Oscar Gordon:
Double down, hexadecimal all the way!

Weirdly enough, there are some applications where you *want* hexadecimal. For example if you're down there on the bare metal of a computer chip and you're looking for patterns.

I simply don't care about "plagiarism" in a politician (much less his super-model wife who speaks English as a 2nd language).

A job of a politician is to steal other people's ideas, repackage them so they're politically practicable, and make them into laws. You judge him by whether he's stealing good ideas, and doing a good job on the repackaging.

By that standard he gets a total pass on this. He can repeat Lincoln's (or Obama's) entire speech as far as I care. I also could care less about the whole lack-of-dignity he brings to anything he touches. I don't like it, but whatever.

However another of his jobs is effective personal management and crisis management. By those standards this was bad. Arguably Trump has to be an effective manager because of his empire so it's probably more a short term than long term thing but whatever.

My problem with him is he's trying to repackage bad ideas. He's running on a lot of things which are economic poison and/or totally unworkable.

tl;dr – If someone wanted to bribe Hillary Clinton from 2013-2015, the correct way to do it would be to say ‘I am giving this *entirely legal* giant bag of money to you, Hillary Clinton, because I want you to like me.’, and she would say ‘No, please, give that *entirely legal* giant bag of money to my daughter instead, I don’t want it showing up on my released tax returns when I run for president.’.

That would be the daughter who has a net worth of $15 million dollars (google)? The Clinton Foundation reportedly pays her *nothing*, NBC paid her $600k/year during her less than 3 years there.

So working off the assumption that Clinton had “NO EXPERIENCE” and showing all sorts of mathematical models for how an inexperienced trader would fare is just straight bullshit.

"Experience" goes to her being there at all. The impossible part comes from making silly amounts of money off of shorts in market that doubled in value in a year (and yes, I realize part of me thinking this is totally outrageous is I have a lot more experience in this sort of thing than most).

That's over and above her first day where she got a 6.5x increase in a flat market where nothing increased by that amount. If I recall the reporting of this correctly, she had to make a dozen or so carefully timed trades to capture various options bouncing around in the market.

Those numbers they're tossing around in wiki claiming what she did was a LOT harder than winning the lottery? They match up really well with her win/loss ratio and various other stats they've got up in there.

People playing by the rules can't do this sort of thing.
Experienced people playing by the rules aren't going to try.

Of course... the cattle futures stuff was heavily investigated by incredibly partisan teams and despite the tin-foil brigade screaming about how obvious it was, nothing was ever found — despite money being poured out like water to find something.

There were no official investigations of the trading and Clinton was never charged with any wrongdoing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy

Morat20:
God, I love the smell of conspiracy theories in the morning. I also love someone trying to pretend you can calculate the odds of futures trading retroactively. That’s fun. Trillions to one that you’d make 60 grand trading futures while heavily leveraged. Someone should tell the futures market it shouldn’t exist.

"Highly leveraged", would make sense if she had just a few trades and made a lot on them, but that's not what happened. She showed that she can consistently beat the market, and not only that, time the market. Note "highly leveraged" also isn't normally isn't allowed for people who don't have adequate depth, if her $1000 "investment" had turned into a $100k loss then that would have been a problem for her broker. Except this very obviously wasn't a normal situation or relationship.

Hillary Rodham Clinton was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released yesterday.

The computerized records of her trades, which the White House obtained from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, show for the first time how she was able to turn her initial investment into $6,300 overnight.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/whitewater/stories/wwtr940527.htm

Her trades don't make any sense. She claims she studied the market a great deal, but her trades (betting short) in a rising market. That's nuts.

Financial writer Edward Chancellor noted in 1999 that Clinton made her money by betting "on the short side at a time when cattle prices doubled."

These results are quite remarkable. Two-thirds of her trades showed a profit by the end of the day she made them and 80 percent were ultimately profitable. Many of her trades took place at or near the best prices of the day. Only four explanations can account for these remarkable results. Blair may have been an exceptionally good trader. Hillary Clinton may have been exceptionally lucky. Blair may have been front-running other orders. Or Blair may have arranged to have a broker fraudulently assign trades to benefit Clinton's account.[17]

"At or near the best prices of the day" means she's simply being given the best trades after the fact. Her broker made a ton of trades, she got the best.

Morat20:
The conspiracy theory mongering about the Clinton Foundation is particular telling, though. From neutral sources, it’s a bog-standard charitable foundation. The only thing even vaguely different about it is it’s not a pass-through charity — they don’t collect funds and then give them to other charities, but do the bulk of the charitable work “in-house”.

I particularly like the sneering implications it’s some sort of bribery machine, because clearly charities are never audited, don’t have to report their spending, and can be used as a personal piggy bank by the Clinton’s without the board even knowing or the spending being tracked. Because unlike every other charity in the United States, the IRS and various watchdogs are totally unaware the CF even exists.

The list of people giving money to CF is very strange, Blackwater (the merc group), the Saudis, and so on (so, yes, it includes people Hillary deals with professionally as SoS).
The Structure of CF is very strange.
When she was Secretary of State, Hillary was getting 700 emails a month from CF (this may explain why she was so adamant that she needed a private server).

The IRS (etc) have to deal with their various publicly filed documents (I put their 2013 tax returns at the bottom to show the level of detail), and yes, they don't have entries for "bribes and kickbacks".

However these sorts of financial oddities and conflicts of interests seem to follow the Clintons around, and yes, they don't normally rise to the level where they can be arrested (the Statue of Limitations had elapsed for the Cattle thing before The NYT went with it).

But notice that the "appearance of impropriety" isn't even an issue (the Sec of State collecting money for her charity from people she's dealing with as Sec State stinks to high heaven), the issue is whether or not they can be arrested, and the answer is clearly 'no'.

They seem willing to go right up to the edge of what's provable, as opposed to what's legal, much less what looks bad.

https://www.clintonfoundation.org/sites/default/files/clinton_foundation_report_public_11-19-14.pdf

You're reversing things. It was Hillary herself who repeatedly claimed she managed her own account, from her own "research", and it was only later that this was shown to be a bald face lie.

Further if you saw her whitewater testimony, her statements on this thing were amazingly weaselly worded. If memory serves, she was asked if she managed her own account and she replied something like she doesn't remember not managing it.

She and her husband still have student loans, she has NO experience in this at all, Cattle Futures was a game where 3/4ths of the "investors" lose money, her initial investment was a lot of money for her at the time, and these trades were heavily on the margin (meaning it was FAR more likely that she'd lose tens of thousands of dollars than gain it).

She and Bill are both intelligent, it makes NO sense to expose themselves to this kind of a financial risk. This is up there with reading a book on juggling and then getting started with chainsaws. Further it also makes no sense for a broker to let her trade an account this thin on the margin this deeply, or for that matter to even HAVE an account at all.

And yes, the market was indeed booming... which actually makes the situation worse since she made money SHORTING it.

without anyone explaining WHO bribed her, HOW they managed to do it through a futures market, or WHY they bribed her — or what she did in return.

HOW is easy. Her dealer was a guy who made lots and lots of trades, at the end of the day he just retroactively gave the best ones to her.

WHY is easy. She's the wife of the newly elected governor. The spouse which is out of power makes mysterious money on behalf of the one who is in power.

WHO is interesting. James Blair (the broker) was another lawyer and the outside counsel to Arkansas' largest employer (Tyson Foods).

So, shock, she's benefiting from someone who represents people who do business in front of her husband. And, also shock, Tyson Foods was treated rather well during this time period by the Clinton Governorship.

The Times also reported, “During Mr. Clinton's tenure in Arkansas, Tyson benefited from a variety of state actions, including $9 million in government loans, the placement of company executives on important state boards and favorable decisions on environmental issues.”

Tyson appears to have obtained these results for what looks like a bribe delivered though Hillary Clinton’s commodities account. To quote the company’s former chairman: politics is “a series of unsentimental transactions between those who need votes and those who have money.”

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2016/02/02/Why-37-Year-Old-Clinton-Financial-Scandal-Still-Relevant

And none of this is hard proof of any crimes or precise exchange of money for favors. Which doesn't change that her behavior (and very much the math) makes no sense if everything was legal.

Dark Matter: Hillary is openly corrupt and totally without morals or ethic
Mike Schilling: Also, Obama is a secret Muslim..

By all means, if it's easy and obvious, please explain the hundreds of millions of dollars that she's acquired (Billions if we count what has gone through the Clinton Foundation and we should). My assumption is that she's worth the money... but what is it that she's does, and for whom?

And while you're at it, please explain her vast abilities (even as a total raw beginner) with Cattle Futures which was roughly equiv to consistently winning the lottery.

Odds of what she did: 1 : 31 Trillion (this is at *best* and gives her the benefit of the doubt, link)
Odds of winning Powerball: 1 : 180 Million (Source: Google, included for perspective);

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy

My expectation is "The Clinton Foundation" is just the modern update of "Cattle". As corrupt and dishonest as she is, imho she'd make a better President than Donald. But IMHO it's a problem when politicians "mysteriously" acquire large amounts of money.

It's a much larger problem when the press and their supporters turn a blind eye to this sort of thing.

Compare Hillary to Obama (or better yet, Obama's wife).

Normal people, even at the level of the Obamas, don't have hundreds of millions of dollars mysteriously show up in their bank accounts with thin excuses on how it was 'earned'.

Hillary and Bill have always been involved in these sorts of things, they're both trained lawyers who apparently go right up to the edge of what-can-be-proved, as opposed to what-is-legal, much less the-appearance-of-impropriety.

Edit: And agreed, I'm not impressed with Trump's basic competence for this sort of thing, which is among the many reasons why I think he should be kept out of the White House even at the expense of electing Hillary.

I thought David Boaz summed it up rather well, meaning Trump would be worse... although to be fair I don't think Trump actually believes half of what he says, but it is what he's running on.

Hillary is openly corrupt and totally without morals or ethics, so it's easy to picture her making deals with a GOP Congress.

Further, Hillary getting herself arrested while President wouldn't be all that bad, but the last time we saw a truly awful GOP President the result was a Dem supermajority.

Stillwater: ...The concept of base mobilization strikes me as implying that partisan individuals within institutions with the power to determine policy are (as you said upthread) pandering to the emotions of a segment of the electorate to gain their votes.

Not "power", more like "money". My expectation is that the people funding BLM are the same people paying for Hillary. Yes, the bulk of the movement are true believers (in what is unclear) but it's odd how their actions never really do her damage. Bern seems a lot more like a natural ally for BLM than Hillary, but that's not how it played out.

BLM wants "massive change". Bern ran as a revolutionary, Hillary is a moderate and one of the founders of a big expansion of the war on drugs/crime. Somehow he was taken to task and his meetings disrupted while she was not. That's over and above the idea that Hillary is going to do the massively good things for BLM that Obama has not.

Stillwater:Btw, my above comment reminds me of one of the few times I’ve robustly agreed with something Hillary Clinton has said during the primary. When BLM confronted her...

Oh, I agree with her too. She handled that really, really well... it made me wonder how much of a "surprise" BLM's visit was.

Hillary doesn't think on her feet, adlib, or go off script, if she's pressed she'll just evade and say basically 'nothing' (mostly this is a strength). And that was the only time I can think of where BLM "confronted" her.

Somehow I suspect after the election when they're no longer useful, BLM will experience a substantial budget cut. In short I think they're being used.

...it's not that I disagree with you (I don't), but imho the BLM movement is channeling their efforts unproductively. If the movement were about reducing the number of dead bodies, then ending the war on drugs needs to be part of the conversation and, as far as I can tell, it's not.

Short of that, there are things we can/should do, but mostly they also isn't part of the conversation. The list(s) of demands seems pretty unorganized and fairly removed from reality (dismantling the police is unlikely to lead to good things for their communities).

This seems more like base mobilization than a serious movement.

I'm a day late but I'll chime in.

IMHO it's naive to think tearing down the system would make things better, as opposed to worse.

I also wonder how much of this is election year pandering to mobilize the base.

Guy:
Honestly, I might just say “all referenda require a 55% percent majority to change the status quo”, on the assumption that anything that winds up on the ballot is important and 50%+1 is vulnerable to noise on close decisions.

I don't know... the whole point of bypassing the politicians is to avoid the "agent" problem (where what's good for the agent isn't for the people). A 50%+1 vote is the legit will of the people, including the ability to be stupid.

Do we really want to establish a principal where 55%(-1) can declare they despise the current situation and have them still be told, "not good enough to override your political masters"? The powers in charge already have lots of ways to put their thumb on the scales, and I have to assume they did (competently is a different question).

I understand the attraction to wanting to override this one, but it seems like something which could and would be abused just as a matter of course.

Not supervillain, just an openly corrupt politician. And btw I'd vote for her to keep Trump out of the White House.

Go look at "Clinton Cattle Futures wiki". What she claims to have done is roughly the same as winning the lottery every week for months.

If she can actually get in/out of the market at it's absolute low/high on a daily basis, that's a Trillion (with a "T") dollar skill which no one else on the earth has and she's wasting her talents.

Now, the $64,000 question, of course:"Is this like or not like what Hillary Clinton was doing with her email server?"

Bush's actions are the nose of the camel, Hillary's are the entire camel. It's what server is hiding that I find disturbing.

Hillary is getting 700 emails a month from The Clinton Foundation (TCF).
Ergo she's actively taking part, presumably raising money...
...from the people she's dealing with as Secretary of State

That would be over and above how Bill Clinton's "speaking fees" skyrocketed after she became Secretary of State. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/more-money-more-problems-a-guide-to-hillary-clintons-cash-scandals/391299/

At it's root we're trying to compare the hiding of (assumed) dirty tricks getting Bush elected and what words do we want to use to describe this? Conflict of interest? Bribery? Clinton Cattle Futures 2?

"awkward or embarrassing" would be viewed as "dangerous" to a politician if said information would cost them the election.

Very good article, thank you for bringing it to my attention.

DavidTC: Additionally, offshoring won’t raise the GDP at all!

The Scientific consensus disagrees with you. Free Trade increases the GDP.

DavidTC: cheaper things *lower* the GDP, not raises it, due to people generally spending less and savings more.

Then you must be thrilled that the cost of healthcare and education are going up. Good for society and the GDP are they?

DavidTC: Again, taxes apparently do not exist in your universe. Because there *are* taxes, if everyone spent everything the multiplier would be, essentially, two.

First, the multiplier deals with taxes and it's a measured value (which you proposed to be "2" and I agreed to).

Secondly, if everyone spent everything then the multiplier would be "infinity". I spent $500 on a TV => the guy selling TVs spends $500 on food => the food guy spends $500 elsewhere, etc. In reality money is taken out via taxes, savings, and so forth.

DavidTC: what money does to the *economy*, not what it does to *jobs*. Which, as I keep pointing out, are not the same thing.

If I tell you the GDP is tanking because of the economy, are you going to think the economy is also creating a lot of jobs? Increasing the GDP is good for jobs (and yes, the job market lags recoveries), and decreasing it is bad. Putting exact numbers on that is hard but those are the generalities.

DavidTC: You have conflated ‘jobs’ and ‘the economy’ again, assuming that because the economy is doing better, that jobs exist. In fact, that appears to be heart of everything you say, because you simply cannot grasp that something that is good for ‘the economy’ can be bad for the average American.

Are you claiming "the average American" would benefit by spending lots more money on clothes?

And btw, agreed, we have problems with job creation (although there are signs we're getting closer to full employment again short of changing laws). However there are things we can do to increase job creation without tearing apart the economy and going against the economic equiv of the theory of gravity.

DavidTC: Note ‘the average American’ is not the same as ‘every American on average’. Take ten dollars from every American, give that and another billion dollars to Bill Gates, and the Americans, on average, just got better off.

The example you're objecting to put money in every household in the US by decreasing the cost of clothing.

Dark Matter: GDP/Job: $110,525
DavidTC: you’ve completely completely forgets...

The big distortions we should be focused on is mis-reporting of GDP or Jobs.
1) GDP is problematic because there are aspects of the GDP which probably don't involve much if any labor.
2) The number of jobs reported doesn't include things which add to the GDP (illegals or whoever working 'off the books', people working for themselves in some cases).
3) The Bill Gates effect.
All of these effects push pretty hard in the same direction.

And yes, granted, this is a distorted view of things, I'm only going down this path because you object to my numbers without providing a sensible alternative.

DavidTC: ...you’re assuming that every extra dime people have will *go* towards the GDP. But, uh, no, it doesn’t. Not if they don’t spend it.

The multiplier effect deals with this issue (that's it's job). If no one spent anything we'd have a multiplier of zero, if everyone spent everything it'd be infinity.

DavidTC: And that leads us to the actual problem: To show that this would increase jobs, you’d have to show it increased the total amount of wages, *instead* of just increasing the total amount of corporate profit or investment income.

Earlier you claimed the Stimulus, which did something similar (but worse designed and temporarily) did increase the number of jobs by just dropping money on the economy.

DavidTC: There have been *huge* increases in corporate profits and investment income over the decades, and wages have stayed steady or slowly declined.

Wage growth is off topic, and even if it were zero, you're objecting to an effective increase in household income and a strongly progressive increase at that. Spending less money on clothing is nothing for the rich, but it's a huge thing for the poor.

DavidTC: Ecomonists are quite clear what they’re talking about when they talk about relative efficiencies. It is not their fault that people are being taught the theory of relative efficiency and then using it to justify something that doesn’t have anything to do with it.... Offshoring factory work from the US is not justified via relative efficiency.

And yet my example of "relative efficiency" show trade worked just fine even though Country "A" was less efficient at everything. By all means, come up with some Country A/B, Product X/Y math which shows what you mean and why I'm wrong about what economists believe. One of us doesn't understand what "relative efficiency" means in this context, perhaps the math will show it's me.

“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”

? Frédéric Bastiat

DavidTC: Taking away someone’s job *does not benefit that person* in any sort of sense. You keep trying to *imagine* circumstances where it does, but the actual fact is, we are talking about *averages* here.

Sure, agreed that the *average* person doesn't benefit. But you're trying to claim that they're simply dead right there. That they never move on with their lives, that they never get another job, that if they do get a job it's at the expense of someone else. That the damage is put-a-fork-in-them every-single-one-of-them is a 100% loss to society. In reality losing a job isn't a death sentence.

Which raises the question, how much does the *average* person suffer, which brings us back to my claim that the recovery ratio is 3, so the average person gets two thirds of their income back. Of course that's mean, some get more, some get less.

DavidTC: But that’s *total economic activity*, not ‘money to create jobs with’.

Fine. We'll do this a different way.

GDP of the US: 16.7 Trillion.
Number of Jobs: 151,097,000
GDP/Job: $110,525

Note this is a *serious* overstatement. This is mean, we want median, the Financial sector (etc) is going to be a serious distortion, so the amount of economic activity to justify a job will be a lot less. If we want to adjust for that... I'm not sure. The mean household income is 50% greater than the median which is suggestive but not conclusive. If we go with that then it's $70-75k. So take a third off of my "jobs created" figure.

DavidTC: I don’t actually *care* about relative efficiency, which has been this gigantic lie used to explain free trade.

A conspiracy involving 10s of thousands of economists and hundreds of governments? Why for?

DavidTC: Yes, it does exist, but it is almost completely moot with *factory work*.

Weirdly I've had their conversation where people have claimed it only works with factory work.

DavidTC: Factories, being enclosed buildings where things that are shipped in are turned into other things, *do not have relative efficiencies* based on location. ... or adding inefficiencies like safety regulations we’ve mandated *by law*.)

Factories located next to their customer have reduced shipping costs, in our just-in-time economy shipping and so forth becomes a big deal. Factory location also brings into play things like legal/governmental stability, electrical stability, availability of labor, and availability of other inputs.

Small Business estimates the cost of compliance to be $10k-$15k per worker (link below claiming $35k in manufacturing). Lots of industries have massive bureaucracies which mostly deal with other massive bureaucracies. Note this is both a problem and it's mostly invisible. The rarest resource in the universe is the attention of senior management.

http://freebeacon.com/issues/report-cost-of-federal-regulation-reached-1-88-trillion-in-2014/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/30/ben-carson/cnbc-debate-ben-carson-cites-high-cost-regulations/

Dark Matter: On a side note, there’s a lot of really counter-intuitive stuff in all this and it takes a semester or two for most people to get their head into it.
DavidTC: How long does it take for most people to actually learn what ‘efficiency’ is?

You were staring at an efficiency increase and you totally missed it. In our textbook example, the output of the larger economy increased. The efficiency of the entire economy went up, even though it happened via trading with a partner who was actually less efficient than they were.

Most of the benefits from FT come from opening up your own economy, i.e. imports, not exports.

DavidTC: Erm, it’s hypothetically possible to read it that way, but there’s as there’s no actual way that one factory could reduce the *average* cost of American’s clothing by any noticable amount, which was the *other* side side of my hypothetical, I don’t know how you can read it that way in good faith.

I assumed you were making up all these numbers as you go and didn't understand how big a 1% increase in household income was.

DavidTC: Economics says that, if people not having their current job would have helped them in any sort of average, then they would have, tada, quit their job. If there was something better for them to be doing, *they would already be doing it*.

Would you move across the country if someone offered you 5% more? If the answer is yes, then picture yourself married with children in high school. Getting fired and having no job is a huge shake up, and moving away from family/friends/church/school becomes a lot more reasonable in that context.

DavidTC: 99.99% of people working in an apperal factory are working there because they see that option as *the best option currently on the table* for them…and they’re almost certainly correct.

It's probably more accurate to say working there is the least risky option, at least in the short term. Hopping to a new job entails risks, many of them impossible to evaluate. Of course *staying* also entails risks but most people don't think that way, if the business has been stable the last few years then it will be stable forever... and the new job might be even worse.

DavidTC: We are discussing your claim that $X dollars in the economy resulted in $X/50,000 jobs paying $50,000.

Hardly. As I explained before, median personal income is $30k. Ergo I hand-waved the cost to create a job as $50k (those links I put out claim it's less). Ergo if you add $50k to the economy you're creating one, median job of $30k.

Household income is $50k (ish), and sometimes it's appropriate to use one and sometimes it's appropriate to use the other. That 1% reduction in the cost of clothing was measured in household income.

DavidTC: If one country can produce something *with less resources*, (less time and/or effort) than another country, than *it* should make that, and other countries should make other things, and they should trade. That is all 100% true.

That's intuitive, but no, this is a misunderstanding of how relative efficiency works and it's wrong. Free Trade doesn't depend on one country being more efficient than the other country, it depends on them having different relative efficiencies. It's perfectly acceptable for one country to be worse at everything, as long as the ratios are different.

Example:
Two Countries, A & B. Both Countries have 10 units of production. There are two products X and Y.
Each product trade for the other at equal value, both countries need a minimum of 3 units of each product.

If both of them have the same relative production ratios, then there is no point in trading.
Country A can use one unit of production to create one unit of Product X or one unit of Product Y.
Country B can use one unit of production to create two units of Product X or two units of Product Y.

Country A will produce 3 units of X and 3 of Y (and 4 of XorY).
Country B will produce 3 units of X and 3 of Y (and 14 of XorY).

Trade serves no purpose here. Total production of both countries will be 30 no matter what the product mix is.

Example 2:
Country A can use one unit of production to create one unit of Product X or one unit of Product Y.
Country B can use one unit of production to create two units of Product X or three units of Product Y.

Production is maximized if "A" only produces "X" and "B" only produces "Y" (even though Country "A" sucks at everything).

A produces 10 units of X.
B produces 30 units of Y.

They trade 5 units so it ends up being
A has 5X and 5Y
B has 5X and 25Y.

On a side note, there's a lot of really counter-intuitive stuff in all this and it takes a semester or two for most people to get their head into it.

DavidTC: ...outsourcing...

As far as I can tell, outsourcing is just another product.

DavidTC: That’s way low.

My point was your made up numbers were massively in favor of trade-being-good and you were underestimating how 'good' things were by multiple orders of magnitude. You were claiming that closing *one* factory (not 200) clearly wasn't worth the cost even if it gave 1% of household income to everyone in America.

DavidTC: First, while *those* displaced workers might find jobs, that, obviously displaces *other* workers.

Ah, no. Serious problem, the amount of work in the economy isn't fixed. The number of jobs isn't fixed. Starting one small business or making a new product doesn't auto-magically eliminate another. If you notice your neighborhood doesn't have a lawn mowing service and you start one, then not only are you creating jobs but the people paying you may actually be making more money if they're working more hours because of the time you've freed up for them. This is especially true for Free Trade (FT) because (for the simplest text book version) you'd have one country which used to produce X+Y shift to X while their trading partner does the reverse.

This means potentially the loss to our economy is "zero". In practice it will be more but just multiplying the number of people who lost their jobs by their income is a VAST overstatement. Some people who lose their jobs from FT will be damaged, others will actually be helped, in practice you divide the total lost by a factor to reflect how many people got jobs (or how good those jobs are). I don't remember what that ratio actually is but I'll handwave a "3", for every 6 people fired, 3 completely recover, 2 get half the income they used to, and one is just screwed.

Secondly, the cost of clothing has not actually halved. The cost a few, specific, really cheap things has halved. The extremely poor can now wear new clothing instead of secondhand.

First, yes, this example does help the poor a lot more than the rich. Second, looking at this time frame is misleading because this is the tail end of long term trends. Looking at before trade started, imho, gives a better picture. The percentage of household income devoted to clothing went from 10% in 1960 (when we made everything) to 3.5% today (link for 10%, your own source agrees with 3.5% http://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2013/05/24/madeinamerica/ ). This means an increase in household income of 6.5%, not 1%, but there's an element of cherry picking to this and I don't feel like looking up all the other numbers which I assume would also change so I won't.

DavidTC: The 2009 Stimulus bears this out…

Our example represents a Permanent increase to the economy, the Stim was a one off (and the Stim was inefficient for multiple reasons and even $280k was probably not even close to the full cost per job but whatever).

DavidTC: it cost about $280,000 per job created, which sounds right to me.

:Gack: :Choke: :Sputter: You really shouldn't be using "the Stimulus" as a baseline for how job creation is supposed to work. Unemployment actually went up when we did it, it was *that* inefficient. The Stim was enough money to give EVERY unemployed person a check for $60k and let them try to start a small business. Alternatively we could have spent the money on infrastructure (which the gov isn't bad at).

Median per person income is something like $30k. Do you really think the private sector has/gives out $250k in (benefits + compliance costs + overhead)?

At a handwave (see links) the cost to create a job is $50k (compliance, taxes, income, benefits).
http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/how-much-does-it-cost-to-create-a-job-by-encouraging-entrepreneurship/
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2011/10/what_does_it_cost_to_create_a.html

Math time (without changing timelines):

Damage done by FT: $16 B
Benefit: $112 billion
Subtract one from the other and we have $96B. Use your multiplier and that's $192B, or roughly 4 million jobs created.

If we expand timelines then some of the numbers change but we're looking at a much higher benefit (probably not 6.5x better but whatever). Something else to consider is when we're measuring gravity and we get numbers which don't match the scientific consensus then either we get a Nobel or we made a mistake somewhere.