Thursday, July 03, 2014

WONKS PROPOSE AND MOBS DISPOSE.

As part of the mainstream media campaign to drown America in liberal lies, the New York Times prints Sam Tanenhaus' long, loving article on "reformicons" -- the Republican New Ideas grifters I wrote about a month ago at the Village Voice. This excerpt will give you some idea:
On Jan. 8, the day before the reformers met for their brainstorming session, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida stood in the Lyndon B. Johnson room at the Capitol — it was the 50th anniversary of Johnson’s declaration of a war on poverty — and announced a plan to create a “revenue-neutral flex fund” that would disburse federal funds to the states to spend as they wished on antipoverty programs. The response was mixed. A Brookings Institution scholar said the idea was workable, but liberals warned that bloc grants give too much power to the states. At the same time, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation argued that collecting money at the federal-government level and handing it out to states is the “exact wrong way to produce conservative policies.”
But for reformers, it was a breakthrough.
[Pause to reflect that these people have ridiculous life priorities, and need to be shaken like paint cans in old-fashioned department stores and told to 'reform' their own dork asses, starting out by taking some drugs and jumping into a fountain]
The plan wouldn’t save a dime in the short run — in fact, it would most likely increase costs — but it met the bigger ideological goal of “incentivizing” work, a pet theme on the right since the days of [Irving] Kristol and his liberal ally Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Mmm, that's some good reform right there! But since so many white people are falling out of the middle class into poverty, will it be as easy as it was in Moynihan's time to convince them that the poor need bootstrappado?

The punchline to this reform bullshit is what conservatives are actually doing these days, as you can see just by reading the news:
So while reformicons play patty-cake, the people they will allegedly lead into an enlightened new age are dancing around the same anti-contraception, anti-immigrant, pro-war bonfires that exercised them in decades gone by. Meanwhile in Texas, which conservatives like to point to as a laboratory of Republican ideas, the state GOP has endorsed repealing the Voting Rights Act, among other boob-bait. Reform is just something to make the starched-collar crowd feel better about themselves.

UPDATE. "Reading through the comments, I see many of us hit on the 'incentivize work' nugget o' shit," says Derelict, and I can see how that particular bit of awfulness would give most normal people pause. The actual Room to Grow manifesto Tanenhaus and his subjects are pimping contains several similar New Ideas, like this, written by Michael Strain:
The federal minimum wage requires that potential employers take a $7.25 per hour risk on long-term unemployed workers -- workers who are already seen as quite risky compared to applicants who are coming from other jobs or have been employed more recently. The government should lower the risk associated with hiring long-term unemployed workers by temporarily lowering the minimum wage that firms must pay them.
Now, now, he did say "temporary":
Temporarily lower minimum wages for the long-term unemployed should be coupled with a temporary subsidy (through an enhanced Earned Income Tax Credit or a wage subsidy) to ensure that no one who works full time and heads a household lives in poverty.
Instead of subsidizing the peons, let's subsidize businesses so they can pay them less -- that's one beauty part. And there another: A hint of how long that "temporary" subsidy would last comes in another part of the same section written by Michael Strain, in which he bitches about Obamacare and its subsidies:
The law gives subsidies to households with income up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line (this year, that would mean up to $94,200 for a family of four) in order to help with the cost of purchasing health insurance. The more money you make, the smaller the subsidy you receive. Because a little extra work results in losing some of the beneļ¬t workers receive from the government, the “subsidy phaseout” operates as a tax that discourages work.
Were his EITC plan ever to pass into law, how long do you think it would take for Strain the Cutter to confront Strain the Giver and tell him his "subsidy phaseout" was making people workshy -- that sub-minimum wage workers were declining to bootstrap themselves to higher wages because their cushy government-subsidized jobs had deincentivized them -- and that it has to go? So it would -- and the workers would stay at their starvation wages, because why would Republicans restore a minimum wage they'd always hated and which their Reform scam had finally enabled them to kill?

101 comments:

  1. it met the bigger ideological goal of “incentivizing” work


    Clearly, the solution to our woes is to cajole people into taking jobs that don't exist.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd like to ncentivize work, too.

    Let's take away the carried interest deduction and other crap the rentier class gets away with, and see them start working for a living, instead of stealing.
    ~

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  3. nomoremister11:41 AM

    Reform conservatism is to true conservatism what Shock Top beer is to Budweiser: a faux-"craft" product meant to expand market share into the upmarket precincts that reject the mainufacturer's better-known mass-market swill.

    ReplyDelete
  4. mortimer200011:48 AM

    it met the bigger ideological goal of “incentivizing” work
    Funny thing, they never, ever think that higher wages for workers might "incentivize" work. Here, direct from their Room to Grow manifesto is one of the Fresh New Conservative Big Ideas that will incentivize both workers and employers:

    The government should lower the risk associated with hiring long-term unemployed workers by temporarily lowering the minimum wage that firms must pay them.

    Incentivized? Hell, unemployed people everywhere will be inspired!

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  5. If "incentivizing" work was your goal, would you want to increase the minimum wage?

    Sure, yew wood, because New Ideas are just too gnu for yuo.

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  6. XeckyGilchrist12:10 PM

    The plan wouldn’t save a dime in the short run — in fact, it would most likely increase costs

    That's an unusually honest description of fiscal conservatism.

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  7. gocart mozart12:17 PM

    Increasing the wages of poor workers will just encourage more people to want to be poor. We should cut taxes on the rich instead in order to encourage more people to want to be rich. It's basic conservative economics.

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  8. BadExampleMan12:31 PM

    No one starches their colors [sic] any more. It's beneath a gentleman's dignity to do it himself and even the Messicans won't work cheaply enough any more.

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  9. edroso12:46 PM

    Ha ha. Thanks, though, fixed.

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  10. Conservative policies have been an absolute disaster for the past thirty-three years, and the way to fix their failure is to double down on them?

    Conservatism is a cult, and a dangerous one at that!

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  11. JennOfArk1:08 PM

    At this point, we could just substitute "conservative" for "insanity" in that old saw about doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result.

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  12. That's class warfare!!!!!!1 !!

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  13. I'm just a naturally vicious human, of course.
    ~

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  14. Derelict1:42 PM

    the bigger ideological goal of “incentivizing” work, a pet theme on the right . . .

    Yes, we must "incentivize" work. Let's see. We can't possibly incentivize work by, say, paying people enough to live on. That's socialism!

    Obviously, the answer is to eliminate the minimum wage, lard yet more tax cuts on the likes of Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon, and figure new and creative ways to penalize the poor for being poor while forcing more people out of the middle class by lowering wages overall. That is the conservative to incentivize work!

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  15. Apparently, sub-subsistence pay and absolute employer power aren't "incentivizing" enough. Go figure.

    Coming soon: think-tank thought pieces promoting legal use of bullwhips and cattle prods in the workplace.

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  16. shocktreatment1:56 PM

    "the bigger ideological goal of “incentivizing” work"


    What! You mean treating human beings as commodities whose prices vary according to supply isn't "incenticizing"?
    You mean "work or you're fired" isn't sufficiently "incentivizing"?


    Geebuzz, pretty soon you commies will be talking about the intrinsic worth and dignity of human beings, or the notion that a fair day's work deserves a fair day's pay! Loud a'mighty! It'll be chaos! Chaos, I tell you!

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  17. Derelict2:01 PM

    Reading through the comments, I see many of us hit on the "incentivize work" nugget o' shit. It prompts me to ask, in all seriousness, WTF is wrong with these people (conservatives)?

    We often ask, half in jest, whether they "know any real people." This whole incentivize work thing confirms to me that they do not actually know or interact with any ordinary Americans. Joe and Jane Average have mountains of incentive to work, and work they do! Hell, our productivity gains over the last 20 years alone have outstripped those of every other nation on Earth. And this despite the fact that virtually none of the gains in productivity or profit have made it back to Joe or Jane.

    So what is wrong with these people? How can anyone gaze at the employment and compensation landscape of America and say, "we need to give people incentive to work?" And how can they do so without even coming within missile range of mentioning the disincentive that massive income inequality produces?

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  18. montag22:04 PM

    Just wait until they make laws enforcing "the beatings will continue until morale improves."

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  19. The plan wouldn’t save a dime in the short run — in fact, it would most likely increase costs — but it met the bigger ideological goal of “incentivizing” work, a pet theme on the right since the days of [Irving] Kristol and his liberal ally Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

    Why does this sound like the premise to a Chapelle show skit?

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  20. montag22:08 PM

    I can picture these pimply-assed fuckers sitting around, brainshitting, desperately trying to come up with yet one more way to destroy minimum wage law.

    Here's a clue. None of you assholes would work for the current minimum wage and you're all talentless morons.

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  21. montag22:10 PM

    Sounds as if KKR wants to be KBR.

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  22. Or a Twilight Zone episode...

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  23. montag22:17 PM

    Have been reading Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew, and that seems to be the message--they're doing the same things they've always done. The big change they have made, however, is that in the `80s they found new and better ways to personally cash in on the anger and resentment they'd always been creating just as a function of being born-again conservatives. Now, more than ever, they have an incentive (perverse though it may be) to keep doing the same things over and over again. It's very profitable.

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  24. M. Krebs2:35 PM

    The photo that the Times ran with this article about the Young Turds of the GOP was just bizarre. I mean, Kate O'Beirne? Really?

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  25. Derelict2:44 PM

    I'm not sure why I don't hear this argument.

    If you're not hearing it, you're not listening to the right people. Actually, the more common variant of it is to reschedule the way benefits index to income. As you point out, people currently on benefits are given clear disincentives to work because making any additional money results is far greater cuts to their benefits. What we need is to re-index that so that making an extra $9,000 a year doesn't completely cut off your food and housing benefits worth $25,000 a year.

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  26. Now look, when neoCons repackage their dookie sandwich, we're supposed to praise them for their efforts and nom it up while making yum-yum noises.

    Expecting them to actually come up with anything new, or even not psychotic is simply unfair liberal bullying of the worst sort.

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  27. montag22:57 PM

    I'll presume this is a serious, rather than rhetorical, question. What's wrong with them?

    They're intrinsically malevolent and vindictive and as fucking petty as is imaginable, and they need enemies, foreign and domestic, to justify those attitudes. Because all those things come quite naturally to them, they become bullies and petty tyrants. And, because more than a few of them are dumb as dogsnot, they cannot conceive that they are busily shitting where they eat, killing the golden goose, because they're a perfect storm of greed, stupidity, petulant narcissism and borderline personality disorder.

    In short, they're nuts. We let them in, and now they won't leave. My fear right now is that we won't throw them out until they've very nearly completely burned the house down. By then, it may be too late. But, at least the media will have video of it on the 11 o'clock news.

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  28. They're assholes. And not the semi-tolerable silly/bumbly assholes, but the mean ones.

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  29. I bet you hang out with bugs and toads a lot.

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  30. ColBatGuano3:42 PM

    It is innovative thinking to reward people unlucky enough to be laid off in the worst economy in decades, and so unable to find a job, with a sub-minimum wage. Wait, is innovative the right word?

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  31. Weird Dave3:53 PM

    ...starting out by taking some drugs and jumping into a fountain...

    Don't forget the riding bicycles part. Fucking hippies.

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  32. I am SO busted....

    http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-35R5AQAbOBc/U61ouDOAwkI/AAAAAAAAOS4/Rg3_VYk5_3w/s1600/June+2014+f+064+crop.jpg
    ~

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  33. Hey, they're hippies. It's what they do.
    ~

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  34. Howlin Wolfe4:24 PM

    No matter what, the conservatives WILL NOT acknowledge the validity of any part of Keynesian theory. Theoretically, they will grant that some poor unfortunates may need help from the government in the form of "handouts" but even that is always too much and too many. They do not want to accept that just having a safety net adequate to help out the larger numbers of people in need due to the Great Recession would be 1) the humane thing to do and 2) it would actually help stimulate the economy, especially in conjunction with a more massive stimulus. Instead, they wrap themselves in knots trying to come up with ways that seem helpful, but actually result in simply helping out the wealthy objects of their admiration. That they do so knowingly or in delusion matters not; they are effectively trying to keep their masters' boots on the necks.

    We could do bootstrappada if we had the bootstraps with which to do said bootstrappada. These cynical bastards don't know what they are, and aren't about to make it easier to get the means to get out of poverty: cutting funds for higher education; trying to make elementary and high school education mainly benefit children of wealthier Americans; ending programs that might let a poor person actually go to school to better chances; put forward the oxymoronic position that the mom should stay home and take care of children, while making sure most people can't make enough to realize that, much less, what's a single parent supposed to do? Oh, yeah, get married! No biggie, right? But we won't raise the minimum wage, nosiree! I am so sick of these assholes, who've had their non-empirical, comic-book ideology and economic theory validated by a lazy press corps, and elected officials who've indulged it as a "voice that needs to be listened to" as if flat-earth theory is just another way to do geography.
    Like Count Floyd would say, "I think the Idiot Boy from Deliverance makes a good point!"

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  35. Bizarro Mike4:26 PM

    Yeah, I think things like universal health care and a universal basic income would work better than premium subsidies, tax breaks on health expenditures, tax-advantaged savings accounts, means-based welfare, food stamps, EITC, and so on. It is certainly a far simpler system for people to navigate. Sure, there's the danger that too many people would freeload, but most people want to work.

    They might not want to work in unsafe conditions or for unpleasant people. I think this is the real fear on the right of any sort of social welfare problem. People will escape the bullies, and they can't stand that.

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  36. I think most conservatives view the modern economy (as it's been for the last 30-40 years) as a sort of natural order. This means that when liberals try to uplift the poor, conservatives view them as fighting nature. Pain is just part of the plan, and any attempt to change that is doomed to failure.


    Part of the problem is that many economists (not just conservative ones, but especially conservative ones) think of themselves like biologists. They look at our economic models as ecosystems that are naturally in balance. That anyone could look at the messy artifice that is the world economy and see balance is proof as to how loopy these guys are (and how scary it is that they wield so much power).

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  37. The unspoken assumption in that book is that despair is a necessary part of the formula. Why else would anyone take a demeaning, demanding job that doesn't pay enough to support a basic lifestyle?

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  38. Bizarro Mike4:53 PM

    I think a major difference is how the sides see helping the poor. I think reducing the misery of others will have major benefits for everyone in terms of well being. I get the idea that the Reformicons think that reducing misery will remove valuable hands that could mow their lawn and wash their car but never never never come through the front door.

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  39. Derelict5:02 PM

    This comment makes me pick and grin.

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  40. Mooser5:33 PM

    "prints Sam Tanenhaus' long, loving article"


    "Loving" article? Another words, Whittaker Chambers was a whole lot worse than Tanenhaus portrays him? I should have known.

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  41. LittlePig6:39 PM

    Green Day libel!!!

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  42. LittlePig6:40 PM

    So, Buck Owens, or Roy Clark?

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  43. The sad part is that there's not a hint of parody in this comment.

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  44. Pope Zebbidie XIII8:35 PM

    Lloyd Blankfein won't get out of bed unless you stuff a million large down the front of his pyjamas.

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  45. tigrismus9:05 PM

    The other solution is to offer more benefits universally, benefits not
    tied to income, so people don't have to be poor to get them.


    I wonder if Amity Shlaes knows Hayek supported this idea?

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  46. That is for the little people. The help.
    ~

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  47. Tehanu10:16 PM

    montag2: I copied this into a Word doc and I plan to print it out and post it above my desk (at home, alas - nsfw where I work) because this is just ferkin' brilliant. I'd upvote it multiple times if I could.

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  48. A few years ago I would have said "Incentivize work" is Hatelish for "Starve the n!ggers if they won't get off their asses and work."



    But now, while I think that translation is still valid, there's no denying the modern day conservosadist can't understand why anyone who doesn't have Chief in their title should be paid at all.



    So a second translation is "Force the proles to provide labor in exchange for as little as we can get away with. But first, let's try to convince them that employment (at multiple jobs) has its own value, separate from grubby old money."

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  49. I'll say this for the modern right--they may have started out saying "n word" iver and iver again but they've really moved past that to a sometimes colorblind hatred for everyone who is not a wealthy conservative.

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  50. BigHank5312:31 AM

    I'd make a joke about the McDookie, but honestly: you already know what that food is like.

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  51. BigHank5312:33 AM

    Fleas? Ticks? Leeches? Chiggers? Rabid sewer rats?

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  52. AGoodQuestion1:21 AM

    Q: Why are you hitting yourself in the head with a hammer?
    A: Because it feels so righteous when I don't stop.

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  53. AGoodQuestion1:24 AM

    That's the only way there'll be anything "large" in the front of his pyjamas.

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  54. AGoodQuestion1:25 AM

    Or a torture porn flick.

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  55. gainsayer1:40 AM

    The sentence that includes the phrase "dumb as dogsnot" needs to be on a wall, in needlepoint form.

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  56. montag21:52 AM

    I'd settle for spraypaint on the wall of Koch Industries in Wichita.

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  57. In my opinion, it really is all about hierarchy. Wealth is just another way to indicate exactly where an individual ranks on the totem pole. Gender and race are other factors they use to calculate this.


    Even if the day were to come when we're all racially mixed to the same color, there will still be Rightwingers, and they will still find some way to identify who should be discriminated against... some group to feel superior to... some kind of people to beat down.


    I think it's the superior/inferior model of society that they really think is important, and the way they identify their "inferiors" is kind of secondary. For example, when they object to a Gay Pride parade, it probably isn't the "Gay" part that offends them as much as the "Pride" part does. The group that is designated inferior isn't allowed to stand tall and be proud; they must forever hang their heads in shame and humiliation.

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  58. I think that's exactly right.

    Many conservatives believe in a Natural Order kind of society... that some people are simply meant to be on the bottom end of things and it's a mistake to try to change that.

    I've known Christians who believe this, and quote Jesus saying "the poor will always be with us." The fact that Jesus said that substantiates their belief in this Natural Order.

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  59. I suppose it's a matter of "Conservatism can never fail; it can only BE failed."


    That sort of thing.

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  60. Universal healthcare and wage support don't offer an opportunity to skim off the top. Most of the other half-assed benefits you mentioned funnel money to the already wealthy. Premium subsidies? They go straight to the shareholders!

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  61. I always wondered about this: "long-term unemployed workers -- workers who are already seen as quite risky compared to applicants who are coming from other jobs or have been employed more recently." Why are the L-TU any more of a hiring risk than someone who is working right now or who got laid off last week? Do the L-TU forget how to work? Does MicroSoft in the meantime come out with a new operating system, rendering all previous computer knowledge obsolete, without the LT-U knowing about it? Or is it because the L-TU get so used to living off those phat unemployment checks that any prospective employer is just gonna have to kiss their lazy ass to make them do anything useful?

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  62. DocAmazing10:50 AM

    I know that I always forget most of my training and education by Sunday night and have to be gradually re-integrated into the workplace at a decreased rate of pay Monday morning.

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  63. M. Krebs10:57 AM

    The analogy with biology is interesting. Parts of economics are very much like mathematical biology in that in both fields researchers construct tractable models of hopelessly complex and unpredictable systems. If you build a model that exhibits certain behavior/characteristics of the hopelessly complex and unpredictable system, then you've achieved some success and the model might help you understand the system better. The trouble with economics though is that too often economists build models that produce a desired result that is motivated politically and not by unbiased observation of the real world.

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  64. Ellis_Weiner11:36 AM

    Toads adorbs, in other words.

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  65. Dr. Hunky Jimpjorps1:18 PM

    Because a little extra work results in losing some of the beneļ¬t workers
    receive from the government, the “subsidy phaseout” operates as a tax
    that discourages work.


    The unspoken assumption here is that either the author thinks all the non-rich work piecemeal, getting paid by the bushel or the burger instead of having their hours set by their employer, or that he thinks they ought to be.

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  66. In response to demographic changes, can the Dookie Torta or Dookie Arepa be far behind? Or am I expecting too much?

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  67. M. Krebs2:12 PM

    I'm not sure dogs have snot. I've never seen a dog booger.

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  68. Actually, I have heard many conservatives of my own acquaintance advocating military spending and more wars on the grounds that war is good for the economy, pointing at WWII and the end of the Depression. When I pointed out to one guy that he was advocating massive government debt-driven spending that puts millions of unemployed to work making expensive stuff that gets immediately destroyed just for the sake of redistributing wealth, he got all sputtery in his insistence that it was totally different from Keynes. And I guess the difference is that Keynes wasn't also arguing for killing foreigners and destroying their industries.

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  69. M. Krebs2:14 PM

    I'd like to see donkey be the theme ingredient on Iron Chef.

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  70. M. Krebs2:17 PM

    Every weekend is a lost weekend.

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  71. Derelict2:21 PM

    Wow. The entirety of 34 years of Republican economic and social theory encapsulated in a single sentence.

    I bow in awe before this comment.

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  72. Derelict2:29 PM

    The long-term unemployed are perceived as being risky hires because their status raises the question, "Why has no-one else hired this person? Obviously, there's something wrong with them, or they'd have gotten a job by now. I just can't see what that something wrong is. So, I won't take a chance."

    It's just one more way American society has become rigged against itself.

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  73. Derelict2:36 PM

    I'm not sure that's what he's writing about. I have a friend who has been disabled from birth (serious birth defects). He lives on government benefits including Social Security disability, food stamps, Section-8 housing subsidies, LIHEAP, and so on. If he makes any reportable income, ALL of his benefits get reduced. So for every extra dollar he makes, he loses $4 to $10.

    He could be doing some light at-home piecework. In fact, he'd love to do that. But the cuts to his benefits more than wipe out whatever he could make.

    And just to make things extra-special good for him, all the cuts to the safety net over the last 6 years have now backed him into a corner where he get to pick which thing he's going to pay for this month. Will it be heat? Electric? Food? Medicine? He can't afford all of them, and his debt is steadily mounting.

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  74. smut clyde4:43 PM

    Also too, because like everything else it looks like a nail.

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  75. KatWillow4:47 PM

    Or economists factor in false data, such as "enlightened self-interest" in the Bosses, which will stop them from underpaying their employes, or storing explosive chemicals in dangerous places, or never EVER use/sell tainted meat because, you know, it would poison the customer. Instead they pay the very least they can, leave TNT next to the water heater, and put their tainted meat ON SALE.

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  76. shocktreatment4:53 PM

    Oh they have snot alright. Just have to be pretty dehydrated before it 'boogers up'.

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  77. montag25:05 PM

    People conveniently forget that Keynes also said that the one deficit that could not be tolerated was a trade deficit, and the U.S. has been happily, eagerly, screwing that pooch since 1983, because we so value the financialization of the economy.

    And those conservatives of your acquaintance apparently--in their coincident hatred of taxes--don't believe that it actually costs anything to buy arms and then blow them up somewhere else. Do they not realize that war, and preparations for war, and tax cuts in time of war have been put entirely on the credit card in this country, and are singularly responsible for the debt they now decry so vituperatively?

    During WWII, the top nominal income tax rate was 94% (in practice, it was quite a bit less--in those years, the man with the highest income in the country, an industrialist by the name of Johnson, paid an effective rate of 66%, because of lower capital gains on his investment income), over and above $200,000, which is about $3 million today (an amount which virtually all would agree one can live on quite comfortably). That tax rate remained in place into the mid-`60s in order to pay the debts war created.

    What your conservative acquaintances studiously wish to ignore is that they want wartime spending (to stimulate the only major manufacturing sector we have left) combined with peacetime tax rates combined with artificially low inflation and high trade deficits due to low exports and high imports, a condition normally conducive to high inflation, and then they simultaneously want a high-growth economy and low wages (despite 70% of the economy being dependent upon consumer spending--and a high percentage of that money spent on imports). Finally, they want deregulated banks and no taxation on corporations which increasingly invest profits overseas or rake off money from the real economy, give a significant portion of that money to themselves and then set the rest on fire through excessively risky investments, thus requiring cash infusions from the U.S. Treasury, creating more debt, even though they and the wealthy want to contribute nothing to pay for the war costs that your conservative acquaintances think is necessary.

    Have I got that about right? Frankly, they strike me as morons from whom one should never take economic advice.

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  78. jcricket5:16 PM

    "they're a perfect storm of greed, stupidity, petulant narcissism and borderline personality disorder."

    good work, here.

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  79. montag25:18 PM

    What I find most abhorrent about this view is that not only is it a subtle form of discrimination, but within weeks or months after the beginning of a wholesale crash in the economy, the pundits are whistling the "oh, my, they lost their jobs because they didn't keep up with skills training, and, oh, my goodness, how their skills must be degrading while they're unemployed," which only reinforces in employers the belief that those unemployed are damaged goods, when it's all just really a smokescreen to divert attention from the fact that a relatively few fatcats just plain flat exploded the economy because they were greedy and stupid.

    American businessmen are mostly morons, but they're fucking experts at blaming the victims.

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  80. DocAmazing5:18 PM

    Not lost, just mislaid.

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  81. montag25:21 PM

    Jaysus, when you find them all, think of the vacation you can take....

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  82. redoubtagain6:55 PM

    I've known Christians who believe this, and quote Jesus saying "the poor
    will always be with us." The fact that Jesus said that substantiates
    their belief in this Natural Order.

    He also had words about rich people, but you never, ever hear them quote him on that.

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  83. JennOfArk7:29 PM

    Dookie Gyros!

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  84. montag27:42 PM

    Or, even worse, that so many of their models take as God-given law that all actors in an economic system are equally and fully informed of their available choices, which is unadulterated horseshit, right from the get-go. That's so far at variance from reality that it has to be intentionally misleading.


    Right-wing economics has always been steeped in a broth of wishful thinking and outright elitist fraud, but when the Libertarians threw in a lot of nonsense about "freedom" and "liberty" and "free" markets and "natural law" and a few of Art Laffer's clangers, it was as if they'd simply abandoned all pretense that their economics was even marginally grounded in reality.

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  85. montag28:02 PM

    Yeah, kinda weird. But, hey, the other young turds are getting a little long in the tooth and/or don't want too much publicity. Abramoff, Ralph Reed, Dinesh, they're all pretty much GOP unpersons these days.

    Yeah, she's in her mid-sixties, and is not at all a "young turk," by any stretch of the imagination, but she does have the advantage that she's unlikely to be indicted or named a co-conspirator.

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  86. Don Smithstone3:25 AM

    You like handouts and the gov taking care of you don't you?

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  87. Derelict7:04 AM

    montag2 does a god job demolishing this bit of conservative Keynesianism, but here's another reason why it doesn't work: Our modern military does not demand high-rate production of any item of equipment.

    1.) The conflicts we engage in now are all very small affairs against adversaries who are not even close to us in capability. Materiel losses are small--especially in terms of high-dollar equipment such as planes and tanks. So the vast bulk of the money poured into war-fighting these days goes to support companies like Halliburton and KBR. Companies which then offshore the profits while screwing their employees (and the military). A net loss for us.
    2.) The only way for military spending to have a real stimulating effect on the economy would be for us to get involved in a massive world-war style conflict. The would mean taking on China or Russia (or both). It would also mean casualties in the millions. (And, of note, if we did get into a major shooting war with China, the world economy would tank overnight.) To engage in that kind of bloodshed in the hope it would stimulate our economy would reserve us all places in Hell.

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  88. DocAmazing10:26 AM

    If he wanted handouts and the government taking care of him, he'd have become an investment banker.

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  89. They are really remarkably pettish about Gay Pride and Black is Beautiful. They never gave up insisting that they weren't behaving hatefully to both Gays and Blacks, but when the political winds changed and Gay and Black pride became impossible to hold back they turned on a dime and began pretending that it offered some kind of unfair advantage to gays and blacks--like the "unfair advantage" of rape victims, I suppose. Or those bitches who wear the tee shirts that say "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." Suddenly the white guys who were telling us "women need men for everything" got all butt hurt and began whining "why do you have to be so aggressive and exclusionary? Can't we just forget Stonewall, electroshock therapy, anti sodomy laws, slavery, torture, murder of the innocent, sexism and laws disabling women from owning property or voting?"

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  90. TGuerrant12:58 PM

    Nonetheless, it's the very picture of America - 82% male and 91% white!

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  91. TGuerrant1:07 PM

    I would like to meet Miss Laid if she has any weekdays available.

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  92. Mooser1:18 PM

    "Hatelish" Great word. It explains so much to me. Thanks.

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  93. montag21:42 AM

    Yes, true in a number of regards. However, it doesn't have to be spending on only war, per se, but spending on preparing for war--what the hawks have perennially labeled a "strong defense." It's also why there will never have to be a "big" war, because the money flows from the threat, not the inevitability. Beyond that, the planners know that every war game with nuclear powers that begins with conventional weapons eventually escalates to all-out nuclear war, so, any talk of an "economy" in those circumstances is almost meaningless.

    This sort of gets into the weeds of defense spending, but handing off billions to services contractors is still the small change of the whole defense budget--even though it still translates into hundreds of billions of dollars a decade, and even though a very considerable amount of that money is fraudulently obtained The big money is still in weapons procurement and development. Chuck Spinney and Winslow Wheeler have gone into that process in so much detail that it's not necessary to repeat what they've said, but that's why there's a Space Command now--to create a new potential battlefield in space, which will probably be so expensive (compared to previous weapons systems) that it will be the straw that broke the camel's back. In terms of waste and utter uselessness for actual defensive purposes, missile defense will seem a distant third compared to what's coming up.

    The "stimulus" that the conservatives mentioned are suggesting is small, but its object is to keep a flawed system in motion, to keep it operating. If the object were just jobs, we could do far better in that regard in other sectors, for far less money. But, what they're suggesting is keeping the money pipeline full no matter what, and the number of units of a given item no longer matters. The amount of money matters. The stimulus they really want is to defense aerospace stock prices. To them, that's the real economy.

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  94. You cyberstalk me from another site and all you have to offer is this hackneyed right-wing boilerplate? You cons don't have even a scintilla of originality. You don't even have a hive mind, you have a hive ass that you pull this shit, crapped out by Rush or Glenn originally, out of.

    For the record, I live in a state that sends more money to DC than it receives, subsidizing the moocher Red States. I pay several voluntary additions to New York State to fund environmental, research, and healthcare efforts.

    I also live in a city that would be considered a somewhat large metropolis if it weren't on NYC's northern verge. I pay city taxes, which fund three library branches, several lovely parks, and a museum with a planetarium.

    I pay for the services I use. It's not about handouts, it's about buy-ins. That's what you right-wing dumbasses never get.

    Seriously, you're among the snarkiest, smartest people on the internet, and you pull out this totally unoriginal bullshit. I'm embarrassed to have such a low-grade troll. Couldn't you have at least tried?

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  95. Derelict6:04 AM

    All very true. The money in the pipeline does provide some jobs, though not many. And there is a critical need to keep some of these people on the job. For example, the Navy is getting ready for buy a bunch of new submarines. It's not that we actually need new subs--it's mostly to retain the highly skilled workforce that builds these things. So we'll be buying subs at the lowest possible production rate, which in itself multiplies costs. But we keep those guys (and gals) working, and keep their skills sharp.
    Again, not an ideal way to stimulate the economy. But I guess it like Huey Lewis said: "Takin' what they're gving 'cause we're workin' for a living."

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  96. beejeez9:06 PM

    Oh, conservatism has been failed, all right. In the way that I was failed, in calculus.

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  97. Aquaria3:13 PM

    My former roommate got a kidney transplant at 19 years old. Even the rich struggle to pay for the medications that cost over $10K a month, the regular required visits to a hematologist and a nephrologist (nearly as costly as the medications), the necessity of having to go to the emergency room and often straight into intensive care if they get any kind of infection--and more!

    But if he makes over $13,000 a year in income, to go with his $125 a month in food stamps and his $400 a month in SSI, he will lose the medical benefits he needs to stay alive.

    He has a degree in geology, but he can't use it. His girlfriend has a stinking law degree, and was just taking off in her career when she needed a transplant. She can't make over a similar amount without losing her benefits.

    This is the dirty secret of transplants. If you get one, you're going to be impoverished for the rest of your life.

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  98. Don Smithstone7:36 AM

    I lol'd at Gary when he went off about the gay kid committing suicide. :). I thought Gary might off himself as well. I need to go find him LOL! Later dude.

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  99. Don Smithstone7:36 AM

    No, they actually have to be smart and work.

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  100. Jayson Alan Grigsby4:55 PM

    Oh, "unadulterated horseshit, right from the get-go" is an exquisite turn of phrase, and so versatile in regard to these topics.

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