Obama!!!

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Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
I'll admit that the whole flyover thing was ill-advised, but the FAA and the NYPD knew about it. I can also understand why they didn't tell the public because that means that some terrorist could have launched a rocket into Air Force One. Of course, he/she still could have anyway... So, as I said, it was ill-advised. Now, maybe if they'd done it at night...
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I am having a nervous breakdance
Who died?

He said it was a mistake - and it was - and that it will not happen again, and I would be surprised if it did.

What do you want? His resignation? I assume the airforce has got rules like any other organization, rules that carefully describes what the airforce can and can not do and with or without some kind of direct apporval from the president. If any of those rules has been broken, well then I guess the airforce has got some basic rules about proper reprimands for those responsible. Obama is responsible for making sure that something like this doesn't happen again, and hopefully he is taking that responsibility.

To compare this incident to Katrina, lies about WMDs and I don't know what else is ridiculous. The fly over was really dumb - but it did nothing but scare people, no one got hurt.
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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but
now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.



He's called Tequila. He's a tough cop.
I still want Yoda to respond to my prior answers to his questions and my follow-up question...
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"Travis Bickle: Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man."

Ask me a question, any question: Grill a MoFo: Dill-Man



You ready? You look ready.
America it seems.
Oh good grief. What's the point in even talking about it (the flyover and this administration) if you're not going to be open to reasonable discussion? Yes, the flyover was dumb. Yes, he owned up to it. Yes, they're taking action so it doesn't happen it again. If you're going to keep skewering the guy over it at least have sensible complaints.
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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza



He's called Tequila. He's a tough cop.
This is an event for the history books. I can just see it in a title for a chapter:

The Day America Died: The Obama Administration and the Fly-over in New York




FTR: The flyover is no big deal in the greater picture, it is the failure to own up to it that bothers me. Obama to me - is a fake, he cannot talk without being told what to say and the media just eats him up like he is the next best thing to sliced bread. How hard is it to understand that he made a mistake, be it first hand or otherwise? He is our president, he needs to be a man and say he f'ed up and move on. It is his watch and I for one was quite a bit pissed at Bush for many things and I think I am on record for it. Obama is a smart man, and I think he is a good man, he just needs to be himself, thats all I want - simple.



You ready? You look ready.
He owned up to nothing - and never will.
So wait, when someone admits a mistake it doesn't mean they're owning up? Woah, dude, this is shocking news. So many people have lied to me. The bastards!!



He's called Tequila. He's a tough cop.
You guys immedietly made me think of two 10 year old yelling at each other and then crossing their arms, putting up the pouty face, turning around and stomping on the ground.



Sorry for the delay in my response. Hard to always muster the effort to continue these discussions. Don't think much of it if I randomly take awhile now and then.

I'm saying it wasn't the programs and spending of the New Deal that actually pulled us out of the Depression. I'm saying it was the programs and spending necessary for America to fight WWII which caused the economic regrowth. Obviously they're similar but the WWII effort was on a much larger scale, and was helped in that their was a unified populace behind the effort. Does this not support the idea that mass spending can pull an economy out of an economic downturn?
If war could cause economic growth, heck, why not blow up our own factories and then hire people to rebuild them, or build more planes and tanks all the time? The idea is, I'm sure we'd agree, pretty absurd, so obviously there's something else going on.

When you really think about the base causes of growth, I think it becomes apparent that it has nothing to do with simply exchanging money, or giving people something to do, but with innovation and technology.

All this would be predicated on the idea that spending during wartime is the same as a porked-up "stimulus" package, too, which I think is clearly not the case.

I'm saying give me an example in which a government used your idea of what a government should do in a recession and succeeded. I'm not saying this to be hostile, but I actually don't know if this ever happened or not.
No hostility taken.

It's happened plenty, but without doing scads of research I can tell you off the top of my head that we had a mild recession in 2000, tax cuts mid-2001, and a mild recovery after. This may not seem like letting the market sort itself out, because it required action, but in this case the action is the removal of free market disincentives and barriers, so it amounts to the same thing.

Interesting thing about the 2001 tax cut: it wasn't the full cut Bush had campaigned on. He was met with resistance (both the Senate and Congress were fairly even, party-wise), and the cut which passed was aimed primarily at lower and middle-income Americans. The economy grew, but at a very anemic pace.

Fast forward to May 28th, 2003: Bush finally implements the rest of his proposed tax cut, the oft-maligned "tax cut for the rich." Growth skyrockets at over 7% in the very next quarter and continues solidly for the next several years, during which unemployment drops almost 2%, if memory serves.

I can gladly go back further, but the correlation between tax cuts and economic growth is firmly established. I honestly can't see why there's any debate as to their value. I can imagine some debate as to whether or not there's some sort of larger societal obligation to temper them (though I find the arguments to this end to be very short-sighted, usually), but I don't think there's any real debate as to which sorts of general economic policy help (or hinder) growth.



And I find it very, very hard to believe that a company would use a tax cut during a recession to hire new staff - just to be kind and help a brother out. The extra money earned by the tax cut would only be used as damage control. The companies will not be expansive before the tide turns and the recession goes away
This is completely true, but it's only an argument to get the recovery underway as quickly as possible, and not for any specific means of doing so.

I'm a bit puzzled by the "be kind and help a brother out" bit. No one's suggesting that tax cuts will generate altruism in companies, just that removing some of their often massive tax burden will increase the number of businesses that can expand.

...which it will do much quicker if the government actively takes measures to make people continue to consume, despite the bad times, which leads to a demand for more products from companies.
Consumer demand does not need to be stimulated; it's built into the economy. Getting people to want things is not difficult, but getting them those things cheaply and efficiencly most definitely is.

Let's boil things down a bit: it wasn't hard to get people to want to, for example, travel quickly and safely. What was hard was inventing the internal combustion engine. The supply of the goods, and the innovation and invention that creates them, has and always will be the driver of economic growth.

Convincing people to buy flat screen TVs during a recession does not drive growth. They already want flat screen TVs, and they'll want the even flatter screen TVs that we'll have in another decade. What will change between now and then to make us wealthier is that someone will find a way to make that flatter TV, and business will get better at manufacturing them en masse.

And I'm not sure that holding the car industry under its arms, for instance, is the right thing to do. When I think about it, I'm quite positive I think it's the wrong thing to do. Is he doing that?
They've given quite a bit of money to the automakers, yes, and even those who support these decisions seem less than thrilled with them, regarding them as a necessary evil.

What's worse, though, is that Obama's basically stated that he's on the side of the autoworkers unions, which are one of the primary reasons for the industry's collapse. The pensions and benefits packages which they receive are often staggering, and are crippling the companies. There's also a jaw-dropping bill in Congress that would essentially remove the secret ballot on union-creating elections, but in the interest of topic condensing, I'll leave that for another conversation.



I am having a nervous breakdance
This is completely true, but it's only an argument to get the recovery underway as quickly as possible, and not for any specific means of doing so.

I'm a bit puzzled by the "be kind and help a brother out" bit. No one's suggesting that tax cuts will generate altruism in companies, just that removing some of their often massive tax burden will increase the number of businesses that can expand.
Yes, exactly. And that's my point. A tax cut will not effect unemployment or work as a weapon against the recession, which I think stimulating incentives by the government can do, if done in the right way. Tax cuts (for companies) might make the companies want to expand a bit sooner when there are signs of better times. But in the longrun this would require a tax cut every time the economic times are bad to achieve the desired kind of effect. Finally there will be no taxes left at all, which of course some people would view as a good thing.

During a time when the government loses money most tax cuts would be unresponsible to introduce. However, I do think that tax cuts meant to keep small businesses and low income takers from bankrupcy is certainly something one should consider.

The situation here in Sweden (where things definitely suck too) is a bit different. We have a considerably large public sector which makes political means of control more efficiant and multi-faceted than in countries with a small public sector. Good times or bad times, people still gets sick, kids still go to school, fires get started, crimes are committed.... This is a sector which the government relatively easy can stimulate - if the means are there - during bad times.

[EDIT]Oops, I forgot the most important part. Yes, you're right. Altruism is certainly not the cup of tea of the companies. And that's where a responsible government comes in. In the role of, rather blindly but as equal as possible, a distributer of wealth in a manner which a commercial comapany will, or can, never allow itself to apply.

Consumer demand does not need to be stimulated; it's built into the economy. Getting people to want things is not difficult, but getting them those things cheaply and efficiencly most definitely is.

Let's boil things down a bit: it wasn't hard to get people to want to, for example, travel quickly and safely. What was hard was inventing the internal combustion engine. The supply of the goods, and the innovation and invention that creates them, has and always will be the driver of economic growth.

Convincing people to buy flat screen TVs during a recession does not drive growth. They already want flat screen TVs, and they'll want the even flatter screen TVs that we'll have in another decade. What will change between now and then to make us wealthier is that someone will find a way to make that flatter TV, and business will get better at manufacturing them en masse.
It simply isn't so at all. You're saying that people are not buying conumerism stuff because the stuff isn't neat or new or exciting enough, and if only the companies where stimulated (by tax cuts) to make products more appealing to the consumers the recession would be solved. You're wrong. Peope aren't buying stuff because they don't know if they will make less money in the future or even lose their jobs. They're not buying stuff because they don't know if they'll need it for foods and bills in a couple of months. This is the case during every recession, people hold on to their money because they worry about the future.

What the banks and companies can do, and are doing, during recessions to speed up things again is to make prices and bank loans more attractive to their buyers. Which, depending on what laws and regulations the markets are working under, can go in either direction in the longrun, as we all quite painfully have had to experience during the past 1-2 years.

[EDIT]An example: the house loans, given by banks to people, during this time of the year compared to the same time the previous years, have gone up! How is this possible during a recession? The State Bank (not a market actor) has lowered the repo rate to stimulate the economy during the last year, step by step, from 4.5 % to today's 0.5 %. The Minister of Finance has urged the banks to follow these directions from the State Bank, which they reluctantly have done. Still, why are the banks - who are super low on cash - deciding that it's a good thing to approve house loans during these bad times? Because compared to giving loans to other ugly fishes (finance institutes and what not), the loans given to families are peanuts. Plus, these families are careful with their money compared to the finance sharks (remember, people don't unnecessarily waste their money on anything during recessions). But why, when the times are so bad, are people deciding to buy houses? Because the interests they'll have to pay to the banks are on a record all time low - and the houses are cheap again. People are thinking that it's a good thing to invest the capital they have in houses. And this because the State Bank acted offensively and the politicians made clear what was expected by the banks as well as giving the impression of being on top of things.


They've given quite a bit of money to the automakers, yes, and even those who support these decisions seem less than thrilled with them, regarding them as a necessary evil.

What's worse, though, is that Obama's basically stated that he's on the side of the autoworkers unions, which are one of the primary reasons for the industry's collapse. The pensions and benefits packages which they receive are often staggering, and are crippling the companies. There's also a jaw-dropping bill in Congress that would essentially remove the secret ballot on union-creating elections, but in the interest of topic condensing, I'll leave that for another conversation.
This car industry thing is threatening to become the new farming subsidies debacle which is pestering the European Union. We don't need to hold another brain dead elephant under its arms!

But to say that the unions are one of the primary reasons to the car industry crisis is just plain nonsense. I will use Volvo and Saab as examples since they're once Swedish and the comapnies I know a little bit about.

Saab Automobile, the passenger car company, has more or less never turned a profit. But since the passenger car division was "baked into" the rest of the company Saab, which also made somre really successful products (like trucks), the losses Saab Automobile made was, not hidden but not very visible either. Since GM bought Saab Automobile I don't think they've made a profit one single year. People simply aren't buying the car.

I don't know what Volvo, or the rest of the big car companies either for that matter, has been doing. During times when everybody are starting to look for cars that needs less gas than before Volvo et al decides to go for big gas-gulping SUVs. Idiocy. The oil is going, there was a recession closing in on us... and they think people would want to throw away their savings on gas-thirsty expensive cars?

I just heard that they have sold 200 000 Tata Nanos, "the world's cheapest car", in India. The manufacturer has only made 100 000 and is having quite pleasant problems. Because he's understood the market and the big car dragons haven't. People aren't buying their products and that's why they're in trouble, not because of the unions. Which in Sweden, by the way, have agreed to lower their memebers' salaries to 80 % of what they are usually paid to save their jobs. You make it sound like you're the one living in a quasi-socialist country, not me.

I don't always like all unions (probably not because of the same reasons as you though) but if we didn't have them a lot more people would probably be living on the street right now.



Yes, exactly. And that's my point. A tax cut will not effect unemployment or work as a weapon against the recession, which I think stimulating incentives by the government can do, if done in the right way.
I don't think that follows -- I said that hiring would lag, not that it wouldn't effect it. Clearly, companies will hire when they feel the tide has turned. The point of contention is how best to hasten the tide-turning.

If your concern is with employment, one would think incentivizing the businesses that provide said employment would be the first order of business.

Anyway, tax cuts do work against recessions. We have examples of this (recently, as detailed in my last post), and it simply makes sense that they would, as well. Business-friendly policies encourage investment, which spurns innovation, which creates growth. Spending is necessary, but it follows growth inevitably.

Tax cuts (for companies) might make the companies want to expand a bit sooner when there are signs of better times. But in the longrun this would require a tax cut every time the economic times are bad to achieve the desired kind of effect. Finally there will be no taxes left at all, which of course some people would view as a good thing.
Well, first off, I'm not saying that tax cuts are required for recovery, just that they'll generally speed it up. That's an important distinction.

Secondly, I'm not advocating tax cuts forever and ever, just that taxes should be a lot lower than they are. Obviously there is a point at which even tax cutting can become counter-productive, but I don't think we're anywhere near it.

During a time when the government loses money most tax cuts would be unresponsible to introduce.
This is a common sentiment, but when we cut taxes in 2003, tax receipts actually increased. This may seem counter-intuititve, but the idea of increased growth as a means to increased tax revenue seems to have some merit to it.

It simply isn't so at all. You're saying that people are not buying conumerism stuff because the stuff isn't neat or new or exciting enough, and if only the companies where stimulated (by tax cuts) to make products more appealing to the consumers the recession would be solved. You're wrong. Peope aren't buying stuff because they don't know if they will make less money in the future or even lose their jobs. They're not buying stuff because they don't know if they'll need it for foods and bills in a couple of months. This is the case during every recession, people hold on to their money because they worry about the future.
I am most definitely not saying that people are not buying stuff because it isn't neat or new enough, I'm saying that their desire to buy things is not what creates economic growth.

You and I agree on their reason for saving: they're uncertain as to how much money will be available to them in the future. They spend when they feel secure in their future and their finances (or, in some extreme cases, if the deal or technology is so extreme as to overwhelm their concerns). The recovery, then, comes when business is booming and businesses are hiring. Talking people into consuming more isn't going to help that, and even if it could, there's little hope of convincing enough people to do so.

This car industry thing is threatening to become the new farming subsidies debacle which is pestering the European Union. We don't need to hold another brain dead elephant under its arms!
We certainly agree here. We have a mechanism for all this -- bankruptcy! We have mechanisms by which large companies can fail without causing massive disruptions overnight.

But to say that the unions are one of the primary reasons to the car industry crisis is just plain nonsense. I will use Volvo and Saab as examples since they're once Swedish and the comapnies I know a little bit about.

Saab Automobile, the passenger car company, has more or less never turned a profit. But since the passenger car division was "baked into" the rest of the company Saab, which also made somre really successful products (like trucks), the losses Saab Automobile made was, not hidden but not very visible either. Since GM bought Saab Automobile I don't think they've made a profit one single year. People simply aren't buying the car.

I don't know what Volvo, or the rest of the big car companies either for that matter, has been doing. During times when everybody are starting to look for cars that needs less gas than before Volvo et al decides to go for big gas-gulping SUVs. Idiocy. The oil is going, there was a recession closing in on us... and they thing people would want to throw away their savings on cars and gas?

I just heard that they have sold 200 000 Tata Nanos, "the world's cheapest car", in India. The manufacturer has only made 100 000 and is having quite pleasant problems. Because he's understood the market and the big car dragons haven't. People aren't buying their products and that's why they're in trouble, not because of the unions.
Sales is only one side of the equation. Businessess succeed or fail based on their sales relative to their costs. If a business is losing money, it can either increase sales, or decrease costs, to become profitable (or more profitable).

I'm not going to defend all the car companies, of course -- many of them make stupid decisions. Capitalism allows for these sorts of mistakes, but they still take place. But the company's success or failure has to do with both their sales AND their costs. They're selling cars, but not enough to offset their massive costs, which the unions play a major role in.

Far from being "nonsense," this is business in its absolutely simplest form. Sales - costs = profit.

Which in Sweden, by the way, have agreed to lower their memebers' salaries to 80 % of what they are usually paid to save their jobs. You make it sound like you're the one living in a quasi-socialist country, not me.
I guess I just have a lower threshold of tolerance for the idea.

I have noticed that, in some industries (like newspapers), some unions have voluntarily lowered salaries -- which is stunning in its rarity alone. My understanding, though I'm hardly following this issue closely enough to be sure, is that the autoworkers were refusing to make any significant concessions prior to the bailout (I'll see if I can find some more information about this). And now that the largest economy in the world apparently has their back, they have no reason to. Government intervention strikes again.

I don't always like all unions (probably not because of the same reasons as you though) but if we didn't have them a lot more people would probably living on the street right now.
I think this is a tad extreme (unless you're being completely literal), but regardless, our choice is not between our current union situation, and no unions at all. Lawmakers can change any number of regulations so as to grant the unions more or less power in their ability to form and negotiate, so there's an entire spectrum of policies that can tilt one way or another.

As unions grow, they become subject to all the same pitfalls as any other large organization. They are just as capable of abusing their standing and power as a business is, perhaps more so, given that they make up more formidable voting blocs, and even the largest of them enjoy the persistent illusion of being the "little guys."



My respect for Obama has risen a bit over the last few days, that is a hot seat he is in.
I respect the office of the president as part of our Constitution and one of the three pillars of our federal government. But I've never expected much of the men who have held that office over the last 50+ years and therefore have never been disappointed.

The one true thing that can be said of any politician elected to the office of president is that he is never as good as his supporters had hoped nor as bad as his detractors had feared. Unfortunately, most in recent years have been outstanding examples of the Peter Principle.