Not to stir the conspiracy pot, but I find it odd that we've been in a recession for a year, but we only hear about it a month after an election.
NBER never announces a recession till they have a firm date for the start (the activity peak), and usually announces them 6 to 18 months after they begin.
Announcing it 12 months after the start is not at all unusual, especially when the various indicators are mixed as to when the peak occurred. When you've got an employment peak that corresponds to the beginning of two quarters back to back of GDP and GDI decline, for instance, its fairly easy to call the recession at 6 months (two quarters) in. This recession didn't quite happen to have that unambiguous a peak.
Since the only growing industries seem to have been weapons and war
Actually, despite general consumer slowdown, video games are up quite a bit. I don't think they count as either "weapons" or "war", even though that's often part of their theme.
The government is no less able to create wealth than any other group of people acting together is.
It's impossible.
Repetition doesn't make a false claim true.
The government doesn't actually do anything productive, thus can't create wealth.
Repeating the same claim a third time, and then saying that it supports a different phrasing of the same claim, still doesn't make it any less false.
The government can (and does) engage directly in productive industry, producing goods and services that are sold on the open market, or that are given away creating private property, or that or the public is allowed to make use of, including for productive purposes (e.g., in the latter case, roads.) All of these are productive and create wealth, as much as anything done by private industry.
All they can do is appropriate money from one part of the economy and give it to another.
Sure, that's one thing they can do. And if they appropriate money from a part of the economy in which the velocity of money in the domestic economy is lower, and direct it to one in which in which the velocity of money in the domestic economy is higher, they increase overall economic activity and, as a natural result, cause the creation of wealth (whether they actually "create wealth" by so doing is a semantic game that I'm not interested in playing.)
They either do that through taxation, appropriating from income sources
Taxation does not necessarily "appropriate from income sources", though it might usually.
through inflation, appropriating by reducing the value of all money
Inflation may be an effect of policy, but it is not a direct policy. I think the act you are looking for here is monetization -- issuing more money (usually used in the context of monetization of the debt, and the principal evil that independent central banks exist to prevent governments from doing.) Printing money is not the same thing as inflation, it is an act which is likely, in normal circumstance, to produce some degree of inflation.
through debt, appropriating by taking money from future generations
Borrowing appropriates money from volunteers (often foreign) in the present. Paying off debt, if it happens at all, is a future spending decision, which appropriates from a then-present source depending on where the money to pay it off is appropriated from.
In recent times, the debt has been increasing at such an insane rate that it is an inflationary measure.
Debt itself is not inflationary; expanding the supply of money in the domestic economy faster than the expansion of goods and services for the money to buy is inflationary no matter where the money is coming from.
Why do you think the US dollar has been hit so hard against all other currencies?
The debt has continued expanding this year, and the dollar has rebounded strongly against other major currencies. I don't think the debt is the explanation for changes in the value of the dollar vs. other currencies, in general. And declines in exchange value vs. other currency isn't the same thing as inflation, anyhow; in an ideal world, they would be equivalent, and one wouldn't need to use PPP adjustment to make meaningful cross-economy comparisons, but inflation is decline in the value of the currency vs. goods and services purchased in the economy, not versus other currencies.
Similarly, the US government in the past 8 years has spent at a greater (inflation adjusted) rate than any time since WWII.
If its not adjusted for population as well as inflation, I'm not sure that number means much of anything, much less what you are trying to use it to mean.
That's a significant portion of the economy dominated by the federal Government borrowing money.
Perhaps, but that would be shown by the deficit:GDP ratio, not the inflation-adjusted total expenditures.
It may not be the intended effect, but this has the effect of "gaming" the system in that increases in federal spending and borrowing offset a private-sector recession.
How, compared to the government not acting to mitigate the effects of a recession? What happens when a government doesn't act in this way, historically?
Since this isn't Soviet Russia, the public sector can't simply offset the private sector like that.
While Soviet Russia jokes are cute, I'd be interested in seeing support for this contention with factual evidence, or at least some kind of coherent, credible reasoning, rather than simple ideological grandstanding.
Giving risky loans to people less likely to be able to repay them is what caused the crisis.
No, it isn't. To the extent that extending loans known to be riskier than average has any relationship to the crisis, its not that risky loans were extended to people less likely to pay them: that's been done all the time, and higher interest rates are charged on such loans as risk premiums. OTOH, banks often wrote loans to higher-risk borrowers as if they were lower risk borrowers, because they had invented new instruments to essentially package up large bundles of debt and sell them to buyers that would essentially have to accept the claimed creditworthiness at face value. Since the risk was, by that mechanism, largely divorced from the lending decision, there was an incentive to treat the risk as lower than it was.
And, more importantly, the actual risk associated with most loans was systematically underestimated because the real-estate market was misjudged. Since part of the factor in weighing the risk in making a secured loan is the expected value of the underlying property in the event of default, a real estate market that drops faster than the people making the loans expected means that the fundamental premises of accounting for the risk were all wrong.
(Of course, a number of people had predicted an eventual collapse in the real estate market, observing that the rate of economic growth and the distribution of the income generated by it wasn't such as to support continued growth in the housing market. Essentially, the housing market and the exotic loan vehicles attached to it that had become the engine of the consumer economy -- wages having been stagnant as, even in the years of growth in most of the last decade, the rewards went to a very narrow class at the top -- had become a giant pyramid scheme that had to collapse. OTOH, even those that knew the whole thing had to come to a stop somewhere had pressure to keep posting good short-term numbers, and as long as the whole scheme hadn't yet hit the wall, no one wanted to stop reaping the paper benefit of the continued mass delusion. And once the bottom started falling out, everyone tightening up at once just made the problem worse.)
One thing I never understood about this bailout of the housing market is where did all this money go? Sure, lots of people way overpaid for their homes, but shouldn't that money still be in the economy in the hands of the people who sold the homes?
In the world economy? Yes, unless money was moved out of banks (because of fractional reserve requirements, converting bank balances to cash, as it reduces the amount of debt that banks can have outstanding, reduces the amount of "money", since most money isn't currency, its notional amounts in account balances that really represent outstanding debt.)
In the US economy? Not necessarily, even if money hasn't been pulled out of banks, destroying more money. A lot of foreign components are used in building and furnishing houses (including workers that make transfer payments to foreign family members). If the money spent on those isn't returned to the US economy in the form of payments for imports from the US or direct investment in US real estate, equity, or debt instruments, then its gone from the US economy until it returns in one of those forms.
Payer A's 8% of 16000 is alot less than Payer B's 8% of 90000 (current cap) while both payers will get the SAME benefits back out.
Uh, no, they won't. Payroll taxes pay for two things: Social Security and Medicare. Social Security benefits are based on income history, Medicare benefits are not. So, no, both payers will not get the SAME benefits back out from the payroll taxes.
Thanks to reduced consumer spending, the CPI has gone down, so our money is worth more.
Except that it hasn't, over the 12 months ending September 2008 (the end of Q3 '08), the CPI increased 4.9%.
Anyway, figures that use "real" GDP (as most do), rather than current-dollar GDP in measuring output are already adjusted for inflation, so bringing inflation into it again is double counting in any case.
I can see that the Gov't is really trying to devalue the dollar as much a possible to try to encourage us all to waste our money and get further into debt.
Um, the government isn't trying to devalue the dollar, and if it was, the purpose wouldn't be to get "us all" to waste our money, it would be to encourage exports.
That is only true if the people being laid off were productive. Since our GDP is still fine, I'd say they weren't.
Real GDP, whether evaluated through the BEA's GDP data set or the GDI data set which is a different method of measuring the same underlying quantity, has decreased or increased at a rate not greater than that of population increase (about 0.9% annually) every quarter except Q2 '08 since Q4 '07.
Now they can get different jobs that are actually productive, and we will all be better off.
Employment has been declining since December 2007. The people losing jobs are not getting different jobs that are actually productive. They are stopping spending money (since they aren't getting any to spend), causing less demand for goods and services, causing more people to lose jobs, ad hopefully not infinitum.
The idea of public stimulus is, in part, to break that cycle.
The whole idea of the Efficient Market Theory is that the market integrates all the facts and arrives at a rationally optimal price. It should not be possible to affect prices without introducing new facts.
Efficient Market Theory (and the Rational Actor model it is a direct consequence of) has been recognized for a long time as being, like Newton's model of gravitation, at best a useful simplification of the more complex underlying facts that is not a complete model of what goes on in reality, but which instead has important limitations in explaining real observations.
OTOH, in the absence of a more accurate general model, its still a useful too, and might even be a useful tool in many situations (as is the Newtonian model of gravity) with a more accurate general model, if that model wasn't much more accurate in some common cases, and was harder to reason from.
There are some people who think you can replace economic growth in the private sector with economic growth in the public sector and it's the same thing.
If stuff is being produced and purchased, no matter where the money is coming from to buy it, it is the same thing.
Now, if it was government buying from government with no money going into the private sector (either by purchasing from contractors or paying employees), that would be different. But, ideological preferences aside, the economic impact is the same.
pork financed with debt is an inflationary measure that doesn't increase the actual size of the economy.
Increasing the supply of money in the domestic economy (whether by debt or otherwise) is, of course, inflationary to an extent (just as increasing the supply of anything decreases its relative value), but spending money on goods and services produced in the domestic economy that would not be produced without the expenditure of the funds does increase the actual size of the economy: and, assuming it is spent correctly, due to the velocity of money, it does so potentially by many times the amount borrowed for direct expenditure. So, you are in part correct (it is, in a sense, an "inflationary measure"), but wrong on the key point (it does, in fact, increase the actual size of the economy.)
In my personal finances I don't pretend debt = income, I'm not about to let the federal government pretend the same.
The federal government doesn't pretend that, by public stimulus or otherwise. You seem to be confusing economic measures of production and income (GDP/GDI/NI/etc.) with measures of government finances. Government spending in the domestic economy can increase the latter. Financing that spending may involve deficit spending and hence borrowing, or it can involve revenue enhancements -- in either case, the spending is expansionary to the extent that the money used would otherwise not have been spent in the domestic economy.
Huh? The April hand-out? As far as I've heard, it had almost no effect at all.
I think seasonally adjusted retail sales went up in May and June before falling back below the level they had been at earlier in the year. It may have been a factor in the weak, but better than Q1 which just kept up with population growth, Q2 '08 GDP growth.
What started in 2007 it wasn't "bad" for the ordinary Joe
The decline in employment in every month since December 2007 hasn't been good for the ordinary Joe. Nor has the decline in per-capita GDP in Q4 '07, the approximately flat per capita GDP in Q1 '08, the weak growth in Q2 '08, and the decline again in per-capita GDP in Q3 '08. So, I'd disagree with that claim about the ordinary Joe.
Now that it's the 2 quarters of negative growth thing, it's a real recession.
There were two quarters of negative measured GDP growth so far in the current recession, but not two consecutive quarters as the popular rule of thumb goes (it was Q4 '07 and Q3 '08), and the quarters of negative GDP growth, while factors, were not the sole basis of the declaration.
The popular two-consecutive-quarters thing is a rule of thumb, not the definition of a recession used by the NBER. See the official announcement for more on what NBER defines a recession as, and how the conditions from December 2007 forward were determined to meet that definition.
(Also note that the BEA GDI measure, which is a different measurement mechanism than the BEA GDP measurement, but which attempts measure a quantity which is by definition identical to the GDP, did show two consecutive quarters of decline in Q4 '07 and Q1 '08, one quarter of weak growth in Q2 '08, and decline again in Q3 '08.)
So then why have we heard constant talk about how the US is in a recession for over a year now?
Because other economists who look at the same indicators that the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee looks at, but that do project (which NBER doesn't) and which do give educated, informed opinions of current conditions rather than waiting until a rock solid peak date can be announced (unlike NBER's BCDC which won't announce a recession until not only is the recession itself clear, but they've got a pretty firm peak date, which is why they've never revised a dating since the BCDC was formed) look at the indicators and say, looking at this, its pretty likely we are currently heading for or in a recession.
Answer: political opportunism, plain and simple. If you can make people believe we're in a recession and that the party of the current president caused it, in the midst of a presidential campaign, that bodes very well for the opposing party.
It wasn't just Democrats (much less partisan Democrats) that were stating that it appeared we were in a recession.
It was pretty much anyone who had half a clue about the economy.
When McCain said, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong," (emphasis mine) he was -- and still is -- 100% correct.
There might be some bizarre definition of "fundamentals" under which that is correct (certainly, the McCain campaign trotted out a few after he was widely criticized), but under any normal, reasonable definition, it was completely false.
How long do you have to hear things are terrible before you believe they are, and start making changes in your own life?
One of the indicators the NBER BCDC considered in declaring the recession is that every month since December 2007 showed declining employment.
My guess is that that's a bigger factor in popular perceptions of the economy, since people feel it directly, than media talk. People know when they are out of a job, or people they know are out of jobs.
And then start feeling the effects of millions of other people making those changes, and people losing jobs, and businesses closing, and this vicious cycle causing a downward spiral?
Except that the people losing their jobs, the business closing, etc., all were going on before the recession talk started and caused the talk, not the other way around.
Disclaimer:
1. I didn't vote for Bush.
2. I voted for Obama.
Anyone can claim that, and its absolutely unprovable. Acting as if that adds weight to your argument is rather silly.
So assuming I'm a die-hard Republican because I'm saying something you likely disagree with isn't going to work.
What your saying is downright ignorant on its key points (definition of recession, order of events in the recent economic downturn, etc.), regardless of your actual, much less your claimed, political affiliation.
I keep hearing the doom and gloom about the recession, and yet when I go to the mall, movie theatre, restaurants, arenas and more, the parking lots are packed. So if people are hurting, it isn't slowing them down.
Uh, yeah, even if you aren't noticing it, it is. That's why major retail chains are closing stores, declaring bankruptcy, and going out of business entirely.
I realize there are alot of people losing their jobs and homes, but I don't think it's as dire as the media makes it seem.
And you are basing this on what, besides your subjective impression of how full the parking lots are at the places you go to shop?
A long-standing rule of thumb for "recession" is that it is defined as contraction in the GDP for at least two consecutive quarters (six months).
True. This is a common rule of thumb regarding recessions.
By that long-accepted definition of recession, the US is not even yet in a recession.
A rule of thumb is not a definition. It is a simple, easy-to-apply approximate guideline.
The US GDP decreased for the first time in recent history only in the third (most recent) quarter, by 0.3%.
If you define "recent history" particularly narrowly, that is as "history starting with Jan. 1, 2008", this is approximately true (it actually didn't decrease by 0.3%, it decreased at a 0.5% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate, that was initially announced as a 0.3% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate prior to revision; similarly, the 2.8% growth in Q2 2008 is a 2.8% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate, not a 2.8% increase in Q2 GDP over Q1 GDP.) But if the definition of recent extends beyond Jan. 1, 2008, then you should note that Q4 2007 saw GDP decline at a 0.2% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate (and, for completeness, Q1 2008 saw a GDP increase at a 0.9% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate.)
While the two-consecutive quarter GDP decline rule of thumb is decent as rules of thumb go, it does not reflect a "definition" of a recession so much as describes circumstances that will almost always indicate a recession, and which will usually, but not always, occur in a recession.
NBER, whose pronouncements are the official definition of recession in the US, defines a recession as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in production, employment, real income, and other indicators" that "begins when the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends when the economy reaches its trough". They look at more than just the GDP reports from the BEA in making this determination (including employment, which has declined every month from December 2007, and Gross Domestic Income, a different measure that measures a quantity that by definition should be identical to the GDP, but because measurements of both are imperfect, varies from the measured GDP -- and this GDI declined in Q4 '07, Q1 '08, and Q3 '08.) From the official announcement of the December 2007 peak:
Because a recession is a broad contraction of the economy, not confined to one sector, the committee emphasizes economy-wide measures of economic activity. The committee believes that domestic production and employment are the primary conceptual measures of economic activity.
The committee views the payroll employment measure, which is based on a large survey of employers, as the most reliable comprehensive estimate of employment. This series reached a peak in December 2007 and has declined every month since then.
The committee believes that the two most reliable comprehensive estimates of aggregate domestic production are normally the quarterly estimate of real Gross Domestic Product and the quarterly estimate of real Gross Domestic Income, both produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In concept, the two should be the same, because sales of products generate income for producers and workers equal to the value of the sales. However, because the measurement on the product and income sides proceeds somewhat independently, the two actual measures differ by a statistical discrepancy. The product-side estimates fell slightly in 2007Q4, rose slightly in 2008Q1, rose again in 2008Q2, and fell slightly in 2008Q3. The income-side estimates reached their peak in 2007Q3, fell slightly in 2007Q4 and 2008Q1, rose slightly in 2008Q2 to a level below its
If that didn't quite sink in: Yahoo puts in the bank several $100.000.000/quarter.
Which certainly doesn't make it worth even $20,000,000,000, especially if there is no indication that that profitably is increasing.
Yahoo! is a mature company, not an up-and-coming star. Unless you've got some real synergies to realize by acquiring it, that means that its current profitability has to justify the cost of the acquisition. Even if it was making $1 billion per year in profit and showing signs of doing that indefinitely into the future, that would only be a 5% annual return on a $20 billion investment, which is decent, but not stellar; but its not doing that much, and its not showing a lot of promise of keeping up what profitability it has, either.
You mean, "If you don't do what we say we will blow your ships out of the water?" kind of conflict resolution?
Um. No. While, of course, that was a big part of the public face of the US response, the reality was considerably more involved. The Wikipedia article on the crisis covers much of it; to portray the substantive "conflict resolution" of that crisis as this kind of simple threat is extraordinarily inacccurate.
There is not always a way to convert from a recursive algorithm to a non-recursive algorithm.
Yes, there is.
On the other hand, most recursive algorithms can be unwrapped but doing so is non-trivial. There is no compiler that exists as yet that will optimize away any recursions that could possibly be made non-recursive.
No one has designed a program that can convert every recursive program to a non-recursive one (and it may even be the case that this is impossible), but there is always a non-recursive equivalent available, otherwise, there couldn't be Turing-complete languages without recursion, which do exist.
What if Lori Drew was the guy she pretended to be. Would that make it better?
It would have eliminated the first of the three counts Drew was found guilty of violating (the false information where the ToS required accurate information one.) It may or may not have affected the second count (depending on whether the ToS only preclude adults from soliciting personal information from minors, or prohibit it generally). It would have no effect on third (the using the service to harras or harm one) if nothing else was changed, though the circumstances at issue in the first (the false representation) count also provide evidence that there was intent to harass or harm in the third, without those facts (whether or not they were chargeable on their own), it would have been harder to charge either of the latter counts especially the third, since the misrepresentation itself is evidence of the mental state necessary to establish the other counts.
One of the things that the law is pretty firm about is that you take responsibility for your own actions, or inaction in some cases. would someone else be responsible for something that this girl did all on her own?
Because while the first statement is true in a sense, its not the sense implied by connecting it to the question that follows. Rather, its true in the sense that you have a responsibility for your own wrongful actions and their consequences, often even when someone else's action is part of the causal chain leading to those consequences, if that action is a reasonably anticipated consequence of either your action itself, or the results you sought with that action.
The prosecution twisted the existing laws, which I cannot abide.
Even though the particular law had never been used in these precise circumstances, the idea that use that violates the only permission one is given to use a resource is unauthorized use is one of the most well established principles in law. Its what, for instance, the entire idea that the GPL is enforceable by prosecuting violations as violations of copyright law is based on.
Since the law used applies to unauthorized use, its application to cases where authorization is conditioned on particular terms and those terms are violated is hardly a "stretch" of the law. If the law had intended to exclude these cases of clearly unauthorized use, it should have explicitly done so.
Slashdot Mirror
At, or at least not later than, the time the secret ballot became an important part of democracy.
NBER never announces a recession till they have a firm date for the start (the activity peak), and usually announces them 6 to 18 months after they begin.
Announcing it 12 months after the start is not at all unusual, especially when the various indicators are mixed as to when the peak occurred. When you've got an employment peak that corresponds to the beginning of two quarters back to back of GDP and GDI decline, for instance, its fairly easy to call the recession at 6 months (two quarters) in. This recession didn't quite happen to have that unambiguous a peak.
Actually, despite general consumer slowdown, video games are up quite a bit. I don't think they count as either "weapons" or "war", even though that's often part of their theme.
The government is no less able to create wealth than any other group of people acting together is.
Repetition doesn't make a false claim true.
Repeating the same claim a third time, and then saying that it supports a different phrasing of the same claim, still doesn't make it any less false.
The government can (and does) engage directly in productive industry, producing goods and services that are sold on the open market, or that are given away creating private property, or that or the public is allowed to make use of, including for productive purposes (e.g., in the latter case, roads.) All of these are productive and create wealth, as much as anything done by private industry.
Sure, that's one thing they can do. And if they appropriate money from a part of the economy in which the velocity of money in the domestic economy is lower, and direct it to one in which in which the velocity of money in the domestic economy is higher, they increase overall economic activity and, as a natural result, cause the creation of wealth (whether they actually "create wealth" by so doing is a semantic game that I'm not interested in playing.)
Taxation does not necessarily "appropriate from income sources", though it might usually.
Inflation may be an effect of policy, but it is not a direct policy. I think the act you are looking for here is monetization -- issuing more money (usually used in the context of monetization of the debt, and the principal evil that independent central banks exist to prevent governments from doing.) Printing money is not the same thing as inflation, it is an act which is likely, in normal circumstance, to produce some degree of inflation.
Borrowing appropriates money from volunteers (often foreign) in the present. Paying off debt, if it happens at all, is a future spending decision, which appropriates from a then-present source depending on where the money to pay it off is appropriated from.
Debt itself is not inflationary; expanding the supply of money in the domestic economy faster than the expansion of goods and services for the money to buy is inflationary no matter where the money is coming from.
The debt has continued expanding this year, and the dollar has rebounded strongly against other major currencies. I don't think the debt is the explanation for changes in the value of the dollar vs. other currencies, in general. And declines in exchange value vs. other currency isn't the same thing as inflation, anyhow; in an ideal world, they would be equivalent, and one wouldn't need to use PPP adjustment to make meaningful cross-economy comparisons, but inflation is decline in the value of the currency vs. goods and services purchased in the economy, not versus other currencies.
If its not adjusted for population as well as inflation, I'm not sure that number means much of anything, much less what you are trying to use it to mean.
Perhaps, but that would be shown by the deficit:GDP ratio, not the inflation-adjusted total expenditures.
How, compared to the government not acting to mitigate the effects of a recession? What happens when a government doesn't act in this way, historically?
While Soviet Russia jokes are cute, I'd be interested in seeing support for this contention with factual evidence, or at least some kind of coherent, credible reasoning, rather than simple ideological grandstanding.
No, it isn't. To the extent that extending loans known to be riskier than average has any relationship to the crisis, its not that risky loans were extended to people less likely to pay them: that's been done all the time, and higher interest rates are charged on such loans as risk premiums. OTOH, banks often wrote loans to higher-risk borrowers as if they were lower risk borrowers, because they had invented new instruments to essentially package up large bundles of debt and sell them to buyers that would essentially have to accept the claimed creditworthiness at face value. Since the risk was, by that mechanism, largely divorced from the lending decision, there was an incentive to treat the risk as lower than it was.
And, more importantly, the actual risk associated with most loans was systematically underestimated because the real-estate market was misjudged. Since part of the factor in weighing the risk in making a secured loan is the expected value of the underlying property in the event of default, a real estate market that drops faster than the people making the loans expected means that the fundamental premises of accounting for the risk were all wrong.
(Of course, a number of people had predicted an eventual collapse in the real estate market, observing that the rate of economic growth and the distribution of the income generated by it wasn't such as to support continued growth in the housing market. Essentially, the housing market and the exotic loan vehicles attached to it that had become the engine of the consumer economy -- wages having been stagnant as, even in the years of growth in most of the last decade, the rewards went to a very narrow class at the top -- had become a giant pyramid scheme that had to collapse. OTOH, even those that knew the whole thing had to come to a stop somewhere had pressure to keep posting good short-term numbers, and as long as the whole scheme hadn't yet hit the wall, no one wanted to stop reaping the paper benefit of the continued mass delusion. And once the bottom started falling out, everyone tightening up at once just made the problem worse.)
In the world economy? Yes, unless money was moved out of banks (because of fractional reserve requirements, converting bank balances to cash, as it reduces the amount of debt that banks can have outstanding, reduces the amount of "money", since most money isn't currency, its notional amounts in account balances that really represent outstanding debt.)
In the US economy? Not necessarily, even if money hasn't been pulled out of banks, destroying more money. A lot of foreign components are used in building and furnishing houses (including workers that make transfer payments to foreign family members). If the money spent on those isn't returned to the US economy in the form of payments for imports from the US or direct investment in US real estate, equity, or debt instruments, then its gone from the US economy until it returns in one of those forms.
Uh, no, they won't. Payroll taxes pay for two things: Social Security and Medicare. Social Security benefits are based on income history, Medicare benefits are not. So, no, both payers will not get the SAME benefits back out from the payroll taxes.
Except that it hasn't, over the 12 months ending September 2008 (the end of Q3 '08), the CPI increased 4.9%.
Anyway, figures that use "real" GDP (as most do), rather than current-dollar GDP in measuring output are already adjusted for inflation, so bringing inflation into it again is double counting in any case.
Um, the government isn't trying to devalue the dollar, and if it was, the purpose wouldn't be to get "us all" to waste our money, it would be to encourage exports.
Real GDP, whether evaluated through the BEA's GDP data set or the GDI data set which is a different method of measuring the same underlying quantity, has decreased or increased at a rate not greater than that of population increase (about 0.9% annually) every quarter except Q2 '08 since Q4 '07.
Employment has been declining since December 2007. The people losing jobs are not getting different jobs that are actually productive. They are stopping spending money (since they aren't getting any to spend), causing less demand for goods and services, causing more people to lose jobs, ad hopefully not infinitum.
The idea of public stimulus is, in part, to break that cycle.
Efficient Market Theory (and the Rational Actor model it is a direct consequence of) has been recognized for a long time as being, like Newton's model of gravitation, at best a useful simplification of the more complex underlying facts that is not a complete model of what goes on in reality, but which instead has important limitations in explaining real observations.
OTOH, in the absence of a more accurate general model, its still a useful too, and might even be a useful tool in many situations (as is the Newtonian model of gravity) with a more accurate general model, if that model wasn't much more accurate in some common cases, and was harder to reason from.
No, GP is not.
So, in arguing from the observation that the traffic he sees is still heavy, the actual impacts aren't as bad as is being reported, he is wrong.
Which is exactly what I was saying.
Well, to correct myself, not quite Q4 '07 overlaps the current recession since it includes December 2007, but is not within the current recession.
That's not entirely true even in the narrow technical sense, as some people are born rights to particular property or claims that attaches at birth.
It is even less true in the substantive sense, since we certainly all are not born with either no accesss to resources or equal access to resources.
If stuff is being produced and purchased, no matter where the money is coming from to buy it, it is the same thing.
Now, if it was government buying from government with no money going into the private sector (either by purchasing from contractors or paying employees), that would be different. But, ideological preferences aside, the economic impact is the same.
Increasing the supply of money in the domestic economy (whether by debt or otherwise) is, of course, inflationary to an extent (just as increasing the supply of anything decreases its relative value), but spending money on goods and services produced in the domestic economy that would not be produced without the expenditure of the funds does increase the actual size of the economy: and, assuming it is spent correctly, due to the velocity of money, it does so potentially by many times the amount borrowed for direct expenditure. So, you are in part correct (it is, in a sense, an "inflationary measure"), but wrong on the key point (it does, in fact, increase the actual size of the economy.)
The federal government doesn't pretend that, by public stimulus or otherwise. You seem to be confusing economic measures of production and income (GDP/GDI/NI/etc.) with measures of government finances. Government spending in the domestic economy can increase the latter. Financing that spending may involve deficit spending and hence borrowing, or it can involve revenue enhancements -- in either case, the spending is expansionary to the extent that the money used would otherwise not have been spent in the domestic economy.
I think seasonally adjusted retail sales went up in May and June before falling back below the level they had been at earlier in the year. It may have been a factor in the weak, but better than Q1 which just kept up with population growth, Q2 '08 GDP growth.
The decline in employment in every month since December 2007 hasn't been good for the ordinary Joe. Nor has the decline in per-capita GDP in Q4 '07, the approximately flat per capita GDP in Q1 '08, the weak growth in Q2 '08, and the decline again in per-capita GDP in Q3 '08. So, I'd disagree with that claim about the ordinary Joe.
There were two quarters of negative measured GDP growth so far in the current recession, but not two consecutive quarters as the popular rule of thumb goes (it was Q4 '07 and Q3 '08), and the quarters of negative GDP growth, while factors, were not the sole basis of the declaration.
The popular two-consecutive-quarters thing is a rule of thumb, not the definition of a recession used by the NBER. See the official announcement for more on what NBER defines a recession as, and how the conditions from December 2007 forward were determined to meet that definition.
No, its not.
That's a common rule of thumb regarding recessions, not "the definition of a recession".
See the NBER FAQ and the NBER's announcement of the current recession for further discussion on why this popular rule of thumb is not used by the NBER.
(Also note that the BEA GDI measure, which is a different measurement mechanism than the BEA GDP measurement, but which attempts measure a quantity which is by definition identical to the GDP, did show two consecutive quarters of decline in Q4 '07 and Q1 '08, one quarter of weak growth in Q2 '08, and decline again in Q3 '08.)
Because other economists who look at the same indicators that the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee looks at, but that do project (which NBER doesn't) and which do give educated, informed opinions of current conditions rather than waiting until a rock solid peak date can be announced (unlike NBER's BCDC which won't announce a recession until not only is the recession itself clear, but they've got a pretty firm peak date, which is why they've never revised a dating since the BCDC was formed) look at the indicators and say, looking at this, its pretty likely we are currently heading for or in a recession.
It wasn't just Democrats (much less partisan Democrats) that were stating that it appeared we were in a recession.
It was pretty much anyone who had half a clue about the economy.
There might be some bizarre definition of "fundamentals" under which that is correct (certainly, the McCain campaign trotted out a few after he was widely criticized), but under any normal, reasonable definition, it was completely false.
One of the indicators the NBER BCDC considered in declaring the recession is that every month since December 2007 showed declining employment.
My guess is that that's a bigger factor in popular perceptions of the economy, since people feel it directly, than media talk. People know when they are out of a job, or people they know are out of jobs.
Except that the people losing their jobs, the business closing, etc., all were going on before the recession talk started and caused the talk, not the other way around.
Anyone can claim that, and its absolutely unprovable. Acting as if that adds weight to your argument is rather silly.
What your saying is downright ignorant on its key points (definition of recession, order of events in the recent economic downturn, etc.), regardless of your actual, much less your claimed, political affiliation.
Uh, yeah, even if you aren't noticing it, it is. That's why major retail chains are closing stores, declaring bankruptcy, and going out of business entirely.
And you are basing this on what, besides your subjective impression of how full the parking lots are at the places you go to shop?
True. This is a common rule of thumb regarding recessions.
A rule of thumb is not a definition. It is a simple, easy-to-apply approximate guideline.
If you define "recent history" particularly narrowly, that is as "history starting with Jan. 1, 2008", this is approximately true (it actually didn't decrease by 0.3%, it decreased at a 0.5% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate, that was initially announced as a 0.3% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate prior to revision; similarly, the 2.8% growth in Q2 2008 is a 2.8% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate, not a 2.8% increase in Q2 GDP over Q1 GDP.) But if the definition of recent extends beyond Jan. 1, 2008, then you should note that Q4 2007 saw GDP decline at a 0.2% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate (and, for completeness, Q1 2008 saw a GDP increase at a 0.9% seasonally adjusted, annualized rate.)
While the two-consecutive quarter GDP decline rule of thumb is decent as rules of thumb go, it does not reflect a "definition" of a recession so much as describes circumstances that will almost always indicate a recession, and which will usually, but not always, occur in a recession.
NBER, whose pronouncements are the official definition of recession in the US, defines a recession as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in production, employment, real income, and other indicators" that "begins when the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends when the economy reaches its trough". They look at more than just the GDP reports from the BEA in making this determination (including employment, which has declined every month from December 2007, and Gross Domestic Income, a different measure that measures a quantity that by definition should be identical to the GDP, but because measurements of both are imperfect, varies from the measured GDP -- and this GDI declined in Q4 '07, Q1 '08, and Q3 '08.) From the official announcement of the December 2007 peak:
Which certainly doesn't make it worth even $20,000,000,000, especially if there is no indication that that profitably is increasing.
Yahoo! is a mature company, not an up-and-coming star. Unless you've got some real synergies to realize by acquiring it, that means that its current profitability has to justify the cost of the acquisition. Even if it was making $1 billion per year in profit and showing signs of doing that indefinitely into the future, that would only be a 5% annual return on a $20 billion investment, which is decent, but not stellar; but its not doing that much, and its not showing a lot of promise of keeping up what profitability it has, either.
Um. No. While, of course, that was a big part of the public face of the US response, the reality was considerably more involved. The Wikipedia article on the crisis covers much of it; to portray the substantive "conflict resolution" of that crisis as this kind of simple threat is extraordinarily inacccurate.
Yes, there is.
No one has designed a program that can convert every recursive program to a non-recursive one (and it may even be the case that this is impossible), but there is always a non-recursive equivalent available, otherwise, there couldn't be Turing-complete languages without recursion, which do exist.
Its also unlikely something that Drew didn't know. Its not like Megan Meier was anonymous stranger targeted at random.
It would have eliminated the first of the three counts Drew was found guilty of violating (the false information where the ToS required accurate information one.) It may or may not have affected the second count (depending on whether the ToS only preclude adults from soliciting personal information from minors, or prohibit it generally). It would have no effect on third (the using the service to harras or harm one) if nothing else was changed, though the circumstances at issue in the first (the false representation) count also provide evidence that there was intent to harass or harm in the third, without those facts (whether or not they were chargeable on their own), it would have been harder to charge either of the latter counts especially the third, since the misrepresentation itself is evidence of the mental state necessary to establish the other counts.
Because while the first statement is true in a sense, its not the sense implied by connecting it to the question that follows. Rather, its true in the sense that you have a responsibility for your own wrongful actions and their consequences, often even when someone else's action is part of the causal chain leading to those consequences, if that action is a reasonably anticipated consequence of either your action itself, or the results you sought with that action.
Even though the particular law had never been used in these precise circumstances, the idea that use that violates the only permission one is given to use a resource is unauthorized use is one of the most well established principles in law. Its what, for instance, the entire idea that the GPL is enforceable by prosecuting violations as violations of copyright law is based on.
Since the law used applies to unauthorized use, its application to cases where authorization is conditioned on particular terms and those terms are violated is hardly a "stretch" of the law. If the law had intended to exclude these cases of clearly unauthorized use, it should have explicitly done so.