Drill Baby Drill...the US Politics Thread (Part 2)

I don’t think Trump is fit for political office, and his actions on January 6 are indicative why. That’s why I voted for Harris. I think his pardoning of the rioters is a disgrace.

I think several things Trump is doing is probably unconstitutional. But we knew this is what he was like. The American people looked at someone whom IMHO is unfit for office and the candidate that represented the past four years, and chose the convicted felon instead.

It says a lot about the Democratic Party.

As I keep telling my Republican friends, Jesus was a socialist!

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https://x.com/BMeiselas/status/1889555215881212291

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From that article:

When asked how he was feeling as he left the courtroom on Tuesday, Bannon said: “Like a million bucks.”

And: Bannon spoke to reporters after leaving the courthouse on Tuesday, and called on the new US attorney general, Pam Bondi, to begin an immediate criminal investigation into James and Bragg.

A further proof that all weels are falling off there. It’s disgusting indeed.

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You know, I’m somewhat of a dismal scientist myself

:rofl:

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I’m not an economist either, but I wonder if it’s because economists aren’t too different from humans in general in having pet theories that they then interpret the world through.

To a mind that has only studied basic microeconomic and macroeconomic theory, I too wonder how much inflation has been because of some genuine stimulus-related activity, e.g. house-buying inflating prices and therefore inflation metrics, even though it’s mostly one-off numbers, and doesn’t, as far as I recall, take into account the type of housing transacted, and how much of it is due to the pandemic-induced supply constraints, i.e. factory and shipping shutdowns. But for me, one big factor that is quite underrated is the impact of the ongoing Russian war crimes. Virtually all inflation reports I can remember (and of course there’s confirmation bias in here) seem to essentially cite energy costs being the key driver of inflation, and I wonder what event happened to lead to energy costs spiking massively?

TL;DR: Big Bad Vlad

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In Europe, particularly the UK, I think energy costs, shipping constraints (Brexit and the Pandemic) make up much of the inflationary pressure but I’m not sure how much of that applies in the US.

I remember fairly early on Buffett was citing growing inflationary pressures across a number of his businesses.

There have been a few studies about the post-COVID inflation, I think one of them coming from the SF Fed. The conclusion has been that roughly half or a bit more of the inflation was caused by the stimulus while the rest was caused by supply chain issues in Asia since China remained under lockdown longer than the rest of the world, at least in the US.

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No it isnt. And if you believe you have been had and should do a root and branch analysis of where you get your information from. Americans “wanted the border fixed” because they largely have no understanding about what is going on because they dont understand how our system works and are being lied to by people who want them to be upset.

There was very definitely a post-covid migration/asylum spike that our system struggled to deal with. That is not at at all the result of an open border policy, or even an ineffective border policy. It is a result of the fact that our immigration is so designed around managing the movement of Mexicans that everyone else is refered to as OTM (“Other Than Mexican”). Current law, enforced by the courts, requires different treatment of these people than it does Mexicans, treatment that is much more labor and resource intensive, and is so by orders of magnitude. These are the groups that have come in recent years and managing those is not an issue of the border.

This is a really good conversation about the history of why and how our system is required to treat different classes of immigrants and how it is so ill equipped to deal with the current migration patterns.

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And? Was it a bad thing to try to achieve liberation from tyrannic South-American regimes at the time? Surely not?

The pope has criticized a policy which puts tens of thousands of people, including innocent children, at serious risk of being seriously abused in their liberties. He criticizes that, and rightly so, and you call him far left woke?

Besides that, what is it you try to tell us here? That every person critical of Trump and his croonies is a far left woke? If that is the case, you should definitely take a step back as @RedArmada suggested, and start a critical reflection on where you take your information from.

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Here is a progressive organization advocating for open borders. Guess I gotta rethink my root and branch sources, amirite?

I can get arguments from other progressive politicians and institutions.

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By the same token, as long as a white supremacist group supports the Republican Party, then the entire right is by definition white supremacist, am I understanding this correctly?

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Not worth engaging with this deplorable

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So a policy position by an advocacy group that has no relevance to what is actually happening with the border or what the Dems implement when put in charge of it. And so something that if you think had an impact on the election is an acknowledgment that Dems are not judged by their actions or positions, but what fringe elements ask of them to do and that they dont do.

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I’m critical of Trump and his cronies, as I’ve mentioned above, and I’m not far left.

And yes, Pope Francis has been supportive of mass migration in the past. Open borders is far left policy with which most people disagree. I don’t know why people are so defensive about being labeled this.

I’d like to point out that when the left was more focused on economic issues rather than identity issues a generation ago, they were against mass migration because they believed that it lowered workers’ wages, whereas conservatives were for it because amongst other reasons it increased the labor pool keeping wages lower.

The Democrats allowed mass migration for three years and only cracked down on it when it was becoming a political liability. The inability to deal with the border helped cause them to lose the election. It was right up there with inflation.

Find something, anything ‘far left’ anyone has ever said or done. Far Left is kinda left, so = Democrats. Kind of ridiculous at this point.

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It is fairly complex, and I would hesitate to criticize any particular study without knowing which ones you are referring to, so some general comments:

i) Economics suffers from being a social science, not an experimental one. N is very limited, and there are no controls for correlated variables. In particular, the EU presents a massive problem for these ‘population’ studies, because we know that inflation in one Euro zone country is to some degree inflation in all of them.

ii) Post-covid stimulus is not the only source of government spending that can drive (and appears to have done so) inflation. For the Canadian case, the writing was on the wall in 2019. I would argue that was absolutely the case for the US as well. The last two budgets of the first Trump administration pre-covid were profoundly inflationary by traditional standards

iii) This particular inflation ‘event’ is a weird one in a couple of different dimensions. It lagged more than would have been expected, leading to that wave of MMT endorsements in 2021 because it really did look like there was a decoupling. Inflation was far below what was predicted by conventional models in many economies.

iv) It was also weird because the consumption bundle used to measure it simply stopped working as well. Some items increased far above measured CPI. That points to complex causes (supply chain in food being the obvious example).

v) There is an interesting discussion around the fact that the size of the covid stimulus may not have been as critical as the timing of it. Canada had a very large stimulus, but also began to rein that back earlier. That has led to mediocre growth, but inflation simply did not spike in the same way that did in the US. Definitely increased, but fell earlier.

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