All this is based on an article of faith: That government is massively holding back growth, and getting rid of government will increase growth.
We have 800,000 people whose jobs are to help others fill out tax forms. If we includes businesses we'd be above a million. Are you seriously claiming this adds value to the economy?
Or that an inhumanly complex tax code doesn't cause economic distortions and unintended consequences? Or that really large bureaucracies don't increase overhead, which in turn are passed to consumers?
So to end an old policy, you need to adopt a new one that allows for an adjustment period.
Agreed.
But the core of the issue is that the parties like conducting policy via the tax code. It’s a convenient way to provide a benefit to a favored group.
The entire "Trump" protest is, imho, something which would never have happened if we had a decent level of growth.
Put differently, if Obama had done a decent job on the economy, Hillary would have won with a "4 more years" slogan. All of these policies and short term trade offs which put growth last have long term consequences.
Those problematic personality traits? They existed before the campaign. They existed and were documented decades ago, when he was just a bad real estate developer.
You're suggesting that he's so unstable he could start a nuclear war on a whim.
This is the same guy who marries gold-diggers and manages to keep his money, manages to increase his money, and manages to raise really functional children who turn into functional adults. His personality flaws always seem to increase the public eye on him and seem... not so much calculated as cultivated to work to his advantage. He's been doing this for 50 years, if he were actually unstable he'd have melted down long before now...
...and he personally would lose hundreds of millions (or Billions) of dollars in a nuclear war which probably guaranties our safety right there.
Every one of which carefully evaluated and polled for maximum impact and minimum offence. And none of which she believed because there was this vast difference between what she said in public and what she said in private. She's for whatever is popular at the moment and against whatever is unpopular at the moment. You can add that to her list of negatives.
Pence is highly unlikely to pull out of NATO, invade Syria, nuke Libya, or otherwise do ‘dangerous’ things. We also don’t have to worry about him sexually assaulting Merkel, starting up a star chamber to investigate his political opponents, etc
This is like saying William Shatner liked beating people up just because Captain Kirk did.
At the moment Trump is a blank slate. What we know of him is a straw-man created by his public act and the insults of his political foes.
Think of him as Obama, 8 years ago, except Trump has a track record of private sector success.
Hopefully you don't get to be a multi-billionaire without some level of sanity; And the reports from the people who know him personally support the idea that it is an manipulative act (which admittedly he's really comfortable with).
I’m arguing that it was reasonable to think in advance that she was the best choice.
She's got no message other than "it's my turn."
She's very old and not charismatic.
Despite having far more money and support, she lost to an unknown 8 years ago.
She's been openly mixing her personal and public business since then to the point where she's got more than 150 million dollars.
She carries all the baggage of the various ethical scandals from previous decades.
I'm excluding fixing the primary election again Bernie and the email server because these things weren't known two years ago, but it was really well known this was the sort of thing she ran around doing as a matter of habit.
I don't know if Sanders could have won, but Biden could have just because he wasn't Trump and didn't have anywhere near the baggage and ethics issues Clinton did.
Does anyone know if Biden is charismatic? I've never heard him give a speech.
But lets not over-estimate how simple it would be to apply simple solutions to real world problems.
Simplicity is much harder to game than complexity.
The current tax code is deliberately made complex because of Congress having been captured by layer after layer of special interests, and because of Congress trying to use the tax code to micromanage the economy and pick winners and losers, and because Congress uses the tax code as a stick/carrot to drum up campaign contributions.
Then after Congress gets done with that the rules are handed over to a bureaucracy which uses their "interpretation" of these rules to empire build, and large complex companies often defensively build their own bureaucracies (which also empire build) to deal with the gov's.
So how much of a growth hit do we take because of this mess? 1%? 2%? If it's 3% then a full fix takes us to 5% growth right there... however we'd be asking Congress to give up a lot of power, fund extorting ability, and face down a lot of upset people.
Millions of people lose their jobs. Without it's tax breaks, green energy probably dies. Lots of people (myself included) have too much house if their mortgage isn't tax deductible.
And that all that would be worth it for 5% growth.
Sanders might have won Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by razor thin margins.
Sanders would have convinced me to vote for Trump rather than Johnson. One of the hallmarks of socialism is food shortages. That makes my involvement personal and is a big enough threat that Trump easily becomes the lesser evil.
Also Sanders never had bricks thrown at him. The DNC and RNC both went really light on him, if he'd been the actual nominee the gloves would have come off.
start trying to figure out how to bait Trump into really goddamn stupid moves. He *already* doesn’t trust a lot of the Republican establishment, and he is perfectly willing to totally destroy his relationship with Congress because he is a tiny-handed baby-man.
Impeach him and Pence is in charge. Pence is a solid conservative, Trump is a Rino.
I don't understand why Pence would be an improvement from your point of view.
Let’s be real here: so-called “BLM” riots occur after unarmed black folks are shot dead by cops. Which doesn’t strike me as either a conservative or liberal, but rather just a bunch of folks who are tired of being mistreated by cops and the criminal justice system.
Ferguson, the father of 'hands up don't shoot', was burned because of a lie. The "unarmed" criminal attacked a cop, tried to take his gun, and then continued.
Don Zeko:
Does anyone think sustained 5% growth is any more plausible than bringing the factories back?
How much economic distortion do we get from the tax code? How much from regulatory capture, how much could we gain from more free trade, immigration, from a fully functional educational system, etc?
I think 5% is possible on paper, I also think it'd take multiple massive political upheavals to get to it.
For example, going to a flat tax (or something describable on one page of paper) would mean most every tax attorney/accountant is out of work. Company bureaucracies would shrink, and the overhead associated with this would fall, although fundamentally we'd be shifting unproductive resources to productive resources, we'd be digesting the economic disruption for years.
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.
On “Jack Move II”
We have 800,000 people whose jobs are to help others fill out tax forms. If we includes businesses we'd be above a million. Are you seriously claiming this adds value to the economy?
Or that an inhumanly complex tax code doesn't cause economic distortions and unintended consequences? Or that really large bureaucracies don't increase overhead, which in turn are passed to consumers?
"
Agreed.
The entire "Trump" protest is, imho, something which would never have happened if we had a decent level of growth.
Put differently, if Obama had done a decent job on the economy, Hillary would have won with a "4 more years" slogan. All of these policies and short term trade offs which put growth last have long term consequences.
On “The Scorecard”
You're suggesting that he's so unstable he could start a nuclear war on a whim.
This is the same guy who marries gold-diggers and manages to keep his money, manages to increase his money, and manages to raise really functional children who turn into functional adults. His personality flaws always seem to increase the public eye on him and seem... not so much calculated as cultivated to work to his advantage. He's been doing this for 50 years, if he were actually unstable he'd have melted down long before now...
...and he personally would lose hundreds of millions (or Billions) of dollars in a nuclear war which probably guaranties our safety right there.
"
Every one of which carefully evaluated and polled for maximum impact and minimum offence. And none of which she believed because there was this vast difference between what she said in public and what she said in private. She's for whatever is popular at the moment and against whatever is unpopular at the moment. You can add that to her list of negatives.
"
This is like saying William Shatner liked beating people up just because Captain Kirk did.
At the moment Trump is a blank slate. What we know of him is a straw-man created by his public act and the insults of his political foes.
Think of him as Obama, 8 years ago, except Trump has a track record of private sector success.
Hopefully you don't get to be a multi-billionaire without some level of sanity; And the reports from the people who know him personally support the idea that it is an manipulative act (which admittedly he's really comfortable with).
"
She's got no message other than "it's my turn."
She's very old and not charismatic.
Despite having far more money and support, she lost to an unknown 8 years ago.
She's been openly mixing her personal and public business since then to the point where she's got more than 150 million dollars.
She carries all the baggage of the various ethical scandals from previous decades.
I'm excluding fixing the primary election again Bernie and the email server because these things weren't known two years ago, but it was really well known this was the sort of thing she ran around doing as a matter of habit.
I don't know if Sanders could have won, but Biden could have just because he wasn't Trump and didn't have anywhere near the baggage and ethics issues Clinton did.
Does anyone know if Biden is charismatic? I've never heard him give a speech.
On “Jack Move II”
@brandon-berg @j-r
Advanced economies uniformly have governments which adopt growth hobbling policies. The problem is the policies, not the "advanced" part.
Only 10% of GDP spent on the government. "Magic" indeed.
http://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Singapore/Government_size/
"
Simplicity is much harder to game than complexity.
The current tax code is deliberately made complex because of Congress having been captured by layer after layer of special interests, and because of Congress trying to use the tax code to micromanage the economy and pick winners and losers, and because Congress uses the tax code as a stick/carrot to drum up campaign contributions.
Then after Congress gets done with that the rules are handed over to a bureaucracy which uses their "interpretation" of these rules to empire build, and large complex companies often defensively build their own bureaucracies (which also empire build) to deal with the gov's.
So how much of a growth hit do we take because of this mess? 1%? 2%? If it's 3% then a full fix takes us to 5% growth right there... however we'd be asking Congress to give up a lot of power, fund extorting ability, and face down a lot of upset people.
Millions of people lose their jobs. Without it's tax breaks, green energy probably dies. Lots of people (myself included) have too much house if their mortgage isn't tax deductible.
And that all that would be worth it for 5% growth.
On “Stephen Bush: Would Bernie Sanders have done better against Donald Trump?”
Sanders would have convinced me to vote for Trump rather than Johnson. One of the hallmarks of socialism is food shortages. That makes my involvement personal and is a big enough threat that Trump easily becomes the lesser evil.
Also Sanders never had bricks thrown at him. The DNC and RNC both went really light on him, if he'd been the actual nominee the gloves would have come off.
On “The Scorecard”
Impeach him and Pence is in charge. Pence is a solid conservative, Trump is a Rino.
I don't understand why Pence would be an improvement from your point of view.
"
Ferguson, the father of 'hands up don't shoot', was burned because of a lie. The "unarmed" criminal attacked a cop, tried to take his gun, and then continued.
On “Jack Move II”
How much economic distortion do we get from the tax code? How much from regulatory capture, how much could we gain from more free trade, immigration, from a fully functional educational system, etc?
I think 5% is possible on paper, I also think it'd take multiple massive political upheavals to get to it.
For example, going to a flat tax (or something describable on one page of paper) would mean most every tax attorney/accountant is out of work. Company bureaucracies would shrink, and the overhead associated with this would fall, although fundamentally we'd be shifting unproductive resources to productive resources, we'd be digesting the economic disruption for years.
"
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
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.