That's why I said IF they go along with any stupid thing HE does....also....I was clearly talking about Republicans, who are much better at being united and playing follow the leader.

Because she hired Shultz as quid quo pro for clearly "cheating" (flagrantly being biased, contrary to the conditions of the job and repeated statements to the contrary) to steal the nomination for Clinton, she's corrupt. Beyond that, you've gone into ridiculousness with your basketball analogy. There aren't ethics rules in basketball, or a duty to serve your fans ethically, or a duty to be nice to your opponent, or a way to fight over a ruling that he fouled another player....and there's instant redress for a foul.
This is just one more instance, the latest in a never ending string, showing her contempt for the rules and laws, and showing that she rewards breaking the rules if done for her benefit. That's reason for disqualification in my eyes.
You are welcome to your opinion. I strongly disagree, and your insistence that she's the best candidate, contrary to all evidence and strong public opinion, is why Trump will win. Thanks a bunch.

We wouldn't know if Bush was worse than Clinton until after her presidency. I contend you can't have a whit of an idea how she would operate, as her positions change with the wind and she'll do whatever suits her on the day she makes a decision, not the right thing, not what she said she would do yesterday.

So you rather go to a dentist that already destroyed several of your healthy teeth, than to a dentist who didnt show what he will do yet?

Your analogies suck as always. Next time Ill log in before reading comments...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/opinion/campaign-stops/a-week-for-all-time.html?emc=edit_th_20160617&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=40977923

Golden quote:
"In this week of trial and tragedy, Trump showed us how he would govern — by fear, by intimidation, by lies, by turning American against American, by exhibiting all the empathy of a sociopath. Seal this week. Put it in a time capsule. Teach it. History will remember. But come November, will we?"

By the way, I've stayed out of this extremely boring back and forth. There was nothing to be gained by weighing in. It finally has come to a blessed end, just as this op-ed was published in the New York Times.

So I'll say it again, since this video is my contribution to the Sift and I am claiming final word. I may not be accorded it, but I am claiming it.

It is a stone hard fact that eligible does not equal fit. A brain-damaged accident victim with the right birth certificate, with the right age, is eligible to be president. That person is not fit to be president. This is logic. It just is. You can ignore the crystalline beauty of the fact of this analogy and have a fine time talking around it. Doesn't change the fact that Ken Burns is right, Timothy Egan is right, Mitt Romney, both Bushes, Meg Whitman, and the Republican strategist who is quoted in this op-ed are all right.

Trump is unfit for the Presidency.

Such a perfect analogy of two people in today's society with opposing viewpoints. Meanwhile, I'm the person draping the meat and laughing at them both.

@Babymech , that is one brilliant analogy.

Black lives matter.

NO NO NO, all lives matter!

What? Who was saying that all lives don't matter??!!!!

I'm going to use that in the future,

Because that is it. Right there.

To restate it in a way that @newtboy might approve:

Women's lives matter.

Men's lives matter.

Feminist = women's lives matter.

Men's Right Movement = men's lives matter.

The Constitution = all lives matter. (In a perfect world.)

PS There are separatist, angry nutters in the Men's Rights Movement. Doesn't mean that their goal is wrong in concept. An example of that is parental rights. What a pendulum swing that topic has gone through over the decades. First men own the children and women have no rights. Then it was women were blindly seen as the "best" to take care of the kids and men had no rights. And after legal pushback, there are plenty of joint custody agreements out there.

Women's lives matter. Yep.

That chemo analogy is brilliant, I like it.

But I'm cautiously optimistic about what a dose of Trump-chemo could do for the US. For him to accomplish anything truly apocalyptic, he'd need a lot of help. I don't think he'd get it -- military might balk at his orders, legislature can utterly ignore him, etc. etc.

...Or, it could all go horribly wrong. But like I said, I'm cautiously optimistic.

Please stop pretending the entire farming industry practices the worst possible practices. It's not true and you know it. Yes, those practices do happen, but there are alternatives where the animals enjoy better than natural lives under the care of their farmers. It's analogous to saying no one should have dogs because puppy mills are horrendous places that should be eradicated.
My eggs come from free range chickens with windows in their roomy coop, and they never get turned into meat when they stop laying, nor do male chicks get chipper shredded.
Egg laying hens and milk cows do not get turned into meat for human consumption.
Many dairy farms do not practice ANY of the methods you claim.

If you call all farmers murderers and torturers, and all their customers accomplices, you have called all non vegans murderers and torturers.

Go to the butcher.
Inuit eat meat because it's all they have. Same with many Maasi, who survive on milk and blood from their cattle with no other resource to exploit. Pretty damn good and logical reason IMO, not starving.
I'm waiting on that video.

Couldn't (shouldn't?) somebody make an android / iOS app that has permissions to force turning on GPS tracking, dials 911 and lets the user talk as normal, and uses text to speech to repeat the lat/long coordinates from the GPS at a low volume every 15-30 seconds or something?

That wouldn't require a technological standard -- from the 911 dispatch perspective, it is all just analog / audio information. It would require people to download/install a 3rd party app, which isn't great since most people don't exactly plan ahead for emergencies like that. But, if it worked well enough and was unobtrusive enough, Google/Apple would probably be well served to adopt it as a standard feature of Android/iOS.

That Back to the Future analogy was brilliant.

I get your point, but I think it should be 'Procedure A will cost you $______....assuming there are no complications."
I actually must disagree about your analogy of the car...because it is like taking your car to a shop but not knowing exactly what's wrong...chances are the price they quote for the service they THINK will solve the problem won't be the final price because they're just guessing at what they'll have to do...they can't KNOW there won't be rusted bolts or other damage that's only visible after taking the timing cover off. That said, they CAN give you a quote for taking the timing cover off, and if pressed, for replacing the cracked block if that's behind it. Hospitals absolutely refuse to estimate, or to give a solid price for a specific service. I think that's the big problem, as it allows them to charge you one price and me another, and insurance another, Medicare another, etc. It's the floating price scheme that's unconscionable, especially for services that are life and death when you can't say "no thanks". It allows them to 'serve' you THEN tell you the aspirin they gave you costs $800. That's unfair by any reasoning.

His analogies are hyperbolic. And the United States is not a democracy? WTF? I wanna punch this turd in the face!

Overpriced? Definitely. But turd? no chance. F-35's would be covering other F-35's. In the unlikely case of someone getting in that close. As soon as an enemy plane (somehow magically gets by all defenses and sensors) pops up behind a fellow pilot, they'd be getting shot down by another F-35.

You might have a valid point with the electronic warfare, but it comes with it's own disadvantages. For example as soon as someone starts jamming, they appear hostile (or atleast "unknown")to even their own friendly forces. So it has to be used appropriately. Jamming also only works at certain ranges, and once you are close enough there are ways to get around it.
Jamming also means that you're broadcasting your own position. It definitely makes things harder for the enemy, but it's not a show stopper.

Continuing the sniper analogy. If for some reason the sniper was alone and not part of a combined force, and someone did sneak up on him with a sword then he might be in trouble. Yet do you see snipers being trained with swords in the military? No, because it's so unlikely to happen. But still they carry a knife just in case. As does the F-35. Missiles that shoot almost backwards and a cannon in case sensors fail.


These 40 year old pieces of shit you are talking about are flying at the limits of physics for human pilots by the way

Well, cheers for sticking with it anyway, I really appreciate it.

It's a one hour talk on the deficit in particular, and most of what she says is based on MMT principles that would add another 5 hours to her talk if she were to explain them. With neoclassical economics, you can sort of jump right in, given how they are taught at schools and regurgitated by talking heads and politicians, day in and day out. MMT runs contrary to many pieces of "common sense" and since you can't really give 10 hour talks everytime, this is what you end up with – bits and pieces that require previous knowledge.

I'd offer talks by other MMT proponents such as William Mitchell (UNSW), Randy Wray (UMKC) or Michael Hudson (UMKC), but they are even less comprehensible. Sorry. Eric Tymoigne provided a wonderful primer on banking over at NEP, but it's long and dry.

Since I'm significantly worse at explaining the basics of MMT, I'm not even going to try to "weave a narrative" and instead I'll just work my way through it, point by point.

@notarobot

"Let's address inequality by taking on debt to increase spending to help transfer money to large private corporations."

You don't have to take on debt. The US as the sole legal issuer of the Dollar can always "print more". That's what the short Greenspan clip was all about. Of course, you don't actually print Federal Reserve Notes to pay for federal expenses. It's the digital age, after all.

If the federal government were to acquire, say, ten more KC-46 from Boeing, some minion at the Treasury would give some minion at the Fed a call and say "We need $2 billion, could you arrange the transfer?" The Fed minion then proceeds to debit $2B from the Treasury's account at the Fed (Treasury General Account, TGA) and credits $2B to Boeing's account at Bank X. Plain accounting.

If TGA runs negative, there are two options. The Treasury could sell bonds, take on new debt. Or it could monetise debt by selling those bonds straight to the Fed – think Overt Monetary Financing.

The second option is the interesting one: a swap of public debt for account credits. Any interest on this debt would be transfered straight back in the TGA. It's all left pocket, right pocket, really. Both the Fed and the Treasury are part of the consolidated government.

However, running a deficit amounts to a new injection of reserves. This puts a downward pressure on the overnight interest rate (Fed Funds Rate in the US, FFR) unless it is offset by an increase in outstanding debt by the Treasury (or a draw-down of the TT&Ls, but that's minor in this case). So the sale of t-bonds is not a neccessity, it's how the Treasury supports the Fed's monetary policy by raising the FFR. If the target FFR is 0%, there's no need for the Treasury to drain reserves by selling bonds.

Additionally, you might want to sell t-bonds to provide the private sector with the ability to earn interest on a safe asset (pension funds, etc). Treasury bonds are as solid as it gets, unlike municipal bonds of Detroit or stocks of Deutsche Bank.

To quote Randy Wray: "And, indeed, treasury securities really are nothing more than a saving account at the Fed that pay more interest than do reserve deposits (bank “checking accounts”) at the Fed."

Point is: for a government that uses its own sovereign, free-floating currency, it is a political decision to take on debt to finance its deficit, not an economic neccessity.

"Weimar Republic"

I'm rather glad that you went with Weimar Germany and not Zimbabwe, because I know a lot more about the former than the latter. The very, very short version: the economy of 1920's Germany was in ruins and its vastly reduced supply capacity couldn't match the increase in nominal spending. In an economy at maximum capacity, spending increases are a bad idea, especially if meant to pay reparations.

Let's try a longer version. Your point, I assume, is that an increase in the money supply leads to (hyper-)inflation. That's Quantity Theory of Monetary 101, MV=PY. Amount of money in circulation times velocity of circulation equals average prices times real output. However, QTM works on two assumptions that are quite... questionable.

First, it assumes full employment (max output, Y is constant). Or in other terms, an economy running at full capacity. Does anyone know any economy today that is running at full capacity? I don't. In fact, I was born in '83 and in my lifetime, we haven't had full employment in any major country. Some people refer to 3% unemployment as "full employment", even though 3% unemployment in the '60s would have been referred to as "mass unemployment".

Second, it assumes a constant velocity of circulation (V is constant). That's how many times a Dollar has been "used" over a year. However, velocity was proven to be rather volatile by countless studies.

If both Y and V are constant, any increase in the money supply M would mean an increase in prices P. The only way for an economy at full capacity to compensate for increased spending would be a rationing of said spending through higher prices. Inflation goes up when demand outpaces supply, right?

But like I said, neither Y nor V are constant, so the application of this theory in this form is misleading to say the least. There's a lot of slack in every economy in the world, especially the US economy. Any increase in purchases will be met by corporations with excess capacity. They will, generally speaking, increase their market share rather than hike prices. Monopolies might not, but that's a different issue altogether.

Again, the short version: additional spending leads to increased inflation only if it cannot be met with unused capacity. Only in an economy at or near full capacity will it lead to significant inflation. And even then, excess private demand can easily be curbed: taxation.

As for the Angry Birds analogy: yeah, I'm not a fan either. But all the other talks on this topic are even worse, unfortunatly. There's only a handful of MMT economists doing these kinds of public talks and I haven't yet spotted a Neil deGrasse Tyson among them, if you know what I mean.

Who is this woman and why did I give her an hour of my time?

I listened to the whole thing.

I don't disagree with everything she said. She's right that supply side tricklenomics doesn't really work that well, and she does a good job outlining problems. But the narrative she weaves is all over the place when she starts talking about solutions. "Let's address inequality by taking on debt to increase spending to help transfer money to large private corporations." (I'm paraphrasing.) Increasing debt transfers power to the lender. Will they borrow from big banks? The Rothschilds? China? What's that quote? "Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."

And "lets pay our debts by just printing more money." What kind of solution is that? The Weimar Republic called. They'd like to have a word with you about hyper-inflation.

And her "angry birds" analogy was insufferable.