Personally, I think the government has minimal positive influence on economy. They can make things worse with bad tax policies, and they can undo damage by removing bad taxes, but for the most part, downswings are basically beyond their control.

The current problem was caused by a toxic combination of greed and stupidity, which oddly enough was stopped in Canada by Government regulation of mortgages.

So maybe I should alter my thesis to be "Governments can help prevent, sometimes, major issues, or cause major issues, but can rarely cause good things to happen"

Madtown - I haven't seen anything from you that looks trolllike, and we don't really agree here. If that makes you feel better.

That article is pretty gross. Is Lowell Ponte running for office?

Sure, gimme a bit. I already touched on free trade, but I'll put together a list. Let me get a couple obvious trolls in first though since we seem to be taking a seriousness break now that I complained. :P

I can't participate without taking it very seriously, or not at all seriously. I have no middle gear.

newsmax bashing democrats, why i never

I don't know if this got reported in the States, but a government MP leaked to a Canadian newspaper that Obama's people called the Prime Minister's office and said that all their anti-free trade talk was bollocks, and that Canada shouldn't worry about it.

I'd play in MT's electoral college game, but I just don't know enough about state-by-state leanings to know anything. Published polls seem so useless when the numbers for any state that anyone's unsure of are usually like 48 v 46 with a margin of error of +/- 4.5%.
May as well just have some sports page pundits putting up letter grades on the reps vs dems offensive and defensive lines. But who's getting the edge on special teams?

It got widely reported in the states during the democratic primaries. The Obama campaign tried to use support of NAFTA as an argument against Clinton. It was BS and I say that as an Obama supporter. It's not so much that he tried to change his positions (he's always been in favor of "free trade" with certain caveats) as that the tone of the argument he was making and the nature of the attack on Clinton was pretty silly.

Madtown is doing me a huge favor by allowing me to avoid spending too much time writing up arguments for this thread. I have too much work to do this week. Thanks Madtown

www.fivethirtyeight.com is my favorite poll analysis site. The authors have a definite democratic lean but I think the regression model they use is decent. It's an interesting project.

Yeah, that link was pretty absurd. Saying that the only intelligent people who vote Democratic are those getting a personal advantage from the party is just as insulting as when people claim the only people who voted for Bush were Bible thumping inbreds. You'd think the least we could do is agree that intelligent people actually believe that their side is correct on various issues.

Am I correct in my impression that this obscene division between democrats & republicans came about with the current Bush election? Or was it always there and I just never noticed?

Pretty funny story about politics in Germany that happened recently (I thought the idea was pure genius)

Required explaination:
SPD = roughly German version of Democrats
CDU = roughly German version of Republicans
Linkspartei = Socialists that have their roots in the ex GDR party that always won by getting 90%+ of the (free, lol) vote
I say roughly because they are not really comparable at all.

Somewhat recently there were elections in the state of Hessen which had been CDU dominated for a long time and thus the German version of a governor (it's somewhat different because he also represents the state in the Senate so he isn't strictly instate) is from the CDU. The elections brought an interesting result in that with the votes of the Linkspartei the SPD could actually take over the governor position in that state. However stated SPD party policy is to not cooperate with them because they don't want to "drift to far to the left" or whatnot so currently it's still a minority CDU governor.
However the SPD candidate for governer Andrea Ypsilanti has repeatedly tried to cut deals with the Linkspartei to get voted into office. To make a long story short this was one of the main reasons why the leader of the SPD party had to step down and he was replaced by Franz Müntefering as the new head of the SPD recently.

On to the fun part:
A voice immitator called Andrea Ypsilanti pretending to be Franz Müntefering and discussed all kinds of fun stuff like "his big plans for her in Berlin" etc etc with her. It was supposed to be aired on a radio station, SPD stopped it but it was leaked to youtube ldo.
I think voice immitators calling politicians to talk about internal stuff is genius and I'm surprised it hasn't happened before.

I thought it was pretty much 2+2 concensus that http://www.intrade.com is the most reliable.

im aware the link is absurd

that's why i posted it

That's because I'm making a deliberative effort not to troll. On other forums I frequent, I don't even bother trying. Of course, neither do the Republican and Libertarian posters. This is very fun, and much easier. To use a lame metaphor, this is akin to behaving like partisan talking heads on cable TV.

I'm trying to talk here like I'd actually talk to people I know in real life; seriously but respectfully. This can be difficult when they have an entrenched ideology or partisan identity, which tends to be the case with people on the internet (likely because you have to actively choose to engage in political discussions on the internet, whereas people who haven't thought much about politics can get drawn into political discussions more easily in real life).

This was precisely what I was getting at. NAFTA-gate was silly and overblown, but I disliked Obama's NAFTA rhetoric during the run-up to Ohio and Texas before that story broke anyway. I felt like he had a point -- Clinton used far stronger anti-NAFTA rhetoric to distance herself from it, when she'd clearly supported it in the past, and still held a similar stance to Obama -- but there was no way to make that point on her without painting yourself as the "real anti-NAFTA candidate," which was silly too.

wordup

There's a lot of ways to address this question. Without writing a book on it, I'll say that it definitely started before the Bush II administration (how far back depends how you frame the question), but that it has easily escalated to unprecedented levels over the last 8 years.

I'm still kicking myself for not betting heavy on Palin the night before she was announced. I called that it'd be her given some of the rumors that were kicking around at about 1-2 AM that night, and she was still rock-bottom cheap on there at the time.

it's always been there imo

My understanding of economics tells me that keeping interest rates artificially low for long periods of time causes a surge of investment that cannot be maintained once the rates rise to market levels. If you actually have on deposit a very small percentage of your paper assets (loans), and then leverage a large percentage of those paper assets into other investments, you run the risk of ruin. The companies, feeling pressure from stockholders, have felt obliged to accept this risk. When the interest rates started to rise, their house of cards blew down. After all, the worst that can happen is that they get bailed out by the taxpayers, or failing that the bank is simply sold off.

Had interest rates not been kept artificially low in the first place in an attempt to make the economy look better than it really was, we wouldn't have nearly the problem we have now. Regulatory policies amplify the effect of economic downturn, and blunt the effect of economic boom. The net effect is overwhelmingly negative.

I think it's always been there, but my impression is it got worse under the Clinton administration, particularly the lead up to the second term. Of course, given my age, that might just be when I finally noticed it, and it was always as bad as it is now.

I'd agree. My point re: regulation is that these companies should be subject to oversight and regulation, preventing them from building such a house of cards in the first place.

I have to get lunch, so I won't argue beyond saying that right now.

The current climate of demonization between the parties started when the religious right started taking over the republican party leading up to and during the Reagan administration. When issues like abortion become divisive party issues, it was easier to portray the other side as evil, rather than just of differing opinion.

Not to say there wasn't some extremely divisive partisan politics before that, just that the levels we see now are more akin to animosity between religious factions than political parties.

But I believe the Gold Standard is fundamentally flawed beyond repair. (One reason: Population grows exponentially, kind of hard to get around that tying your currency to a (relatively) fixed quantity of an arbitrary asset that has little intrinsic value. You wind up right back where you started: I can trade this piece of paper for some substance that I cannot use in any practical way, and thus has value only as long as people agree it has value. One example in history (amongst several) where it weakness is exposed is when the Romans pulled out of Britain, and they reverted to barter for 400 years.)

And sadly, the underlying issues are not even live issues usually. Abortion may possibly be influenced by supreme court nominations, though that is a long shot at best imo.

Also, politicians like to pontificate, but I don't believe they have strong convictions on many of these hot button (albeit irrelevant) positions. Case in point, Bush Sr. was pro choice until he joined the Reagan ticket iirc.

To keep the political theme but maybe sidestep some of the pointless arguing (and supplant it with pointless speculation):
What do you thing the chances are that Lieberman becomes a Republican and time frame for doing so if he does.

Well, there's a whole thread about Adanthar trying and succeeding at making money from it's inefficiencies, so there's that. I think intrade is pretty good, but it's kind of apples and oranges. If I had no information about the election, and I wanted a pretty good prediction without having to evaluate the meaningfulness of a particular predictor, than Intrade would be my first trade. But the reason that Intrade works, presumably, is because those using it are getting information from other sources that they use to try and make money via the market. 538 is one of the better sources, as far as filtering and evaluating data from polls.

Most of Intrade's problems arise from lack of volume in some of the markets though, it may prove to be just as good at answering which of McCain and Obama will win the election. As far as understanding how and why they will win 538 is a better source though.

Intrade is only as reliable as the efficient market theory, imo. Which is a debate I am not prepared to have, nor do I have a strong horse in in any case (but a weak horse that says it is not so great).

a) I disagree with the statement that gold has little intrinsic value, why do you think it costs that much?
b) It doesn't have to be tied to gold. What I mean when I say gold standard is "money backed by more than thin air". More precisely, a one $ bill is nothing more than a certificate to be exchanged at any time for some other item that is worth 1$ and that is held in storage (a bank). Gold just happens to work rather well for this purpose.

No way can i keep up with this thread, but...

Yup, there's exactly no such thing as unbiased in this context. Simply the act of deciding what news to put in the bulletin is a decision which imparts bias.

i used to work in the city (the uk version of wall st), and indeed at lehman brothers, before giving it all up to be penniless

The mess that we're in was caused, most directly, by greed on wall street, but could not have happened without a healthy dose of cooperation from greed amongst the hoi polloi and certainly a lack of action from the government/regulators helped.

tldr passages deleted. Cliff notes: read - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraor...ness_of_Crowds , it's very funny and very true (and 170 years old). The worst thing that governments can do, imo, is be hands-off when times are good but step in when times are bad, but, oh, that's what they always do. When the bubble bursts, it's too late, but no government wants to be the party pooper when times are good.