Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All the liberal ranting on this site is nauseating.

I think you're mistaking "liberal ranting" for "disgust at supposedly educated Americans who can't be bothered to read a newspaper, book, or any other source of information." I'm neither liberal nor conservative; but frankly willful ignorance disgusts me. And between the Teabaggers and the various fringe-nuts on the left and right, we're getting it in spades.

According to Psychologist Bob Altemeyer this is classic authoritarian behavior. Altemeyer’s book is a fun (albeit rather scary) and eye-opening read, and he has a comment on his website about the tea party. If Altemeyer is correct about authoritarian behavior, then there is no amount of evidence, no matter how solid and convincing that will sway tea partiers from their belief that the planet is not warming and that scientists are manipulating data etc. They will accept claims that agree with their view without any pre-qualifications, and they have no idea how silly they look to others outside their very tight circle

Anonymous wrote:I'll stop calling it class warfare when you stop calling the murder of innocent lives "pro choice".

Suppose Brooks ever took 10 minutes to read the Obama administration's projections for the stimulus. (It's on the web and can be downloaded for free, so a NYT columnist should have access to it.) The first item in the summary of Romer-Bernstein report would tell Brooks that:

"A package in the range that the President-Elect has discussed would create between 3-4 million jobs by the end of 2010."

Let look at that one again:

"A package in the range that the President-Elect has discussed would create between 3-4 million jobs by the end of 2010."

Okay, 3-4 million jobs from a "package in the range that the President-Elect has discussed."

How many jobs did the economy need? By April of 2009, when the first stimulus payments were going out the door, the economy had already lost more than 6.5 million jobs. If we add in normal job growth that we would have seen in a healthy economy, we were already down by more than 8.0 million jobs.

And the economy was still losing jobs at the rate of more than 400,000 jobs a month. By July, we down by almost 10 million jobs from what would have been expected if the economy had sustained a normal pace of job growth from the start of the recession. This is what Brooks would know if ever bothered to look at the numbers.

Now let's look at that quote one more time:

"A package in the range that the President-Elect has discussed would create between 3-4 million jobs by the end of 2010."

President Obama proposed a stimulus package of about $800 billion. He got a package of around $700 billion. (We have to pull out $80 billion for the Alternative Minimum Tax fix. No one, I mean no one, thinks that this fix, which is done every year, had anything to do with stimulus.)

Furthermore, the package was more heavily tilted toward tax cuts than the package that President Obama proposed. Tax cuts have less impact per dollar than spending. David Brooks could find this fact in the Romer-Bernstein paper as well. The appendix tells us that a tax cut equal to 1 percent of GDP will eventually increase GDP by 0.99 percent. By contrast, government spending equal to 1 percent of GDP will increase GDP by 1.57 percent of GDP.

If President Obama got a package that was smaller than what he requested and more tilted towards tax cuts than what he expected, then the impact on growth and jobs would be less than what he expected. He expected that the package he rquested would create 3-4 million jobs, the package he got would be expected to create something less than 3-4 million jobs. And, we know that the economy needed somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million jobs.

So how is anything about stimulus disproved because a stimulus that could have been expected to create maybe 3 million jobs was not adequate in a downturn where we needed 10 million jobs? There are no tricks here, this is all arithmetic and it is all right there in black and white.

But, Brooks does not want to be bothered by arithmetic. He wants his readers to support his plans for tax reform, for cutting Social Security and Medicare. In other words he wants his readers' support for doing all the the things that David Brooks always wanted to do, but he now says that we absolutely have to do because of an economic crisis caused by the incompetence of the people who always wanted to do these things.

And the people who insist on sticking to arithmetic -- who point out now and said at the time that the stimulus was not large enough -- well to a man in love with his hammer, every problem requires a nail. If arithmetic is nails, Brooks has no hammer.

Anonymous wrote:All the liberal ranting on this site is nauseating.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'll stop calling it class warfare when you stop calling the murder of innocent lives "pro choice".

Sure, but a fetus in the first two trimesters isn't "a life". So it's not "murder", and neither is a fetus in any sense "innocent". So you'll need to stop using the term "pro-life" and use "forced pregnancy advocate".

Forcibly taking money from high income earners to fund failed programs (stimulus) and new boondogles (Obamacare) and then branding the people who don't want to give up their money as evil is class warfare.

The story of Keynesian economists and the Obama stimulus, as anyone who’s been reading me knows, runs as follows: When information about the planned stimulus began emerging, those of us who took our macro seriously warned, often and strenuously, that it was far short of what was needed — that given what we already knew about the likely depth of the slump, the plan would fill only a fraction of the hole. Worse yet, I in particular argued, the plan would probably be seen as a failure, making another round impossible.

But never mind. What we keep hearing instead is a narrative that runs like this: “Keynesians said that the stimulus would solve the problems, then when it didn’t, instead of admitting they were wrong, they came back and said it wasn’t big enough. Heh heh heh.” That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it, never mind the facts.

And what the facts say is that Keynesian policy didn’t fail, because it wasn’t tried. The only real tests we’ve had of Keynesian economics were the prediction that large budget deficits in a depressed economy wouldn’t drive up interest rates, and the prediction that austerity in depressed economies would deepen their depression. How do you think that turned out?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'll stop calling it class warfare when you stop calling the murder of innocent lives "pro choice".

Sure, but a fetus in the first two trimesters isn't "a life". So it's not "murder", and neither is a fetus in any sense "innocent". So you'll need to stop using the term "pro-life" and use "forced pregnancy advocate".

Anonymous wrote:I'll stop calling it class warfare when you stop calling the murder of innocent lives "pro choice".

Anonymous wrote:I'll stop calling it class warfare when you stop calling the murder of innocent lives "pro choice".

Anonymous wrote:I'll stop calling it class warfare when you stop calling the murder of innocent lives "pro choice".