I can't even ask a simple question without getting heckled by the Fortune Teller.

If I asked for the paper you'd yell at me for assuming a paper was distributed for the talk.

"Ah, the beauty of public education!"

Your mommy and daddy clearly overpaid for the libertarian indoctrination, since you don't know how tax revenues work.

Judging by the response, I think I hit the issue right on.

I'm not a conservative, I don't assume academics have some kind of ideological axe to grind and work backwards from their conclusions, especially mathematicians.

But since you live in an echo chamber where you only hear or read what you want to read, and distort what people say on a continual basis, I'm not surprised you "found" whatever bs you claim you're looking for.

I start my day reading the Guardian app. Look somewhere else for a guy in the conservative media bubble.

But again, the spill of venom makes the more confident I was on to something. It really was just a guess.

I've met plenty. Friends with a few. I think I've mentioned my mother's affiliation with the local Republican Party growing up in a distinctly red county. Maybe it is because we elect our judges and, although the don't list a party affiliation, you can tell by who endorses them what party backs them.

And lets look at SCOTUS. Tell me the judges there are apolitical...

"But again, the spill of venom makes the more confident I was on to something. It really was just a guess."

You impugn somebody's motives and character for no apparent reason based on an innocuous question and you're going to get tart responses, sweet pea. You act like a dick and claim that the inevitable reply is validation of your attempt at character assassination.

" Look somewhere else for a guy in the conservative media bubble."

As far as webdiplomacy forum goes, you perpetually distort what people say and simply read into it what you want it to say. You're completely and thoroughly intellectually dishonest.

Funny, the maybe 30 year old PutFuck implies a stated in this very thread 67 year old is some kid. Gotta love his selective reading.

I didn't imply any such thing. If he didn't get a public education then mommy & daddy paid for it, either via homeschooling or some fancy private school. Clearly they overpaid.

They're not as political as is believed, and anyway a Supreme Court justice is hardly a representative example.

In some states the state bar association effectively picks the judges and then the legislature rubber stamps the people. Even where they're elected judicial campaigns are nowhere near as partisan as other elected offices, even sheriff and coroner. And at any rate, it's a better solution to have some possibly slightly biased judges in addition to people from other professions on a supposedly apolitical committee than it is to just have the legislatures draw them themselves.

"As far as webdiplomacy forum goes, you perpetually distort what people say and simply read into it what you want it to say. You're completely and thoroughly intellectually dishonest."

Oh, I'm sorry pot. What did you say to this old kettle?

@ Bob Genghiskhan

How can you tolerate your own hypocrisy?

@ Putin33

"We're not on the gold standard. There is a difference between the currency issuer (government) and the currency user (everybody else). The government does not need revenues in order to spend money. It issues currency first in order to collect revenues. The government is not a household."

...and that's the problem. Do you honestly believe that it would be better to spend money that we simply don't have than to live within our means? We can have a budget surplus, a kickass military, a reasonable social safety net, and good infrastructure all at the same time. It's a matter of appropriate distribution of responsibilities between the federal government, state governments, and the people (as outlined in the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution)

"Means" have nothing to do with it. We're not on the gold standard. It's a fiat currency. We are only constrained by real resources. We always have the ability to make any size payment with our own currency. Tax increases and spending cuts reduce GDP. Tax decreases and spending increases increase GDP. It's that simple.

Look at history. Every single significant reduction of the debt was followed by an economic crisis. In the late 1810s, we paid down the debt by 30%. In 1819 we had a recession. From 1823-1836 we paid down the debt, in 1837 we had another economic crisis. Ditto 1853-1857, we had a bad crisis in 1857; 67-73, we had a crisis in 73. 1880-1893, we had a crisis in 1893. 1920-1930 - great depression.

We had a surplus in the late 1990s and a bad recession in the early 2000s.

Budget surpluses are bad because they decrease private savings, which is what really matters. Budget deficits increase private savings.

No one is advocating budget surpluses. We're not playing HOI. What we advocate is a balanced budget, where the government spends only what it takes in. #strawman

Yeah, but we need a surplus to get out of debt. Once we're out of debt and we have a reasonable amount of money in a rainy day fund, we can get as close to budget-neutral as possible (but erring on the side of surplus)

Again, we're not playing HOI. If we don't add more debt and the economy grows the gross amount of money owed will not longer be a matter of concern.

The debt is at too high of a level now because it's a too high a percentage of GDP. If GDP were higher it would be less of a problem, and if GDP keeps growing while the debt stays the same the problem magically goes away. It's not that however many trillion of dollars it is is a bad thing in and of itself, it's that it's way too much to owe relative to our wealth as a whole. It's not really right to think of governments "paying back debt" the way an individual does on a credit card or mortgage.

As for a rainy-day fund, we have one. The Fed's printing press. American states (well run ones, at least) set aside money like that because they can't just create more if they really need some. The federal government can.

Printing money does *not* take care of the problem because it devalues the money in circulation. if you have 2000 dollars and print 500 more, then that 2500 is worth the same as the 2000 was originally worth meaning those dollars are now worth 80 cents compared to their worth previously.

People who say "just print more" don't understand even the most basic principles of economics. I'm no econ major and even I understand that simple concept.

The debt can be the debt. I don't care if all we do is pay interest. As long as we don't increase the debt via a deficit, I'm good with it. But an ever increasing debt is not good for our S&P rating and some day we will reach a point of paying more in interest than we do in real expenses.

It's a "rainy day" for a reason. You really need it.

Keeping inflation under control is just about the most important thing a government can do. But, if the past decade or so is any indication, we seem to have slayed that dragon and the contemporary problem is deflation, which is just as bad in different ways for an economy.

Way to make a tangent on a tangent, Draugnar.

Of course, the Fed has to do everything perfectly to keep the consequences from QE from unmaking all that. Will they do so? Maybe probably.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/the-debt-ceiling-and-the-housing-bust/?_r=0&gwh=C5E46F7ED8E24AFF48D3BB6B8FC8C650

Well, some were arguing to increase the debt on the idea "we can always print more" which you know as well as I is utter bullshit. Others were all about reducing the debt until we reach zero and have some saved up. I could get behind that if done reasonably slowly and not through extreme austerity, but I don't see the need. Maintaining the status quo with a balanced budget works, especially if you can drive the economy by cutting costs *and* taxes so that John Q. Public has more discretionary money to pump back into the economy.

BTW, Putin, my secondary education was at an all male military academy and then, after my father died, I worked my way through college (5years) with a degree in Finance, and, yes, I'm a proponent of supply side economics.

Ok, I am doing a phd on econ, so a few things I want to point out (but I dont think I will waste any more time arguing with ron paul types. not like they're gonna change their minds):

1- You do not need to balance the budget to keep the debt stable - having a higher growth rate than real interest rates will be sufficient - real interest rates are very close to zero (if not negative) at the moment and will be there for the foreseeable future according to the yield curve.

2- You can print money without causing inflation as long as the zero lower bound is binding - this is effectively what QE is doing.

3- Empirical studies indicate that cutting taxes has much smaller long-term effects on growth than many americans I have spoken to seem to think. a temporary tax cut can make people shift their spending to now instead of future and stimulate short-run growth, but that's mostly it. supply-side stuff gains are negligible.

4- Given low interest rates, debt makes sense from an efficiency perspective: as long as you have an investment that has a higher return than the interest you pay, it is worth borrowing to make it. It also makes sense from the perspective of inter-generational fairness as future generations will use the infrastructure we build now, so they should also chip in.

Where to even begin with this.

"What we advocate is a balanced budget, where the government spends only what it takes in. #strawman"

#StopwiththeHashTags.

A balanced budget is worthless. We need to collectively be able to purchase & consume what we produce in order to grow the economy. If the private sector is not spending the money then the spending has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the government.

"f GDP were higher it would be less of a problem, and if GDP keeps growing while the debt stays the same the problem magically goes away"

And how are you going to grow GDP while reducing government spending while the private sector is not anywhere close to filling the gap left by the government?

"The debt is at too high of a level now because it's a too high a percentage of GDP"

That's irrelevant. Japan's debt as a % of GDP is much higher than ours and they're just fine. Our credit rating was "downgraded" and it had absolutely no effect on interest rates or anything else. Debt is not a problem for currency issuers.

"People who say "just print more" don't understand even the most basic principles of economics"

Actually you have a worse understanding, since 1 - the Fed doesn't "print money" and 2 - The Fed purchase of bonds has no effect whatsoever on the public's financial assets. It's simply a zero-sum asset swap - reserves for bonds. Ask Japan if so-called "printing money" leads to inflation. Or ask Bernanke since QE shouldn't hasn't led to inflation in the US.

Inflation occurs when we have more spending than goods available at current prices. Essentially when taxes are too low. We aren't even close to that point at the moment, because spending is far below where it needs to be. If anything taxes are too high.

The economy can be thought of as a big department store filled with goods produced and offered for sale for the year. We get paid enough to buy everything at the store. The government taxes people so it can spend what it wants without the combined spending of government & the public exceeding whats for sale in the store. If the government taxes too much and doesn't spend enough then there is stuff left unsold in the store. If the government taxes too low while spending too much then there is overspending & thus inflation.

Anlari,
1- yes GDP is higher than real interest rates, but how does that keep debt stable when you are spending $500 billion to $1 Trillion more annually than you take in. The debt keeps growing under such conditions.
2-The Fed isn't printing money FYI. The fed is simply creating liquidity in the private sector by holding down interest rates.
3-Please provide the empirical studies you refer too. The Revenue Acts of 1921, 1924, and 1926 cuts marginal tax rates significantly. The growth of real wages and GDP in from 1921 to 1928 speaks for itself. Lyndon Johnson cuts income taxes 20% across the board with the 1964 Tax Reduction Act and the economy enjoyed steady expansion from 1964-1969 as a result. President Reagan signed ERTA in 1981 and this began a sharp recovery from the 1981 recession and extended into robust growth until 1989.
4-Low interest rates make since for debt in the private sector, but accumulating public sector debt that does not result in productive growth in poor policy. If we built infrastructure with our debt that would be one thing, but we are not spending our money on infrastructure. We are spending it on bureaucracy, welfare programs, and social security.