Krugman VS the market

[fskimospy]

uhh, you didn't answer the question. where are god damn jobs from all the stimulus since 2009?

You can't answer it. Because all the stimulus has been wasted on democrat agenda like non productive social programs and green energy companies that cannot compete with China.

there are real stimulus and stimulus that got feed into black hole with nothing to show for. Which one is more likely when you let politicians to decide how the stimulus will be spent on.

You do realize that independent agencies have evaluated the stimulus and (depending on the standards used) come up with it saving and creating somewhere between about 2 and 4 million jobs, right?

 

[bwanaaa]

why are we still stuck in Keynesian macroeconomics? Govt spending did not solve the fundamental problem that was the great depression. Glass-Steagall did. Our growth of the 40s and 50s was due to the influx of educated workers with a good work ethic. Not by any miraculous govt action. All the govt did was build a factory (the military - industrial complex) for these people to apply their skills.

We are now in a fundamentally different crisis. We lack the motivated, educated workforce and therefore have come to rely on a different form of income-wagering. We have become skilled at gambling (the lottery was nonexistent in the US 40 years ago), speculating (derivatives did not exist 40 years ago) and short term rewards (most corporate discussions since Enron are about compensation of the upper echelons of the executive suite in terms of stock options, vesting schedules and not prospects for long term investment) Fear of disruptive technology invented in a garage has everyone looking at the immediately obtainable rather than the future.

Keynesian policies will not fix this. Instead of creating demand for public works projects, the govt has to start regulating education so that tuitions are not stratospheric, so that students get tax credits, so that people with a healthy lifestyle get tax credits. This is far better than printing money - a fungible value metric that has no moral compass nor any incentive for real personal growth.

 

[JSt0rm]

We are now in a fundamentally different crisis. We lack the motivated, educated workforce and therefore have come to rely on a different form of income-wagering. .

its the workers fault, of course.

 

[werepossum]

why are we still stuck in Keynesian macroeconomics? Govt spending did not solve the fundamental problem that was the great depression. Glass-Steagall did. Our growth of the 40s and 50s was due to the influx of educated workers with a good work ethic. Not by any miraculous govt action. All the govt did was build a factory (the military - industrial complex) for these people to apply their skills.

We are now in a fundamentally different crisis. We lack the motivated, educated workforce and therefore have come to rely on a different form of income-wagering. We have become skilled at gambling (the lottery was nonexistent in the US 40 years ago), speculating (derivatives did not exist 40 years ago) and short term rewards (most corporate discussions since Enron are about compensation of the upper echelons of the executive suite in terms of stock options, vesting schedules and not prospects for long term investment) Fear of disruptive technology invented in a garage has everyone looking at the immediately obtainable rather than the future.

Keynesian policies will not fix this. Instead of creating demand for public works projects, the govt has to start regulating education so that tuitions are not stratospheric, so that students get tax credits, so that people with a healthy lifestyle get tax credits. This is far better than printing money - a fungible value metric that has no moral compass nor any incentive for real personal growth.

I largely agree, with one small quibble. I disagree that our workforce is not motivated and educated. Certainly we aren't what we were half a century ago, but we still have a lot of employees well-educated in their field and willing to work very hard for a good wage. And we have a record percentage of foreign-born people here - that's usually a sign of people willing to work just as hard as Americans ever did to get ahead. What these employees can't do is work hard enough to compete with equally (if not more so) motivated people in places like China working for a small fraction of what would be a good wage here, much less the incremental cost of our regulations. (And a large percentage if not the majority of those regulations are sensible and desirable.) Other than that small quibble, I can only say spot on, sir.

 

[rchiu]

You do realize that independent agencies have evaluated the stimulus and (depending on the standards used) come up with it saving and creating somewhere between about 2 and 4 million jobs, right?

Given that American total workforce is about 150 million, you do realize that 2~4 million jobs is about 1.3%~2.6% right?

Show me how the unemployment rate has improved by 1.3% to 2.6%. I mean I guess the whole America was wrong and Obama should be recommended for his success in creating jobs.

 

[JSt0rm]

Given that American total workforce is about 150 million, you do realize that 2~4 million jobs is about 1.3%~2.6% right?

Show me how the unemployment rate has improved by 1.3% to 2.6%. I mean I guess the whole America was wrong and Obama should be recommended for his success in creating jobs.

Do you understand whats going on right now? What the possible pit falls are? If we want to get out of debt the best thing to do is grow the economy. If consumers and business stop spending and the republicans had there way and the government also stopped spending you would be eating potatoes cooked over a open flame of library books.

 

[werepossum]

Given that American total workforce is about 150 million, you do realize that 2~4 million jobs is about 1.3%~2.6% right?

Show me how the unemployment rate has improved by 1.3% to 2.6%. I mean I guess the whole America was wrong and Obama should be recommended for his success in creating jobs.

That's the beauty of "saving" jobs, the numbers are strictly pulled from one's ass. Since they can never be proven, they can never be disproven.

 

[rchiu]

why are we still stuck in Keynesian macroeconomics? Govt spending did not solve the fundamental problem that was the great depression. Glass-Steagall did. Our growth of the 40s and 50s was due to the influx of educated workers with a good work ethic. Not by any miraculous govt action. All the govt did was build a factory (the military - industrial complex) for these people to apply their skills.

We are now in a fundamentally different crisis. We lack the motivated, educated workforce and therefore have come to rely on a different form of income-wagering. We have become skilled at gambling (the lottery was nonexistent in the US 40 years ago), speculating (derivatives did not exist 40 years ago) and short term rewards (most corporate discussions since Enron are about compensation of the upper echelons of the executive suite in terms of stock options, vesting schedules and not prospects for long term investment) Fear of disruptive technology invented in a garage has everyone looking at the immediately obtainable rather than the future.

Keynesian policies will not fix this. Instead of creating demand for public works projects, the govt has to start regulating education so that tuitions are not stratospheric, so that students get tax credits, so that people with a healthy lifestyle get tax credits. This is far better than printing money - a fungible value metric that has no moral compass nor any incentive for real personal growth.

I think you are partly right with the influx of motivated and educated workforce. But I disagree with Keynesian didn't have an impact. The government spending did help American recover back in the 40's, 50's and that's because of the following reason:
1) There are demand for the factories, government projects that American was investing with debt at the time. After WW2, there was a huge demand for everything around the world because much was destroyed
2) and in addition, not many countries still have the manufacturing capacity American had, so there were little competition for the supply to meet the demand so the investment with debt/deficit had great return
3) American was good at what it did back then. American had the manufacturing capacity, efficiency, nobody else was close to American capability. Again, this made the investment with debt justified.
4) American government was less worried about "Political Correctness" and wasn't that crazy about projects to make some liberals feel good about themselves. It was all about economy and improving the economy.

All the above factors allowed the government spending to have immediate and effective impact on both the employment and the economy.

Now with bunch of crooks in the government, stimulus are invested in programs (many due to PC) that doesn't produce economic return, like green energy. American companies are no longer competitive, and the economy in the US and around the world lacks the demand to digest whatever investment government spending will be on.

It's not as simple as spend money you shall solve your problem. Keynesian policy certainly isn't a magic bullet for all problems, sometimes it will work, sometime it won't. This is something zombie economist around here with only the ability to google won't understand.

 

[werepossum]

I think you are partly right with the influx of motivated and educated workforce. But I disagree with Keynesian didn't have an impact. The government spending did help American recover back in the 40's, 50's and that's because of the following reason:
1) There are demand for the factories, government projects that American was investing with debt at the time. After WW2, there was a huge demand for everything around the world because much was destroyed
2) and in addition, not many countries still have the manufacturing capacity American had, so there were little competition for the supply to meet the demand so the investment with debt/deficit had great return
3) American was good at what it did back then. American had the manufacturing capacity, efficiency, nobody else was close to American capability. Again, this made the investment with debt justified.
4) American government was less worried about "Political Correctness" and wasn't that crazy about projects to make some liberals feel good about themselves. It was all about economy and improving the economy.

All the above factors allowed the government spending to have immediate and effective impact on both the employment and the economy.

Now with bunch of crooks in the government, stimulus are invested in programs (many due to PC) that doesn't produce economic return, like green energy. American companies are no longer competitive, and the economy in the US and around the world lacks the demand to digest whatever investment government spending will be on.

It's not as simple as spend money you shall solve your problem. Keynesian policy certainly isn't a magic bullet for all problems, sometimes it will work, sometime it won't. This is something zombie economist around here with only the ability to google won't understand.

Exactly. But we didn't simply get bad at manufacturing, although certainly we've slipped (and I would argue, recovered by now.) We did two extremely stupid things - we eliminated our barriers to (and punishments for) transferring high technology, and we altered our tax policy to no longer favor American-made goods. Those two things allowed us to get a cheap but significant improvement in our standard of living. However, just as with anything else there are no free lunches, and our improved standard of living was purchased on credit.

We're like the farmer who made a decent living farming, then one day sold off some land to a developer. Suddenly his income skyrockets for that year, so he stops farming the marginally productive land which takes a lot of work and investment for a meager return. Each year he sells off some land, and he makes so much money he stops farming altogether. But eventually he'll run out of land. And then it's too late to go back to farming.

 

[bfdd]

there are some good posts on this page

 

[JSt0rm]

there are some good posts on this page

Why? Because they reinforce your belief system?

 

[forhonor]

Do you understand whats going on right now? What the possible pit falls are? If we want to get out of debt the best thing to do is grow the economy. If consumers and business stop spending and the republicans had there way and the government also stopped spending you would be eating potatoes cooked over a open flame of library books.

There are more problems with the government besides its overspending that are causing consumers and businesses to not spend.

 

[Jhhnn]

There are more problems with the government besides its overspending that are causing consumers and businesses to not spend.

Like what?

 

[shira]

Given that American total workforce is about 150 million, you do realize that 2~4 million jobs is about 1.3%~2.6% right?

Show me how the unemployment rate has improved by 1.3% to 2.6%. I mean I guess the whole America was wrong and Obama should be recommended for his success in creating jobs.

That's the beauty of "saving" jobs, the numbers are strictly pulled from one's ass. Since they can never be proven, they can never be disproven.

These two posts show just how ignorant right-wingers are. First of all, rchiu insists that creating a job is the same thing as reducing the number of unemployed by 1. He lacks the mental capacity to understand that a stimulus-created job may make up for a job that's lost because of the bad economy, leading to a net change in the number of jobs = 0. In other words, without the stimulus, there would have been a net loss of 1 job; with the stimulus, the net change in the number of jobs is 0.

And then of course werepossum chimes in, insisting that estimates of the effects of the stimulus are "pulled from one's ass." Oh really?

http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/123xx/doc12385/08-24-ARRA.pdf

(See page 2)

CBO estimates that ARRA’s policies had the following effects in the second quarter of calendar year 2011 compared with what would have occurred otherwise:

They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 0.8 percent and 2.5 percent,

Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.5 percentage points and 1.6 percentage points,

Increased the number of people employed by between 1.0 million and 2.9 million, and

Increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 1.4 million to 4.0 million, as shown in Table 1.

 

[manly]

That's the beauty of "saving" jobs, the numbers are strictly pulled from one's ass. Since they can never be proven, they can never be disproven.

I'll take the word of a majority of economic studies over rchiu, who's fixated on green energy spending that was less than 3% of ARRA.

 

[werepossum]

These two posts show just how ignorant right-wingers are. First of all, rchiu insists that creating a job is the same thing as reducing the number of unemployed by 1. He lacks the mental capacity to understand that a stimulus-created job may make up for a job that's lost because of the bad economy, leading to a net change in the number of jobs = 0. In other words, without the stimulus, there would have been a net loss of 1 job; with the stimulus, the net change in the number of jobs is 0.

And then of course werepossum chimes in, insisting that estimates of the effects of the stimulus are "pulled from one's ass." Oh really?

http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/123xx/doc12385/08-24-ARRA.pdf
(See page 2)

CBO estimates that ARRA’s policies had the following effects in the second quarter of calendar year 2011 compared with what would have occurred otherwise:

They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 0.8 percent and 2.5 percent,

Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.5 percentage points and 1.6 percentage points,

Increased the number of people employed by between 1.0 million and 2.9 million, and

Increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 1.4 million to 4.0 million, as shown in Table 1.

Sorry, I should have said "pulled from one's ass with a great deal of paperwork and hand waving . . ."

In engineering there is a term for numbers whose uncertainty is equal to or greater than their magnitude: Garbage.

There is also a term for people who insist those numbers mean something: Idiots.

Just in case you discuss this with any non-idiots in the real world, I'll give you a free clue. There is absolutely no way to determine how many jobs would have been lost without the stimulus. The ONLY thing you can calculate is how many jobs were funded completely with stimulus money, and even then you have no way of knowing whether some of those jobs would have been funded without the stimulus. It's not like companies are filling out applications saying "We're going to hire these people anyway, but we thought you might like to pay for them."

 

[JSt0rm]

There are more problems with the government besides its overspending that are causing consumers and businesses to not spend.

the government overspending is not what is causing business and consumers to not spend and banks not to loan. Thats kind of stupid to think thats the main problem here.

 

[Jhhnn]

Sorry, I should have said "pulled from one's ass with a great deal of paperwork and hand waving . . ."

In engineering there is a term for numbers whose uncertainty is equal to or greater than their magnitude: Garbage.

There is also a term for people who insist those numbers mean something: Idiots.

Just in case you discuss this with any non-idiots in the real world, I'll give you a free clue. There is absolutely no way to determine how many jobs would have been lost without the stimulus. The ONLY thing you can calculate is how many jobs were funded completely with stimulus money, and even then you have no way of knowing whether some of those jobs would have been funded without the stimulus. It's not like companies are filling out applications saying "We're going to hire these people anyway, but we thought you might like to pay for them."

Nice soft shoe. I'm sure you'd express an entirely different sentiment (which is what it is, as opposed to actual reasoning) wrt tax cuts at the top, which obviously, uhh, "create jobs!", right?

Hiring people and companies to do work obviously creates jobs or extends them- actual work occurs, rather than promises of creating work. Those people having money to spend obviously ripples through the economy, as well.

Employment wasn't going anywhere but down at the time the stimulus was enacted- companies weren't hiring, but rather laying off, so your last sentence is absurd.

 

[JSt0rm]

They keep coming back in here to get owned more. "I believe" is the stance. I believe in trickle down, I believe in stimulus and government killing the economy, I believe china will take us over...

If big government is so bad why do you think china will do well with a big government?

Hmmm? My little peasants?

 

[the DRIZZLE]

I think you are partly right with the influx of motivated and educated workforce. But I disagree with Keynesian didn't have an impact. The government spending did help American recover back in the 40's, 50's and that's because of the following reason:
1) There are demand for the factories, government projects that American was investing with debt at the time. After WW2, there was a huge demand for everything around the world because much was destroyed
2) and in addition, not many countries still have the manufacturing capacity American had, so there were little competition for the supply to meet the demand so the investment with debt/deficit had great return
3) American was good at what it did back then. American had the manufacturing capacity, efficiency, nobody else was close to American capability. Again, this made the investment with debt justified.
4) American government was less worried about "Political Correctness" and wasn't that crazy about projects to make some liberals feel good about themselves. It was all about economy and improving the economy.

All the above factors allowed the government spending to have immediate and effective impact on both the employment and the economy.

Now with bunch of crooks in the government, stimulus are invested in programs (many due to PC) that doesn't produce economic return, like green energy. American companies are no longer competitive, and the economy in the US and around the world lacks the demand to digest whatever investment government spending will be on.

It's not as simple as spend money you shall solve your problem. Keynesian policy certainly isn't a magic bullet for all problems, sometimes it will work, sometime it won't. This is something zombie economist around here with only the ability to google won't understand.

I wouldn't even credit Keynes for spending on infrastructure that turned out to be a wise investment, that really has nothing to do with Keynesianism.

 

[rchiu]

These two posts show just how ignorant right-wingers are. First of all, rchiu insists that creating a job is the same thing as reducing the number of unemployed by 1. He lacks the mental capacity to understand that a stimulus-created job may make up for a job that's lost because of the bad economy, leading to a net change in the number of jobs = 0. In other words, without the stimulus, there would have been a net loss of 1 job; with the stimulus, the net change in the number of jobs is 0.

And then of course werepossum chimes in, insisting that estimates of the effects of the stimulus are "pulled from one's ass." Oh really?

http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/123xx/doc12385/08-24-ARRA.pdf

(See page 2)

Maybe you want to read what CBO said before your so called "effect". Quote:

CBO has estimated the law’s impact on employment
and economic output using evidence about the effects
of previous similar policies and drawing on various mathematical models that represent the workings of the economy. On that basis, CBO estimates that ARRA’s policies
had the following effects in the second quarter
of calendar year 2011 compared with what would have
occurred otherwise:

In words you maybe able understand, your "effect" came from mathematical models based on historical data. I am sure how that translates into reality huh. And I am sure these bureaucrats running the numbers won't pick the "models" and the "previous policies" that will make their bosses look good.

You wanna be a puppet to the democrats and believe everything this f'ed up admin that caused historical deficit for this country, that's fine. Don't assume others wanna follow your path or don't have the mental capacity to think and gather real info.

 

[JSt0rm]

yeah fuck those math models and all that higher education stuff. We have the bible, a 45 caliber and white people.

And we should also forget looking at history too. We just know that when times are tough you have to stop spending. We dont need any "educated" people tellin us thats not correct.

 

[sMiLeYz]

yeah fuck those math models and all that higher education stuff. We have the bible, a 45 caliber and white people.

And we should also forget looking at history too. We just know that when times are tough you have to stop spending. We dont need any "educated" people tellin us thats not correct.

"The evidence doesn't reinforce our neatly constructed view of the world, so we're going to dismiss it out out of spite" - right wingers

pathetic...

 

[rchiu]

yeah fuck those math models and all that higher education stuff. We have the bible, a 45 caliber and white people.

And we should also forget looking at history too. We just know that when times are tough you have to stop spending. We dont need any "educated" people tellin us thats not correct.

Hah, I know you are upset being exposed for citing academic exercise as the "proof" of this phantom "2~4" million jobs. But really what does bible and guns and white people have to do with anything?

I have already give you the reason why stimulus may work in the past but not now. But hey, go ahead and put all your trust in messiah Obama, after all, he has a great track record of leading this country out of deficit and build a successful economy full of jobs.

 

[shira]

Sorry, I should have said "pulled from one's ass with a great deal of paperwork and hand waving . . ."

In engineering there is a term for numbers whose uncertainty is equal to or greater than their magnitude: Garbage.

There is also a term for people who insist those numbers mean something: Idiots.

Just in case you discuss this with any non-idiots in the real world, I'll give you a free clue. There is absolutely no way to determine how many jobs would have been lost without the stimulus. The ONLY thing you can calculate is how many jobs were funded completely with stimulus money, and even then you have no way of knowing whether some of those jobs would have been funded without the stimulus. It's not like companies are filling out applications saying "We're going to hire these people anyway, but we thought you might like to pay for them."

Another moronic post.

The CBO is a non-partisan fact-finding wing of Congress. I would imagine they have far more intelligence and far more resources to make estimates than you do.

But of course you know better; you know more than the CBO. You're a friggin' genius. You know there's "absolutely no way to determine how many jobs would have been lost without the stimulus."

Why don't show us the scholarly article that demonstrates that there's "absolutely no way to determine how many jobs would have been lost without the stimulus." And given your assumption that there's "absolutely no way to determine how many jobs would have been lost without the stimulus," why don't you explain to us on what basis you and your fellow right-wing idiots have so confidently determined that the stimulus didn't work.

Idiot. Moron.