When Jimmy Carter was elected... worst

[Hygro]

Voodoo is sticking pins in a mock up, hoping for a reaction. For an example, see Congress 1933-1939. I am talking about the Fed lowering the discount rate from 5.75% to 0.50% in under 2 years. The pin is a discount and overnight rate 4%+ below the treasury rate. What does the doll look like? Gold?

J

You are talking about the Fed lowering rates fast. Okay, but that's a different topic than "artificially low for two decades".

Congress 1933-1939 is not an example of voodoo. It's the most striking example of the power of fiscal policy. The economy comes roaring back in 1933 with the changes in policy, completely falls flat in 1937 after they reigned in spending cutting multiple programs while raising taxes, realized they caused they second largest recession in history and then began spending again and the economy bounced back as a result.

You have to be reading this somewhere... you gotta get some new sources man. What are you reading?

 

[onejayhawk]

You are talking about the Fed lowering rates fast. Okay, but that's a different topic than "artificially low for two decades".

Congress 1933-1939 is not an example of voodoo. It's the most striking example of the power of fiscal policy. The economy comes roaring back in 1933 with the changes in policy, completely falls flat in 1937 after they reigned in spending cutting multiple programs while raising taxes, realized they caused they second largest recession in history and then began spending again and the economy bounced back as a result.

You have to be reading this somewhere... you gotta get some new sources man. What are you reading?

Funny. I was thinking you were quoting party line like a robot.

I read everything in general and trashy science fiction for pleasure (at least that is what I tell my wife). Mostly, my economics is a sideline to investment research.

J

 

[Antilogic]

Ok, since arguing about the fall of the USSR and the Iranian Revolution with oneliners can't possibly be intended to be serious debate, i take it this is a "fun" opinion thread where one can just post one's opiion without going through the giant waste of time involved with backing it up in a doomed effort to convince people?

So be it.
Post-war US presidents from best to worst:

Eisenhower
Carter
Nixon
G.H.W.Bush
Kennedy
Ford
Clinton
G.W.Bush
Johnson
....50 feet of poop...
Truman​

I had a conversation with someone recently (at the JFK museum in Dallas) where she claimed that Johnson was the worst president ever yet she didn't seem to have a problem with Vietnam. Are you ranking him low based on his foreign policy?

Even after the 19th century. For example you'd be hard-pressed to find something more corrupt and scandal-ridden than the Harding administration.

True. I appreciate that you went before WW2 to find a bad one--most people I encounter who talk about bad presidents seem to think our history started in 1945.

Historically I think Carter is going to rank like a President Pierce. He happened, certainly wasn't terrible but won't ever be remembered in comparison to the presidents around him.

If I had to give a personal rank of the 20th century Presidents it would go like this:

1. FDR
2. Johnson
3. Nixon
4. T. Roosevelt

...

Ranking Johnson and Nixon ahead of Teddy Roosevelt?

I would tend to agree with a statement like this, but I am hesitant to support the people who say such things because then they usually start ranting about Illuminati and reptilian shape-shifters trying to set up the "New World Order".

So as long as your not one of those Illuminati conspiracy theorists, I agree with this statement.

+1. You don't have to be a huge conspiracy theorist to see that public media shapes the public narrative, but not go further than that.

Funny. I was thinking you were quoting party line like a robot.

Hygro is definitely not party line, unless you are thinking of a Conga line.

 

[Hygro]

Funny. I was thinking you were quoting party line like a robot.

I read everything in general and trashy science fiction for pleasure (at least that is what I tell my wife). Mostly, my economics is a sideline to investment research.

J

Luiz in the madurismo quote accused me of disregarding everything my economics professors teach, and you're telling me I'm repeating it party line.

The truth is that some debates in economics are over. How the Great Depression ended is one of them. You hear a lot of echos but the substance of the debate by The details can always be improved, and I'm always down to find out I'm wrong because that usually entails learning something even cooler. I've only seen a few folks argue that the government was inconsequential for ending the depression. Most of them chose their economics by political affiliation.

(Thunder be shaking my house right now better post this before the power goes out!)

Hygro is definitely not party line, unless you are thinking of a Conga line.

Link to video.

 

[onejayhawk]

Luiz in the madurismo quote accused me of disregarding everything my economics professors teach, and you're telling me I'm repeating it party line.

The truth is that some debates in economics are over. How the Great Depression ended is one of them. You hear a lot of echos but the substance of the debate by The details can always be improved, and I'm always down to find out I'm wrong because that usually entails learning something even cooler. I've only seen a few folks argue that the government was inconsequential for ending the depression. Most of them chose their economics by political affiliation.

The party line that economists can control the economy. It seems to be endemic with economics majors that don't start as math geeks.

J

 

[Hygro]

The party line that economists can control the economy. It seems to be endemic with economics majors that don't start as math geeks.

J

Oh. That's not a thing.

 

[onejayhawk]

oh. That's not a thing.

????

Religion maybe?

J

 

[Tee Kay]

My favourite post-war US presidents (screw best-worst ranking, this is TKsomeness ranking)

1. Eisenhower
2. Johnson
3. Nixon
4. Truman
5. Clinton
6. Carter
7. Ford
8. Bush I
9. Obama
10. Kennedy
10. Bush II
11. Reagan

 

[Cutlass]

????

Religion maybe?

J

That's not a thing either. Economists do not believe that economists can control the economy. They do believe that government can exercise a substantial level of control over the macroeconomy. A belief born out by experience. It's notable that the economy went into the crapper when the government ceased trying to control it, not when the government was actively trying to control it.

 

[Traitorfish]

????

Religion maybe?

J

Posts like this always confuse me. I guess it makes sense to you, but do you not stop to wonder if it will make sense to anybody else? Are you just sitting there like "well, I understand it", but it never occurs to you to ask if that's just because you're the one writing it, and people who don't have the context of your thought-processes are going to have a more difficult time decoding it? All we're seeing is four question-marks, "????", and then the sentence fragment "Religion maybe?"- and not even "religion, maybe?", like a question, just "Religion maybe?", a statement followed by a question mark- without any attempt to elaborate, even implicitly. I don't know what that means "???? Religion maybe?", even though I can see the post it's replying to, and follow the line of conversation back through the thread. It just looks like some arcane error code, something I'm supposed to look up in a reference book, but not actual human conversation.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Really, no. No action or policy of Reagan was responsible for what happened to the USSR. The USSR's economy was dead in the water before Reagan took office. The USSR did not change any policies in response to anything that Reagan did.

What Gorbachev did was in response to factors that had nothing to do with Reagan. He was trying to revive the economy that had at that point been moribund for at least a decade. He just lost control of it. Gorby was not reacting to Reagan at all.

If anything, Reagan tried to revive the USSR and strengthen it. He used US tax dollars to subsidize Soviet food imports, letting the USSR spend more money on guns pointed at us. He also worked to create oil and gas exports from the USSR so that they could earn more money to support their empire.

The only thing Reagan did which could be considered a positive towards the end of the USSR was in meeting with Gorby and signing some arms control treaties. This weakened the hand of Soviet hardliners in internal political battles against Gorby. But the USSR was coming apart at the seems long before that.

The complete opposite. Reagan successfully deprived the Soviet Union of hundreds of millions of dollars a year by sabotaging world oil prices with a bribe to the Saudis (which also helped the struggling American economy).

The following year was the first time the Soviet economy contracted since WWII.

If you wish for me to produce quotes from Central Committee and high-ranking government members (like Gromyko and Shakhnarazov, for example) talking about how they couldn't keep up with the new arms race and thus needed to reform, I will.

 

[onejayhawk]

Do you see what I'm getting at?

No. You explain this comment, because I don't understand it.

Oh. That's not a thing.

J

 

[Traitorfish]

No. You explain this comment, because I don't understand it.

Hygro says "that", i.e. the belief among economics majors that economists can control the economy, is not a "thing", i.e. an actual, observable phenomenon. It makes perfect sense in context, and although it assumes a certain intuitive grasp of English-language pronouns ("that") and an understanding of certain semi-colloquialisms ("thing), there are none of the unfillable blanks we found in your post. If you speak the language as Hygro uses it, everything is there.

 

[onejayhawk]

Hygro says "that", i.e. the belief among economics majors that economists can control the economy, is not a "thing", i.e. an actual, observable phenomenon. It makes perfect sense in context, and although it assumes a certain intuitive grasp of English-language pronouns ("that") and an understanding of certain semi-colloquialisms ("thing), there are none of the unfillable blanks we found in your post. If you speak the language as Hygro uses it, everything is there.

So why is a reference to religion obscure?

By the way, I disagree. Control is much too strong a word.

J

 

[Traitorfish]

So why is a reference to religion obscure?

See, I didn't even realise it was supposed to be a reference. I still don't know what the reference actually is. It was just the word "religion", a string of letters arranged in a familiar pattern but without any obvious semantic content.

 

[onejayhawk]

See, I didn't even realise it was supposed to be a reference. I still don't know what the reference actually is. It was just the word "religion", a string of letters arranged in a familiar pattern but without any obvious semantic content.

The concept that governments control the economy is a religious dogma.

J

 

[Hygro]

????

Religion maybe?

J

edit: seems dogma was it... x-post with above.


Yeah I'm not sure what this means, either. That there's dogma among economists? That a lot of language used by economists is religious?

I used to be able to talk for days about that. Lemme (not actually bother to) see if I can dig up my posts from 2011.

Short answer, though, is that the economists who are the most dogmatic are the ones who

A) don't understand the actual semantic values of the terms of their field and misapply them, which leads to micro arguments used for the macroeconomy (fail) and economics-economics arguments used for for finance (fail) and sometimes both (do two fails make a right?)

and

B) follow a particularly axiomatic school of economics (so orthodox neoclassicalists, a rather large umbrella that includes old school Austrian economists, Chicago School economists, and whatever universities that put out most of the ECB governors)

You find folks who fall under "A", the ones who could pass their exams and repeat back what they heard without thinking more critically--the ones who took their professors' conclusions out of context and then unfortunately used those conclusions as foundations of further reasoning ("inflation is a tax? inflation is a tax therefore..." (inflation is not actually a tax btw)). But these folks are not terribly dogmatic, they're just not very thoughtful.

You find that most people who are B are also A or they wouldn't be B in the 21st century. But if you read the original Carl Menger (the founder of the Austrian School which is the foundation of, well, modern mainstream aka neoclassical economics) you will find that his work of theory isn't too dogmatic. It's just highly axiomatic and literally anti-empirical.


When you combine the two is where you find the real straight up dogma. Guess what almost all of them think about government, economists' roles, and what drives the economy?

 

[Cutlass]

The concept that governments control the economy is a religious dogma.

J

Not at all. It's been born out by experience for a couple centuries now. What government does not do is control every single thing that happens in the economy. What government does do is control the overall condition of the economy. When it exerts itself to do so.

 

[Hygro]

The concept that governments control the economy is a religious dogma.

J

but believed by whom?

 

[Tahuti]

but believed by whom?