Glibertarians.com 2019 Archive

Author: Winston’s Mom

  • Economics Corner with Paul Krugman and Winston’s Mom

    What?  I’m on?   I’m sorry.  Let me get a clean pair of skivvies, I’m not quite ready yet…

    So here is the column of bullshit from last week.

    “If you live in the Midwest, where else do you want to live besides Chicago? You don’t want to live in Cincinnati or Cleveland or, you know, these armpits of America.” So declared Stephen Moore, the man Donald Trump wants to install on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, during a 2014 event held at a think tank called, yes, the Heartland Institute.

    The crowd laughed.

    Moore is an indefensible choice on many grounds. Even if he hadn’t shown himself to be extraordinarily misogynistic and have an ugly personal history, his track record on economics — always wrong, never admitting error or learning from it — is utterly disqualifying.

    His remarks about the Midwest, however, highlight more than his unsuitability for the Fed. They also provide an illustration of something I’ve been noticing for a while: The thinly veiled contempt conservative elites feel for the middle-American voters they depend on.

    This guy again? Stephen Moore.  Stephen Moore?  Stephen Moore!  Motherfucking STEPHEN MOORE.  How many moore of these columns are you going to dedicate to STEPHEN MOORE

    Seriously, did he sleep with your wife or something?

    This is not the story you usually hear. On the contrary, we’re inundated with claims that liberals feel disdain for the heartland. Even liberals themselves often buy into these claims, berate themselves for having been condescending and pledge to do better.

    But what’s the source of that narrative? Look at where the belief that liberals don’t respect the heartland comes from, and it turns out that it has little to do with things Democrats actually say, let alone their policies. It is, instead, a story line pushed relentlessly by Fox News and other propaganda organizations, relying on out-of-context quotes and sheer fabrication.

    Conservative contempt, by contrast, is real. Moore’s “armpit” line evidently didn’t shock his audience, probably because disparaging views about middle America are widespread among right-wing intellectuals and, more discreetly, right-wing politicians.

    Hey dumbass.  Everyone makes fun of Cleveland.  It’s an easy target, plus people there cheerful and have pretty good humor about it..  Contrast this with Chicago where walking in the wrong neighborhood will get you shot by the locals, or some asshole says you have weed and the cops break down the door of your business looking for kickbacks and shooting my workers.

    …and lets be real, I hate fucking cops.  They think they can get everything for free…

    …and he’s making me defend Cleveland.  Christ, what an asshole…

    Let’s be clear: There is a real economic and social crisis in what one recent analysis calls the “Eastern Heartland.” This region suffers from persistently low employment among working-age men and has seen a surge in mortality from alcohol, suicide and opioids — “deaths of despair,” in the phrase of Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

    What lies behind this crisis? The view of most liberals, as far as I can tell, is that it reflects declining economic opportunity, changes in the economy that have favored metropolitan areas over rural communities. On this view, declining opportunity has led to social disruption, in the same way that the disappearance of urban industry undermined inner-city communities a half century ago.

    Those industries didn’t disappear, they went to Texass.

    Many conservatives, however, blame the victims. They attribute the heartland’s woes to a mysterious collapse in morality and family values that somehow hasn’t affected coastal cities. Moral collapse is the theme of books like Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America,” and of innumerable articles. One widely read essay in National Review went so far as to label the troubled Eastern Heartland “the white ghetto,” whose people are too indolent to move to where the jobs are.

    So who, exactly, doesn’t respect middle America?

    When it comes to politicians, of course, what they say is much less important than what they do. So what do the policy choices of liberal and conservative pols say about how they value the heartland?  Some Democrats, notably Elizabeth Warren, have been offering real proposals to help rural areas. They’re probably not enough to reverse rural and small-town economic decline, which would be hard to do even with plenty of money and the best will in the world. But they would help.

  • Economics Corner with Paul Krugman and Winston’s Mom

    Hey fellas?  How ya been?

    Here’s tonight’s drivel from your favorite Nobel Laureate!

    A peculiar chapter in the 2020 presidential race ended Monday, when Bernie Sanders, after months of foot-dragging, finally released his tax returns. The odd thing was that the returns appear to be perfectly innocuous. So what was all that about?

    The answer seems to be that Sanders got a lot of book royalties after the 2016 campaign, and was afraid that revealing this fact would produce headlines mocking him for now being part of the 1 Percent. Indeed, some journalists did try to make his income an issue.

    This line of attack is, however, deeply stupid. Politicians who support policies that would raise their own taxes and strengthen a social safety net they’re unlikely to need aren’t being hypocrites; if anything, they’re demonstrating their civic virtue.

    This criticism is perfectly valid as Bernie’s entire message is the wealthiest among us should pay for every tom, dick, and harry snatch of a government program that he never seems to have an issue supporting.  If he himself makes more money than nearly all Americans and programs where he can pay more in taxes than is required by law, yet fails to do so demonstrates hypocrisy on his part. He can’t even say he donated to charity, as he donated a pittance compared to what he made.  Bernie is no saint and neither are you for defending him.

    But failure to understand what hypocrisy means isn’t the only way our discourse about politics and inequality goes off the rails. The catchphrase “the 1 Percent” has also become a problem, obscuring the nature of class in 21st-century America.

    Focusing on the top percentile of the income distribution was originally intended as a corrective to the comforting but false notion that growing inequality was mainly about a rising payoff to education. The reality is that over the past few decades the typical college graduate has seen only modest gains, with the big money going to a small group at the top. Talking about “the 1 Percent” was shorthand for acknowledging this reality, and tying that reality to readily available data.

    But putting Bernie Sanders and the Koch brothers in the same class is obviously getting things wrong in a different way.

    This is absolutely correct.  The Kock brothers donate generously to charity, as well as have a number of foundations in their name, including educations grants, research, k-12…. How much did Bernie donate again?

    True, there’s a huge difference between being affluent enough that you don’t have to worry much about money and living with the financial insecurity that afflicts many Americans who consider themselves middle class. According to the Federal Reserve, 40 percent of U.S. adults don’t have enough cash to meet a $400 emergency expense; a much larger number of Americans would be severely strained by the kinds of costs that routinely arise when, say, illness strikes, even for those who have health insurance.

    $400?  Sounds like a personal problem.  Even I have $2000 in cash hidden in my ass.

    So if you have an income high enough that you can easily afford health care and good housing, have plenty of liquid assets and find it hard to imagine ever needing food stamps, you’re part of a privileged minority.

    But there’s also a big difference between being affluent, even very affluent, and having the kind of wealth that puts you in a completely separate social universe. It’s a difference summed up three decades ago in the movie “Wall Street,” when Gordon Gekko mocks the limited ambitions of someone who just wants to be “a $400,000-a-year working Wall Street stiff flying first class and being comfortable.”

    Even now, most Americans don’t seem to realize just how rich today’s rich are. At a recent event, my CUNY colleague Janet Gornick was greeted with disbelief when she mentioned in passing that the top 25 hedge fund managers make an average of $850 million a year. But her number was correct.

    One survey found that Americans, on average, think that corporate C.E.O.s are paid about 30 times as much as ordinary workers, which hasn’t been true since the 1970s. These days the ratio is more like 300 to 1.

    Why should we care about the very rich? It’s not about envy, it’s about oligarchy.

    With great wealth comes both great power and a separation from the concerns of ordinary citizens. What the very rich want, they often get; but what they want is often harmful to the rest of the nation. There are some public-spirited billionaires, some very wealthy liberals. But they aren’t typical of their class.

    Its not about millionaires like Bernie.  No, the problem is billionaires.  You’re starting to sound like this guy.

    The very rich don’t need Medicare or Social Security; they don’t use public education or public transit; they may not even be that reliant on public roads (there are helicopters, after all). Meanwhile, they don’t want to pay taxes.

    …but…but…muh ROOOOOOAAAAAAAADZ.  Billionaires never use ROOOOOOOOAAAAAAADZ.

    Sure enough, and contrary to popular belief, billionaires mostly (although often stealthily) wield their political power on behalf of tax cuts at the top, a weaker safety net and deregulation. And financial support from the very rich is the most important force sustaining the extremist right-wing politics that now dominates the Republican Party.

    Well shit.  Could it be prominent politicians in the Democrat Party, like Bernie, having anything to do with that?

    That’s why it’s important to understand who we mean when we talk about the very rich. It’s not doctors, lawyers or, yes, authors, some of whom make it into “the 1 Percent.” It’s a much more rarefied social stratum.

    None of this means that the merely affluent should be exempt from the burden of creating a more decent society. The Affordable Care Act was paid for in part by taxes on incomes in excess of $200,000, so 400K-a-year working stiffs did pay some of the cost. That’s O.K.: They (we) can afford it. And whining that $200,000 a year isn’t really rich is unseemly.

    But we should be able to understand both that the affluent in general should be paying more in taxes, and that the very rich are different from you and me ­— and Bernie Sanders. The class divide that lies at the root of our political polarization is much starker, much more extreme than most people seem to realize.

    Last I checked, with a single exception, none of the billionaires you are lambasting are running for president.  The number of billionaires is also such a tiny number in comparison to the general population that simply taking their money will never pay for his programs.  No, he will have to tax people like him, like you and nearly everyone else to pay for turning the entire country into a marauding gang of whores.  When given the chance to pay more than his “fair share” of taxes, or even to charities that do a lot of good helping the poor and downtrodden, he chose not to.  This is what makes him a hypocrite, because he knows better than everyone else who actually produced anything of value to society and was rewarded with wealth beyond what any one person might require, until it cums to his own money.

    Which is fine for you to defend him, you advocate the same bullshit he does, and as it turns out, you also donated absolutely nothing to charity, either.

  • Economics Corner with Paul Krugman and Winston’s Mom

    Here’s the link.  Apparently Krugabe thinks Trump is trying to kill us all.

    There’s a lot we don’t know about the legacy Donald Trump will leave behind. And it is, of course, hugely important what happens in the 2020 election. But one thing seems sure: Even if he’s a one-term president, Trump will have caused, directly or indirectly, the premature deaths of a large number of Americans.

    C’mon now, that doesn’t sound the least bit hyperbolic.  Its not like somebody is going to put a black bag over my head, and tie me up and beat me…..well at least not somebody from the Government.

    Some of those deaths will come at the hands of right-wing, white nationalist extremists, who are a rapidly growing threat, partly because they feel empowered by a president who calls them “very fine people.”

    I see you support your claim with a link to Vox.  I’m going to escalate this by throwing Jihadwatch at you!

    Some will come from failures of governance, like the inadequate response to Hurricane Maria, which surely contributed to the high death toll in Puerto Rico. (Reminder: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.)

    Reminder:  Puerto Rico received $16 Billion last year to recover from Hurricane Maria.  Assuming the population statistics from the Census Bureau are correct that is approximately $5007 per Puerto Rican in response to a single event…

    Some will come from the administration’s continuing efforts to sabotage Obamacare, which have failed to kill health reform but have stalled the decline in the number of uninsured, meaning that many people still aren’t getting the health care they need. Of course, if Trump gets his way and eliminates Obamacare altogether, things on this front will get much, much worse.

    But the biggest death toll is likely to come from Trump’s agenda of deregulation — or maybe we should call it “deregulation,” because his administration is curiously selective about which industries it wants to leave alone.

    Krugman — or maybe we should call Krug”man”…

    Consider two recent events that help capture the deadly strangeness of what’s going on.

    One is the administration’s plan for hog plants to take over much of the federal responsibility for food safety inspections. And why not? It’s not as if we’ve seen safety problems arise from self-regulation in, say, the aircraft industry, have we? Or as if we ever experience major outbreaks of food-borne illness? Or as if there was a reason the U.S. government stepped in to regulate meatpacking in the first place?

    Now, you could see the Trump administration’s willingness to trust the meat industry to keep our meat safe as part of an overall attack on government regulation, a willingness to trust profit-making businesses to do the right thing and let the market rule. And there’s something to that, but it’s not the whole story, as illustrated by another event: Trump’s declaration the other day that wind turbines cause cancer.

    Yeah, because meat is the same thing as aircraft.  Besides, organizations outside of government are more than capable of providing food safety standards.  Not like there are any cultural or religious standards that have thousands of years of success that we can point to.  In Krug”man’s” world, it was the great salmonella outbreak of the 1940s that nearly eradicated (((them))).

    But when it comes to renewable energy, Trump and company are suddenly very worried about supposed negative side effects, which generally exist only in their imagination. Last year the administration floated a proposal that would have forced the operators of electricity grids to subsidize coal and nuclear energy. The supposed rationale was that new sources were threatening to destabilize those grids — but the grid operators themselves denied that this was the case.

    So it’s deregulation for some, but dire warnings about imaginary threats for others. What’s going on?

    Part of the answer is, follow the money. Political contributions from the meat-processing industry overwhelmingly favor Republicans. Coal mining supports the G.O.P. almost exclusively. Alternative energy, on the other hand, generally favors Democrats.

    There are probably other things, too. If you’re a party that wishes we could go back to the 1950s (but without the 91 percent top tax rate), you’re going to have a hard time accepting the reality that hippie-dippy, unmanly things like wind and solar power are becoming ever more cost-competitive.

    I see you linked to Forbes.  Wanna see what else Forbes has to say about the market viability of hippie-dippie, unmanly things like wind and solar power?

    A study by the University of Texas projected that U.S. energy subsidies per megawatt hour in 2019 would be $0.5 for coal, $1- $2 for oil and natural gas, $15- $57 for wind and $43- $320 for solar. Many of the renewable energy subsidies come in the form of a Production Tax Credit (PTC) of 2.3 cents per kilowatt hour. Wholesale prices for electricity in 2017 were between approximately 2.9 cents to 5.6 cents per kilowatt hour. Therefore the wind production tax credit covers 30% to 60% of wholesale electricity prices.

    …that means it is only competitive because of the scale of subsidies.  That means it is not competitive.  So how does Krug”man”end it?

    Whatever the drivers of Trump policy, the fact, as I said, is that it will kill people. Wind turbines don’t cause cancer, but coal-burning power plants do — along with many other ailments. The Trump administration’s own estimates indicate that its relaxation of coal pollution rules will kill more than 1,000 Americans every year. If the administration gets to implement its full agenda — not just deregulation of many industries, but discrimination against industries it doesn’t like, such as renewable energy — the toll will be much higher.

    So if you eat meat — or, for that matter, drink water or breathe air — there’s a real sense in which Donald Trump is trying to kill you. And even if he’s turned out of office next year, for many Americans it will be too late.

    WERE ALL GONNA DIE….putz.

  • Economics Corner with Paul Krugman and Winston’s Mom

    The column where he admits he was wrong……not.

    So here’s the link boys don’t be shy…

    It’s no secret that Donald Trump has appointed a lot of partisan, unqualified hacks to key policy positions. A few months ago my colleague Gail Collins asked readers to help her select Trump’s worst cabinet member. It was a hard choice, because there were so many qualified applicants.

    The winner, by the way, was Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary. That looks like an even better call now: Ross’s department has reportedly prepared a report declaring that imports of European cars threaten U.S. national security. This is both ludicrous and dangerous. It gives Trump the right to start a new phase in his trade war that would inflict severe economic damage while alienating our allies — and, as a result, undermine national security.

    So he links to a Politico article that explains the Trump administration is considering levying a 25% tariff on cars imported from Europe.  This is not without consequences but he seems to think Trump is doing it out of sheer lunacy.

    Nah, chances are pretty good it is a play to his base.  Trump cites luxury cars made in Germany, Mercedes-Benz specifically.  Now a tariff on foreign imports might benefit domestic manufacturers, and the workers that build them.  Where do domestic auto companies build cars, again?  Now, Mercedes-Benz has a plant in Alabama because it is already more cost effective for them to build cars here for the North American market.  A tariff is ultimately going to be paid by the consumer which would make a base S-Class ($91,250) something around $114,062.  Can the market sustain that?  Maybe, but I bet they consider retooling and building the S-Class with its big luxurious, leather clad, climate controlled back seat…here in America.  They do that more jobs open up in Alabama, which is smack in the middle of Trump country.

    About Moore: It goes almost without saying that he has been wrong about everything. I don’t mean the occasional bad call, which all of us make. I mean a track record that includes predicting that George W. Bush’s policies would produce a magnificent boom, Barack Obama’s policies would lead to runaway inflation, tax cuts in Kansas would produce a “near immediate” boost to the state’s economy, and much more. And, of course, never an acknowledgment of error or reflection on why he got it wrong.

    Because you have never been wrong, no way no how.  Even where you admit you were wrong, you link a previous article where you link to yet another article where you retract your infamous statement that markets would never recover from Trump’s election.

    So conservatives could, if they wanted, turn for advice to highly partisan economists with at least some idea of what they’re doing. Yet these economists, despite what often seem like pathetic attempts to curry favor with politicians, are routinely passed over for key positions, which go to almost surreally unqualified figures like Moore or Larry Kudlow, the Trump administration’s chief economist.

    Many people have described the Trump administration as a kakistocracy — rule by the worst — which it is. But it’s also a hackistocracy — rule by the ignorant and incompetent. And in this Trump is just following standard G.O.P. practice.

    Why do hacks rule on the right? It may simply be that a party of apparatchiks feels uncomfortable with people who have any real expertise or independent reputation, no matter how loyal they may seem. After all, you never know when they might take a stand on principle.

    Your syphilis called.  It wants you to know it thinks your genital warts are disgusting.

    Even now — as I can attest from personal interactions — a great majority of those working for the Treasury Department, the State Department and so on are competent, hard-working people trying to do the best they can for their country.

    But as top jobs systematically go to hacks, there is an inevitable process of corrosion. We’re already seeing a degradation of the way our government responds to things like natural disasters. Well, there will be more and bigger disasters ahead. And the people in charge of dealing with those disasters will be the worst of the worst.

    What’s the difference?  This political class is the biggest group of cum-dumpsters I’ve seen in a long time.  Your problem is you’re used them fixing their hair, freshening up, and leading you to believe they at least change their panties between customers.  They don’t.  They are all a bunch of filthy, naked whores, and its better we all see it.

     

  • Economics Corner with Paul Krugman and Winston’s Mom

    Greetings!

    Since a few of you discussed some of his articles without me in the links, I’ll take a stab at this one.

    If you’re like me, you could use at least a brief break from talking about Donald Trump. So why don’t we talk about Ivanka Trump instead? You see, recently she said something that would have been remarkable coming from any Republican, but was truly awesome coming from the Daughter in Chief.

    Let’s not talk about Krugman.  Lets instead talk about Krugman’s wife.  Tell me, does she still look at you while somebody else fucks her brains out?

    Do you see why that is a ridiculous way to start a column?  Probably not.  But do continue.

    O.K., this was world-class lack of self-awareness: It doesn’t get much better than being lectured on self-reliance by an heiress whose business strategy involves trading on her father’s name.

    So what?  So does every politician named Kennedy.

    But let’s go beyond the personal here. We know a lot about upward mobility in different countries, and the facts are not what Republicans want to hear.

    […]

    The key observation, based on a growing body of research, is that when it comes to upward social mobility, the U.S. is truly exceptional — that is, it performs exceptionally badly. Americans whose parents have low incomes are more likely to have low incomes themselves, and less likely to make it into the middle or upper class, than their counterparts in other advanced countries. And those who are born affluent are, correspondingly, more likely to keep their status.

    You know where this is going.  Because there must be somebody on Earth we can emulate…

    Back to the “potential for upward mobility”: Where do people from poor or modest backgrounds have the best chance of getting ahead? The answer is that Scandinavia leads the rankings, although Canada also does well. And here’s the thing: The Nordic countries don’t just have low inequality, they also have much bigger governments, much more extensive social safety nets, than we do. In other words, they have what Republicans denounce as “socialism” (it really isn’t, but never mind).

    Are they socialists or not?  I’m pretty sure if I point out Cuba, Cambodia, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe as socialist helloles, you’ll start talking about Sweden.  Pick one shit head.

    But as to the question of upward mobility, here’s a fun snippet from OECD.

    Intergenerational mobility reflects a host of factors, including inherited traits, social norms and public policies that may influence the individual’s willingness and ability to seize economic opportunities. These factors are difficult to unbundle precisely and, as regards norms and policies, to some extent reflect societal choices over institutional settings as well as differences in choices over redistribution and equity, which are likely to be valued differently across countries. Therefore, no “benchmark” mobility level can be identified in cross-country comparisons.

    So comparing the country with the world’s largest economy to a tiny European ethnostate, is pardon my anglo-saxomisms, probably comparing shit to syphilis.

    Which means once again, we have to point out the countries you are talking about have small, nearly homogenous populations, distributed among a few population centers.  How small exactly?  The United States has more millionaires than Sweden has people. Even then, the millionaires in Sweden appear to have inherited their wealth.  Why does Sweden have the type of “income equality” that they do?  Probably because their middle class pays most of the taxes, and if you happen to be a high earner you have incentive to leave….because the taxes there suck balls.

    At any rate, here is a book I am sure you never read that explains how many of these so called “successes” are actually the result of free market reforms that have been put in place since the 70’s…when the Swedes figured out they were turning into what we now call Venezuela.  So how do you conclude?

    By contrast, progressive Democrats are calling for universal health care, increased aid to the poor, and programs offering free or at least subsidized college tuition. They’re calling for aid that helps middle- and lower-income parents afford quality child care. And they propose paying for these benefits with increased taxes on high incomes and large fortunes.

    Yes, because Universal Healthcare is working out in Finland.  If you need to find out how well that works out in the US, one simply need to look at how well the Veteran’s Administration is meeting the challenge of providing universal healthcare to 3-4% of the US population.  Its particularly bad if you live in a rural area.

    Which I assume an asshole like you is okay with fucking over the half of the country that doesn’t vote for your preferred politicians.

     

     

     

  • Economics Corner with Paul Krugman and Winston’s Mom

    This freaking guy just keeps on writing this crap.

    At some point you’d think he’d give it up.

    So child care really should be an important part of the progressive agenda. Hillary Clinton had a serious plan back in 2016, but the news media were too busy obsessing over emails to pay attention. And if you ask me, Elizabeth Warren’s new proposal isn’t getting as much attention as it should.

    For the Warren proposal is the kind of initiative that, if enacted, would change millions of lives for the better, yet could actually happen in the near future.

    Among other things, unlike purist visions of replacing private health insurance with “Medicare for all,” providing child care wouldn’t require imposing big new taxes on the middle class. The sums of money involved are small enough that new taxes on great wealth and high incomes, which are desirable on other grounds, could easily raise sufficient revenue.

    Keep in mind this is a guy with an estimated net worth worth of $2.5 million.  Just enough to be able to afford to live in a trendy neighborhood in New Jersey, but perhaps not enough to be “great wealth” or “high income.”  But do continue, darling.

    The logic of the Warren plan is fairly simple (although some commentators are trying to make it sound complex).

    Logic?  Well grab a spoon and eat my ass.

    Child care would be regulated to ensure that basic quality was maintained and subsidized to make it affordable. The size of the subsidy would depend on parents’ incomes: lower-income parents would get free care, higher-income parents would have to pay something, but nobody would have to pay more than 7 percent of income

    There is already a tax credit for child care.  The details are here but we’re talking $2000/year for qualifying families.  Incidentally, the child care provider is already aware of this tax credit and price their services accordingly.  They currently have no incentive to price their services below this $2000 per year, so they’ll make sure it stays above $2000 or about $38 per week so their customers max out this tax credit. Need proof of this lack of incentive?  The average cost of infant care in the US last year was — $211 per week.

    But sure…maybe charging $38 per week is unrealistically low.

    Warren’s advisers put the budget cost at $70 billion a year, or around one-third of one percent of GDP. That’s not chicken feed, but it’s not that much for something that could transform so many lives.

    It is, for example, well under half the revenue lost due to the Trump tax cut, which seems to have been used mainly for share buybacks. And it’s a tiny fraction of what it would cost to replace all private health insurance with a public program.

    Again with the stock buybacks…. the sake of all that is fuck!  Let people control more of their money they might just do what they want with it. Some might get their finances in order, other might buy my personal favorite, hookers and blow.  More hookers. More blow.

    Meanwhile, on the right there are the usual cries of “socialism,” which these days means anything to the left of eating poor people’s babies.

    Cut that out.  You’re too much a fucking pussy to beat off, let alone beat a straw-man.

    More interestingly, I’m seeing at least some commentary on the right that doesn’t just push back against the whole idea of making it easier for mothers to work, it wants us to go back to the days when families could “live on one income.”

    Darling, there’s no link here.  That means you just made this up.

    Going back to this $70 billion number lets say this does go in effect.  Is this number go higher or lower as individuals try to fogure out how many kids they have?  Had I known I can send Winston to daycare for free, there might be more than one Winston.  Think about that.  Two Winstons!

    And it would be for free, I work how I get paid—under the table.  I haven’t paid taxes since 1967.

    With this increased demand, will the cost of the subsidy go up or down?  How will supply be determnied to adjust to demand? Now that I think about it, it might work out okay for me, as I’ll get more business greasing the wheels of that governing body.

    Still, Krugman provides no evidence as to how this will substantively reduce the cost of child care.  While I can point to subsidies like, I dunno, college tuition assistance, or rent control…neither of which actually reduced the cost of tuition or housing.

    But do continue providing cover for Lizzy.  Lizzy is busy laying low and hoping we all forget the whole white squaw thing.

  • More Economics with Paul Krugman and Winston’s Mom

    Since the editors were still unable to find a suitable replacement, I, Winston’s Mom will continue to provide valuable analysis of the economic questions of the day.

    In your face Heritage Foundation!

    Drake, dear.  I left half a box of Summer’s Eve in the back of your car.  If you can be a peach and can drop it off later.  KThxBi!

    Lets start here.

    That’s a shameful line of argument. In fact, whenever you see someone invoking Venezuela as a reason not to consider progressive policy ideas, you know right away that the person in question is uninformed, dishonest, or both. It basically shows that the speaker or writer isn’t willing to engage in serious discussion, preferring to scare people with a boogeyman of which he or she knows nothing.

    I was working in Jersey once when a group of sailors stopped by the brothel I was working at tha time. My Madam said not to reuse the condom, we’ll all get the clap that way.  I didn’t believe that the first time.  Let me tell you something, we all got the clap after that.

    The next time soomebody says, thats how you get the clap…you might just get the clap.

    But what, exactly, does any of this have to do with the policy ideas of Elizabeth Warren, or Kamala Harris, or even a genuine radical like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Is anyone in U.S. politics, even those who call themselves socialists, proposing that we nationalize large parts of the private sector? Is there anything in the record of U.S. progressives suggesting that they are less fiscally responsible than the people who keep using voodoo economics to push massive tax cuts for the rich?

    I wouldn’t trust any of these broads you mentioned to run a brothel.  Everybody would get the clap.

    Maybe you disagree with all these policy ideas. But if your first response, literally, is to scream “Venezuela,” you’re demonstrating both your unscrupulousness and your lack of any serious arguments for your position.

    I don’t lack serious arguments.  You lack serious arguments.  VENEZUELA!!!! VENEZUELA!!! VENEZUELA!!!

    But from now on, here’s my rule: anyone who tries to use Venezuela as a cudgel in U.S. political debate doesn’t deserve to be part of that debate.

    Of course its relevant!  I can’t even get a job in Venezuela you punk bitch.  I hope Venezuela’s giant, wet snatch is rubbed in your face from now until the end of fucking time.

  • Economics Corner with Winston’s Mom & Paul Krugman

    Note from the Glibertarians.com editing staff:  Here at Glibertarians.com, we are constantly searching for new features.  We noticed a niche in our features was lacking:  macroeconomic analysis.  Because of this, we reached out to Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand institute.  Unfortunately, that guy wants to get paid for his work.  So we found the next best thing:

    Winston’s Mom.

    First thing I want to say is, hi Winston, Mom got a new gig!

    Now that we got thst out of the way, let me begin here,

    In 1961, America faced what conservatives considered a mortal threat: calls for a national health insurance program covering senior citizens. In an attempt to avert this awful fate, the American Medical Association launched what it called Operation Coffee Cup, a pioneering attempt at viral marketing.

    Here’s how it worked: Doctors’ wives (hey, it was 1961) were asked to invite their friends over and play them a recording in which Ronald Reagan explained that socialized medicine would destroy American freedom. The housewives, in turn, were supposed to write letters to Congress denouncing the menace of Medicare.

    In 1961, I recall a doctor that would send his wife down to Biloxi, MS with her girl friends.  He was into fisting for some reason but that didn’t stop him from penetrating everything.  He was a lousy (((tipper))) as I recall.

    What do Trump’s people, or conservatives in general, mean by “socialism”? The answer is, it depends.

    Sometimes it means any kind of economic liberalism. Thus after the SOTU, Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, lauded the Trump economy and declared that “we’re not going back to socialism” — i.e., apparently America itself was a socialist hellhole as recently as 2016. Who knew?

    Ever try telling the lady at the methadone clinic you’re on Medicaid?  What a bitch.

    Other times, however, it means Soviet-style central planning, or Venezuela-style nationalization of industry, never mind the reality that there is essentially nobody in American political life who advocates such things.

    That broad from NY, always on TV, always smiling with her squeaky voice.  Whats her name?

    Trump’s economists clearly had a hard time fitting the reality of Nordic societies into their anti-socialist manifesto. In some places they say that the Nordics aren’t really socialist; in others they try desperately to show that despite appearances, Danes and Swedes are suffering — for example, it’s expensive for them to operate a pickup truck. I am not making this up.

    What about the slippery slope from liberalism to totalitarianism? There’s absolutely no evidence that it exists. Medicare didn’t destroy freedom. Stalinist Russia and Maoist China didn’t evolve out of social democracies. Venezuela was a corrupt petrostate long before Hugo Chávez came along. If there’s a road to serfdom, I can’t think of any nation that took it.

    Who was it that wrote that book and who was he writing about anyway?

    So scaremongering over socialism is both silly and dishonest. But will it be politically effective?

    Probably not. After all, voters overwhelmingly support most of the policies proposed by American “socialists,” including higher taxes on the wealthy and making Medicare available to everyone (although they don’t support plans that would force people to give up private insurance — a warning to Democrats not to make single-payer purity a litmus test).

    On the other hand, we should never discount the power of dishonesty. Right-wing media will portray whomever the Democrats nominate for president as the second coming of Leon Trotsky, and millions of people will believe them. Let’s just hope that the rest of the media report the clean little secret of American socialism, which is that it isn’t radical at all.

    I do have a story from 1973 about a Danish john named Viggo.  We bargained a bit, but he started small.  First he asked how much to finger my ass, so I said 5 Kroner, and when he said he had real money i said $5.  Then he asked how much to finger his ass and I’m all well the first one is free dear, but the second will cost another $5.  One thing lead to another, and eventually we built up a lather using the hotel soap and I had an bottle of vodka in his ass while I was rubbing him out.  Doesn’t seem so weird now, but back then I might not have opened up the bottle and taken a swig after the fact.

    What were we talking about?  Right, slippery slopes.  It starts small but if you keep slipping, it might net you $58 in the end.