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Senate Passes Short-Term Deal To Reopen Government, With Trump's Endorsement
President Trump has endorsed a bipartisan deal that would end the 35-day partial government shutdown. The three-week stopgap funding measure would reopen shuttered agencies while negotiations continue.
Trump announces deal to lift shutdown
President Donald Trump has endorsed a deal to reopen the US government for three weeks, after a record-breaking shutdown of federal agencies.
But the pact does not include any money that Mr Trump has demanded for a US-Mexico border wall.
See also: Dem senator unveils 'Stop STUPIDITY Act' to prevent all shutdowns
White House: 'Large down payment' on wall could end government shutdown
35 ways the shutdown is affecting America
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 26 2019, @10:33PM (8 children)
When it comes to turning the wheels of the economic engine, it's not so much about what people do as it is about what people spend.
Dot com wasn't a go-go boom because of all the pets.com websites that were being created, it was a go-go boom because people with cash hoards splashed it out to pay a bunch of people to create pets.com and friends, and those people took their income and spent it on all kinds of things, driving the economic engine.
A bunch of people dutifully showing up to work at a factory and producing high quality goods won't drive economic activity unless people also buy those high quality goods. $200 blue jeans, $4.50 lattes, $80,000 new cars - those drive economic activity, not because they have great intrinsic value, but because they get a lot of cash flowing from the consumers to the whole supply chain that provides these, ahem, premium priced products, and everybody in that supply chain can take their slice of the profits and turn around and feed the machine again.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 28 2019, @04:01AM (7 children)
If they aren't buying, then those things likely aren't high quality goods.
And the problem isn't merely the lack of importance of the activity being shutdown, but also the meager quantity of the economic activity.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 28 2019, @06:36PM (6 children)
Government is people, and people are expensive.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 29 2019, @02:47AM (5 children)
So... get rid of the people and you get rid of the cost. Sounds fine to me. I think we already discussed firing the 720k who weren't doing any work.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 29 2019, @02:40PM (4 children)
The cost is also economic stimulus. Firing the people and eliminating the cost is an anti-stimulus. If you don't believe that matters, then you're calling the Fed and every other economic theorist in power for the last 40 years wrong. That may be your opinion, but lots of data has been collected to back up the validity and effectiveness of economic stimulus, at least for short term effects.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 29 2019, @04:37PM (3 children)
The cost is also an anti-stimulus for everyone who pays taxes in the present and future.
Which, let us note, is far from a big deal. Conflict of interest and wishful thinking are things, Joe.
By all means, let's review that data and see how it fails to explain so many economic recoveries of the past 30 years. For example, Japan is working on lost decade number three despite it's government borrowing more than twice its GDP. The US had a pathetic recovery from its 2007-2008 recession despite massive stimulus spending. Same with the EU.
This is just yet another example of that ancient economic fallacy, the Broken Window fallacy. Here, we're chasing after the shiny unicorn of economic stimulus, by paying 800k people to do the work of 80k people (as you acknowledge), which is the broken window.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 29 2019, @05:59PM (1 child)
Don't forget, you are also wishfully thinking about how you might like things to be, imagining how they _might_ be better if everybody did things your way.
1. Everybody is quite unlikely to do things your way, even if you could present a more charming and convincing argument
2. Even if they did, your theory of what will happen is presently untested on the current economic situation, even if it is based on a long gone historical state of the world economy as documented by biased sources with vested interests
What would I like? For one thing I would like financial institutions that pay a meaningful guaranteed interest rate - say 4 or 5% - on deposited funds - that was a huge component of the economic landscape back when things were done more like you are calling for them to be done again. Am I likely to get that? Hell no, and little point in whining about it, either.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 29 2019, @11:33PM
Back at you on that. Critical thinking is all about mitigating that wishful thinking. Let's do more of that, ok?
In particular, "everybody" means you. This sort of dishonest presentation is a big part of the reason you don't get more politeness from me. Because it's wasted on you.
But it is quite well tested on the economic situation prior to about the 1920s. For example, the US has suffered numerous recessions [wikipedia.org] prior to the present economic approach. Every single one of those recessions ended despite there being no organized Keynesian approach or central bank with control over credit to fix things. So why are we to suppose that stimulus matters when there's little difference in recessions from before and after - including when the US government spent 2-4% of US GDP instead of 20%).
But the reason you wouldn't get that is because it doesn't work, not because some imaginary "everybody" stands in your way. Japan tried that with their postal savings system (which turned into a destructive cycle - they had to invent fake investments to dump the savings into and the result was construction of a vast amount of shoddy infrastructure that few wanted combined with that massive debt I already mentioned in a previous post). Now, it's merely a big part of the reason their economic system is crumbling. There's not enough investment to back that interest rate.
As to your other reply:
Sure, I'm good with gradual approaches - when we are capable of implementing them. But I notice that gradual rarely happens. What happens is that the "broken window" gets protected by the special interests that benefit from the economic harm (which after all is the real reason the broken window fallacy happens in the first place, someone always benefits from the course of action even if it is very harmful to most others) even successfully resisting small reforms. There is no graceful failure mode as a result. We often can't "boil the frog" because the frog figures out how to turn off the oven (after all the reform dude is only going to be in office for a few years).
To name a few examples, agricultural policy in the US is chock fully of incredibly stupid ideas that should have ended half a century or more ago under the gradual ending scheme, but still kick around. There's not going to be a gentle transition to a saner economic basis for that. We have peanut and sugar subsidies that are deeply broken. Currently, there's still a massive incentive to use corn-based ethanol in gasoline even though the process wastes more oil than it saves.
For another such example, raisins used to have a marketing board [reason.com] that would seize a portion of the US raisin market every year. Sometimes up to half the crop and sometimes the farmers wouldn't receive compensation for the seizure. This board was set up in 1937. It was finally ended [reason.com] due to court ruling (massive violation of the Fifth Amendment) in 2015. This is what "gradual" looks like in the real world. Government abuse gradually growing until it gets so big that it destroys itself.
Elsewhere in the world, "austerity" in Greece happened because they never fixed the problems until external forces had enough leverage to force reforms all at once. Notice that the parties complaining about said austerity are peculiarly disinterested in actually solving the problems that led to the austerity measure in the first place.
So sure, I'd love to do gradual reform. But we'll rarely get the opportunity for that. So I'd rather fire 720k government employees at a time than have no reform at all (and eventually destruction of the US instead).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 29 2019, @06:02PM
By all means, fix the broken window - but study the successful approaches available for boiling a frog... same thing applies to the world economy. Idiots making big changes all at once don't accomplish their aims.
🌻🌻 [google.com]