What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

mercury14 said:

So it should always be based on the assumption that revenue will remain the same? LOL, no, they do projections and update them periodically when the numbers come in, making further adjustments. Just like a private corporation does.

Hmm, turns out you don't want government to be run like a business after all. Or you just don't know how businesses work.



Oh so you had to deflect in a hurry when you saw that blue states subsidize crappy red ones. Gotcha.

And California shouldn't engage in revenue projections when doing their budget. Unless it's high-speed rail (not light rail, doofus), then it's okay to engage in all the budget projections we want? Classic AJ anti-logic.

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The scale of demand at the auction suggests investors expect US interest rates to remain low for several years. The $21bn sale of 10-year paper sold at a yield of 1.459 per cent, the lowest ever in an auction.

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Stock prices sank after the Fed expressed concerns about the economy. The Dow Jones industrial average had been down nearly 40 points before the minutes were released at 2 p.m. Eastern time. At around 2:30 p.m., the Dow was down 112 points, on track for its fifth straight day of losses.

Since the Fed met June 19-20, the job market's weakness has persisted. The government said Friday that hiring in June was weak for a third straight month. The economy added just 80,000 jobs.

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We are witnessing a seismic shift in global affairs. The shake-up is a perfect storm of political, demographic, and technological change that will soon make the world as we have known it for the last 30 years almost unrecognizable.

Since the mid-1980s there have been a number of accepted global constants. The European Union was assumed to have evolved beyond the nation-state as it ended the cycle of militarism and renounced free-market capitalism. With its strong euro, soft power, and nonaligned foreign policy, the EU was praised as a utopian sort of foil to the overarmed U.S. with its ailing dollar.

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Conventional wisdom also assumed that an indebted U.S. was in permanent decline, a cash-rich China in ascendency. The world would increasingly make the necessary political corrections as it pivoted eastward.

But none of that conventional wisdom now seems very wise — largely because of a number of technological breakthroughs and equally unforeseen political upheavals.

The euro zone is unraveling. An aging, shrinking population and a socialist welfare state lead to serfdom, not utopia. War guilt and EU membership will no longer ensure German subsidies, but rather will serve to alienate the German public. Europe’s cloudy future hinges not on Brussels technocrats, but on Europeans’ learning how to deal with a dynamic, increasingly confident and peeved Germany.

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In comparison, China is not only resource-poor but politically impoverished. For decades we were told that Chinese totalitarianism, when mixed with laissez-faire capitalism, led to sparkling airports and bullet trains, while a litigious and indulgent America settled for a run-down LAX and creaking Amtrak relics. But the truth is that the Los Angeles airport will probably look modern sooner than the Chinese will hold open elections amid a transparent society — given that free markets did not make China democratic, only more contradictory.

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vetteman said:

Morning Gump, as you well know, Merc has a major case of "selective" input.

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fair_warning said:

To those of us who have a degree in History and understand the world is always changing....your point is?

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4est_4est_Gump said:

In the 1990's I was always pointing out that social utopias are bound to go bust and all I ever heard was, Europe is doing just fine A_J, you're a fucking idiot if you think expanding government is a bad thing...



There will be no medieval magic when one turns to government to be their champion. Government is not a shining knight on a strong horse; it is a night mare.
A_J, the Stupid

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In spite of the obvious ultimate objective of the masters of Russia to communize and conquer the world, and in spite of the frightful power which such weapons as guided missiles and atomic and hydrogen bombs may put in their hands, the greatest threat to American liberty today comes from within. It is the threat of a growing and spreading totalitarian ideology.

Totalitarianism in its final form is the doctrine that the government, the state, must exercise total control over the individual. The American College Dictionary, closely following Webster's Collegiate, defines totalitarianism as "pertaining to a centralized form of government in which those in control grant neither recognition nor tolerance to parties of different opinion."

Now I should describe this failure to grant tolerance to other parties not as the essence of totalitarianism, but rather as one of its consequences or corollaries. The essence of totalitarianism is that the group in power must exercise total control. Its original purpose (as in communism) may be merely to exercise total control over "the economy." But "the state" (the imposing name for the clique in power) can exercise total control over the economy only if it exercises complete control over imports and exports, over prices and interest rates and wages, over production and consumption, over buying and selling, over the earning and spending of income, over jobs, over occupations, over workers — over what they do and what they get and where they go — and finally, over what they say and even what they think.

If total control over the economy must in the end mean total control over what people do, say, and think, then it is only spelling out details or pointing out corollaries to say that totalitarianism suppresses freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of immigration and emigration, freedom to form or to keep any political party in opposition, and freedom to vote against the government. These suppressions are merely the end-products of totalitarianism.

All that the totalitarians want is total control. This does not necessarily mean that they want total suppression. They suppress merely the ideas which they don't agree with, or of which they are suspicious, or of which they have never heard before; and they suppress only the actions that they don't like, or of which they cannot see the necessity. They leave the individual perfectly free to agree with them, and perfectly free to act in any way that serves their purposes — or to which they may happen at the moment to be indifferent. Of course, they sometimes also compel actions, such as positive denunciations of people who are against the government (or who the government says are against the government), or groveling adulation of the leader of the moment. That no individual in Russia today gets the constant groveling adulation that Stalin demanded chiefly means that no successor has yet succeeded in securing Stalin's unchallenged power.

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... Gustav Cassel. This was published in a pamphlet with the descriptive but rather cumbersome title: From Protectionism Through Planned Economy to Dictatorship.[1] I take the liberty of quoting an extensive passage from it:

The leadership of the state in economic affairs which advocates of Planned Economy want to establish is, as we have seen, necessarily connected with a bewildering mass of governmental interferences of a steadily cumulative nature. The arbitrariness, the mistakes and the inevitable contradictions of such policy will, as daily experience shows, only strengthen the demand for a more rational coordination of the different measures and, therefore, for unified leadership. For this reason Planned Economy will always tend to develop into Dictatorship.…

The existence of some sort of parliament is no guarantee against planned economy being developed into dictatorship. On the contrary, experience has shown that representative bodies are unable to fulfill all the multitudinous functions connected with economic leadership without becoming more and more involved in the struggle between competing interests, with the consequence of a moral decay ending in party — if not individual — corruption. Examples of such a degrading development are indeed in many countries accumulating at such a speed as must fill every honorable citizen with the gravest apprehensions as to the future of the representative system. But apart from that, this system cannot possibly be preserved, if parliaments are constantly over-worked by having to consider an infinite mass of the most intricate questions relating to private economy. The parliamentary system can be saved only by wise and deliberate restriction of the functions of parliaments.…

Economic dictatorship is much more dangerous than people believe. Once authoritative control has been established it will not always be possible to limit it to the economic domain. If we allow economic freedom and self-reliance to be destroyed, the powers standing for Liberty will have lost so much in strength that they will not be able to offer any effective resistance against a progressive extension of such destruction to constitutional and public life generally. And if this resistance is gradually given up — perhaps without people ever realizing what is actually going on — such fundamental values as personal liberty, freedom of thought and speech and independence of science are exposed to imminent danger. What stands to be lost is nothing less than the whole of that civilization that we have inherited from generations which once fought hard to lay its foundations and even gave their life for it.

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vetteman said:

And when you do get it back, does it represent the same value as those dollars you loaned in the first place.

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The second main tendency that marks the drift toward totalitarianism is that toward greater and greater concentration of power in the central government. This tendency is most easily recognizable here in the United States, because we have ostensibly a federal form of government and can readily see the growth of power in Washington at the expense of the states.

The concentration of power and the centralization of power, I may point out here, are merely two names for the same thing. This second tendency is a necessary consequence of the first. If the central government is to control more and more of our economic life, it cannot permit this to be done by the individual states. The pressure for uniformity, and the pressure for centralization of power, are two aspects of the same pressure.

It is not difficult to see why this is so. Obviously, if government is to intervene in business, there cannot be 48 different kinds of conflicting interventions. Obviously, if government is to impose an over-all "economic plan," it cannot impose 48 different and conflicting plans. Planning from the center is possible only with centralization of governmental power. And so deep is the belief in the benevolence and necessity of uniform regulation and central planning that the federal government assumes more and more of the powers previously exercised by the states, or powers never exercised by any state; and the Supreme Court keeps steadily stretching the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution to authorize powers and federal interventions never dreamed of by the Founding Fathers. At the same time recent Supreme Court decisions treat the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution practically as if it did not exist.[2]

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If we ask how it comes about that Congress and other legislative bodies throughout the contemporary world have tended to fall into public disrepute, we again find that the answer lies in the apparently unshakeable contemporary faith in the necessity and benevolence of a continually expanding government intervention. Congress and the planners can never agree among themselves on precisely what the government should do to remedy some supposed evil. They cannot agree on an unambiguous general law, whose application in specific cases could be safely left to the courts. All that they can agree upon is that "something should be done." In other words, all they can agree upon is that the government must intervene, that the special area of economic activity under discussion must be "controlled." So they frame a law setting forth a number of vague but high-sounding goals and create an agency or commission whose function it is to achieve these goals through its own omniscience and discretion....

From then on, Congress in that particular sphere is treated mainly as a nuisance. The administrative bodies that it has set up resent its "interference" and "meddling" with their activities. These administrative bodies devote themselves in large part to extolling "administrative discretion" at the expense of the Rule of Law — that is, of any body of clear rules to be applied by the courts. Any subsequent effort of Congress to reduce the range of administrative discretion, arbitrariness, and caprice is denounced as "crippling" to administrative bodies, and as interfering with that "flexibility" of action so dear to the administrative heart.

Along with this growth of administrative agencies and administrative power, less and less controlled either by Congress or the courts, there has been a constantly widening interpretation of the president's constitutional powers. This has occurred both in the foreign and in the domestic field.

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vetteman said:

Henry was a remarkable man. I have a couple of his books. He was amazingly self educated in economics.

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