The debates on the Debates

Had it not been for a Senate intent on obstruction, I believe Obama's jobs bill, if passed, would have managed to balance out the loss of some of these defense industry jobs with jobs created by investments in rebuilding the infrastructure, refurbishing old and abandoned properties, and expanding wireless access to remote rural areas. And of course, you could have added them to the jobs already being created by alternate energy investments.

I agree, Tully, but can't find a way to justify keeping the military and defense budgets at the level they are simply to keep people employed when there are alternate options we could be pursuing that would provide jobs - with the added benefit of providing much needed improvements to the public infrastructure.

It seems like a no-brainer to me.

 

Absolutely, but there is no reason to maintain the current force level (and the associated personnel costs, including pay, health care, retirement) other than demonstrating "support for the troops" at levels beyond the DoD's request. It is unsustainable.

Republicans like to make the "unsustainable" case about police, firefighters, teachers, etc (in which 1/2 million jobs have been lost in the last few years) but not apply the same standards to the military.

And then offset these cuts to a small degree with increases on the domestic side to address the increased unemployment to support all of the above.

 

Without disagreeing that Social Security requires some clever and thoughtful consideration going forward, I find your remedy a bit thoughtless, Rogue.

Once upon a time, an individual could pretty much rely on spending most of his life in the employ of a single company. If he was fit enough, he might be welcome to stay until he was 70.

These days, if an individual happens to be laid off at say, 60, it becomes extremely difficult to find new employment. Companies are bound by equal opportunity and anti-discrimination hiring laws but they are not bound by any quotas to actually hire aging candidates.

So you would have this individual go another ten years without employment or possibly working at reduced hours and wages as a bagger at the end of a grocery checkout and in most cases, without health coverage, to collect the "entitlements" he has paid into for his entire working life.

Of course people don't want to work past 65? Generalize much? Most people do, I think. It's the other way around - companies don't want to hire or keep on board, aging employees who they regard as a liability if they happen to have a few health issues likely to drive up the company's health insurance premiums or if they have slowed down a bit in comparison to their much younger and energetic colleagues (or at least, this is often an impression hirers will harbor.) Employment "At Will" and the disintegration of unions also make it easier for companies to "trade" older workers for younger ones.

Unless the future promises a glut of jobs and a lack of employees to fill them (which it could well promise once the baby boomers are safely in their graves), younger workers will likely be considered before older candidates unless the position requires the combination of a high degree of experience and education a younger candidate might be unlikely to possess.

If I was 40 and someone told me that I was going to have to remain employed until I was 70 before I could claim SS and Medicare benefits, I would want some assurance that the job market would be a different animal than it is today.

 

Don't think for a second I'm not all in for massive military cuts. I am. I just want to make sure we do it with a plan. The military is possibly the most wasteful organization I've ever been involved with. Hell we used to throw six month old file cabinets and desks off the fantail of my ship because every new senior chief we got "didn't like the color." In two years we went from tan desks and file cabinets to gray to black and back to tan countless times. The last six months I spent in the Navy I was the supply officer for my division (it's just a title I was always an enlisted member, discharged as an E-5) in charge of ordering parts and tools. When you thumbed through the catalog of available tools you'd find things like "open end, non-adjustable, hand operated, wrench, sized 9/16, price- $196.00." Nothing more than a common 9/16 box end wrench you could buy for $8 at any Sears. But anything with a "mil-spec" number is worth hundreds if not thousands more then it's civilian counterpart. Often they're the same damn thing. I often ordered items like that wrench and upon opening the box found a Craftsman or Motorcraft tool. The GOP and the right are consistently complaining about waste and fraud in entitlement programs. I'd be much more convinced they're actually concerned about waste and fraud if they talked just as much about it in the DOD and "war on drugs" as well.

You could take the money the military is throwing away and/or giving away to it contractors and invest it in job skills training and trade school scholarships and the displaced people who may lose jobs from base closures could learn new skills. They could learn solar panel installation, wind generator repair and maintenance, computer network installation or more traditional jobs like truck driving and construction. Hell we have roads and bridges in the US failing down and fail apart. With the money being wasted and out right ripped off through the DOD you could train people to repair and replace such things and fund the work.

 

military spending can easily be cut, as can the entire department of "homeland security."
these are central to the republican patronage system. so don't expect anything to happen in terms of responsible spending control from the right.
in practice they'll take these elements off the table and then whine about debt.

which you might wonder about...this neo-liberal thing hasn't worked out so well. the markety market ideology that oozed over america with the reagan period hasn't produced any of the results that it was supposed to have. now we're in a serious, global economic recession/depression. not only can the blame for it be placed squarely on conservative economic thinking....but applying conservative economic logic is the worst imaginable idea in a crisis situation. in us historical terms, the republicans are herbert hoover again again. austerity for everyone but the military is the fine idea that's shattering greece as we speak



with spain not too far behind. neo-liberals running the show at the eu. stupid ideology--->stupid results. they all talk about "pain" and the need to "be strong" or "tough" which of course applies to other people as it always does.

 

A guarantee of employment? Bizarre way of putting it. Surely you mean it's not intended to be the fall back option to a lack of employment. Most Everyone would agree, including me, but again, you make this statement thoughtlessly (in my opinion) without appearing to take any other factors into consideration (factors pointed out in my previous post) stuck on the idea that raising the retirement age is the only solution to the issue of fiscal sustainability. In reality, there are other methods to skinning this cat. (I make no claim to support them, merely pointing out other options that would not leave those "vulnerable to age" without a safety net for a longer period of time. )

Increase the payroll tax
Increase taxation of benefits
Reduce cost of living adjustments
Means test

Those are a few.

Are 68 and 69 years olds not vulnerable to age? Maybe we should just push it up to 75 or 80 then. At what age does vulnerability to age begin, Rogue, and what constitutes vulnerability?

You don't have to answer that. I'm going to drop this now as this debate is off-topic.

 

Mmm... I wouldn't say that, to be honest.

Don't get me wrong, what you say is perfectly sound from an economic perspective, but from the number of US government officials I have met and talked with, I almost always got a strong impression that they heavily prefer "the devil you know" over the one you don't.

And to them, no matter how much data and evidence the other devil sits on, he is still unknown.

 

Granted, cuts in defense and military budgets resulting in a grand-scale loss of employment is nearly unthinkable (yet, set to happen anyway) without the "other devil" in place and ready to pick up the pieces. I blame this on the failure of Congress to pass Obama's jobs bill or in lieu of that, one of their own.

 

Again, completely agreed from a theoretical perspective. Though, what you are talking about here is a large injection of public funds into other sectors of the economy, in order to build them up and create jobs, while keeping the current spending pattern on the military industry at the same level in the near-to-mid term. I don't see how the current political climate (or ever since late 2008 for that matter) could possibly justify to the average Joe that an increase of spending is required, when everyone is harping about gross overspending.

 

because the arguments for aggressive state action in a period of severe economic crisis aren't being made. the reason follows simply from the debilitating consequences of the "washington consensus" or la pensée unique---you know, neo-liberal intellectual monocropping, the stupid idea that markety market bullshit is the necessary framework for thinking about economic policy questions. things have reached such a pass that even orthodox keynesian viewpoints sound radical. so the main problem is ideological/cognitive paralysis within the monolith of us political discourse. the straightjacket that is imposed by neo-liberal "thinking" is the sort of thing that results in some "debate" about whether social security is expendable. you know, a flight back toward the capitalist barbarism of the 1920s. it's lunacy. particularly because it's obvious to anyone who fucking looks that monetarism is not working and will not work to get the us economy out of the crisis that neo-liberal cowboy capitalism visited upon it. so neo-liberalism has nothing to offer except more of the same one-dimensional nonsense that created the mess we're now stuck in.

think about this: romney's foreign policy team. elect this fucking guy and you get people like john bolton back again, like an odor around your sneakers. so add to the application of an economic policy logic everyone already knows doesn't work to a problem it cannot address a collapse of international position for the united states because people will conclude---rightly---that electing these buffoons will indicate that the place has lost its collective mind.

 

Romney was pretty clear that the goal is to make the "pie" larger. He understands that with real wealth creation government will have money to spend on discretionary programs (he wants to direct those funds to programs that get results). He also made clear the downward spiral in President Obama's perspective of thinking that raising tax rates will have long-term benefits - the opposite is true. Looking at the numbers it has been clear that government stimulus spending using debt did not have any lasting impact. GDP growth is slower currently than when the US recession actually ended prior to the government stimulus spending using debt.
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The US is not in a severe economic crisis. The US economy is growing. Marginal economic growth activity is in a state of crisis, specifically small business activity - those striving to get into the 1% while they benefit everyone else. It is what some call greed that makes our system work. If we want a different system say so, and tell us what it is.

 

A recent report from the non-partisan CRS would suggest otherwise.

Tax cuts for the top bracket does not creates jobs, stimulate investment or increase the size of the pie, but only increases income inequality.

This is not the first report with such finding. There have been numerous objective, non-partisan reports over the years that reach the same conclusion.

Hell, even the Reagan economists responsible for his supply side/trickle policies of the 80s have since acknowledged it is, as GHW Bush said, voodoo economics.

However, there is little evidence to support your conclusions....unless Milton Friedman returns from the dead.

 

Agreed but Obama's plan was structured in such a way as to not increase the deficit. Been a while since I looked at it so I'm not sure what the offsets are.

In any event, stimulus (spending) is required to pull it off, at least until offsets are in place, which may or may not come in tandem with the spending. The sticking point remains that for every citizen who believes that stimulus is the key to getting out from under, there is a counterpart who doesn't agree. (mirrored by similarly divergent views in the EU) So while it makes perfect sense to me that we should pursue it, I fully understand that probably 50% of US citizens don't and agree with you that it is a near to impossible sell right now. More's the pity.

 

ace, i am not interested in your make-believe economy full of make-believe john gaults.

out there in the empirical world, mitt is taking quite a beating for making shit up.
this piece is useful in aligning mitt's rhetoric with the ultra-right lunacy we saw during the primaries, the kind of stuff that the aces out there seem to eat up, reality notwithstanding:

Political Animal - No, Romney Did Not “Move to the Center” in Debate

 

Being specific, it is true that a simple tax cut will not directly lead to job creation. A tax cut directly leads to people who pay the tax, paying less in taxes. You can play semantic games with this concept and fool many people. But I think you know better.

At the optimal tax rate economic growth is maximized.

If you dispute the above statement, say so.

It is clear that in some high tax rate environments tax cuts result in net social economic gain. In some low tax rate environment tax increases result in net social economic gain (assuming tax dollars collected are used in a productive manner).

If you dispute the above, say so.

In essence President Obama's weak debate performance was due to his reliance on talking points, like the one you often repeat here, that defy reality and Romney called him on it over and over.

A simple test question for you - If you are given $1 billion in wealth overnight, what do you do with the wealth? How many other people benefit from your wealth? Why isn't this process "trickle down"? Or, are you the only person on the planet who would destroy the wealth (not saving it in a bank, not spending it, not giving it away, not investing it, etc., etc.)

I realize that any answer given will make you appear to be foolish, and I understand not responding directly. I also understand that you will never deviate from your talking point on this question - I simply enjoy these exercises.
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You made a statement that appears unrealistic, I thought you would want to clarify it. I now assume you can not.

 

IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO) Update -- New Setbacks, Further Policy Action Needed, July 2012

flatlining growth. this from the neo-liberal imf. but i'm sure that conservative folk wisdom rejects the unfortunate reality of data in favor of self-serving impressions based on nothing.

 

From the link you provided -



Why do some want to skew reality and make people believe the economy is in crisis? What political agenda is being promoted with this skewed reality?

 

yes, ace. i looked at that very picture. and i read the words around it. maybe try that. or---better still---go interact with someone who takes you seriously. i'm sure you can find someone.

 

There is data and there is interpretation of the data and commentary. The data does not suggest "crisis", the interpretation and commentary gives the impression conditions are worse than the data suggests. My question is related to - why? What political agenda is being promoted? Simple questions. I to read the words surrounding the data - keep up!
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I just took a look at IMF's financial statements, I calculated an operational ratio of about 26%. In my review I may have missed something, but that number seems high for an organization of its nature - trying to address international poverty and stuff. I am thinking they are run like most big international corporations - but what they sell is something to make liberals in wealthy nations feel less guilty. Did i nail it or what?!?