The Red White and Blue Pill
Is Russia 2015 Venezuela 1983?
Venezuela then, like Russia now, was a petro-economy which had consistently run external surpluses. But it was nonetheless a vulnerable debtor, because all those external surpluses and more had in effect been recycled into overseas assets of the corrupt elite.
Rand Paul’s “anti-torture” sham: Why his ignoring CIA scandal says so much – Salon.com
Put simply, if Sen. Paul’s commitment to his small government vision extended beyond the GOP’s usual hatred of taxes, throwing himself into the CIA torture scandal by vocally and repeatedly demanding the summary’s release would be the perfect way to prove it. If Paul’s libertarian rhetoric is just a branding exercise to separate him from the rest of the 2016 presidential pack, however, then going after the “patriots” who tortured “evildoers” for George W. Bush is not in his best interest.
I predict that the 2016 GOP pack will come out strongly for the use of torture. I expect Rand Paul to take a lukewarm stance against
I once lost a whole truck over a few hundred bucks. It had been towed, and when I called the company they told me they’d need a few hundred dollars for the fee. I didn’t have a few hundred dollars. So I told them when I got paid next and that I’d call back then. It was a huge pain in the ass for those days. It was the rainy season, and I wound up walking to work, adding another six miles or so a day to my imaginary pedometer. It was my own fault that I’d been towed, really, and I spent more than a couple hours ruing myself. I finally made it to payday, and when I went to get the truck, they told me that I now owed over a thousand dollars, nearly triple my paycheck. They charged a couple hundred dollars a day in storage fees. I explained that I didn’t have that kind of money, couldn’t even get it. They told me that I had some few months to get it together, including the storage for however long it took me to get it back, or that they’d simply sell it. They would, of course, give me any money above and beyond their fees if they recovered that much. I was working two jobs at the time. Both were part time. Neither paid a hundred bucks a day, much less two. I wound up losing my jobs. So did my husband. We couldn’t get from point A to point B quickly enough, and we showed up to work, late, either soaked to the skin or sweating like pigs one too many times. And with no work, we wound up losing our apartment. It’s amazing what things that are absolute crises for me are simple annoyances for people with money. Anything can make you lose your apartment, because any unexpected problem that pops up, like they do, can set off that Rube Goldberg device.
Three quarters of whites don’t have any non-white friends – The Washington Post
Going back to Chris Rock’s point, the average black person’s friend network is eight percent white, but the average white person’s network is only one percent black. To put it another way: Blacks have ten times as many black friends as white friends. But white Americans have an astonishing 91 times as many white friends as black friends.
Conspicuous Consumption? Yes, but It’s Not Crazy
One common claim is that the wealthy routinely violate the economist’s law of demand. A bedrock principle of economic rationality, this law holds that as the price of a good rises, consumers buy less of it. Many analysts, however, portray the rich as people who lust after what are known as “Veblen goods” — commodities whose sales actually increase when their prices rise
The Business Tycoons of Airbnb
Getting ahead on Airbnb is much more simple: just sign multiple leases in desirable locations. Of course, that requires upfront investment and financial savvy. But once it’s up and running, an Airbnb rental network can become seriously lucrative. One operation of 272 listings booked $6.8 million in revenue from 2010 through June of this year, according to the attorney general. The economic forces at play are similar to what the French economist Thomas Piketty discusses in his recent blockbuster book, ‘’Capital in the Twenty-First Century,‘’ only in miniature. In a slow-growth economy, Piketty argues, wealth delivers better returns than labor, so those with wealth to invest in things (like, for example, rent-earning apartments) will tend to get wealthier; those without probably won’t. Listing a spare room on Airbnb might keep you current on your always-climbing Manhattan rent, but real entrepreneurship (as always) requires real dough.
AirBnB is literally a platform for wealthy people to engage in rent seeking.
The Benghazi Report Truthers: Even The GOP Cant Get To The Bottom Of It
When in late November the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a report finding that there was no direct wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, it seemed like the case might finally be closed. After all, this was a panel controlled by a Republicans.
But that’s not quite what happened.
Some of the loudest torch-and-pitchfork wielding Benghazi investigation enthusiasts weren’t satisfied.
Expect more Benghazi on FOX. They are going to waste untold time and money until they find something. It’s whitewater all over again.
And this is a shame. There are dozens of actual things they could be investigating.
Krugman on why he is misquoted
I guess you can’t expect people to be aware of what I was saying, seeing as how I only write for an obscure publication nobody has heard of.
In Front Of Your Macroeconomic Nose
at this point we’ve been at the zero lower bound for six years; we’ve seen a 400 percent rise in the monetary base without a takeoff in inflation; we’ve seen record peacetime deficits go along with record low long-term interest rates. Liquidity trap economics aren’t a speculative hypothesis at this point, they’re the world we’ve been living in for years. How can that go unnoticed?
It’s not unnoticed. There is plenty of people who noticed. But since the truth isn’t the right wing approved talking point, it isn’t being talked about.
Inequality Is Bad For Income Growth Of the Poor (But Not For That of the Rich)
The average state-level Gini coefficient in the US over the entire 50-year period is 0.43, with a standard deviation of 0.04. Now if a state’s level of inequality were reduced by four Gini points (about one standard deviation of the average) keeping everything else equal, the rate of growth of the very poor (people at the fifth or tenth percentile of income distribution) would increase by 0.9% per capita per annum (pc pa) on average. Since the incomes of the very poor on average grew by 0.8% pc pa, such a reduction in inequality wouldmore than double their growth rate on average. At the other end of the spectrum, the same decrease in inequality would reduce the growth rate of the rich (the top 5%) by 0.3% per capita annually. The rich’s average growth rate over the past half-century was 2% pc pa, so their growth would be cut by about one seventh.
Worth a read.