Профиль

Look eventually those people were gonna die anyways

The current austerity debate mostly just doesn't consider the possibility of raising more revenue. I think this demonstrates that we can, if we have the political will. Full report here.

The debt-to-wealth ratio: A missing lens on the U.S. government's fiscal capacityWhy scaling the national debt by what the country owns—not just what it earns in a year—reshapes the debate over how much we owe and who could help pay it down.equitablegrowth.org

Quisling university administrator: "I can commit to all of these except lowering tuition."

Right, you can't get just some of SAVE, you basically have to take all of it or none of it. They probably have 50 votes for SAVE as it's written.

Maybe I'm naive but I think he's wrong here and that Ds really do care about Democracy. There's virtually no disagreement on this issue among Ds.

All the reasonableness stuff - Yglesias mentions back-end certification - is going to be no-go for Trump and therefore Republicans.

A better adaptation would have played Pulp's I'm a Man as the credits rolled. Also the Orko erasure is pure cowardice.

Still can't write jokes though right?

Why would you yank the horny parts from a *vampire* story

Gotta wonder about this kind of thing when Rs are on the losing end of an enthusiasm gap. Are their voters dying to drive twice as far to vote?

Or "everything just seems so fucked up right now," also a good candidate.

We really under-index on this. Like, even the cost of money argument doesn't quite make sense through this lens. If you take this really seriously then the only possibilities are partisanship or information environment.

The one other thing I would say about this is that I think it's a case of harmful short-termism. Bankers do this for a living, they ought to be able to estimate downside risks. Either they did bad short-term thinking or good gov-will-bail-us-out thinking.

That's fair enough, everyone had incentives to do dumb and dangerous stuff. That's why we regulate markets.

I don't know, the idea that it's fine as long as prices keep going up means basically that you're banking on an exit strategy through sale of the house or refinancing, and that you really can't afford the full term of the loan. I think the loans were crummy.

Underwriting was loose generally though right. Seems like this is still compatible with the idea that banks wrote some crummy loans.

Debt-to-GDP isn't a complete picture of the resources available to service government debt. Funding current spending levels is more a question of political will than available resources. See the full report here.

The debt-to-wealth ratio: A missing lens on the U.S. government's fiscal capacityWhy scaling the national debt by what the country owns—not just what it earns in a year—reshapes the debate over how much we owe and who could help pay it down.equitablegrowth.org

As a thought experiment, we note in the report that a one-time levy of 10% on the wealth of the wealthiest 1% of households would wipe out about 15% of the debt in a single stroke.

This is pretty significant, because people are always saying "you can't just tax the top," and maybe that's mostly true, but it gets less and less true as inequality rises.

Wealth has grown much faster than GDP. And because of rising wealth inequality, more and more of it is held by the very wealthiest households. Debt-to-top 0.01% wealth (about 13,000 households) is lower now than it was for the entirety of 1940-2000.