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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History » Fri Nov 30, 2012 1:06 pm

Anti-looting legislation is difficult for a lot of reasons, but mainly boils down where you draw the line between the rights of the owners/investor or corporation (with the executives as agents of the corporation), the rights of the corporation's debtors, and the rights of the workforce. Most of the restructuring and refinancing that Bain Capital et al. do is perfectly legal, just short-sighted and designed to extract maximum profit for a select few in the short term, often at the expense of the investors and the people working at the company.
The big sadness about the demise of Hostess is less the loss of indelible snackstuffs than laying off all the employees (especially after being complete dicks about it), and borrowing against the employee pension fund. Because we as Americans should value the employment of the many over the enrichment of a few. Now, you could make laws that involve borrowing against pension funds and whatnot hideously illegal, but that won't stop looting in general - just a specific form of looting.
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Shatner
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Post by Shatner » Fri Nov 30, 2012 5:17 pm

During the Q&A following the talk about the Fiscal Cliff, someone asked my CEO if he could provide a document they could use to better communicate this issue to their elected representatives. Below is that letter.

> See below a draft communication to congressional leaders that I prepared, in which I tried to capture the main points from our discussion earlier. I encourage you to contact your congressional representatives and communicate your feelings on this subject, regardless of what they may be. Please do so voluntarily, in writing and on your own behalf from your personal email address.
> Regards,
> NAME REDACTED

> Dear _____,
> Our nation has been taking on debt for years, and unless something changes this will continue. Our debt load creates significant uncertainty in the economy, which makes it harder for businesses and citizens alike to plan and invest for the future. This uncertainty is because of the lack of a financially-sound budget path and is increasing the risk for our currently-delicate economy to sustain a recovery. The current fiscal situation also creates a real national security issue that we cannot ignore.
> We have waited too long to act, but it is not too late if we act now. Please immediately set aside any partisan bickering and enact a comprehensive plan that addresses all parts of the budget. To make a difference, we need to address the true drivers of our long-term debt problem, namely rising health care costs and retirement costs; while cutting wasteful and low-priority spending; and reforming the tax code to make it simpler and more competitive while increasing revenues. In order to achieve this, you and your colleagues in Congress must work together and not “kick the can down the road” on this important issue any longer.
> As a faithful, hardworking and patriotic American, I expect our leaders to take seriously our nation’s fiscal problems. There is no time to waste – we must address this issue thoughtfully and proactively -- and immediately.
> Sincerely,
> [Name and address]

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Post by Stahlseele » Fri Nov 30, 2012 6:08 pm

Your CEO actually did it? Nice O.o
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> Shrapnel wrote:

> > TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
> > Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.

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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History » Fri Nov 30, 2012 6:14 pm

Yeah, what's almost as amazing is how baldy wrong it is.
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Post by Username17 » Fri Nov 30, 2012 8:06 pm

If you believed that increasing public debt was the main problem or even a problem that was by itself worse than whatever harm might be caused by reducing government stimulus of the economy, then the Fiscal Cliff would be a thing you should embrace. The Fiscal Cliff automatically increases revenues and cuts spending, thereby arresting the growth of the debt. It is incoherent to attempt to pose as a deficit hawk while simultaneously claiming that there is any urgency in reaching an agreement before the Fiscal Cliff sets in.
If you agree that the Fiscal Cliff would be bad for the economy, then you have conceded the Keynesian point that government spending stimulates the economy and government cuts depress the economy in non-boom scenarios. If you concede that point then it is intellectually inconsistent to not also concede the next part that:

> John Maynard Keynes, 1937 wrote:The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury

But the stupid goes deeper than that with this CEO guy.

> Whoever this guy is wrote:reforming the tax code to make it simpler and more competitive while increasing revenues

First of all, "more competitive" tax codes is a dog whistle for "lower tax rates". Lower tax rates means lower revenues. Period. End of fucking story. If you lower tax rates, revenues go down. You can do other things that increase revenues at the same time to partially or even wholly offset the reduction in revenues from reducing rates, but it is those other things that are increasing revenues. The act of cutting rates is still always and forever a revenue reducing move.
Secondly, the idea that reducing rates spurs economic growth is just wrong. Congress already put their own non-partisan research arm onto this question and found that there is no effect on economic growth from reducing tax rates. The entire idea that a lower, "more competitive" tax rate would spur growth is empirically false. We've tried that, we have the t-shirt, the promised economic boom does not happen.

> This dude wrote:we need to address the true drivers of our long-term debt problem, namely rising health care costs and retirement costs; while cutting wasteful and low-priority spending

First of all, if he concedes that the true drivers of our long-term debt problem are rising health care costs and retirement costs, why do we need to cut other things that he admits are not the problem? That is again intellectually inconsistent. If you have identified X as the problem, your argument that you "need" to cut Y is extremely weak. You've already essentially admitted that you want to cut Y regardless of whether it is actually a problem, which makes you a zealot whose demands are based on ideology rather than logic or evidence.
But secondly, where does he get the idea that rising retirement costs have anything to do with anything? Here, let's look at the components of the debt in three graphs:
It's Healthcare, stupid. 100% of our long-term debt is healthcare related. We are developing techniques to keep people alive longer at greater expense, people are getting older, and we aren't making enough doctors. But no "spending cuts" are going to solve that issue. In fact, every dollar we cut out of medical programs makes the long term situation worse. Because:
Oh snap! It turns out that costs in privatized systems are rising faster than costs of the public sector, and that shifting the burden of healthcare payments from public to private is going to drive total costs up even faster. If we wanted to reign in the cost increases, we'd transfer more of the costs to the public sector, because that's cheaper.
TL;DR: if you want to solve America's long run financial problems, you would increase public spending on healthcare and raise tax rates to cover it. And you'd ignore every single thing that CEO suggested, because he literally refutes his own argument several times in his two and a half paragraph essay.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Fri Nov 30, 2012 8:11 pm

> FrankTrollman wrote:Secondly, the idea that reducing rates spurs economic growth is just wrong. Congress already put their own non-partisan research arm onto this question and found that there is no effect on economic growth from reducing tax rates. The entire idea that a lower, "more competitive" tax rate would spur growth is empirically false. We've tried that, we have the t-shirt, the promised economic boom does not happen.

Not even tax cuts for the non-overclass?

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Post by Username17 » Fri Nov 30, 2012 10:28 pm

By the way: the above quoted letter is basically a Mad Libs cut-n-paste from the Republican Party Platform Declaration, which is why it doesn't make any economic sense and isn't even internally consistent. "Uncertainty" is a Republican dog whistle that means "Kenyan Socialist Policies". Debt loads do not create uncertainty in the classic sense, but they do create uncertainty in the way the Cato Institute would like the word to be used.

> Lago PARANOIA wrote:

> > FrankTrollman wrote:Secondly, the idea that reducing rates spurs economic growth is just wrong. Congress already put their own non-partisan research arm onto this question and found that there is no effect on economic growth from reducing tax rates. The entire idea that a lower, "more competitive" tax rate would spur growth is empirically false. We've tried that, we have the t-shirt, the promised economic boom does not happen.

> Not even tax cuts for the non-overclass?

Well, tax cuts for the poor don't happen as often, so there's less data. Zing!
But seriously, the rational expectations people would like tax cuts to work like this:

- People having money to spend is exactly like the government spending money, thus a tax cut and a government stimulus spending are the same.
- People can however anticipate the extra money they are going to have over the year from a tax cut and start their extra spending now, thus causing the stimulus effects to be measurable much faster from a tax cut than a government spending program (which has to wait for the red tape and checks to clear).

Problem is: this is in fact not how it works in reality. There has never been a measured increase in economic growth stemming from a tax cut. The way it actually works is this:

- People have a preferred savings rate that is higher the more money they think they have. If you have five dollars, you'll pay all your money and more to buy shelter and food. If you have five hundred million dollars, some large amount of your money will be squirreled away for a rainy day. Thus, the economic stimulus of putting money into the hands of any particular person are smaller the more money they already have. So giving out $X in tax cuts is always going to be less economically stimulating than spending $X on employing people who now currently don't have jobs, because the savings rate at the very bottom is always the lowest.
- If you ask ten people what their total tax burden is, your chances of finding even one person who can accurately guess even to within 5% is vanishingly low. And if you aren't asking in April or June, your chances are even lower. The fact is that people have in general no idea what their tax burden is, and shockingly most of them can't even tell you whether their taxes went up or down with any accuracy. So it's not even that people won't change their spending habits in response to the tax rate change until after they see their next tax return - they might not even change their behavior at that point. The sad fact is that people are enough out of touch with the nation's tax policy that it could take several years for people to adjust their spending policies in line with tax rate changes.

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Koumei
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Post by Koumei » Sat Dec 01, 2012 2:33 am

> FrankTrollman wrote:Debt loads do not create uncertainty in the classic sense, but they do create uncertainty in the way the Cato Institute would like the word to be used.

Is that the sense of "I'm not certain I'm raking in as much money as I possibly could"?

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Post by tussock » Sat Dec 01, 2012 5:46 am

> Chamomile wrote:So let's say you wanted to prevent stuff like this from happening. What laws would you write to stop the vultures from looting a failed company? While this is obviously amoral greed screwing over hapless bakers, I'm having a tough time articulating how so in an exact enough way that you could outlaw it.

So, the pension fund (and other such money piles) have to be set up as an external first-order shareholder with voting rights for the long-term workers, so any bullshit that benefits shareholders benefits the pension fund (and thus the staff) equally.
The directors must be legally disinterested, so they can't hold shares, can't take profits, and gain no benefits related to company profits or losses (externally or otherwise). If they want a pay rise, the shareholders have to vote them one, every time.
Legally, asset-stripping at a book loss should force a company into receivership just like running out of operating capital does, directors all lose their jobs and are replaced with government accountants and lawyers immediately. Companies dumping assets at a loss are bad news.
That would pretty much ring-fence a company's net worth. Separating the directors from the capitalists and putting the worker's money on the side of capital gives everyone the right basic incentives.
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Post by Username17 » Sat Dec 01, 2012 7:38 am

> Koumei wrote:

> > FrankTrollman wrote:Debt loads do not create uncertainty in the classic sense, but they do create uncertainty in the way the Cato Institute would like the word to be used.

> Is that the sense of "I'm not certain I'm raking in as much money as I possibly could"?

"Uncertainty" in the way right wing talking heads use the term is a non-falsifiable effect that causes recessions because of Obama-socialism. The theory as they have advanced it is not subject to evidence, because it is "uncertain".
Basically, the RBC guys used to try to claim that recessions weren't caused by entirely solvable limits in Demand, but rather on real changes in tastes and technological shocks. This claim was made because if recessions were caused by poor people not having enough spending money, the obvious solution was redistributionalist government spending programs that they were ideologically opposed to. But if recessions were caused by wealthy people having to retool factories to cope with a changing and advancing technological landscape, then they were a harbinger of good things in the future and also had no obvious socialist solution. Unfortunately for the RBC theory, that's actually falsifiable and evidence exists that that is total bunk. So they needed a different theory of recessions.
So around the time of the Great Recession in 2007, they started pushing the "Uncertainty" theory pretty hard. The idea was that "job creators" wouldn't create jobs if they feared the risk of investment return was too high - and that democrats created that risk by being perceived as proto-communists. The nice thing about this theory from a right wing talking head perspective is that there is absolutely no evidence for it, and more importantly still it's very difficult to imagine what contrary evidence might look like. It's basically non-falsifiable, because they defined uncertainty in a way that is wholly subjective and not particularly measurable. Remember, it's not the effects of democratic policies, it's the fear of what the effects of democratic policies might be.
If you really want to claw your eyes out, you can check out the working papers of the guys who tried to turn that into a rigorous mathematical description of recessions. Their findings were that if you defined mathematically measurable uncertainty as periods where in hindsight a bunch of firms were about to go out of business, that these periods of high uncertainty correlated very highly with recessions. Or to put it another way: in the historical data they tautologically found that periods just before recessions came just before recessions. Therefore: Obama causes recessions. The math proves it.
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Post by Koumei » Sat Dec 01, 2012 8:14 am

> FrankTrollman wrote: If you really want to claw your eyes out, you can check out the working papers of the guys who tried to turn that into a rigorous mathematical description of recessions.

Seeing as I don't have any booze on-hand, I think I'll give that one a miss.

> Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.

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Post by Ancient History » Mon Dec 03, 2012 1:26 pm

http://news.yahoo.com/boehner-faces-lin ... 14266.html
The face of the Republican party is basically House Speaker John Boehner - who is being a complete douche and is willing and eager to play brinkmanship with the economy for any political gain. I really think the GOP strategy at this point is just to sink the economy and when the elections roll around blame Obama for their obstructivism.
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Post by Username17 » Mon Dec 03, 2012 1:45 pm

It's still sort of amazing to me how transparently the republicans lack a Plan B here. It's December 3rd, and the House Republicans still don't have an opening bid on what spending cuts they even want. The plan was apparently to just let Obama negotiate with himself while they threw temper tantrums, and then blame Obama for whatever unpopular cuts came out of the "deal". Admittedly, that did work in 2010, but you'd think they'd have a backup in case it didn't.
Turns out, all Obama had to do was ask them what their proposals actually are and they are stuck because they don't really have any. This is like Rmoney not writing a concession speech. Optimism is fine and all, but how did these guys get to the top of their party without ever making a contingency plan?
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Mon Dec 03, 2012 3:06 pm

> FrankTrollman wrote:Turns out, all Obama had to do was ask them what their proposals actually are and they are stuck because they don't really have any. This is like Rmoney not writing a concession speech. Optimism is fine and all, but how did these guys get to the top of their party without ever making a contingency plan?

I think that the non-Tea Party Republicans, that is, the overclass-fellating wingnuts that don't really give a toss what happens as long as the rich get the lion's share, do in fact have a contingency plan.
The problem is that the Tea Party Republicans are deeply stupid and contradictory. They are so stupid and contradictory that any possible opening bid that's better than the status quo of 'austerity shocks agreed to in 2010/2011 happen' is going to alienate the caucus.

- The Tea Party won't just accept a mulligan on the debt ceiling hysteria and resume deficit spending. This is because they are actual deficit hawks rather than being deficit chickenhawks. Yes, the sincerity is born out of ignorance and resentment, but it's all the same.
- The Tea Party won't accept obvious cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and/or to Defense. You can claim that this is because they're stupid and contradictory (and I agree) and don't realize that their goals of 'no deficit, no real cuts to 90% of the budget, and lowered taxes' are impossible to implement. You can also claim that they would actually like the cuts but realize that cuts to these programs are very politically volatile; with the short memory of the public, they would suddenly be holding the hot potato. But the conclusion remains the same: there will be no serious cuts to Medicare, SS, and DoD.
- Even for the 10% of the budget that aren't the Big Three, they're filled with landmines that don't really accomplish any deficit-cutting goals. Threatening to cut the Department of Energy or Education or Big Bird may be popular among the wingnut base -- the Tea Party will eat it up -- but outside of wingnuttia cutting these programs is political malpractice. Boehner and friends putting the NEA up on the chopping block soothes the rattled minds of Tea Party wingnuts but puts them in a weaker position.
- Higher taxes on the wealthy are out of the question among Republicans even though that is what the public supports While the Republicans are definitely angling for higher taxes on the poor and middle class (remember that whole We Are the 53 percent garbage) the problem is that A.) they're very politically unpopular and B.) Obama and friends can just shoot it down anyway.
- Boehner is already facing some grumbling from the Tea Party/Red State wing about being ineffective and unable to advance wingnut goals. Even if Boehner realizes that there's no way he can get a deal better than the status quo without alienating his base, grandstanding on Tea Party points won't just cause him to get shredded in opinion polls but will also make him look weak. The point is that he has the choice A.) of doing nothing and hoping that omission bias will carry him, B.) of offering credible deals that would get him crucified by the Tea Party or C.) offering non-credible deals that shore up his wingnut cred but hurt him in the Village. There's also the problem that if he offers a non-credible deal that gives the Tea Party boners he'll disappoint and alienate his base by not being able to get them passed. Even if I was playing Devil's Advocate I can't think of a better option than 'A'.

So that's the dilemma Boehner is facing. He's not just in a position where Republicans can offer nothing that better than the status quo that won't get them in trouble with his base -- he can't even publicly provide a plan without getting put in a politically weaker position. Anything he provides will get him crucified either from the Tea Party or the public at large. It's exactly like George W. Bush and Medicare Part D. Republicans don't just have to obfuscate the content of their programs to the media and public -- they have to obfuscate the content of their programs to their own politicians.
My prediction: Boehner waits until the absolute last minute to provide a plan. The plan has no chance of passing because of the above Tea Party contradictions, but at least he gets the ameliorate the talking points of 'the GOP did not want to negotiate'. The Democratic party of course rejects the plan.
Two things in this debacle surprises me.
[*] The corporate whore media is actually criticizing the Republican party for not being serious about negotiations. Not Obama, not even a 'but both sides do it', but the Republican party. Joe Scarborough whining that the problem lies with Republicans and not both sides came from fucking left field. Corporate whores gotta corporate whore though and I don't expect this sudden outbreak of common sense to last.
[*] Public polling shows that the populace will blame the Republicans for the austerity shock if negotiations fail. That's gotta make Republican testicles shrivel (further). Sometimes the short memory of the deeply retarded and putrid American voter works to liberal advantage. Sometimes.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Mon Dec 03, 2012 3:18 pm, edited 3 times in total.

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Post by Josh_Kablack » Mon Dec 03, 2012 4:44 pm

Ignoring CEOs isn't going far enough
Those class warrior plantation owners need to be shouted down and everything they call for needs to be labelled as the self-serving anti-American democracy destroying greed it is.
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Post by fbmf » Mon Dec 03, 2012 6:17 pm

> are actual deficit hawks rather than being deficit chickenhawks.

I've seen these terms before, but I don't actually know what they mean. Can you explain?
Game On,
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Post by Username17 » Mon Dec 03, 2012 6:50 pm

> fbmf wrote:

> > are actual deficit hawks rather than being deficit chickenhawks.

> I've seen these terms before, but I don't actually know what they mean. Can you explain?
> Game On,
> fbmf

The "Hawks and Doves" idea goes back to political parties in Ancient Rome. The Hawks favored war, the Doves favored peace. It was more complicated than that, but since that's the only part people remembered a thousand years and more later, that's good enough.
Being "hawkish" or "a hawk" means that you are in favor of aggressively combating whatever the hell it is that is being talked about. Being "a hawk" generally means that you're in favor of war, or whatever war is being talked about - in the sixties "Hawks" were in favor of war with Vietnam and "Doves" were not. But if it's in some specific context, the aggressive combating you are doing doesn't have to be literal.
In common discussion these days, many people claim the mantle of "Inflation Hawk" or "Deficit Hawk"meaning that they want to aggressively combat "inflation" or "the deficit" respectively. The problem with this, is that while many people want to be known as deficit hawks because it sounds respectable, very few people actually want to do the things you would need to do to bring the deficit down in real terms. I mean let's face it: you're asking for the government to hand out less free money on the grounds that you want there to be less debt overhang sometime in the future. It's not a terribly exciting position once you get away from raw rhetoric.
And so we have people like Paul Ryan and Pete Peterson who go on great tirades about how the deficit is the biggest problem and we must combat it now, and so on and so forth, but when pressed for actual budget suggestions they just want a tax cut for their friends. So these people get insultingly referred to as "Deficit Chickenhawks" because they pose as "Deficit Hawks" but when it comes down to brass tacks they are chicken.
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Post by Ancient History » Mon Dec 03, 2012 6:52 pm

It's originally from the term war hawk, politicians that would call for war or escalation of a current war. "Deficit hawks" by extension are politicians that strongly advocate a lowering of the deficit. "Chickenhawks" are, basically, birds that aren't hawks but are mistaken for them - the implication being that there are politicians that would appear to strongly advocate for war or lowering the deficit, but when faced with political pressure or appeasal will relent.
[/edit]Beaten by Frank.
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Post by Whipstitch » Mon Dec 03, 2012 6:53 pm

Calling someone a chickenhawk is basically referring to a subset of NIMBY politics. Nimbies and chickenhawks are selfish hypocrites, basically--they claim to want something to happen and will use strong language to that effect but are unwilling to be involved with any of the sacrifices needed to effect such change. The name comes from the fact that the classic example of a chickenhawk stems from conscription and war politics--the archetypal US chickenhawk is some rich fuck who is totally for the draft as long as there's exemptions available that allows them to stow their own kids away in college until the war is over.
Go team ninja.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Mon Dec 03, 2012 6:57 pm

Quick primer:
Deficit dove (rarely used): are people like Krugman who say that the budget deficit of a monetarily sovereign economy is a concern but should not be addressed at the cost of other social needs. Like social safety net spending and infrastructure. When the economy is running at full employment is the time to reduce the deficit.
Deficit hawk: Sort of the opposite of the above. They are people who say that the deficit is an overriding concern and threatens to wreck the economy by causing default or intimidating bond sellers and etc.. Generally, the deficit should be cut whenever possible even at the cost of some economic pain. Probably the most famous deficit hawk is Ross Perot.
Deficit owl: People who say that the deficit is in of itself a good thing. No matter how well or poorly the economy is performing, the deficit should be kept as high as possible until it causes as inflation. The key difference between a deficit dove and a deficit owl is that deficit doves believe that the federal deficit should be reduced in good times and deficit owls believe that it should only be reduced in cases of high inflation. All deficit owls subscribe to post-Keynesian economics. Probably the most famous of these is Warren Mosler. If you haven't heard of 'deficit hawk' you haven't heard of Mosler.
Chickenhawk: (unrelated to the terms above) A bellicose pro-war politician that nonetheless never served when given the opportunity.
So as a bit of a neologism, Deficit Hawk and Chickenhawk have been combined to snarkily create a fourth kind of politician -- the Deficit Chickenhawk. That is, someone who poses as a Deficit Hawk when someone else is controlling the ins and out of public legislation, but have no problems driving up the deficit and debt when they control the legislation.

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Mon Dec 03, 2012 8:20 pm

Deficit Owls, or more broadly Fu Owls (where "Fu" is anything at all) are not real things. The "Owl" nomenclature is just a trite statement of third wayism. Whenever someone describes themselves as a "Fu Owl" they are self describing themselves as some sort of disinterested centrist or a fanatical dropout.
Owls dates back to the Vietnam, where people like Greenspan (yes, that Greenspan) ranted about how the Hawks and Doves were both wrong and we needed to do something else.

> Alan Greenspan wrote:This country has too many hawks and too many doves. What we need are a few owls.

Needless to say, Alan Greenspans suggestions for dealing with the cold war generally or Vietnam in particular weren't any better than the screaming hawks. The mantle of disinterest was a facade from the beginning - his third way was never real. Centrism is a morally bankrupt doctrine that is neither philosophically coherent nor pragmatically competent, and people who cloak their goals with the weasel words of Centrism are generally speaking up to no good.
Issues for which the Hawk/Dove nomenclature are popular are not for the most part amenable to "third ways" at all. Either you support a war or you don't. Either you think it's important to reduce the deficit right now or you don't. There is no third direction, the choice is simple and binary.
Now you could have a million or a thousand times a million reasons for coming down on the side you come down on. And those lines of reasoning could lead you to come down on the other side in different situations or ask for as many different actions in support of your position as there are villains in history. But the choice itself is still always defined as current and binary. You are with us or you are against us: you are a Hawk or you are a Dove. Anyone who claims that their position is distinct enough that it deserves its own representative bird is at best a mewling narcissist.
-Username17
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Korgan0
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Post by Korgan0 » Mon Dec 03, 2012 8:48 pm

Well, in this case, isn't the kind of MMT-inspired Deficit Owl position that whether or not we should run a deficit is not dependent on the boom-bust cycle, but rather the current level of inflation, a fundamentally different position to the Deficit Hawks and the Deficit Doves? Certainly, in the kinds of binary circumstances you're talking about, "sane, rational centrism" is disgusting, but in this scenario it seems that the Deficit Owl position is a legitimate Third Way.
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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History » Mon Dec 03, 2012 8:50 pm

Nah. It's like you've got people that already know they want chocolate and some want white chocolate and some want dark chocolate. It's the fuckers calling for nougat you need to worry about, because they're not on the same wavelength.
Deep Cuts In A Lovecraftian Vein
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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History » Mon Dec 03, 2012 10:00 pm

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... ma/265856/
GOP counterproposal. Which is basically the same as intransigence: they propose to raise money without increasing rates, slashing social services, no stimulus.
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Maj
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Post by Maj » Mon Dec 03, 2012 10:09 pm

I have no freaking clue why people are letting Republicans get away with representing the 2% and not their constituents. It's stupid.
My son makes me laugh. Maybe he'll make you laugh, too.
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