Obama is at it again

[Rust]

If the Mafia had built roads and the infrastructure used by those businesses, and if it were using powers granted to it by the supreme law of the land, the comparison might make sense.

[SomeBum]

tldr; don't ever link form fox news dip shit

[psychomanthis]

Originally Posted by Psych

How are you so stupid as to summarize a huge piece of legislation into one line?

Oh right, you're a retard.

As a whole, the legislation is extremely socialist. Paying hospitals to lower their admission rates, forcing people to buy insurance, insurance companies having to pay the government fees based on their market share, it goes on and on.

Essentially, the government controls every aspect of the health care system, so I ask; How is that not nationalized ie. socialist health care?

You're totally right bro, next thing you know you'll be living in the United States of Soviet America, it's horrible.

[Malice]

Originally Posted by TheRascalKing

Guess who couldn't use the roads when they were private? Guess who didn't get to go to college? No income tax before WWI? No regulations for the workforce either. You ever read the Jungle? Pick it up sometime. Essentially, you want to knock us back to the Gilded Age. What you advocate has already been tried, for an idea of how it worked read that book.

Oh, fuck it.

I've told you this before, The Jungle is bullshit: www.mackinac.org/4084

Gabriel Kokol, a leftst, has written more about this. His book, which has a deceiving title, has a lot of great information about the myths of the so called "Progressive Age".

The mainstream story of the Gilded age is garbage: http://www.fee.org/nff/the-myth-of-the-robber-barons/

Did you know that Rockefeller saved the whales? He made kerosene so cheap that people could use it instead of whale oil, they could stay up later of they wanted because they had a source of light. Prices in the sectors that were allegedly monopolized fell at a far faster rate than prices in general. Of course, you never learn about this in school, you just hear these fantasies about how awful everything was and how government saved the day.

The economic history you learned is junk. It's a common disconnect between ideas in the leftist mind. Something that some teachers/professors like to talk about is the "real" version of history, the stuff you weren't taught about in school, as opposed to the elementary school version of history. The problem is that they usually only question things that aren't in line with their biases. This childish view of business and capitalism is in line with their biases, so they aren't skeptical of it. It's a matter of incentives, there's no incentive for them to try to learn whether something that's a significant part of their worldview is false. That's something that's likely going to stir up negative feelings, and who seeks out displeasure?

Crazy, Denmark has a good school system? Really?

If we look at the other end of the education level, those with only 9 years of education, in Denmark it is 34 percent, whereas in the U.S. it is 14 percent. In Sweden the number is 26 percent and in Norway 18 percent. Again the numbers are much more favorable in the U.S.

I would argue that Denmark is a good example of the failure of social democracy:

http://mises.org/daily/905
http://mises.org/daily/1274

You'll likely bring up that they're rated as the happiest country in earth, but so what? That completely ignores the importance of culture. On those same surveys, France and Germany actually scored significantly lower than the US, amazingly. Are they not socialist enough? Do they not have a large welfare state? I believe that the French government actually spends more as a percentage of GDP than Sweden. Nothing but simplistic lazy thinking.

On taxes, statistics can be extremely misleading. Do you ever ask how those statistics are compiled? Do you understand confounding variables. What I'm getting at is that there's an enormous amount of junk out there, both from right and left wingers.

Originally Posted by Rust

The problem? Their unemployment statistic is based on ignoring 3+ million people who were employed by the New Deal.

Creating government jobs is easy. If we staffed every worker in the army and fleet, we'd have full employment, and nothing to eat.

What most people don't understand is that jobs are a means, not the ends in themselves. People work to live better, to put food on the shelves. Real growth means production of what people demand, that's entrepreneurship, not their central plan!

[Rust]

Originally Posted by Malice

What most people don't understand is that jobs are a means, not the ends in themselves. People work to live better, to put food on the shelves. Real growth means production of what people demand, that's entrepreneurship, not their central plan!

Exactly, they work to better themselves and put food on the table. That's exactly what those programs allowed these people to achieve. Those 3+ million people where successfully employed and appreciated having that employment. They don't give a flying fuck about your political and rhetorical distinction between "entrepreneurship" and those jobs.

There was absolutely no good reason to not count those people as employed; and using those flawed statistics, Ohanian and Cole make it look like the New Deal wasn't effective when in fact it was.

[Malice]

Originally Posted by Rust

Exactly, they work to better themselves and put food on the table. That's exactly what those programs allowed these people to achieve. Those 3+ million people where successfully employed and appreciated having that employment. They don't give a flying fuck about your political and rhetorical distinction between "entrepreneurship" and those jobs.

There was absolutely no good reason to not count those people as employed; and using those flawed statistics, Ohanian and Cole make it look like the New Deal wasn't effective when in fact it was.

Production of what people demand.

What if they had payed them to fill holes and fill them back up? I recall hearing an anecdote of workers recommending they not use some equipment so as to lower efficiency and require more workers. It terms of contributing utility, they likely did very little, far less than what their wages would have commanded on a private market.

What you're essentially saying is that the New Deal was effective because it gave people money. Yes, giving people money is easy. Did it help end the underlying problems of the economy? I very much doubt it.

[Rust]

Originally Posted by Malice

Production of what people demand. What if they had payed them to fill holes and fill them back up?
...
What you're essentially saying is that the New Deal was effective because it gave people money. Yes, giving people money is easy. Did it help end the underlying problems of the economy? I very much doubt it.

And unless you're suggesting that this...

"The government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York’s Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown.

It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country’s entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock."

Marshall Auerback. TIME FOR A NEW “NEW DEAL”.
http://www.cobar.org/repository/Insi...2012.12.08.pdf


... is in any way equivalent to "digging a hole and filling it back up" or is not something people demand or would like, then your comparison is atrocious. You have no point. Just as you had no point in terms of what you were quoting initially, which was Cole and Ohanian's flawed statistic.

[Malice]

OK. Just because they built or renovated things doesn't mean they did so in a cost effective manner or that those renovations were necessary. The government would certainly have a strong incentive to make their programs seem much more effective than they really were.

I haven't researched this, so I don't know, but given the track record of government, I am very skeptical.

Aside from the public works programs, there were other aspects of the New Deal that were harmful, particularly to the poor:

http://www.cato.org/publications/com...ns-poor-people

Other New Deal programs destroyed jobs, too. For example, the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) cut back production and forced wages above market levels, making it more expensive for employers to hire people - blacks alone were estimated to have lost some 500,000 jobs because of the National Industrial Recovery Act. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933) cut back farm production and devastated black tenant farmers who needed work. The National Labor Relations Act (1935) gave unions monopoly bargaining power in workplaces and led to violent strikes and compulsory unionization of mass production industries. Unions secured above-market wages, triggering big layoffs and helping to usher in the depression of 1938.

New Deal programs were financed by tripling federal taxes from $1.6 billion in 1933 to $5.3 billion in 1940. Excise taxes, personal income taxes, inheritance taxes, corporate income taxes, holding company taxes and so-called "excess profits" taxes all went up.

The most important source of New Deal revenue were excise taxes levied on alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, matches, candy, chewing gum, margarine, fruit juice, soft drinks, cars, tires (including tires on wheelchairs), telephone calls, movie tickets, playing cards, electricity, radios -- these and many other everyday things were subject to New Deal excise taxes, which meant that the New Deal was substantially financed by the middle class and poor people. Yes, to hear FDR's "Fireside Chats," one had to pay FDR excise taxes for a radio and electricity! A Treasury Department report acknowledged that excise taxes "often fell disproportionately on the less affluent."

What about the good supposedly done by New Deal spending programs? These didn't increase the number of jobs in the economy, because the money spent on New Deal projects came from taxpayers who consequently had less money to spend on food, coats, cars, books and other things that would have stimulated the economy. This is a classic case of the seen versus the unseen -- we can see the jobs created by New Deal spending, but we cannot see jobs destroyed by New Deal taxing.

On the jobs lost, was it guaranteed to be a a 1 to 1 loss gain from the taxes and jobs created? Were the taxes solely on the poor? No, not necessarily, but this would be difficult to calculate.

For defenders of the New Deal, perhaps the most embarrassing revelation about New Deal spending programs is they channeled money AWAY from the South, the poorest region in the United States. The largest share of New Deal spending and loan programs went to political "swing" states in the West and East - where incomes were at least 60% higher than in the South. As an incumbent, FDR didn't see any point giving much money to the South where voters were already overwhelmingly on his side.

Americans needed bargains, but FDR hammered consumers -- and millions had little money. His National Industrial Recovery Act forced consumers to pay above-market prices for goods and services, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act forced Americans to pay more for food. Moreover, FDR banned discounting by signing the Anti-Chain Store Act (1936) and the Retail Price Maintenance Act (1937).

Poor people suffered from other high-minded New Deal policies like the Tennessee Valley Authority monopoly. Its dams flooded an estimated 750,000 acres, an area about the size of Rhode Island, and TVA agents dispossessed thousands of people. Poor black sharecroppers, who didn't own property, got no compensation.

FDR might not have intended to harm millions of poor people, but that's what happened. We should evaluate government policies according to their actual consequences, not their good intentions.

[Rust]

1. You're changing topics. I never claimed to know or be able to quantify the "cost-effectiveness" of the New Deal. What I said was that it wasn't anywhere close to the ridiculous comparison you were making to "digging a hole and filling it backup", and that the things it did were in fact things that people wanted; like building hospitals, hiring teachers etc.

I certainly have no evidence whatsoever from you, to verify your implications that it wasn't cost-effective or whatever, so that point is a failure from the start anyways.

2. Your sources are a convenient spin on the situation by focusing on alleged negative exampl;es, but their never going to refute the fact that we know that the job creation must have been immensely greater than the job-loss since there was an unprecedented recovery observed. Unemployment (especially when you use the correct statistic for unemployment, not the inflated statistic used before), shows impressive growth. If the net effect had been negative, such growth would have been impossible.

The same applies to GDP, which also rose impressively. I'll quote some sources already posted:

"Can government policies that increase the monopoly power of firms and the militancy of
unions increase output? This paper studies this question in a dynamic general equilibrium model
with nominal frictions and shows that these policies are expansionary when certain “emergency”
conditions apply. These emergency conditions–zero interest rates and deflation–were satisfied
during the Great Depression in the United States. Therefore, the New Deal, which facilitated
monopolies and union militancy, was expansionary, according to the model. This conclusion is
contrary to the one reached by a large previous literature, e.g. Cole and Ohanian (2004), that
argues that the New Deal was contractionary. The main reason for this divergence is that the
current model incorporates nominal frictions so that inflation expectations play a central role in
the analysis. The New Deal has a strong effect on inflation expectations in the model, changing
excessive deflation to modest inflation, thereby lowering real interest rates and stimulating
spending."

"Was the New Deal Contractionary?". Eggertsson. 2008.
http://www.econ.wisc.edu/workshop/Eg...on%20paper.pdf


"A major conceptual error in the standard BLS and Lebergott unemployment estimates for 1933-1943 is reported. Emergency workers (employees of federal contracyclical programs such as WPA) were counted as unemployed on a normal-jobs-to-be-created instead of job-seekers unemployment definition. For 1934-1941, the corrected unemployment levels are reduced by two to three-and-a half million people and the rates by 4 to 7 percentage points. The corrected data show strong movement toward the natural unemployment rate after 1933 and are very well explained by an anticipations-search model using annual full-time earnings"

http://www.nber.org/papers/w0088

[Malice]

I never claimed to know or be able to quantify the "cost-effectiveness" of the New Deal.

I never said you did.

What I said was that it wasn't anywhere close to the ridiculous comparison you were making to "digging a hole and filling it backup", and that the things it did were in fact things that people wanted; like building hospitals, hiring teachers etc.

Conceded.

GDP is a very flawed thing to rely on. Two explanations of the flaws of GDP:

http://mises.org/daily/770

http://mises.org/daily/4654/

Even Joseph Stiglitz knows this:

Joseph Stiglitz - Problems with GDP as an Economic Barometer - YouTube

Joseph Stiglitz - Problems with GDP as an Economic Barometer - YouTube
Video: click to display

Expansionary?

There are different schools of economic thought, certain issues aren't going to be agreed upon. To deal with this you would have to really argue against the entire Keynesian model. i could link to a paper claiming the exact opposite, but that isn't proof. This should be set aside.

A good example of this is the myth of prosperity during World War 2 due to misleading statistics, which also applies to the New Deal era. Skim through it and you'll see:

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=138

[Rust]

Originally Posted by Malice

Conceded.

Great! Then what's left to discuss? Because it seems you essentially conceded everything I was actually arguing, and you haven't provided any evidence for the (tangential) implication that it wasn't cost-effective...

GDP is a very flawed thing to rely on.

I don't have to rely on GPD; I mentioned GPD as an additional metric that can be used. The main metric that I was talking about was unemployment, which Cole and Ohanian used to claim that the New Deal had worsened the depression by keeping unemployment high (which we know used statistics that ignore millions and millions of workers which were actually employed). So you're right, there are flaws, but it's still an useful indicator, and it, coupled with the unemployment statistics, show the net positive effects of the New Deal. The sources you were providing where focusing on some individual cases they can point to where an (alleged) negative effect took place, however they miss the net positive effect that undoubtedly happened. Unemployment statistic and GDP, despite their flaws, serve to show this.