David Angelo

The War on Women

davidangelojokes:

Who is fighting it?

These images were pulled from the Huffington Post’s front page 5 minutes ago (1:50pm PDT 4/9/13). All these images/”stories” appeared concurrently.

But, remember, they ARE progressive…

see?

for further reading: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/gop-war-on-women

David Angelo Jokes: Top 10 Cars of All Time

Response to: The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!

Long time no blog!

I was putting together some quotes for my smash hit youtube series, eEconomics, and figured I’d browse through Krugman’s blog as an easy source for some choice B-S.

And this statement about the Cyprus banking crisis jumped out at me:

As long as you haven’t bought into the Barney-Frank-did-it school of thought, you realize that the global crisis of 2008 was in a fundamental sense made possible by the erosion of effective bank regulation. As Gary Gorton (pdf) has documented, we had a 70-year “quiet period” after the Great Depression in which advanced countries had very few major financial flare-ups; Gorton argues, and most of us agree, that the key to this quietness was a constrained, regulated financial system that also limited the opportunities for excessive non-bank leverage.

But this regulation in turn depended, to an important extent, on limited international capital flows; otherwise regulations made in Washington or elsewhere would have been bypassed via havens like, well, Cyprus. And once capital controls began to be lifted in the 1970s we entered an era of ever-bigger financial crises, starting in Latin America, then moving to Asia, and finally striking the whole world.

…

All of which raises the question, is the era of free capital movement just a bubble, fated to end one of these years, maybe soon?

Because - as all these communist economists tell us - regulation is the solution. Government can save us. Rules and laws and protocols will be our salvation. 

On some level I agree. But the regulation we need back is sound money.  Capital flows are naturally regulated when money has a defined value. Don’t take my word for it, ask the Fiat Maestro himself…

Alan Greenspan, 1998 Congressional Testimony:

There was some evidence of that process working in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century when international capital flows were largely uninhibited. Losses, however, in an environment where gold standard rules were tight and liquidity constrained, were quickly reflected in rapid increases in interest rates and the cost of capital generally. This tended to delimit the misuse of capital and its consequences. Imbalances were generally aborted before they got out of hand. But following World War I such tight restraints on economies were seen as too inflexible to meet the economic policy goals of the twentieth century.

…

In the late twentieth century, however, fiat currency regimes have replaced the rigid automaticity of the gold standard in its heyday. More elastic currencies and markets, arguably, are now less sensitive to and, hence, slower to contain the misallocation of capital. Market contagion across national borders has consequently been more prevalent and faster in today’s international financial markets than appears to have been the case a century ago under comparable circumstances.

My fundamental problem with Krugman is that he is so blinded by his ideology/pathological insecurities that he forgets basic economics.  The answer to this problem is not capital controls instituted by increasingly autocratic governments. It’s much simpler - just put the monopoly money away and let people be free.

I miss blogging. Forgot how amazing I am at it.

Assault Weapons

LOTS of inappropriate and inaccurate commentary on today’s events. Frankly, I’m tired of correcting all the exact same nonsense on this topic.

Learn something:

1. Gun Control

2. Why the NRA Pays for Lobbying

Warren Buffett Hathaway with Lying

Oh man, just CLASSIC stuff going on today.  It’s difficult to accept that Buffett gets away with his shenanigans, but it’s easy to understand why if you just spend 3 seconds talking with any typical American.

Today, Berkshire Hathaway spent $1.2 billion buying back shares.  This was universally reported, without the slightest criticism, by every major news outlet.

So, what’s interesting about it?

First, the context. Ever since he’s accepted his mortality, Warren has been lobbying for higher taxes on the rich - which, I speculate, is to ensure his legacy as a “man of the people.”

we need Congress, right now, to enact a minimum tax on high incomes. I would suggest 30 percent of taxable income between $1 million and $10 million, and 35 percent on amounts above that. A plain and simple rule like that will block the efforts of lobbyists, lawyers and contribution-hungry legislators to keep the ultrarich paying rates well below those incurred by people with income just a tiny fraction of ours. Only a minimum tax on very high incomes will prevent the stated tax rate from being eviscerated by these warriors for the wealthy.

In short, he wants the rich to pay higher taxes.

So, what is a share buyback, and how does that contradict his public snakeoil act?

Berkshire Hathaway stock does not pay dividends. Shares are also priced, nominally, quite high (one class-A share will set you back ~$132,000). In short, this is a stock owned by the rich - with the majority of the shares owned by Warren himself.

Because the stock does not pay dividends, the only way to make money on it is through selling it at a higher price - A.K.A. “capital gains.”  Capital gains are taxed at a low 15% - a rate every secretary in America can envy!

When Berkshire spends $1.2 billion buying back shares, it basically gives a premium to the stock and increases potential capital gains should the shareholder sell.

And they have good reason to sell because, as luck would have it, in a few weeks the capital gains rate goes to 20%.

How ‘bout that!?

This whole thing is an elaborate tax avoidance scheme. Courtesy of the man who wants to raise taxes.

Cute, huh?

Krugman on Inflation

Some selected Krugman quotes this year about inflation…

Incredible Credibility:

But won’t that money printing cause inflation? Not as long as the economy remains depressed.

Still a Phantom Menace:

Early last year the inflationistas were yelling a lot; commodity prices had jumped, and they were shouting that high inflation was just around the corner, with much talk of debasing the currency and all that.

Whoops.

A couple of further points. One refuge of some of the inflationistas has been to claim that the feds are cooking the data, that true inflation is much higher than reported. You can take those claims apart in detail, but a simpler answer may be just to look at independent inflation measures, like MIT’s Billion Prices Index:

[graph]

No hint of book-cooking there.

Billion Price Update:

For some reason I seem to be seeing a resurgence of inflation scare stories, despite the fact that — gas prices aside — inflation remains quiescent. And along with the scare stories come assertions that the inflation numbers are faked, that the government is hiding the true rate.

Which leads to this bit of preciousness…

The Full McConnell:

there are good reasons to believe that the true inflation rate facing seniors is actually higher, not lower, than the CPI.

Never gets old.