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Originally posted by Shakka The 90's were a pretty unique period characterized by the coming of the internet/digital age and associated massive productivity boom. Tax levels had little to do with it and are a red herring if you ask me. The wealth effect that resulted from so many dot.coms cum dot.bombs enabled some amazing things to happen to boot. If you think that scenario is repeatable today, I'd love to hear how you think it's likely to play out, particularly considering were were in a secular bull market then vs. a secular bear market now.

There was no productivity boom.

The boom in living standards is fake, it is all debt and has been since roughly 1975.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/

Debt outstanding is ~50 tn yet GDP ~ 15 tn.

Over this time period ('75 - current) debt has grown exponentially while output has grown linearly. This system is not sustainable.

Until the relationship between national debt and national output is reversed problems will persist and the inhabitants will have to foot the bill for past spending.

Don't like it - check out somalia

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Originally posted by atbell There was no productivity boom.

Whatyousay? I'm talking about the rise of the digital age, the ubiquity of personal computers and the associated massive rises in productivity that the age of the personal computer brought to all aspects of our lives, private, commercial, industrial, etc. It is undeniable.

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Originally posted by Shakka Just circling back to this. This stat has been out for a while and I'm sure a lot of people already saw it, but this is simply not right. Federal Workers Earnings Twice Their Private Counterparts As Ed Hyman of ISI Research points out, "To have gov't workers paid twice private sector workers is a significant negative on many fronts, e.g., companies have to pay up for labor or lose employees to the gov't at the same time they have to pay higher taxes to pay the higher paid gov't workers...We now have legislation in place to lift federal outlays by $1T from 2013-2017. Legislating today a 4-year freeze in those out years could come close to knocking out the deficit. One can argue that politices is trumping responsibility and common sense."

I would agree. But who do you think is responsible for this? If public sector pay has grown more than double over the past decade and yet Obama is asking for the smallest increase in public sector pay increase in the past decade ... ummm that kinda leaves one particular administration as being responsible for this massive bloating in public sector pay. This shouldn't come as any surprise though. As a deficit hawk, I've brought this issue up time and time again from 2002 until the present. For being the supposed party of personal accountability, you guys are not really very willing to hold people accountable until you're out of office .

If you want to fix the problem think about what's causing the problem. I can guarantee you postman wages, or the wages of other similar public sector jobs, haven't doubled over the past decade. As a former dc resident, I feel comfortable definitively stating that that massive wage increases stem from the massive hiring of contractors via the defense department (think blackwater) and things like the creation of entirely new white collar gov't agencies (think the DHS). So if this is really a newsworthy item for conservatives, they should start thinking about making meaningful cuts to the things that are causing it like the defense department budget and DHS rather than crying foul about it for pure political teabagger gains. I provided a link to where our spending goes to ... I challenge republicans to "show me the money".

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Retro ...

Last edited by occrider on Aug-18-2010 at 06:55

This may not be directly relevant to spending and taxes, etc., but I think it is pretty interesting:

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Kind of makes me think the stimulus was just enough to flat-line us, not bring us out of a slump. I don't see any great engineering feats being built, I don't see unemployment moving an inch, etc. All I see are signs on the side of the road harking on some road project being a result of the stimulus act. Whoopty-fucking-do. Where's our Hoover Dam?

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Originally posted by Comrade Stalin Kind of makes me think the stimulus was just enough to flat-line us, not bring us out of a slump. I don't see any great engineering feats being built, I don't see unemployment moving an inch, etc. All I see are signs on the side of the road harking on some road project being a result of the stimulus act. Whoopty-fucking-do. Where's our Hoover Dam?

The stimulus was just to stop the bleeding, not to spur growth. It was nearly 50% tax cuts, which aren't going to do much to stimulate demand or output.

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Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov The stimulus was just to stop the bleeding, not to spur growth.

That's not at all what Obama and Biden were touting when trying to push the bill through. It was going to stimulate all kinds of economic growth and infrastructure advancement.

Obama: February 9th, 2009:

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It is the right size, it is the right scope. Broadly speaking it has the right priorities to create jobs that will jump-start our economy and transform it for the 21st century.

Now that it's an abject failure, the message has changed to, "Well, uh, without passing it things would have been a lot worse!" Really? They can say that with no real ability to know if it's true or not. But this much is true: 1/6 Americans get government aid now... including 40 million on food stamps, up 50% from pre-stimulus days.

Oh, and this.



-Dark blue line: with the Stimulus, we were told unemployment wouldn't eclipse 8%
-Light blue line: what we were told would happen if it wasn't passed.
-The red line is where we actually are with it.

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It was nearly 50% tax cuts

for?

Last edited by The17sss on Sep-08-2010 at 08:59

Kevin, you're faulting the Obama Administration for using rhetoric? Their only fault was making a macro-economic prediction, when the fact is, not even professional economists get macro-economic predictions correct most of the time. The fact that unemployment is 9.6% is nothing more than that. How Obama is responsible for that, is beyond me. In the Great Recession, when the financial system is nothing more than simply stabilized, you expect full employment? That's woefully unrealistic. To me, it's nothing more than an excuse for the right wing to complain about how Obama is the incarnation of the Anti-Christ, Hitler, and Lenin.

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Originally posted by Comrade Stalin To me, it's nothing more than an excuse for the right wing to complain about how Obama is the incarnation of the Anti-Christ, Hitler, and Lenin.

No, he's just woefully unqualified to manage, let alone lead. And he panders to the worst of the left.

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Originally posted by The17sss That's not at all what Obama and Biden were touting when trying to push the bill through. It was going to stimulate all kinds of economic growth and infrastructure advancement. Obama: February 9th, 2009:

And that's precisely why Obama was hit from the left by economists like Krugman, Easterly, Stiglitz, etc.

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for?

95% of Americans.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...lus-made-it-so/

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Originally posted by Shakka No, he's just woefully unqualified to manage, let alone lead. And he panders to the worst of the left.

You're joking, right? I honestly think the liberal establishment hates Obama more than you do.

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Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov You're joking, right? I honestly think the liberal establishment hates Obama more than you do.

I sleep with an image of PrezBo sucking Nancy Pelosi's withering 70 year old clitcock while Harry Reid gives him a reach-around. I just watched him give a shout-out to Dennis Kucinich today. But if the rest of the left hates him more than I do....eesh!