FUBAR Economics

While I am suffering the effects of yet another sinus infection, I thought I would post this article by Paul Krugman, who takes apart the nonsense peddled by the austerity crowd and was actually debunked a few weeks ago.

It never had any validity anyway; it was another phony intellectual "cover" for the unbridled greed of the economic elites, nothing more and nothing less.

Reinhart-Rogoff lasted longer, even though serious questions about their work were raised early on. As early as July 2010 Josh Bivens and John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute had identified both a clear mistake—a misinterpretation of US data immediately after World War II—and a severe conceptual problem. Reinhart and Rogoff, as they pointed out, offered no evidence that the correlation ran from high debt to low growth rather than the other way around, and other evidence suggested that the latter was more likely. But such criticisms had little impact; for austerians, one might say, Reinhart-Rogoff was a story too good to check.

So the revelations in April 2013 of the errors of Reinhart and Rogoff came as a shock. Despite their paper’s influence, Reinhart and Rogoff had not made their data widely available—and researchers working with seemingly comparable data hadn’t been able to reproduce their results. Finally, they made their spreadsheet available to Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst—and he found it very odd indeed. There was one actual coding error, although that made only a small contribution to their conclusions. More important, their data set failed to include the experience of several Allied nations—Canada, New Zealand, and Australia—that emerged from World War II with high debt but nonetheless posted solid growth. And they had used an odd weighting scheme in which each “episode” of high debt counted the same, whether it occurred during one year of bad growth or seventeen years of good growth.

Without these errors and oddities, there was still a negative correlation between debt and growth—but this could be, and probably was, mostly a matter of low growth leading to high debt, not the other way around. And the “threshold” at 90 percent vanished, undermining the scare stories being used to sell austerity.

The austerity crowd is trying to cover it all up, but to them it is more about ideology than fact anyway.

Too bad Obama still believes in that nonsense.

Austerity Policies Equal Mass Murder

That's no joke, as our federal government, which could do so much to alleviate the suffering of millions of people, prefers to listen to the banksters and not do one goddamned thing about this DEPRESSION out here.

Even though austerity policies are failures and cause all of this suffering, our politicians in D.C. that we supposedly "elect" are embarking on a deliberate policy to force this country into a third world status in some bullshit globalist fantasy that has long since been discredited and debunked:

If suicides were an unavoidable consequence of economic downturns, this would just be another story about the human toll of the Great Recession. But it isn’t so. Countries that slashed health and social protection budgets, like Greece, Italy and Spain, have seen starkly worse health outcomes than nations like Germany, Iceland and Sweden, which maintained their social safety nets and opted for stimulus over austerity. (Germany preaches the virtues of austerity — for others.)

As scholars of public health and political economy, we have watched aghast as politicians endlessly debate debts and deficits with little regard for the human costs of their decisions. Over the past decade, we mined huge data sets from across the globe to understand how economic shocks — from the Great Depression to the end of the Soviet Union to the Asian financial crisis to the Great Recession — affect our health. What we’ve found is that people do not inevitably get sick or die because the economy has faltered. Fiscal policy, it turns out, can be a matter of life or death.

FUBAR Economics

If it weren't for the fact "austerity" policies have created so much human misery, the Reinhart-Rogoff scandal would be hilarious.

Unfortunately, it isn't.

Paul Krugman has been rubbing this in for the past few days.

In a new paper, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff," Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst successfully replicate the results. After trying to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results and failing, they reached out to Reinhart and Rogoff and they were willing to share their data spreadhseet. This allowed Herndon et al. to see how how Reinhart and Rogoff's data was constructed.

They find that three main issues stand out. First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth. Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries. Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries. All three bias in favor of their result, and without them you don't get their controversial result.

They fucked up. They could have published their findings in the National Enquirer, but even that publication would want something to back it up.

This is just a minor blip, however; it won't matter when there are ideologues who insist on screwing over everybody to enrich the few.

The Worst President in American History

You-know-who is hellbent on destroying the New Deal and Great Society in order to help the billionaires and hedge fund crooks who want to steal the money.

He's a piece of shit, that's all there is to it:

A particularly cruel measure would target Social Security, reducing future payments to beneficiaries by using a new formula for calculating adjustments for inflation. Called the “Chained C.P.I.” (in reference to the Consumer Price Index), the change would generate $130 billion in savings and $100 billion in revenue as a result of the impact of the formula change on other government programs. The measure has been long sought by Republicans.

The “chained” formula contains statistical assumptions that lead to a Social Security increase lower than the rate of inflation, even though critics point out that the elderly spend a disproportionate amount on health care and other goods whose prices are rising at a much faster rate.

This proposal for reducing the real income of Social Security recipients needs to be placed in perspective. The median income of Americans over the age of 65 is less than $20,000 year, and nearly 70 percent of those on Social Security rely on these benefits—which average less than $15,000 a year—for more than half their income. The proposed change in inflation adjustments for Social Security would have the effect of driving millions of seniors deeper into poverty.

The fucker doesn't care about seniors. He is more worried about his standing among historians than he is about whether what he is doing is in the best interests of the American people.

A "Democrat" Wages Class Warfare

No matter how much "austerity" measures don't work and won't work in this country, this asshole-in-chief is still bent on implementing them here.

I wish he were run out of Washington and out of the Democratic Party.

Obama and the Democrats continue to cynically pose as opponents of the sequester cuts even as they maneuver with the Republicans to make them permanent. This pretense reached new heights of absurdity in Obama’s press conference Friday and his weekly address to the nation on Saturday.

In the latter, he acknowledged the social impact of the cuts, focusing on the effect on the military and military-related businesses and communities. “Businesses that work with the military will have to lay folks off,” he said, and added that “Hundreds of thousands of Americans who serve their country…will see their wages cut and their hours reduced.”

He noted economists are forecasting that the sequestration will eventually cost more than 750,000 jobs and cut US economic growth by over 0.5 percent.

It'll make the economy even worse with even less demand.

However, this is what the gangsters want to get even more money.

It Wouldn't Surprise Me In the Least

if Bob Woodward is right about the sequestration crap. Obama and the Republicans are one and the same, while the American people will be screwed over again

After all, Obama, despite having a "D" after his name, is actually a tool for Wall Street and billionaire interests and a far right Republican in "Democrat" clothing. Take a look at his outrageous attempts to undermine Social Security and Medicare--he's listening to his buddy Pete Peterson, an avoided enemy of Social Security. Take a look at his attitude toward public education--Bill Gates and Eli Broad OWN Obama and Duncan. Look at his utter disregard for the importance of fixing the economy and widespread joblessness. He's nothing but a neoliberal faker whose backers have successfully infiltrated the Democratic Party to further far right aims. "Austerity" policies are just more discredited Friedmanite bullshit.

I can't stand the man politically because I ALWAYS knew he was a complete and total fraud. I wish Democrats would realize the obvious of what he is. He never should have gotten the Democratic Party nomination to begin with.

Yes, a "Democrat" Came Up With the Idea

of "sequestration" because he is obsessed over the whole nonsensical "austerity" agenda of his backers like Pete Peterson and the Wall Street gangsters who have control over D.C. politics:

Let me repeat: Sequestration was Obama’s idea. So-called entitlement reform is Obama doctrine. Austerity was embedded in the Democratic Party’s agenda under President Obama. More than any other individual, it was Barack Obama who engineered the current disaster scenario. These waves of austerity crises were not inevitable, but they are the inevitable result of President Obama’s calculated statements and actions since Election Day 2008. The Republicans are his partners, not his opponents. The closest thing he has to an opposition – at least on paper – is the Congressional Progressive Caucus, whose two co-chairs introduced a bill that would turn the austerity juggernaut on its head. It’s called the Balancing Act of 2013, and would replace all of the sequestration cuts with new revenues, and then add a $276 billion stimulus to the economy. Needless to say, the progressive bill will get nowhere, not just because of Republican opposition, but because the top Democrat, Barack Obama, wants to go down in history as the smart austerity president. Just as he said he wasn’t opposed to wars, but only to dumb wars – which is why he has built tens of thousands of the smartest drones and smartest bombs ever devised by man. He’s outsmarting what passes for a Left in the United States at every turn. They cheer him as he effectively consummates his grand bargain with the GOP, in a cacophony of manufactured crises, exhausting what little opposition remains. That’s why we at BAR call him the more effective evil.

Note the key sentence: "The Republicans are his partners, not his opponents." People still haven't figured the obvious out.

The STFU Obama Speech

is on tonight, but I don't know if I will bother with it. The man lies so damned much it's pathetic, and he's hellbent on serving his Wall Street masters and make the country even worse off than it's been.

Here is what we have to look forward to:

On Friday, the White House published a list of the most egregious consequences of the domestic spending cuts looming under sequestration, as part of an effort to blame the Republicans for cuts for which both corporate-controlled parties are responsible. The list details the cumulative effect of the cuts, which total nearly $500 billion in domestic spending over the next ten years. Among the cutbacks:

An estimated 600,000 women and children would lose food stamps.
100,000 formerly homeless people would lose their government-financed housing.
Head Start cuts would eliminate early education slots for as many as 70,000 poor children.
Federal support would be eliminated for 7,200 school employees who serve special-needs children.
Job safety and food safety inspectors would face unpaid furloughs.
Federal loans to small businesses would be reduced by $500 million.

President Obama devoted his Saturday radio and Internet address to the sequester, warning of thousands of federal layoffs or furloughs and a “huge blow to middle class families and our economy as a whole” if the cuts took effect.

Etc.

Seriously, Arne Duncan should be impeached for undermining NCLB and Congress with his waivers of NCLB and his forcing even worse "reforms" on the states.

I am surprised nobody in Congress has thought of this.
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Fake Democrat Erskine Bowles is just as rotten a son of a bitch as Arne Duncan.
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This is a nice piece about people riding with Greg LeMond recently where he used to train early in his cycling career.
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Another dumb shit couldn't keep his pants zipped:

Central Intelligence Agency Director David Petraeus has resigned, citing "extremely poor judgment" for having an extramarital affair.

Petraeus told President Barack Obama of the affair on Thursday and offered to resign, a senior official told NBC News. Obama accepted his resignation in a phone call Friday afternoon.

"Yesterday afternoon, I went to the White House and asked the President to be allowed, for personal reasons, to resign from my position," Petraeus said in a letter to CIA colleagues. "After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours."

The woman in question is rumored to be Paula Broadwell, his biographer. She's some twenty years his junior, married, and has two young children.

Too bad it wasn't Arne Duncan, but he's so stupid nobody else would have him.
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Obituary: Original lead singer of the Penguins ("Earth Angel") Cleve Duncan, 77, has died:

Long after the original Penguins broke up, Duncan continued touring with a new version of the group, introducing several generations of fans to a song whose rich background harmonies were almost as indelible as Duncan’s vocal.

“It’s a timeless song,” Duncan said in 1989, 35 years after it was first recorded. “The same way Irving Berlin songs are timeless. People will always want to hear it.”

Duncan admitted to some frustration that he never shared more of the rewards from a song that’s been played millions of times on the radio, but he said being known for singing “Earth Angel” “makes you feel good.”

The Penguins also were never able to follow up with more hits, though they made a string of first-class records like “My Troubles Are Not At An End,” “Devil That I See,” and “Love Will Make Your Mind Go Wild.”

Their “Christmas Prayer” is one of the finest rhythm and blues holiday records, revived every Christmas season.


R

Evil by Any Other Name

Why neoliberal politicians and right-wing "thinkers" and bankrollers are evil:

The greatest coup of the deficit hawks so far has been fostering an alliance with President Barack Obama, who has turned out to be as committed to fiscal austerity as almost any Democrat and more than many Republicans. Obama appointed two of Washington’s deficit hawks, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, to head his bipartisan “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform”. Obama’s true belief in the fiscal austerity “meme” may come from a number of sources: a naturally conservative character, a belief in bipartisanship as an end in itself, a long-term political strategy of protecting his right flank, endorsement of neoliberal principles altogether and perhaps, an interest in graduating to a comfortable post-Presidency mingling with the Washington and Wall Street elites. Overall Obama has governed as a moderate conservative rather than the liberal that his right-wing critics portray him as and that progressives wish he had been. Obama seems entirely in his element satirizing the now marginalized “Left” in the US and is hesitant, surprisingly inarticulate, and a little awestruck when he is attacked from the Right. The deficit hawks’ apparent victory consists not only in having an ideological ally in the White House but furthermore having that ally be the leader of the “left-ward” major political party in the US. This has pacified the resistance to austerity in the US so far.

This prick, meaning Obama, is hellbent on forcing "austerity" on the masses of people to bail out the crooks who tanked our economy.

And this will be the end of the Democratic Party if he does it.

Parasites and Thieves Are Running the Government

and are waging outright class warfare against the rest of us. They call this class warfare "austerity," which we are supposed to give them even more money that they can piss away like they did when they crashed the economy.

When is this shit going to end?

We know we can't trust Obama to do the right thing and reject this garbage that the country is "going broke." It can't by definition.

While our government is forcing poor people to go cold and older folks to go without health care, they’re doing absolutely nothing about the estimated $70-100 billion we lose every year to corporate tax dodging overseas, due to loopholes that have been successfully written into the tax code by corporate lobbyists. There still isn't any legislation on the table that would do something about the $32 trillion that's estimated to be stashed by the 0.001% in overseas, tax-free bank accounts. That money, by the way, is actually more than the combined national debt of both the European Union and the United States.

But by simply passing Sen. Carl Levin’s CUT (Cut Unjustified Tax) Loopholes Act, which would reap $13 billion in new tax revenue every year for a decade by simply closing some of the more egregious loopholes, these major corporations would actually have to pay above a 0% effective corporate tax rate. None of January’s budget cuts would be necessary. If you asked most Americans if they’d rather see their grandparents afford their health care or see Bank of America keep a few billion more in profits, I bet most Americans would go with grandma and grandpa.

I am reading Barlett and Steele's new book about the war against the middle class, Betrayal of the American Dream. It's an update of their previous three books that the two wrote in the early 1990s. One good thing about the book is the authors ditched the suggestion made in one of the earlier books that Social Security should be "means tested." Somebody must have pointed out to them that would basically abolish the program by making it a "welfare" program and undermine public support.

Austerity is a Con

It's all about ideology, not about improving the economy. Those of us who have followed the neoliberal frauds saw through them years and years ago.

Nothing new here:

So the austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs. And this is, of course, exactly the same thing that has been happening in America.

"I don't use it or need it, so why should I pay for it?" That is neoliberalism in a nutshell. They don't believe in anything called the common good.