Does this sound like a familiar set of circumstances?
It’s gotten to the point where even the most mundane parts of daily life -- waiting for the elevator, taking a cab, bumping into a neighbor -- can quickly turn into full-blown screaming matches. The tensions are dividing friends, family and colleagues. Many have taken to proclaiming that they’re voting for neither, whether that’s true or not, just to sidestep the whole mess.It's Brazil, in the runup to the run off between presidential candidates Jair Bolsonaro and Fernando Haddad.
Today's must-read: "Controlling the Debt is Gonna Be Painful" by Robert Verbruggen at NRO.
You should also spend some time with the Manhattan Institute study that it discusses.
Bottom line: We've waited so long to deal with the debt and deficit that it's going to require some wrenching changes.
Somebody with requisite resources please step in and rectify the horrifying situation at this Albanian zoo.
Geostrategy is not for the squeamish. One's immutable principles may not always take the highest priority. But, in the Khashoggi case, a guy like Trump, who has no core principles anyway, may be just the person to thread the needle:
Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin, Jr. to Fauxcahontas:Whichever version of the story of his murder you believe, bin Salman emerges from this sorry saga weakened. If these really were rogue elements from the top-level of his security apparatus, he clearly does not rule with the total power and control he needs to turn his vision of a modern Saudi Arabia into reality. Taking note will be his many enemies inside the royal family, as well as the bitter military chiefs bin Salman has summarily dismissed. Alternatively, if bin Salman is about to throw to the wolves a bunch of assassins he did in fact send on their mission, including three of his personal bodyguards, he will be betraying the only people surrounding him he can trust apart from immediate family. The result is that Saudi Arabia is about to enter an era of even greater paranoia and political repression.Looked at another way, though, it’s a win-win for all sides. Bin Salman’s most powerful opponent outside of the royal family is dead, and he can get back to dragging the kingdom into the 21st century. With the audio and video evidence of the crime apparently in his hands, Erdogan gains leverage over rival Saudi Arabia as they vie for influence in the region, just as frosty relations with the US thaw following the release of American Pastor Andrew Brunson. We can all breath a sigh of relief that Saudi Arabia will not carry out its threat to tank the global economy. The assassins will lose their heads. And Trump, once again, can prove that he is a master of diplomacy.
Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven. Senator Warren is undermining tribal intrests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”I agree with every one of Chris Queen's choices at PJ Media for the 10 Most Overrated Hit Singles of All Time, as well as his rationales in each case. Gratified to see "Imagine" at number one. Now, I'd better forget all about it, or I'll be playing the parlor game of constructing my own list in my head all day, and I have a busy lineup.
I'll tell you what's going to be painful is repealing the corporate tax cuts and having to live with their push back as they'll use it against the entire world economy. You dont cut income before you cut liabilities, Einsteins...
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteDid you see what the report had to say about corporate tax?
ReplyDeleteRaise corporate tax rates and they take operations overseas - and I know for a fact you don’t dig that.
ReplyDeleteTypical corporate threat, what is new with that?
ReplyDelete"The sell-off last week was likely just a mild review of what will happen once the blunt contradictions of Trump's major economic moves--crazy even by his standards--set in. "We're fucked," a market analyst friend of mine put it this weekend. "It's all baked in the cake already." The major ingredients, according to the article are: 1) Fed tightening; 2)Trump's tax cuts depend on monster growth (based on too-rosy projections of economic growth.); 3) Trump's tariffs.
Sure, it's gonna be a very painful withdrawal to Trump's version of rainbows & unicorns.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/stock-market-slump-trump-737792/
It's not a threat. It's economic principle. It's really unbecoming for you to play ignorant. Companies do what is in their best financial interest.
ReplyDeleteAnd while it's a different subject, I am in agreement that Trump's economic "policy" is incoherent.
Who is playing ignorant? I'm with the Dems, we lept before we looked. You're willfully ignorant if you think we didn't know what was up your sleeve--prepping us now for the coming pain.
ReplyDeleteActing like you don’t understand basic economic principle, i.e., corporate capital going to its most productive use.
ReplyDeleteAnd just what has been “up my sleeve”? You’re also willfully ignoring what I just said about Trump’s inconsistency
I should have said up your former party's sleeve: passing tax cuts without cutting spending first. Up their sleeve and yours is now prepping us for the coming pain which is the subject to your linked article. I know corporate capital goes to its most productive use, supposedly for the stakeholders, in a perfect world. Adam Smith's invisible hand is just that: invisible, i.e., it doesn't exist and therefore in order to make visible the invisible we must tax the corporate ass.
ReplyDeleteAdam Smith's invisible hand doesn't exist. Now I've heard everything.
ReplyDeleteYou obviously haven't come close to hearing everything for a long long long long time.
ReplyDeleteAdam Smith suggested the invisible hand in an otherwise obscure passage in his Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. He mentioned it only once in the book, while he repeatedly noted situations where “natural liberty” does not work. Let banks charge much more than 5% interest, and they will lend to “prodigals and projectors,” precipitating bubbles and crashes. Let “people of the same trade” meet, and their conversation turns to “some contrivance to raise prices.” Let market competition continue to drive the division of labor, and it produces workers as “stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”
https://hbr.org/2012/04/there-is-no-invisible-hand
A bank can't charge a higher interest rate than the market will bear. Same as with prices and wages.
DeleteRe: people of the same trade meeting: collusion is not the free market. It's true that it's good to have anti-collusion laws.
Re: market competition driving the division of labor: Smith was writing before anything like modern technology and production methods were on the scene.
http://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2007/09/did-adam-smith-denounce-division-of.html
In Adam Smith’s day, workshops were not remotely like modern manufacturing processes. There was hardly any power driven machinery, excepting windmills, water mills, a few Necomen steam engines for pumping water out of coalmines. The bulk of ‘manufacturing’ was by hand labour, and such machines as existed ‘augmented’ labour and did not substitute for it.
The famous pin factory was a hand driven work processes (18 of them in his example) which reduced each man’s labour to small steps, thus raising their productivity. Instead of a few pins a day, their output was raised to thousands.
But the division of labour was far more extensive than the pin factory; a little further on in the chapter (WN I.i) you find Smith describing the manufacture of a common labourer’s woollen coat and all the elements that went together to produce this item, most of them disconnected in location, including overseas for dyes, and all of them constituting distinct markets for their products and the trades they employed. Raw wool required farmers and flocks of sheep, metal scissors from a forge, from ore in the ground, and so on. This is as much a part of the division of labour as the boys working in the pin factory.
The only alternative to market competition driving the division of labor is for some central force - and that's going to be government - deciding what society needs. No good. That's the first step to tyranny.
"The failure to model the invisible hand is ironically powerful. Any given economic model might well be implausible. But if the brightest economic minds failed for a century to show how some invisible hand could move markets toward equilibrium, can any such mechanism exist? Something outside markets — social norms, economic regulation, Ben Bernanke in his happier moments — must usually avert disaster."
ReplyDeleteIbid
Google there is no invisible hand for more, much more....
ReplyDeletehttps://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/03/11/adam-smiths-invisible-hand-really-isnt-what-you-think-it-is/#15d5595d5c5b
Deletehttps://fee.org/articles/adam-smith-and-the-invisible-hand/
Deleteif we operate within the proper moral and legal framework, employing our God-given talents to the limit of our powers, then we will find individual fulfillment directly and get the good society as an unexpected bonus.
My point is your claim to being aghast that someone would claim that there is no invisible hand, by indicating that "now (you've) heard everything, intended to reveal me as shallow and stupid, was a complete and utter falsity unless you really are as uninformed as you display that you are on economic issues, though you call everyone else not in agreement so.
DeletePutin, Kavanaugh, and now Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud...
ReplyDeleteWhen will these groundless accusations against these GOOD MEN going to stop! :o)
The guy who wrote that Harvard Biz Review article is a disingenuous collectivist. He thinks he can get away with cherry-picking Smith to arrive at a conclusion that is the diametrical opposite of Smith’s essential premise
ReplyDeleteWhat makes you think that Jonathan Schlefer is a disingenuous collectivist? Besides his thought is among that of many regarding the invisible hand throughout the ages. Why would the conservative Hoover Institution have him write so much stuff for them? Do you at least get that your "now I"ve heard it all" retort and a bit misplaced. You know what you/your ilk are? Tyrants of the minority. Yet you puff yourselves up as principled Patriots.
ReplyDeleteThat's about as odd a conclusion as I've come across in some time. Defending freedom makes one a tyrant.
ReplyDeleteYou have met the enemy and it is another ism--populism. About aligned with Pogo's 'it is us.'
ReplyDeleteAs to repealing state tax cuts to help our current debt situation: how does one rectify the fact that the IRS is collecting record tax revenues after the tax cuts? Ethan and economics simpleton can be deuce that repealing the tax cuts will result in less tax revenue.
ReplyDelete