domain:worksinprogress.co
Felagund
6d ago
The US will never default, we are in a better place than all other countries, hence the strong dollar.
Okay, the US won't default, but at some point it'll need to start printing money, at least, to avoid it.
That is:
The US wants to pay for stuff.
To raise funds to do so, it sells bonds.
Demand for bonds is not limitless.
US spending keeps growing.
Eventually it will hit the limit of those willing to buy US debt.
At that point, it must either print money to pay for things, or fail to pay for things (that is, default).
Unless you think all other players are totally irrational investing in it?
It wouldn't surprise me. But really, all you need to buy a bond is just to think that things will be fine within the lifetime of the bond, which is entirely possible even if you think it's going to collapse in a few decades.
If we are defaulting, the rest of the world has already fallen apart and it doesn't matter. Like people who buy gold for the apocalypse...when what you really need is beans and bullets.
I see no reason to think the former is true. And the latter depends heavily on what kind of apocalypse you're in.
xpym
6d ago
Well, the point is that Russia hasn't had any other context basically throughout the entire thousand years it existed, so this isn't held against Putin by anybody other than an irrelevant fringe. This doesn't mean that any tsar is automatically popular, he has to maintain decent standards of living and the kayfabe of Russia as a great power. Especially if the reality is that Russia is in fact a gas station with nukes which is fucked in the long tern regardless of what any likely tsar might do, so going out with a bang instead of a whimper is actually preferable to many nationalists who can see through the kayfabe.
epohon
6d ago
Govt. number: DO NOT REDEEM THE CARD SIR. You think that idea would be to a net benefit of the normies?
epohon
6d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUM_Manifesto etc. etc. etc.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
Okay, can you list the "etc.", "etc.", and "etc."? Because whenever I've seen this claim the reference point is always the SCUM Manifesto, and that sort of a thing kind of makes one think there are, in fact, no other reference points.
Harlequin5942
6d ago
Such a discussion would be hard. MMT advocates tend to see themselves as primarily stating a profound critique of standard theories of public finance that is true as a simple matter of institutional facts + accounting, whereas I see them as warming up a few ideas that almost all Keynesians abandoned long ago. So the very terms of the debate would likely be messed up. This has been my experience debating MMTists in the past, e.g. they say, "Do you admit X?", I show that X has been standard econ for 100+ years, and they say "Oh, so you admit X!", I say "Of course", and then they say, "Well, this politician says otherwise, and he did PPE at Oxford, so economists must teach otherwise!"
Great post. The simple truth is that unless…
- Trump wins
- The GOP get a trifecta with a very comfortable senate majority
- They abolish the filibuster
- Trump is suddenly hugely more competent at wrangling Congress
…there will be no better deal than this one. That is to say that even if Trump wins, the chance of a better border control bill is minimal at best. If this hill had passed under Trump, he would have signed it. Of course it wouldn’t, because there’s no way Democrats would vote for it in that case.
There is no way this isn’t a mega black pill. But the ultimate black pill is that it’s really all about Trump. There is no ‘national conservative’ movement. There is no ‘Trumpist’ party with a coherent, European-style nationalist policy platform. There’s a Trump personality cult with very little genuine infrastructure behind it, sitting on top of the carcass of the post-Tea Party GOP, which itself is a hollowed-out shell of what it once was even ten years ago. The fact that Trump was personally able to kill this bill is testament to the extent to which service to his personal whims and (perceived) self-interest are now the sole metric by which congressional Republicans are and wish to be judged.
There is no plan, and if there is, Trump doesn’t even seem committed to following it. Sure, I’ll still vote for him, that’s the reality of a two-party system. But no Trump voter should be under any illusions that his second term won’t be him attempting some (likely unsuccessful) crusade against those he believes have wronged him (personally) while behind the scenes very little changes.
“Buh buh buh this doesn’t deport 10/12/15 million illegals”. Yeah, and neither will anything that Donald Trump can, let alone will, accomplish in office. Moreover, if by some stroke of luck this bill had passed and Trump won and decided to become competent, it would afford him MORE power to reduce inflows and impose ZERO meaningful restrictions on additional actions by the president or congress to increase deportations.
Moreover, 50,000 additional immigration visas a year is nothing compared to the current numbers of legal and illegal immigrants, so focusing on this was especially retarded.
Few things make me seethe more than what happened with this bill. As many on the right acknowledge, immigration is the only thing that matters. It is the central issue upon which every other issue ultimately depends. Even a minor shift in the right direction, even something that delays demographic destiny by a few more years buys the right more time. Every single measure that reduces total inflows must pass. Unless, apparently, it might make it a little harder for Donald Trump to win the presidency and accomplish nothing, again.
I remember that the bare links thread was primarily used as a way to link to random things and to have people make comments on them that wouldn't be tolerated in any other thread.
It being introduced when it did told me a lot about our society.
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
This again? If Biden wanted to cut down on illegal immigration, he could do it now, without any additional Congressional authority
... Okay? Ben's not arguing Biden is blameless here, just that Trump is blameworthy. Yes, Biden and the Dems aren't doing this out of sincere care for immigration, they're trading a better chance at getting elected for a concession to the public's policy priorities. Trump should, by the values of his own voters, take the deal and reduce his chance of winning because this would hugely reduce illegal immigration.
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
The DOJ’s clever wordsmithing, however, did not accurately describe the origin of the cover sheets. In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.
This is a tendentious presentation imo. Politico presents this as:
Smith’s team revealed in the filing that FBI agents carried printed “classified cover sheets” during the Aug. 8, 2022, search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and used them to replace any classified documents they discovered in cardboard Bankers Boxes that littered the former president’s residence.
“The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose, until the FBI ran out because there were so many classified documents, at which point the team began using blank sheets with handwritten notes indicating the classification level of the document(s) seized,” the prosecutors wrote.
“Any handwritten sheets that currently remain in the boxes do not represent additional classified documents — they were just not removed when the classified cover sheets with the index code were added,” Smith’s team wrote. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.”
I think it's reasonable to put cover sheets on the classified documents, given they are classified. The documents would have already had classification markings, so I don't see how this is "willfully misleading" the public "into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security".
It turns out that when the government alleged that Trump had classified documents he was not supposed to have, the government itself did not accurately know which documents Trump had, or which documents Trump was even supposed to have. Actually, worse than that, it turns out they fabricated some or all of the accusations
"Some or all", here, seems unjustified - I don't think anyone (other than perhaps Trump on Twitter) is claiming the accusations are all fake - that's a much stronger claim than "the documents aren't in the same order that they were when we scanned them". Your sources imply this is like "tampering" with evidence, and it may (not sure) be a procedural issue, but things like "adding cover sheets" and "reordering documents" don't undermine the claim that Trump committed a crime.
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
Remember how many times progressives on social media were wrong about Russia, and about Trump's legal woes in general? I think you're doing the same thing in reverse here. What the government's alleged to have done is very minor, but a lot of the words look like the words you'd use in a major situation, so it's blown up into a big deal.
SlowBoy
6d ago
Dems don't need new laws to stop illegal immigration. They aren't enforcing the laws that already exist. Why would passing more laws make Dems enforce them?
The politicians who created the problem, who could stop the problem at any time, are saying they need new powers to stop the problem. The politicians who want to solve the problem say that it's a bad bill. Trump wants to run on the border? But Biden could solve it today.
SlowBoy
6d ago
Read the Trump comments in the piece Ben linked. They were all Trump remarks clearly about illegals. Ben claims Trump was too mean to immigrants, eliding the difference.
SlowBoy
6d ago
Well, the same people who orchestrated Russiagate are now running the government. The parallel runs toward more scam prosecutions. Why do you think they lied about the cover sheets?
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Calling Cliff Asness a "lifelong Democrat" is disingenuous at the very least. I used to keep CNBC on as background noise when I was in law school and his name rings a bell as the guy who was complaining that one or another of Obama's bailouts was too friendly to workers and not friendly enough to hedge fund billionaires such as himself. Some further internet research shows he was a Rubio supporter in 2016 and a Haley supporter more recently. I don't know what the details of his voter registration are, but he definitely comes across more as one of those never Trump conservatives who Republicans spent the last 8 years assuring us were electorally irrelevant.
2rafa
6d ago
Biden can deport 15 million people today? The law mitigates some percentage of the legal challenges by pro-migrant groups that would be inevitable (and will be) in any executive-led effort.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I agree with most of what you said, but aren't you an American expat living in London? There seems something a bit off about someone in your position saying that immigration restrictions are the only thing that matters.
yellowgreenred
6d ago
It's only a "black pill" if one is overly concerned about the ethnic composition of the United States. Most Republicans don't have a problem with what they commonly understand "legal immigration" to be. More importantly, they don't view this issue from the racialist perspective you outline. There is not going to be a "European-style nationalist policy platform" because there is no demand for it. It's commonly understood among the citizenry, white and non-white, that the US is a country of immigrants. We can debate whether this is some massive psyop (I don't think it is), but that doesn't change that even most Republicans are sympathetic to this statement. This is really the kind of issue where one needs to touch grass. White Americans get on plenty fine with non-white immigrants within their own social class.
Barring mass deportations of citizens, the US is going to remain "diverse". A number of large states already have or are very near no single racial group being a majority.
Even a minor shift in the right direction, even something that delays demographic destiny by a few more years buys the right more time.
I don't understand this. Buys the right more time to do what exactly?
SomethingMusic
6d ago
Maybe people are feeling well?
ace
6d ago
No, I just think you're not very astute.
This was unnecessary to your otherwise very good points.
SlowBoy
6d ago
It's in the name: Public Relations. Your argument is that Trump's PR was too mean, and damaged the cause of immigration restriction. But when pushed on this you fall back to claiming that Trump hated illegal immigrants. What's the point of blaming his PR then? If Trump hates immigrants, it doesn't matter what his PR is, because by your logic he would still have hurt the cause just by being Trump.
2rafa
6d ago
I’ve never argued against all immigration. Only against unnecessary and troublesome immigration with deleterious long term consequences. For example, half of London’s social housing stock is occupied by people born outside the UK. By contrast I have almost never used public services and pay three times the country’s median income (at least) in taxes every year. Even then, I would think it reasonable if I and every other immigrant had no right to citizenship, ever.
So there isn’t really any hypocrisy. I’ve even advocated for affluent, high-skilled immigration from other Western countries to the US to do things like break down the AMA’s cartel on physician pay, which is currently like 4x what it is in most other developed countries. It’s disingenuous to suggest that that’s the issue people have with mass immigration.
Was wondering the same when I checked this morning, and actually checked the news to see if some grand event was taking up people's time in the wide world. Nothing beyond the usual wars and lawsuits.
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