March 2, 2019

Trump not responsible for low unemployment. Demography is.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/03/01/baby-boomers-parting-gift-workforce-one-last-mess/?utm_term=.cbd99985431a&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1

By Andrew Van Dam at the Washington Post

"SNIP.....

The youngest baby boomers are around 55 years old. The oldest are in their 70s. Most Americans don’t remember a workforce without the largest generation.

And yet, as boomers enter their final years in the workforce, their retirements are taking companies by surprise.

In the next five years, almost three-quarters of the companies surveyed in 2018 by Willis Towers Watson, a risk-management and insurance brokerage company, expect to face significant or moderate challenges from late retirements. But because nothing is predictable, a significant share are also worried about early ones.


....SNIP"

February 28, 2019

GOP Lawmakers Say Cohen Perjured Himself

GOP Lawmakers Say Cohen Perjured Himself

February 28, 2019 at 1:33 pm EST By Taegan Goddard 113 Comments

https://politicalwire.com/2019/02/28/gop-lawmakers-say-cohen-perjured-himself/

"SNIP....

Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mark Meadows (R-NC) sent a letter to the Department of Justice referring Michael Cohen for perjury.

......SNIP"

Gaslighting. GOP has a whole staged production to make Trump look good and his enemies bad. I'm beginning to think they see Trump voters as a captured group of voters for the long term. Like NRA voters or anti-abortion evangelicals. Trump and his base are something the GOP want to nurture and protect long after he leaves office.

February 28, 2019

I look forward to getting to know Beto and him raising the bar for all

the Democratic candidates.

February 22, 2019

The republicans run dyslexics who can connect... then when in power they

make sure they follow the layed out GOP agenda. They do it again and again: Reagan, Bush (when he thought for himself once and raised taxes they made him pay) ,Bush, Trump (some of his agenda is his own so help us god: trade wars, leaving Syria, separating families at the border etc.). In history JFK, Ted Kennedy, Woodrow Wilson, Elianor Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt and Churchill were dyslexic. In Canada Trudeau and Chretien are. Dyslexics are not picking up on details until they form a pattern (details are preconscious until they repeat and thus form a pattern). Then look out. Imagine if the the world you saw were all the patterns? You certaily would see the forest for the trees. You would not get lost in details like Hillary. Dyslexics are experts at reading a crowd. At counter punching. At the big picture (except for Trump). And dyslexia says nothing about how smart someone can be. It is just a different organization of the brain. So dyslexics can be great presidents or bad ones if they are being spoon fed lower taxes and destroying social programs by the right. Depends who is feeding them the details. I don't know if Beto is dyslexic but he can certainly read a crowd like the Kennedys could. He certainly excels at the big picture. Only time will tell if he has the gravitas to be a great leader at a national level. And choose the very best policies from the world once he gets into power.

February 21, 2019

By market failure i mean that the markets fail to deliver in terms of the values

of the economy. Healthcare is a market failure. So someone invented something called insurance which gets healthy people to share in paying for the sick with insurance premiums. The US healthcare system with private insurance then failed by having too many people who could not afford to be insured resulting in bankruptcies and 45,000 deaths a year. So Obama care came into play. That is what I mean by market failure and government involvement in the market. Now Trump has chipped away at it while the people have been informed that single payer results in even better outcomes for keeping costs down and covering all, both values efficiency and equity are better in a single payer plan, so hopefully Obama care will give way to something better. So too the market fails in r&d and secrecy so the government does some of that. Like inventing the internet which was government defence and is now private industry. Or running NASA. Now the market can handle r&d on putting satellites into orbit so that is often done through private industry now and things are more efficient in private satellite launching. Again you have values of equity and values of efficiency. The market will meet those values or not. If it doesn't, you have market failure. Different parties have different values. When the markets work - great privatize. When they don't regulate.

Here is something that summarizes the types of market failure.

https://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Market_failures/Types_of_market_failure.html

Types of market failure:

A market failure is a situation where free markets fail to allocate resources efficiently. Economists identify the following cases of market failure:

Productive and allocative inefficiency

Markets may fail to  produce and allocate scarce resources in the most efficient way.

Monopoly power

Markets may fail to control the abuses of monopoly power.

Missing markets

Markets may fail to form, resulting in a failure to meet a need or want, such as the need for public goods, such as defence, street lighting, and highways.

Incomplete markets

Markets may fail to produce enough merit goods, such as education and healthcare.

De-merit goods

Markets may also fail to control the manufacture and sale of goods like cigarettes and alcohol, which have less merit than consumers perceive.

Negative externalities

Consumers and producers may fail to take into account the effects of their actions on third-parties, such as car drivers, who may fail to take into account the traffic congestion they create for others. Third-parties are individuals, organisations, or communities indirectly benefiting or suffering as a result of the actions of consumers and producers attempting to pursue their own self interest.

Property rights

Markets work most effectively when consumers and producers are granted the right to own property, but in many cases property rights cannot easily be allocated to certain resources. Failure to assign property rights may limit the ability of markets to form.

Information failure

Markets may not provide enough information because, during a market transaction, it may not be in the interests of one party to provide full information to the other party.

Unstable markets

Sometimes markets become highly unstable, and a stable equilibrium may not be established, such as with certain agricultural markets, foreign exchange, and credit markets. Such volatility may require intervention.

Inequality

Markets may also fail to limit the size of the gap between income earners, the so-called income gap. Market transactions reward consumers and producers with incomes and profits, but these rewards may be concentrated in the hands of a few.

February 21, 2019

I studied economics in Nova Scotia. We were given a lecture on supply side economics and how

it is based on supply shocks to the aggregate supply curve in 1984 or 85. There was a graph and equations I believed it for years. It was bullshit. I have also heard from business people that economics is like autopilot. It works for things that are predictable to keep the economy airborn. Autopilot is based on science. It is true that economics is becoming more scientific but it is also full of GOP propaganda. So to say it is a social science as it is practised and taught today in the US is true too. The gop don't share all the information they have with us, with the public, for the greater good. How else do you explain the lack of keynesian spending after 2010. Or that John McCain was flipped into believing he didn't understand economics as he won the nomination race for 2008, so he toed the GOP line on the economy. So economics is badly practised by the right, to their benefit, to the point it is a social science. It is a human construct that benefits the wealthy politically in the US, as they practice it. Of course it is a war on the little guy. A war of keeping the important information on economics, and things like psychology, to themselves and their benefit.

February 19, 2019

The paranoia is being started in canada. I was on a facebook thread

about Oak Island, my family spent weeks in the summer in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, where it is filmed. Somebody implied the reason show played in Western Canada 5 days after the rest of Canada was for 'some reason'. People pointed out that it played in the US, only, earlier in the week That it wasn't a conspiracy by Trudeau. That the liberals were not messing with his TV. That the Curse of Oak Island played every Sunday all across canada. My point is if that is what some Canadians see in something as innocuous as an international chat about a reality tv show, what hope is there when people watch an election in 5 months? The conservatives have already demonstrated that they are going to microtarget small immigrant communities based on their greatest fears. This is going to be a bloodbath. And Harper made Canadian elections permanently in off years for US politics. So the right wing US politicos can better be involved. Meanwhile Democratic politicos will be busy with the 2020 nomination race. And I'm sure the Russians will show up and make Canadians paranoid some more. Any advice would be helpfull.

February 18, 2019

And the nitpicking doesn't have to be a real reason for criticism. Just so long as

it alienates democrats from their great candidates and turns into a meme - the GOP will be happy. We should call it astroturf nit-picketing.

February 18, 2019

Harris is being nitpicked. Nancy was too. I'm drawing parallels and

saying with Nancy it was GOP trolls. And so many fell for it. Expect it during the Democratic nomination race. Don't fall for it. Maybe it was GOP trolls with this hot sauce thing or maybe not. Be wary of those who would fight a candidate without referencing their character, their talents or their policy positions. I've seen psychopaths use nitpicking to re-create the perceptions of people they want to control. It is a common technique with abusers, misogynists or harrassers. Nitpicking to control the perceptions of a group (democrats). Watch for it.

February 18, 2019

I don't know if trolls started this but we need to be wary. Remember Nancy Pelosi

was the enemy of the left in the year before the 2018 elections?
She is amazing. She was amazing before. The right wing trolls nitpicking happened to democratic perceptions in the middle and we almost jettisoned her. So too will many of our Democratic nominees be so alienated. Don't fall for the ridiculous. If we let the GOP nitpick then they will have picked who our 2020 nominee is by the time it is over.

https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1097319633831378944