biccat wrote:Except you're wrong. It's not procedural, and in/out of the state does matter.
Playing a political game to avoid a bill with majority support being voted on is bad. It's bad whether you do it by turning up, or you do it by not turning up.
This stupid thing you and Fraz are attempting, where you claim that stopping a bill being voted on is very bad is absurd. You know it is absurd. So just be honest, and say that the real reason you didn't like the Democrat ploy, but were fine the Republican ploy is because you liked the Wisconsin bill, but didn't like healthcare reform.
You'll find once you start letting little bits of honesty like that into your politics your ability for rational thought will increase tremendously.
Are you really so deep in the DNC horsehooey that you don't believe that government backing actually changes the value of something?
Ah, no, it's that I have professional financial training and know that the reality of the situation has nothing to do with the 'boo governments' piffle you're trying to contort it into. It's cute that you think I've got anything in common with the ideology of the Democrats, though it does betray your upbringing in the 'boo democrats/boo republicans' shambles that is US political dialogue... and not in any kind of actual economics or finance training.
Anyhow, ignoring the poor terminology (a mortgage is actually the commitment to pay and has negative value, you meant the future value of mortgage payments)... your little narrative about a government guarantees growing the value of a mortgage was meaningless piffle. No notion of government guarantee drove the asset bubble, indeed there was no goverment guarantee... that's why we've got foreclosures.
Instead, the bubble was caused by banks lending to people on the assumption that rising house prices would allow them to refinance and stay solvent, despite the fact that they couldn't meet the basic repayments on the house. This is what a bubble is, when the primary drive for demand of an asset is it's growing value.
Government was involved, as the Fed's policy of keeping interest rates incredibly low continued to put too much capital into the market, and when investment in productive assets became saturated it moved into non-productive investments, like houses. On this level you might, and likely will, try to blame the bubble on government, except that the folk driving this investment were all hardcore free marketeers, their rational was that the economy was best served by getting capital out there into investment, where the market would know what best to do with it.
Except it didn't. The champion of all those free-marketeers was Alan Greenspan, and in the wake of the GFC he admitted "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms."
You're kidding, right? We're seeing the exact same thing happening with the current student loan bubble. The only difference is student loans aren't dischargable, and so the bubble isn't going to burst in the same way the mortgage bubble burst.
Easy access to student loans are inflating tuition prices. It's not ideology, it's economics. When there's a high demand for a product and a limited supply, price goes up.
Obviously, but you effort to try and characterise the ideas as coming from government and not from people with complete faith in the market to resolve the issue is where your politics leave for the land of fantasy.
The drive across the world over the twenty years has been towards deregulation, in the mistaken belief that free markets will operate with more stability and more efficiency. This is not a matter for debate, it's very fething obvious. The effort to pretend that this never happened, and to try and contort the deregulation movement into government interference has been attempted, but the arguments have been obviously weak.
In fact, I'd say it's been such obvious
bs that you really should be very embarrassed for ever having believed it.
Which would be true, except the public sector isn't subject to the free market. There are plenty of studies that show government workers make more than private sector employees, once you factor in benefits.
Which would be true, if having the word 'government' applied to an organisation somehow caused it to be capable of all job interactions when dealing with markets. Left would be right, and dogs would be marrying cats.
It isn't true, though, and government is engaging in the same labour market that the private sector is. At which point you have to realise that employment is subject to the same basic market conditions, and that includes the idea that employees will demand higher salary for unpleasant conditions (such as low job security) and accept lower salary for better conditions (such as high job security).
At which point you have to look at those studies, and wonder if their conclusions are sensible. If government typically employs people with higher levels of education or skill levels than is the average in the private sector, you're obviously comparing apples and oranges and need to look at better studies.
If the answer is "no, I don't have any facts to support the absurd statement that was made," then just say that. Stop deflecting.
That's pathetic. I gave you a very clear example of the governor of Wisconsin stating that he is not negotiating in good faith, and you just make up some drivel that pretends I didn't. Try harder.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Stormrider wrote:Ah, but when a Private Union negotiates, shareholders in the companies they work for get a direct say in what the pay and benefits will be.
No, they don't. I've never had a direct say in the pay and conditions of any company I own shares in. Instead, I elect the board, who appoints a CEO and management team, who negotiate on behalf of me and the shareholders.
This is exactly the same as government.
With government unions, the share holders (tax paying citizens) get vicarious representation instead of voting on it. Sounds like: "Here's the proposal, now take it since you have no choice"
I'm guessing you've never worked in government, let alone worked there during negotiations, let alone actually been been present at any such negotiations. Because I have, and it works nothing like what you claim. Instead, the process is very similar to the private sector, with government reps trying to keep pay and benefits down, and the union trying to get as much for it's members as possible, typically ending up in a compromise that leaves no-one happy.
The head of a government department has exactly the same personal incentive to keep salary costs down that a private sector CEO has - if there's a cost blow out he gets fired.
I'm sorry if you think I'm being silly, maybe I saw through the bs long ago and decided that people working in goverment should make more sacrifices, not less.
The problem is that you've got some idea in your head that the word government somehow means that somehow direct negotiations magically change into something else. They don't.
If a state wants to pay through the nose for teachers fine, but why the hell do they need a union? Would it be that they don't neccessarily attract the best candidates most of the time?
It would probably have a lot to do with management being removed from the interests of the employees, and the employees feeling that to get safe working conditions and the best pay and conditions possible they should collectively negotiate. Same as the justification for unions everywhere.
This whole problem can be solved if the country get's off of it's addiction known as government. We're practically insolvent thanks to massive entitlement programs and wasteful spending.
That argument relies on seeing government as some kind of parasitic thing, when it's an essential part of a functioning society. The capitalist system that people assume just exists naturally is the product of government laws on contracts and property, and the investment that drives growth comes from the stability and security offered by government.
Instead, you have to look at government and realise the issue is figuring out how to make what's needed financially sustainable. This means higher taxes.
Automatically Appended Next Post: biccat wrote:Leaving aside the debate about whetehr this was a real 'surplus' or not, more entitlement programs were added since then.
But, as anyone should really be well and truly aware by now, there was also a tax cut. A big one. A very highly publicised one.
Those tax cuts removed about a hundred billion a year out of federal revenue. This, along with the two wars and rising healthcare costs, accounts for the entirety of the difference between the operating budget in 2000 and the operating budget now.
Automatically Appended Next Post: thedude wrote:I dont think program cuts of any type will make much of a dent, be it military (which does have an insane budget) or welfare programs. I mean these are small potatos the the amount spend on so called quantitative easing and corporate bailouts
Conspiracy theories aside, the Fed charges the government interest to print money that the government can print on its own. That money is then used to subsidize the too big to fail banks which encourages recklessness in the markets (I consider the analogy of giving a kid a credit card, and regardless of how much they spend, paying it off for them month over month...they are not going to learn responsibility that way). Furthermore, when the Fed takes losses in the markets, they no longer call them losses but in a new bold accounting practice they employ what they call negative liabilities (look it up if you are not familiar with it) where they simply do not show losses and send the bill to the treasury and our defficit grows while our dollar weakens. The whole Keynesian economic philosophy which continues to give more power to the central bank is just not sound money.
Your whole post is incoherent nonsense, indicating an almost complete failure to understand economics.
First up, as dogma pointed out quantitative easing and the corporate bailouts are once off programs, and so not really comparable to on-going programs. Nor can the amount spent of corporate bailouts be simply stated as a once-off figure, you have to allow for the plain reality that most of the funds have been repaid.
Then you fail to understand that the Fed is not independant of government.
The recklessness exhibited by the banks is not a product of organisational backing from government. The banks would have had no idea government would have acted to secure them. Instead you have to look at individuals operating within the banks, acting for their own profit motives to reach their bonus targets, while the bank's internal governance policies failed to secure itself against risk (generally because the financial instruments were too complex for the risk to be fully gauged).
A negative liability is an asset, if you were to attend first year accounting classes. If you continued studying, you'd learn 'negative liability' is a term sometimes used to describe journal entries recognising the reduction in a liability occurring through a windfall gain. I don't know where you've heard the term, but it's come from people who don't understand accounting.
Finally, you're completely mistaken in assuming that any of the above in any way accurately reflects Keynesian economics.
