if we had a respected President, one who could come on TV and calm everyone down, this 'bailout' would be unnecessary."
I was with you until you wrote that. George Washington could be the President, and he couldn't stop this. Perception is a problem here, but there's a very real financial hole to deal with... thousands of subprime borrowers have defaulted on their mortgages. That's not perception. That's "where's my money?"
"The major effect of this bill is that it is causing fiscal conservatives to blow gaskets. They can't accept the fact that the free market is what caused this mess."
No wonder you posted AC.
It's not a free market when the government tells banks they have to make X amount of dollars available for loans to the poor out of "fairness". These were people that had no money, no assets... some of them didn't even have week to week paychecks. But hey, we mandated fairness. And the subprime mess was it's child.
If there's no subprime mess, there's no mortgage crash. Period. This happend because large amounts of subprime borrowers stopped making payments. Gee, who could have seen that coming, eh?
In a real free market, subprime loans wouldn't even exist. This was one of your beloved regulatory mandates.
Actually, the reason Ireland has come so far in terms of standard of living and per capita income is because of heavy investment by the EU during the late 90's. This investment was mostly funded from tax revenue in wealthier EU countries (like Germany). That investment of public money has certainly turned around the Irish economy, but to act as if it is because of their pro-business, free market policies is a bit misleading.
Those investments may have laid the foundation for Ireland's ability to attract this kind of business, but do you honestly think that their low tax-pro markets strategy isn't responsible for getting new business? If Ireland's corporate tax burdens were much higher, do you honestly think they'd still be getting business like this?
So, Ireland is smarter than us in how they go about attracting corporate dollars...... and you fault THEM for it?
Maybe if we were a little more competitive companies wouldn't bother fleeing there. Just a thought.
While the US has a low sales tax burden compared to other nations, we have, depending on who's numbers you believe, the third or fourth highest corporate tax rates in the world, and our combined personal Federal and State income tax rates are on the high end compared to others as well. The Nordic Countries have much higher personal rates than we do, but few other countries do.
In contrast to the many "doom and gloom" postings about the US government's actions, it's nice to see a story where they are doing something "right" for a change.
If you think 40 million bucks for some reports to Congress is prudent spending, then I've got a bridge to nowhere to sell you.
Slashdot Mirror
If these people did not know what was going on, they are not professionals, they are just a schmuck who is being paid too much. To say that the computer models did not anticipate their stupidity is just denial.
Why not question their competence? After all, economists don't seem to know what the hell they're doing lately. All of the bailout solutions that were demanded have flopped thus far. Perhaps one good thing will come out of this... people will realize economists, of all stripes, are vastly overrated in their ability to actually understand how this massive world economy works. Because you've got hundreds of PhD's, some with Nobels, that can't agree on jack shit.
Whomever thinks self-regulation will ever work for the benefit of the public needs their head examined.
Does the phrase "Fox guarding the hen house" ring a bell to anyone?
Tell me, being that the root of this whole mess are subprime loans, were you this concerned when some Congressmen tried to enact new regulations on Fannie and Freddie, and others blocked it, citing such economic justifications as "racism" and "fairness"? Because it's in the Constitution that everyone gets a house, you know.
You have completely lost your grip on reality.
And yet you didn't dispute his point... that there were more murders in Detroit than there were in Baghdad for the same time period.
Look, I love the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" quote from Twain too, but facts are facts... you had a better chance of being mowed down in Detroit than you did in Baghdad. I've got a college buddy that's a law enforcement officer in Detroit, and he jokes about the Iraq/Detroit comparison all the time.
"Really? Preach it brother - Name Names of those conservative economists that were screaming about the problems, yet being ignored by the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress!"
It didn't even take a degree in economics to see this coming, my mental giant of a friend. Bush tried to implement reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to get a grip on the subprime mess in 2003. These reforms (including new regulations, for you lovers of beauracracy out there) were shot down when, surprise surprise, Democrats stonewalled them. In hearing, Barney Frank in particular said he saw no subprime problem at all, that it was alllll a racist attempt to keep poor people from the American Dream of home ownership. And this is according to a bastion of Republican advocacy.
"Because I never heard anything from any of them - possibly they were too busy talking about how lowering taxes on the wealthy was going to generate an economic boom, the likes of which the world has never seen."
Or, maybe because you had your head so far up your ass (or in Indymedia... same thing) that you never noticed anyone else yelling about the problem lo these many years.
... Krugman was not the first or only person to warn of the housing bubble, and many of the people he loathes beat him to it.
Where was your fanboy-ism for the Nobel when the Austrian School types were winning it?
What's plainly idiotic about your post is that despite Krugman's other political views, the work in which he won his Nobel for advocated for free trade heavily. He was in part rejected for a job in the first Clinton Administration because he thought their early protectionist views were disastrous, and he lobbied for free trade policies in the 90's.
I'm no fan of the man, and he does advocate some uncomfortably nanny-state views on some subjects, but in economics, the very theories that the man won his prize for laid some of the very foundation for "Reaganomics", as you like to put it.
Of course others differ in their opinion of Krugman....
I have to point out that the "other" side does not have a nobel prize or a college diploma, and appears on Fox news and National review.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Luskin)
Milton Friedman was often at odds with Krugman, and he did have a nobel.
Economics, a fine scholarly field, is not a science, as much as some economists would like to pretend with their crude algebra and stats.
This is one of the things that makes Krugman in particular so insufferable about his profession. He places far too much importance on it in relation to it's actual value. Like all social sciences... sociology, psychology, political science... economics is not a hard science. It's a genuine field of study that uses some math and some science to reach conclusions, but also depends upon human behavior, which is not easily quantified, and cannot be quantified with any scientifc certainty or accuracy in many cases.
This doesn't mean the fields are of no importance... they certainly are... but they're not pure science, and I have a hard time with calling some a political "scientist" or a social "scientist".
"Whine all you want about the Nobel Committee having a political agenda. Right is right. And Krugman was right"
You act like Krugman was the only one warning us about the housing bubble, when he was one of many, a lot of them being the very people he despises. It's not like Krugman was the first one to go "Hey, this thing is gonna burst".
The guy isn't only anti-Bush, he's an arrogant douchenozzle to anyone that disagrees with him on anything. In Krugman's world, if you don't agree with him... be it economics, politics, whatever... you're not just wrong, you're an idiot. He's a very, very bright man, but he also holds too high an opinion of himself in every regard. He also takes the status of his field far too seriously, often indicating that economics is the most important field of study in the world. Medical doctors, physicists, and engineers would probably beg to differ.
All that said, even though he hasn't done any real research in decades, even his enemies admit that he deserves the prize for his groundbreaking work in the late 70's. When standard Keynesian economists were saying that Stagflation couldn't possibly really exist, Krugman was one of a handful of guys that said "Yes it can, and here's how". He's a pioneer in many theories that are the bedrock of free trade work. You wouldn't know it from his rambling against Bush and Co. today, but he was on the outs with the Clinton crowd because he was too free-trade for them.
"Hopefully the MacBook trackpads are better. Sounds like they are. But the Mighty Mouse is just utterly horrible."
Yup. I use a Microsoft optical mouse with my Mac. The people at Apple have mouse issues, apparently.
Well there went my hope that they'd finally offer us two-buttons.
*sighs*
There is nothing I hate more than having to use a trackpad as a click-button. You try to move the cursor and open up half a dozen links accidentally.
I nearly sent back my Dell until we found drivers that let me turn that feature off. :(
Steve...YOUR A TWIT!!!
Is anyone else actually looking forward to the day that Steve Jobs retires? Every computer Apple now makes either looks like a hunk of metal and glass or a cheese grater; its brutalist architecture for the PC, and it's just as ugly on computers as it is on buildings.
It's also painfully obvious that he doesn't give a rat-fuck about what end users want; note the number of mouse buttons on the new laptops.
Jobs built, and then re-built, this company into what it is, but I'm tired of all the computer models being his personal art project. You can expect excellence in design from Apple without this depressing, Bauhaus case design that Apple seems addicted to now. We're getting German worker housing in a PC, and paying a premium for it. Apple computers used to be beautiful and original. I love my eMac... it's instantly recognizable as an Apple with its white plastic and round curves. Now all of Apple's computers are dark, gun-metal slabs. I seriously wonder if Jobs and Ive spend all their time shooting heroin and listening to Goth music in the dark now.
I dunno, it works out if you do consumer OSs:
Win 3
Win 95
Win 98
Win ME
Win XP
Vista
Win 7
If 7 is based on Vista, then they should just be honest and call it Windows Crap.
Yay! People rediscover the advantages of thin clients! How long until they rediscover the downsides...
I first got the computer bug seriously when I was in college, and took some courses requiring the use of dumb terminals in our computer center... they were running off a DEC minicomputer running Unix, and I was hooked. I learned to do a lot using those old green and orange screen terminals, and to this day, I wonder if most businesses wouldn't be incredibly more productive if they went back to simple no-GUI dumb terminals... with text email and Lynx browsers.
Think about it. How many employees now blow off hours at a time during the workday by playing solitaire, going to MySpace, releasing the latest trojan into their LAN via email attachments...
Even with a GUI terminal, if it was stripped down and wasn't Windows based (and had drastically limited Internet access), I think a lot more would get done around offices.
"Giving the super wealthy more money is not socialism."
So now confiscating less of their earnings is now "giving them money"? What kind of Marxist bullshit is that?
If you want to make the case for so-called "progressive" taxation, fine, but drop this shitty notion that it's the government's money in the first place. It's not. Money is property, and last time I checked, we still have property rights in this country.
"A bit of history: in the mid 1980s, Ronald Reagan came into office with the idea to slash income taxes, particularly for people who were "important" to the economy, i.e., very wealthy."
The wealthy are important to the economy. The wealthy and the upper-Middle class business owners are the engine of American prosperity. How many poor people ever offered you a job?
So let's cut this bullshit right now that wealthy = villain.
"At the time there was some belief on the Republican side that cutting taxes would magically produce new economic activity that would pay for the reduced tax cuts. Unfortunately, that never really happened and the nation started to go deep into debt."
Except that increased economic activity did "pay for" the tax cuts. The problem is that Congress increased spending by huge amounts, negating any savings, especially increases in entitlements which, by law cannot be touched during budget cuts. To this day, the biggest item in our budget is not defense (which is one of the few things the Constitution explicitly says should be paid for by taxation), but those damned entitlements. And when the Baby boomers start their retirement peak, we're going to be in a world of crap that makes the current crisis look tame.
"The surplus was ended by Bush and cronies deciding to spend it all on a huge, unnecessary tax refund, most of which went to the extremely rich."
Yeah, and the crash of the dot com bubble had absolutely nothing to do with that.
Lots of very smart people... Warren Buffett among them... warned us for a couple of years that the dot com boom wasn't sustainable, that you can't make money when you don't actually have anything to sell.
The dot com movement was the vaporware of economic booms, all promise and no production. Just like the housing bubble that has now burst was a product of massive numbers of people being given loans when they had no credit and no assets.
The "surplus" of the late 90's and early 2000's was nothing but an illusion that popped. It was based on fake wealth from fake products. You shouldn't mourn it's absence.
Well, I didn't think he won. I don't think anyone with any intelligence thought he won, either. Although it proves that P.T. Barnum knew what he was talking about.
I think it proves you're one of those people Pauline Kael made famous when she said "I don't see how Nixon could have possibly won. No one I know voted for him"
I don't understand why the parent was modded troll. He's telling the truth.
Wikipedia is an absolute gift on matters of knowledge in most ways, but its very strength in things like science and math articles are its very weakness in political pages... anyone, including trolls, can edit them. It's kind of hard to write a troll on, say, polynomials. It's all too common to do it to politicians.
And he's right about the US media becoming like the British media. There are no "neutral" media outlets anymore, if indeed they ever existed in the first place. Much as the UK has red papers and Tory papers, US news outlets now all have a bias of some kind. Fox is well known for tending to the right, CNN trended left in the early 90's (that one was a shame, as they were the only truly unbiased news outlet in America during the late 80's). NBC has gone so blatantly to the left that we call it's cable outlet "MSDNC".
I have paid zero in income tax through various legitimate and less-than-legitimate methods over the last 4 years. .
I'll remember that while my neighbors are trying to survive an upstate New York Winter on HEAP, Food Stamps, a Medicaid HMO and SSI.
Perhaps you and Joe Biden need to read something...
""Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as
possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the
treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes.
Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister
in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone
does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any
public duty to pay more than the law demands." " - Judge Learned Hand
"My point is, if we had a respected President, one who could come on TV and calm everyone down, this 'bailout' would be unnecessary."
I was with you until you wrote that. George Washington could be the President, and he couldn't stop this. Perception is a problem here, but there's a very real financial hole to deal with... thousands of subprime borrowers have defaulted on their mortgages. That's not perception. That's "where's my money?"
"The major effect of this bill is that it is causing fiscal conservatives to blow gaskets. They can't accept the fact that the free market is what caused this mess."
No wonder you posted AC.
It's not a free market when the government tells banks they have to make X amount of dollars available for loans to the poor out of "fairness". These were people that had no money, no assets... some of them didn't even have week to week paychecks. But hey, we mandated fairness. And the subprime mess was it's child.
If there's no subprime mess, there's no mortgage crash. Period. This happend because large amounts of subprime borrowers stopped making payments. Gee, who could have seen that coming, eh?
In a real free market, subprime loans wouldn't even exist. This was one of your beloved regulatory mandates.
Actually, the reason Ireland has come so far in terms of standard of living and per capita income is because of heavy investment by the EU during the late 90's. This investment was mostly funded from tax revenue in wealthier EU countries (like Germany). That investment of public money has certainly turned around the Irish economy, but to act as if it is because of their pro-business, free market policies is a bit misleading.
Those investments may have laid the foundation for Ireland's ability to attract this kind of business, but do you honestly think that their low tax-pro markets strategy isn't responsible for getting new business? If Ireland's corporate tax burdens were much higher, do you honestly think they'd still be getting business like this?
So, Ireland is smarter than us in how they go about attracting corporate dollars... ... and you fault THEM for it?
Maybe if we were a little more competitive companies wouldn't bother fleeing there. Just a thought.
While the US has a low sales tax burden compared to other nations, we have, depending on who's numbers you believe, the third or fourth highest corporate tax rates in the world, and our combined personal Federal and State income tax rates are on the high end compared to others as well. The Nordic Countries have much higher personal rates than we do, but few other countries do.
In contrast to the many "doom and gloom" postings about the US government's actions, it's nice to see a story where they are doing something "right" for a change.
If you think 40 million bucks for some reports to Congress is prudent spending, then I've got a bridge to nowhere to sell you.