It's sickening that David Brooks makes a better case for the Democrats than anyone else does

We need companies that make things like cars in this country. Although we need them to make better cars.

We did NOT need to save health insurance companies. They make nothing. They do not provide health care. And they do their best to avoid paying for health care, even after you have paid them for years.

There is NO VALID REASON to save that corrupt industry. Let alone FORCE everyone to buy from them. Every other civilized nation on the planet knows this to be the case. Including our neighbors to the north. And those other two countries we consider our "best friends"

We did not need to save the corrupt "too big to fail" banks of Wall Street. It would have made more sense to let those criminals fall, and instead save the smaller banks which the criminals have cannibalized since then, courtesy of taxpayer money.

Sorry Mr. Brooks. Apparently that jacket ain't working as well as you thought.

I don't think I've ever agreed with anything you've posted.

Good work! :hi:

If you really want to find some of that though, I can suggest a forum where just about every post is dripping with it. Literally, given some of the avatars.

I think you know which one I mean.

Have a nice evening, Mr. Moran :)

I sometimes wonder if you intend what you write to be flipped before processing. This beats 1984-type argument.

Can you roll over too?

BTW if you find an avatar that is nasty you should alert on it.

Its good to have a hobby.

It isn't at all. Health insurance companies would have continued to exist and do well even without reform. The new customers and new regulations basically cancelled each other out in terms of profits. Without reform, the employer market (by far the biggest market) would be little different than today. The bill mainly affects a small percentage of the market (the individual market).

Without reform, insurers would have likely wound down their individual market businesses or kept them to a minimum. The employer market would have continued to do well.

In fact, the fact that HCR was not a bailout in any sense is so obvious that it should go without saying. If it was a bailout, the the stock process of the insurers would have tanked as we got closer to the election of Scott Brown.

Instead, Wellpoint hit a 2 year HIGH on January 19th, 2010, the very DAY of Scott Brown's election. The day when HCR looked doomed to everyone. Some bailout.

No reason for a criminal health insurance industry. That was actual reform. The public option, which would have set up a system comparable to that, and allowed the corporations to compete with it, would have been the reasonable compromise, and indeed that is what Barack Obama campaigned on, and said would happen after he became President.

Under that fair competition, the insurance corporations would have had the choice to clean up their act, or go out of business when everyone chose the public option. And that is exactly why the industry whores had to buy people like Baucus, Conrad, Nelson, etc. to make sure that never happened.

It's a disgrace that those bastards were allowed to win.

Or not (since it is nothing but religion that can't be defended factually).

And a public option would have barely touched the insurance industry. The public option Obama campaigned on was only for the tiny INDIVIDUAL market. Not for the giant employer market.

FFS, he's not making a case for Democrats. He's making a case for Democrats turning into Republicans. Please try to keep up.

I love that last paragraph about how giving a huge bailout to Banks so they could keep their multi-million dollar salaries worked so well. Unbelievable.

He's making a case for Democrats to not play into GOP's hands (like we always do).


There's nothing wrong with being a "pro-growth progressive". Growth helps everyone, including the working class.

:eyes:

And yeah, there is something wrong with being a "pro-growth progressive". It's the same thing that's wrong with being a pro-drilling environmentalist, a pro-war peace candidate, or an anti-marriage-equality "fierce advocate" for gays.

that they couldn't control a city council, much less ever have national political power (and are essentially relegated to posting on message boards). Unfortunately, Republicans (whose policies destroy economic growth, despite their rhetoric) are not so marginalized.

If you do, print out your last post, frame it and leave it to them in your will. They'll love you for it. I promise.

Oh, you also might want to leave them a pic of a dolphin, a sea turtle or a rainforest. Just so they know what they looked like.

Luckily, almost everyone agrees.

Just in case they want to know what the fuck we were thinking.

(again, by a small minority). Their great-great grandkids probably grew up feeling sorry for the people doing the spewing. There will always be a few Luddites in every generation that hunker down waiting for the Malthusian catrosphe.

Or are you just preternaturally incapable of connecting the dots?

are about as credible as Malthus himself.

are about as credible as Malthus himself.

No one said anything about green energy. If you want to hold pro-growth, Chamber of Commerce positions, have at it. You just don't get to call yourself a progressive.

If you're that proud of your views, then own them. It's a conservative, pro-business philosophy that has many followers. Inventing phrases like "pro-growth progressive" is pretty much why Orwell had to write 1984.


(And, btw, you may want to review your Malthus. He predicted his "catastrophe" would take place over either generations or centuries. Or is it your position that we have fewer resource pressures today than we did when Malthus was alive?)

I never said anything about the Chamber of Commerce. Republicans who push for "pro-growth" policies are just as bad as "progressives" who are anti-economic-growth as a concept. Republican, "pro-growth," cut-taxes-for-the-rich policies stifle growth and aggregate what's left at the top.

If you want to argue against Republican "pro-growth" policies, feel free. Just be sure to bring more bales of straw to construct someone to attack.

And if you want to argue that we are facing a Malthusian crisis, you are going to have to find someone else. I similarly don't tend to argue with creationists or truthers about said topics. It wastes time and lends legitimacy to the idea that they are open to debate.

That's not conservative in the least. :eyes:

made of green cheese. (At least, not about the makeup of the moon.) Debating with them is pointless. They take hard evidence to the contrary as proof of an even wider conspiracy. It is not productive.

I can do that, too! Obviously, you think either the world has infinite resources or that Baby Jeeezus will rapture us all before things get really bad. Which is it?

Now you have put me in the position of having to rec this thread just so more people can see you hand a "Pro-growth Progressive" his head on a platter.

I never claimed people don't have the right to be stupid. Positions don't become legitimate just because they can be stated in English words (despite what some people on this thread think). I would happen to disagree with who is holding which head on said platter (as I would imagine does the non-squeaky-wheel group here), but I don't particularly care to argue about it.

Once again, you have two choices to support your pro-growth fantasy:

1) The Earth has infinite resources

-- or --

2) Baby Jeezus rapture.


C'mon, hand me my head. :eyes:

Growth does not necessarily imply resource consumption. That argument seems to be that we need to move to renewable sources, not that we need to stop growth.

Growth occurs when innovation results in more use with less resources (where resources is defined very broadly, not just from an environmental perspective). For example, a computer no longer is the size of an entire room, and it no longer uses the power of a device that is as big as a room.

Sure, there are more computers now. But even considering that, computers are able to do more and more with less and less. This is just one example.

Sometimes, even though less overall resources are needed, there is a change in the distribution of resources that is negative for those particular resources. Obviously a car is an example of this (where it costs much less in terms of time and money to move somewhere, but this comes partially at the expense of environmental damage).

But this is an indication that fuel is too cheap and not reflecting its true environmental cost. The policy perscription would be to pass something like "cap-and-trade" or a direct carbon tax that would make carbon better reflect its true cost. But it would NOT to be to somehow artifically and directly retard economic growth. Growth (innovation to do more with less resources) is not inherrently a bad thing (it is in fact a good thing), and it has made the standard of living grow dramatically over time.

Republican policies (like their "tricke-down" tax cuts for the rich) are called "pro-growth," but they are not actually pro-growth. It is a logical fallacy to declare growth inherrently bad just because some policies that some people call "pro-growth" are not actually "pro-growth."

Answer me one simple question: when you talk about "growth", what, exactly, is growing?

Where, again, resources is not just defined as environmental resources. It includes time, money (a proxy for other resources), actual materials, energy, etc. When I say "more with less resources," I don't mean EVERY resource is reduced. I mean that the TOTAL SUM of ALL the resources is reduced. There could be a spike in energy at the expense of time (which is what is happening today).

There are indeed some people (a small minority, but more than one or two) that have a view that the world is basically constant, in this sense. There is a direct trade-off between standard of living and energy or some other resource. In other words, they have the idea that "there is no such thing as growth." To them, any "innovation" is simply a direct substition of one resource for another (such as energy for time).

The other camp (the vast majority) believe that it is possible to reduce the total sum of all resources and still do more. That is growth, by definition. We learn how to organize society to improve standards of living, how to organize materials, how to turn raw materials into useful products, and many other things. This knowledge is what growth is. One possible future example of this would be figuring out how to use the practically limitless power of the Sun productively. This would require an initial (constant) amount of non-renewable resources to develop, but would not require a significant amount of non-renewable resources to be sustainable.

If you took the first camp (the "no-growth" camp) to the extreme, they would basically say that any society more advanced than the Olmec is simply due to substituting time for energy, and that (therefore) when non-renewable energy "runs out," any society more advanced than the Olmec is not sustainable.

Even most people in the "no-growth" camp would disagree with the above. But by disagreeing with the above, they implicitly concede that it is possible to grow in knowledge of how to do more with less total resources.

So at that point, the difference between the two camps isn't philosophical. The difference is in degree. The people in the "no-growth" camp believe that there is essentialy a "cap" on human knowledge, That any future growth is "fake" (because it is just resource substitution), because we have hit that "cap."

I would wholeheartedly disagree with that position (as would most people).

Hey, I'm pro-growth, too! I want my potted loquat tree to keep growing! Wow, I'm a conservative and I didn't even know it.

The other camp (the vast majority) believe that it is possible to reduce the total sum of all resources and still do more. That is growth, by definition

No, that is not "growth, by definition". Economic growth is defined as an increase in the GDP, measured by either output, income or expenditures. Nothing is said about what resources are consumed to achieve that growth. GDP gives the same value to mountaintop removal as it does to a cure for cancer. Hell, most common metrics probably value raping the environment more, since reducing human suffering is usually bad for business.

Now, if you're advocating that we need to change our accepted economic metrics to a system that promotes a more sustainable society, then you and I are in violent agreement. But that position is not, by any stretch of the imagination, anywhere close to "pro-growth".

Of course if you want to look at the definition of growth relative to money, it would be defined as an increase in the GDP. I am not disagreeing with that at all.

I am just looking at growth with the understanding that money is defined as a proxy for real things. I am bypassing money and defining growth in terms of the real things that money represents. Anything defined by a proxy can be simultaneously and consistenly be defined by looking past the proxy.

I never said ALL growth is sustainable. For example, in the case of cars, the time+energy SUM is reduced, but energy is increased. That is obviously not sustainable if we only consider non-renewable resources. But nevertheless, the sum of time and energy is reduced. This results in growth (an increase in GDP).

I also stated that growth is not DEFINED as resource substition. In other words, there is such thing as growth that is NOT resource substition. In the end, as we deplete a certain resource, there will be less growth achieved by substituting the depeleted resource for some other resource, and more growth achieved by learning how to do without the depeleted resource. To the extent that the market does not think long-term enough, government policy (such as a carbon tax) can help society realize the real long-term cost of a resource in ways that markets alone can't. As they say, our yet-to-be-born children and grandchildren do not send market signals that force companies to think about the long term.

Really, this is Econ 101. You are free to promote your own nonstandard metrics but then you are -- by definition -- NOT pro-growth. Period.

Just like you can define a dollar in different ways that mean exactly the same thing, you can define growth in different ways that mean exactly the same thing.

"A candy costs a dollar" is the same as saying a candy costs 100 cents. Likewise, a definition of growth in terms of money can be identical to a definition of growth in terms of what money is a proxy for.

And no, your subscription to "Lucky" doesn't count.

You are, once again, spewing nonsense. GDP is not about "money". It's about production, income or expenditures, depending on the method used. Those things may be measured in dollars, yen or francs, but they are expressly not money**. The fact that you think I'm saying something different means that you don't have a basic understanding of what GDP means.


You can talk about all the innovation you want, but as long as things like the BP oil disaster *improve* our GDP -- our metric of economic growth -- we will be on the downhill slide to disaster. Now you're recommending we use a different metric, which is exactly what many progressive economists recommend. OK -- now stay with me here -- if "growth" is defined in one standard way by every economist in the world, and you are advocating that we work for something different from that, you are NOT pro-growth. It's simply not possible, by definition.




** the financial markets make this statement a bit more complicated, but I'm intentionally leaving that alone for the purposes of this discussion. It doesn't change the core of the argument at all.

What does "market value" reflect? What does it mean for something to be "valuable" to a market? Could it possibly mean it saves people time? Perhaps it involves a resource substitution (or reduction in a sum of "resources" relative to life without the product or service) that a user finds "valuable?"

Sheesh. What I am saying is not difficult.

Suffice it to say, you need to entertain the possibility that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue. Here's a good place to start: http://www.davidkorten.org/NewEconomyBook


What I want you to address is this:




How can you say you're pro-growth when the thing that we're growing is a metric that reacts positively to war and ecological disaster? Are you in favor of growing that metric or not? You seem advocate that we adopt a different metric, which would mean you disagree with our current growth metric... which would mean you are NOT pro-growth.


Sheesh. What I am saying is not difficult.

Yes, some activities that cause environmental damange can (in the short term) increase growth, as I have said in practically every post about the issue in this thread.

Am I going to throw out the entire metric because it isn't perfect, and ignore the positive correlation between standard of living and growth (that has been very strong through most of our history)? No. Just because a metric is not perfect does not mean it should be thrown out. Likewise, just because I don't want a metric thrown out does not mean I favor activities that damage the environment. (In fact, I obviously agree with something like a cap-and-trade program or a carbon tax that would disincentivize such damage.)

Agreeing that economic growth as a concept is a good thing does not imply that EVERY activity that improves growth is a good activity.

There are some people here that are against growth in general, even growth caused by innovations sprung from green energy. I obviously disagree with those people (as does a vast majority). If your entire point of this thread is that activities that cause growth include some bad activities, I have addressed that above and in many other posts in this thread.

There are many positive correlations with growth, not just your first-world standard of living. Environmental degradation, labor abuse, income inequality are all positively correlated with growth.

If all you care about is being able to afford the next bauble at Best Buy, then you're pro-growth, but you're certainly not progressive (getting back to the topic at hand). Again, you can't have it both ways: you either favor the traditional definition of growth, but then you're not progressive; or you re-define growth to make it progressive and you're not pro-growth.

Again, this shouldn't be that hard.

I already explained how that is wrong, and now we're going in circles.

n/t

Think about it.

Otherwise, not so much.

think about it.

The only thing worse than a neocon is a neocon enabler.

and didn't work any more than this column does made him hungry for brown rice?

Maybe if he still ate it, he wouldn't be so full of shit.

Exhibit: "First, we’re going to have the same old tax debate. We’re going to not extend the Bush tax cuts on the rich. The Republicans will blast us for killing growth and raising taxes as they did in 2000 and 2004. "

The problem, David, is that you pinheads always get it wrong. Tax hikes on the plutocrats result in money being freed up for infrastructure investments and more social spending which in turn provide the structure for the next bunch of businesses and help the present ones flourish by providing demand for goods and services. Got that, plastic hippie? Tax hikes on the rich GROW the economy. Tax cuts on plutocrats SHRINK the economy.

Damn, right wingers are thick as planks not to have noticed what actually happened over the last 30 years instead of living quarter to quarter and chasing the pot of gold under a right wing rainbow.

On edit: That idiotic quote is about as far as I read, which seems farther than the OP did.

A foundation for the future...where is the leader that can get us there? I'm still waiting...

when one has to resort to the likes of David Brooks, whatever argument they might have had is pointless or lost.

I am sure he throws in some punches somewhere.