This clip from john Oliver is summarization of all of the fears I have about where we are going with the partisan politics. The end is sobering, and I think it reflects perfectly how dysfunctional as a nation we’ve become and it will get far worse, before it will ever get better
Being called “intellectually dishonest” by a Trumpista who clearly has the brains to write coherent, albeit tendentious paragraphs is rich, considering said person has to engage in Orwellian Doublethink daily with the current clown car of an Administration.
You can attempt to argue with a ball-peen hammer but don’t expect them to refute your arguement or use anything but blunt force in theirs. Tools do what their masters want them to do, or they break. Will be interesting to see whether this tool continues to spout his master’s drivel in a ball-peen fashion or breaks. But drivel is drivel regardless.
See also: Playing chess with a pigeon.
Excellent clip. The epistemic closure of the Fox News mindset is a direct outgrowth of the mid-90’s maximalist take-no-prisoners Gingrich “Contract With [on] America” philosophy combined with Clinton Derangement Syndrome. The Republicans were so nonplussed that Bush 41 didn’t win the second term to which he was OBVIOUSLY entitled that they went crazy, and haven’t gone any less crazy since, in fact rather the opposite. Just look how Fox News (basically the Pravda of the GOP) defends Trump of all people.
Funny thing is, that election (Bush v Clinton v Perot) was all about the deficit.
By the end of the Clinton Administration, we were running a surplus, only to have it completely blown up the W. and the GOP.
As Cheney said, deficits don’t matter (unless the president is a Democrat, of course).
If only. I did find it funny that the Democrats are now the fiscally responsible party (and have been for 25+ years), but now that they seem to be the ONLY responsible party, it’s not so funny anymore.
I’m old enough to remember that the Reagan wing of the GOP was freaking out about a $60 billion deficit during the election of 1980. By the time the Reagan tax cuts + 1986 tax reform and the Reagan-Bush 41 years were over, it was about 5 times as high. Even that figure seems tiny now. Our economy is much bigger now, of course. But I don’t know if 1992’s economy was 5 times the size of 1980’s.
I’m no economist, it it seems to me that there ought to be times to spend and others when we should be working to pay down the debt. For instance, I thought it made sense to spend when the economy was in the tank to keep things from getting worse. When the economy is strong, seems like we should be taking advantage of that to scale back the debt, not mortgaging our future.
That is one of the core principles of Keynesian economics. So there is lots of analysis supporting hat very point.
Yup, and it’s the core reason a lot of people think the tax cut was extremely poorly timed and destined to make the next recession a lot worse.
By Keynesian thought, the right thing to do was actually raise taxes, to both pay down the debt incurred with tax cuts and spending increases during the market crash/depression, and keep those tools available to blunt the next recession. Instead, it is likely to be worse, and more difficult to fix,especially as interest rates are already rising, making the past debt and the new debt even more expensive.
Interesting article about this a couple of days ago talking about how there was another economic bubble on the horizon, not because of the housing market, but because of corporations and their stocks being overvalued, which they connected to corporate buybacks and borrowing as a result f the stimulus.
To be honest, I didn’t really get how this was as bad as before, unless banks were buying up corporate debt (which I don’t think they said, but maybe I missed it). The average person isn’t really in the stock market, are they? Of course, their IRA certainly might be, which hadn’t crossed my mind initially.
Thanks for posting that. Yeah, this looks really bad. Financial institutions are buying up corporate debt, then repackaging it and selling it as CLOs (didn’t even bother trying to hide that they are similar to the CDOs from last time) to consumers, pension funds, and insurance companies.
When some significant percentage of the companies holding the debt go bankrupt, as they will when interest rates go up and they find they are too far leveraged to stay solvent, the CLOs will become worthless, just like the CDOs did. The pension funds and other investors will lose everything, the insurance companies will have to be bailed out, and we’ll have another giant recession.
So, what do I “big short” to come out ahead on this one?
Bonds, or money market funds?
Just don’t forget to move it back after the crash. I’ve seen people forget, and several years later, and it wasn’t pretty.
Rosenstein just threatened to call for an investigation into the house Intel committee’s staff.
LOL, this is getting surreal.
About fucking time - investigate the shit out of that piece of crap outfit. Den of traitors.