gehringer_2

Hindsight history is one of my pet Peeves. It's an easy cop out for the Dems to blame all the issues on "Reagan Started It" when they've had 20 years of the Presidency since to have done something about the direction things were going. Clinton and his 'New Dems' had bought into the "knowledge and finance future" paradigm as much as any repub ever did. And the concentration of the historical blame game continues to be an intellectual diversion from the effort of figuring out what to do about where we are now. The Dems still don't have any consistent economic message for how to rebuild a private sector middle class economy (Biden had an idea but never articulated it in any effective way) which is what has left the door wide open to a charlatan like Trump to sell his snake oil.

LOL - maybe at some point they will get it. The main reason there are so many undocumented residents in the US all along is that no matter how you decide to try and change that situation, it's going to be very expensive, and no-one has ever really believed the problem is so serious to have appropriated the money to deal with it - from border security to asylum courts, it all takes money and no consensus has ever emerged in Congress that there aren't more important things to spend money on than that. So this is the dog catching the UPS van. They've manufactured a public belief in an immigration 'crises' to whip up the culture warriors and other miscellaneous xenophobes to get elected, but guess what they are finding out? Gonna cost a lot of money - and when it becomes a matter of finding money, suddenly the problem doesn't look any more serious than it really is, which in the overall scheme of budget priorities, isn't very.

a lot of things were disappointing about the Carter admin by the end. The Rose Garden paralysis over Iran really hurt him. Sure it was a crisis but you don't stop everything in a nation of 300 million over what's happening to a couple of hundred. He couldn't figure out how to hit the tone for something being serious without being all consuming. But all that said, without a plan to deal with inflation, Carter loses that election no matter what else he does or doesn't do.

It's like it comes and goes. He was hitting 97 in a previous outing - then poof.

yeah - Back in an era when noblesse oblige was a thing, you could elect the rich guy because he was harder to bribe. The problem is that today's rich guys don't want to serve, they just want to get richer.

I am so past expecting anything from Rubio.

The case you are trying to make if that you care more about whether an idea is right or wrong than whose idea it was. Reagan was right on some very big issues and older Americans in particular remember that. That is what the larger public want to see leaders do. You gain credibility with a voter if show you are willing to act in the public interest instead of only party interest, and you do that by admitting when the other side gets something right.

Reagan fired the controllers for striking against the government. In the time since then, most states where public employee strikes were legal have also moved to make them illegal again. That was historically the norm before the 70' era and that is what is has returned to. The deal when you go to work for the people is that you don't go on strike. I think most people agree with that. And there is solid logic behind it. Public employees doing critical (and mostly monopoly) services have an outsized negotiating leverage which basically makes collective bargaining that is fair to the public side impossible if a strike threat is present.

that is pretty much what I was going to say. And TBH, I would not blame Reagan for what happened in the 30 yrs since he left office. Reagan was capable of changing his mind and he became a Republican not because he was in bed with the Oligarchs, but because he believed the left was hurting the working class. Given that, I would argue there is at least a 50/50 chance that when he saw what was happening to the middle class, he would have moved toward revised policies. When Reagan took office the most important issues on his plate were inflation and the Cold War and he dealt with those things about as successfully anyone could have asked. Nobody was ruminating on the possible future of the middle class or making predictions it was at risk at that point in history. Plus it's also not uncommon for 'movements' to end up claiming far more in the name of their founder than the founder would ever recognize - a fact in evidence all around us everyday.

I think there is absolutely going to be a dynamic pulling Barrett toward the unity of the other women, especially in the face of Thomas and Alito being such weirdos. Who knows how much effect it will have, but there is going to be some kind of pull there.

so much winning: Exerpts from the yahoo finance report this AM: On Wednesday, fresh data from ADP showed the private sector added 75,000 jobs in February, far fewer than economists' estimates of 140,000 — and significantly lower than the 186,000 jobs added in January. January's number of job additions was revised up from a prior reading of 183,000. February's data marked the largest month-over-month decline in private payroll additions in since March 2023. ...... A string of weaker-than-expected data has economists' projections for first quarter economic growth sliding. On Monday, two separate releases showed activity in the manufacturing sector slowed in February while construction spending fell more than anticipated in January. The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow tool, which uses already released data to forecast the quarterly pace of economic growth, now projects GDP fell by 2.8% in the first three months of the year, down from Friday's projection of a 1.5% decline. ..... ISM's manufacturing index fell to a reading of 50.3 in February from 50.9 in January. Meanwhile, the prices paid index surged to a reading of 62.4, up from 54.9 the month prior, marking its highest level since July 2022. The rise reflects increasing costs to companies. ..... Monday's data was just one of the many prints that have come in weaker than expected to start 2025. In January, consumer spending fell for the first time in nearly two years, and separate data showed retail sales saw the largest monthly decline in a year. Meanwhile, housing activity has remained in the doldrums. Citi's economic surprise index, which measures how data comes in relative to expectations, shows growth data has been missing the Street's mark for most of the past month. Subsequently, many economists have been slashing their GDP outlook for the quarter as the data has come in. "The January figures of private construction have lowered our estimate of Q1 GDP to 0.6% annualized, down from 1% at the end of last week and well below the 2.5% penciled into the February baseline forecast," Oxford Economics lead US economist Bernard Yaros wrote in a note on Monday. Meanwhile, JPMorgan recently reduced its projection for first quarter GDP to 1.5% from a previous estimate of 2.25%. Goldman Sachs' latest projection is 1.6% GDP, down from an initial projection of 2.6% in late January.

well, one thing you absolutely will not get out of this kind of chaos is any re-shoring investment.

Nice to see Faedo get the win. ...oh, wait...damn.

this is why tariffs were the wrong way to go about any rebuild of US manufacturing in the first place. If the approach were via investment incentives, corporate governance reform, financial system reform that would reduce the profit in cannibalizing manufacturers, worker training support -the whole nine yards - THEN you could have have an evolutionary regrowth and an economy that continued to grow while changing. If Trump produces a recession in the name of helping US workers it will be 110% an unforced error.

Could be the Miller trade has made him such a pariah in his own locker room that he finds himself out there as more or less a solo skater (i.e. no teamwork) so all he can do is keep his head down make the play in front of him. And now it's become a catch-22. He needs to be moved but no-one will take the contract until he plays better and Canucks won't take the loss. Easy front office move to criticize in hindsight but they should have moved them both at the same time.

What is ironically funny about all this is that Marx has never been in less favor yet a good chunk of his analysis that capitalism has deep inherent problems in terms of creating any kind of just society is today being proved spot on in the US like no time since the 1930's. He solution was as wrong as his analysis was right, so now we don't pay any attention to the analysis either, but all you have to do is look and see it coming to fruition. If you look at it in terms of a mathematical or mechanical system, capitalism inherently drives to the extremes. The greater the capital amassed, the more profitably that capital can be deployed, so there is an inevitable wealth concentration effect that leads to either a fascist oligarchy or a robber baron pseudo democracy. It's such a fundamental misunderstanding that's been foisted on Americans by the conservative movement. The WSJ matra - "Free people, free markets" couldn't have it more wrong. The necessary role of the government in a free society is not, as the right would have you believe, to facilitate capitalism, but is in fact the exact opposite. In a free capitalist state the government must regulate that capitalism into some kind of reasonable social equilibrium by taxation, provision of public goods, and defense of consumer and worker rights. It role is exactly the opposite of facilitating unfettered 'free' markets. Related to this, the (ex?)conservative Peter Wehner had an NYT column this week where he talked to a well known evangelical philosopher, who when asked how the US evangelical right wing is getting it wrong, said that the evangelical church is so hung up seeing the government as the guarantor of liberty, this it has forgotten that the Bible taught that the most important role of government is provision of Justice. Whether you are religious or not I think that is spot on also.

In the past, reporters did not headline their stories, that was done by editors - but I'm not sure if there are any editors left at any local newspapers so take that bit of past practice FWIW.

What business acumen Trump has was gained in real estate and from that he has learned that everything is a zero sum game, the pie never grows, because pieces of land don't grow - you either have it, or the other guy has it. But of course that is one sliver of a giant economy where almost *nothing* else works that way. Outside of real estate, economics is exactly about creating more stuff out of nothing - it's all about synergy, integration, pooling resources to cooperate in the production of new wealth. He doesn't understand any of that.

Trump may have fallen out with Tillerson but he apparently still has buddies in big oil.

US is very long on natural gas. But if the Canadians export tax Alberta oil that will definitely hit midwestern refineries hard.

Yup, Ontario Hydro and the utilities in Quebec have been selling low cost hydro from Northern CAN into the US for decades, so the grid is connected all through the Great Lakes/St Lawence basin.

I don't know if the conditions of the 70's could be easily reproduced because the population demographics have shifted so much but you are correct that if the economy tanks, tax receipts will fall so deficits will go up - which means the Fed will either have to print more money to accommodate that (inflation) or tighten to counter weight the fiscal stimulus and make any recession worse. IOW a bad situation all 'round.

well I'll give Trump this, he wanted interest rates to come down and the recession he is engineering will certainly bring them down.

So what the over/under that Musk has lost more on his Tesla stock since it peaked than DOGE has saved the US taxpayer?

Aside from the pure ego thing, which is probably at least 50% of everything he does, to the degree he actually has any thoughts on political economy, he has a long standing belief that US manufacturing has collapsed because of 'unfair trade deals', instead of the real reason, which is the US government's failure to provide a positive manufacturing environment in its now 4 decade long windmill tilt to become a "knowledge and finance" based economy.