Mystery Economic Theater 2010

[apocalypse]

Originally Posted by Fusion_power

The trees in Alabama grew 3 feet taller in 1999 while corn production was high
The trees in California grew 5 feet taller in 1999 while corn production was low because Cali just doesn't grow that much corn.

Because the trees grew in both Alabama and California and because corn production was moderate in both in 1999, Bill Clinton submitted a balanced budget.

Sound wacky? That is what I hear when I read the Bill Clinton balanced budget claims.

Really? You made a baldly counterfactual claim and have willfully disregarded the evidence disproving it. The circumstances you described were not unique to the Clinton administration (and in fact were common across all 4 previous administrations), but the outcome (a balanced budget) was unique.

Originally Posted by Fusion_power

If you want to make a real argument, post a chart of the tax revenue the U.S. government collected per year over the last 30 years. Post another of the per capita income per year. Then we will see where the spikes were.

And now, it seems you are so intellectually lazy as to demand that I do the research to support or disprove the argument which you can't be bothered to formalize.

I'll bite. I've attached a chart. I've assumed that by "per capita income", you meant GDP per capita.

Please note that the slope of the tax receipts line is greater than the income line between FY1994 and FY2000 due to the Clinton policy of raising tax revenues to cover expenditures. Please also note that the slope of the outlays line is shallower under Clinton than under Reagan or George W. Bush.

Data from:

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfa...historical.xls
http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/macroec...comeValues.xls

[garo]

DarJones,
Take it like a man! You were pwned! Please read the article below. It is just for you!
When the scientific evidence is unwelcome, people try to reason it away

[cheesehead]

DarJones,

Your frantic dancing to avoid admitting a contradiction in current conservative propaganda is a sad example of the consequences of abandoning federal fiscal responsibility that I have deplored.

It appears that the statement which you claim is a misattribution was, as you quoted,

"the only balanced budgets during that 30 years were the result of a Democratic administration".

You torture that wording to produce a twisted interpretation, and then you accuse me of "reading emotional baggage into simple statements"?

Budgets are submitted to Congress by presidents.

No Republican president in the past 30 years has subnitted even a single balanced budget.

No fiscal year for which a Republican president submitted the budget to Congress in the past 30 years has wound up with a surplus.

Those are facts, whether you like them or not, whether you admit them or not, no matter how often and how vigorously you try to change the subject away from federal budget balances or unbalances, surpluses or deficits.

My statement is that it was NOT a result of a democrat administration.

But you can justify that statement only by torturing the meaning of "result" way beyond what I intended.

The president's annual submission of a budget to Congress is a result of that president's administration. When Clinton, in early 1997, for example, submitted a budget for fiscal year 1998 to Congress, that budget was a result of the Clinton administration. Not a result of the Reagan administration. Not a result of either of the Bush administrations. It was a result of the Clinton (who was Democratic, not Republican) administration. That is a fact, whether you like it or not, whether you admit it or not, no matter how often and how ingeniously you try to change the subject.

I can see that if I had chosen some other word or words than "result", I might have stumbled upon a choice that you'd find more difficult to twist. I don't think that's my obligation here, but I'm going to give it one try anyway.

Replace my former statement ("the only balanced budgets during that 30 years were the result of a Democratic administration") with:

"the only fiscal years, among the most recent 30, for which either (a) the budget submitted to Congress by the president had a surplus, or (b) the result at the end of the fiscal year was that it turned out to have a surplus, were fiscal years for which the president who submitted its budget to Congress was a Democrat and the administration that did the detail work of constructing the budget was Democratic."

Now that I've clarified what I meant (I hope), there should be no more wiggle room for any good-faith debater to pretend that the subject of my statement and discussion of that statement is "prosperity" rather than federal budget deficits and surpluses.

And now that you've clarified what you meant, you owe me an apology for your accusation of "misattribution", as well as the intensifier "deliberate". You've presented no evidence that I misattributed anything. All you've done is try to argue that a particular mistaken interpretation that you find politically convenient, but is not the only, the most reasonable, or the simplest interpretation, constitutes a misattribution.

Why did you not first, before hurling the intensified accusation, try simply asking me whether your interpretation of my words was correct? Why not post something like:

"cheesehead, please clarify and expand upon what you mean by 'result'. The way I interpret it, that statement is false, but it's possible you mean something other than what I have in mind."

It WAS a result of having a loggerhead congress...

... but there's more than one thing a balanced budget can be the "result" of, depending on one's orientation.

The political balance of Congress is one of those things, but not the only one.

For a trivial example, the budget could also be said to be the "result" of the Government Printing Office. More sincerely, it could be said to be the "result" of the overall balance of economic factors pertaining to the United States during a certain time period.

You should have asked for clarification before assuming that your interpretation was certain enough to justify the accusation you hurled.

You also had Greenspan holding down interest rates and blowing economic bubbles.

In the midst of my irritation of being accused of something not "seemly" without having the accuser specify just what it was so that I might correct my mistake if such existed, I even temporaily misinterpreted that sentence as meaning that you were stating that I, cheesehead, had posted that Greenspan held down interest rates and blew bubbles.

After a bit, it occurred to me that there might be some other meaning than that you had confused me with some other contributors to this thread. It seemed unlikely that you would have made such a glaring misattribution just after making your accusation of misattribution. Instead, I realized, your use of "you" in that sentence might be a colloquial substitute for "one", as in:

One also had Greenspan holding down interest rates and blowing economic bubbles.

So I deleted my counter-blast. :-)

The internet bubble was what balanced the budget during clinton's term.

... in one sense, that is -- but that's not the only sense in which the budget could be said to have been balanced, and it's not the sense I had in mind.

Your statement re balanced budgets

... or, more accurately, your (DarJones) chosen interpretation of my statement re balanced budgets ...

is a lot like saying "The surgery was a resounding success, unfortunately, the patient died."

[ewmayer]

[06 July: I just realized - and I see garo caught it,too - that when I posted this I inadvertently - and embarrassingly - wrote "Paul Krugman" rather than "Robert Reich", who is the real author ... just in case anyone thought I'd gone bipolar and suddenly found myself in violent agreement with Mr. "deficits don't matter because my Nobel Prize says so"]

Robert Reich's latest blog posting has an interesting conclusion about the high cost of "muddling through" the financial crisis:

Slouching Toward a Double Dip or a Lousy Recovery at Best

The irony is that had there been no bank bailout in 2008 and 2009, no large stimulus, and no extraordinary efforts by the Fed to pump trillions of dollars into the economy, we’d have had another Great Depression. And because it would have sucked almost everyone down with it, the nation would have demanded from politicians larger and more fundamental reforms that might well have lifted everyone, and set America and the world on a more sustainable path toward growth and shared prosperity: A stimulus that financed the rebuilding of the nation’s infrastructure and alternative energies, single-payer health care, a cap on the size of big banks and resurrection of Glass-Steagall, earnings insurance, an Earned Income Tax Credit that extended into the middle class, and a truly progressive tax coupled with a price on carbon to pay for all of this over the long term.

[Fusion_power]

Please note that the slope of the tax receipts line is greater than the income line between FY1994 and FY2000 due to the Clinton policy of raising tax revenues to cover expenditures.

You can do better than this Ewmayer. Don't even begin to make a blanket statement like that without at least looking for alternate explanations. You are supposed to be a decent mathematician! And you think I am intellectually lazy? :)

Note that you attribute the increase in tax revenue to greater taxation. I attribute it to the additional revenue directly resulting from the internet bubble. Note that your trend line precisely matches the peak of the internet bubble from 1995 to 2001. The bubble collapsed in early 2000 and final revenues from that event were received in 2001. The internet bubble was unique in generating tax revenue. By comparison, the recently deflated housing bubble was much less effective in generating additional taxes at the federal level. You can see that on your trendline if you look closely enough. I have a significant quibble about using the GDP trendline, but if you look at it closely, you can see the internet bubble even though it is attenuated by the scale.

There is one very telling event that the line shows clearly. The Bush tax cuts reduced the tax revenue significantly below the spending trendline. Would anyone care to engage in a good argument about all the reasons those tax cuts should never have happened?

You'll have to do a better job than just to claim the balanced budget years were solely a result of democrat policies. Some more time could be well spent in looking to see if the tax laws could have been sustained at the levels they were set during those years. In other words, did the Bush tax cuts avert a recession event.

One more telling question. If the democrats have a method to balance the budget, why are they currently spending like there is no tomorrow?

Cheesehead,

One thing I thoroughly enjoy is a polarized discussion. I often play devils advocate even if it does not exactly align with my personal position. Instead of spending endless time taking this as a personal attack or making a vendetta of it, look at it as a chance to put forth your position in the best light possible.

DarJones

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by Fusion_power

Cheesehead,

One thing I thoroughly enjoy is a polarized discussion. I often play devils advocate even if it does not exactly align with my personal position.

Are you now trying to convince me that your adjective "deliberate" was merely playing devil's advocate?

If you had promptly apologized for that adjective after I first complained about it, I would have been willing to grant you your "devil's advocate" excuse.

But you didn't, you still haven't, and I'm not.

Your persistent refusal to apologize for what could have been seen as merely your unfortunate choice of adjective obviously demonstrates that you deliberately (rather than accidentally or unknowingly) stand by your false accusation that I deliberately (and therefore, knowingly) made an attribution to the wrong cause.

As I said before, you have not shown us any shred of evidence that I made that choice deliberately. (And you can't ever, because I didn't.)

Instead of spending endless time

You could have apologized promptly. You chose, and are still choosing, to drag this out. You are choosing to introduce more and more purported explanations to attempt to legitimize your false accusation.

taking this as a personal attack

How else am I to interpret an accusation of deliberate wrongdoing for which you have not yet apologized?

look at it as a chance to put forth your position in the best light possible.

I have already explained my position at length in my previous post!! I don't see your acknowledging that. What do you still find unclear, if anything, about my explanation of how I meant "result"?

Your purported explanation so far seems to be that I must (because of "deliberate") have been trying to conceal (" deliberate misattribution" rather than "mistaken" misattribution, for instance) that I knew the balanced budgets were the "result" of the party balance in Congress (plus Greenspan, internet, ...). That is false; I never had any such idea in mind when I posted my original statement.

Now, you seem to be merely trying to squirm out of admitting that you now understand that your original interpretation of my statement was mistaken. I'm disappointed in you; I would not have imagined, before this incident, that you would have put up such a prolonged attempt to justify your false accusation.

Your "devil's advocate" excuse does not add up, not least because you did not offer it immediately in response to my first complaint. That is, if you genuinely were only trying to play devil's advocate, there seems to me to be no reason for your not having explained that just as soon as I showed that I did not understand that you were posting in the role of devil's advocate.

A polarized discussion does not have to include an unjustified accusation of deliberate wrongdoing. We could have had a fine polarized discussion with the polarization being around the relationship between the national economy and party balance in Congress. I could enjoy that kind of polarized discussion.

But you're perpetuating a different kind of polarization, in which you produce the polarization by falsely accusing me of deliberate distortion. False accusations are not necessary for the purpose of having an honest polarized discussion. If you genuinely enjoy polarizing a discussion by posting a false accusation of deliberate wrongdoing and repeatedly trying to justify it without apology, that ... is something I didn't know about you.

If you can explain why it was legitimate for you not to reveal your "devil's advocate" reason in an earlier post than the one in which you actually did, please explain it, else please post your overdue apologies in order to show that you're not just trying to drag this out.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Fusion_power

You can do better than this Ewmayer. Don't even begin to make a blanket statement like that without at least looking for alternate explanations. You are supposed to be a decent mathematician! And you think I am intellectually lazy? :)

Methinks I stand falsely attributed ... that post was by apocalypse.

[ewmayer]

The local bay area news stations were all atwitter last week about the much hyped IPO of Tesla Motors [TSLA], whose shares closed up 40% - nothing compared to the 3,4,5,600%-pops that were common during the height of the dotcom insanity, but a lot by recent standards - at the end of the first day of trading, relative to the IPO price of $17 per share.

The 2nd day of trading was even more interesting ... shares rocketed up to $30 mid-session, then hit the wall and fell back 20% to ~$24, essentially unchanged from the previous day's close.

In the ensuing 3 days of trading the shares have continued to drop: -7%, -13%, and today a whopping -16%, bringing them back below the IPO price. [And note that for retail investors not in privy to the IPO, the 1st-day open was $19, so folks who bought at open last Tuesday, thinking this was the next Google, are down nearly 20%.

The chart of the first 5 days screams "pump and dump":

[Fusion_power]

Rofl Ewmayer, The poetic justice is too rich! I did indeed type your handle when I should have used apocalypse.

Cheesehead, I challenged one of your core beliefs, i.e. that the balanced budget years were attributable to Clinton. Most of us human beings respond very aggressively to challenges to our core beliefs. Your response is a bit more erratic than most. The reason I cannot and will not apologize is that I do not accept your core belief. In other words, I do NOT attribute the balanced budget to Clinton, rather I point out events that he did not control as having a far greater impact on the balanced budget.

To take a side trip on this thread, consider that Clinton tried hard to get a health care bill passed. His health care proposals, if they had been passed, would have totally wiped out the budget surplus.

My position is and will continue to be that Clinton was effectively countered by a republican congress. Clinton had no choice but to submit a balanced budget because he was not able to get the bulk of his platform promises implemented.

As any politician can tell you, spin is all important to public perception.

DarJones

[garo]

DarJones, your position is and will continue to be unaffected by mere trivialities such as facts.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by Fusion_power

Cheesehead, I challenged one of your core beliefs, i.e. that the balanced budget years were attributable to Clinton.

As I have already patiently explained,

1) they are attributable to Clinton in the senses that (a) only Clinton proposed balanced budgets to Congress, and (b) the fiscal years that turned out to have higher revenues than expenditures were all fiscal years for which Clinton was the president who proposed the budget to Congress,

which are plain facts you can look up in the World Almanac and Book of Facts,

and

2) the senses defined in 1) are the only senses I had in mind when I posted my original statement.

Thus, my original statement was not a misattribution at all and so could not possibly have been deliberate misattribution.

Your insinuation of "deliberate misattribution" was a slander on my integrity.

I have graciously granted that your issue of that slander was a result of your simply having misinterpreted my statement, rather than any malevolent intent to injure me. Thus, a simple prompt apology acknowledging that you misunderstood me originally would have sufficed to cancel your slander, and by now we could have been deep into a discussion of, for instance, the relationship between the national economy and the party balance of Congress.

Also, I have already acknowledged that my original choice of wording ("result") was not the only or even the clearest way of expressing my intent. I have, two postings ago, "spelled out" my intent in more detail so as to minimize the possibility of further misinterpretation. You could, after that detailed explanation, have admitted that you understandably misinterpreted my original statement and simply apologized for both words of your unfortunate insinuation.

Instead, you have continued to pile up new excuses for not admitting your originally-simple-and-easily-forgivable error. By this continuation, you make it less and less likely that what seemed to me to be a simple mistake borne of misunderstanding was as innocent as you claim. Had you really no malevolent intent, you could quite easily show your innocence with one or two simple apologetic sentences.

However, your continued refusals to acknowledge your mistakes, and your introductions of more and more purported explanations that avoid taking responsibility for your mistaken slander show either exceptional (for you) thick-headedness or unreasonable stubbornness. I am willing to grant that either of these could be the result of an illness or a change of medication on your part. Is it?

Most of us human beings respond very aggressively to challenges to our core beliefs.

But you didn't challenge any core belief of mine except that discussion participants ought to be civil to one another and acknowledge common facts.

The reason I cannot and will not apologize is that I do not accept your core belief.

Does that mean that you don't share my core belief that discussion participants ought to be civil to one another and acknowledge common facts?

Because it can't refer to any core of mine about politics or economics, since your insult challenged neither of those.

In other words, I do NOT attribute the balanced budget to Clinton,

... but you can justify that only by using a definition of "attribute" that does not match the sense in which I made my original statement.

You can, if you wish, admit, without violating any of your core beliefs, that the balanced budgets were attributable to Clinton in the senses that (a) only Clinton proposed balanced budgets to Congress, and (b) the fiscal years that turned out to have higher revenues than expenditures were all fiscal years for which Clinton was the president who proposed the budget to Congress. Those are plain facts, not dependent on, or reflective of, any particular philosophical, economic, or political belief.

rather I point out events that he did not control as having a far greater impact on the balanced budget.

So what? That isn't what your insult pertained to. We can discuss that after you apologize.

To take a side trip on this thread,

... in yet another of your series of attempts to weasel out of taking responsibility for your mistakes and apologizing for your slander ...

My position is and will continue to be that Clinton was effectively countered by a republican congress.

We can discuss that after you admit your mistakes and apologize for your slander.

As any politician can tell you, spin is all important to public perception.

... and now, having spun my reputation to make it seem that I have deliberately misattributed certain statements, you want to sail on without taking responsibility for your spin.