No one’s ever given me a cite to that reg., though.
So you're claiming that an inhumanly complex tax code doesn't cause economic distortions which hurt growth?
That all the hoops we make business go through in order to create a job doesn't cause side effects?
That the taxes (etc) we lard onto creating a job doesn't reduce job creation?
That the various massive bureaucracies which only exist to deal with other massive bureaucracies add so much value that it doesn't hurt growth?
That every regulation is worthwhile, even in total sum, and every gov bureaucrat never abuses his role? That Congress is never bribed into doing economically foolish things? That the regulators are never captured?
Saul Degraw:
You live in such a different universe than say actual reality that I am not sure which drugs you are taking.
System seems to have eaten my post filled with links to liberals rioting. :(
What are you claiming here, that liberals aren't rioting? That conservatives did after Obama won? Or is it just that the left gets a pass because their feelings were hurt and left-violence is always justified?
Now we are back to “liberals are the real racists” and complaining about why don’t minorities vote libertarian or Republican instead of seriously trying to contemplate why minorities don’t trust libertarian or Republican philosophy?
Right now we have multiple cities with (left wing) riots because the wrong guy won the election, we've seen similar (left wing) riots in other situations, like judges letting people go. I can't remember when the right rioted because of losing an election and Obama won two of them, but with the left it's barely news.
If my city burns down it will probably be because BLM didn't like some judge's verdict. With all of that, we're supposed to be worried about the Right being violent?
My expectation is that in a year the minority death toll will be the same as it is now, and the big villain will continue to be the war on drugs as opposed to racism... but the culture of victimhood will be used again the moment the Dems need a political point to score.
2. His other sons have flirted with and courted the alt-right who are definitely anti-Semitic.
Somehow I can't picture Trump walking away from his family over this one.
My expectation is that his family gets money (Trump's true love) and the alt-right will get vague promises of something happening in the future which won't come due until after he leaves office.
Saul Degraw: I have to agree with JA here. The factory jobs are not coming back except as automated masterpieces.
Agreed,
Now what I will acknowledge is that the neo-liberal left does not have any answers and have piss poor rhetoric skills. But it is clear that libertarians are losing on free trade too even if they get to sneer at liberals for being smug.
:sigh: Also agreed.
However, return the country to 5% growth and complaints about growth become small squeaks. Obama was an extreme disappointment from that point of view, either he didn't know how to create growth or he didn't care to because it'd mean sacrificing some leftist white elephant. Fundamentally this was why he and his just got thrown out.
So now it's Trump's turn. If he can create growth, then the rest of it doesn't matter and he'll be in charge for a while.
Fighting climate change currently means
1) Funding boondoggles.
2) Building coal plants rather than nuclear.
3) Insisting poor people stay poor.
4) Signing treatings which claim future politicians will make the painful choices the currents ones aren't willing to make.
If the greens were screaming for nuclear with one voice we might do something, as it is we're not and I see little evidence this will change in the future.
Right now we have riots and arson from the left because the wrong person won the election. Notice the total lack of riots/arson when Obama won, either time, or when Bill won, etc. Similarly if Trump had lost I'd expect we wouldn't have seen riots/etc. Moving beyond the election we've seen BLM have riots/arson on a reasonably regular basis when the wrong thing happens or they disagree with some judge.
The real threat of violence mostly comes from the left, not the right. The left just likes to pretend the right is violent because it makes a good straw man to drum up support for their policies.
The usual things which are illegal will remain illegal and the legal system is well able to arrest people for brutalizing others.
#2 You really think bringing in Trump and his associates and hangers on is going to reduce the levels of corruption?
I think we have an already established corrupt team in (and around) the White House right now. Throwing out the entire group is a good thing just from a disruption standpoint for this issue.
It will take Trump and his crew time to figure out how to accept bribes without getting caught, HRC has been doing it for decades (at least since her Cattle Futures' days) and is polished to the point where it's not possible to figure out where her public activities end and her private enrichment begins.
Saul Degraw:
Are you going to be making these flippant comments when people start getting beat up?...
Are we going to hear apologies from you in a few years if these don't happen? If all these claims of racism turn out to be just rhetorical clubs to get people to vote for one party?
Or worse, if minorities end up actually better off because the free market is allowed to work?
At it's root I'm pro-growth.
What I'd like:
1) Reduce the size of the tax code to something a human can understand.
2) Reduce the level of corruption in government (probably already done by throwing the current set of rascals out). Having the IRS used to suppress speech and the Sec of State soliciting "donations" seem like bad things.
3) Set the Supreme court on a path where it doesn't become hostile to business and does show hostility to expansion of government.
4) Immigration reform, i.e. making a set of laws which can and will be followed, this will require some form of amnesty.
5) Move the GOP away from the social warriors (i.e. the ones who want sex-police and to arrest a third of all women for wanting to control their reproduction) and focus on things which grow the economy.
6) Reduce crony capitalism and congressional influence peddling.
Why I didn't vote for Trump (i.e. what I fear).
a) Ending Free trade.
b) Immigration reform handled badly would be a mess.
c) Pulling the US back from being global cop means handing that job to Russia or other interested/problematic parties.
We are still at the point where we can patch *broken* genes to what they are ‘supposed’ to be based off other people, but as far as I know, we don’t even know how to make someone slightly more athletic, much less do anything *outside* of normal human variation.
"Normal human variation" (NHV) includes lots and lots of useful things. Everything from lots of intelligence to a lack of genetic diseases to supermodel good looks. NHV includes myostatin-related-muscle-hypertrophy (links below), muscles that might not deteriorate if you have a desk job.
It'd be using the power of the government to corruptly swing elections (even if it takes Billions of dollars and corrupting the judicial process). My expectation is that holding Trump's charity up to a microscope (where Clinton's pretty clearly has not been) is another example.
It does not work that way. Game changers *are* incremental technology.
Yes and no. Technology tends to increase incrementally, it's effects on society may not.
As far as Genetic Engineering goes, right now we're building tools which make gene manipulation possible, easy, and cheap. We're already read everything, but we understand very little of how the code works, so we're building databases to explain that. These tools which build tools or explain how other things work are still growing, but the rate of growth and the rate of our increase in understanding seems high.
With cloning sheep, making stronger corn, and three parent'ed people as a baseline, I'm not sure what +X% more technology means in terms of our abilities, but we might be staring at multiple game changers, and it's hard for me to picture this NOT happening in the next 50 years.
Designer kids may be a boring technology when they finally come out, but the impact on society won't be.
The next game changer is almost certainly self-driving cars.
2) Considering how much you owe Deutsche Bank, what do you think about the fact they will have trouble playing their fine for their role in defrauding people during the mortgage crisis?
And, maybe most importantly, does the size of the fine have anything to do with the fact that they're Trump's bank?
As *supposedly* part of Warren Buffet’s shtick was ‘making sure to investigate companies he was investigating it’, a lot of his shine has worn off recently, and the jury is kinda out if he’s *actually* an investor that beats the market, or just a guy that was lucky until now.
He's been doing his thing for 60 years and has gone from being a millionaire to Billionaire to many many Billions.
The scale of his mistakes and successes has certainly gotten larger, and he's also 86, it's possible he's off his prime.
Except, uh, it actually hasn’t. It’s gone into *incremental* upgrades, but, in reality, that’s *always* what it’s gone into…it’s just, between the 20s and 60s, a lot of stuff incrementally got good enough (Or at least small and cheap enough) for households to use.
Incremental is great (useful, etc) but a few times a century we get a real game changer. Genetic engineering might be next. :)
One of the problems with the idea of a guy who can consistently beat the market is... why should he do it for you? He should charge a premium for that service equal to most of the "extra" money you'd get. Which in turn leads to lots of people claiming they can do this, charging "appropriately", and then handing in substandard results after subtracting their pricy fees.
I'd love to think that Trump is done... but I never understood his attraction to voters to start with. A lot of the people claiming he's done have claimed that lots of times, that doesn't bode well.
When they do this, they consider exactly the sorts of things you ask about:
Sure, that's the example of a well functioning gov program. That's how it's supposed to work.
But nothing in your description justifies what we see in practice, which is exponential growth. Even if we subtract GNP per cap growth, it's still exponential growth.
Which is why I keep pointing out that we have serious long term problems stemming from all this, and why I try to bring up causes... but there's a lot of people who look at these trends and proclaim 'don't worry, be happy', it can't happen here, and if it does we can use hyperinflation.
The first step in dealing with a problem is to admit that there's a problem.
...countries don’t have programs to vaccinate against mumps.
You can substitute in "disease X" if you want.
First, a lot of the costs in a vaccine program are gonna be fixed, so it really oughta scale with per capita GDP.
I'm not following. Can you use an example?
New vaccines protecting against new diseases are being developed pretty consistently. For you have more money (’cause you have more revenue) you can protect people against other infections, like HPV or varicella, and derive more public health benefits.
True, but this is also an example of a program increasing scope that ought to be budget approved if it's going to require more money.
How much is the vaccination, how nasty is the disease, what happens if we wait 7 years for the drug to go off patent? If it's a nasty disease and we don't have budget, then should we be ending vaccination for disease "X" and doing this one instead?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Jack Move II”
So you're claiming that an inhumanly complex tax code doesn't cause economic distortions which hurt growth?
That all the hoops we make business go through in order to create a job doesn't cause side effects?
That the taxes (etc) we lard onto creating a job doesn't reduce job creation?
That the various massive bureaucracies which only exist to deal with other massive bureaucracies add so much value that it doesn't hurt growth?
That every regulation is worthwhile, even in total sum, and every gov bureaucrat never abuses his role? That Congress is never bribed into doing economically foolish things? That the regulators are never captured?
On “The Scorecard”
System seems to have eaten my post filled with links to liberals rioting. :(
What are you claiming here, that liberals aren't rioting? That conservatives did after Obama won? Or is it just that the left gets a pass because their feelings were hurt and left-violence is always justified?
"
Right now we have multiple cities with (left wing) riots because the wrong guy won the election, we've seen similar (left wing) riots in other situations, like judges letting people go. I can't remember when the right rioted because of losing an election and Obama won two of them, but with the left it's barely news.
If my city burns down it will probably be because BLM didn't like some judge's verdict. With all of that, we're supposed to be worried about the Right being violent?
My expectation is that in a year the minority death toll will be the same as it is now, and the big villain will continue to be the war on drugs as opposed to racism... but the culture of victimhood will be used again the moment the Dems need a political point to score.
"
Copy/paste error.
"
RE: Spelling.
Sorry.
Somehow I can't picture Trump walking away from his family over this one.
My expectation is that his family gets money (Trump's true love) and the alt-right will get vague promises of something happening in the future which won't come due until after he leaves office.
On “Jack Move II”
Agreed,
:sigh: Also agreed.
However, return the country to 5% growth and complaints about growth become small squeaks. Obama was an extreme disappointment from that point of view, either he didn't know how to create growth or he didn't care to because it'd mean sacrificing some leftist white elephant. Fundamentally this was why he and his just got thrown out.
So now it's Trump's turn. If he can create growth, then the rest of it doesn't matter and he'll be in charge for a while.
"
Fighting climate change currently means
1) Funding boondoggles.
2) Building coal plants rather than nuclear.
3) Insisting poor people stay poor.
4) Signing treatings which claim future politicians will make the painful choices the currents ones aren't willing to make.
If the greens were screaming for nuclear with one voice we might do something, as it is we're not and I see little evidence this will change in the future.
On “The Scorecard”
He was certainly supportive when his daughter converted to Jewdaism and thinks the world of his son-in-law and grandchildren.
"
Right now we have riots and arson from the left because the wrong person won the election. Notice the total lack of riots/arson when Obama won, either time, or when Bill won, etc. Similarly if Trump had lost I'd expect we wouldn't have seen riots/etc. Moving beyond the election we've seen BLM have riots/arson on a reasonably regular basis when the wrong thing happens or they disagree with some judge.
The real threat of violence mostly comes from the left, not the right. The left just likes to pretend the right is violent because it makes a good straw man to drum up support for their policies.
The usual things which are illegal will remain illegal and the legal system is well able to arrest people for brutalizing others.
"
I think we have an already established corrupt team in (and around) the White House right now. Throwing out the entire group is a good thing just from a disruption standpoint for this issue.
It will take Trump and his crew time to figure out how to accept bribes without getting caught, HRC has been doing it for decades (at least since her Cattle Futures' days) and is polished to the point where it's not possible to figure out where her public activities end and her private enrichment begins.
"
@saul-degraw
Are we going to hear apologies from you in a few years if these don't happen? If all these claims of racism turn out to be just rhetorical clubs to get people to vote for one party?
Or worse, if minorities end up actually better off because the free market is allowed to work?
"
At it's root I'm pro-growth.
What I'd like:
1) Reduce the size of the tax code to something a human can understand.
2) Reduce the level of corruption in government (probably already done by throwing the current set of rascals out). Having the IRS used to suppress speech and the Sec of State soliciting "donations" seem like bad things.
3) Set the Supreme court on a path where it doesn't become hostile to business and does show hostility to expansion of government.
4) Immigration reform, i.e. making a set of laws which can and will be followed, this will require some form of amnesty.
5) Move the GOP away from the social warriors (i.e. the ones who want sex-police and to arrest a third of all women for wanting to control their reproduction) and focus on things which grow the economy.
6) Reduce crony capitalism and congressional influence peddling.
Why I didn't vote for Trump (i.e. what I fear).
a) Ending Free trade.
b) Immigration reform handled badly would be a mess.
c) Pulling the US back from being global cop means handing that job to Russia or other interested/problematic parties.
On “Moore’s Law Investing Strategy”
"Normal human variation" (NHV) includes lots and lots of useful things. Everything from lots of intelligence to a lack of genetic diseases to supermodel good looks. NHV includes myostatin-related-muscle-hypertrophy (links below), muscles that might not deteriorate if you have a desk job.
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/myostatin-related-muscle-hypertrophy#
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/5278028/ns/health-genetics/t/genetic-mutationturns-tot-superboy/#.V_U1-fkrLRY
http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2009/01/liam_hoekstra_3_is_all_muscle.html
On “This Election Is Probably Over”
It'd be using the power of the government to corruptly swing elections (even if it takes Billions of dollars and corrupting the judicial process). My expectation is that holding Trump's charity up to a microscope (where Clinton's pretty clearly has not been) is another example.
On “What’s On Your Ballot?”
If memory serves, a few other states have tried something like this over the years, the costs grow until the state backs out.
So good luck with this, maybe you'll get it right and face up to how much rationing it will take and find a sane way to implement them.
On “Moore’s Law Investing Strategy”
Yes and no. Technology tends to increase incrementally, it's effects on society may not.
As far as Genetic Engineering goes, right now we're building tools which make gene manipulation possible, easy, and cheap. We're already read everything, but we understand very little of how the code works, so we're building databases to explain that. These tools which build tools or explain how other things work are still growing, but the rate of growth and the rate of our increase in understanding seems high.
With cloning sheep, making stronger corn, and three parent'ed people as a baseline, I'm not sure what +X% more technology means in terms of our abilities, but we might be staring at multiple game changers, and it's hard for me to picture this NOT happening in the next 50 years.
Designer kids may be a boring technology when they finally come out, but the impact on society won't be.
I think that's a reasonable guess.
On “This Election Is Probably Over”
And, maybe most importantly, does the size of the fine have anything to do with the fact that they're Trump's bank?
On “Moore’s Law Investing Strategy”
He's been doing his thing for 60 years and has gone from being a millionaire to Billionaire to many many Billions.
The scale of his mistakes and successes has certainly gotten larger, and he's also 86, it's possible he's off his prime.
Incremental is great (useful, etc) but a few times a century we get a real game changer. Genetic engineering might be next. :)
"
One of the problems with the idea of a guy who can consistently beat the market is... why should he do it for you? He should charge a premium for that service equal to most of the "extra" money you'd get. Which in turn leads to lots of people claiming they can do this, charging "appropriately", and then handing in substandard results after subtracting their pricy fees.
On “This Election Is Probably Over”
I'd love to think that Trump is done... but I never understood his attraction to voters to start with. A lot of the people claiming he's done have claimed that lots of times, that doesn't bode well.
"
The early rounds were basically a name recognition (and/or who can get the most media coverage) contest, and Trump wins that hands down.
On “The American Interest: A Republic If You Can Keep It”
Yes. And that tracks decently well with the gov's growth into command+control and social(istic) programs.
"
Sure, that's the example of a well functioning gov program. That's how it's supposed to work.
But nothing in your description justifies what we see in practice, which is exponential growth. Even if we subtract GNP per cap growth, it's still exponential growth.
Which is why I keep pointing out that we have serious long term problems stemming from all this, and why I try to bring up causes... but there's a lot of people who look at these trends and proclaim 'don't worry, be happy', it can't happen here, and if it does we can use hyperinflation.
The first step in dealing with a problem is to admit that there's a problem.
"
@j_a
@stillwater
Fair enough.
Graph of long term growth per capita.
http://visualizingeconomics.com/blog/2011/03/08/long-term-real-growth-in-us-gdp-per-capita-1871-2009
Graph of long term real growth
https://visualizingeconomics.squarespace.com/blog/2010/11/03/us-gdp-1871-2009
Hmm... instead of growing 5x we grew 4x, so pop growth was indeed a 20% effect, or in other words it's a bit player in all this.
"
You can substitute in "disease X" if you want.
I'm not following. Can you use an example?
True, but this is also an example of a program increasing scope that ought to be budget approved if it's going to require more money.
How much is the vaccination, how nasty is the disease, what happens if we wait 7 years for the drug to go off patent? If it's a nasty disease and we don't have budget, then should we be ending vaccination for disease "X" and doing this one instead?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.