Somebody stop that old man...he's going to use up all the rice, that has to last a full year. We can use that folding shovel...defend the rice!

The butler
in the caboose
with the Shovel

Nice cast, but pretty underwhelming trailer.

Hilarious. Guy has no clue how to taste food. He can only shovel.

No...I do not accept that voting for overtly racist bigot was an acceptable thing to do, no matter how disillusioned you are. I fully understand being totally pissed off at our system, I -am- one of those. But shitting in your bed is still an asinine thing to do, and I'll call a spade a fucking shovel every time.

I feel for liberals, we don't -have- a liberal party any more. We have a corporate right-wing party, and a corporate whack-job party. Those of us who understand how the world works have nowhere to go in the establishment parties. So leave the establishment parties. Throwing a tantrum and voting for one of them only proves they were right in thinking they could get away with it.

In truth, the establishment felt Trump was a lesser threat to the rich than Sanders was, that's why we had the choice we had forced upon us. Had more folks had the courage of their convictions, we -could- have seen the first third-party president, or at least enough support that there was some hope to see a change in one of the two parties. Now...now we'll see the same thing next time, and the time after that, and over and over.

Sanders was an outstanding chance to break the two-party system. No other candidate out there has the decades of reputation he has built, and there won't be another for at least 15-20 years. And power will continue to accrue to the corporate world for those two decades, it'll never be this possible again in my lifetime.

Congratulations! Your video, Crankin' Up the 3-String Shovel Guitar, has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 4 Badge!

Your video, Crankin' Up the 3-String Shovel Guitar, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Congratulations! Your video, Man Gets Payback After Neighbor Steals Shovel, has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 45 Badge!

Your video, Man Gets Payback After Neighbor Steals Shovel, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

wow, was the perfectly placed shovel and water basin part of the kid's plan? He really understands applied physics well for his age.

You remind me of Raleigh, whom I quote as follows...

You never studied your Holy Homework. That's two capital H's there. All the rest are lowercase in any fucking case.

Supreme Court? You are not the fucking supreme court of anything except hell.

For the next 10,000 years you will shovel your shit and eat it because you're on repeat motherfucker and it just started backwards and you can't do a fuckin' thing about it.

The public are gonna take back from you everything you took away from them you motherFUCKER!

Pedophile Bill Clinton?! Based on what? Dead bodies?!

While you are completely making things up, Trump said publicly that most Mexicans coming over the border are drug dealers and rapists. I wonder when faced with a choice between them, which negatives will Latinos focus on. Or if you are a woman, will you focus on Bill Clinton's negatives or the actual GOP candidate saying only the woman should be punished for getting an abortion?

If you honestly believe the BS you are shoveling, prepare to be shocked when Trump gets crushed should he get nominated.

In Communist Russia, Snow Shovel You.

What, too soon?

@radx @enoch @eric3579

For one thing, give the executive or legislative power over the printing press in a crisis and they will not willingly give that power up and end up abusing it. For another, if you're simply printing money to spend then you depreciate and inflate your currency commensurately, at least in the long term. Relying heavily on this is the kind of thing that Venezuela does. There's a reason that governments instead take on their fiscal spending as debt. On that I would say, I've also become much more skeptical of fiscal stimulus in general but particularly in corrections or recessions. I'm okay with automatic stabilizers (unemployment benefits, the largely limitless kind with strings attached we have here in Australia) but not so much direct fiscal stimulus.

The fundamental issue to me is large, even extremely large fiscal spending will not affect business confidence levels of economic conditions. There is some fiscal multiplier effects (the multiple of the effect on national income over the spending injection by the government) but the worse economic conditions are, the lower this will be. Also, yes with say infrastructure spending, you're creating immediate jobs. Problem is these are in no way permanent jobs and simply pushes the can down the road on them finding new employment. Better to provide unemployment benefits and training to get them into a more permanent job faster.

Also large bouts of spending (again to use infrastructure as an example) tends to be hugely wasteful. Good projects require appraisals, consultation and careful planning. The notion of handfuls of 'shovel ready' projects is a political myth. You can instead span it out but then you don't get the mooted fiscal boost. In fact I would argue infrastructure spending is never appropriate as fiscal stimulus. It should be in a constant, planned process of improvement irrespective of business cycles or downturns. The US stimulus under Obama was largely long term spending projects like this as giveaways to the states. There is little evidence it eased the recovery or altered behaviour though. Many states simply enacted the same civic projects they would have otherwise and used this money instead of issuing debt like they would have otherwise - effectively they saved on interest.

So what are the alternatives then? The government here in Australia also heavily spent on roads, home subsidies and schools but notably also gave all income earners a cash deposit of AUD $300-950. The latter is probably the closest you can get to a pure fiscal stimulus - immediately cash to spend, injected not into banks than might save it but given particularly to low / medium income earners most likely to spend it. Again what we saw is that it hardly altered consumer / household behaviour. Many saved it, many spent it on large one off purchases (e.g. TVs, in which case most of that value was transferred overseas). So we gave a dollop of cash as stimulus to the global economy of which Australia is a drop in the ocean. Basically my attitude is, if you maintain good infrastructure, effective education systems, adequate but efficient regulation, reasonable tax rates, and importantly competitive markets, the best way to get through a crisis is to let the market stabilize by itself. Provide assistance and retraining to workers who lose their jobs by all means, but don't expect government spending to be some kind of savior.

I agree on the inflation aspect of your post. There were certainly no shortage of self-declared monetarists buying up gold in anticipation of high inflation, but as you say dollops of cash in the economy are meaningless if they are idle and the economy under capacity. The question now with unemployment in the US at 5.5% whether capacity is finally pushing LRAS levels. Probably not, participation rate is low and falling, and the unemployment rate is woefully underrepresenting forced part timers. Also as you mention the dip in oil will temper prices on the input cost side. The Fed certainly seems to think so and has started tightening rates but as so much commentary in the investing world is saying, this may turn out to be a mistake and they may end up having to reverse course.

No wonder they died out. Can't even shovel the sidewalk right.