Before the tax cuts I happened I made the insanely obvious call of saying unemployment would hit or be around lows for years to come and that wage growth, especially for the lower and middle class, will grow like most/all of us have never seen in our lives.

I know a lot of you all are waiting for me to dunk in your faces and say BOOM I am right, but I am going to hold off on all of that. It is going to get a lot better than this. As most of us know these tax cuts will have profound long term effects on our economy. Trump's tax cut and deregulation created economic growth that most economists said was no longer possible in the immediate future for America.

No, I don't. Please explain this further so we both understand it better.

If millions of people didn't have to worry about how they're going to pay their medical bills or stay in a less than optimal job because their health insurance is tethered to employment or didn't have to worry about who's going to watch their kid while they work or worry about how they're going to feed themselves and others, then they'd be more productive to the economy. It's kind of hard to produce for an economy if you can't actually live and function in it.

It doesn't just stop at "from domestic investment to personal consumption". That "personal consumption" allows an individual to actually live. Or actually have their medical problems cared for, properly and with quality. Or work the optimal job for them, and not the one they don't want and are unhappy with but are stuck with because healthcare is tethered to employment.

The economy is doing well and all, but if we implemented a robust healthacre system NOW or if the Rs reversed their mentality and instead spent their efforts improving upon Obamacare instead of undermining it like they have the last ten years, then millions of people would literally be lifted out of burdens that I haven't even bothered to use any moral argument for yet. Economically, a person who can't leave their job by choice is a drag on the economy. A person who has a ****ed up back but can't get an MRI and proper treatment because the insurance company has to profit through denial can't go back to work. They can't support themselves or their families as well as possible. This is a drag on the economy.

I don't think this "trade off" is a freeroll. It is a policy decision that will benefit certain people and not others. We can go around in circles talking about the same bull**** over and over and the fact remains the power is there, the will is not. Slant the discussion however you want, "freeroll" and "hurts us all" are just bull**** phrases to make it sound like what you are saying is more true than it is. It's not. I just said that we can debate the merits of taxation and where to draw lines and all, but this isn't really debateable. Other countries are doing it and this is ****ing America. We can do ANYTHING. We have all teh moneyz. America is like Ben Simmons. ****ing extraordinary talent, but no jump shot. Giannis Antetokounmpo is like (insert here any country beating us on multiple metrics regarding quality of life and happiness, etc). Choosing to add muscle to his skinny frame and improving his jumpshot to benefit the entirety of his game. Now he's a terror and still has upside. Simmons chooses to do nothing but **** a Kardashian or Jenner or whoever I don't keep track of all those "influencers". America chooses to do nothing in the realm of healthcare and subsequent quality of life and happiness for the entirety of its citizens. I can only imagine how much better healthcare would be in this country if in the last ten years there were a concentrated effort on making the system more efficient, effective, and robust. Instead we did the reverse and millions of people are sitting around with thumbs up their asses trying to make do with a ****ing travesty of a system with no solution in sight.

It isn't so much that the general principle is wrong, it's that people act like taking a little of the top and investing in the bottom and middle in a more direct, concentrated effort won't bring about a better ROI than just letting all the rich ****s not have to pay more taxes. Multipliers, bro...Sustaining a continual support system for people who have none and struggle eventually leads to those people being self sustaining. Or at least improves the sustenance of the next generation. We are watching other countries do this now while we pretend we can't do the same thing. I'd argue we can do something superior, the powers that be just don't want us to.

wat. he quoted babah saying some nonsense stuff about obama being just as bad as trump with regards to payday loans..

max clearly quoted that section and posted links of that obviously false claim by bahbah. i have no idea how that could be confusing.. one or two of the links even had titles clearly defining them..


i agree with you on the pardon talk. if you aren't paying attention to current events you may have missed the pardon and had limited idea what we were talking about.

He posted "lol at suggesting trump should shoulder any more blame than any of our last few presidents for pay day loan types of places existing."

The URLs I provided are literally on trump rolling back regulations on pay day loans.

opinion/trump-payday-loans

trump-administration-rolls-back-payday-loan-protections

payday-loans-rule-consumer-financial-protection-roll-back

Now if I really stretch my imagination and hold dear the forum admonition to presume good faith, I can believe he might legit not be able to connect the dots from his claim to the links provided (which clearly contradict his unsupported claim). But you? Pfff

People with a sober view will acknowledge this as true and yes the economy seems strong and moving at a hot clip.

People with a sober view will also demonstrate concern for the debt and deficit, which forgive my BFI ignorance, is something that will affect us at some point? I'm under the impression that we try to grow our way out of it and also let inflation eat some of it, but this does not seem healthy.

Would it be inaccurate to say that the debt is a tumor growing inside the body but the body functions just fine anyway? At some point it has to be dealt with and shrunk, no? Will it ever matter? Seems like we conveniently ignore it when portraying the health of the economy...

I think he is correct that Obama created a watchdog group comprised of those who are against and wanted to go after PayDay loans. The reg changing the burden of verifying the ability to repay and income verification seems to be putting a lot of unnecessary cost onto the lender. That will drive up the amount of time and cost per loan. When your talking a small dollar loan to begin with it does not take many reporting requirements to make it non cost effective to make.

I'm happy to concede that I just wasn't following that closely, and if I had been I would have gotten it. I'm just saying it's helpful to have things spelled out a bit more, precisely because then people don't have to be following quite as closely.

To be clear, I'm not saying it's a huge deal or you ought to feel badly or anything else. Anyway, please carry on...

Granted Obama did something as he was leaving but the thing he did never went into effect. Which he could have done something that actually happened while he was office. So I am not sure it really counts.

Yes.

As I said, I think HFT provides value in making markets more liquid. You defended it on the basis that it makes markets more efficient like normal trading does. I personally don't see much value in increasing the speed by which markets become more efficient by fractions of a second - this looks to me more like rent-seeking than adding value. HFT does subsidize research in developing faster computers I suppose.

WN, when you're done policing the payday loan conversation here, you might want to check out the linguistics conversation that's taken up about half of my demographic thread

I like that thread. I know it's not what you wanted it to be but that's how threads go sometimes. C'est la vie?

Yeah free ponies for all no one has to pay electricity.

Doubling down is the wrong move. It was late in his term due to all the political obstruction by republicans and it put on a delay timer in order to give the industry time to prepare. Now you take back your lol!

God forbid someone in poverty get something they need for free.

You need to make up your mind here because you're bouncing between rationals.

You first try and use a utilitarian frame talking about if we get rid of pay day lenders and them making a premium off of the poor in order to pay for basic utilize then there will be no source of income for these poor people aka payday lenders are providing some service and it's good that they're there.

In fact, if you would have read the NYT article you'd see when Warren proposed the "no roll over policy" some lenders were on board. They said they wouldn't make as much money but they'd still be profitable, but the payday lenders didn't want to get rid of a lucrative profit source

So I propose a way to fill in that missing gap via either direct ownership and subsidization of the utilities, which is pretty common in the world, or through income subsidization, again, pretty common.

So, because that frame hasn't worked out, you have to immediately switch to what's called the 'just desserts' framework. In other words, they don't deserve that income to pay their electricity bills in the first place without going into debt whether or not an better alternative system could work at all.

It's all very odd. Payday lenders say they're providing a service that is sorely needed, but when someone else proposes a away to provide that service without the debt peonage immediately it because the idea that the poor deserve the debt they take on in the first place and there's no other way.

Whatever. They are regulations not laws. Your going to have to cite something that indicates the Republicans even had the ability to obstruct these regulations and then actually did.

That's a problem with making a claim so strongly without knowing you can support it. lol at suggesting such nonsense and whatnot


Just waiting politely in the citation line. After you.

If you've ever put in an order on somewhat low volume, and the second you put in the order, the bid/ask moves just out of your order, then you just got got by hft. They also front run orders and **** over customers that way. Liquidity is nice, but retail traders pay for that liquidity in a very direct manner

Yes the debt and deficit is a concern, but I believe our government has a spending problem and not necessarily an income problem (aka: cutting gov't spending is the solution and not increasing taxes).

trying not to be a biased repub (BTW: I'd love a dem to answer this question as how they think dems and repubs in general are trying to reduce the govt debt):

Repubs believe the way to get out of debt is to cut spending and taxes (more money in the pockets of the most productive people in our country) in an attempt to grow our way out of debt.

Dems think increasing taxes and spending which takes money out of the pockets of the most productive people in our society to give it to less productive people will get us out of debt because (they can't see the big picture) the less productive people are spending a higher % of that money and they ignore the fact that what the productive people are doing with their money is also good for an economy.

My main point is that if you are buying a stock sometime the HFT are making trades to lower the price and something they are raising the price and the same is true if you are selling. People have this notion that because these machines are trading they are somehow getting screwed but they forget that half the time it is helping them.

As we have been giving more money to richer people, growth and productivity in the US has slowed

i mean lol at believing trickle down is still a real thing in 2019.. Reagan made that crap up like 40 years ago

the tax cut resulted in the biggest stock buyback in history. that money didnt boost anything other than ceo paychecks.. like others have said if corporate welfare actually led to increasing jobs than apple should be the biggest company in the world..

Glad to see your eyes have been closed for the past couple years. I suggest you keep them closed for the next 10+ years.

As I pointed out earlier we are not giving rich people more money. We are letting them keep more of the money that the population of the US voted (with their feet and checkbooks) they deserve. Secondly, when the economy grows (which will be for the rest of your life unless dems go crazy beyond anything seriously being talked about today or birth rates drastically shrink) the rich will always get richer and it is very likely over the next 20 years the poorer will get richer too.

My honest view is that the GOP uses the debt and deficit as a bad-faith mechanism to oppose social welfare or insurance spending under Democratic presidents and then jack up spending and cut taxes when they hold power with little concern for either the debt or deficit. Democratic presidents usually are more invested in the long term health of these programs and so try to make deals to put them on a sounder financial footing by decreasing the deficit when they are in power.