Somewhere in the comments far below our friend Big Swede brought us an article from Heritage, said that I would not look at it due to its source, which of course meant that I had to go look at the damned thing. Its conclusion (in 2005) was that European economies were suffering from too much government spending. It was a farce, as the authors could not separate and isolate variables, but that was also its strength. Dealing as they were with a massive data set and no meaningful way to manipulate it, the authors were free to insert their ideology to force their conclusion. The report was garbage, the science behind it the “Natelson method”, named after the self-proclaimed constitutional scholar who also self-validated in neoclassical economics. He introduced new depth and rigor into the field of confirmation bias.
Neoclassical economics is bullshit that persists due to its ideological utility. It serves power well, and so is the only economics taught at our most prestigious universities. Max Plank said that new scientific truth only triumphs because old scientists die off. The current bankruptcy of economics will persist until the Geithners, Summers and Greenspans join Milton Friedman in slumber, and that cannot happen soon enough.
Look what they are doing to us! Austerity, the “fiscal cliff” are political agendas that have their roots in bullshit economics. The stealth target is to gut our great social programs, and Democrats, please smell the coffee: your Obama is as filthy stealthy as any of them.
I started to read this article, The Trillion Dollar Cat Shit Coin, with only mild interest until I realized that the author, Rob Urie, had some real juice. I jumped to the bottom to check his credentials. He has none! I Binged him – he doesn’t turn up! His words must stand on their own without and Ivy League or Chicago hue.
And they do, in my opinion. Due to his apparent lack of creds in the field of economics, the guy actually has some deeper understanding of economics. Steve Keen, an iconoclast in the field, has noted that
Neoclassical economics has effectively insulated itself from the great advances made in science and engineering over the last 40 years. This self-imposed isolation must come to an end. For while the concepts of neoclassical economics appear difficult, they are actually quaint in comparison to the sophistication evident in today’s mathematics, engineering, computing, evolutionary biology and physics. In order to advance, economics must humbly submit to learning from disciplines that it has studiously ignored for so long. Some researchers in outside fields have called for the wholesale replacement of standard economics curricula, using at least the building blocks of modern thought inherent in other disciplines. In light of the catastrophe economists have visited upon the real world, those calls carry substantial weight.
Urie’s piece is worth a read for the clarity he brings to economics due to his credentials: he is, as his brief bio says at the and, an “artist and political economist,” and not pedigreed in economics. He therefore has some real insight.
Piece of Mindful 
Greece’s debt to GDP ratio in 2011 was more than 160%.
The austerity package requires them to lower that ratio to 120% by 2020.
Does that sound like “gutting social programs” to you?
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You can read this Mark.
It’s not from Heritage. http://www.voxeu.org/article/cut-deficits-cutting-spending
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I went to the link swede, mr. Impenetrable. My reaction, first time by for you no doubt:
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There’s two types of economists, ones that reinforce their theories with numbers and the others which go out of their way to avoid talking about absolutes.
I’ve noticed in all of your examples nothing is ever said about the unemployment rate, or the amount of debt to GDP, or interest of the debt. No comparison ever is made of civil servants salaries as compared to the private sector or sweetheart pension/health care plans.
Non-neos seldom show graphs and the relationship between exorbitant spending rates and the over all health of the economy.
They can’t. Because spending more than your total output is unsustainable.
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Here’s a neoclassical in debt study example from the author from my link.
“In 2011, the IMF identified episodes from 1980 to 2005 in which 17 developed countries had aggressively reduced deficits. The IMF classified each episode as either ‘expenditure-based’ or ‘tax-based’, depending on whether the government had mainly cut spending or hiked taxes. When Carlo Favero, Francesco Giavazzi, and I studied the results (2012), it turned out that the two kinds of deficit reduction had starkly different effects; cutting spending resulted in very small, short-lived recessions (if any), and raising taxes resulted in prolonged recessions.
We weren’t the first people to distinguish between the two kinds of deficit-cutting, of course. In the past, critics such as Paul Krugman, Christina Romer, and some economists at the IMF have responded to this claim, arguing that the two approaches don’t have different results. When an economy performs well after government spending cuts, they say, it’s actually because the business cycle has picked up, or else because the government’s monetary policy happened to be more expansionary at the time. But my colleagues and I took both factors into account in our research, carefully analysing the business cycle and monetary policy in relation to each fiscal episode, and concluded that the difference between expenditure-based and tax-based actions remained.”
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The point of this post was the cat shit link which you obviously have not read.
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Urie or Keen for that matter doesn’t back anything up with numbers.
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Keen’s work is featured at at Debt Watch, and undermines your point in total. He thinks that the numbers currently in use are not refined or useful and that the essential formulations of neoclassical theory are useless – there is no Says Law, no demand curve, no rational consumer or equilibrium. e thinks that more and better refinement of formulas, including chaos, needs to be introduced.
And, of course, Urie is a child in the crowd who says the emperor has no clothes. You’re very opaque, hard to deal with.
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Perfect.
It you don’t like the numbers you call them unrefined.
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You’re just not getting this, Swede. You’re having a conversation with yourself, assuming that this is about too much government or spending. It’s about the “science” of economics and its use as a force to advance ideology, in the case of neoclassical economics, fascism. You come trotting in here bringing their numbers and graphs and missing the point entirely. You think there is rigor and science behind those numbers, and Keen says not, far from it, it is all fraud.
Greece is under attack, the economists, as they are called, demanding austerity and privitization, in essence bringing down its democratic government and replacing it with banks. It’s about overthrowing popular government.
I’ll bet you did not know you are supporting fascism, and that is what the debate is about – economics as a Trojan Horse for banksters and thugs.
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I do get it. Big picture that is.
Capitalism is under attack and its cancer is socialism. The dirty little secret is, and I know you’re aware of it, is that nations eventually succumb to immoral relationships between power and money.
Power wins in the long run which brings fascism.
And armies trump bankers.
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Round and round. Again, the linked piece for this post is about the illusion that debt-based currency and neoclassical economics present. he $trillion dollar coin is a metaphor that pops the illusion – we can simply ignore the concept of debt and go our merry way without regard to the money we supposedly owe the Fed.
You keep coming ack with tales of woe about debt debt debt. You’re bought into the illusion. Buying into that illusion cedes power from government to bankers, and leads to fascism. You are an unwitting fascist. Is the link beginning to make sense to you? I’m not saying he’s right or has the answer but only that we do not have to think like neoclassical economists, as that whole science is a fraud.
OK?
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Oh I see.
Just ignore the debt and it vanishes.
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The real illusion. From Zero Hedge.
“But in just a few short sentences Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe eviscerates the Krugmans of the world by pointing out the obvious: If governments or central banks really can create wealth simply by creating money, why does poverty exist anywhere on earth? Why haven’t successive rounds of quantitative easing by the US Fed solved our economic recession? And if Fed money creation really works, and doesn’t create inflation, why haven’t Americans gotten richer as the money supply has grown?
The truth is obvious to everyone. Fiat currency is not wealth, and the creation of more fiat dollars does not mean that more rice, steel, soybeans, Ipads, or Honda Accords suddenly come into existence. The creation of new fiat currency simply strengthens a fantasy balance sheet, either by adding to cash reserves or servicing debt. But this balance sheet wealth is an illusion, just as the notion we can continue to raise the debt limit and borrow money forever is an illusion. “
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Well, Swede, big breakthrough for you to realize that currency is an illusion. So too is gold-backed currency. That’s a fact of life, big fella. Welcome aboard. Your Zero Hedge guy is not saying anything new, and fiat money does not solve the problem of resource distribution. And as we saw in 2007 and 2008, bankers, and not government, created immense bubble wealth (inflation). That’s a problem for sure – runaway banks, and private bank-caused inflation.
Now, explain to me why fiat currency does not represent real wealth but DOES represent real debt, and why we have to worry about that debt.
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Austerity package? Greece has three main goals imposed upon it, of which austerity is only one. The other two are the privatization of public/government assets, and structural reform.
Want to get into the details of privatization and structural reform? Or is it adequate to say that Greece has been assimilated into the greater Eurozone neofascist ruling corporatocracy?
And do you have any idea of what austerity is doing to social programs in Greece? Or are you just enamored by a the notion that a 25% drop in debt to GDP ration over 8 years can’t be that much of a “gutting”?
Greece’s debt problems at the hand of the Eurozone and IMF have resulted in it becoming a debt slave and losing its sovereignty at the hands of external economic fascistic forces.
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Would we save money if we privatized the US Postal system?
And what I’ve read about the IMF is that they support a Keynesian approach to managing economies.
Until of course things get outta hand. Like Greece’s ratios.
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I think we would be “saving” tons of money if the system simply allocated some of the money from their CAFR (Comprehensive Annual Finance Report) funds – which holds hundreds of trillions of dollars – into “essential” programs like the postal service. The “government” has no problems with money. It is simply that, as a business (in one sense), it can’t help itself getting more money from its host population. And since the money is printed by the same banking families that own the “government”, it hardly matters.
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To learn more about CAFRs, read:
https://www.municipalbonds.com/education/understanding-the-comprehensive-annual-financial-reports-cafrs/
https://realitybloger.wordpress.com/?s=CAFR
Here’s a list of Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFR) for Colorado:
https://osc.colorado.gov/financial-operations/financial-reports/acfr
Colorado’s CAFR for fiscal year 2020:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cHfbVNbDm7TMiF9bN6UEY677dANu8BOl/view
This is where all “your” tax money goes.
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Here’s the “U.S. government’s” CAFR report for fiscal year 2020. You’ll see that they generate far more revenue than they do debt. The system isn’t “broke” by sheer accident or incompetence; it’s corrupt beyond reform by design (ditto).
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Learn more about the “usefulness” of ‘comprehensive’ annual financial reports from this detailed article about the subject:
https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-are-annual-financial-reports-useless.html
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For British readers, there’s a similar annual finance reporting system in the U.K.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=annual+comprehensive+financial+report+in+the+uk&ia=web
Many other countries have similar revenue reporting systems, too. It’s a scam of a “global” scale.
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You want to reduce spending? Raise interest rates! Banks and hedge funds won’t let this happen, the price distortion favors their high-speed casino scheme. House of Cards much?
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Ron M. sent me this.
Quote: “Sometimes governments start out as gangs; strong men with brutish followers who simply want to toss out the aging mustache Petes, and take the gold, glory, and girls for themselves. Those that do start out with noble intentions often (always?) transmute into gangs anyway, corrupted by the intoxication of power, and losing sight of the original goal.
Today’s US government meet many of the criteria that define a gang. It has one strong, charismatic leader who intimidates, lies, coerces, bribes, ridicules, and proscribes all who dare oppose him. Of course politics have always been a blood sport, frequently operating like a Mafia family, but far less efficiently. Like every corrupt government, ours is now like an onion—as layers are peeled, the smell gets stronger.
We’re careening along a one-way street, heading for a major pileup at the intersection of Deficit Spending Boulevard and Common Sense Avenue. Even if we can find a way around that traffic jam, we’ll encounter a free-for-all melee at the entrance to the Fiscal Solvency Freeway, which will very likely misdirect us to a wrong-way on-ramp.
Our powerful V-8 SUV is firing on 4 cylinders and running out of Canadian petrol. The fighter-bomber is experiencing major electrical problems and losing air speed. The ship of state has had a gyrocompass tumble, can’t read its navigational charts, and is taking on water faster than Rose O’Donnell takes on a bag of supersized fries.
Hey, how ’bout this: why don’t we just give the pilot another shot at getting us home safely? Yeah, that oughta work. I mean, after all, he’s really an articulate and likable homey who went to Harvard.”
Ron M.
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As Clint Richardson once said:
“Government likes debt. Debt is profitable. And so government is in a continuous cycle of borrowing and bonding money… FROM ITSELF!!! One government or fund will loan to another. Government funds makes loans and creates corporate bonds to banks and corporations. The whole shell game is about creating and sustaining debt to ensure future taxation for more investment opportunities in the future. The thought of paying off all debt would be like asking pharmaceutical companies to develop a cure for disease… It ain’t going to happen!!! They’d be out of business if they cured the thing they treat the symptoms of… and so too would a majority government bureaucracy be redundant and unnecessary if government did not promote perpetual debt.”
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Just as true today as it was in 2012.
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