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Assuming we have a Trump/Biden general election, I would imagine most of us agree that neither one of them is going to hesitate to spread their legs for our corporate overlords so maybe let's call that a wash and try to put someone whose response to a major pandemic isn't going to be "Fuck it! Go to work bruh!" into the Oval Office.

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4 minutes ago, Continental Op said:

Assuming we have a Trump/Biden general election, I would imagine most of us agree that neither one of them is going to hesitate to spread their legs for our corporate overlords so maybe let's call that a wash and try to put someone whose response to a major pandemic isn't going to be "Fuck it! Go to work bruh!" into the Oval Office.

I feel like this is pretty much the goal of people turning to Biden.  Baby steps back to a decent human being as leader.  Then baby steps to making meaningful change.

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3 hours ago, washparkhorn said:

 

 

Is the "Biden wing" of the party Obama, who essentially rescued our country from the brink of economic disaster?

This isn't really a winning argument.

 

I'm not saying Obama did it perfectly. There was some cronyism and some undeserving recipients, and not enough restrictions on how money could be spent. But he did do it effectively. And we recovered all of the money that we loaned out to the banks, and a little bit more. It's like when trying to come up with an attack on Biden this person thought "let me figure out his biggest weakness and attack it", then did the exact opposite.

Edited by BradInATX
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6 minutes ago, ChiTownDoc said:

Hope Stanco isn’t in the 30% or so that may go bankrupt before prices recover.  

Not to worry. He plowed along for 20 years somehow not making any money in the oil business until trump came along. He can weather this.

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  • 2 months later...

*bump*

Quote

The growth rate of real gross domestic product (GDP) is a key indicator of economic activity, but the official estimate is released with a delay. Our GDPNow forecasting model provides a "nowcast" of the official estimate prior to its release by estimating GDP growth using a methodology similar to the one used by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

GDPNow is not an official forecast of the Atlanta Fed. Rather, it is best viewed as a running estimate of real GDP growth based on available data for the current measured quarter. There are no subjective adjustments made to GDPNow—the estimate is based solely on the mathematical results of the model. In particular, it does not capture the impact of COVID-19 beyond its impact on GDP source data and relevant economic reports that have already been released. It does not anticipate the impact of COVID-19 on forthcoming economic reports beyond the standard internal dynamics of the model.
...
The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2020 is -42.8 percent on May 15, down from -34.9 percent on May 8. After this week's data releases from the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and the U.S. Census Bureau, the nowcasts of second-quarter real personal consumption expenditures growth and real gross private domestic investment growth decreased from -33.9 percent and -62.8 percent, respectively, to -43.6 percent and -69.4 percent, respectively.
...

https://www.frbatlanta.org/cqer/research/gdpnow

ouch

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16 hours ago, bernorange said:

ouch

Like a cluster of EMP's to the economic system. We have used MMT for propping up the asset bubble - no sign of inflation (which is a good and a bad fact). Good - because there is capacity and MMT worked for the asset bubble (for the moment). That asset bubble requires some undergirding - quickly. The economy is like an assembly line. All were in motion; significant ones shut down. All need to be in working order as the economy ramps up. Including households. If the system is running close to normal, the asset bubble may not look so bublicious. 

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Quote

... As an analogy, the IMF or Chapter 11 bankruptcy is very good at dealing with a couple of countries or a couple of firms at a time. But just as the hospitals can’t handle all the Covid-19 patients showing up in the same week, neither can our bankruptcy system and neither can the international financial institutions.

So there are going to be phenomenal frictions coming out of this wave of bankruptcies, defaults. It’s probably going to be, at best, a U-shaped recovery. And I don’t know how long it’s going to take us to get back to the 2019 per capita GDP. I would say, looking at it now, five years would seem like a good outcome out of this.
...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-05-18/harvard-s-financial-crisis-experts-this-time-really-is-different?srnd=premium

^ Kenneth Rogoff

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Five years? Five fucking years for locking up the healthy for 3 months?

When you consider the fact that this EXPOSED some serious issues, it didn’t just create them....a long recovery makes sense. I think 5 years is long....but 2-3 seems likely.
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...
Since the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns started in mid-March, some 35.5 million people have applied for jobless benefits through their states. Roughly 9.2 million have applied via a new federal program that has made self-employed workers and independent contractors such as writers or Uber drivers eligible for the first time ever.

The total: almost 45 million.
...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/jobless-claims-jump-44-million-in-mid-may-as-applications-for-federal-benefits-surge-2020-05-21

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On 5/18/2020 at 9:23 AM, Brisketexan said:


When you consider the fact that this EXPOSED some serious issues, it didn’t just create them....a long recovery makes sense. I think 5 years is long....but 2-3 seems likely.

I think 5 years is short. Nearly every state currently run by Republicans is lying to their own citizens in an attempt to get people to go back to normal. When that results in spikes and more deaths, people who can will stay in on their own, regardless of whether their states officially lock things down again or not, and they won't trust their officials to let them know when things actually probably are safe for them to get back to normal. That means that a lot of people will probably end up basically self quarantining for substantially longer than they'll actually need to do so, depressing economic activity when things should be returning to normal. We're going to be feeling the effects of our shitty handling of this for years to come.

And that's not even considering what happens if Biden wins but the GOP keeps the Senate, in which case we'll see the GOP Senate go all out to sabotage any effort to spur economic recovery. Hell, even if the Dems win the Presidency and the Senate, they'll probably water down any recovery bills to try to get bipartisan support they'll never in a billion years get. 

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"The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickled down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the dryest little spot. But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands."  --- Will Rogers, 1932

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Hank Paulson presents the US case for the dollar’s dominance in the time of COVID-19. He suggests curbs on fiscal relief. Admits the Fed can print whatever we need if dollar remains the reserve currency. Lays out they are interlocked in battle against Chinese FinTech. Worth a read when pondering this market. Paulson knows how the market works. He shares a little. 
 

TLDR: China is not ready to overrun the Dollar’s dominance. Their holdings are harmless since they are payable in . . . dollars. 
 

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2020-05-19/future-dollar?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=twofa&utm_campaign=Chronicle of a Pandemic Foretold&utm_content=20200522&utm_term=FA This Week - 112017

Edited by washparkhorn
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  • 2 weeks later...
Quote

When the U.S. government’s official jobs report for May came out on Friday, it included a note at the bottom saying there had been a major “error” indicating that the unemployment rate likely should be higher than the widely reported 13.3 percent rate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/05/may-2020-jobs-report-misclassification-error/

has to do with how people are counted when they believe their job will still be available, seems like a lot of  people got counted as being on vacation:

Quote

Economists say the BLS was trying to be as transparent as possible about how hard it is to collect real-time data during a pandemic. The BLS admitted that some people who should have been classified as “temporarily unemployed” during the shutdown were instead misclassified as employed but “absent” from work for “other reasons.”

The “other reason” category is normally used for people on vacation, serving jury duty or taking leave to care for a child or relative. These are typically situations where the worker decides to take leave. But in this unusual pandemic circumstance, the “other reason” category was applied to some people staying at home and waiting to be called back.

here's the questionnaire

Edited by elfenix
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  • 3 months later...

Posting this here, because I could not find the 2017 tax bill thread and did not want he subject matter buried in DT thread.

https://www.dcreport.org/2020/09/05/the-ugly-numbers-are-finally-in-on-the-2017-trump-tax-rewrite/

https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2020reports/202030015fr.pdf

No surprises if you were paying attention.

TLDR: Shit does not "trickle down".

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Posting this here, because I could not find the 2017 tax bill thread and did not want he subject matter buried in DT thread.
https://www.dcreport.org/2020/09/05/the-ugly-numbers-are-finally-in-on-the-2017-trump-tax-rewrite/
https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2020reports/202030015fr.pdf
No surprises if you were paying attention.
TLDR: Shit does not "trickle down".

That anyone continues to believe that lie after it has been proven as such time, and time, and time again...I just don’t f’n get it.
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So I just now had a look at the page @Jiggy-Z posted yesterday.  The author presents his analysis of the impact of the 2017 tax law on different income brackets and unsurprisingly, it disproportionately benefited the wealthy.  However, the author does not make any claim with respect to Jiggy's comment on "trickle down" effects.  The author did say this:

Quote

...
The number of households enjoying incomes of $200,000 or more soared by more than 20%. The number of taxpayers making $10 million or more soared 37% to a record 22,112 households.
...

Upward mobility from the middle class seems to me to be a good thing .  It would be interesting to see a deeper analysis of "bracket mobility" to see if there were similar growth/movement patterns from lower income strata to higher tiers.

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Households with incomes of $200,000 are not middle class. The policy objectively and disproportionately benefited the wealthy and big corporations that already paid no or low taxes. Certain income levels saw taxes increase, even. Meanwhile we took on almost a trillion in debt to make it happen. Sure would be nice not to be burdened with that extra debt now that the economy is truly in crisis

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51 minutes ago, troph said:

I think both of those increases are good.  but yes there needs to be increases below that too.  folks from 100 --> 150,  75 --> 125, etc. for this all to work out.

This is what I got from reading the article as well.  Bern makes a good point that a deeper look into lower brackets below the 200K threshold.  I know my father works for AT&T and when all this shit came out he guessed (correctly) that instead of giving employees a raise they'd probably get a bonus and the rest would go back to shareholders, executives, etc.  They ended up giving employees a one-time $1,000 bonus.  

AT&T (as well as others) instead moved that money back to shareholders in one way or another.  

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/at-t-got-a-giant-tax-cut-but-has-laid-off-thousands-union-says/

 

 

Edit to add that my pops would probably fall in that "deeper look" into the tax brackets as he makes (usually) between 90-105K a year depending on overtime work so I'd be interested to know how, if at all, his taxes have either increased or decreased.

Edited by CowboyFred
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56 minutes ago, bernorange said:

Agreed, but since the 200K bracket grew by 20%, it was presumably people in the middle class bracket that grew into it.

It seems to me that the most likely explanation for the increase in people making $200k/year are stock market gains by people who already made enough/had enough to have significant money invested in the stock market. That's not exactly middle class America. 

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I’m lucky and am one of the people who greatly benefitted from the trump tax cuts. 

still not voting for the fucker.  Would gladly trade the new merc the cut bought my wife for nondipshit potus.   From a purely monetary standpoint, the competence and stability alone will make me more money long term.    
 

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2 hours ago, bernorange said:

However, the author does not make any claim with respect to Jiggy's comment on "trickle down" effects. 

Counterpoint:

"Trump’s tax law will require at least $1.5 trillion in added federal debt because it falls far short of paying for itself through increased economic growth even without the pandemic. Most of the tax savings were showered on rich Americans and the corporations they control. Most of the negative effects will fall on the middle class and poor Americans in the form of Trump’s efforts to reduce government services."

 

Pretty much textbook definition of "trickle down" or lack thereof.

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42 minutes ago, DaysOff said:

Wow. That article. Just wow. The whole premise.

So recovering from covid is offering us the same opportunity as post WWII? Where we were untouched by war and had what ended up being 95% of the world's production capacity while the rest of the world was completely rebuilding? That kind of opportunity? Particularly since we're a country that doesn't even make shit anymore? What a fucking farcical premise. 

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