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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Ooh, we're moving into the General Economics thread's territory. Let's just imagine that I'm a private citizen with a certain amount of price-setting power: say I act as an early transaction broker. Rather than trade in goods, I trade in "I.O.U.s" — slips of paper saying they are redeemable for a certain value of goods that I hold in store for people. This "money" is a debt instrument: a promise that you can give it to me and get something of tangible value.
You don't want to swap your pigs for my carrots, you want instead to have a symbol of the debt that you can trade for someone else's potatoes, and that person can in turn come to me with the debt instrument and get the carrots they want, or even the pigs.
Note that, in this system, I could have a stack of IOUs going up the Moon and, as long as I'm the one holding them, they have zero value. They are worthless because I can't trade them with myself for stuff — well, I can, but it's meaningless. But if someone else gets them, they suddenly represent a debt that I owe, and if I run out of stock with which to back the transactions, then I'm in big trouble.
Good enough, right? But a fiat currency issuer like the U.S. government takes it a step further: there are no tangible goods backing the value of its currency. Rather, the value is maintained through two basic principles: the government requires dollars as payment of taxes, and the government will imprison you if you don't pay them. The government also does act as a primary provider of certain services, such as military, police, education, and whatnot. Through taxing and spending, the government creates both a supply of and a demand for its currency.
Now, the reason the government should balance its books in principle is because of its role as guarantor of the value of the currency. If the supply increases rapidly and without limit, it causes distortions in the market's ability to determine prices. if there isn't enough, on the other hand, people hoard money and don't spend it, causing recessions and depressions. The money has value within the government as well, as a medium of accounting — basically, an analogue of the private market designed to ensure that the prices the government pays for products and labor don't get out of sync with the private economy.
However, as with my IOUs, the idea of money having value when held by the central bank is a myth. If the Federal Reserve has dollars in its possession, those dollars represent a debt owed to itself: net value zero. Semantically, if the Fed takes in dollars, stores them in a vault, then pays them out again; or if the government burns all the dollars it takes in and creates new ones from thin air to pay out, there is zero difference. note
Now, as for debt instruments, the central bank sells bonds, in lieu of issuing direct cash, to cover any shortfall in revenue vs. spending (deficits). These debt instruments are payable in dollars, at maturity, by the Federal Reserve. The purpose of these is twofold: to provide a safe savings vehicle for the private economy, and to allow the government to operate at a deficit without inflating the currency (say, by printing new money to cover any shortfall, which while possible in the short term, can have harmful inflationary effects in the long term).
U.S. bonds act as a backstop for the national economy — even the world economy — by setting the benchmark interest rate that all other savings and investment vehicles must compete with.
There is zero danger of a Weimar-style hyperinflation because we still produce goods and services, and all our debts are denominated in our own currency. That kind of disaster can only occur when goods critical to an economy are in such short supply that they cannot be had at any price in the currency issued by the nation's central bank, such that printing money only chases the problem down the street. So, unless our private industrial sector gets swallowed by the Yellowstone supervolcano, we're cool.
To sum up, the fundamental role of a central currency issuer is to ensure that there is enough money in the economy that people feel free to spend it, but not so much that prices rise too rapidly — in other words, its job is to adjust the supply of money to make Say's Law
true in practice. To this end, the amount of debt it takes on at any given time is solely a function of the need to fulfill that role. That it has taken on such mythical properties in the public's mind is a real problem.
edited 25th Oct '16 2:00:36 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"![]()
as always.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/25/politics/colin-powell-hillary-clinton-endorsement/index.html
So Powell is still a Republican, due to his positions on defense and the free market but he all but admits that the party is leaving him behind.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.From 538: Re "not voting for Hillary so much as voting against Trump", maybe we've just been spoiled by Obama
. By percentage of those who are voting for that candidate rather than against the opponent, Clinton (56%) seems to be getting about average going back to 1980; Obama got around the 80's in his two campaigns. Trump, by contrast, is at 41%.
Muslim kids in the US are having nightmares about Donald Trump.
NY Times, so 10 article per month limit applies.
“Baba, I had a scary dream,” she said, hugging him tight. “About Donald Trump.”
It was the morning after the second presidential debate, which the Elcharfa family’s two youngest daughters watched in the basement of their Staten Island home with their parents. In the middle of the night, Maaria went to her parents’ room twice, unable to sleep, and walked to her living room and checked her family’s security camera.
That morning, Mr. Elcharfa, 52, asked his daughter what she saw in the nightmare.
“He was so mean to us,” she said. “He had a scary face, like a zombie or something.” In the dream, Maaria later said, Mr. Trump came to the home of every Muslim family in the country and put each one in jail.
“Don’t worry,” he told his daughter, comforting her. “He’s just talk.”
He tried to sound convincing. But her nightmare unsettled him. Mr. Elcharfa and his wife had fled war in their native Lebanon in the hopes of raising a family in safety in the United States. Mr. Elcharfa, a taxi driver, has dealt with his own share of anti-Muslim sentiment, like the time a passenger refused to pay his fare because he said Muslims needed to pay for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
But for innocent Maaria, who still loves playing dress-up and pretending she is a princess, to experience it? Never had he felt so helpless.
“I’m trying to let my kids live in peace,” he said. “I don’t want them to worry.”
Maaira was just beginning to understand that her family’s faith sets her apart in her public school, where she is one of only a few Muslims in her second-grade class. But she did not fully grasp how it could be used against her and lacked the ability of even her older siblings, in their teens, to absorb the blows.
“They cannot defend themselves,” Mr. Elcharfa said about Maaria and her 9-year-old sister, Zaynub. “They’re still young.”
Across the country, Muslim parents have been facing such moments almost daily, riding each tumultuous wave of the news cycle, like Mr. Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and calls to ban Muslims from entering the country and the recent bombing in Manhattan. But how to explain such harsh realities to a young child?
Even as some Muslim parents try to shelter their children from the news, they cannot prevent them from hearing hurtful words in their classrooms and at the playground. Their children come home asking their parents why a classmate said Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, wants to kick their family out of the country. They ask why, if their religion is one of peace, they so often get called terrorists in the hallways.
Many Muslim parents fear that the tensions could push their children away from the faith entirely. They are struggling with how to balance guiding their children in practicing and defending their religion, and letting them embrace it — or not — on their own terms.
“We don’t know how to handle it sometimes,” Mr. Elcharfa said. “Maybe someday they won’t believe in anything.”
The pressures are intense on Staten Island, a Republican stronghold and New York City’s whitest borough. A few blocks from the Elcharfa home in the South Beach neighborhood, a large flag for Mr. Trump’s campaign flaps in the wind, and a Trump sign is prominent in a yard around the corner.
Many of the family’s Muslim friends have pulled their children out of public school and put them in private Islamic schools.
One of them, Somaia Saie, made that decision more than a year ago for her youngest children, ages 9 and 11, because she felt it was the “only way to keep the kids in a safe environment.”
“I have no clue how we can raise children like this,” Ms. Saie said. “As grown-ups, we can take it. With children, it’s another story.”
Last spring, the Elcharfas’ 9-year-old, Zaynub, was sitting on the carpet in her third-grade classroom when two boys said to her, “If Donald Trump becomes president, he’s going to kick you out of the country.”
That night, frightened, she asked her mother about it. “Are we going to get kicked out? Where are we going to go?”
Her mother, Nayla Elhamoui, assured her that no president could do that. “That will never affect us,” she told her daughter. “We belong here.” She called the school’s parent coordinator the next day. The principal met with the students and instructed them to apologize to Zaynub.
Mr. Elcharfa first came to the United States in the mid-1980s, and Ms. Elhamoui joined him about a decade later, after marrying him in Lebanon. Their five children, ages 7 to 18, were all born in the United States.
Ms. Elhamoui tells them the story of a terrifying night in Beirut when a bomb went off across the street from her house. She was about 8 years old. The shrapnel hit her leg, leaving her with scars. It took her years before she could sleep without holding somebody’s hand.
“See, be thankful we brought you up here,” she said to her children on a recent afternoon, as she served them a Lebanese wheat dish called freekeh at their dining room table.
The Elcharfas’ home is dotted with references to Arab and Muslim culture. Their couches are gold-trimmed. A kitchen clock marks the Islamic call to prayer. Their children speak fluent Arabic and have taken Quran classes.
But they also could not be more stereotypically American. The four youngest children all attend public school. Abubeckr, 13, plays basketball, loves video games and dreams of playing in the N.B.A. Maaria puts on makeup in her pink-walled bedroom, and Zaynub, a gymnast, does flips in the kitchen, wearing a pink shirt that says, “Leave sparkles wherever you go.”
Mr. Elcharfa often tells his children they are American first, before they are Lebanese.
“We tell them this is your country,” he said. “You’re lucky you’re born here.”
But sometimes, in school, classmates only see the children’s Muslim names and Arab heritage. In the hallways in Abubeckr’s school, boys will sometimes make sounds of bombs exploding and yell out “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great” — as he walks by. On the bus after school, a classmate once said to him, “You’re a terrorist, and your mom is a mastermind bomber.”
He told the principal the next day, but he did not tell his parents. He is used to it at this point, Abubeckr said, and does not want his mother to “make it a bigger deal than it is.” His father has taught him to tell an adult, but not to react physically or verbally. “If you ignore it, it’s better,” Abubeckr said.
But Mr. Elcharfa sees the taunts taking a toll on his children. They frequently ask him not to speak in Arabic in front of their friends. After the explosion in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan last month, his 15-year-old, Ismail, told him, “That’s your Islam, Baba.”
Abubeckr, who was in Italian class when he heard the news, thought to himself, It was a Muslim, wasn’t it? “I was like, here we go again,” he said, recounting that day while sitting with his father in the family’s living room.
“Why do you say a Muslim; why don’t you say a person?” Mr. Elcharfa asked his son.
These are the moments that worry Mr. Elcharfa and his wife. They fret that their children are starting to distance themselves from their religion and their culture. These are also the moments when the couple’s parenting styles clash.
Mr. Elcharfa wants his children to be freethinkers. He does not want them to be practicing Muslims simply because they inherited the religion from their parents. Sometimes, he said, he wishes their religion could be hidden from view. He said he felt pangs of regret for giving them Muslim names: “Why didn’t I name them Tony or George?”
His wife scoffs at such comments.
“I’m totally different,” Ms. Elhamoui said. “We have to guide them. I have to push him and the kids to pray, to go to the mosque.”
Their contrasting approaches played out in their kitchen this month, in a conversation over whether Zaynub should begin wearing a hijab. Ms. Elhamoui encourages both Zaynub and Maaria to wear a head scarf to school a couple of times a year, as “practice,” she said. She bribes them, offering ice cream or chocolate.
“Zaynub says, ‘I don’t want to wear hijab; it’s embarrassing,’” Mr. Elcharfa told his wife, while he chopped peppers and cooked beans over the stove. He did not want his daughter to face the taunts that often come. “Let her choose,” he said. “It’s O.K. as long as she dresses nice and conservatively. It’s not the way you look. It’s the way you believe.”
Ms. Elhamoui insisted they should encourage their daughter to try it. “It’s in the religion,” she said.
Similarly, when Maaria turned 7 a few weeks ago, she began to pray multiple times a day with her parents, in exchange for a $10 allowance at the end of the week, which she keeps in a blue bear-shaped bank. Mr. Elcharfa knows the importance of prayer, but does not agree with his wife’s incentives.
“It’s not easy, believe me,” he said, about these parenting disagreements. “That’s why we keep fighting.”
One decision was easy for the parents to make: During the third presidential debate on Wednesday, and other future speeches by Mr. Trump, the children would not be watching it..
“I don’t want her to be scared,” Ms. Elhamoui said, thinking again of Maaria’s nightmare.
Maaria said that if Mr. Trump became president, “I’m going to stay in my room forever.”
Mr. Elcharfa expressed frustration at what his family’s life had become. He thought he had left behind conflicts over religion in Lebanon, where sectarian tensions cast a long shadow.
“I came here and found the same things following me,” he said.
Sitting in the family’s living room one recent morning, Ms. Elhamoui asked one of her daughters why she liked being a Muslim. The 9-year-old said she felt proud thinking about the Prophet Muhammad and the way he led his friends and followers in spreading peace.
Ms. Elhamoui reminded her daughter about the time the boys in her class made the comment about Mr. Trump’s threatening to kick Muslims out of the country. She asked, “What did you do to follow the Prophet Muhammad?”
Zaynub said she forgave the boys. Her mother smiled, nodding.
“We forgive,” her mother reiterated. “So we can always live in peace.”
Re: corporate personhood — definitely should be curtailed in terms of political involvement, but the general concept isn't going away. There are four or five Supreme Court cases that establish it in America, and there's enough precedent where corporations were represented as a singlem independent entity that it would be impossible to just do away with.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."I'm currently taking a Law Clerk program up here in Ontario, and the corporate personhood thing was described as allowing the corporation to be treated as a single entity. The teacher mentioned an old case from before that was decided where a corporation was sued, and the plaintiff decided to sue every single employee of the corporation, regardless of their actual job. The judge threw it out.
Granted, here in Canada, we have donation limits and things like that, so on the Federal level, a company has exactly the same donation limit as a single person.
I actually agree with Fighteer's assessment in that the best way to promote competition in this day and age is to actually punish megacorporations severely when they fuck up big time from a consumer standpoint. For example, take the Epipen fiasco. The New Deal Democrats would have forced Epipen to license its patents on the device so that there would be more competition and thus lower prices since it was such an essential product. This is a thing that the New Deal Democrats historically did that the article details. Breaking up Ma Bell only works as long as the government keeps Ma Bell broken up. Otherwise, the broken pieces of Ma Bell will just recombine into AT&T which actually ended up happening. A true trust-bust should only happen if there is no other option, namely if it is a true monopoly in a vital field.
Wizard Needs Food Badly@Fighteer: Yeah, but certain breakups and forcing open of competition can be done, and should. At the very least, a hammer needs to be taken to cartels that are causing active damage.
As Jack somewhat inaccurately pointed at, our communications network is stagnating, choking out new life, and using its lobbying power to prevent communities from setting up their own ISPs, with a result that America's internet sucks compared to places where this is not the case.
@146445
: ... You have no idea how volcanically furious I felt while reading that. I've been a victim of bullying throughout my school life, from my first year in elementary and until the end of high school, and it got so bad many times that I got fed up with the silent treatment and fought back. It's from there that I embraced total pragmatism in combat (when it comes to dealing with unjustified aggression, that is) so thoroughly that I frequently ran what amounts to simulations in my head at how to best end a fight quickly, with most of the ideas boiling down to hitting hard and fast where it hurts the most (joints, neck, groin, eyes, anything where virtually no level of muscle-building can protect it); the bullies should count themselves lucky that I've never had reason to actually resort to such drastic measures.
It frustrates and enrages me even more that my above methodology is not only useless, but counterproductive for the situation those kids are facing.
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.This is fucking amazing. Scorched Earth tactics.
New Survey coming this weekend!I never thought I'd get to see the destruction of the GOP. It's so beautiful.
Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?What is the point of screwing over your own party this hard?
I do so hate to come at you with that hopey, changey stuff, but isn't Trump's campaign a pretty cynical one?
edited 25th Oct '16 4:52:02 PM by BearyScary
Do not obey in advance.
x3 I hate to play Debbie Downer here, but most of us thought we were seeing the beginning of the end of the Modern GOP back in 2012 after R-Money Romney got curbstomped in the election, yet instead of stepping back and going "ok, trying to appeal to the Angry White Male vote obviously isn't working, let's try something different", they doubled down on the crazy, and here we are now.
At this point, I've resigned myself to the fact that, barring a program of mass institutionalization and re-education, the Reality-proof Right is here to stay and that any and all efforts at human progress will have to work around them.
edited 25th Oct '16 4:52:55 PM by Reflextion
Someone did tell me life was going to be this way.Demographics will marginalize the right-wing eventually (if the GOP can't drop its hate on for Hispanics), but the key question is if the GOP can be held off at the federal level until 2024 or 2028. The Dems winning 4 or 5 presidential races in a row could be difficult.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.The reason this might actually be the death knell of the GOP is that they're literally going bankrupt. Trump sucks at raising money for them, and they don't really do that much fundraising on their own, especially not in an election year.
It is plausible that they literally can't afford another run anytime soon.

However simply printing off the money to pay the debts without the growth to absorb the extra influx of currency and turn that extra money into goods and services being purchased does result in a very steep rise in inflation, a-la Wiemar Republic.
It isn't also in the interest of the debt holders to have the US pay those debts, for many of them it works as a saving fund or the least risky investment option they have because other forms of investment aren't stable enough on the long run to be invested in.
What can be done is to reduce the GPD to Debt ratio, but besides some sensationalist and alarmist the top economists are still arguing if the effort needed to reduce that ratio is even worth to begin with as it can potentially pull money from other areas and direct them towards debt paying, which can make things worse by removing funds that would add a net gain to the economy to something that doesn't add anything at all.
edited 25th Oct '16 12:46:18 PM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent leges