OT: Goodbye to the American Dream

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 08:20:29 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 10:35:12 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Tuesday, 1 September 2015 13:47:20 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 7:56:30 PM UTC-4, Les Cargill wrote:
dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
snip

Barack Obama means 'by force.' Charity is never forced.

That's disingenuous. Pay them taxes; it's worth it.

That's incredibly arrogant, and incorrect. It's not in my interest to fund
the demise of my own country. I'm morally opposed.

And intellectually challenged. Not that you can't process data, but you are selective about the results that you will recognise as valid.

It's not in my interest to pay large amounts to create poverty and permanent > non-productive rent-seekers. If Barack wants something built, let him build > it, himself.

But you like the Tea Party which is chock-a-block with unproductive rent-seekers. What's your take on Donald Trump? He seems to be dumber than Sarah Palin, and just as attractive to the moronic fringe.

Will he be the third party candidate who gives Hillary the presidency?

So, I'll continue holding my tax liability to nothingness, and you can pay
69 cents on the dollar to promote and encourage poverty. Deal?

To encourage policies that James Arthur believes will promote and encourage poverty, based on his exhaustive reading of Bastiat (who died in 1850), and his comprehensive rejection of Keynes (who only died in 1946, and whose ideas are thus nowhere near mature enough to be taken seriously).

So you'd rather argue about icons? Your arguments are always about people,
never ideas.

You'd like to think so.

You've got the idea that Roosevelt's New Deal didn't end the Great Depression and you found a lying-by-omission web-site that shares your demented point of view.

http://www.hoover.org/research/stimulus-and-depression-untold-story

Unsurprisingly, it fails to show the graph of what was actually going on

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/1930Industry.svg

which demonstrates that the claimed "recovery" was just one more example of the industrial production fluctuating as it went down the tubes until The New Deal kicked in - and industrial production kept on fluctuating on the way up too.

Engineers call that noise. Ideologues like you want to call it signal, when it suits your -specious - argument.

> It's a mistake to think others rely on authorities for their thinking.)

In your case it's more like charity.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 8:45:10 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 2/09/2015 1:18 AM, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 10:23:06 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Tuesday, 1 September 2015 13:37:30 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 7:48:21 PM UTC-4, Les Cargill wrote:
dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 11:56:58 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 07:40:23 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 11:00:23 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

[stimulus]

It did work, from 1933 to 1937, and it's premature retraction was what created the 1937 recession.

Let's briefly examine that. If a government showers money to
'stimulate' the economy for five years (per your theory), you're saying
that's not long enough for desperate businesses to rehire, consumption
to rise, and create aself-sustaining recovery if, as you assume, the
loop gain is >1 ?

You're barking mad. Businesses would be hiring in three months. By
five years they'd be in their nth wave of new hiring, with wages
percolating throughout the economy and stimulating your precious demand
to whatever maximal extent it ever would. Five years is far more than
enough to ignite a fire if your theory were correct, but, it didn't. It > > >>> never happened. It doesn't work.

It creates artificial activity that stops the instant the artificial
input disappears--you just cited the proof! No lasting 'recovery' is
launched.

Japan's been doing it nearly three decades and it still hasn't worked.

That's because IT DOESN'T WORK. Stealing from one's future to party in
the present is a significantly under-unity proposition. Q.E.D.

Strange kind of "proof". James Arthur spells out what he thinks should have happened - and didn't - and thinks that this proves something. It does prove he can't think straight, as if we needed any extra evidence of that..

Some businesses explode/implode in a year or two, and some grow or
fade away over generations.

To grow, a business has to evolve products, grow a customer base,
develop a talented staff and management, and learn how to design,
manufacture, and sell. I'd estimate that the average business has a
stimulus-response time constant in the range of 10 to 20 years.

Granted. The wasteulus theory was about getting existing businesses
rolling and up to speed again though, shovel-ready etc. All the
infrastructure should already be in place, idled, ready to roll. That
should respond quickly.

That didn't happen in the 1930's because it had been left to rot for three years under Hoover.

http://www.hoover.org/research/stimulus-and-depression-untold-story
"After the initial stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent economic plunge, a recovery began in the summer of 1932, well before the New Deal. The Federal Reserve Board's Index of Industrial production rose nearly 50% between the Depression's trough of July 1932 and June 1933."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#/media/File:1930Industry.svg

shows a couple of similar bounces in the US industrial production - one
in the middle of 1931 which died away just as rapidly as did the 1932
bounce.

If you were as clever as you think you are, you would have noticed
that this didn't mean what you would like it to mean.

The recovery process through 1933 to 1936 was equally ragged.

Your right-wing lunacy web-site dispenses with the graphs that
show what was actually going on, and lies about the significance of
bounce. It's Bastiat-level lying by omission.

"k.kraft - self-made, based on "Netscape-navigator-usage-data.svg" by El_T"
--is the same information used by those authors?

But your graph, such as it is, makes my point--there was little if any
actual recovery; that the instant the stimulus was withdrawn the economy
fell back to where it would have been anyhow; and nothing lasting was
made except debt.

Cheers,
James Arthur

 

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 9:00:40 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 03:09:06 UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 15:44:20 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

The first year my wife and I were married we earned $18,000, we saved
$6,000*. You can live on less than you earn.

That makes you a rich person deferring consumption for investment.


Average family income is around $53,000. But 30% live on $40,000, that
means the average family could trim there expenses and save $13,000 a
year, do this and invest for 30 years and you are wealthy.

And the wealthy have to stash their wealth somewhere, so they invest.

Not in a recession, which is the core of Keynes insight.

If a culture consumes 100% of its earnings and invests zero, their
productivity will deteriorate.

As it does in a depression. US productivity shrank 25% during the Great Depression.

Printing currency won't help.

The cure isn't printing currency, it's borrowing it from the rich, who aren't investing it for themselves, and spending the money on government-funded projects.

Question: after you 'borrow' it, and raise taxes to pay it back, who pays
those taxes? (secret decoder below)

..sunineg ,morf 'deworrob' uoy elpoep eht ,yhW

It's not borrowing at all. That's simply a lie.

'Aren't investing it for themselves' - that notion disqualifies you from
further comment.


Cheers,
James Arthur

 

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 9:01:09 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 03:01:44 UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 21:38:35 -0500, Les Cargill wrote:

But you don't create poor people. They occur naturally. Poverty is the
default state of Man.

That's meaningless, especially in the face of modern technology and
productivity. Government policy has trapped millions of people in a
permanent underclass. That is entirely unnecessary. And cruel.

US government policy traps millions of people in a permanently under-educated and unemployable sub-class. That is entirely unnecessary. And cruel.

Agreed. Johnson's Great Society did it. We ought to call all those major
metropolitan misery-magnets--invariably Democrat--"Johnsonvilles."

James Arthur

 

[dcaster@krl.org]

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 9:00:40 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

And the wealthy have to stash their wealth somewhere, so they invest.

Not in a recession, which is the core of Keynes insight.


Bill Sloman, Sydney

So what do the wealthy do with their money during a recession? Inquiring minds want to know.

I thought the core of Keynes insight was that people decreased spending during a recession. Especially true of those that lost their jobs.

I have always invested during recessions. Hell of a lot better time to invest than when stocks are over priced. I believe in the first part of " Buy Low, Sell High ." I am more of a " buy low, find a better investment when High. ".

Dan

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 11:19:23 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 8:45:10 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On 2/09/2015 1:18 AM, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 10:23:06 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Tuesday, 1 September 2015 13:37:30 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 7:48:21 PM UTC-4, Les Cargill wrote:
dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 11:56:58 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 07:40:23 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 11:00:23 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

[stimulus]

It did work, from 1933 to 1937, and it's premature retraction was what created the 1937 recession.

Let's briefly examine that. If a government showers money to
'stimulate' the economy for five years (per your theory), you're saying
that's not long enough for desperate businesses to rehire, consumption
to rise, and create aself-sustaining recovery if, as you assume, the
loop gain is >1 ?

You're barking mad. Businesses would be hiring in three months.. By
five years they'd be in their nth wave of new hiring, with wages
percolating throughout the economy and stimulating your precious demand
to whatever maximal extent it ever would. Five years is far more than
enough to ignite a fire if your theory were correct, but, it didn't. It > > >>> never happened. It doesn't work.

It creates artificial activity that stops the instant the artificial
input disappears--you just cited the proof! No lasting 'recovery' is
launched.

Japan's been doing it nearly three decades and it still hasn't worked.

That's because IT DOESN'T WORK. Stealing from one's future to party in
the present is a significantly under-unity proposition. Q.E.D.

Strange kind of "proof". James Arthur spells out what he thinks should have happened - and didn't - and thinks that this proves something. It does prove he can't think straight, as if we needed any extra evidence of that.

Some businesses explode/implode in a year or two, and some grow or
fade away over generations.

To grow, a business has to evolve products, grow a customer base,
develop a talented staff and management, and learn how to design,
manufacture, and sell. I'd estimate that the average business has a
stimulus-response time constant in the range of 10 to 20 years.

Granted. The wasteulus theory was about getting existing businesses
rolling and up to speed again though, shovel-ready etc. All the
infrastructure should already be in place, idled, ready to roll. That
should respond quickly.

That didn't happen in the 1930's because it had been left to rot for three years under Hoover.

http://www.hoover.org/research/stimulus-and-depression-untold-story
"After the initial stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent economic plunge, a recovery began in the summer of 1932, well before the New Deal. The Federal Reserve Board's Index of Industrial production rose nearly 50% between the Depression's trough of July 1932 and June 1933."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#/media/File:1930Industry..svg

shows a couple of similar bounces in the US industrial production - one
in the middle of 1931 which died away just as rapidly as did the 1932
bounce.

If you were as clever as you think you are, you would have noticed
that this didn't mean what you would like it to mean.

The recovery process through 1933 to 1936 was equally ragged.

Your right-wing lunacy web-site dispenses with the graphs that
show what was actually going on, and lies about the significance of
bounce. It's Bastiat-level lying by omission.

"k.kraft - self-made, based on "Netscape-navigator-usage-data.svg" by El_T"
--is the same information used by those authors?

As it says in the URL this is just a graph from the Wikipedia page on the Great Depression

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

It was fairly close to the top of the page, next to the heading "Kenysian" so one can see why you might not like it.

But your graph, such as it is, makes my point--there was little if any
actual recovery; that the instant the stimulus was withdrawn the economy
fell back to where it would have been anyhow; and nothing lasting was
made except debt.

You seem to be looking at a different graph. Mine declines to a low point, $4B around 1933, rises to $9B - a bit above the 1929 level - in 1937, drops precipitously back to $6B in 1937 - clearly, back then everybody believed that stimulus spending worked - but not back to the $4B 1933 level, and started rising again in 1938.

The recovery from $4B to $9B is large - not "little if any" and $6B is still half-again more than it was in 1933.

If the decline has been allowed to persist from 1933 to 1937 at a steady -6% per year it would have gone roughly twice as far to about $2B so "where it would have been anyhow" is a long way below the $6B to which it actually fell.

I'm not sure which region of cloud-cuckoo-land you are talking about, but you are vying with Jim Thompson for being out of touch with reality, and with Sarah Palin for being in touch with your inner reactionary.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 11:29:30 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 9:00:40 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 03:09:06 UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 15:44:20 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

The first year my wife and I were married we earned $18,000, we saved
$6,000*. You can live on less than you earn.

That makes you a rich person deferring consumption for investment.


Average family income is around $53,000. But 30% live on $40,000, that
means the average family could trim there expenses and save $13,000 a
year, do this and invest for 30 years and you are wealthy.

And the wealthy have to stash their wealth somewhere, so they invest.

Not in a recession, which is the core of Keynes insight.

If a culture consumes 100% of its earnings and invests zero, their
productivity will deteriorate.

As it does in a depression. US productivity shrank 25% during the Great Depression.

Printing currency won't help.

The cure isn't printing currency, it's borrowing it from the rich, who aren't investing it for themselves, and spending the money on government-funded projects.

Question: after you 'borrow' it, and raise taxes to pay it back, who pays
those taxes? (secret decoder below)

.sunineg ,morf 'deworrob' uoy elpoep eht ,yhW

But the people now have jobs and pay taxes, so it's a win-win situation. Unless you are rich capitalist, who had wanted everybody poorer than himself to go bankrupt and be forced to sell him all their assets in a buyers market.

> It's not borrowing at all. That's simply a lie.

You are starting to sound like krw.

If my choice of words constitutes a lie do tell us what words you would use to describe the process. The business of selling government bonds isn't theft, though some may feel it to be a confidence trick.

'Aren't investing it for themselves' - that notion disqualifies you from
further comment.

If they had invested it for themselves - as opposed to dumping it in a bank account to earn derisory interest - they wouldn't have been able to put their hands on the money to use it to buy government bonds.

You seem to be relying on your monetarist economic models that include the fictitious - but mathematically tractable - ideal investor who never misses an opportunity to invest, and thus has no spare money to put into government bonds.

This would imply a zero market for government bonds which doesn't happen to be the real-world situation, but since you live in ideological cloud-cuckoo-land you won't have noticed.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[krw]

On Tue, 01 Sep 2015 11:47:33 -0700, John Larkin
<jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 12:33:44 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 9/1/2015 9:18 AM, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 07:39:18 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 8/31/2015 9:44 PM, John Larkin wrote:


But that's a big "if". We suck out loud at redistribution.

Job creation (REAL job creation) is the best form of redistribution,

Without doubt.

because it creates wealth to redistribute.



Sometimes. But this has been extremely slow since 2008 ( and even
before ) and you can't attribute it to the guy in the oval office,
tax policy or much else, really.

I do attribute it to tax policy. And immigration policy.


I'll throw in Obamacare, companies have limited employees (under 50)
and they have put many more employees on part time to sidestep the
Obamacare rules.

Then we have a decline of incomes, some of that because of immigration
policy.
In my business an excess of immigrated/imported shrimp has kept the
price the same since Jan 1, 2000.

The big farm-raised imported shrimp have no taste.

Often true, although I have had some good sweet shrimp from South America.

Rock shrimp are awful.

Can't agree with that! They are more lobster flavored.

Yeah, sort of small bland-flavored lobsters.

I've made many sales to reticent customers by, removing the head,
using a pair of scissors pushed in at the mud vein to cut the shell on
the bottom side. Then I butterfly the shell and rinse it clean. Put one
or two in the microwave* for 10 seconds, let it cool 10 seconds and then
5 more seconds. I put nothing on it. I let the customer try it, they are
always impressed.
The usual complaint is they're to hard to peel. Cutting up the bottom
side with scissors negates that complaint.

* Microwaves vary, and the plate can make it take much longer.



Sometimes, not often, we can get Gulf shrimp at Whole Foods.
Very rarely we can get them with heads, which are really vital to
making a good sauce for shrimp-and-grits.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53724080/Food/Shrimp%2BGrits_2.JPG

To be fair, the price has been up and down, but I expect a continued
drop in price. A recent (2 to 4 year) increase was caused by a disease
called Early Mortality Syndrome, the cause has been found and solved on
a farm by farm basis, so prices have dropped with higher
immigration/importation.

When I was a kid in New Orleans, we were poor, so we ate shrimp when
we couldn't afford hamburger. That was before all the shrimp were
renamed "prawns", loaded into 747 cargo planes, and shipped to
yankees.


My line when customers look at my big shrimp and call them prawns,
"If you call them Prawns I need to charge you more"

Down here, there are yankees and damn yankees, yankees come down spend
their money and go home, damn yankees come down and stay. I'm one of the
latter.

I sell in the Florida panhandle, when I get Louisiana customers, they
often say, I only pay half that back home. These days, I just say, it's
a long drive to save a few bucks. (I'm getting jaded after 15 years.)
It is true their prices are much lower than ours. The boats there can
get 2000 lbs in a night, here, it's more like 500 lbs, or 240 lbs, like
one boat last night.
Mikek


The Gulf is warm and prolific, sort of a wet jungle. The critters
gobble up anything, even the oil spills.

We used to love to vacation around Pensacola and Destin and such.
Imagine, WHITE sand! The motels were cheap and the dunes were
deserted.

We've been doing a week every September or October on the Gulf, most
years in Destin. This year I decided we'd go to Orange Beach (on the
Alabama coast). In the fall, the water is still warm, the air
tolerable, rentals reasonable, and no kids' parents.

 

[krw]

On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 15:42:14 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 9/1/2015 1:47 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 12:33:44 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 9/1/2015 9:18 AM, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 07:39:18 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 8/31/2015 9:44 PM, John Larkin wrote:


But that's a big "if". We suck out loud at redistribution.

Job creation (REAL job creation) is the best form of redistribution,

Without doubt.

because it creates wealth to redistribute.



Sometimes. But this has been extremely slow since 2008 ( and even
before ) and you can't attribute it to the guy in the oval office,
tax policy or much else, really.

I do attribute it to tax policy. And immigration policy.


I'll throw in Obamacare, companies have limited employees (under 50)
and they have put many more employees on part time to sidestep the
Obamacare rules.

Then we have a decline of incomes, some of that because of immigration
policy.
In my business an excess of immigrated/imported shrimp has kept the
price the same since Jan 1, 2000.

The big farm-raised imported shrimp have no taste.

Often true, although I have had some good sweet shrimp from South America.

Rock shrimp are awful.

Can't agree with that! They are more lobster flavored.

Yeah, sort of small bland-flavored lobsters.

I've made many sales to reticent customers by, removing the head,
using a pair of scissors pushed in at the mud vein to cut the shell on
the bottom side. Then I butterfly the shell and rinse it clean. Put one
or two in the microwave* for 10 seconds, let it cool 10 seconds and then
5 more seconds. I put nothing on it. I let the customer try it, they are
always impressed.
The usual complaint is they're to hard to peel. Cutting up the bottom
side with scissors negates that complaint.

* Microwaves vary, and the plate can make it take much longer.



Sometimes, not often, we can get Gulf shrimp at Whole Foods.
Very rarely we can get them with heads, which are really vital to
making a good sauce for shrimp-and-grits.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53724080/Food/Shrimp%2BGrits_2.JPG

To be fair, the price has been up and down, but I expect a continued
drop in price. A recent (2 to 4 year) increase was caused by a disease
called Early Mortality Syndrome, the cause has been found and solved on
a farm by farm basis, so prices have dropped with higher
immigration/importation.

When I was a kid in New Orleans, we were poor, so we ate shrimp when
we couldn't afford hamburger. That was before all the shrimp were
renamed "prawns", loaded into 747 cargo planes, and shipped to
yankees.


My line when customers look at my big shrimp and call them prawns,
"If you call them Prawns I need to charge you more"

Down here, there are yankees and damn yankees, yankees come down spend
their money and go home, damn yankees come down and stay. I'm one of the
latter.

I sell in the Florida panhandle, when I get Louisiana customers, they
often say, I only pay half that back home. These days, I just say, it's
a long drive to save a few bucks. (I'm getting jaded after 15 years.)
It is true their prices are much lower than ours. The boats there can
get 2000 lbs in a night, here, it's more like 500 lbs, or 240 lbs, like
one boat last night.
Mikek


The Gulf is warm and prolific, sort of a wet jungle. The critters
gobble up anything, even the oil spills.

We used to love to vacation around Pensacola and Destin and such.
Imagine, WHITE sand! The motels were cheap and the dunes were
deserted.

You know it's not like that anymore, right?
Well, we do have the white sand, although hurricanes wash sand off the
beaches, then they pump new sand from far out in the ocean and it isn't
white. I think it's a push for diversity. ;-}

Destin is still white.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 12:00:04 UTC+10, dca...@krl.org wrote:

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 9:00:40 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

And the wealthy have to stash their wealth somewhere, so they invest.

Not in a recession, which is the core of Keynes insight.


Bill Sloman, Sydney

So what do the wealthy do with their money during a recession? Inquiring minds want to know.

Basically keep it readily accessible in a bank account or the like to buy out their less well-capitalised competitors for 10 cents on the dollar.

After the recession they've got fewer competitors, and some cheap manufacturing hardware to exploit a larger share of the market (when it recovers).

I thought the core of Keynes insight was that people decreased spending during a recession. Especially true of those that lost their jobs.

I have always invested during recessions. Hell of a lot better time to invest than when stocks are over priced. I believe in the first part of " Buy Low, Sell High ." I am more of a " buy low, find a better investment when High. ".

The trick is to hang back long enough that what you buy has become really cheap. Buying right at the bottom of a falling market is ideal, but you can't know that the market isn't going to fall even further ...

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On 2/09/2015 1:18 AM, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 10:23:06 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Tuesday, 1 September 2015 13:37:30 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 7:48:21 PM UTC-4, Les Cargill wrote:
dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 11:56:58 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 07:40:23 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 11:00:23 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

[stimulus]

It did work, from 1933 to 1937, and it's premature retraction was what created the 1937 recession.

Let's briefly examine that. If a government showers money to
'stimulate' the economy for five years (per your theory), you're saying
that's not long enough for desperate businesses to rehire, consumption
to rise, and create aself-sustaining recovery if, as you assume, the
loop gain is >1 ?

You're barking mad. Businesses would be hiring in three months. By
five years they'd be in their nth wave of new hiring, with wages
percolating throughout the economy and stimulating your precious demand
to whatever maximal extent it ever would. Five years is far more than
enough to ignite a fire if your theory were correct, but, it didn't. It > > >>> never happened. It doesn't work.

It creates artificial activity that stops the instant the artificial
input disappears--you just cited the proof! No lasting 'recovery' is
launched.

Japan's been doing it nearly three decades and it still hasn't worked.

That's because IT DOESN'T WORK. Stealing from one's future to party in
the present is a significantly under-unity proposition. Q.E.D.

Strange kind of "proof". James Arthur spells out what he thinks should have happened - and didn't - and thinks that this proves something. It does prove he can't think straight, as if we needed any extra evidence of that.

Some businesses explode/implode in a year or two, and some grow or
fade away over generations.

To grow, a business has to evolve products, grow a customer base,
develop a talented staff and management, and learn how to design,
manufacture, and sell. I'd estimate that the average business has a
stimulus-response time constant in the range of 10 to 20 years.

Granted. The wasteulus theory was about getting existing businesses
rolling and up to speed again though, shovel-ready etc. All the
infrastructure should already be in place, idled, ready to roll. That
should respond quickly.

That didn't happen in the 1930's because it had been left to rot for three years under Hoover.

http://www.hoover.org/research/stimulus-and-depression-untold-story
"After the initial stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent economic plunge, a recovery began in the summer of 1932, well before the New Deal. The Federal Reserve Board's Index of Industrial production rose nearly 50% between the Depression's trough of July 1932 and June 1933."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#/media/File:1930Industry.svg

shows a couple of similar bounces in the US industrial production - one
in the middle of 1931 which died away just as rapidly as did the 1932
bounce.

If you were as clever as you think you are, you would have noticed
that this didn't mean what you would like it to mean.

The recovery process through 1933 to 1936 was equally ragged.

Your right-wing lunacy web-site dispenses with the graphs that
show what was actually going on, and lies about the significance of
bounce. It's Bastiat-level lying by omission.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Les Cargill]

John Larkin wrote:

On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 14:06:23 -0500, Les Cargill
lcargill99@comcast.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 11:01:53 -0500, Les Cargill
lcargill99@comcast.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 17:29:30 -0500, John Fields
jfields@austininstruments.com> wrote:
snip

And rich people are the only people who can defer significant
consumption in favor of investment.


The first rich person I ran into had a wedding gift of several million
1970s dollars. The whole "live frugally and become rich" thing is fine
if you're prepared to remain single and/or not procreate. Other
than that, you'll need some sort of Dutch Uncle.

One of the richest I worked for wore Kmart clothes and drove an oldish
car, and lived in a nice but unfancy house. He was the sort who had a
PhD from a state U in the 1950s in physics and went to work for a
Fortune 500 until the Fortune 500 left millions on the ground, so
he pulled a startup in the 1980s.

I know a guy who co-founded a laser company that was recently sold for
over two billion dollars.

This always blows my mind - that a *laser* company can be
a hot property in this day and age. Being ignorant of
the details, they seem common as dirt.

This one sells the majority of the light sources used in silicon
lithography. That's a serious industry.

Ah, there you go. Makes sense.

--
Les Cargill

 

[dcaster@krl.org]

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 11:38:48 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

You seem to be looking at a different graph. Mine declines to a low point, $4B around 1933, rises to $9B - a bit above the 1929 level - in 1937, drops precipitously back to $6B in 1937 - clearly, back then everybody believed that stimulus spending worked - but not back to the $4B 1933 level, and started rising again in 1938.

It is not at all clear to me that everybody believed that stimulus spending worked. The statement that they did believe is a Non Sequitur . Another explaination could be that the natural state of the economy is to grow. And that the return to growth would have happened with or without the stimulus.

The recovery from $4B to $9B is large - not "little if any" and $6B is still half-again more than it was in 1933.

If the decline has been allowed to persist from 1933 to 1937 at a steady -6% per year it would have gone roughly twice as far to about $2B so "where it would have been anyhow" is a long way below the $6B to which it actually fell.

You did not express any reason for believing this. If the economy had not been stimulated, at some point it would have recovered anyway. Unfortunately we have no way of running various scenarios and seeing what would have happened.

I'm not sure which region of cloud-cuckoo-land you are talking about, but you are vying with Jim Thompson for being out of touch with reality, and with Sarah Palin for being in touch with your inner reactionary.

Why use logic when you can slander.

Dan

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[dcaster@krl.org]

On Wednesday, September 2, 2015 at 12:01:48 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 12:00:04 UTC+10, dca...@krl.org wrote:
On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 9:00:40 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

And the wealthy have to stash their wealth somewhere, so they invest.

Not in a recession, which is the core of Keynes insight.


Bill Sloman, Sydney

So what do the wealthy do with their money during a recession? Inquiring minds want to know.

Basically keep it readily accessible in a bank account or the like to buy out their less well-capitalised competitors for 10 cents on the dollar.

But putting money in a bank account still leaves it available for investment. Banks do not store deposits in a vault. The money deposited in a bank is available as loans.

After the recession they've got fewer competitors, and some cheap manufacturing hardware to exploit a larger share of the market (when it recovers).

I thought the core of Keynes insight was that people decreased spending during a recession. Especially true of those that lost their jobs.

I have always invested during recessions. Hell of a lot better time to invest than when stocks are over priced. I believe in the first part of " Buy Low, Sell High ." I am more of a " buy low, find a better investment when High. ".

The trick is to hang back long enough that what you buy has become really cheap. Buying right at the bottom of a falling market is ideal, but you can't know that the market isn't going to fall even further ...

It is not necessary to make perfect decisions when investing to make money.

So what is the core of Keynes's insight? Lack of investing because people are not buying goods, or lack of spending by the general public?

Dan

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 22:18:38 UTC+10, dca...@krl.org wrote:

On Wednesday, September 2, 2015 at 12:01:48 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 12:00:04 UTC+10, dca...@krl.org wrote:
On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 9:00:40 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

And the wealthy have to stash their wealth somewhere, so they invest.

Not in a recession, which is the core of Keynes insight.


Bill Sloman, Sydney

So what do the wealthy do with their money during a recession? Inquiring minds want to know.

Basically keep it readily accessible in a bank account or the like to buy out their less well-capitalised competitors for 10 cents on the dollar.

But putting money in a bank account still leaves it available for investment. Banks do not store deposits in a vault. The money deposited in a bank is available as loans.

True. The critical point is that once it's invested, it's harder to use it to buy out your bankrupt competitors.

After the recession they've got fewer competitors, and some cheap manufacturing hardware to exploit a larger share of the market (when it recovers).

I thought the core of Keynes insight was that people decreased spending during a recession. Especially true of those that lost their jobs.

I have always invested during recessions. Hell of a lot better time to invest than when stocks are over priced. I believe in the first part of " Buy Low, Sell High ." I am more of a " buy low, find a better investment when High. ".

The trick is to hang back long enough that what you buy has become really cheap. Buying right at the bottom of a falling market is ideal, but you can't know that the market isn't going to fall even further ...

It is not necessary to make perfect decisions when investing to make money.

So what is the core of Keynes's insight? Lack of investing because people are not buying goods, or lack of spending by the general public?

Trying reading what he wrote - he wrote quite a bit, and what he wrote was widely admired.

These days it might pay to read up on the neo-Keynesian concensus. Keynes died in 1946, rather before economists were given access to stored-program computers, and long before they did anything useful with them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 22:07:59 UTC+10, dca...@krl.org wrote:

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 11:38:48 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

You seem to be looking at a different graph. Mine declines to a low point, $4B around 1933, rises to $9B - a bit above the 1929 level - in 1937, drops precipitously back to $6B in 1937 - clearly, back then everybody believed that stimulus spending worked - but not back to the $4B 1933 level, and started rising again in 1938.


It is not at all clear to me that everybody believed that stimulus spending worked. The statement that they did believe is a Non Sequitur .

It's an explanation of why industrial production fell so sharply - even more sharply than it had after the stock market crash. Everybody expected that the removal of the stimulus would kill consumer spending, and stopped making new stuff that they didn't expect to sell.

If you've got a better explanation, do tell.

> Another explanation could be that the natural state of the economy is to grow. And that the return to growth would have happened with or without the stimulus.

The natural growth of the economy had been stalled - and in fact reversed - from 1930 to 1933, and it resumed when Roosevelt was elected and brought in the New Deal. Coincidence is a theoretical alternative explanation, but not a particularly persuasive one.

The recovery from $4B to $9B is large - not "little if any" and $6B is still half-again more than it was in 1933.

If the decline has been allowed to persist from 1933 to 1937 at a steady -6% per year it would have gone roughly twice as far to about $2B so "where it would have been anyhow" is a long way below the $6B to which it actually fell.

You did not express any reason for believing this.

I don't have to - I assume that I'm interacting with people who are in the habit of inferring cause from effect. James Arthur refuses to succumb to this confusion of correlation with causation - his Tea Party friends would stop talking to him if he did something that revealed him as inadequately indoctrinated - but most people feel free to use their common sense.

> If the economy had not been stimulated, at some point it would have recovered anyway.

But it was stimulated from 1933 on, and did recover.

> Unfortunately we have no way of running various scenarios and seeing what would have happened.

Sure. It's a great pity that the experiment wasn't allowed to run it's course.
Of course, Germany might then have won WW2, so I'm happy enough with the real world outcome.

I'm not sure which region of cloud-cuckoo-land you are talking about, but you are vying with Jim Thompson for being out of touch with reality, and with Sarah Palin for being in touch with your inner reactionary.

Why use logic when you can slander.

Nothing slanderous about that. James Arthur admires Sarah Palin, even if I don't. I can scarcely be blamed for exposing James Arthur to hatred, ridicule and contempt when he's posting ridiculously contemptible nonsense, designed to win him popularity with right-wing nitwits

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 11:53:11 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 11:29:30 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 9:00:40 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 03:09:06 UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

Printing currency won't help.

The cure isn't printing currency, it's borrowing it from the rich, who aren't investing it for themselves, and spending the money on government-funded projects.

Question: after you 'borrow' it, and raise taxes to pay it back, who pays
those taxes? (secret decoder below)

.sunineg ,morf 'deworrob' uoy elpoep eht ,yhW

But the people now have jobs and pay taxes, so it's a win-win situation. Unless you are rich capitalist, who had wanted everybody poorer than himself to go bankrupt and be forced to sell him all their assets in a buyers market.

I'll assume you're trolling, not just incapable of doing sums.

It's not borrowing at all. That's simply a lie.

You are starting to sound like krw.

If my choice of words constitutes a lie do tell us what words you would use to describe the process. The business of selling government bonds isn't theft, though some may feel it to be a confidence trick.

You've proposed money was 'borrowed' from 'rich people.' If true,
it would have to be paid back by taxes. Whose taxes? Mostly 'rich'
people--they pay the lion's share.

It's not 'borrowed' if they're the ones forced to make the payments.

But they never bought bonds anyhow, you made that up.

It's too complicated for you, Bill.

'Aren't investing it for themselves' - that notion disqualifies you from
further comment.

If they had invested it for themselves - as opposed to dumping it in a bank account to earn derisory interest - they wouldn't have been able to put their hands on the money to use it to buy government bonds.

The Federal Reserve bought the bonds. That's why they have $4 trillion.
Not imaginary 'rich' people. It's how the government prints money.

'Rich' people bought stocks, which is why they've gotten all the gains.

You're confused about the process, uninformed, and assuming non-facts.

Cheers,
James Arthur

 

On Wednesday, September 2, 2015 at 8:07:59 AM UTC-4, dca...@krl.org wrote:

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 11:38:48 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

You seem to be looking at a different graph. Mine declines to a low point, $4B around 1933, rises to $9B - a bit above the 1929 level - in 1937, drops precipitously back to $6B in 1937 - clearly, back then everybody believed that stimulus spending worked - but not back to the $4B 1933 level, and started rising again in 1938.


It is not at all clear to me that everybody believed that stimulus spending worked. The statement that they did believe is a Non Sequitur . Another explaination could be that the natural state of the economy is to grow. And that the return to growth would have happened with or without the stimulus.

That was my point. Bill's extrapolating that if a man fell and skinned his
knee, he could never have gotten up and walked away on his own, but would've
fallen clean through the center of the Earth had the government not rescued
him (by heaping debt on his shoulders).

The natural order is for methods of production to improve with time, worker
populations to grow, and economies to recover.

Stimulus--taking cash from parts of the economy and dumping it on others--
is just an expeditious way of misallocating society's capital (& ultimately
an expropriation).

Borrowing the money is the same, shifted in time, which fools Bills.

Cheers,
James

 

[dcaster@krl.org]

On Wednesday, September 2, 2015 at 9:13:11 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

I don't have to - I assume that I'm interacting with people who are in the habit of inferring cause from effect. James Arthur refuses to succumb to this confusion of correlation with causation - his Tea Party friends would stop talking to him if he did something that revealed him as inadequately indoctrinated - but most people feel free to use their common sense.

i do not happen to believe your cause and effect. So while you do not have to explain , not doing so lower your credibility.

If the economy had not been stimulated, at some point it would have recovered anyway.

But it was stimulated from 1933 on, and did recover.

Unfortunately we have no way of running various scenarios and seeing what would have happened.

Sure. It's a great pity that the experiment wasn't allowed to run it's course.
Of course, Germany might then have won WW2, so I'm happy enough with the real world outcome.

I'm not sure which region of cloud-cuckoo-land you are talking about, but you are vying with Jim Thompson for being out of touch with reality, and with Sarah Palin for being in touch with your inner reactionary.

Why use logic when you can slander.

Nothing slanderous about that. James Arthur admires Sarah Palin, even if I don't. I can scarcely be blamed for exposing James Arthur to hatred, ridicule and contempt when he's posting ridiculously contemptible nonsense, designed to win him popularity with right-wing nitwits

Well I think it is slanderous and I suspect most of the readers here feel the same.

Dan

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 18:29:24 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 9:00:40 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 03:09:06 UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 15:44:20 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

The first year my wife and I were married we earned $18,000, we saved
$6,000*. You can live on less than you earn.

That makes you a rich person deferring consumption for investment.


Average family income is around $53,000. But 30% live on $40,000, that
means the average family could trim there expenses and save $13,000 a
year, do this and invest for 30 years and you are wealthy.

And the wealthy have to stash their wealth somewhere, so they invest.

Not in a recession, which is the core of Keynes insight.

If a culture consumes 100% of its earnings and invests zero, their
productivity will deteriorate.

As it does in a depression. US productivity shrank 25% during the Great Depression.

Printing currency won't help.

The cure isn't printing currency, it's borrowing it from the rich, who aren't investing it for themselves, and spending the money on government-funded projects.

Question: after you 'borrow' it, and raise taxes to pay it back, who pays
those taxes? (secret decoder below)

.sunineg ,morf 'deworrob' uoy elpoep eht ,yhW

It's not borrowing at all. That's simply a lie.

'Aren't investing it for themselves' - that notion disqualifies you from
further comment.


Cheers,
James Arthur

Why do you bother with Sloman? He is full-time nasty, full-time
downer, endlessly pompous, and doesn't design electronics.