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Slowing economy complicates campaign messaging for Trump

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

I have trouble deciding if he is a troll or if he simply is completely disconnected from reality.
 
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. .
Are you sure you are an economist? Our welfare clause is General and must cover any contingency. The right wing only complains about the general welfare not the general warfare, which is nowhere to be found in our Constitution and supreme law of the land.
 
Are you sure you are an economist?

Let's see. I have a bachelor of science in applied economics, a master's in economics and I am in my second year as Ph.D. student also in economics. But if that isn't enough for you, I happen to be paid for my work. There is a long list of scholarship, prizes, paid assitantships and research grants that suggest people think I know what I'm doing.

But, hey people, danielpalos thinks I might not be qualified! :lamo

Our welfare clause is General and must cover any contingency.

Until the 1930s, literally every justice who ever had to debate the issue strongly disagreed with you. It is thoroughly unsurprising: everything about the Constitution is designed to limit the power of the State. Affiording Congress an expansive and unbounded capacity to define and seek the pursuit of "general welfare" by taxing and spending however they see fit is a manifest absurdity. Explain to me how exactly the same people who basically were invoking the basic tenets of Locke's political philosophy just two decades earlier somehow meant by "general welfare" something no government instituted prior to the early 20th century, some 200 years later... As I said, it's absurd.

You're clinging to an expression without couching it in the proper historical context, not noticing that the people who wrote the Constitution could not possibly have meant anything even remotely close to public healthcare.


And I never mentionned the welfare clause(s) of the US Constitution. I said that you're once more using concepts that have very specific meaning in completely the wrong way. To literally everyone except you, apparently, natural rights means something along the line of Locke's theory of rights. And you won't find people taking this line of thought and coming up with an argument about how healthcare really is a natural right... What you will find is people who criticize natural rights claiming that healthcare should be decreed to be a right because, in their mind, rights are creatures of the State.
 
Let's see. I have a bachelor of science in applied economics, a master's in economics and I am in my second year as Ph.D. student also in economics. But if that isn't enough for you, I happen to be paid for my work. There is a long list of scholarship, prizes, paid assitantships and research grants that suggest people think I know what I'm doing.

But, hey people, danielpalos thinks I might not be qualified! :lamo

Until the 1930s, literally every justice who ever had to debate the issue strongly disagreed with you. It is thoroughly unsurprising: everything about the Constitution is designed to limit the power of the State. Affiording Congress an expansive and unbounded capacity to define and seek the pursuit of "general welfare" by taxing and spending however they see fit is a manifest absurdity. Explain to me how exactly the same people who basically were invoking the basic tenets of Locke's political philosophy just two decades earlier somehow meant by "general welfare" something no government instituted prior to the early 20th century, some 200 years later... As I said, it's absurd.
I would believe you more, if you had more doctrinal rebuttals instead of trollish fallacy.

Our understanding of economics was also much less than it is now. And, I am not sure how you reached your opinion, Government is social-ism and the social Power of eminent domain for the Public Good is sufficient Proof. What you claim of the general welfare must be even more true of any implied right fantasy concerning the general warfare and the common offense; yet, right wingers don't complain about the ethical implications of a warfare-State on a for-profit basis.
 
And, I am not sure how you reached your opinion, Government is social-ism and the social Power of eminent domain for the Public Good is sufficient Proof.

Socialism narrowly defined is the collective ownership of the means of production. In essence, it means nationalizing almost everything. In a broader sense, some people call themselves socialist in reference to the social democrat model of most European countries. That essentially means a large welfare state. There is nothing about all government that is socialist. Public education programs, public health care programs, public employment programs, public unemployment insurance programs, government operator utilities, etc. all come with a socialist flavour. The army? No. Some libertarians have a bone to pick with a standing army, but most people tend to assume it is a necessary function of government: without the capacity to repel invaders, the government does not have the capacity to enforce the respect of individual rights. The argument could be and usually is extended to the police for similar reasons. As the Declaration of Independance clearly states, "governments are instuted among men to secure" the right to life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

And how did I form my opinion? Well, read John Locke. Then re-read the Declaration of Independance and the US Constitution. Once you do that, it will be unambiguously clear what they mean. Otherwise, there is also the pesky problem that welfare programs on a large scale are more or less a 20th century invention. You cannot read the Founding Fathers thinking they meant that Congress should forcibly levy taxes on the rich to take care of the poor, unless you read them with a degree of anachronism that buggles the mind.

Right wingers don't complain about the ethical implications of a warfare-State on a for-profit basis.

They're not a mass of ideologically homogeneous people. A lot of them actually do not like US foreign policy. It's very expansive and it's not like meddling into the politics of foreign countries has always been a success. I'm sure you're aware of the Carter administration and the human catastrophy that is the regime in Tehran. On the other hand, there absolutely are people working to undermine American interests and those of their allies. It's not like all countries can be expected to play fair and to respect their commitments. I would not count on people who stone their homosexuals and who call for religious wars over caricatures to behave themselves.

With that being said, the primary complaint I have heard on the right recently with foreign policy and warfare is the fact that America is always the one footing the bill worldwide. You all have every right to be a bit pissed and to ask Europe, Canada, Australia and other allies to chip in a bit more.

In the meantime, I'd say thank God for America.
 
Government must be a form of social-ism. Besides, you seem to overlook that social-ism is about Power not voluntary social transactions as must be the case, to be truly a form of Capitalism.

Social: relating to society or its organization.
 
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.

Rights are established by government. Without government, your only right is the right to whatever you have or can get, and if someone bigger or stronger comes along and decides that he wants what you have, you have no right to it, he does. You have no right, because without some form of government establishing and protecting that right, no one is going to come to your aid. You are going to lose it, because you never had a right to it, and it's the bigger stronger persons right to take it from you.

There is no such thing as natural rights.
With "natural rights, you have the right to what you have, until you lose what you have, and then tough ****, ain't no one going to help you protect it. rights are not rights, without the protection of some form of government.
 
Rights are established by government. Without government, your only right is the right to whatever you have or can get, and if someone bigger or stronger comes along and decides that he wants what you have, you have no right to it, he does. You have no right, because without some form of government establishing and protecting that right, no one is going to come to your aid. You are going to lose it, because you never had a right to it, and it's the bigger stronger persons right to take it from you.

Natural rights isn't a statement about facts, but about ethics. It is not a statement about the enforcement of rights, but about the legitimacy of the enforcement and the immorality of the violations.

Whne John Locke says that I have a right to my life and to the fruits of my labor, he does not mean that I will always find myself in circumstances where either of these things are secured. He means to say that my claim to having the right to live and to keeping the fruits of my labor is unabiguously legitimate. Regardless of the opinion of anyone and regardless of my capacity or the capacity of anyone to secure those rights, I am the only person with a legitimate claim to either of these things. That's natural rights. Natural rights theory says that what justifies the enforcement of laws are fundamentally legitimate claims on the part of individuals, claims that would be legitimate irrespective of their enforcement and whose violation would be immoral and wrong irrespective of them not being met by a legal punishment.


The gist here is simple: even if your comment makes sense, you're not responding to the right idea. My point is that even if all of humankind bar one person were in cahoots and declared for themselves the right to force the last man to slave away on their behalf, it would still be wrong. Rights, in other words, aren't a matter of convention, of enforcement, of opinion. You cannot invent them and you cannot erase them. They are part and parcel of the dignity and the sanctity of humanlife.
 
Just as a sidenote, consider what you can draw from my point of view.

From my perspective, black Americans always had rights and the white Americans who treated them as cattle were always doing something immoral. Even during the middle of the 19th century, in heavily Democratic areas that whole heartedly adopted the point of view of white supremacy, those black slaves had rights, slavery was a violation of those rights and everyone who had an hand in the process -- or, indeed warranted and excused the process, were unambiguously wrong. Even if the government decided that black people were not on par with white people, my point of view is that they were in clear violation of the rights of black people. Even when no one was there to enforce those rights, they were in clear violation of the rights of black people...


The curious thing to me is that my point of view applies to all human beings, at all times, under all political regimes and across all cultures. You cannot find something truly horrifying that I am not in a position to condemn. On the other hand, if you believe that "rights" are just social conventions, just creatures of the State, you are in the very odd position of defending Nazi Germany and Democratic slave holders because, in their time and place, that was the law and those were the conventions. I would submit that this is not just wrong, but in fact despicable.

The only thing we really have to get out of those types of conundrum is to attach value directly to human life and property rights, so you always have an objection when the majority gangs up on the odd kid and forces them to do their bidding.
 
Natural rights isn't a statement about facts, but about ethics. It is not a statement about the enforcement of rights, but about the legitimacy of the enforcement and the immorality of the violations.

Whne John Locke says that I have a right to my life and to the fruits of my labor, he does not mean that I will always find myself in circumstances where either of these things are secured. He means to say that my claim to having the right to live and to keeping the fruits of my labor is unabiguously legitimate. Regardless of the opinion of anyone and regardless of my capacity or the capacity of anyone to secure those rights, I am the only person with a legitimate claim to either of these things. That's natural rights. Natural rights theory says that what justifies the enforcement of laws are fundamentally legitimate claims on the part of individuals, claims that would be legitimate irrespective of their enforcement and whose violation would be immoral and wrong irrespective of them not being met by a legal punishment.


The gist here is simple: even if your comment makes sense, you're not responding to the right idea. My point is that even if all of humankind bar one person were in cahoots and declared for themselves the right to force the last man to slave away on their behalf, it would still be wrong. Rights, in other words, aren't a matter of convention, of enforcement, of opinion. You cannot invent them and you cannot erase them. They are part and parcel of the dignity and the sanctity of humanlife.

In our case, natural rights are expressed for purposes of quibbling at law.

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.
 
In our case, natural rights are expressed for purposes of quibbling at law.

The theory of natural rights is not a mere quibble. Nobody raises concerns about your right to your life and to the fruits of your labor in an attempt to evade facing difficult issues. Those concerns are raised as a direct answer ot the difficult issues in questions. My point here is that imagep above adopted a peculiarly dangerous position, one that gives too much power to the government. The majority cannot be entitled to do whatever it pleases with the rest of the population.
 
The theory of natural rights is not a mere quibble. Nobody raises concerns about your right to your life and to the fruits of your labor in an attempt to evade facing difficult issues. Those concerns are raised as a direct answer ot the difficult issues in questions. My point here is that imagep above adopted a peculiarly dangerous position, one that gives too much power to the government. The majority cannot be entitled to do whatever it pleases with the rest of the population.

We have our supreme law of the land and our federal doctrine of separation of powers to help prevent that dilemma.
 
Most American have noticed that the climate is warming and those in the Midwest have certainly noticed the manufacturing recession too.

First of all, I don't know where exactly lemmiwinx gets his information, but global warming isn't exactly controversial. Average global temperature are either rising or they are not and we have ample data on the matter. Any dimwit can take a look at it and realize that there has been a significant rise over the last century. If there are disputes to be had, it is when more complicated questions of causality and policy options, period.

Second of all, you have to be kidding me. You face the longest stretch of economic expansion in US history. If there is a point where measurement problems surrounding unemployment and employment figures is going to be low, it is going to be right now and those figures are exceptional. You really have to be grasping at straws to try to claim this isn't a good situation. On net balance, it's about as good as it has ever been for large swaths of the population. Regarding manufacturing specifically, you're looking at a very bad long term trend for the whole industry that might nonetheless respond to changes in trade agreements as they come into force.

You have to be absolutely nuts to think those aren't good times. If the Whitehouse was blue, we'd be hearing wall to wall coverage of how Democratic lawmakers turned the economy around. I know because politicians have been known to brag about less.
 
Slowing economy complicates campaign messaging for Trump | TheHill


President Trump is heading into the 2020 campaign with a resilient economy behind him and new trade deals under his belt, counting on both to help bolster his reelection odds.

But as Trump claims credit for extending the longest-ever stretch of U.S. economic prosperity, recent government figures show he is falling far short of his promise to accelerate the economy.


And global Trumpfluenza is not going to help either the economy or him
Just added 225,000 jobs, participation went up, wages went up. What slowing economy?
 
First of all, I don't know where exactly lemmiwinx gets his information, but global warming isn't exactly controversial. Average global temperature are either rising or they are not and we have ample data on the matter. Any dimwit can take a look at it and realize that there has been a significant rise over the last century. If there are disputes to be had, it is when more complicated questions of causality and policy options, period.

Second of all, you have to be kidding me. You face the longest stretch of economic expansion in US history. If there is a point where measurement problems surrounding unemployment and employment figures is going to be low, it is going to be right now and those figures are exceptional. You really have to be grasping at straws to try to claim this isn't a good situation. On net balance, it's about as good as it has ever been for large swaths of the population. Regarding manufacturing specifically, you're looking at a very bad long term trend for the whole industry that might nonetheless respond to changes in trade agreements as they come into force.

You have to be absolutely nuts to think those aren't good times. If the Whitehouse was blue, we'd be hearing wall to wall coverage of how Democratic lawmakers turned the economy around. I know because politicians have been known to brag about less.

There is nothing "complicated" about human caused global warming. It is the predicted result of the release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere raising it's concentration past 4% and logarithmically increasing the amount of heat energy reflected back to Earth instead of it going out into space. Surely an "Economist" knows what a logarithm is?

So you deny that the Manufacturing sector has been recession for most of 2019? I thought Trump was bringing manufacturing back to the USA? I also thought 2% GDP growth was terrible according to Trump and now it's the best it has ever been? You can't see the irony of that? The longest stretch you speak of was mostly under Obama who got better or equal growth while cutting bush's trillion $ deficit nearly in half. Trump has succeeded in bring that trillion $ deficit back while the CBO forecasts 2.2% growth or lower for all of 2020 and 1.7% growth for the rest of the decade. Those are hardly "bragging" numbers and reflect the results from the continued worsening of income inequality which is the biggest factor restricting our GDP growth.

The Economy. In 2020, inflation-adjusted GDP is projected to grow by 2.2 percent, largely because of continued strength in consumer spending and a rebound in business fixed investment. Output is projected to be higher than the economy’s maximum sustainable output this year to a greater degree than it has been in recent years, leading to higher inflation and interest rates after a period in which both were low, on average. Continued strength in the demand for labor keeps the unemployment rate low and drives employment and wages higher.

After 2020, economic growth is projected to slow. From 2021 to 2030, output is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 1.7 percent, roughly the same rate as potential growth. That average growth rate of output is less than its long-term historical average, primarily because the labor force is expected to grow more slowly than it has in the past. Over that same period, the interest rate on 10-year Treasury notes is projected to rise gradually, reaching 3.1 percent in 2030 (see Chapter 2).

The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2020 to 2030 | Congressional Budget Office
 
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First of all, I don't know where exactly lemmiwinx gets his information, but global warming isn't exactly controversial. Average global temperature are either rising or they are not and we have ample data on the matter. Any dimwit can take a look at it and realize that there has been a significant rise over the last century. If there are disputes to be had, it is when more complicated questions of causality and policy options, period.

Second of all, you have to be kidding me. You face the longest stretch of economic expansion in US history. If there is a point where measurement problems surrounding unemployment and employment figures is going to be low, it is going to be right now and those figures are exceptional. You really have to be grasping at straws to try to claim this isn't a good situation. On net balance, it's about as good as it has ever been for large swaths of the population. Regarding manufacturing specifically, you're looking at a very bad long term trend for the whole industry that might nonetheless respond to changes in trade agreements as they come into force.

You have to be absolutely nuts to think those aren't good times. If the Whitehouse was blue, we'd be hearing wall to wall coverage of how Democratic lawmakers turned the economy around. I know because politicians have been known to brag about less.

lol. What economy did the right wing "turn around"? I love it when economists, show us the charts and get all doctrinal.
 
There is nothing "complicated" about human caused global warming. It is the predicted result of the release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere raising it's concentration past 4% and logarithmically increasing the amount of heat energy reflected back to Earth instead of it going out into space.

You misunderstood my point. I did not mean to say that the idea of anthropogenic climate change was complicated. I meant to say that the statistics behind measuring the phenomenon of rising global temperature are substantially simpler than the statistical work required to attribute factor loadings to human activity. It should exactly be shocking to read that explaining is harder to do than describing.

Besides, I did not side with anyone here. I pointed out something that should be obvious: it's easy to settle a debate on whether or not global average temperatures have been rising since the late 19th century. However, if you get into the business of trying to evaluate the relative contribution of each possible factor that plays into it, you have a big problem. A causal impact is a distance between what happened and what would have happened. Outside of the luxurious environment of controlled experiments, you only have what happened: you have to span the missing scenarios on way or another and that requires making some assumptions that you cannot verify directly, but you can usually find ways to address objections to your choices by checking the consistency of alternative explanations with some aspect of the data that you have. This is what happens in economics. Most of the time, you cannot run the relevant experiments. What you can do is either rely on a theoretical model or use a suitable regression design to span the missing scenario(s). Either way, most of your paper will be written to explain why the specific choices you make are appropriate and why some objections are either wrong or do not change the results substantially.


It's harder to talk about causes than it is to talk about descriptions.
 
You misunderstood my point. I did not mean to say that the idea of anthropogenic climate change was complicated. I meant to say that the statistics behind measuring the phenomenon of rising global temperature are substantially simpler than the statistical work required to attribute factor loadings to human activity. It should exactly be shocking to read that explaining is harder to do than describing.

Besides, I did not side with anyone here. I pointed out something that should be obvious: it's easy to settle a debate on whether or not global average temperatures have been rising since the late 19th century. However, if you get into the business of trying to evaluate the relative contribution of each possible factor that plays into it, you have a big problem. A causal impact is a distance between what happened and what would have happened. Outside of the luxurious environment of controlled experiments, you only have what happened: you have to span the missing scenarios on way or another and that requires making some assumptions that you cannot verify directly, but you can usually find ways to address objections to your choices by checking the consistency of alternative explanations with some aspect of the data that you have. This is what happens in economics. Most of the time, you cannot run the relevant experiments. What you can do is either rely on a theoretical model or use a suitable regression design to span the missing scenario(s). Either way, most of your paper will be written to explain why the specific choices you make are appropriate and why some objections are either wrong or do not change the results substantially.


It's harder to talk about causes than it is to talk about descriptions.

How about this then. If you are cold and you put on another blanket does it make you warmer? That is what increasing CO2 does, it adds more blankets to the Earth. It really is that simple and cut and dry.
 
So you deny that the Manufacturing sector has been recession for most of 2019? I thought Trump was bringing manufacturing back to the USA? I also thought 2% GDP growth was terrible according to Trump and now it's the best it has ever been? You can't see the irony of that?

You seem to be laboring under the false impression that I am siding with the Trump administration, or against the former Obama administration for that matter. As a matter of fact, I did not attribute current circumstances to any cause whatsoever. You should also pay attention to the details of what I said regarding US Manufacturing. I said that what you see in US Manufacturing seems to be the result of a long term, downward trend in the weight of manufacturing in industrialized economies. Whether you count it as its share of total production or its share of total employment, the weight has been declining steadily since the 1970s and 1980s in all industrialized countries. What you called a "recession" might in fact largely be the result of that long term movement out of manufacturing. The nuance? I'm saying it's mostly permanent and you're saying it's mostly cyclical, temporary -- that's what "recession" means.

As for GDP growth, you should again take a look at what I wrote. I talked about employment, not production. Of course, a real rate of growth around 2% is pretty much ball park, average figures for the US post 2000. What I am saying is that you have very, very good news here: a lot more people from a lot more backgrounds are enjoying employment. Some people who had given up looking for work re-enterred the labor force and every group who usually suffer from higher rates of unemployment (black people, hispanic people, the young, etc.) are enjoying what probably is the best labor market they will have seen in their whole lifetime. I just said that was good news. And it is... People have bragged about a lot less in the past.
 
How about this then. If you are cold and you put on another blanket does it make you warmer? That is what increasing CO2 does, it adds more blankets to the Earth.

You do not seem to understand the problem, now do you?

The bastardized version of climate models that you likely only poorly approximate in this statement is not hard to grasp. What is hard to do is to bring the real models to the data and test them. I said it's a lot harder to do that than it is to run a statical tests that compares descriptive statistics... If you do not see that, it is a clear indication that you never worked on it. Little kids in high school can compare means. I don't think they understand fully why what they do would work, but we're not in a case where you have a whole lot of options. But formally testing an hypothesis about causality? Some graduate students have trouble getting the nuances of theorems that would help them make the right choices. I happen to know this from the experience of getting graduate students to trip over nuances.


I don't know to whom you are trying to reply here, but I never said a presumed linear relationship was hard to understand.
 
The longest stretch you speak of was mostly under Obama who got better or equal growth while cutting bush's trillion $ deficit nearly in half. Trump has succeeded in bring that trillion $ deficit back while the CBO forecasts 2.2% growth or lower for all of 2020 and 1.7% growth for the rest of the decade. Those are hardly "bragging" numbers and reflect the results from the continued worsening of income inequality which is the biggest factor restricting our GDP growth.

1. Donald Trump has been in office since January 2016, so we're a little over three years into his presidency. If we define recessions as does the NBER, we're a little above 10 years into an expansion period. Obviously, that cannot be entirely attributed to the Trump administration;

2. While the Obama administration eventually reduced deficit spending, especially later in his second term, they also more or less doubled the total federal US debt over its 8 years of existence. None of the Bush, Obama or Trump administration can be considered fiscally conservative by any stretch of the imagination. But then again I wonder how much the President alone can do about it. I'd blame Congress for most of it: they write the bills to levy and to attribute public funds. Yes, that means blaming both parties because both of them had majorities in either or both house at some point since 2000.

3. Since Donald Trump got into office, for whatever reason, it's the bottom 50% that made the largest gains. Both personal and household real median income have also been rising since a low point in 2012, so you have 4 years of Obama and 3 years of Donald Trump where at least one form of inequality has been receeding a bit in the United States. To be entirely fair, the GINI coefficient can be increasing nonetheless if inequality among the top percentiles increased, but I'm assuming you're not too concerned about a fat cat not being able to afford a country house and a yatch.

4. I have never seen any credible study that link inequality to reduced economic growth. I'm not even sure how to think about it. You cannot neglect spillover effects and feedback effects at the macroeconomic level and the models that could eventually do this in a Kosher fashion are a very recent development. It's really complicated to think about macroeconomic dynamics when you don't limit yourself to an average household and explicitly introduce an entire distribution of households. In fact, it is getting sufficiently complicated that some mathematicians are beginning to be interested in solving these problems.

And without a model, it's hard to think about how a changing distribution can affect long term growth when you think that the distribution has to change in response to various factors, including long term growth. If you know if anyone who has made some inways in that direction, I would be interested to read about it.
 
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