It shows debts being paid off after the War of 1812, Civil War, WWI, Great Depression, and WWII. Only in the 80's did we start to charge up debt without paying it down.
I'm sorry, I thought you could figure it out. The graph shows debt as percentage of GDP; the graph slopes downward not because any debt was paid off but because of economic growth.
Keynesians use state-of-the-art mathematical modeling to make predictions. And some of them are damn good at it
What makes you think that Jim O'Sullivan is a Keynesian? Plenty of people who reject Keynesianism build mathematical economic models (I do). Furthermore, O'Sullivan may simply have been lucky.
But Austrian economists continue to put hyperinflation predictions out there that are easily proved wrong when said hyperinflation fails to materialize over and over.
You obviously are only familiar with a caricature of Austrian economics.
At the end of the day, something like economics is only useful to the extent that it has predictive power
Austrians don't dispute that economics is useful, they dispute that it is a science.
Think of it like this... if the US was to disappear off the radar for all of Europe and not show on Google, would we be affected? Answer: Yes.
Correct: Europeans lose a lot.
The other way round is not only the same - it's actually WORSE.
Individual Europeans can still come to US platforms under US law.
Because the European market is more often bigger than the US, depending on what/how you measure it and what you're looking it.
This directive doesn't make it any more difficult for American companies to sell in Europe. Disney and Hollywood will love it: more opportunities to sue European bootleggers. And Google and Facebook will love it because it makes life far more difficult for European competitors and gives them an excuse to put more censorship tools into their platforms.
If it happened on Slashdot, you'd lose at least half the articles, half the commentors and half the advertising revenue.
You mean we would be subjected to less ignorant drivel from Europeans? Sadly, this directive won't accomplish that.
It is likely that most content owners will just grant a blanket license.
They may not have the option of doing so. Often, the way this works in Europe is that fees are collected by national licensing organizations and then apportioned to their members.
Presumably this was because most of Europe have proportional election systems with several alternatives to pick from and plenty of opportunity to punish politicians who were too obviously on the take.
The proportional election system in Europe does the opposite: it allows parties to shield politicians from the voters; meaning, powerful party figures who have fallen out of favor with voters are simply moved from a direct mandate to a party position.
Furthermore, the parliamentary system in Europe has resulted in numerous extremists and dictators taking over, foremost Hitler; people like that have no chance under the US system.
And European governments are far more under the control of large corporations than the US government.
The general approach is that once you have put your idea in material form, you automatically have copyright over "that particular expression" of that idea. No problem there.
That is actually a huge problem. In the US, it used to be the case that you only got a copyright if you registered it with the government. That created legal clarity. The crappy system we have now is the result of bad European copyright legislation.
Creators deserve a chance to exploit their creations.
The justification for copyright in the US is purely utilitarian. In any case, "creators" had that right under US law before adoption of the Berne convention.
GitHub may have problems operating in Europe, but it can certainly operate in the US.
And subversive European developers can connect to it from Europe, at least until Europe follows in the footsteps of China and implements its own Great Firewall.
If Google has to pay to link to EU sites, the obvious answer is that EU sites just fell off of google.
Yes, and how is this a problem? You can't read The Guardian anymore?
If your income depends on google linking to your site, and you have copyrighted material on your site-- you're screwed.
Large publishers and government media in Europe won't have a problem, so Europe is going to kill a lot of its small and medium sized online publishers; sites like Facebook and Twitter will experience severe restrictions in Europe. All of that is bad for Europeans, both politically and economically, but I don't see any significant effect on the US.
Why should anybody waste a lot of time trying to oppose this at the level of the EP? People understand full well that their vote is pretty much worthless. As I understand it, the EU can adopt these rules without the EP.
Furthermore, what makes you think that European youth would vote to oppose this?
It also marks the day where the EU finally succumbed to the power of the copyright lobby and became a nest of utter corruption just like their US counterparts.
Are you kidding? The copyright lobby and their insane demands started in Europe. The US managed to avoid their madness for a long time and didn't implement the Berne convention until 1989. One particularly evil aspect of the Berne convention was the removal of the requirement for copyright registration.
could have significant repercussions on the way we use the internet
I'm not sure what "repercussions" restrictions on European content is supposed to have for "us" in the US; it's not like there is a lot of interesting content coming out of Europe.
Unsurprisingly, these parts of the bill have been met with opposition from digital rights groups, computer scientists, academics, platforms such as Wikipedia and even human rights groups.
Oh, I don't know, through most of its history until the advent of delusional Reaganomics?
Your graph doesn't show any debts being paid off; you're looking at the wrong graph.
Austrians argue that no experiment or empirical evidence could falsify their theory
Austrians don't just say that their theory is unfalsifiable, they say that all economic theories are unfalsifiable because economics is not a science. And they are correct. Keynesianism in particular is a pseudoscience because it uses the trappings of science (math, modeling, scientific language, empirical data), but fails to use the scientific method.
Nor is that surprising. Keynes was a very smart, arrogant man, but he had no scientific training, understanding, or accomplishments (ditto for Krugman). And Keynes was a proud leader in another pseudoscientific field, namely eugenics.
The two are the same thing, since you can't have a free market without fair governance. Absent government, whoever gains the upper hand winds up dominating the market and exerting unfair influence over the other players.
Yeah, anti-capitalist, fascist fairy tales since 1920.
You are making the claim that Obama is bad at predicting
Not at all: I think Obama's prediction for what was going to happen without the Keynesian stimulus was about on target. His error was in predicting the effect of the Keynesian stimulus.
No, based on the metrics I provided. Repeating this same thing over and over doesn't make it true, and doesn't refute the facts.
The fact is as you stated: this was one of "the longest recoveries"; that logically makes it one of the slowest.
What Keynesians give you is a responsible adult model of economic behavior - pay off your debts when things are good, so you've got some room to borrow when things are bad.
Pay off debts? Are you delusional? When has the US government ever paid off debt?
Austrians suck at math, modeling, and basically all the modern tools of science, because fundamentally, they don't believe in them.
Correct. What you are leaving out is that Keynesians also suck at math, modeling, and basically all the modern tools of science, but unlike Austrians, they are so dumb and partisan that they don't even realize it.
False. They're called offsets, and they work.... That opens the door to require that they be zero-emissions vehicles in the future. Farm implements are ideal candidates for battery-swap technology, because they are so very simple in construction; thus battery access can also be simple. And of course, we can mandate zero-emissions fertilizers. We could use AIWPS [sdsu.edu] to produce that fertilizer from our human waste.
How competitive do you think California agricultural products are going to be with free trade and competition from countries without all these costly measures? Or do you oppose free trade now?
Agriculture is a huge source of carbon emissions in California (both directly and indirectly through transportation and processing), a major source of environmental destruction in California, a big strain on limited water resources, and a magnet for unskilled illegal migration. To go carbon neutral, California would have to shut down much of its agriculture, which would not just result in much lower carbon emissions from the state but also address all those other problems. What a win-win solution for California and the world!
There was a backlash, but conservatives in denial that "the free market" and deregulation could ever be wrong, immediately blamed government policy.
Under a free market, any bank or lender who made too many bad loans would have gone out of business and lost all their money, thereby preventing them from repeating these mistakes. That's the way free markets police themselves. It is government that keeps bailing out these people.
Look at the folks still trying to misdirect blame to Freddie and Fanny, despite the Glass-Steagall repeal having a much larger impact
The problem isn't these policies, the problem with government is that it keeps rewarding bad decisions and bad risk taking by market participants through bailouts. That is, government socializes the risk but privatizes benefits. That is not a free market problem, it is a problem with government.
The banks are still running everything. They got a bailout and they got to keep the properties on which they knowingly sold bad mortgages for which they got bailed out. We paid for those homes and didn't even get them. Tell me again about this "big backlash".
Yeah, and who was responsible for that? Well, Bush signed it into law, but Obama and McCain both supported it. And Obama doubled down on those bailouts during his presidency.
Nathaniel Popper, writing for The New York Times: When I moved to the Bay Area two years ago, it was with a sense of relief. Relief from New York winters and deteriorating subways, yes. But also relief after six years of covering Wall Street,
Covering Wall St., covering High Tech, it's all the same to a NYT reporter: it's not like their work requires any competence or insight into what they are reporting about, and it shows in their writing. I'm glad I stopped reading that rag a decade ago.
You're setting arbitrary goalposts here to declare his failure. Obama should not be expected to predict the future.
The fact is that Obama did predict the future and used his predictions to justify his election and his economic policies. Obama predicted one outcome that was going to happen with doing nothing and another outcome for his economic plan. What happened? The country did worse with his plan than his own predictions for doing nothing. So, Obama acted irresponsibly by predicting the economic future, he acted irresponsibly by using his predictions to justify massive spending on cronies, and then it all blew up in his face.
Obama's recovery is one of the longest in history,
Yes, and hence one of the slowest, i.e., one of the weakest and worst.
Citation needed. This is just a baseless claim. "People" in this case were obstructionist Republicans
There are basically two different views of recessions, the Keynesian one and the Austrian one. Obama's economic policies were based on the Keynesian view. If the Keynesian view were correct, the economy should have responded as he predicted. But, in fact, the economy responded like Austrian models predicted.
I'll take slow-and-steady growth over boom-bust cycles any time.
But what Keynesians give you is slow growth and boom-bust cycles because the boom-bust cycles are caused by monetary policy and government spending in the first place.
Objectively speaking, considering 14 different measures, Obama had a more positive impact on the economy than all but one of the last 6 administrations
Given the depth of the recession, that would have been true of any president, short of starting WWIII. And the very article you quote says "Furthermore, while shortfalls do exist on the Obama end-of-term report card, his performance holds up more than adequately against other US leaders of recent history."
What Obama should be measured by is (1) how his performance compares to his own economic predictions and promises, and (2) how the recovery compares to historical recoveries. Obama performed dismally bad by his own predictions; his economic policies failed to achieve his stated objectives. And the recovery was dismally slow (CNN, Forbes).
Obama's poor economic performance isn't surprising either: his stimulus package, fiscal policy, regulatory policy, and welfare policy worked as people expected it to and the way they have always done: they slowed economic recovery, employment, and growth.
EVs are powered by the grid which contains energy from a mix of sources, and even when it is 100% non-renewables they are still cleaner than ICEs due to efficiency and regeneration.
So we have dispensed now with your bogus argument that "one source of energy (fossil fuels) gets to ignore all of its externalities", since both EVs and gas powered cars largely use the same source of energy. Since both rely on fossil fuels for their manufacture and operation, they both are subsidized at about the same rate (if anything, since gas is taxed more than electricity, EVs are subsidized at a higher rate).
Slashdot Mirror
No, not at all. I want a minimalist government, one so small and with so few resources that it isn't worth bribing politicians.
I'm sorry, I thought you could figure it out. The graph shows debt as percentage of GDP; the graph slopes downward not because any debt was paid off but because of economic growth.
What makes you think that Jim O'Sullivan is a Keynesian? Plenty of people who reject Keynesianism build mathematical economic models (I do). Furthermore, O'Sullivan may simply have been lucky.
You obviously are only familiar with a caricature of Austrian economics.
Austrians don't dispute that economics is useful, they dispute that it is a science.
Oh, believe me, I have seen enough political unrest that I don't take liberal democracy for granted: it is always under threat from people like you.
Correct: Europeans lose a lot.
Individual Europeans can still come to US platforms under US law.
This directive doesn't make it any more difficult for American companies to sell in Europe. Disney and Hollywood will love it: more opportunities to sue European bootleggers. And Google and Facebook will love it because it makes life far more difficult for European competitors and gives them an excuse to put more censorship tools into their platforms.
You mean we would be subjected to less ignorant drivel from Europeans? Sadly, this directive won't accomplish that.
They may not have the option of doing so. Often, the way this works in Europe is that fees are collected by national licensing organizations and then apportioned to their members.
The proportional election system in Europe does the opposite: it allows parties to shield politicians from the voters; meaning, powerful party figures who have fallen out of favor with voters are simply moved from a direct mandate to a party position.
Furthermore, the parliamentary system in Europe has resulted in numerous extremists and dictators taking over, foremost Hitler; people like that have no chance under the US system.
And European governments are far more under the control of large corporations than the US government.
That is actually a huge problem. In the US, it used to be the case that you only got a copyright if you registered it with the government. That created legal clarity. The crappy system we have now is the result of bad European copyright legislation.
The justification for copyright in the US is purely utilitarian. In any case, "creators" had that right under US law before adoption of the Berne convention.
GitHub may have problems operating in Europe, but it can certainly operate in the US.
And subversive European developers can connect to it from Europe, at least until Europe follows in the footsteps of China and implements its own Great Firewall.
Yes, and how is this a problem? You can't read The Guardian anymore?
Large publishers and government media in Europe won't have a problem, so Europe is going to kill a lot of its small and medium sized online publishers; sites like Facebook and Twitter will experience severe restrictions in Europe. All of that is bad for Europeans, both politically and economically, but I don't see any significant effect on the US.
Why should anybody waste a lot of time trying to oppose this at the level of the EP? People understand full well that their vote is pretty much worthless. As I understand it, the EU can adopt these rules without the EP.
Furthermore, what makes you think that European youth would vote to oppose this?
Are you kidding? The copyright lobby and their insane demands started in Europe. The US managed to avoid their madness for a long time and didn't implement the Berne convention until 1989. One particularly evil aspect of the Berne convention was the removal of the requirement for copyright registration.
I'm not sure what "repercussions" restrictions on European content is supposed to have for "us" in the US; it's not like there is a lot of interesting content coming out of Europe.
A bunch of hypocrites.
Your graph doesn't show any debts being paid off; you're looking at the wrong graph.
Austrians don't just say that their theory is unfalsifiable, they say that all economic theories are unfalsifiable because economics is not a science. And they are correct. Keynesianism in particular is a pseudoscience because it uses the trappings of science (math, modeling, scientific language, empirical data), but fails to use the scientific method.
Nor is that surprising. Keynes was a very smart, arrogant man, but he had no scientific training, understanding, or accomplishments (ditto for Krugman). And Keynes was a proud leader in another pseudoscientific field, namely eugenics.
Yeah, anti-capitalist, fascist fairy tales since 1920.
Well, good luck with that. I won't be investing in California.
True enough. You are a fan of are even more corrupt politicians and even worse war criminals.
Not at all: I think Obama's prediction for what was going to happen without the Keynesian stimulus was about on target. His error was in predicting the effect of the Keynesian stimulus.
The fact is as you stated: this was one of "the longest recoveries"; that logically makes it one of the slowest.
Pay off debts? Are you delusional? When has the US government ever paid off debt?
Correct. What you are leaving out is that Keynesians also suck at math, modeling, and basically all the modern tools of science, but unlike Austrians, they are so dumb and partisan that they don't even realize it.
How competitive do you think California agricultural products are going to be with free trade and competition from countries without all these costly measures? Or do you oppose free trade now?
Agriculture is a huge source of carbon emissions in California (both directly and indirectly through transportation and processing), a major source of environmental destruction in California, a big strain on limited water resources, and a magnet for unskilled illegal migration. To go carbon neutral, California would have to shut down much of its agriculture, which would not just result in much lower carbon emissions from the state but also address all those other problems. What a win-win solution for California and the world!
Under a free market, any bank or lender who made too many bad loans would have gone out of business and lost all their money, thereby preventing them from repeating these mistakes. That's the way free markets police themselves. It is government that keeps bailing out these people.
The problem isn't these policies, the problem with government is that it keeps rewarding bad decisions and bad risk taking by market participants through bailouts. That is, government socializes the risk but privatizes benefits. That is not a free market problem, it is a problem with government.
Yeah, and who was responsible for that? Well, Bush signed it into law, but Obama and McCain both supported it. And Obama doubled down on those bailouts during his presidency.
Covering Wall St., covering High Tech, it's all the same to a NYT reporter: it's not like their work requires any competence or insight into what they are reporting about, and it shows in their writing. I'm glad I stopped reading that rag a decade ago.
The fact is that Obama did predict the future and used his predictions to justify his election and his economic policies. Obama predicted one outcome that was going to happen with doing nothing and another outcome for his economic plan. What happened? The country did worse with his plan than his own predictions for doing nothing. So, Obama acted irresponsibly by predicting the economic future, he acted irresponsibly by using his predictions to justify massive spending on cronies, and then it all blew up in his face.
Yes, and hence one of the slowest, i.e., one of the weakest and worst.
There are basically two different views of recessions, the Keynesian one and the Austrian one. Obama's economic policies were based on the Keynesian view. If the Keynesian view were correct, the economy should have responded as he predicted. But, in fact, the economy responded like Austrian models predicted.
But what Keynesians give you is slow growth and boom-bust cycles because the boom-bust cycles are caused by monetary policy and government spending in the first place.
Given the depth of the recession, that would have been true of any president, short of starting WWIII. And the very article you quote says "Furthermore, while shortfalls do exist on the Obama end-of-term report card, his performance holds up more than adequately against other US leaders of recent history."
What Obama should be measured by is (1) how his performance compares to his own economic predictions and promises, and (2) how the recovery compares to historical recoveries. Obama performed dismally bad by his own predictions; his economic policies failed to achieve his stated objectives. And the recovery was dismally slow (CNN, Forbes).
Obama's poor economic performance isn't surprising either: his stimulus package, fiscal policy, regulatory policy, and welfare policy worked as people expected it to and the way they have always done: they slowed economic recovery, employment, and growth.
So we have dispensed now with your bogus argument that "one source of energy (fossil fuels) gets to ignore all of its externalities", since both EVs and gas powered cars largely use the same source of energy. Since both rely on fossil fuels for their manufacture and operation, they both are subsidized at about the same rate (if anything, since gas is taxed more than electricity, EVs are subsidized at a higher rate).