Why we should not be expecting Great Things

The US is a hidebound conservative country. It is deep in debt, which is the reason Replicant administrations refuse to further the plunge by spending more money - even if Covid has eviscerated Consumer Demand. And yet, it is mostly Their Wars that started Uncle Sam's slide into quasi-permanent indebtedness. (I will note, however, that Vietnam was Johnson's failing.)

And, given that Americans voted for Biden but have hamstrung him as well, they will likely not give him the Senate. And we all know, You can't to diddly-shat economically with a presidency that does not have a majority in both parts of Congress.

Mitchel of the Senate has Biden by the short&curlies.

From the Guardian here: The toxic polarisation of our politics

It's not what I voted for, because I didn't vote. And given the freakish result, I'm glad I didn't waste my money on mailing a ballot back to the US. Well, at least Donald Dork is not PotUS - but that's not much either. The Replicants are people who are blind to the facts of life if they are not spoken in money-terms. It's their own particular fixation, and if you read all of the above article, you will understand better the history behind that fetish.

Europeans live longer and are better educated - but who cares (in America) about that because we are fixated upon the amassing of wealth by barely 20% of the population. And for anyone who succeeds doing so, then that attribute in America is tantamount to walking on water.

Go figure, because there is no sense to any of it ...

 

Uh, oh. Looks like we're a nation in deep trouble. I can believe that the Republicans in the Senate are sabotaging the Biden administration before it even gets in. It still shocks me, however. Looks like we'll have to struggle the hard way to climb out of the pit that COVID-19 threw us in.

 

Well, you know, hardline Conservatives have been trying to warn your side about this for many many years. That debt would eventually get to this point, and then there'd be an emergency and the government wouldn't have the money to spend.

You are correct, that is one of the major points of hypocrisy coming from conservative side, going by a continuous observed pattern of past history.
(Although not all conservatives have been like this, just overall their side as a whole, and it's also important to point out that there have been many on the side of the Left that have been war hawks and gone along with it, so you can't say this is all a conservative phenomena)

I do appreciate and thank you for admitting/conceding that. If you didn't, I might have brought it up.

 

Well, what about the states, individually? They're not totally helpless.

Is it because your solution involves taking on more debt, or printing more money, that you don't see that as a viable solution?

 

Maybe that's because the country has already had its stimulus?

You can't just keep pumping out more and more stimulus as the solution to a big long-term ongoing problem like this.
I think maybe some of you don't really understand what the concept of "stimulus" actually is. It's not free money that comes out of nowhere. That money is ultimately coming out of some other part of the economy.

(The analogy of refusing to sleep, and continually drinking coffee as the solution whenever you become tired. It's not really a sustainable way to keep on going)

 

Maybe you'd care to explain to us exactly what these "liquidity options" are?

I don't think lending money is going to solve the problem.
Though that always seems like the optimal solution to many of these financial policy experts. (a little bit suspiciously conveniently)

 

Meaning the Democrats in the House will actually be forced to compromise. Something they absolutely refused to do while Trump was in office, despite Trump trying to make many deals with them.

If it was all just really about politics, maybe they will finally make a deal to try to make the President from their party look good (getting money thrown out into the economy to make things short-term look good).

 

Yes, it can - and it always does when country-economies nosedive. That and tremendous debt-raising expenditures of the Fed can restart demand in the US.

For the moment, everybody is rushing to line-up for their far-too-late anti-Covid killer-shot ...

 

Why do you think borrowing money will help the economy?

(I mean short-term, yes, that will seem to jump the economy, in the same sense as a bubble, but I am talking overall in the long-term)

 

I think when money is borrowed, it diverts economic activity away from savings and investments, because people think there's more money in that economy than actually exists. They are all counting on future repayment of that debt, without thinking so much about how that money to repay the debt is going to have to come from them.

(maybe we should replace the word 'money' with wealth or purchasing power to be more accurate, if we want to bring the concept of inflation into the mix)

 

You realize that comment of yours would be hilarious to Republicans. To them, it would say a lot about your side, and just confirm their belief that those like you are wacky, out of touch with reality, irresponsible, too whimsical, lack common sense, etc.

I'm not trying to criticize you personally at all, I'm just telling you how most Republicans would view your statement there. It seems kind of completely asinine, like "What did he just say?", and they would start searching to see if there could be some alternate meaning to the statement that makes sense, even though you mean exactly what they thought it meant from their first reading of your statement.

 

Um... I highly doubt America would suddenly have all the good indicators of quality of life and societal wellbeing if they just adopted European-like policies.

Anymore than a country like Mexico, Brazil, or South Africa would.
We can see in countries like Spain and Italy, they have all of the European-type policies of the rest of Europe, yet their level of wealth (financial standard of living) and employment is substantially lower. So obviously there are other factors at play here.

I've repeatedly told you before, it's ridiculous to cherry-pick all the White English-speaking and Western European countries, and say if only the US had policies like them the standard of living would be as good there.

Correlation does not necessarily imply a particular direction of causation, and it may likely be that the policies these countries have are because they can afford to have them. (Rather than the other way around, where those policies are what leads to the underlying creation of higher standards of living)
It's a little bit of a "chicken and the egg" problem.

 

It sounds like your side knows Biden is not going to be that good so you are just trying to lower our expectations and preemptively explain the future lack of improvement away.

 

Uh, because borrowed-money is spent. And spending money puts people to work! And as long as non-public spending is strong, the jobs on the private side maintain.

Sometimes, however, it doesn't work that way. And when that happens, a lot of kids die fighting a war that should have never happen!

It's dead simple, that part. The hard-part is when Troubled Minds (like the present round of Replicants) think that the US is under imminent attack by a foreign power. And they justify a response based upon that simplistic notion. Then, when 200 or 2000 American soldiers have died, they hand out "bravery awards"!

And, of course, neither were their sons the victims. It was the poor-slobs who could not get into university who die. They took the offer of a post-secondary education fee-paid by the DoD - but first you do some duty on-line! Well, most survived that condition. And many did not!

Regardless, that is NO WAY to run a Defense Department except in a country that is spoiled-rotten on Corporate Profit Objectives ... !

PS: And how/why does the above happen? Because we, the sheeple, let it happen. It's no more complex than that.

 

Bet the last four years of democrats doing that to Trump didn’t shock you.

 

No, not the HofR but yes in the Senate. Unless the two Senate-elections in January flip for the Dems. And I doubt that is going to happen.

With the Senate in Replicant hands it means its head-honcho will be merciless McConnell, the titular Party Majority leader of the Senate in LaLaLand-on-the-Potomac. He will be awaiting anxiously the outcome of the two run-off votes for the Senate in Georgia programmed for January 5th.

To the extent that the Dems win both seats (currently owned by the Replicants) the Senate Vote would a 50/50 tie. Who becomes Senate Majority Leader then becomes an interesting question.

Great fun that for passing laws. Really great ... !

 

Actually, it did.

 

Any PotUS needs his/her party in control of at least one of the two houses in Congress. Controlling both the HofR and the Senate makes implementing a presidential-programme all the much easier.

But, that just ain't gonna happen with McConnel in charge of a Senate Republican majority. Nope, no way.

The Replicants cannot understand that their game of political-domination is over and done with. It will take another two years and some key Dem wins in the Senate to be able to execute craftily a good Dem political-program.

I keep harping about the fact that the US has become far too dominated by Replicant get-rich-quick control of US politics. Who in hell cares how much the really-'n-truly wealthy are earning? Whatever their after-tax net-worth amount may be, it is doing absolutely nothing for Americans at the lower end of the income spectrum.

America - I keep harping - needs a decent National Healthcare System AND a free post-secondary education for lower-class kids who cannot presently afford to go given that at a state-university the average tuition-fee for a year is $14K ... !

 

But I quite agree with you!

The Replicant-party is constituted of members who are living on some other planet! They have not the foggiest notion of what is happening at the bottom. All they know is, "Well, there's a lotta crime down there!" Moreover, they could not give a damn either.

Selfishness in America knows no bounds ...

 

Okay, but we have to look at where that spending power comes from.

Why didn't people spend that money before?


It seems to me what all this may really be about is trying to psychologically convince people to spend their purchasing power now rather than at some more distant point in the future. That there is sort of a direct overall cost to the economy, if this spending is done now rather than later.

I think we really have to try to logically analyze this and be able to make some sense of the overall picture, before we automatically assume that borrowing money to spend it will just stimulate the economy.
That might have to be a topic for a different thread discussion, since it is a more complicated subject.

 

Well, I won't disagree with that, but there is plenty of that in the Democratic Party as well.

I think Trump did start bringing some awareness of that into the Republican Party, at least around the time he was first elected (although he later started sliding a little bit into an "everything is wonderful!" mentality towards the end).

 

Whatever "that" was or is?

The man has shown his incompetence time and time again. Enough was enough. He lost his election to the presidency in the Popular Vote the first time around - and the American people said nothing. Everything was "normal".

Losing the popular-vote and STILL becoming PotUS is NOT NORMAL and not by any conventional meaning of the word "normality".

He therefore had no right to accede to the presidency. Except by means of a voting-mistake made more than two-centuries ago. When the country was the ONLY DEMOCRACY ON EARTH. (It had the right to make some mistakes, but also the duty to correct them!)

And most people in America THINK they are living in a Truly Functional Democracy? They've voted the majority of one candidate and it was the loser who won the vote in the Electoral College.

That should tell us WHAT about the Electoral College!

Wakey, wakey ... !

 

Sometimes we must choose between the lessor of two or more evils. Establishing debt for emergency scenarios should be fine but using debt as SOP is fiscally reckless.

 

Edit by me.

And that is where my reading ended. It doesn't matter what the rest of the post said, I'll likely find it on my own if it's worth reading at all.

 

Let's not forget that it was many of those on the Left here telling us that "debt doesn't matter".
You need to take some responsibility for the belief of those on your own side.

And we still have some of these members around here in this forum.