Debt Debate in Congress

[Townsend]

My dearest apologies. There were 6 of the 18 picked by those outside of his party. 

I must be affected by too much right-wing propaganda.  Please don't hesitate to set me straight.

We try.

[Teatownclown]

Conan....what's changed?



You seem more flexible with regard to our blackie black man President's performance.....

quit drinking?

[Conan71]

Conan....what's changed?



You seem more flexible with regard to our blackie black man President's performance.....

quit drinking?

No actually, I was smile-faced when I wrote that and my white guilt overcame me

I'll give any leader credit where and when it's due.

Without the growth in computer technology in the 1980's, job growth under President Reagan might have been stagnant.  There's a certain amount of luck in presiding over good or bad economic times.  There's simply no new "IT" technology to get all that money off the sidelines right now and that will play into a negative legacy for President Obama just as much as it played into positive legacies for Reagan, Bush, and especially Clinton.

[Teatownclown]

Perhaps, but the technology age is still young!!!!

Lots more advances coming in bio-tech and in high-tech....

[we vs us]

Ok, it's bad to criticize without offering reason.

RM, you are correct, it is necessary to spend in some areas to stabilize and soften the impact of cyclical recession, but that is only a small part of what the government can do.

If this were a standard cyclical recession based on supply/demand mismatch, our rebound would be much farther along and much stronger.  Unfortunately, this is a balance sheet recession -- and one of the worst in modern memory.  Our recession is based on a burst credit and real estate bubbles, and unfortunately these are very slow to recover from  (cf. Reinhart and Rogoff's This Time It's Different an historical survey of 800 years of economic crises.).  As the WSJ review of the book says,

"This Time Is Different" doesn't simply explain what went wrong in our most recent crisis. The book also provides a roadmap of how things are likely to pan out in the years to come. Real-estate bubbles invariably give way to banking crises. Losses in the financial sector are followed by the sharp deterioration in government finances amid bailouts and decreased tax revenue. The decline in economic output that follows the bust is sharp, but the recovery tends to be slow and protracted. The situation is especially dire when the crisis is geographically widespread."

We did very little of that, and every carrot offered was attacked to a giant stick.  Capital did not flow into the private sector where the jobs live. We got exactly what we purchased.  

The philosophy necessary for economic growth is very contrary to the philosophy of President Obama and most on the left, because it requires recognition that small businesses (and that means wealthy people) are where recession starts, and where it ends.  Their business decisions, positive and negative, are what makes the economy of this country ebb and flow.   It would also require recognition that innovation and expansion requires capital, and capital diverted for public sector growth diminishes private sector growth to an even greater measure because the public sector is not sustainable on its own.

What's interesting about this paragraph is that Obama has done exactly that.  Government payrolls have shrunken dramatically under his watch.  He's upped small business loans to work around the failure of the private banking sector, etc etc etc.  Do you know what he's actually done?  If you did, I think you'd be much more pleasantly surprised than you are. 

[Conan71]

Government payrolls have shrunken dramatically under his watch. 

See, even you admit it.  He's contributed to unemployment

On a more serious note:  Small business credit is still very difficult to obtain, especially for start-ups.  That's really not a policy issue so much as a risk issue with lenders when they've got less risky ways to make money right now.

[Gaspar]

Perhaps, but the technology age is still young!!!!

Lots more advances coming in bio-tech and in high-tech....

That is true.  According to Kurzweil we are getting very close to the "singularity."  Our processing power is growing exponentially and with the newest generation of microprocessors we have overcome many of the software hurdles of the past.  Now, as in the 80's, we are back in a position of waiting for the software to catch up with the hardware, however the hardware is now progressing faster than developers can push code.

The result is that we have now developed more impressive tools for coding that basically write their own code.  

This is a very exciting time to live in.

[Red Arrow]

That is true.  According to Kurzweil we are getting very close to the "singularity."  Our processing power is growing exponentially and with the newest generation of microprocessors we have overcome many of the software hurdles of the past.  Now, as in the 80's, we are back in a position of waiting for the software to catch up with the hardware, however the hardware is now progressing faster than developers can push code.

The result is that we have now developed more impressive tools for coding that basically write their own code.  

This is a very exciting time to live in.

Who would ever need more that 640 KB?

[Gaspar]

Who would ever need more that 640 KB?

My farts have more than 640 kb now!

[Conan71]

Who would ever need more that 640 KB?

The first PC I ever bought had a 40 meg hard drive and 1 meg of RAM.  The salesman said "You won't fill a 40 meg hard drive in 100 years and that meg of RAM will never see a program it can't handle!"

[we vs us]

I don't get it.  The green tech "revolution" (for lack of a better word) is pretty much a new space race to the nth degree, with multiple international players, some pretty rigorous scientific background (as well as impetus), and enough transformational work to do to engage us for decades.  And here it is, sitting in our lap, tied up real pretty with a bow.   I don't get the dismissiveness. 

I DO get that we live in the ancestral home of American oil and gas, and that it's not only part of our current economic reality but part of our history and our culture . . . so it's not going to be a surprise that we're part of the folks saying no no no.  But the opportunities out there are just astounding.

[Gaspar]

The first PC I ever bought had a 40 meg hard drive and 1 meg of RAM.  The salesman said "You won't fill a 40 meg hard drive in 100 years and that meg of RAM will never see a program it can't handle!"

My first PC had 4k and a cassette tape drive.

[Red Arrow]

I don't get it.  The green tech "revolution" (for lack of a better word)

I think evolution (no "r") would be more appropriate.  I think one difference between this and the space race is that NASA could pretty much declare a direction to be wrong and go another way.  Beanie and Cecil helicopter hats were rejected early.  The green revolution has too much politics tied to it.  I am not talking about government funded research, which I think has a place, but continued subsidies for things like corn to ethanol.  That should be mature enough to support itself. 

[Conan71]

I don't get it.  The green tech "revolution" (for lack of a better word) is pretty much a new space race to the nth degree, with multiple international players, some pretty rigorous scientific background (as well as impetus), and enough transformational work to do to engage us for decades.  And here it is, sitting in our lap, tied up real pretty with a bow.   I don't get the dismissiveness. 

I DO get that we live in the ancestral home of American oil and gas, and that it's not only part of our current economic reality but part of our history and our culture . . . so it's not going to be a surprise that we're part of the folks saying no no no.  But the opportunities out there are just astounding.

What remains a mystery to me is why companies like ADM and Cargill aren't churning out bio-diesel by the tanker-load right now.  With current road diesel prices, bio-d should be able to stand on it's own without subsidy and make the manufacturer about $1 a gallon profit.  

There is a lot of profitability in oil and plenty of government subsidies built into a barrel of oil.  It's also an incredibly efficient source of energy.  If there were mass quantities of money to be made in green industries, you'd see a lot more movement in that direction with private enterprise.  Red is correct, the administration has taken a political, rather than practical approach on how to develop such industries.

[Gaspar]

What remains a mystery to me is why companies like ADM and Cargill aren't churning out bio-diesel by the tanker-load right now.  With current road diesel prices, bio-d should be able to stand on it's own without subsidy and make the manufacturer about $1 a gallon profit.  

There is a lot of profitability in oil and plenty of government subsidies built into a barrel of oil.  It's also an incredibly efficient source of energy.  If there were mass quantities of money to be made in green industries, you'd see a lot more movement in that direction with private enterprise.  Red is correct, the administration has taken a political, rather than practical approach on how to develop such industries.

Small amounts from recycling efforts is feasible, but not as a primary replacement for petroleum.

Still costs too much to produce in mass. Plus it poses a dangerous pricing loop. Because in large quantities it would be produced from stocks like corn, rapeseed, soy, and other oil grains, to produce it in mass would inflate food costs.  To further subsidize the production of such food stock, would turn farmers to fuel production over food, further increasing the price of food (as ethanol did). Once the market began to turn to surface energy production as opposed to pumping it out of the ground, we would need to devote ever increasing amounts of surface area to bio-fuel crops. This would increase the cost of production, food, and eat up a lot of land. To be sustainable in the market it would have to be priced competitively with regular diesel, and that would require regulation to artificially increase the price of petroleum diesel as demand for the product fell.

Natural demand is not there, and manipulated demand never turns out well.

This thread will change to a discussion on pot in 3. . .2. . .1