Things we'd be talking about if the forum wasn't deadFollow

Ah, you.

That's her full name, no need to put it in quotes like that.

Can the Left let the families grieve for even 24 hours before they push their anti-gun and anti-gunowner agenda?

Well, there were 317 mass shootings last year, so that might actually be quite difficult. You know, if you were actually interested in having a conversation about it.

Of course, the shooters don't efficiently space their shootings, so we probably have a good quarter of the year where talking about mass shootings isn't haram.

Yeah, it should at least be as long as the waiting period to buy an AR-15 in Florida. Oh, wait...

Gee. Could that be because nearly all economists on the igm panel are neokeynesians? There's an unfortunate "where your bread is buttered" aspect to this that gets forgotten along the way. Think about where most economists are employed, then think again about how this might just skew things in terms of classical (or neoclassical) versus keynesian (or neokeynesian) thinking. It's nearly impossible to get a job teaching economic in a university in the US if you don't subscribe to some form of keynesian ideology.

What's amusing is when we look historically at these things rather than forward. The predictions are always "this wont work, we must do that!", but it's startling how often, when we do manage to do exactly that which these "expert" economists tell us not to do, our economy flourishes. It's also equally startling how often, when we do exactly what they tell us to do, our economy sputters along.



Ok. But surely you can grasp that "failing to match predictions" is not the same as "actually failing". When the growth predictions do come to pass, you'll never look backwards and say "gee. Maybe they had the right idea". You'll move the goalposts instead. You'll ignore gdp growth and look at unemployment. Or you'll ignore unemployment and look at inflation. Or ignore those and look at trade balances. Or... or.... or... Or my favorite one where they'll ignore economic indicators entirely and insist that out government not spending enough money on social services means the "economy is in the dumps" (remember back in 2004-2005 time period when this was the argument?).

There's always some negative you can find if you ignore the big picture and look really hard for just that one thing you can paint negatively.

EDIT: Oh. I'll also point out that you are repeating an often misstated interpretation of "conservative fiscal policy", where the focus is in reducing or eliminating deficits, period. The reality is that it matters how the deficit is created. Deficits generated via increased spending falls into the heading of "racking up a debt that the public must pay". Deficits generated via decreased taxes does not fall into the same category, because the debt was already there in the form of the increased spending in the first place. Whether we pay via higher taxes or higher debt doesn't matter, but if the debt is higher and this creates pressure to cut spending in the future, it's a positive from a fiscal conservative point of view (the whole "starve the beast" line of thinking).

The really perverse misapplication of fiscal conservatism is to demand that fiscal conservatives should be ok with increasing taxes to pay down debt. Yet, I run into this idea all the time. Again, usually couched in some kind of "don't you guys care about reducing the deficit?" argument. Um... No. That's not it at all. The primary focus of fiscal conservatism is to reduce the economic footprint of the government on the people. Period. That means minimal spending, and thus minimal taxes to pay for that spending. Anything that pushes us in that direction is good from a fiscal conservative point of view.



Yeah. Look at the first two quarters of 2017, and compare to the 4 year averages over the past. You can't compare the four year average at the end of that chart, because it includes some really crappy gdp growth at the tail end of the Obama administration. That trend (3% gdp growth or higher) has continued through the entire last year, where it's only hit a couple times (as a trend) over the entire 8 years of Obama. Obviously, we can't use this relatively small amount of data to predict accurately what will come, but the start certainly does look promising.

What's strange is that you produced data, but didn't seem to bother to do any analysis on it. Again, it's hard to get a good handle on this with the data set you included, since it only has two quarters we could even remotely label as "Trump's". Even then though, it's a positive sign.

Edited, Feb 16th 2018 6:59pm by gbaji

GDP growth for Q1 and Q2 2017 was 1.2% and 3.1% respectively, for an average of 2.15%. The minimum 4 year average during Obama's presidency was 1.38125% (This is at the very start, and includes the -5.4% gdp growth in 2009Q1 from the economic downturn) and the maximum was 2.43125%. Your statement of seeing between double and triple gdp growth, by your own specifications, is false.

What's strange is that I'm upset you are arguing in bad faith even though this was entirely predictable. It bothers me, because you could have done something as arbitrary as stipulate Q2 and Q3 of 2017 for Trump rather than Q1 and Q2, and then the claim wouldn't have been necessarily untrue (but only with the inclusion of that disastrous 2009Q1 number). I would have thought it disingenuous, but at least it wouldn't be necessarily wrong. But you specified the quarters and periods you did because you didn't bother checking. You made a claim and didn't care if it was true or not. That bothers me greatly and tells me this isn't worth my time.

Edited, Feb 16th 2018 10:54pm by Allegory

Now that GOP donors are threatening to take away money from that "side" maybe they will.

2015 study showed that cold weather kills more than hot, so arguably the reason crime is lower is because it's harder to find targets.

Now that is optimism. It's like watching the look on a kid's face right before they pull off his fake beard at a mall and find out that Santa Claus isn't real.

Florida, totally out of respect y'all, refused to discuss guns but had plenty of time to get to discussing how porn is a public health risk.

Edited, Feb 21st 2018 11:19am by lolgaxe

ETA: people who enjoy leather?

How many licks does it take to get to the center of two people?

Edited, Feb 21st 2018 12:51pm by stupidmonkey

And then another 3.2 and another 2.6 to round out the year, for an average of 2.5%



Yeah. We're not going to cherry pick time frames here. We could look at rolling averages of each 4 quarter period, or averages of all 32 quarters, either of which put Obama's "average" somewhere between 1.5 %to 1.8% depending on calculation methodology (average of averages is about 1.53%, straight averages of all quarters is 1.84%).

To be fair, this does mean that Trumps first 4 quarter average is only somewhere between 1.5x to 2x that of Obama's. So yeah, I guess you win on that point. Congratulations! I overestimated how dramatically much better the economy has done since Trump took office. It's only "significantly better" rather than "insanely better".




My math isn't disingenuous. The problem is that we're trying to compare a longish period of time (32 quarters) to a very short period of time (only 2 quarters in your list, to which I've added two additional quarters based on newer data). The broad point I'm making isn't wrong though. The economy has experienced a noticeable improvement since Trump took office.

Oh. And let me be very clear here. I don't think that Trump himself personally had a whole lot to do with it (although he did chuck out a fair amount of executive order based regulations pretty quickly after taking office, so there is that). We'd have experienced an upturn pretty much with any non Democrat in the White House. At the end of the day, a lot of what drives the markets (stock markets, business markets, and job markets) is speculation. Business owners make decisions based on whether they think the current climate is going to create positive outcomes for them. This in turn affects things like stock values flowing into our out of our tracked stock markets, and affects things like job creation as well. Fair or not, those business owners, at every level from the mom and pop small business owner to the biggest corporations all saw Obama as anti-business and anti-growth. Thus, they held their money back and invested very cautiously, worried about when the next regulatory shoe was going to drop.

Simply removing that uncertainty freed up the economy to create big gains. And it has. Again, not just in the stock world, but at every level. GDP is just one measure of this btw. Unemployment dropped from 4.8% in Jan 2017 to 4.1% today. The labor participation rate is still too low (hovering just under 63%), but one can expect that with sustained sub 5% unemployment rate, this should start to go up in the near future. Wage growth is harder to say in terms of long term trends (same issue with GDP growth really), but the 'average' for last year was pretty darn good compared to the 'average' across all of Obama's years. To be completely fair, there was a year or two in Obama's administration with slightly higher wage growth, but when you look at other factors (bad years, plus significant drops in labor participation rates), those numbers get washed out.

Most people look at whether they're going to be better, worse, or the same in say 5 or 10 years. Again, there's a lot of forward looking speculation involved, but I think it's hard to argue that right now there aren't a lot more people hopeful of a positive financial future today than they were during the Obama administration. I wouldn't quite go so far as to call those year some kind of long national nightmare or something, but from a financial sense, for a lot of people, it does kinda feel like we're waking up from a bad dream. That doesn't mean that the reality of today is guaranteed to be better, but at least from the initial signs, it does look quite good.

Like making it harder to get a gun? Great idea! I'm all for gun ownership if you can pass a competency test (regular and weapon related) to legally own one.

There are a number of things in this country that are regulated for the general good (auto and truck licenses being an obvious example). There is no reason not to include guns on the list of things of "you can have/use one when you prove you can do it properly".

Edited, Feb 21st 2018 11:34pm by Bijou