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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM

OhnoaBear I'm back, baby. from Exiting, pursued by a... Since: Jan, 2011
I'm back, baby.
#43001: Dec 6th 2012 at 9:34:05 PM

How probable do you think a split among the Republican majority leading to the installment of a Democratic Speaker in a Republican majority house is?

edited 6th Dec '12 9:34:16 PM by OhnoaBear

"The marvel is not that the Bear posts well, but that the Bear posts at all."
Trivialis Since: Oct, 2011
#43002: Dec 6th 2012 at 9:36:04 PM

There probably won't be a Democratic speaker. But there would need to be as many anti-Boehner Republicans as there are Democrats for a new Speaker to be elected. A portion of Republicans isn't enough.

Serocco Serocco from Miami, Florida Since: Mar, 2010 Relationship Status: Faithful to 2D
Serocco
#43003: Dec 6th 2012 at 9:46:20 PM

Baehner's trying to assert command over Republicans at a pretty bad time, given how Obama's making him look unreasonable.

In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.
DeviantBraeburn Wandering Jew from Dysfunctional California Since: Aug, 2012
Wandering Jew
#43004: Dec 6th 2012 at 9:50:51 PM

The Republicans are not going to replace Boehner with someone else in more opposition to the president. Not if a sizable portion of the party would disagree.

That doesn't mean some won't try.

edited 6th Dec '12 9:51:02 PM by DeviantBraeburn

Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016
Thorn14 Gunpla is amazing! Since: Aug, 2010
Gunpla is amazing!
#43005: Dec 6th 2012 at 10:26:58 PM

[up][up]

I think he's aware his party is reaching a schism and he's trying to reign in some control.

Skatepunk Since: Feb, 2011
#43006: Dec 6th 2012 at 11:02:10 PM

[up] & [up][up]

How is Boehner not "against the president enough"?

This is WHY the GOP is in a schism and WHY it is going to hurt them in the long run. Heck, one could argue that it hurt in the short run considering they lost a few red states in their Senate races.

Ramidel Since: Jan, 2001
#43007: Dec 7th 2012 at 12:16:13 AM

@Serocco: Can't agree. If anything, I'd say the reverse; Boehner is actually realizing that Obama has him over a barrel and that the fiscal cliff will cause irreparable damage to the Republican Party, so he's launching a purge and making sure he's in position to make a deal with the Democrats, whatever the Tea Party does. I'm not going to call the guy a hero or anything, but he is in an impossible position that wasn't really of his own making, and the best way he can see to get out of the quagmire is to purge the Tea Party and form a coalition with the Democrats, even at the expense of ever being able to get cooperation from his own party again.

Now, granted, he did purge one guy for being "too liberal," which is something I really can't read. My best guess as to his thinking is that he's trying to make it look like a naked power grab instead of an attempt to compromise with EVIL to save the country. Either way, it smacks of him being desperate and hitting the panic button.

DeviantBraeburn Wandering Jew from Dysfunctional California Since: Aug, 2012
Wandering Jew
#43008: Dec 7th 2012 at 12:18:29 AM

December 7th

It's the 71th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor Attacks.

Date of Infamy and all that.

What would FDR do in response to the Fiscal Cliff?

edited 7th Dec '12 12:30:41 AM by DeviantBraeburn

Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016
Thorn14 Gunpla is amazing! Since: Aug, 2010
Gunpla is amazing!
#43009: Dec 7th 2012 at 12:51:31 AM

I dunno, probably use the radios like the way he sold the new deal.

Euodiachloris Since: Oct, 2010
#43010: Dec 7th 2012 at 5:05:33 AM

[up][up]I don't think FDR would have the opposition of the... calibre... needed to make an Olympus Mons out of a molehill using their own earthmoving equipment. tongue

RadicalTaoist scratching at .8, just hopin' from the #GUniverse Since: Jan, 2001
scratching at .8, just hopin'
#43011: Dec 7th 2012 at 5:15:19 AM

Different attitude; this was before PR execs started determining campaigns (before Obama, notice how many presidents had the exact same coiffed hair and photogenic smiles) and the Cult of Centrism hadn't taken off yet, nor the major media behind said cult. IIRC, FDR once said of his opponents "they are united in their hatred of me, and I welcome that hatred". You'd never find Obama saying something like that today.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.
Greenmantle V from Greater Wessex, Britannia Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Hiding
Euodiachloris Since: Oct, 2010
#43013: Dec 7th 2012 at 5:36:36 AM

[up]You know... time to bring out the Bull Moose as a mascot, again... Progressive Conservatives, you don't need to look for a new symbol.

You've got a good one, already: dust it off and give it an airing.

edited 7th Dec '12 5:36:48 AM by Euodiachloris

tricksterson Never Trust from Behind you with an icepick Since: Apr, 2009 Relationship Status: Above such petty unnecessities
Never Trust
#43014: Dec 7th 2012 at 7:00:08 AM

And they could make this their party anthem.

edited 7th Dec '12 7:03:02 AM by tricksterson

Trump delenda est
TheStarshipMaxima NCC - 1701 Since: Jun, 2009
NCC - 1701
#43015: Dec 7th 2012 at 8:53:40 AM

Re: economics. I cannot overstate how much my view of the Universe is changed. I mean I was sitting thinking China was this close to declaring the US one of the Chinese provinces. I thought no debt ceiling automatically meant we were going to go broke and create a third world country.

This is why I come to OTC. I gain things I never would anywhere else. This place makes me better.

With that said....can someone please explain how recessions and depressions work? I mean, we don't have famines and the like anymore so....exactly how do jobs just disappear and stuff becomes massively expensive?

It was an honor
Trivialis Since: Oct, 2011
#43016: Dec 7th 2012 at 9:06:14 AM

Debt ceiling doesn't mean that disaster happens if we go over it. It simply means we can't go over it. It's an agreed cap on net spending (minus revenue).

shimaspawn from Here and Now Since: May, 2010 Relationship Status: In your bunk
#43017: Dec 7th 2012 at 9:19:57 AM

Recessions and Depressions happen when we don't put controls and limits on our economy. What happens is that greed for short term profit causes companies to engage in shady activity like gathering mortgages they know are bad and selling them as good. (This was the cause of the current recession.)

This causes a temporary boom in the form of faking economic growth on one large confidence scam, then it falls apart taking everything it touched down with it. Basically, if we passed more laws regulating bad business practices we'd have fewer crashes. That's why they didn't happen after the Great Depression until we started relaxing business regulations again.

tl;dr: Conservative lawmakers won't regulate business like they should.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
TheStarshipMaxima NCC - 1701 Since: Jun, 2009
NCC - 1701
#43018: Dec 7th 2012 at 9:27:02 AM

[up] You're talking about the Keynesian economic model?

It was an honor
Euodiachloris Since: Oct, 2010
#43019: Dec 7th 2012 at 9:28:50 AM

[up]Pretty much.

And, the thing has legs. Every time people start saying it was horribly wrong and need not be considered as things have moved on, regulations designed to keep to the general premise get relaxed... and... guess what? tongue

edited 7th Dec '12 9:30:40 AM by Euodiachloris

TheStarshipMaxima NCC - 1701 Since: Jun, 2009
NCC - 1701
#43020: Dec 7th 2012 at 9:30:33 AM

Why in the hell do I have to come to a website for fiction nerds to learn basic economic theory??

It was an honor
Euodiachloris Since: Oct, 2010
#43021: Dec 7th 2012 at 9:31:28 AM

[up]'Cos we read and watch anything that doesn't run away fast enough? evil grin

AceofSpades Since: Apr, 2009 Relationship Status: Showing feelings of an almost human nature
#43022: Dec 7th 2012 at 9:31:28 AM

Because they don't teach us this in high school, when in fact they should.

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#43023: Dec 7th 2012 at 9:31:55 AM

@Starship Maxima: At its core, an economy is an equation of supply and demand. Supply = manufacturing, production, farming, all the sources of stuff that people need and/or want. Demand is the ability of people to buy things. So as to avoid the inefficiency of the barter system, which is that you don't always have a pig to trade for five chickens, we use money as an storehouse of value. Money is a form of stored utility — it represents a debt of time/labor/goods that can be exchanged with any other person for an equivalent amount of time/labor/goods.

When the supply/demand balance gets out of whack, problems occur. A supply crisis happens when there isn't enough production/resources to satisfy demand. It can be as simple as a drought making food scarce or as complex as a real estate bubble where an increasing amount of money is chasing a fixed supply of houses.

A demand crisis happens when the purchasing power of consumers drops and they are no longer able to buy all the stuff that the economy is capable of producing. Demand can fall when a product is no longer seen as desirable, or it can fall when a systemic shock (like the credit crisis of 2008) sets off a shift from spending to saving across the consumer market.

The technical definition of a recession is a certain number of quarters of declining GDP. There is no technical, agreed-upon definition of a depression but it is generally a sustained economic malaise such as the one we're in now, when total production remains substantially below capacity and unemployment remains high.

There are two major causes of recessions: from a supply side and from a demand side. In a supply crisis, you have too much money chasing too little goods. There are a couple of solutions to this. First, increase supply — this takes the form of investment (either directly by the government or encouraged by means of rate changes and/or tax policy) and is generally a good thing as long as the demand itself isn't artificially inflated (e.g., the housing bubble). Second, reduce demand — this can be done by raising interest rates to soak up available credit or increasing taxes to soak up consumer cash.

There have been a couple of recessions in the past few decades that were triggered deliberately by the Fed, which raised interest rates to cool off an overheating economy. There was no fundamental problem with the system, it was just a gentle application of the brakes to rein in inflation — and as soon as the Fed relaxed rates, growth resumed.

The other kind of recession is triggered by a demand crisis. The recent housing bubble is a perfect example of overreach in the private debt markets, with waves of borrowing chasing ever-increasing housing prices, fueled by lax regulatory policy and tacit encouragement by the administration, coupled with naked greed on the part of bankers. Consumers got over-leveraged, meaning they borrowed too much against assets whose value was at best expressed as "wholly fictional". When the value of the assets collapsed, consumers were forced to stop spending in order to pay down their debts; this caused a global reduction in demand that triggered mass layoffs, which further reduced demand and sent more private consumers over the edge of bankruptcy, and so forth in a vicious cycle.

The Great Depression was in fact two recessions separated by a false recovery, and it was a massive demand crisis.

In a demand crisis, increasing supply does nothing because supply is not the problem. Building more houses is pointless when people aren't buying the ones already for sale. You can shovel money at banks to help encourage lending and save businesses that might fail because they can't access short term credit, but none of that solves the underlying problems: high unemployment and consumer debt holding down spending. Furthermore, inflation (on a large scale) cannot happen in this scenario no matter how much money is floating around, because inflation happens only when demand exceeds supply.

In this situation, when borrowing costs are at record lows but economic activity is stagnant due to reduced consumer purchasing power, the government's role is to boost demand, kind of like a jump start on a dead car battery. Throw money into the consumer economy, which will be spent immediately. If it is sustained for long enough, it will increase net demand, which will make businesses willing to hire again, which will give consumers more money to spend, and so forth. You break the downward cycle and replace it with an upward cycle.

Doing this reliably requires an infusion of money that is at least half of the total production gap — that is, the difference between what the economy is doing now and what it could be doing if the recession hadn't happened. It's an ideal time to borrow this money, because you're taking cash that's sitting idle in investors' bank accounts and putting it to use boosting the economy, which will pay dividends once things are moving again.

This is Macroeconomics 101.

edited 7th Dec '12 9:48:50 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Euodiachloris Since: Oct, 2010
#43024: Dec 7th 2012 at 9:39:30 AM

Some recommendations for easing into Economic Theory for the turgid allergic and plot-hungry... might I recommend Going Postal and Making Money? smile

Heck, it's practically Terry Pratchett's hat: "things I should have learnt in school, the fun way". evil grin

edited 7th Dec '12 9:45:30 AM by Euodiachloris

Midgetsnowman Since: Jan, 2010
#43025: Dec 7th 2012 at 9:47:45 AM

[up][up]

Translated into a much shorter form.

When consumers are afraid to spend because they lack money/Jobs, the best solution is to shovel money into the hands of consumers, thereby creating more incentive for employers to hire to help handle the increased demand.


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