Wednesday Open Thread

7 thoughts on “Wednesday Open Thread”

1. Picture FDFQ reading this in the voice of Dr. Evil, with his pinky up against his lips, and you'll begin to understand:

   Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!

   Log in to Reply

2. Paul Krugman retires from NYT.

   He is reviving his email newsletter. 

   Once upon a time a Republican president, sure that large parts of federal spending were worthless, appointed a commission led by a wealthy businessman to bring a business sensibility to the budget, going through it line by line to identify inefficiency and waste. The commission initially made a big splash, and there were desperate attempts to spin its work as a success. But in the end few people were fooled. Ronald Reagan’s venture, the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control — the so-called “Grace commission,” headed by J. Peter Grace — was a flop, making no visible dent in spending.

   Why was it a flop? There is, of course, inefficiency and waste in the federal government, as there is in any large organization. But most government spending happens because it delivers something people want, and you can’t make significant cuts without hard choices.

   Furthermore, the notion that businessmen have skills that readily translate into managing the government is all wrong. Business and government serve different purposes and require different mindsets.

   In any case, the Grace commission’s failure taught everyone serious about the budget, liberal or conservative, an important lesson: Anyone who proposes saving lots of taxpayer money by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” should be ignored, because the very use of the phrase shows that they have no idea what they’re talking about.

   Log in to Reply

   1. "An Insurance Company with an Army"

      The lion’s share of state and local employment is in education. Much of the rest is either in hospitals and other health care or in law enforcement. So when someone says “government worker” you shouldn’t imagine a paper-pusher in a cubicle — I mean, the government, like the private sector, does have lots of guys in cubicles, but they aren’t the typical employee. You should instead picture a schoolteacher, or maybe a nurse or a police officer.

      But if the federal government doesn’t employ all that many people, why does it spend so much money? The answer — which, again, anyone who has paid the least attention to the subject knows, but Muskaswamy apparently don’t — is that the federal government is basically an insurance company with an army. Nondefense spending is dominated by Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, with relatively small additional amounts for other safety-net programs like food stamps and health insurance subsidies.

      Are these programs efficient? In the case of Social Security, the answer is a flat yes: it simply sends out checks, with very low overhead and very little fraud.

      Log in to Reply

      1. Thank you for recognizing me as a government worker. My 20+ career as a middle and high school teacher helped to prepare thousands of adolescents to participate in a multiracial democracy, and to read and write at a functional level l( at least).

         And now I teach adults , in transition from years of incarceration, to re-integrate into society with a paying job and functional literacy skills. We are paid primarily from Department of Education adult education designated funds, and also partly in-kind from the Department of Corrections.

         ( the dreaded Government Jobs)

         Would any sane conservative really want these guys NOT to get jobs, NOT to attain literacy and numeracy? Is society better served by just "locking them up" forever? I know that's highly profitable for the private prison industry, but growing the prison system doesn't necessarily help society as a whole.

         Most of the J6 rioters were employed middle class working men. But if they were not, if we applied the same standard to the J6 rioters, would we not want them to pay restitution, maybe take some anger or substance classes, get their GED if necessary, and then start contributing to society again?

         Log in to Reply

         1. From years of reading and helping debaters prepare, my sense is that little government spending happens without justification. 

            • somebody has to propose the program and detail how much money is needed for it.
            • legislators consider the requests (in at least broad strokes) and have little incentive to support spending without public support OR strong belief in its necessity, or both
            • government workers rarely have "too much" money, so there often is incentive to make prudent spending choices
            • there are internal and external incentives for revealing "bad" spending choices.  When discovered, there often is enough embarrassment to change or limit future spending.

            I'm looking forward to the specific proposals for "savings" from "efficiency." Then watching the reactions from people who will be impacted.

            Log in to Reply

         2. kwtree, thanks for your service!   MAGA does not care, the whole point is grift. 

            Log in to Reply

3. Crony Capitalism is alive and well.  The line is forming at Mar-a-Lago for all the CEO's hoping to become Trump's new bestie, especially the ones that didn't donate to his campaign or actually supported Kamala Harris.

   Wall Street’s titans can’t wait for Trump 2.0

   CEOs with big pay packages contingent on rising stock prices are heartened that Trump, as he did in his first administration, is again agitating for lower interest rates, which generally propel financial markets higher by incentivizing risk-taking.

   And heady times for Wall Street are often followed by economic troubles. The financial services industry has traditionally thrived right up to the brink of collapse, such as before the bursting of the internet bubble in 2000 and the mortgage market in 2007.

   We have already exceeded the wealth gap of the previous Gilded Age at the turn of the 19th century

   The richest 0.01% — around 18,000 U.S. families — have also surpassed the wealth levels reached in the Gilded Age. These families hold 10% of the country's wealth today, Zucman wrote. By comparison, in 1913, the top 0.01% held 9% of U.S. wealth, and a mere 2% in the late 1970s

   Log in to Reply