Culture Wars Era - is it moving into its final phase?

[pbrower2a]

(01-27-2017, 01:25 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(01-27-2017, 08:21 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-26-2017, 10:07 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(01-26-2017, 09:48 PM)David Horn Wrote: Government outlays always rise to offset at least some of the general economic decline during a recession.  Some of it is automatic, like unemployment insurance, and some is legislated.  Add to that, the decline in revenue due to lower incomes and reduced economic activity, and you get huge deficits.  That's a feature of proper government, not a bug.

While automatic spending increases were a small part of it, the main driver of the increased deficits was ill considered pork barrel spending initiatives that delayed the recovery for years by displacing more productive private sector spending.

Crowding out, which is your argument, has a tell tale sign: high and rising interest rates.  If money is in short supply, then the demand triggers rate hikes.  In other words, if you want my money, you'll have to pay me for it!

That didn't happen.  It's only starting to happen now, and it's still mild by historical standards.

Have you ever considered checking for actual facts before making your false assertions?  Or is using facts too much of an alternative method for progressives?



Rising interest rates, exactly when you would expect from the private sector being crowded out by deficits from the bailouts, "stimulus" bill, and other ill considered spending of the time.

Note also the consolidation of the banking industry into entities best described as "too big to fail" and the selling-off of credit-card units of banks. The disappearance of competition tends to raise consumer prices for anything -- even credit. Also, consider that credit defaults had made consumer credit appear much riskier by early 2011 than in mid-2007. People with good credit may have been scaling back consumer purchases in 2008 and 2009 and been leery of taking out consumer debt to live some "Good Life".

I am tempted to believe that President Trump would love a debt-fueled boom in consumer spending... but if there is any one clear lesson of history, people are averse to replication of follies of a recent time. The best thing for America is that no boom of mindless spending with the dubious aid of predatory lending is possible because people well remember the boom-and-bust Double Zero Decade that went badly in the end. Such just might spare us a 1930*-style or 2008-style crash.

*The real crash happened in 1930. There was a partial recovery of stock prices in the winter of 1929-1930, with the stock market prices  having fallen slightly more than 40% in value and going back to about 20% less than the market value of the peak.



(the case for the Nobel Prize in Economics for former-President Barack Obama)