• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

Biggest Reform EVER passed thread

PhDeac said:
First month with over 300K jobs created under Trump. Happened 8 times under Obama.

And of course, the Feb number could be adjusted down.
Click to expand...

Wages, adjusted for inflation, were negative for 7 of the last 10 years. Thanks, Obama.
 
In actuality, most small business owners have been in business long enough that they are unlikely to knowingly change or adapt quickly. However, there are certain companies who will trickle down the wealth and snatch up the top talent of their competitors. Usually wages tend to normalize so just the small amount of firms that do aggressively move their wages up could force upward pressure across the board. But how long that process takes is very hard to predict, but we are seeing a huge rise in average wages in our industry, granted I wouldn't expect our industry to be close to representative of the overall economy.
 
Last edited:
palmab03 said:
Wages, adjusted for inflation, were negative for 7 of the last 10 years. Thanks, Obama.
Click to expand...

Democrats are all for increasing the minimum wage.
 
Weird that they need another bill when they were all excited to run on the first.
 
avalon said:
Weird that they need another bill when they were all excited to run on the first.
Click to expand...

I noticed on the Sunday morning talk shows the past couple of weeks that many GOP talking heads seemed genuinely surprised that the tax bill doesn't seem to have helped them in recent elections, such as the special House election in PA, as they thought it would. I guess since they're not getting any traction with the first bill at the polls, they've decided, being right-wing GOPers, that the solution must be to pass a second tax cut bill. That'll do the trick! Surely the electorate will vote for GOP candidates in the fall if they're getting two tax cuts aimed mostly at the wealthy and corporations!
 
Unicorns of the Intellectual Right

Read on the site for relevant embedded links.

Quote:
----------
The hiring-then-firing of Kevin Williamson followed a familiar script. A mainstream media organization hires a conservative in the name of intellectual diversity, then is shocked, shocked to discover that he’s dishonest and/or holds truly reprehensible views – something that the organization could have discovered with a few minutes on Google. But when the bad hire is let go, the right treats him as a martyr, proof of liberal refusal to let alternative viewpoints be heard. Why does this keep happening?

As others have pointed out, the real problem here is that media organizations are looking for unicorns: serious, honest, conservative intellectuals with real influence. Forty or fifty years ago, such people did exist. But now they don’t.

To understand why, let me talk about what I know: the field of economics. This happens to be a field with a relatively strong conservative presence compared to other social sciences, and as far as I can tell even contains considerably more self-identified conservatives/Republicans than hard science. Even so, trying to find influential conservative economic intellectuals is basically a hopeless task, for two reasons.

First, while there are many conservative economists with appointments at top universities, publications in top journals, and so on, they have no influence on conservative policymaking. What the right wants are charlatans and cranks, in (conservative) Greg Mankiw’s famous phrase. If they use actual economists, they use them the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

The appointment of Larry Kudlow to head the National Economic Council epitomizes the phenomenon. The NEC director doesn’t have to be an academically prestigious economist; Larry Summers was an exception. But under Obama the director was always someone who was interested in real policy research, listened to what experts had to say, and was willing to change views in the face of evidence.

Obviously none of this is true in Kudlow’s case. He’s basically a TV personality, whose shtick is preaching the magic of tax cuts, and nothing – not the Kansas debacle, not the Clinton boom, not the strong job creation that followed Obama’s 2013 tax hike – will change his mind. And it’s not just that he’s incurious and inflexible: selling snake oil is his business model, and he can’t change without losing everything. And that’s the kind of guy Republicans want.

All this means that if you get a conservative economist who isn’t a charlatan and crank, you are more or less by definition getting someone with no influence on policymakers. But that’s not the only problem.

The second problem with conservative economic thought is that even aside from its complete lack of policy influence, it’s in an advanced state of both intellectual and moral decadence – something that has been obvious for a while, but became utterly clear after the 2008 crisis.

I’ve written a lot about the intellectual decadence. In macroeconomics, what began in the 60s and 70s as a usefully challenging critique of Keynesian views went all wrong in the 80s, because the anti-Keynesians refused to reconsider their views when their own models failed the reality test while Keynesian models, with some modification, performed pretty well. By the time the Great Recession struck, the right-leaning side of the profession had entered a Dark Age, having retrogressed to the point where famous economists trotted out 30s-era fallacies as deep insights.

But even among conservative economists who didn’t go down that rabbit hole, there has been a moral collapse – a willingness to put political loyalty over professional standards. We saw that most recently in the way leading conservative economists raced to endorse ludicrous claims for the efficacy of the Trump tax cuts, then tried to climb down without admitting what they had done. We saw it in the false claims that Obama had presided over a massive expansion of government programs and refusal to admit that he hadn’t, the warnings that Fed policy would cause huge inflation followed by refusal to admit having been wrong, and on and on.

What accounts for this moral decline? I suspect that it’s about a desperate attempt to retain some influence on a party that prefers the likes of Kudlow or Stephen Moore. People like John Taylor just keep hoping that if they toe the party line enough, they can still get on the inside. But so far this keeps not happening – and for sure it won’t get better under Trump.

And no, you don’t see the same thing on the other side. Liberal economists have made plenty of bad predictions – if you never get it wrong, you’re not taking enough risks – but have generally been willing to admit to and learn from mistakes, and have rarely been sycophants to people in power. In this, as in so much else, we’re looking at asymmetric polarization.

Am I saying that there are no conservative economists who have maintained their principles? Not at all. But they have no influence, zero, on GOP thinking. So in economics, a news organization trying to represent conservative thought either has to publish people with no constituency or go with the charlatans who actually matter.

And I think that’s true across the board. The left has genuine public intellectuals with actual ideas and at least some real influence; the right does not. News organizations don’t seem to have figured out how to deal with this reality, except by pretending that it doesn’t exist. And that’s why we keep having these Williamson-like debacles.
----------
 
New Memo Shows How Republicans Used Tax Bill to Enrich Themselves

But Republican complicity in the culture of corruption isn’t limited to turning a blind eye to the goings on in the executive branch. To the contrary, the GOP’s signature legislative accomplishment in the Trump era is an artifact of the deep rot of corruption running through Republican politics writ large, and there are new indications that the Democratic Party is prepared to extend the corruption case beyond Trump and his cabinet secretaries to the people who will actually face voters in November.

In a new memorandum scheduled for wide release this week, the Center for American Progress Action Fund—the advocacy arm of the influential Democratic think tank—explores the self-dealing nature of the GOP’s corporate tax cut law, which Republicans enacted in historically opaque fashion late last year.

The memo, provided exclusively to Crooked.com, details how a specific measure in the bill, which was seemingly critical to securing its passage, enriched key Republicans in Congress, some to the tune of hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars a year, and provides credible estimates of the value of that provision to specific members.
Click to expand...
 
anyone read the CBO projections for the next ten years that came out yesterday?
 
DeaconSig said:
I thought about it, then I realized I have a life and didn't.
Click to expand...

yeah, i did the same but heard a little. thought i would call on the better financial minds to give an overview.
 
avalon said:
New Memo Shows How Republicans Used Tax Bill to Enrich Themselves
Click to expand...

tenor.gif
 
Corker: Tax cuts ‘could be one of worst votes I’ve made’

“If it ends up costing what has been laid out here, it could well be one of the worst votes I’ve made,” he said at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on the Congressional Budget Office estimate that produced the figure.

“I hope that is not the case, I hope there’s other data to assist, whether it’s jobs or growth or whatever,” Corker added.
Click to expand...

The new CBO estimate that the bill would cost $1.9 trillion through 2028 is higher than previous available estimates, largely because it includes the interest costs of servicing the debt, as well as more recent economic data. The Joint Committee on Taxation had estimated that the bill would cost roughly $1.1 trillion over a decade at the time Corker cast his vote. Both estimates take into account the effects of economic growth on revenues.
Click to expand...
 
dummie Dem messengers need to learn how to message tax reform to middle American whites.


Oh yeah, they will never win over middle American whites 'cause god hates queers and baby-killers.
 
Newenglanddeac said:
"None of us have covered ourselves in glory. This Congress and this administration likely will go down as one of the most fiscally irresponsible administrations and congresses that we've had," Corker said.
Click to expand...

No shit.

If only there had been some way to know ahead of time that slashing taxes on the wealthy (at exactly the wrong time) and corporations would decrease tax revenue and inflate deficits.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top