JayB

No Jay. What makes you a regressive is your wanting the taxpayer to pay for infrastructure and its maintenance in order to turn it over to the private sector so that someone can make a profit and the taxpayer cannot recover its expenditure. What makes you a regressive is your willful ignorance of natural monopolies that demand considerations other than profit in order to provide necessary and efficient services to the entire public (not only that part that is profitable). What makes you a regressive is your making the unreasonable assumption that privatized entities are always (notwithstanding a handful of exceptions that you concede) more efficient than public management. What makes you a regressive is your neoliberal religion that leads you to think that greed is the only valid motive for economic activity. So, for example - if you're a progressive, it's better to spend ~$70 million in public money each year to maintain a port facility to serve private companies instead of taxing the profits that a private port would generate to fund public services. Got it.

Word. [video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn1ta0E2Bhw

I've actually argued a couple of things. The first is that there are things that only government can do, like draft laws, enforce laws, etc. There are things that the government is currently doing that the private sector can do - like staffing ferries, filling potholes, or running a port facility. When the demands on tax revenues exceed the economy's capacity to finance them via tax revenues, and you can't fund everything that government currently does - it's best to focus government on things that only it can do. The second is that even in those domains where government is the only entity in society that can provide a given function, the government has a responsibility to use public funds as efficiently as possible. That's it. Consequently - I think that, say, spending 70 million dollars subsidizing a port facility, instead of leasing it to whoever can operate it for a profit is a completely unjustifiable waste of public money. Instead of generating money for the public via its operations, public money is funding it's operations to the tune of 70 million dollars a year. "Port of Seattle reduces tax bite on property owners It may be a first: the Port of Seattle commission voted on Monday to approve a 2010 operating budget that will reduce the amount of tax dollars the port collects from King County property owners over the next year. The port, which has the authority to tax property owners without voter approval, decreased the amount they will collect this year by about $2.4 million - dropping the total amount they will receive down to about $73.5 million." All things being equal, I can think of quite a few more legitimate and effective uses for public money. Evidently some can't. That's fine - but I find it endlessly amusing that as a consequence of that I'm the "regressive."

Think Seattle has a way to go before cash-flow vulture types would step in to put a floor on prices. Maybe 10-15% more before we hit that point. We're still a long way from buying so it's all kind of fantasy-football for me.

I think that the great cornholing, delayed by two years via the CHMC whipping out the 40-year-100% loan with a reset in 5 years when the freefall started in '08, is now well underway in Canada in general and BC in particular. Just a matter of time for Australia as well IMO. Enjoy Garth's tone and scrolling through the comments.

One of the more amusing RE blogs these days. http://www.greaterfool.ca/

Doesn't this apply to S-Corps as well? Seems like the only bone of contention there is whether or not reinvestment in the business will be taxed at the same rate as money diverted to personal income. The specifics of the tax law are beyond me, but I think that the figures are that the measure will increase tax collection by ~3 billion over some period (single budget cycle?), and the B&O and property tax credit will reduce taxes by ~ 300 million or thereabouts. So the net effect is ~ 1.7 out of the private economy over whatever increment of time that we're considering here. I'm voting against every single tax measure that comes up until all state workers move to defined contribution retirement plans, the minimum retirement age is 65, and both the value of their health benefits and the percentage of the cost that they pay are equal to the private sector average. Until that day arrives, there's plenty that can be cut without touching services.

Love the Rorschach test element here. I plugged "pancakes" into the Google news searchbar, and here's the first link I got. http://theweek.com/article/index/207243/ihop-vs-ihop-mdash-and-4-more-bitter-branding-battles " IHOP vs. IHOP — and 4 more bitter branding battles The International House of Pancakes is suing the International House of Prayer over its four-letter acronym — but the IHOP clash is nothing compared to "Macedonia vs. Macedonia"" Have at it.

They are cutting services because your boys drove the economy over the cliff not because public employees make too much. Until you suggest to repare the mess you supported (2 wars, wall street casino, shipping good jobs to the land of the bottom cost, etc ..) you have no credibity whatsoever when you suggest that public employees should take a pay cut. as most know, providing a good service usually demands a good standard of living for service providers, but you couldn't care less because you don't give a shit about providing good public services despite your crocodiles' tears (not convincing at all btw) Whether it was an evil plot by libertarian regressives working in conjuction with Satan and the Bilderburgs in the basement of Dick Cheney's Wyoming guesthouse, or a typical boom bust cycle amplified by loose credit, or an act of god is irrelevant. The money isn't there to finance the current level of services at current wage rates. Until that changes, the options are limited. Cut compensation, cut services, or some combination of both. If you believe that providing a comfortable living to as many public sector employees as possible is the highest priority, then it's time to cut as many services as necessary to preserve existing pay and benefit levels. If you believe the opposite, then it's time to cut pay and benefits in order to maintain existing service levels. It's really that simple.

I'm not blaming public employees for anything. But when they are paid by the public from taxes there needs to be some reasonable give and take in the system. I'm a bit miffed that King County, for a specific example, has chosen NOT to negoiate with the union to have employees pay a higher share of thier medical benefits. Given the extremely large deficts that are looming it's a mystery to me because there will be more layoffs without it. Should everyone, private sector and public, have access to health care without the screwed up system we have now? Of course. But that is a larger systematic issue and in the meantime having higher, public funded benefits seems out of wack. This is particularly egregious given that they're opting to cut services. The purpose of the public sector is to maximize the public well-being by providing services that no other institution in society can, as efficiently as possible. It's not to provide the maximum private benefit to those that deliver the services. If we're going to have, say, public transport - then the sole object should be to transport the public as efficiently as possible. In practice that means benefit and wage levels should be determined by the compensation levels necessary to operate the buses - nothing more. I am quite certain that there are large numbers of people who would be willing and able to drive buses at compensation levels that would allow Metro to operate without making service cuts. If we're spending money to operate public buses - then granny getting a ride to the senior center trumps the driver's standard of living as a public priority. If they don't like it - there are plenty of private bus operators that they can apply to.

Markets aren't an inherent thing. They are social constructs, and therefore need rules. They are not a natural process and the uncontrolled practice of it is not superior. If you just "leave it alone" things won't get better, because greed and selfishness ARE inherent, and they regularly interfere with and undermine human enterprise. So - there was complete anarchy before we had abstract models and formalized mathematical representations of them administered by a central authority who had the foresight to translate them into a set of laws? Per your definition, nothing that humans engage in is a natural process since everything from sex to defecation to eating is governed by an ornate set of rules and norms associated with a local and mutable social context. Humans have been engaged in production and exchange as long as there have been humans. There has never been a time when they have done so in the absence of a complex set of rules and norms that governed the said activities. The idea that all of the rules and norms that govern human interactions owes its existence to a formal rule-making body that imposed them on society in a top down fashion is as ahistorical as it is irrational. Where do you think things like commercial contracts, letters of credit, titles, liens, fractional reserve banking, stocks, bonds, liability, etc came from? Do you really think that they were designed in a room somewhere by a committee of intellectuals who were able to look into the future and determine that they'd be necessary to regulate commerce someday? Who said anything about anarchy? Just because something is not optimal doesn't mean it's anarchistic. Anarchy doesn't really exist, there are always rules, implicit or otherwise. It's not black and white. Are you saying that markets were born pure? Give me a break, you can't really believe that. As we become more advanced, we can learn things we are doing that are not efficient and we can improve upon them. Democracy is not inherent; we invented it, and improved upon it over the course of thousands of years. We can also improve upon markets, by figuring out what works well and what doesn't. That sounds a lot better to me than leaving everything to chance, and letting the most powerful agents rise to the top, and then trusting that "everything will work itself out." Why have rules at all? Why not just let EVERYTHING "work itself out" ?? If you want to have free markets and believe that the free market system will police itself, why not have free EVERYTHING. Abolish ALL laws. It will all just work out, right? What I was arguing against was the notion that without an abstract model of the economy to guide our thinking, the economy would cease to operate. Economy activity predates our ability to do much abstract thinking about it at all, and certainly predates the arrival of formal models that seek to explain how it operates. Moreover - the formal legal and informal social mechanisms that govern exchange have been around for a long time. Quite a bit longer than there have been any formalized theories to guide either. It's far from clear that the simple existence of a formal theory of the economy is actually beneficial in all cases. The economic model at the heart of communism and socialism, which attempts to substitute a central bureaucracy for market mechanisms, is worse than nothing. It has been an unmitigated disaster wherever it has been implemented according to the official playbook. Bureaucracies are great for enforcing rules, they aren't so good at determining the "right" price for carrots, or determining how many screwdrivers can be imported in a given year, which crops a farmer should plant, etc, etc. That's assuming they operate free of political incentives, which they don't. Once you factor that reality in, the picture gets even worse - and you get gems like the Corn Ethanol Subsidy, "Cash for Clunkers," the mortgage interest deduction, etc, etc, etc. The corn ethanol program is worse than nothing. Cash for clunkers was worse than nothing. Farm subsidies are worse than nothing. I could go on forever. Given a choice between a model of the economy that fosters the delusion that the government can determine, say - the "right" price of corn - no model whatsoever I'd gladly choose the latter.

Markets aren't an inherent thing. They are social constructs, and therefore need rules. They are not a natural process and the uncontrolled practice of it is not superior. If you just "leave it alone" things won't get better, because greed and selfishness ARE inherent, and they regularly interfere with and undermine human enterprise. So - there was complete anarchy before we had abstract models and formalized mathematical representations of them administered by a central authority who had the foresight to translate them into a set of laws? Per your definition, nothing that humans engage in is a natural process since everything from sex to defecation to eating is governed by an ornate set of rules and norms associated with a local and mutable social context. Humans have been engaged in production and exchange as long as there have been humans. There has never been a time when they have done so in the absence of a complex set of rules and norms that governed the said activities. The idea that all of the rules and norms that govern human interactions owes its existence to a formal rule-making body that imposed them on society in a top down fashion is as ahistorical as it is irrational. Where do you think things like commercial contracts, letters of credit, titles, liens, fractional reserve banking, stocks, bonds, liability, etc came from? Do you really think that they were designed in a room somewhere by a committee of intellectuals who were able to look into the future and determine that they'd be necessary to regulate commerce someday?

Conclusions of a new study conducted by PERI of UMass and cepr: "The Wage Penalty for State and Local Government Employees in New England" http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_201-250/WP233.pdf I love papers like this. 1)Assume that all educational credentials, from all institutions, in all disciplines have an equal value. 2)Assume all private sector earnings are accrued in the course of a 40 hour work-week. 3)Assume that age automatically translates into a higher salary. Bingo - all the evidence you need to demonstrate that a 58 year old with a BA in sociology from 1975 who hasn't worked in the private sector since that date will automatically, or would have automatically, secured a higher salary by entering the private sector. Which of course, explains why public sector turnover is 1/3rd that of the private sector, and why wages and benefits are matters of peripheral concern to public employees when it's time to renegotiate contracts. The only class of government employees for which these claims have any evidence to support them are those with professional degrees or PhD's, and who are generally not part of public sector unions. The notion that the guys filling potholes or tying the ferry to the dock are voluntarily renouncing crass material rewards like a higher salary that they could obtain elsehwere in pursuit of a higher calling is quite amusing.

Is this when you fellows date the origins of capitalism? Christ, why not take it all the way back to the frickin' Holocene? Find a goddamn gene for it or something? Fit in good with your "human nature" arguments. I don't think it requires an abstract theory of either human nature or economics to conclude that people were engaging in production and exchange long before there was...written language...much less a formalized theory to tell them how or why to do either. Market processes don't require market theories in order to function. This fact seems to be quite disconcerting to a broad class of activists and intellectuals, who do require market theories in order to function.

You should write a book, "Jay_B's Big Book of Economistic Brain Teasers". Great for when you're on the toilet bowl or stuck in an airport but not much good for real life. Should be a snap. Just read what "every analyst" has had to say and you should have all of the tools you need to make your case. "I am now a Keynesian in economics" --Richard Nixon, 1971 "I've abandoned free market principles in order to save the free market system" --George W. Bush, 2008 You douchebags should be praising Keynes as the savior of global capitalism 4 or 5 times over by now! But then, I guess someone has to play the role of doctrinaire. Yes. Without his insights we never would have had, say, Phoenician traders plying the Mediterranean, etc, etc. Anyhow - does the "paradox of thrift" involve savings in the form of CD's, bank deposits, T-Bills, etc - or just physical currency? I've been hoping to find someone who has a keen understanding of Keynesian economics to explain that to me, and now it appears I've got one at the ready.

Which part? http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch16.htm This: "If, in such circumstances, we start from a position of full employment, entrepreneurs will necessarily make losses if they continue to offer employment on a scale which will utilise the whole of the existing stock of capital. Hence the stock of capital and the level of employment will have to shrink until the community becomes so impoverished that the aggregate of saving has become zero, the positive saving of some individuals or groups being offset by the negative saving of others. Thus for a society such as we have supposed, the position of equilibrium, under conditions of laissez-faire, will be one in which employment is low enough and the standard of life sufficiently miserable to bring savings to zero. More probably there will be a cyclical movement round this equilibrium position. For if there is still room for uncertainty about the future, the marginal efficiency of capital will occasionally rise above zero leading to a “boom”, and in the succeeding “slump” the stock of capital may fall for a time below the level which will yield a marginal efficiency of zero in the long run. Assuming correct foresight, the equilibrium stock of capital which will have a marginal efficiency of precisely zero will, of course, be a smaller stock than would correspond to full employment of the available labour; for it will be the equipment which corresponds to that proportion of unemployment which ensures zero saving. The only alternative position of equilibrium would be given by a situation in which a stock of capital sufficiently great to have a marginal efficiency of zero also represents an amount of wealth sufficiently great to satiate to the full the aggregate desire on the part of the public to make provision for the future, even with full employment, in circumstances where no bonus is obtainable in the form of interest. It would, however, be an unlikely coincidence that the propensity to save in conditions of full employment should become satisfied just at the point where the stock of capital reaches the level where its marginal efficiency is zero. If, therefore, this more favourable possibility comes to the rescue, it will probably take effect, not just at the point where the rate of interest is vanishing, but at some previous point during the gradual decline of the rate of interest. We have assumed so far an institutional factor which prevents the rate of interest from being negative, in the shape of money which has negligible carrying costs. In fact, however, institutional and psychological factors are present which set a limit much above zero to the practicable decline in the rate of interest. In particular the costs of bringing borrowers and lenders together and uncertainty as to the future of the rate of interest, which we have examined above, set a lower limit, which in present circumstances may perhaps be as high as 2 or 2 1/2 per cent. on long term. If this should prove correct, the awkward possibilities of an increasing stock of wealth, in conditions where the rate of interest can fall no further under laissez-faire, may soon be realised in actual experience. Moreover if the minimum level to which it is practicable to bring the rate of interest is appreciably above zero, there is less likelihood of the aggregate desire to accumulate wealth being satiated before the rate of interest has reached its minimum level. The post-war experiences of Great Britain and the United States are, indeed, actual examples of how an accumulation of wealth, so large that its marginal efficiency has fallen more rapidly than the rate of interest can fall in the face of the prevailing institutional and psychological factors, can interfere, in conditions mainly of laissez-faire, with a reasonable level of employment and with the standard of life which the technical conditions of production are capable of furnishing. It follows that of two equal communities, having the same technique but different stocks of capital, the community with the smaller stock of capital may be able for the time being to enjoy a higher standard of life than the community with the larger stock; though when the poorer community has caught up the rich — as, presumably, it eventually will — then both alike will suffer the fate of Midas. This disturbing conclusion depends, of course, on the assumption that the propensity to consume and the rate of investment are not deliberately controlled in the social interest but are mainly left to the influences of laissez-faire. If — for whatever reason — the rate of interest cannot fall as fast as the marginal efficiency of capital would fall with a rate of accumulation corresponding to what the community would choose to save at a rate of interest equal to the marginal efficiency of capital in conditions of full employment, then even a diversion of the desire to hold wealth towards assets, which will in fact yield no economic fruits whatever, will increase economic well-being. In so far as millionaires find their satisfaction in building mighty mansions to contain their bodies when alive and pyramids to shelter them after death, or, repenting of their sins, erect cathedrals and endow monasteries or foreign missions, the day when abundance of capital will interfere with abundance of output may be postponed. “To dig holes in the ground,” paid for out of savings, will increase, not only employment, but the real national dividend of useful goods and services. It is not reasonable, however, that a sensible community should be content to remain dependent on such fortuitous and often wasteful mitigations when once we understand the influences upon which effective demand depends.

You should write a book, "Jay_B's Big Book of Economistic Brain Teasers". Great for when you're on the toilet bowl or stuck in an airport but not much good for real life. Should be a snap. Just read what "every analyst" has had to say and you should have all of the tools you need to make your case.

Yup. Doubt there's much of a probability that the Democrats will emerge as net winners in the next round of elections, but the long-term trajectory of religio-conservatism doesn't seem like a terribly good horse to hitch the wagon to these days. Keep wishing that the creationists and the protectionists would coalesce into a single party.

I have yet to encounter a Keynesian who can employ the tools of Keynesian economics to explain why paying every unemployed person to spend eight hours a day shouting at the sun wouldn't bring about a recovery via the magic of the Keynesian multiplier. Far better still would be to pay people $50 an hour to destroy 50% of the nation's most productive cropland. To get the most out of the multiplier, I've proposed dispensing the rock-salt one-grain at a time, and the long-acting herbicide one drop at a time with hand-held eye droppers. Toss in 100% pensions when the said cropland has been destroyed and you've got yourself the makings of a Keynesian miracle. The price of farm products skyrockets and farmers start plowing that increased purchasing power back into the economy, the folks who used to make their living building luxury condos and McMansions are fully employed at a living wage and then some - and prosperity is assured. Keynesians - have at it. Use Keynesian economics to explain why the above wouldn't be just the ticket for getting the country out of a recession.

Yes, this is a conversation worth listening to. Having listened to the program again, one could only say that Morticia Addams spends the majority of her airtime... reslicing the data pie so many times we're left with a misty soup... Lots to chew on there but I'll stick with the stats for a moment. I'm willing to listen to an argument to the contrary, but it seems to me that the more your analysis is based on entities that have an existence outside of a sociologist's spreadsheet (people), rather than one that does not (income quintiles) you clarify rather than distort what's actually going on in society. Take a single example - the "household." Take two households with two adults and two children each, in which all four adults earn an equal salary. Now keep one intact, and split the other into two independent households. Nothing has changed about their jobs, their incomes, etc - but splitting one of them in two has just increased the level of income inequality between these households by a factor of two. This is clearly significant, particularly when the tendency to form stable households with two incomes is not evenly distributed across all social groups or "household income quintiles." Speaking of which, when you focus on quintiles instead of people it's easy to get the impression that each "household income quintile" contains the same number of people, that the average age is identical in all of them, that the households in the lowest quintile contain the same number of incomes as those in the top quintile, and that people are born into a "household income quintile" and stay there rather than cycling through a number of them over the course of their lives. None of which are true, and all of which matters if your goal is to actually understand what's actually happening in society. If you look at actual humans, very few of them leave the labor force with a real income that's less than or equal to the real income that they entered the workforce with. As most people gain skills and experience a chart of their real earnings would look like a volatile plot with a trendline that generally slopes upwards, reaches a peak somewhere between 30 and 60, and then declines sometime at or near retirement. That statistical picture looks quite a bit different than that generated by "income quintiles," and if you are interested in understanding whats driving actual differences in the amount of money that actual workers are earning now as opposed to some arbitrary point in the past - it's a much better place to start than a data set that's confounded by things such as differing tendencies to marry and divorce, etc, etc.

I think it's an interesting topic that looks very different when you look at actual people as opposed to statistical abstractions like "households," or income quintiles. The changing composition of "households" over time has a significant effect on what a metric like "household income" would look like over time, even if the distribution of incomes per worker in society were held completely static at early 1970's levels. Ditto for the income quintiles. The fact that the top quintile of households contains more people than the bottom quintile, and that the households in the top quintile contain more than two income earners while the bottom quintile contains something like 0.6 matters quite a bit. Then there's the fact that very few people stay in the same household income quintile for life, and tend to be in a lower quintile at the beginning and after the end of their working life than they occupy in their peak earning years. Et...cetera. You can go on like this for quite some time. All this has been covered before ad nauseum, but I think the conversation was one that most people with an interest in the topic will find worth listening to.

Thought it was "good" because the participants were generally able to state their arguments clearly, and explain the rationale behind the conclusions that they derived from the data reasonably well. I'm sure that Ms. Furchtgott-Roths arguments will endlessly enrage progressives, but given that both the host and all of the guests took the other side of the argument, I don't think they'd be able to complain that their perspective wasn't represented.

Glad to have provided fodder for some clever wordplay with the typo...

Good discussion on NPR today: http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/tp/tp100914does_the_growing_inc

Nary a tear in the Che-mug from you. Good to hear. As long as we're on the topic of the Koch brothers, what distinguishes their activities from those of say, George Soros, other than the nature of the causes that they support. Are you opposed to all rich people spending money to promote ideas and causes that they believe in, or only those who promote ideas and causes that you happen to dislike?