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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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The reason I ask, is that in US Gov class today, our teacher had us do their Fix the National Debt
activity, which which seemed like a bit of an ideological tip off to me. Would that be Neo-Classical?
edited 27th Apr '18 4:50:48 PM by megaeliz
I sort of got that sense too, which is part of why I asked here.
What was interesting to me, is that despite talking about the national debt, and trying to get us to do that activity, my teacher was struggling to explain what it actually was, what purpose it had, or even why she thought it was always bad.
edited 27th Apr '18 4:54:35 PM by megaeliz
The purpose is simple: there are things that need to be spent on that exceed direct tax income.
And running a surplus for a sovereign issuer of currency is just stupid.
Edit: to explain in simple terms: if I issue my own currency and "save" it, this money ceases to have an impact on the economy. Effectively, I may as well be setting it on fire and actively trying to cause deflation (because I'm taking money out of the economy and shrinking it) which is, if kept up, the very definition of a recession.
It wouldn't matter if you call it "saving", it has the exact same effect as destroying currency and then issuing new currency when you spend it again.
edited 27th Apr '18 4:59:51 PM by RainehDaze
Going through the activity, I was able to balance the national budget based on their estimations without sacrificing healthcare, welfare programs, or eating the poor, mainly by cutting defense spending and eliminating most of the ridiculous tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.
That seems fair.
EDIT: I even saved enough money by not letting the rich ignore taxes that I was able to go back and add funding to some extra programs.
edited 27th Apr '18 5:12:18 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Not really in the same category. The Heritage Foundation is openly conservative and pushes conservative takes on a wide variety of policy issues, including all the socially conservative stuff. CRFB isn't openly conservative, they're more of a "very serious people" type deal.
Peter G. Peterson, the guy they get a lot of their money from, was Nixon's secretary of commerce and has spent the years since then on Wall Street spending his fortune to try and cut welfare programs. They're one of the many organizations he supports to that end.
They should have sent a poet.![]()
It's quite possible to eliminate the deficit by eliminating a large chunk of military spending and raising taxes significantly. Of course, you'll never hear about that as a solution from anyone on the right side of the aisle, because their fixation on deficits is a red herring. What they really want is to cut taxes and social spending, so the wealthy can get wealthier, and they want to funnel defense money to big contractors.
Getting rid of the debt itself is a much longer process, and we wouldn't even want to pay it down too quickly because that could possibly tip the economy back into recession. When the government saves (runs a surplus), it does so by drawing money out of the consumer economy. This is fine and indeed desirable if the economy is under inflationary pressure due to excessive demand. However, when there's deflationary pressure (a recession or depression), you want the government to run deficits to help boost spending.
Bill Clinton understood this. His term ended with a government surplus, fueled by increased tax receipts and reduced entitlement spending during an economic boom. Bush 43 blew that all to hell, and thus wrecked the economy.
edited 27th Apr '18 5:26:55 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Here's a thread
comparing personal to national debt and the economic purpose of each.
That was weird. Wrong thread, obviously. Fixed.
The conservative fear of national debt is esp. ironic given that it tends to be Republican administrations that run it up, while Democrats seek to pay for their programs with taxes.
edited 28th Apr '18 5:21:28 AM by DeMarquis
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.Conservative blog/"news" site Red State has conducted a mass purging of staff and writers who are insufficiently pro-Trump, including long time contributors.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/27/media/redstate-blog-salem-media/index.html
Ignoring all the details about what the debt actually means, it's worth remember that they can't force us to do anything without declaring war and winning. Unlike a personal debt, there's no court they could go to that has any authority over the US government. Even if we decide not to pay back the bonds they've purchased from us, there's not a single thing they could do about it.
It would ruin our credit rating though.
edited 27th Apr '18 7:27:01 PM by Clarste
The "credit rating" of the U.S. is a weird idea - a bit like having a popularity contest where one participant is a kaiju. Call it unpopular if you want; it doesn't really give a damn. Really what it means is that people would demand higher interest rates as a condition of buying U.S. treasuries. The cost to service the debt would increase, but then so would the return to investors. The dollar would weaken, shifting our trade deficit towards a surplus: more income from trade, less international investment in U.S. businesses.
It's not precisely a zero-sum game, but what you have to keep in mind is that debt is just one lever in a complex machine whose inputs and outputs all depend on one another. The machine is self-correcting, meaning that a shift in one area will balance out in others, assuming no well-intentioned (or not so well-intentioned) idiot deliberately tries to gum it up.
Now, if we catastrophically defaulted: simply stopped paying back the principal of any bonds whatsoever, then it would cause a titanic shift in credit markets that would probably kick the global economy into a full-on depression. Everyone would get taken down, pretty much.
I don't have a good mental picture of what would happen if we decided, for whatever reason, to not pay China in particular — refuse to honor our bonds held by China as they came to maturity. Thinking through it, it would trigger a panic selloff of all dollar assets by Chinese enterprises, tanking the dollar in international markets. Other nations would buy China's US bonds at fire sale prices, since they could still redeem them (assuming we don't default again, of course). China would go through a massive deleveraging and its credit markets would crash, but our net debt position wouldn't change much at all; there'd just be other people holding it.
edited 27th Apr '18 8:08:16 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Okay, that's doubly off-topic: first, this isn't the Economics thread, and second, this isn't the China thread. I'll give a brief answer: the degree to which the Chinese economy is or is not teetering on the brink of collapse is something of a meme among economics laymen and professionals alike, and nobody seems to be able to agree on it. What is demonstrably true is that the government has kept it afloat for quite some time, despite constant and loud predictions of an imminent collapse "Real Soon Now (tm)".
I refuse to offer any personal predictions along those lines, and I'll believe that it's going to crash if/when I see it happen.
edited 27th Apr '18 8:00:01 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I've been reading the Minority Report
that House Democrats released today, and it's incredibly damning.
In so doing, the Majority has not only failed to meet the mandate given to the HPSCI by the Speaker of the House and the Minority Leader, but they have engaged in a systematic effort to muddy the waters, and to deflect attention away from the President, most recklessly in their assault on the central pillars of the rule of law. Their report, as with their overall conduct of the investigation, is unworthy of this Committee, the House of Representatives, and most importantly, the American people, who arc now left to try to discern what is true and what is not.
The Majority’s report reflects a lack of seriousness and interest in pursuing the truth. By refusing to call in key witnesses, by refusing to request pertinent documents, and by refusing to compel and enforce witness cooperation and answers to key questions, the Majority hobbled the Committee’s ability to conduct a credible investigation that could inspire public confidence. The Majority’s conduct has also undermined Congress’ independent investigative authority. Their repeated deferrals to the White House allowed witnesses to refuse cooperation, and permitted the Administration to dictate the terms of their interaction with Congress, or evade congressional oversight altogether, setting a damaging precedent for future non-cooperation by this President and, possibly, by his successors
A majority of the report’s findings are misleading and unsupported by the facts and the investigative record. They have been crafted to advance a political narrative that exonerates the President, downplays Russia’s preference and support for then-candidate Trump, explains away repeated contacts by Trump associates with Russia-aligned actors, and seeks to shift suspicion towards President Trump’s political opponents and the prior administration.
One can find no better example of the Majority’s willingness to contort facts to support its politicized narrative than the report’s Finding #35. The Majority argues that evidence that Trump associates sought after the election to establish secret back channels to communicate with the Russians without the U.S. government finding out – and then lied about it – actually proves there was no collusion with Russia. The sophistry of this kind of analysis, and the report as a whole, wither under scrutiny. Even before its public release, the report suffered in the face of public revelations that bear directly on the investigation and contradicted the Majority’s conclusions.
Tragically, for a country in need of the truth and an election system in need of greater security, the Majority diverted the investigation in the service of President Trump by launching parallel probes to promote baseless allegations of wrongdoing by the Obama Administration and our law enforcement agencies. The Majority’s efforts have cultivated doubt about what occurred during the 2016 elections; cast suspicion on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice (DOJ), including the FBI’s basis for and handling of its counterintelligence investigation into links between Russia and the Trump campaign; and sought to undercut Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation, including by attempting to tarnish the credibility of numerous current and former officials with knowledge pertinent to the Special Counsel’s probe.
Despite these setbacks and the constraints of being in the Minority, the Committee’s Democratic Members remain committed to continuing the investigation. We have significantly advanced our understanding of key aspects of the investigation, including Russia’s covert activities and the issues of collusion and obstruction of justice. We have assembled to date a significant body of evidence from witness interviews, hearings, classified intelligence, and materials produced to the Committee, which has in turn identified new leads, persons, and entities of interest.
Our charge remains clear and unchanged: ensure a full accounting of Russia’s meddling, including the involvement by any U.S. persons; inoculate the public against future foreign influence campaigns; and provide a roadmap for securing future elections. These Minority Views are not a substitute for a comprehensive report, which the Minority will present to the American public after completing the necessary investigatory work. Instead, the Minority Views will highlight a small portion of the evidence that has come to our attention, the many important leads which the Majority made a deliberate decision not to pursue, and the reasons to reject the Majority’s attempt to explain away conduct by the Trump campaign that was clearly deceptive and unethical, and may very well have violated U.S. laws.
edited 27th Apr '18 10:13:21 PM by megaeliz
So there was an article from The New Yorker
published in January about illegal immigrants being denied refugee status and subsequently killed or harmed after being deported to their home country because the standard for granting asylum is still based on WWII-era metrics (if your government's not doing it, it doesn't count as persecution). The article's well-worth the read, but be warned that there are graphic descriptions of violence in there.
I bring this up because this bit of foulness slipped completely under my radar. Earlier this month, the DOJ, under Jeff Sessions, announced that they would be implementing a quota for Immigration Court judges to meet or face consequences
.
According to the Justice Department, the average immigration judge currently completes 678 cases per year.
If judges are not performing, they could be fired or potentially moved around the country — a tactic that could push judges out of the system.
The only one it might apply to would be the aforementioned Refugee treaty - and that's working on a model that hasn't been updated since WWII.
edited 28th Apr '18 6:16:05 AM by ironballs16
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?""US law gives the attorney general broad and substantial power to oversee and overrule these courts, as opposed to the civil and criminal US justice system, which is an independent branch of government. In the immigration courts, judges are employees of the Department of Justice."
There's the real problem, right there. I'm surprised this doesn't violate some international treaty or other.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.I wonder if the Democrats are only now figuring out the Republicans have gone from The Rival to organized crime.
If so, they must be incredibly dense.
edited 28th Apr '18 5:39:15 AM by CharlesPhipps
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Donald Trump's tax law firm has 'deep' ties to Russia
Sheri Dillon and William Nelson, tax partners at the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, which has served as tax counsel to Trump and the Trump Organization since 2005, wrote a letter in March released by the White House on Friday stating that a review of the last 10 years of Trump’s tax returns “do not reflect” ties to Russia “with a few exceptions.”
In 2016, however, Chambers & Partners, a London-based legal research publication, named the firm “Russia Law Firm of the Year” at its annual awards dinner. The firm celebrated the “prestigious honor” in a press release on its website, noting that the award is “the latest honor for the high-profile work performed by the lawyers in Morgan Lewis’ Moscow office.”
According to the firm’s website, its Moscow office includes more than 40 lawyers and staff who are “well known in the Russian market, and have a deep familiarity with the local legislation, practices, and key players.” The firm boasts of being “particularly adept” at advising clients on “sanction matters."
Following the release of the letter, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) noted the firm’s connection to Russia, calling it “unreal."
Asked if there could be other business ties between Trump and Russian partners, Sheri Dillon told ABC News that “the letter speaks for itself.”
As for the firm’s presence in Russia, a firm spokesperson said that no lawyers from Morgan Lewis have handling any business dealings for Mr. Trump in Russia.
Dillon has never been to Russia and does no work there, the spokesperson said.
Jack Blum, a Washington tax lawyer who is an expert on white-collar financial crime and international tax evasion, called the Dillon letter “meaningless.”
Blum told ABC News that real estate projects, in particular, can be structured with partners and subsidiaries so that it would be easy to shield the identity of all involved. Trump’s tax returns would not show where all the money came from to finance these projects, he said.
“There’s no substance to it. The letter is just another puff of smoke,” Blum said. “It has no meaning at all. It’s just another way to not answer the question.”
edited 28th Apr '18 5:46:08 AM by megaeliz

Which would be insane but China has made some crazy decisions lately and so has America with it's frequent shutdowns.
They cannot do this. They cannot demand that they be paid money now. The way debt is issued by sovereign states is as bonds etc.: they have a fixed point at which they will mature and have been paid back. You cannot take them and cash it in for the full value of the debt now.
What China can do is stop buying them but that doesn't stop more from being issued. It involves more buying from oneself and would do horrible things to inflation, but runaway inflation in the dollar would decrease its value, decrease its buying power, and suddenly relying on exports to the USA would be a bad idea. So it would screw them over. And that's assuming that China as a bond market is enough to cause that amount of destabilisation.
It doesn't matter how much debt anyone has already bought because that just exposes them to massive risk from the USA not repaying. It is not leverage for the person owning the debt.
edited 27th Apr '18 4:46:26 PM by RainehDaze