Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

I knew you were a closet intellectual. B&B are pretty deep. Sure you can grok?

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Those mathematical equations make up a model that attempts to recreate the behavior of a real economic system in the way that a map recreates the land it describes. The model will make predictions about how the system will work in different situations. If those predictions turn out to be accurate, then we can conclude that the model is probably a mostly accurate depiction of reality. If they don't, then we need to find a new model or revise the old one.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

But it really isn't that simple at all. Isn't it true that models can be interpreted in different ways? and that interpretations can be incorrect. This wouldn't be so bad if these were just models on a blackboard in some classroom but these models affect policy and by extension, the economy.

For instance, the Laffer Curve. There are many people who swear that Laffer modeled the perfect tax rate structure and there are those who think he was some incarnation of the devil.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Do you think it's unfair that the bottom 20% of Americans live better lives than the rest of the world's 80%? Yay Americans, fuck everyone else?

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

I just don't think the solution is to ensure that the bottom 80% of Americans are dragged down to the level of the most destitute person in the world. Why isn't there concern about the unfairness of how the top 10% of Americans are living, if it's so tragic that the poorest Americans aren't poor enough?

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Badhat wins the Fox award by throwing her own gender under the bus.
You could at least have tempered it by pointing the remaining fingers on that hand at the gays, blacks, immigrants, and minimum wage teenagers.
I liked the post better before you edited it.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Damn all those shrill feminists and their 83-cents-on-the-(male)-dollar wages!!1!

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

I am concerned about it. I've been on record saying that the rich should pay more. I've also said that the left has a fantastical notion that undoing Bush tax cuts would fix everything. Furthermore, I find it deeply troubling that Gallup polls find socialism more popular than capitalism.

Did you get anything out of Capitalism and Freedom?

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Careful Unc, we are treading dangerously close to getting slapped with a jpeg of Beavis and Butthead.. nobody wants that!

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Thanks, except I realized that it didn't address miceelf's post well enough. However that wouldn't really matter to you since your style is entirely non-sequiter.

How is pointing out a well known sociological phenomenon throwing my gender under the bus?

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Got to hand it to you. You have successfully rephrased and reposted your "I don't get it so it's meaningless" retort. Well played once again.

Perhaps I was expressing my skepticism that it is one in a clever way.
But since you did not read it that way, then I wasn't.
That about right?

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Well, people were promised the capitalism would solve all ills and lift all boats, so it's not surprising if some people are mistakenly souring on it. Most serious people recognize that capitalism isn't a guarantee of all goodness and especially without some kind of regulation and effort toward equality of opportunity.

It's been a few years but I remember capitalism and freedom as having some good ideas, but gave short shrift to the degree to which transparency isn't a given without some regulation and in general a little magical thinking about how it would inevitably lead to the best possible outcomes without effort toward the outcomes that most serious conservatives acknowledge are orthogonal to capitalism. Of course, I was reading it through the prism of the mid Bush years which was when I read it, so I was not in an overly generous mood.

And, yes, you've said that the rich should pay more and that it's not a panacea. But "the rich should pay more" is a little different than "the rich should be satisfied as long as they're better off than the poor in bangladesh" which seemed to be where you were headed with regard to the bottom of the American economic pile. If we were to tax the rich to the level at which you were arguing Americans should be satisfied, we would indeed be pretty close to solving the deficit problem. But neither of us is actually proposing that.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

I would never call you clever.

PS. Why don't you just say what you mean? if you are aware of what that is, of course.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

C'mon Badhat, you can do this.

Or are you deflecting from the fact you can't defend your assertion that the women's liberation movement played a large role in creating the need for dual incomes?

I'll translate:
You, badhat, pretend not understand, to avoid defending statements.
Like:
1.Meaningless sentences make up progressive narrative.
2.Women working made need for women to work.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

You can be completely hostile to the book; that's perfectly fine. I just find it hard to believe that you could say the above after having read it. While I didn't read that specific book, I did read the simplified version published afterward.

I think you meant the poor should be satisfied? No, I wouldn't tell the poor how to feel about their economic situation. I made a factual assertion, not a normative one. It is a fact that our bottom 20% are better off than the rest of the world's 80%. So, if birth into the world is pure chance, there's an 80% likelihood that your life would be worse than America's poorest, e.g., perpetual war, disease, starvation, manual labor, lack of clean water, plumbing, electricity, etc.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Here's a quick visual of the impact of letting the Bush tax cuts expire:

http://img810.imageshack.us/img810/8...ternative1.jpg

And the corresponding article:

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

LOL. Projections to the year 2035!

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Sure, although you characterized concern for American poor as kind of a national chauvinism.

But there's a 99.999999999% chance that someone born into the world will be worse than America's well-to-do. I just don't see how a statement about how good it is to be poor in America can be disentangled from how good it is to be rich in America.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

It's either out of bounds to use the CBO or it isn't. I take it from the above you think it is out of bounds.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

You see an obligation for the rich to equalize outcomes. That's not something I believe in some moral sense. I think the rich should pay because they're threatening the future of capitalism entirely if conditions get worse. In other words, we believe in higher taxes for the rich for completely different reasons.

I'm saying the American way of life has afforded our bottom 20% better outcomes than the rest of the world's 80%.


You can make reasonable predictions about who might win the World Series next year. You can't possibly do that for the year 2035. (Yankees)

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Yep. Thanks to the American left, which your kind have been violently opposing since, oh, about the first decade of the 20th century. We've done a lot of good, while you're determined to roll back the clock and restore the "natural capitalist order."

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Ahh. How quickly we regress to the ad hominem. I'm always willing to have substantive conversations with people. I don't know why people don't want to have them with me.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

I didn't think that was an ad hominem. I thought it was a straightforward description of your libertarian philosophy. Or are you a closet socialist, now?

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

No, I actually don't. As I said, I just don't see how we can demand that the poor in America be grateful without making a proportionate demand of the wealthy in America.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

No, no no! This is ad hominem:

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

I was rather wondering where that strange claim came from.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

20% / 80%. Let's stay on topic, hmm?


Donuts?

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

I see. My word choice was poor. I should've said that you want to move towards less inequality through redistribution and it looks like you've confirmed that. If you'll recall, we've had this conversation months ago and it was a long one. The conclusion was the same as it is now: let Bush cuts expire. Absolutely.

Then what? And what if that doesn't work? Increase taxes again? Then what? I really want to know what's the alternative plan.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

HOnestly, for me, let tax cuts expire. First for the top, then for everyone else in a year. Close the capital gains loophole. Then if there's still structural deficit problems, we figure out what to cut.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

I can absolutely defend it but you never asked me to. Instead you used some sort of strange thing you describe as cleverness to indict me for saying it. And what's more you insinuated that saying such a thing is horrible beyond belief and essentially throws women under the bus. Liberal kneejerk nonsense, again. I should probably say just kneejerk nonsense and leave the liberal out of it.

Here's what I said:
So apparently, according to you, the increased income that families enjoyed due to women entering the workforce did absolutely nothing to the economy. Families weren't able to buy more things and increase their standard of living which resulted in greater costs to familes in the form of more expensive housing, more cars, more stuff, more education costs because they now had to educate their daughters, more debt obligations, child care, etc. And according to you it is very controversial, almost heretical, to say that over time the standard of living for the average family rose to such an extent that two incomes were needed to sustain it.

But I will admit that my time frame was off. It would probabaly be more accurate to date the dramatic increase of women in the workplace to be around 1960 which would make it fifty years.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Yeah, I agree. Plus some drastic cuts to the military, and we could be running surpluses.

I think we all know we do have a long term problem with Medicare; something has to be done to fix that problem. But, as sugarkang pointed out, simply letting the Bush tax cuts carries us at least through 2035. Maybe over the course of the next 4, 8, or 12 years we'll be able to advance the national conversation about the best remedy for skyrocketing health care costs, helping us to agree on a better solution. I'm not an expert on health care policy, but my impression is that the best way to control costs would be with single payer. If we could ever neutralize influence of the tea party and corporate dominance of our political system, we might be able to elect enough reality-based representatives to fix the problem in a way that doesn't, like the Ryan Plan, sacrifice millions of lives on the altar of libertarianism.

We're the richest and most technologically advanced nation on earth. We can figure out a way to take care of our people in their old age. It's just a question of willingness. The problem isn't that we can't; it's that we have a radical faction of far right extremists who don't want us to: they're the people Ron Paul whipped into a frenzy by championing the death of the uninsured. As long as people of that (lacking) moral character dominate our politics, we won't be able to solve these problems.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Pathological altruism.

I wrote this last year. I might have to sue this woman for copyright infringement.

You seriously scare me. Seriously, don't hurt anyone.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

a walk down memory lane! most of the good stuff landed in the dungeon. impressive effort on your part.

but, i've got to admit i still don't quite get the nazi thing or think it may be a bit extreme. but i could be wrong. there doesn't seem like a really good explanation for some of the stuff that goes on here.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Do you think all altruism, or most of it, is pathological?

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

No, he thinks that putting some weirdo given to drama, whining, and inappropriate insults in an ignore list is the same as sending millions of people to be tortured and killed in concentration camps. And all that happens while one is trying to do some good.

Conclusion: do evil for better results?

Go figure.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

oh my goodness! the mask comes off.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

only in the case of animal hoarding. :)

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Well, we agree for once. Mark your calendar- I've marked mine.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Come on, man. Why have you been doing this lately? Can we not extrapolate to extremes? I provided a link and everything.

Altruism is good. It's the pathological part that makes it pathological. The book is important because it identifies what I've noticed for quite some time: the moral certainty and hatred that some people have on here. This is the same sort of rational thinking that allows someone to murder a doctor who performs abortions or firebomb a clinic.

This has nothing to do with ideology. You have to know that when eeeeeeeli was a more frequent commenter, I rarely if ever exchanged uncivil words with him and he was quite possibly the most socialist person on this board.

I'm not saying TS will go out and commit horrible acts. You need physical violence and intent to do so for it to qualify. Thoughts are not enough; words are not enough. But this type of thinking, this so called pathological altruism, is a necessary, not a sufficient. And that means you don't get horrible behavior if you don't have this type of thinking.

Because the left shares similar moral sensibilities, it might be difficult for a liberal to distinguish between altruistic and pathologically altruistic sentiments. After all, that's a subjective evaluation. This happens to people on the right as well, like in my abortion clinic example. I am not trying to score points here.

But one should take note that of the 6 factors for moral foundations, conservatives have all 6, as do virtually everyone else in the world. Liberals, by contrast, only have 4. See Haidt. So, that's where the bias creeps in. You can't see it if you don't have it.

Re: Matt Yglesias: Creating Jobs by Cutting Wages
 

Talk about kneejerk. Not to mention dishonestly paraphrased, but you didn't understand what I was saying, right? BTW the "clever" comment was sarcasm. You are right about my cleverness, I could never think up anything as clever as a JPEG of beavis and butthead. Or Harkin drooling and spitting his vile "nanny state" nonsense. I came across that PM you sent me by mistake recently, cheerleading how fantastic his post was... cleverness in action, to be sure! By whoever made up his stale talking points in the first place, that is.
What you said was about survival, not standard of living, but I think women's liberation, as you put it pre-edit, had little to do with SURVIVAL depending on two wage earners. I think most of our economic ills are due to the scrapping and exporting of our manufacturing base, and your finger pointing at social issues are just smoke and mirrors put in your field of vision intended to divert attention long enough to finish the job.

This is all pretty hard to quantify with hard facts IMO. But since you got to make a causal connection between a far right conservative social beef and an economic consequence, then it was pretty clear from the start what the angle was. Defending would, as evidenced by your response, only amount to reiteration.

The real problem I had with your comment is that you seem to be arguing for reversing the trend, and think we ought to turn back the clock on this, hence the bus reference. You would do much better to clarify that aspect of it, but once again your reading comprehension level gets you off the hook as you had no idea what my crazy ramblings were driving at, right?

Before you get all rabidly partisan on me (again), I've said it before and I'll say it again, this was a group effort, all ideological, political, demographic, race, and gender divisions are responsible. But if you want to continue to believe it was the evil, (I paraphrase for effect sometimes) "progressive narrative" at play, I really don't care, 'cause those jobs ain't coming back unless everyone gets thier head out of their ass ASAP, and I'm not holding my breath.

Don't worry, This forum is about to go down the tubes and I probably won't be calling you on your "aw shucks" "Fox and Friends" inspired passive aggression anymore. But keep the links to those JPEGs on your desktop just in case!