SOTU, Feb 2013

It's cottonmouth from smoking lots of weeeeeed. Man.

My office is next door to a 3D Printer company. Their phones have been ringing off the hook since Obama mentioned that tech in the State of the Union.

Thin walls, eh?

Heck, the walls in TechShop SF don't even go all the way to the ceiling. ProtoTank (our company) and Type A Machines have an all-encompassing "FrieNDA". We don't talk about the high-tech awesomeness they're plotting on the other side of the wall, and they return the favor.

But given the kind of nerds that make up both companies, it's just a matter of time until one of us builds a desktop trebuchet during a slow day and starts an inter-office siege. Super-bounce-balls away!

Overall my impression was that Liberalism seems exhausted (compare this speech to his second SOTU) and a missed opportunity.

I will concede that the tradition Reagan started by always showing the state of the union in rosy terms is a bad legacy. America has never seen such affluent material lives where obesity not malnutrition is our biggest threat to the national health. Yet despite this, we have a government willing to try to placate our never ending appetites for new "stuff" paid for by someone else. That someone else is the future generations that will have to pay off our $17 trillion debt where just the interest on the debt will push aside all other government spending.

The fault lays mostly on us the citizens not on the politicians we elect. We have the safest workplaces in our history with the most advanced medical care yet have the highest levels of disability. The future of America should be the brightest it's been yet it does not feel like it. We have massive new discoveries of natural gas and oil, largest food production in the world, stable advances in technology, have actual demographic growth unlike Europe, strong defense and constitutional stability.

Instead of taking advantages of our strength we rather bicker on who will receive the largest share of entitlement spoils and enforced equality rather than advancing opportunity and liberty. Yet we remain paralyzed and unable to make the cuts today to prevent the fetal disease from taking us tomorrow.

So instead of facing that hard reality but also the opportunities for rebirth that can come from it we got a rehashing of old speeches and token nods to his specific interest groups not the interests of the Union.

Really? I don't have that impression of the bickering that goes on in the US political debate.

The bickering I witness is in large part about differing view of how the world works.

In one of those views, climate change simply isn't happening, and claims it is are a conspiracy involving Big Government and alarmist scientists.

In one of those views, the earth might possibly be 6000 or so years old, and that proposition is as worthy of treatment as a scientific proposition in the education curriculum as evolution. (If not that, then at least the notion that God had a hand in evolution should also be regarded as a scientific idea within the school system.)

In one of those views, it is better to engage in economic austerity right now while the economy's growth is slow and its performance is below capacity, rather than fostering growth first which will improve the capacity to repay the accrued debt (just because a fast-growing economy generates more revenues pretty much just by growing).

In one of those views, a female body subject to rape won't be subject to pregnancy because it will just shut that whole thing down.

And then there is a worldview that says
- climate change appears to be happening and it is appropriate to believe the great mass of scientists who have been arguing and predicting this;
- evolution is a theory, yes, but a scientifically credible one, and any theological arguments do not belong in the science classroom;
- subjecting a weakly growing economy to austerity measures is likely to make matters worse rather than better;
- rape victims can in fact get pregnant as a result of the rape.

These comments aren't all in regard to the SOTU speech per se, but they are in regard to the meta-bickering that has been going on.

Which leads me to wonder, why exactly have you not been paying attention?

To the extent that liberalism is exhausted, it is exhausted because it is busy fighting off the depredations of a political movement that is, frankly, fucking barbaric. You can rag on the ineffectiveness of liberalism in the current climate all you want, but the simple fact is that most of the political will behind liberalism is being expended trying to stop people who think WOMEN'S BODIES SHUT DOWN RAPE PREGNANCIES.

As liberals, we have to settle for a pathetic unwillingness to investigate, much less prosecute, war crimes in our intelligence services. We have to settle for an inability to put men who defrauded the country out of trillions--and who happily accept literal blood money from drug cartels--in jail where they belong. We have to settle for Gitmo still being open. We have to settle for these things because there are powerful people who want these things to continue, and we don't have the political will to both effect real change and keep goddamn intelligent design out of schools.

To a large extent, we're not going to agree on what needs to be done. You want to cut spending, we want to spend more. I get that, and that's fine. There is room for differing viewpoints. But if you're truly tired of liberalism, present a fucking alternative. Don't make voters choose between liberalism and homophobia.

As for an actual argument about austerity. No matter what no one likes austerity; regardless of when times are bad or when times are good. Every spending area has a passionate special interest and politicians like bringing home the pork. Even if the economy was booming there would be calls to not do any cuts and at most we could hope for is reduction of the growth of government.

The problem is that we have not been doing cuts when the times were good (both parties are guilty) and we are fast approaching the point of no return. Therefore, it would be best in the long term to do this now along with entitlement reform before it becomes too late. We have had the economy grow in the past along with government cuts (look at Calvin Coolidge) so it can be done.

Just because GDP as a whole might shrink due to reduction in government spending that does not mean that the private sectors percentage of GDP will also grow. Doing so will put more money into the private sector and we will stop wasting so much money on the interest on the national debt. In 2012 we paid 220 billion and by 2020 that will be 1 trillion if nothing is done now.

Of course austerity cuts will have to be coupled with entitlement reform, tax reform, and regulation reform. It is too important to do nothing. While I could say more I think this is a good time to stop before we try to cover too much.


In regards to the comments that had nothing to do with the topic at hand nor to my argument

Oh for fuck's sake! Could you please try thinking before typing? Please?

Are you really aware of what you just wrote? Regardless of when times are good or bad? Are you fucking serious?

Austerity when times are bad is the equivalent of taking a sickly patient and sticking leeches all over their body. Are we really back to that?

Who totally governed the country during a major recession.

.... oh, wait ...

Seriously. Fucking seriously. *headshake*

I don't know quite what the fuck this is meant to mean ... but are you saying that if the private sector's share of GDP is growing in a shrinking economy, that's OK? Seriously?

Christ. No wonder the US is in trouble.

And nowhere in my comment did I claim you did. Are we bros now or something?

Why do a cost benefit analysis (of what?) if you've already decided to do nothing?

I'm not saying every Republican believes this. But an endorsed Republican said an utterly ridiculous thing about rape and the fact is endorsed Republicans are prone to saying things about rape that are, well, beserk, to put it kindly.

So now all I can ask is, are you playing dumb or are you actually this stupid?

You think there's no difference between austerity policies in boom times or bust times, as if a doctor ought to prescribe the same treatment to a sick person or a healthy one regardless.

All I'm saying is that the Republicans reveal a consistent pattern of Reality Denial across a wide spectrum of topics and issues, and you've managed to display exactly the same pattern of behaviour while play-acting at being reasonable and rational.

I shall try to rescue this thread from personal insults and return to respectable discourse.

The reason I bring up that we don’t like austerity regardless of the state of the economy is that we have not done cuts to reduce the national debt when times were ideal. Since we as a nation have failed we are quickly approaching the point of no return where the national debt will strangle our economy. It is to the point where we are going to have to roll the dice on our immediate future in order to save our long term future. That is unless we are willing to continue to borrow more, not pay off our debt and accept that in the near future payment on the debt is going to consume all other government spending.

Now I do see hope from this and I wish the President would have been honest about our current trends. There is a transfer of wealth in this nation but it is not from the poor to the rich but from the young to the old. By tackling this issue we can have entitlement reform so that our unfunded liabilities are not 122 trillion. By reducing or eliminating our liabilities would mean that in the long term our austerity cuts would have to be less.

It is also time for regulation reform. Notice that I did not say deregulation but rather it is time to go over the books and remove any duplicate laws, out dated laws, and ones that have no effect or the opposite effect of what was intended. We have to remove barriers of entry that protect the large firms and keeps out new ones. Doing this will help businesses grow which will help the economy which will make austerity easier.

It is also time for us as citizens to make sacrifices that might not be easy but will help us in the long term. To quote Russell Kirk, “Moral decay first hampers and then strangles honest government, regular commerce, and even the ability to take genuine pleasure in the goods of this world.” It is time to stop asking “how can the government help me” and start asking “how can I help society.” We have to start saving again and realizing that forgoing the pleasures of the present will bring greater rewards in the future. That we need to become reengaged in civic institutions and start building the local community again.

So this is just the same Republican policies wrapped up in appeals to "honesty" and "common sense" that ax-grinding partisans have been engaged in whenever they try to sound reasonable since time immemorial.

The need for austerity is predicated on fiscal doom-and-gloom projections that the cost of borrowing will spike dramatically and we need to enact cuts which will hurt real, actual people (who contribute not just the bullshit "votes for goodies" crap we always hear about, but productivity and, yes, tax revenue to government). However the cost to borrow has remained low. Inflation has remained fairly low. The austerity recommended is, of course, never to things like the mortgage-credit or bloated defense spending, but government largess that enables things like poor children to have food to eat.

The so-called transfer of wealth from young to old is what most people call, specifically, government honoring its obligations to citizens who paid into Social Security for their entire lifetimes and now would like to collect the promised benefits. More broadly, it's part of what's known as the social compact between government and the people who empower it. The idea that Social Security is perpetually on its last legs and close to collapse any minute, absent massive reform--that would, of course, dramatically cut already-promised-benefits and harm those who don't have multimillion dollar retirement savings or investments--is largely heard from the conservative lawmakers and policy advisors who (a) continually raid SS payments to pay for other government obligations, (b) resist any effort to better fund the program to put it on a more sound fiscal footing, and (c) are wholly committed to a government that either provides no safety net or the barest one worthy of the name, all in the name of cutting taxes to even greater historical lows than they're already at.

In short, the problem with Social Security currently is that the Republican tactic of starve the beast worked, and too well at that. Republicans have internalized the message of constant tax cuts for so long that they now argue for tax cuts as a good unto themselves, for vague and specious reasons that are not backed by any real concrete economic data (don't get me started on the Laffer curve, it's just a fucking curve of diminishing returns applied to tax revenues, not some mathematical proof that low taxes ramps up economic growth or that they pay for themselves on a long enough timeline). And in arguing for such cuts, they have to cut spending--as the W. Bush administration taught all of us, as painfully as possible--to a commensurate level to offset such cuts.

The idea of "starve the beast" was born when Republicans realized they couldn't attack the Great Society, much less the New Deal head on. Why? Because voters approve of these programs in overwhelming numbers. Luckily, voters also approve of lower taxes. And just as Republicans love to accuse Democrats of "buying votes" with government "goodies" they're guilty of buying votes with lower taxes. Because "buying votes" is basically what politicians are supposed to do in a democracy. Democratically elected officials get elected by promising that they'll enact the will of their constituents, so whenever I hear someone talking about buying votes, I like to recast it in my brain as "I hate that poor people can vote for politicians who promise government will take steps to give them more opportunity".

Starve the beast! Right! Back on track!

Not being able to dismantle the New Deal and Great Society programs head on, mainly because voters don't buy into some lofty bullshit about the intrinsic good of smaller government (maybe because people too poor to buy boots don't have a lot of success grabbing the non-existant straps and pulling themselves up), Republicans became the party that peddles tax cuts for all things. And when the natural result of such policy--a broke-ass, heavily indebted government--finally made itself manifest, now we have to cut all those programs that voters like or raise taxes, a choice specifically designed to be unappealing on all fronts.

Even as terrible as things are, voters have overwhelming continued to support government action to stimulate the economy, assist people struggling through the recession, and--above all--levy the tax increases necessary to continue to fund such behavior and begin to right our budgetary ship. Even with "the beast" starved and its opponents endlessly crying its death knell, the majority of people would rather bring it back to life than kill it once and for all (to strangle a metaphor).

The fact is that these horseshit appeals to "common sense" and "honesty about our situation" are just pretty--and above-all reasonable sounding--wrapping for the same pro-business/wealth, small-government, quasi-libertarian-but-mostly-conservative-business-as-usual bullshit that wants to rollback government social spending, cut taxes dramatically, and leave the poor and old to starve in the streets if they can't find their magic bootstraps.

The worst thing about you, personally abbazappa (and you'll note none of the above or what follows is name-calling or personal attacks, they're specifically engaged with your ideas, and above all, the rhetoric they're cloaked in), is that you present this stuff as though it's something other than it is, cloak yourself in moral indignation and superiority, and rush to be all offended that every one doesn't agree with you. You're serving warmed-over-shit and offended that no one's hailing your culinary genius. If Republicans actually had even half the courage of their convictions, I'd disagree with them just as vehemently, but at least respect their position. Instead we get the creation of an entire alternate reality (as TFOK so wonderfully elucidated) in which their positions are right, and evidence to the contrary is ignored, suppressed, or discarded. And then that counter-reality gets presented as some sensible middle ground position instead of the obvious end result of policies knowingly enacted with this exact end goal in mind, with a radical reversal and dismantling of the social compact as the ultimate end.

As MFB said, if liberalism sounds tired these days, it's probably in large part because it has to keep expending so much energy battling phantasms constructed by conservatives to justify their worldview, which is increasingly separated from and hostile to empirical reality.

Now, you wanted discourse, this is what discourse looks like. You have something to offer to counter what I've said here, by all means, throw the hell down. If all you have on offer is more "appeals to common sense" and chicken-little-sky-is-falling statements about SSI and the deficit which have been thoroughly debunked on this message board and all around the internet, please, just skip the whining about "personal attacks" and go back to SG Conservatives. But I suspect you'll just try and counter with some petulant variation of "tl;dr".

More fucking denialist nonsense.

There is ABSOLUTELY a transfer that has occurred from poor to rich. It's absolutely fucking mindbuggering that you would try to pretend otherwise in total denial of the factual evidence to the contrary.

The transfer from young to old is far more complex than you imply. The existence of debt in and of itself is not evidence that wealth is being transferred away from future generations to the present. If the economy is being primed to actually grow, then that creates wealth for future generations and creates the means by which the debt can be serviced/repaid.

(The Bush tax cuts and war expenditures were particularly bad examples of borrowing to improve future growth prospects but let's put that little bit of Republican awkwardness aside, shall we? Except to note that I was on these boards all through that period and I don't think ANY conservative commentator here seemed to be worried at all about the implications for the debt at the time.)

The transfer from young to old is, as I say, more complex than your frame of reference enables you to contemplate, and has to do with access to education, healthcare and affordable housing and the provision of productive infrastructure. All that do-gooder liberal nonsense, in other words.

Stupidity, stupidity, stupidity.

Seriously. To claim that there is no transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich is to deny, among other things, that the 2007 crash even happened at all.

He does raise the very valid point that our plutocracy is taking on a gerontocratic bend. This is a point worthy of exploring. In many cases, the rich are the rich because they are old, and the deck is stacked to allow people to slowly but reliably accumulate wealth over time, at the expense of the inexperienced and the naive. I.e., the young.

The financial debacle of recent years is somewhat tangential to this overarching trend... but not entirely tangential. Young, naive home buyers take a risk. Old, established bankers also take risks. Both make mistakes. The bankers are let off the hook, the buyers aren't. Yes, there's a trend that wealth gets used to protect itself, and the bankers are the established wealthy party. But the primary use for these investment vehicles was for retirement funds to care for the old. There are stronger examples you could point to, but it's a valid one.

The aged are very, very risk averse. The young always have their health and energy to fall back upon. If a young person loses their fortune, they can start over. The aged just have to rig the rules such that they have no risk.

Actually, there's a brilliant bit of fiction on this point: "Holy Fire" by Bruce Sterling. Its so loaded with concepts as to lean away from poetry and prose at times, but it's a good read once you can get into it, all the same.

Holy Fire is an amazing read.

Yes it is, except I don't see that as being his point.

I see his point as being that debt, by definition, takes from future repayers and "gifts" to current borrowers.

By this logic, when I take out a mortgage over several decades, I am enriching my current self at the expense of impoverishing my somewhat older self.

Worse, he exaggerates it into a false dichotomy: either "Austerity now!" (I can hear George Costanza shouting this out loud), or an inevitable and terrible Ponzi scheme:

It's actually possible in principle for a government to roll over debt, staying in debt but stabilising it. Whether this is a good idea is a separate issue, but as a point of simple principle, a government "lives forever" as a financial entity, so it never faces a time horizon by the end of which it needs to be debt-free.

This is one of the many reasons why comparing public finances to a household's finances is misleading.

(I was contemplating on writing a newswire article to try and explain all this stuff coherently. Maybe I need to do that, to stop all this stupidity in its tracks. I wish.)

Isn't the interest rate on new US debt competitive with inflation anyway?

The interest rate is so low it's hard to imagine a better time to borrow to fund actual useful things.

Highly needed.

I have never understood this comparison, particularly when it comes from people who also believe in less taxation. That's like saying that a family in debt shouldn't try to find better paying jobs. It's nonsense!

It's more like saying a family in debt should quit their jobs. If, of course, the analogy were accurate. Madness.

+1

My understanding is that our rates are negative when adjusted for inflation - meaning that lenders are paying us to hold their money.

I just read this and it seemed relevant:
How to Worry About the Deficit: (1) Don't; (2) Wait a Few Years; (3) Then Worry About Healthcare Costs

TFOK- I keep meaning to tell you how much I enjoyed you on this thread!