There are limits, of course. They are only stealthy under certain circumstances, it requires the radar installation to use certain wavelengths, and they need to avoid flying in front of another target (or there will be a stealth plane shaped hole in the radar return).

I would expect it to still work just fine against a single older export style Buk installation, but perhaps not so well against the newest ones used by the Russian army (and although I have heard nothing about the Chinese equivalents, I expect the same would apply).

I have not agreed that my position is wrong on the performance and capability designs of the F-35 and modern air combat. Please read the rest of my post above.... I'm still saying that dogfights have ended with WW1. I've never said we don't need ANY dog fighting capabilities. I'm saying that it's never the primary design idea of a modern fighter jet. You still have a cannon for back up. Just like soldiers have a side arm and a knife. Just in case you do get caught with your pants down or the main weapon fails at a critical moment.

I have agreed on the waste of money aspect of course. I'll also agree that if test goals are being downsized to accommodate flaws, then that's just terrible. If it's not able to perform to it's design then it's useless.

The F-4 != F-35. I can see why people draw parallels. But that only works if you ignore that absolutely everything on the planes is different, the adversaries are different, and stealth is requirement for survivability. You don't use stealth planes in the way you use an non stealth plane. Have you ever heard of a sniper wearing a ghillie suit run across the open battlefield with a sword or pistol? There were so many tactical mistakes in Vietnam as well. The conditions in which that article talks about are also different. Those planes were flying low and slow for a bombing run. Because they didn't have laser, gps guided bombs, infrared fire and forget air to ground missiles or cruise missiles back in those days. You don't get fog at 40,000 feet. They had to fly that low to get a visual identification of their bombing target. That does not happen anymore either. You scream past at mach 1 above the clouds and the bomb hits where it was programmed to hit. Also the phantoms missiles were unrelaiable. That hasn't been the case since the 80s. And their training was poor. None of that is true these days, and has not been true since the 80s either. That's why every single fighter plane apart from the F-16 (which is made mostly as an export product anyway) has been created to fight at long range primarily. The F-15 which is the main air superiority fighter for the US, is heavy and has a worse maneuverability than any Russian plane. But it's still the most feared plane, with no loses in combat. The article you linked even says that. So it's basically contradicting itself. At the start it says, F-4's lost because they couldn't maneuver, and ends with therefore the US made the F-15 which has worse maneuverability than the Russian planes lol.



Edit: Cracked.com doesn't count as a reputable source for anything, including basic sentences, spelling and punctuation.

Edit2: Here is an article from an actual F-35 pilot that says the F-35 dog fights better than a F-16 since they keep tuning the fly-by-wire parameters. http://theaviationist.com/2016/03/01/heres-what-ive-learned-so-far-dogfighting-in-the-f-35-a-jsf-pilot-first-hand-account/

So even if it came to a dogfighting encounter, the F-35 is still the best plane in the US arsenal for dogfighting.

That is all well and good, but the F35 is not just a sniper. It's a multi-role aircraft that needs to be an interceptor, a bomber, and a close ground support plane. You can be a 'sniper' and hide long range in interceptor mode, but bombing and close ground support are not going to be as kind to a plane that relies completely on stealth to overcome it's shortcomings in maneuverability, etc.

Additionally, the sheer cost of the vehicle is going to make it prohibitive for our allies to purchase it, meaning that in NATO combat groups, we will have it and our allies won't. It also means that we can't offset the trillion dollar development cost in ally purchases. Of course, it is likely that we won't even try to export it for the risk of having the stealth breached. We didn't export the F22 for similar reasons and it is dead now.

The simple fact is that we have sunk a ton of money into a pit and for little return. There are still huge long term delays in Russian and Chinese stealth programs, so just like the F22, this plane is going to come into production with no real enemies to fight against. Are we going to risk sending these vs last gen or earlier systems when our older planes are still more advanced than those and cost far less?

We aren't going to stop making this plane, we've gone too far. But it is going to be just as much of a waste as the F22 and probably more of a debacle when the enemy does come up with hardware capable of defeating it's stealth capabilities. Once that happens, we have a plane that is worse than the previous generation facing enemies more than capable of taking it out of the sky.

It has seem a joke for an overly long time. When you can buy every homeless person in this country a $600k mansion for the money we've spent on this thing one has to wonder why are Forget buying a homeless person/family a big mansion, get them a permanent starter home (my part of Ohio, super nice new family homes are $150k, starter homes are well under $100k), job training, and voila, not only far less money spent then is spent on homeless shelters, but they are now trained workers, in a home, and we've still save far more than this program.

Wasn't the F-22 canceled because this was supposed to save us money? That and the inability to export it... which raises the question are we wanting to build the best aircraft for our defense or a plane that we can sell, because those are not super compatible. Yes the F-15 and F-16 are both aging designs, but this program so far doesn't seem to be the answer. Heck, the B-52 fleet is scary old and there doesn't seem to be any real replacements for it.

One of the supposed tasks of the F-35 is to provide a sensor rich environment for other aircraft to operate in, providing these other craft with sensor data, but this task seems best dealt with using drones. Why I question the use of drone strikes (at least as used now), a drone flying though the field providing rich sensor data for the follow up fighters and bombers seems to be a perfect role for drones.

At this point the program is probably only going on because we've spent so much on it that turning back will be seen as a bigger waste than going forward.

@greatgooglymoogly

Thanks for taking the time to watch it.

Like I said in my previous comment, this talk needs to take a lot of shortcuts, otherwise its length would surpass anyone's attention span.

So, point by point.

By "balanced budget", I suppose you refer to the federal budget. A balanced budget is not neccessarily a bad thing, but it is undesirable in most case. The key reason is sectoral balances. The economy can divided into three sectors: public, private, foreign. Since one person's spending is another person's income, the sum of all spending and income of these three sectors is zero by definition.

More precisely: if the public sector runs a surplus and the private sector runs a surplus, the foreign sector needs to run a deficit of a corresponding size.

Two examples:
- the government runs a balanced budget, no surplus, no deficit
- the private sector runs a surplus (savings) of 2% of GDP
- the foreign sector must, by definition, run a deficit of 2% of GDP (your country runs a current account surplus of 2% of GDP)

- the government runs a deficit of 2% of GDP
- the foreign sector runs a surplus of 3% (your current account deficit of 3%)
- your private sector must, by definition, run a deficit of 1% of GDP, aka burn through savings or run up debt

If you intend to allow the private sector to net save, you need to run either a current account surplus or a public sector deficit, or both. Since we don't export goods to Mars just yet, not all countries can run current account surpluses, so you need to run a public sector deficit if you want your private sector to net save. No two ways about it.

Germany runs a balanced public budget, sort of, and its private sector net saves. But that comes at the cost of a current account surplus to the tune of €250B. That's 250 billion Euros worth of debt other countries have to accumulate so that both the private and public sector in Germany can avoid deficits. Parasitic is what I'd call this behaviour, and I'm German.

If you feel ambitious, you could try to have both surplus and deficit within the private sector by allowing households to net save while "forcing" corporations to run the corresponding deficits. But to any politician trying that, I'd advise to avoid air travel.

As for the "devaluation of the currency", see my previous comment.

Also, she didn't use real numbers, because a) the talk is short and numbers kill people's attention rather quickly, and b) it's a policy decision to use debt to finance a deficit. One might just as well monetise it, like I explained in my previous comment.

Helicopter money would be quite helpful these days, actually. Even monetarists like AEP say so. If fiscal policy is off the table (deficit hawkery), what else are you left with...

As for your question related to the Fed, let me quote Eric Tymoigne on why MMT views both central bank and Treasury as part of the consolidated government:

"MMT authors tend to like to work with a consolidated government because they see it as an effective strategy for policy purpose (see next section), but also because the unconsolidated case just hides under layers of institutional complexity the main point: one way or another the Fed finances the Treasury, always. This monetary financing is not an option and is not by itself inflationary."

MMT principle: the central bank needs to be under democratic control, aka be part of government. The Fed in particular can pride itself on its independance all it wants, it still cannot fulfill any of its goals without the Treasury's help. It cannot diverge from government policies too long. Unlike the ECB, which is a nightmare in its construction.

Anyway, what does he mean by "one way or another the Fed finances the Treasury, always"? Well, the simple case is debt monetisation, direct financing. However, the Fed also participates by ensuring that Primary Dealers have enough reserves to make a reasonable bid on treasuries. The Fed makes sure that auctions of treasuries will always succeed. Always. Either by providing reserves to ensure buyers can afford the treasuries, by replacing maturing treasuries or buying them outright. No chance whatsoever for bond vigilantes. Betting against treasuries is pointless, you will always lose.

But what about taxation as a means to finance the Treasury? Well, the video's Monopoly example illustrated quite nicely, you cannot collect taxes until you have spent currency into circulation. Spending comes before taxation, it does not depend on it. Until reserves are injected into the banking system, either by the Fed through asset purchases or the Treasury through spending, taxes cannot be paid. Again, monetary financing is not optional. If the Treasury borrows money from the public, it borrows back money it previously spent.

Yes, I ignored the distribution of wealth, taxation, the fixation on growth and a million other things. That's a different discussion.

@radx

I think you misunderstand the Swiss referendum. It's about preventing banks from creating money through fractional lending, it doesn't restrict the central bank. Typically banks will take in deposits and lend a portion out (keeping a % as a capital buffer), that money then filters through the system and some of if returns as deposits, and the process repeats (hence the term fractional banking).

In effect banks are creating money through lending out more money than otherwise exists. It also means they lend out far in excess of the deposits they have, creating high leverage and meaning even a small level of default can lead to them eating through their capital and insolvency (see US in 2008). The referendum seems to be about effectively preventing fractional lending.

No idea what effect it would have in a country like Switzerland. The country is an exception as it has a relatively small economy but is seen globally as a safe haven currency meaning every time there is a crisis you see the CHF appreciate rapidly (similar to the USD). Naturally that tends to wreck havoc with the economy and exports since the currency value no longer reflects the real economy and is why the central bank has taken various measures to discourage it in the past.

Actually, the Americas did export viruses -- syphilis and herpes. Of course, they weren't nearly as deadly as their imports.

Yeah he embarrasses her with his stupidity, as he embarrasses me. So fake news picks a naive college student to debate, and when she starts putting her thoughts together to make a point he interrupts her like the condescending asshole that he is.

I'm sorry, but you wouldn't need the top 1% to pay nowhere near 90% in taxes to cover education. Just a made up number to make her look stupid as she didn't know how to answer it.

With a higher percent of more educated people, they as a whole would be making more money to contribute to the tax fund, increasing revenue.

And really Neil, rich people would leave the honey hole because we taxed them more? How about we start taxing and putting tariffs on companies that go into these third world countries for cheap labor to export products back here. Fuck em if they want to leave, they will no longer be "hoarding" the money and it would allow other companies to fill the void and thrive.

And her point that was so rudely interrupted was spot on, "There is a population that is doing nothing to contribute to the progression of society"

And lastly, these are all moot points if we just quit dumping all our money into the military, and it's not even going to benefit our veterans, but to the select few who own these government contracts. Why do they NEVER Talk about that? Why do we have to continuously be engaged in some kind of war? Oh, that's right to convince people we need a bigger military budget, more spying...blah blah blah...unpatriotic if you don't agree...blah blah...scare people into some kind of threat..

I'm sorry this particular girl wasn't ready for this debate, she probably had a speech prepared they told her she could give.

@Trancecoach

nice article.
explains much in regards to the evolution of germanys social market economy,the reasons and motivations.was a rather enjoyable read.

it still does not excuse your own hackery,but it does explain how germanys more marxist socialism was failing and needed to be adapted to a more free market enterprise.that by itself,did not create a free market capitalism though,it changed the dynamic of a marxist socialist economy that was failing to meet the needs of a country that imported way more than it exported.

in the end it was still a social market economy with the market expanded.

we all need to evolve and adapt ,and elements of free market capitalism is well equipped to do just that.so bravo for germany.

Military support of Syrian rebels in by the US has by all accounts been minimal, it's primarily been non-arms tactical equipment. Arms support has come largely from the Gulf states / Iran. The idea that the US fomented the Syrian civil war is also largely groundless. If you want to talk about the private military sector, let's not forget that Russia is a major arms exporter.

Meanwhile Russia has armed and provided direct bombing to support Assad directly, a guy who uses chemical weapons and barrel bombs on his people to intimidate them. His Putin's priorities are to protect his only Mediterranean port in the Middle East and to use his war footing to prop up his own domestic support the same way he did in Ukraine.

If he wanted to end the conflict he would have pressured Assad to step down in favor of a traditional government and have the successor negotiate a settlement and eventual elections with moderate rebels. Instead he's poured fuel on the fire. The longer these conflicts last, the more radicalized the opposition becomes. Now that he's let it play out and fanned the flames, he can blame the US for creating the mess.

This comes up a bit short on some issues.

For instance, the ongoing drought in the Euphrates-Tigris area pushed people in Syria into the cities, adding pressure to already overstretched infrastructure.

Also, what about the West's glorious idea to run illegal wars of aggression in Iraq and Libya, which destabilized the entire region? Nevermind Afghanistan or the bombing campaigns in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. What about the gulag that is Palestine? What about the economic consequences of our obsession with free trade, taking away from developing countries the ability to protect and nurture their own industries? What about our subsidies of farm exports, thereby undercutting local farmers and destroying these peoples' ability to feed themselves?

All of these countries have heaps of issues of their own, but let's not forget that "we" not only didn't help, but actively made things worse in many cases. As cities drain resources from the hinterland, so do our centers of capitalism drain resources from developing nations. They are our hinterland.

Yugoslavia seems to have been forgotten by most people, but the split and following neoliberal treatment left the entire area in a state of instability. Kosovo today is basically run by organised crime.

So, as horrible as Assad's actions are, very few countries are in a position to offer meaningful criticism, having pissed away what little moral authority we had to begin with.

And as far as legal responsibilities towards refugees go, I'd say after torture, wars of aggression, global espionage, a stateless people in Europe (Roma/Sinti), destruction of a society (Greece), an openly xenophobic regime (Hungary), etc, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that "rights" are meaningless unless actively enforced by someone with the required amount of power.

Look at Calais, look at Lesbos, look at Lampedusa, and tell me all about our European morals and values...

Written by the grandson of a man whose family fled from Silesia in '45 with nothing but two bags and walked all the way to Lower Saxony on foot.

That's certainly possible, but I can think of other plausible explanations:

• Spain's problems mainly involved real estate and non-productive investments. Maybe Greece was doing a better job of employing the borrowed funds, and therefore lost more with their removal?
  
• Spain's austerity program started in 2010, their bailout was in 2012 but they left the program in January 2014. You can clearly see the dip in GDP during that timeframe, although as you say it does seem suspiciously small. Perhaps the effect of austerity was actually greater in Greece because the initial recession was deeper and the period of austerity was greater?
  
• Spain's economy is more export focused, which helped offset the impact of reduced domestic demand (although at 33% of GDP vs 28% of GDP it's not enough).
  

8:18 – "Germany is very financially responsible".

The clip makes a few good points, twists others and omits some central issues. But I want to comment on the quote above most of all, because it forms the basis for all kinds of arguments and recommendations.

The claim that Germany is financially responsible stems from what has been paraded around domestically as the "schwarze Null" (black zero), meaning a balanced budget. Given how focused most economic debates are around the national debt or the current budget deficit, it shouldn't come as a surprise that not running a deficit evokes positive responses in the public. If there has ever been an easy sell, politically, it's this.

However, it's not that simple.

For instance, the sectoral balance rule dictates, by pure accounting identity, that the sum of public balance, private balance and external balance is 0 at all times. In case of Germany, this means that the balanced public budget (no surplus, just a fat zero) requires a current account surplus of the same size as private savings – or an accumulation of private debt. For someone to run a surplus, someone else has to run a deficit. In this case, foreign economies have to run a deficit vis-á-vis Germany, so that neither the German government nor the German private sector have to run a deficit.

The composition of each sector is another topic entirely, but the point remains: no surplus in Germany without a deficit in the periphery. If everyone is to be like Germany, Klingons have to run the respective deficit.

My question: is it financially responsible to depend on other economies' deficits to keep your own house in order? Is it responsible to engage in this kind of behaviour after having locked yourself into a monetary union with less competitive economies who have no way of defending themselves through currency devaluation?

Second point: capital accounts and current accounts are two sides of the same coin. If Germany runs a current account surplus of X%, it also runs a capital account deficit of X%. Doesn't explain anything, but it's the same for the countries at the other side of these trade imbalances. Spain's current account deficit with Germany meant a capital inflow of the same size.

Let's look at EuroStat's dataset for current accounts. Germany had run a minor current account deficit during the late '90s and a small surplus up to 2003. From then on, it went up, up, up. Given the size of Germany's economy within Europe, that jump from 2% to 7.5% is enormous. Pre-GFC, the majority of this surplus went to... yap, PIIGS. Their deficits multiplied.

Subsequently, capital of equals size flowed into these countries, looking for investments. No nation, none, can absorb this amount of capital without it resulting in a massive misallocation, be it stock bubbles, housing bubbles, highways to nowhere or lavish consumption. Michael Pettis wrote a magnificent account (Syriza and the French indemnity of 1871-73) of this and explains how Germany handled a similar inflow of capital after the Franco-Prussian war: it crashed their economy.

As Pettis correctly points out, the question of causality remains. Was the capital flow a pull or a push?

The dataset linked above says it all happened at just about the same time, in all countries. It also happened at the same time as Germany's parliament signed of on "Agenda 2010", which is the cause of massive wage suppression in Germany. Germany intentionally lowered its unit labour costs and undercut the agreed upon inflation target (2%). German employees and retirees were forced to live below their means, so the export sector could gain competitiveness against all the other nations, including those in the same currency union. Beggar-thy-neighbour on steroids.

Greece overshot the inflation target. They lived beyond their means. But due to their size, it's economically negligable. France stayed on point the entire time, has higher productivity than Germany and still gets defamed as the lame duck of Europe. Yet Germany, after more than a decade of financial warfare against its fellow members of the EU/EZ, is hailed as the beacon of financial responsibility.

Mercantilism always comes at the cost of others. And the EU is living proof.

Let's ignore for the moment what led to this current mess within the Eurozone. You point out, correctly, that Greece is too poor to service its debt. And yes, for the German government to do whatever is required to get back their loans is to be expected. However, Greece was incapable of servicing its debt five years ago. Yet the subsequent programs, all supported or even demanded by the German government, reduced Greece's ability to pay back at least portions of its debt. At the end of the day, goods and services are what it's all about. And by dismantling the Greek economy, nevermind the Greek society, they actively undermined what they publicly claimed to be working for: a self-reliant Greek economy, capable of financing the needs of Greece. And capable of paying back what is owed.

The question inescapably poses itself: was it done intentionally or are they blinded by ideology?

One doesn't have to be as far left as I am to see that it didn't work, doesn't work, and never could have worked. Even the likes of Krugman and Stiglitz are perfectly clear about it.

Varoufakis, as you note, has been just as clear about this at least since late 2010, when he published the first draft of his Modest Proposal with Stuart Holland. There was a very good discussion about it in Austin in 10/2013 under the topic "Can the Eurozone be saved?" Participants included Varoufakis, Tsipras, Flassbeck, Holland and Galbraith, amongst others. I submitted a short clip back then.

His argument that Germany won't see a dime when Greece is shoved off a cliff, as correct as it is, never had any bite to begin with. The German government, and large parts of parliament, are operating in a parallel universe, economically. Over here, mercantilism is the road to success. Monetarism works. Surplus good, deficit bad. Saving good, spending bad. Everyone should have a current account surplus.

It's horseshit by the gallons, and it's the official economic policy of the largest economy in the EU.

And we're not even getting into the political aspects of it. Throwing a member of the EU into debt bondage, suspending its democracy to please the gods of the market... that's a travesty and a half. Yet it's also inevitable if they insist on going down the road of neoliberalism.

Worst of all, Greece is just the canary in the coal mine, as Varoufakis likes to point out. Greece had plenty of issues before they joined the EZ, but when they chose to adapt the same currency as a much larger economy hell bent on competitiveness, which is the favorite euphemism for Germany's beggar-thy-neighbour policies, they were doomed to be crushed. The rest of the PIIGS are next in line, unless this whole mess explodes beforehand. Maybe Rajoy's Franco-esque repression techniques fail, maybe le Pen wins in 2017, who knows. Maybe Schäuble finds the 100k of bribes that he conveniently forgot about back in the '90s and chokes on them.

Last but not least, 208 billion Euros – that's the projected current account surplus of Germany this year. That's 208 billion Euros of debt foreign economies have to accumulate, so that the German public and private sector can run a combined surplus of €208b. That's the elephant in the room. Systematic undercutting of the inflation target through suppression of unit labour costs and a dysfunctional focus on exports.