Slowing economy complicates campaign messaging for Trump

[What if...?]

Are you building a global warming bunker? The temperature 20 ft down is a constant 50 degrees F or so. You could ride out climate change down there for decades.

No water. No light.

Typical conservative "solution".

 

[What if...?]

Unless there's a killer crash that's obvious to everyone, I doubt it will matter to Trump supporters. They don't pay attention to facts, the get their information from Trump & his media. And Trump and his media are telling them the economy has never been better.

Which of course is generally true of a relatively healthy economy over time as population increases.

More people equals more sales and more workers.

But it always sounds good.

And people are stupid.

 

[What if...?]

I truly think it is counterproductive to keep insulting folks who support Trump. It probably makes some more entrenched in their thinking. It also allows for the disgrace that happened on CNN with Don Lemon. Did not see it but it seems he was laughing at insulting jokes.

Actions such as these probably makes many who don't consider themselves coastal elites oppose those arrogant enough to demean them.

Stupid should be painful.

I don't let liberals get away with their stupid, like their gun control nonsense, either.

I've always felt trumps great usefulness would be breaking this country once and for all. Putting an end to the experiment.

Going swimmingly so far.

 

[danielpalos]

It's not a case study. It's literally decades of research and thousands of articles. And the concept is specific to financial markets.

Solving for simple poverty via existing legal and physical infrastructure will cost around three trillion dollars and generate a multiplier of Two or more. The financial markets must be affected.

 

[What if...?]

Cool now explain how you sell a $15 Minimum wage to the same people you are selling the economy is tanking to....

Same way you sell huge tax cuts for globalists as a blow against globalism.

 

[Drawdown]

Same way you sell huge tax cuts for globalists as a blow against globalism.

By supporting Neomercantilism? Call me skeptical.

 

[danielpalos]

Cool now explain how you sell a $15 Minimum wage to the same people you are selling the economy is tanking to....

Higher paid labor pays more in taxes and creates more in demand.

 

[Drawdown]

Higher paid labor pays more in taxes and creates more in demand.

So the more people get paid the more the democrats demand their taxes, huh? Well that seems technically true, but I am not sure how you sell that to the Earned Income Tax Credit crowd.

 

[danielpalos]

So the more people get paid the more the democrats demand their taxes, huh? Well that seems technically true, but I am not sure how you sell that to the Earned Income Tax Credit crowd.

Why would the earned income tax crowd need a selling point; they should be richer not poorer and receive credit accordingly. The point is, more people participating in our markets means more people creating demand and paying taxes.

 

[Drawdown]

Why would the earned income tax crowd need a selling point; they should be richer not poorer and receive credit accordingly. The point is, more people participating in our markets means more people creating demand and paying taxes.

Why would someone want to work an extra 330+ hours to make the money the government was already giving them for free?

 

[danielpalos]

Why would someone want to work an extra 330+ hours to make the money the government was already giving them for free?

The selling point is a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage. That is around thirty thousand per year, for an Individual.

 

[Drawdown]

The selling point is a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage. That is around thirty thousand per year, for an Individual.

That is about the value people get from the government without all that working part in terms of housing benefits, etc for popping out a few kids so still not seeing ow it is a plus for the demographic that would be most affected.

 

[danielpalos]

That is about the value people get from the government without all that working part in terms of housing benefits, etc for popping out a few kids so still not seeing how it is a plus for the demographic that would be most affected.

Fifteen dollars an hour translates to a higher more immediate income that can help with immediate housing costs of the Individual over having to get means tested.

 

[Drawdown]

Fifteen dollars an hour translates to a higher more immediate income that can help with immediate housing costs of the Individual over having to get means tested.

With all this free college and free healthcare, people can live like a king on $7.25 an hour.

 

[danielpalos]

With all this free college and free healthcare, people can live like a king on $7.25 an hour.

Not really. And, our housing sector needs more market participants to be able to upgrade more often not just maintain current housing.

Markets should be able to "float more freely" by solving for simple poverty and should increase market efficiency due that increase in market based consumer preference metrics.

 

[Drawdown]

Not really. And, our housing sector needs more market participants to be able to upgrade more often not just maintain current housing.

Markets should be able to "float more freely" by solving for simple poverty and should increase market efficiency due that increase in market based consumer preference metrics.

The most direct way to address that is through public housing in affected areas, not nationwide minimum wage increases, particularly one as drastic as $15 an hour.

 

[danielpalos]

The most direct way to address that is through public housing in affected areas, not nationwide minimum wage increases, particularly one as drastic as $15 an hour.

And be accused of excessive socialism? We allegedly subscribe to Capitalism and "free markets". Why would consumers be better off with Government housing versus "free market" housing with their adjusted income?

 

[TheEconomist]

Solving for simple poverty via existing legal and physical infrastructure will cost around three trillion dollars and generate a multiplier of two or more. The financial markets must be affected.

I hate to break it to you, but you will never get a multiplier of two or more. You might be able to find some papers in the structural vector autoregression litterature that get to a multiplier a little above one, but never around two. Likewise, if you dig into the theoretical litterature, even if you "cheat" by exaggerating the impotency of the central bank at the zero lower bound and linearizing a toy version of a New Keynesian model, you still will not get to a multiplier of two.

Chances are, in times of very serious crisis, you might get a multiplier that hovers a little above one and, more generally, it's below one.

 

[danielpalos]

I hate to break it to you, but you will never get a multiplier of two or more. You might be able to find some papers in the structural vector autoregression litterature that get to a multiplier a little above one, but never around two. Likewise, if you dig into the theoretical litterature, even if you "cheat" by exaggerating the impotency of the central bank at the zero lower bound and linearizing a toy version of a New Keynesian model, you still will not get to a multiplier of two.

Chances are, in times of very serious crisis, you might get a multiplier that hovers a little above one and, more generally, it's below one.

Sorry to break it to you but these guys were simply, more doctrinal than You. Dogma only goes so far in modern broadband times.
https://wdr.doleta.gov/research/FullText_Documents/ETAOP2010-10.pdf

 

[Drawdown]

And be accused of excessive socialism? We allegedly subscribe to Capitalism and "free markets". Why would consumers be better off with Government housing versus "free market" housing with their adjusted income?

government housing is income-based and would pick up shortages in supply or income. See this is not the democrat's problem. They are too worried about the optics. They are too worried about the stigma of people living in government housing. They are not socialist enough which is why their policies are always just another failed corporate subsidy in the end. One of the housing issues in England right now is that their hybrid system isn't working well because they base sliding rents off market rates and not the actual incomes of the residents thereby leaving many working poor people struggling to pay inflated rents even on a sliding scale.

 

[danielpalos]

government housing is income-based and would pick up shortages in supply or income. See this is not the democrat's problem. They are too worried about the optics. They are too worried about the stigma of people living in government housing. They are not socialist enough which is why their policies are always just another failed corporate subsidy in the end. One of the housing issues in England right now is that their hybrid system isn't working well because they base sliding rents off market rates and not the actual incomes of the residents thereby leaving many working poor people struggling to pay inflated rents even on a sliding scale.

We should have no homeless problem in our First World economy. Solving simple poverty via existing legal and physical infrastructure can enable markets to arbitrage better with more participation.

 

[TheEconomist]

I think the difference in worldview comes down to a difference of thinking about healthcare as a commodity like any other good or service, versus as a basic human right.

There is a major issue with defining "health care" as a human right. To see where the objection lies, consider other rights.

Freedom of speech does not compel anyone else to do anything on my behalf. My freedom of speech is not a mandate they have to carry out, but a prohibition on what they cannot do to me. Conversely, it also forces me to observe the exact same prohibition when others have something to say. The same can be said about the freedom of assembly, the freedom to associate, as well as property rights. All of those things (1) are prohibitions, so they do not force anyone to do anything and (2) are strictly symmetrical in the sense that I ask of others no more and no less than I am myself forced to respect.

Now comes healthcare. As much as we all understand the importance of healthcare, it is not free. Your right to healthcare services is effectively a right to the labor of someone else. And that's where conservatives disagree. By the way, as I pointed out many times, the government is not the only way to organize people to tackle social problems such as deaing with health issues among the poor. It's not because conservatives do not like the compulsory program that they would not applaud voluntary efforts. Everyone agrees that a child born to poor parents receiving a bad diagnosis is a sad part of life. Nobody would just say "tough luck."


I don't think of healthcare as a human right, specifically because of the aforementionned reason. On the other hand, I don't think of healthcare programs as peculiarly problematic. The only difference here seems that I am perfectly aware this requires digging into the pockets of other people by force, so I see that as a necessary evil, not as a right.

But the whole purpose of healthcare is to take care of sick people, not make money. This is not working out because the free market is not designed to address the problem we are trying to deal with here, which is to have a healthier society. These companies are working in a broken system. That is why it seems to me that healthcare, among all economic sectors, should be taken out of the free market system. This is one of the rare situations where the ends and purposes of what we as a society want and need, and what the free market wants to provide, are not aligned.

I'm not going to take issue with your commentary on healthcare and health insurance. There arguably are information problems involved that suggest it's not always to be dealt with effectively in a decentralized system, as much as I dislike the idea of centralizing decisions. I'm not an expert in health economics either.

On the other hand, I will absolutely take issue with how you personnify "society." It is a collection of individuals with different preferences and who likely will face different costs and benefits when policy changes are made. The core problem behind your personnification of society, of treating it as if it was proper to call it "we" is essentially the formal problem of coherently aggregating individual preferences. Here comes Arrow's Impossibility theorem. The idea is this: assuming that individuals have coherent preferences (meaning, it produces a proper ordering of relevant options), can we bundle them together and be certain that the resulting "social" preferences are also coherent?

If you impose that unanimity should be respected and that the social preferences cannot be the preferences of just one person (what we call the dictatorship condition), it's impossible to guarantee you will get a coherent set of preferences. That's why you get things like the Condorcet paradox, by the way. So, when you say "we" to mean society, it necessarily either is (1) pure nonsense, or (2) you mean a small group of people imposing their preferences to others under the guise of social welfare. Society is not a person. It does not have interests. It does not have goals. Individuals do. What "you as a society needs" really means what a subset of the population wants to impose on another subset of the population.

I do not always object to the idea that it might nonetheless be desirable, but I don't try to lie about it. It's very clear that when I favor those types of policies, it does involve coercing some people for the benefit of others. That's how all redistributive policies work. All of them without a single exception: it always forces some people to work for the benefit of others. I at least have the guts to not sugar coat it.

The free market is great. But it is not a magic cure-all that can just be blindly applied to all problems to fix them.

For the sake of clarity, I will add that I never said it should.

 

[danielpalos]

There is a major issue with defining "health care" as a human right. To see where the objection lies, consider other rights.

Only the right wing has a problem with natural rights.

All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.[

 

[Fledermaus]

Only the right wing has a problem with natural rights.

Now you are getting danielpalos all over this thread....

 

[TheEconomist]

Only the right wing has a problem with natural rights.

The core idea behind the theory of natural rights is that you can legitimately impose certain demands on others even if no institution exists to guarantee that those demands will be met. From this point of view, the legitimacy of governments and other social institutions rests primarily on their capacity to enforce the respect of rights: because the rights are antecedent to and the reason for the legitimacy of all such institutions, they ultimately supersede those institutions. In other words, you cannot legislate them away, even if all but one person agreed to do it.

In mainstream American politics, the only people who have a problem with this idea are on the left. By their light, rights are creature of the State and can be revoked or created on demand. Now that is a profound disagreement with the theory of natural rights.

Going back to the issue of healthcare, I don't think you will be able to find a political philosopher who argued that healthcare is a natural right. The fundamental problem here is that it violates a sense of symmetry which underlies almost all arguments made with regards to natural rights. In particular, the whole appeal of freedom of speech is that I ask of you no more and no less than I will accept that you would ask of me, namely to not aggress me on account of what I say or of what I write. The same applies to property rights. In fact, you could make a solid case that all rights that satisfy this symmetry constraint derive from the simple ethical assumption that you own yourself. In other words, that they fundamentally derive from property rights.


Healthcare isn't a right in any of the above sense. You're not unequivocally entitled to my labor. I'm not your slave.