J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 147

Kevin Drum: Trump Hits a New Low... Again: "A very non-ex...

Kevin Drum: Trump Hits a New Low... Again: "A very non-exhaustive list of things that have been called new lows for Trump over the past few years. Enjoy:

2015

July 20: Attacks John McCain for being a POW.

November 13: Compares Ben Carson to child molester.

November 21: Proposes Muslim registry.

November 23: Retweets claim that 81 percent of white people are killed by blacks.

November 26: Mocks a reporter���s disability.

December 8: Calls for ban on Muslim entry.

2016....

March 23: Attacks Ted Cruz���s wife.

March 30: Says that women who get abortions should be punished.

May 3: Suggests that Ted Cruz���s father killed JFK.

June 3: Attacks federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel.

July 27: Asks Russia to please find and release Hillary Clinton���s 30,000 emails.

August 1: After Khizr Khan accuses Trump of never sacrificing anything for his country, Trump attacks Khan and says that he has too made a lot of sacrifices, such as ���building great structures.���

August 10: Suggests his supporters might want to shoot Hillary Clinton.

October 8: ���Grab ���em by the pussy��� tape.

October 12: More women accuse Trump of sexual assault....

2017

February 22: Attacks transgender children.

March 4: Accuses Obama of tapping his wires.

June 29: Accuses Mika Brzezinski of ���bleeding badly from a face-lift��� during a New Year���s party.

July 2: Retweets video of CNN being attacked.

August 15: Suggests that there were ���very fine people on both sides��� at Charlottesville.

September 30: Attacks mayor of San Juan after Hurricane Maria hits Puerto Rico.

October 13: Ends Obamacare cost-sharing program.

November 29: Retweets three anti-Muslim videos from the leader of an extremist British group.

2018

January 12: Shithole countries.

June 8: Begins separating children from their parents at the border.

July 5: Insists on meeting with Vladimir Putin with no one else present.

September 13: Says the 3,000 dead from Hurricane Maria is ���fake news��� invented by Democrats.

October 18: After murder of Jamal Khashoggi, reminds everyone that Saudi Arabia is a good customer.

October 19: Calls Stormy Daniels ���horseface.���

October 19: Applauds Rep. Greg Gianforte���s body slam of a reporter.

November 1: Runs racist ad just before midterm elections.

November 7: Suspends CNN reporter Jim Acosta.

November 12: As wildfires are raging, threatens to cut off federal aid to California unless they change their ���forest management��� practices.

December 29: Says any deaths of children along the border are strictly the fault of the Democrats.

2019

February 9: Mocks native American genocide.

March 8: Accuses Democrats of being the ���anti-Jewish party.���

March 20: Attacks John McCain yet again.

May 24: Retweets doctored video of Nancy Pelosi.

July 11: Attacks British prime minister Theresa May.

July 14: Tells Democratic congresswomen to go back where they came from...

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Comment of the Day: Grebmorts: "Seven thorns. 'Yt' is an ...

Comment of the Day: Grebmorts: "Seven thorns. 'Yt' is an abbreviation for '��at' https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yt

Touch��...

Why �� and &���not to mention ��, ��, �����have not made more of a comeback in this Age of Twitter is a mystery to me...

#commentoftheday

I want my country back! I want my country back now!!: Gre...

I want my country back! I want my country back now!!: Great^10-Grandfather William Bradford: The Project Gutenberg eBook of Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation', by William Bradford: "So being ready to departe, they had a day of solleme humiliation, their pastor taking his texte from Ezra 8:21: And ther at ��e river, by Ahava, I proclaimed a fast, that we might humble ourselves before our God, and seeke of him a right way for us, and for our children, and for all our substance. Upon which he spente a good parte of ��e day very profitably, and suitable to their presente occasion. The rest of the time was spente in powering out prairs to ��e Lord with great fervencie, mixed with abundance of tears. And ��e time being come that they must departe, they were accompanied with most of their brethren out of ��e citie, unto a towne sundrie miles of called Delfes-Haven, wher the ship lay ready to receive them. So they lefte ��t goodly & pleasante citie, which had been ther resting place near 12. years; but they knew they were pilgrimes, & looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to ��e heavens, their dearest cuntrie, and quieted their spirits...

I must say, six thorns in one paragraph is a lot. And, I must say, I was not expecting to find: "The rest of the time was spente in powering out prairs to ��e Lord with great fervencie"...

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I did not pay enough attention to the racist animus under...

I did not pay enough attention to the racist animus underlying Tea Party Republicans in the early 2010s. Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin tried to warn me. I ignored them. Shame on me: Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin: The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism: "In the aftermath of a potentially demoralizing 2008 electoral defeat, when the Republican Party seemed widely discredited, the emergence of the Tea Party provided conservative activists with a new identity funded by Republican business elites and reinforced by a network of conservative media sources. Untethered from recent GOP baggage and policy specifics, the Tea Party energized disgruntled white middle-class conservatives and garnered widespread attention, despite stagnant or declining favorability ratings among the general public. As participant observation and interviews with Massachusetts activists reveal, Tea Partiers are not monolithically hostile toward government; they distinguish between programs perceived as going to hard-working contributors to US society like themselves and ���handouts��� perceived as going to unworthy or freeloading people. During 2010, Tea Party activism reshaped many GOP primaries and enhanced voter turnout, but achieved a mixed record in the November general election. Activism may well continue to influence dynamics in Congress and GOP presidential primaries. Even if the Tea Party eventually subsides, it has undercut Obama���s presidency, revitalized conservatism, and pulled the national Republican Party toward the far right...

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A sensible model conveying useful and understandable info...

A sensible model conveying useful and understandable information about the state of American productivity growth. Why we have speedups and slowdowns, and why it seems to be a matter of regimes rather than a randomly walking parameter, remain mysteries on which this approach sheds no light But other else has shed light here either: James A. Kahn and Robert W. Rich: Trend Productivity Growth: "Through 2019Q1... with probability 0.93 productivity remains in a low-growth (1.33% annual rate) regime.... Productivity growth in 2019Q1 in the nonfarm business sector was 3.6% (annual rate), the highest rate in more than four years. The four-quarter change was 2.4%, the highest year-over-year reading since 2015Q1. The near-term forecast profile, however, is little changed, with... a predicted 5-year trend of 1.9%... | James A.Kahn and Robert W.Rich (2007): Tracking the New Economy: Using Growth Theory to Detect Changes in Trend Productivity...

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A healthy macroeconomy continues to be the best of all la...

A healthy macroeconomy continues to be the best of all labor-side policies. The past decade of bitter experience has taught us that monetary policy cannot do the entire job on its own: a healthy macroeconomy requires planning, and some of that planning must be on the fiscal-policy side. And the evidence that expansionary fiscal policy is a very effective tool to cure a depressed economy, and cure it with minimal blowback costs of any kind, continues to mount:

J��r��mie Cohen-Setton, Egor Gornostay, and Colombe Ladreit de Lacharri��re: Aggregate Effects of Budget Stimulus: Evidence from the Large Fiscal Expansions Database: "This paper estimates the effects of fiscal stimulus on economic activity using a novel database on large fiscal expansions for 17 OECD countries for the period 1960���2006. The database is constructed by combining the statistical approach to identifying large shifts in fiscal policy with narrative evidence from contemporaneous policy documents. When correctly identified, large fiscal stimulus packages are found to have strong and persistent expansionary effects on economic activity, with a multiplier of 1 or above. The effects of stimulus are largest in slumps and smallest in booms https://delong.typepad.com/lfe_database.zip...

#noted

J��r��mie Cohen-Setton, Egor Gornostay, and Colombe Ladre...

J��r��mie Cohen-Setton, Egor Gornostay, and Colombe Ladreit de Lacharri��re: Aggregate Effects of Budget Stimulus: Evidence from the Large Fiscal Expansions Database: "This paper estimates the effects of fiscal stimulus on economic activity using a novel database on large fiscal expansions for 17 OECD countries for the period 1960���2006. The database is constructed by combining the statistical approach to identifying large shifts in fiscal policy with narrative evidence from contemporaneous policy documents. When correctly identified, large fiscal stimulus packages are found to have strong and persistent expansionary effects on economic activity, with a multiplier of 1 or above. The effects of stimulus are largest in slumps and smallest in booms https://delong.typepad.com/lfe_database.zip...

#noted

Geoffrey Parker: Emperor: A New Life of Charles V: "In 15...

Geoffrey Parker: Emperor: A New Life of Charles V: "In 1504, Charles���s father paid ��15 to a bookbinder for ���making wooden covers for five large books, and for repairing and re-gilding several other works���; and ��36 to ���Jeronymus van Aeken, called Bosch��� for ���a very large painting measuring nine feet high and eleven feet wide which will show the Last Judgement, that is to say Heaven and Hell, which My Lord has ordered him to paint���. The following year, Philip paid ��23 to ���a man who played a strange Spanish instrument, and to a young girl from Lombardy��� who ���played several songs and performed acrobatics for him while he dined���, as well as ��25 to a painter who presented him with ���a picture of a naked woman��� (payments that put the gift of ��10 to Brother Erasmus of Rotterdam in perspective)...

#noted

Why have the more polite modern-day neo-Nazis picked tran...

Why have the more polite modern-day neo-Nazis picked transgender people as those seek to demonize���as tree equivalent of what the Jews were for the original Nazis?:

Zack Beauchamp: Trump and the Dead End Of Conservative Nationalism: "Their vision of social conservatism... is not focused on classic issues like abortion and same-sex marriage���two issues little mentioned at the conference (although there were multiple cruel attacks on trans people in major speeches)... [but on] bucking libertarians to use the power of the state at home to address problems like the opioid crisis, the use of pornography by teenagers, and the overweening influence of Silicon Valley... going against neoconservatives in limiting the United States��� role abroad....

"It���s... arguing that liberalism (in the political philosophy sense, not the partisan one) is too focused on the 'atomized' individual and not focused enough on building social ties.... chipping away at the separation of church and state and the philosophical framework underpinning liberal rights... end[s] up justifying excluding groups of individuals from those rights���transgender people, for example. This new 'national conservatism' is no exception. And nowhere is this clearer than its discussion of immigration and race....

"Wax, the Penn professor, made this subtext the text during her address���even positively citing Trump���s 'shithole [countries]' comments. She argued for what she called a 'cultural distance' approach to immigration... that... 'preserves the United States as a Western and First World nation'.... She favorably quoted John Derbyshire, a writer who once penned a piece telling his white children to avoid going places where black people hang out in groups and was fired from his job at National Review as a result... VDARE... Taki... an outright argument for white supremacy���exactly the sort of thing that Brog claimed to abhor and reject....

"[Brog] is trying to do something impossible.... That is most obvious on immigration, where politicians and intellectuals can speak openly about banning certain types of people from entering the country entirely. But it inevitably rebounds on citizens as well. Just ask Ilhan Omar....

"It was striking to be at this conference as Trump���s assault on the Squad unfolded. The self-identified nationalist president was telling nonwhite citizens that they do not belong on the basis of their skin color. If there was ever a golden opportunity to distance national conservatism from racism, this was it. And yet no one took it... not... a single attempt to tackle Trump���s comments or to distance the conference organizers from the president���s racist assault. When Hazony mentioned Trump���s racist tweets, in the very last speech of the conference, it was only to mock reporters who kept asking him about them....

"There is no non-racist explanation for telling four American congresswomen of color to 'go back' to their countries, as if the United States does not truly belong to them. There is no non-racist explanation for making up claims that a black Muslim congresswoman, Omar, is an al-Qaeda sympathizer. Yet it is this rhetoric that attracts people to Trump���s brand of nationalism....

"'National conservative' conference attendees may dream of a better conservatism, but they already have what they���re trying to create. And it���s much uglier than they can admit...

#noted

Jamie Powell: The best of Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas: "M...

Jamie Powell: The best of Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas: "Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas is a renowned Tesla bull... until yesterday.... [He] proceeded to lay into the future prospects of Elon Musk's company, holding nothing back.... To pick one, of many possible, quotes from the call is hard. But this is a standout: '[Tesla's]... seen more as a distressed credit story and a restructuring story. So from a growth story to a distressed credit and restructuring story [in a quarter]. At the heart of this though, is demand'. Jonas' change of heart comes as a surprise to Alphaville, as for many years he's been a vocal bull.... So to commemorate the mood swing, here are five of our favourite Adam Jonas quotes from Tesla's various quarterly conference calls over the years...

...The time Adam asked about a rationale for Tesla to work with SpaceX on space exploration (Q2 2016).... "When we think of SpaceX, is there any conceivable strategic rationale for Tesla Motors and Tesla Energy, or Tesla Solar, to work closely with the efforts of space exploration?... We're thinking proprietary low earth orbit satellite network to enhance the connected autonomous car ecosystem."... The time Adam asked whether Apple would be either a suitable acquirer or strategic partner (Q1 2017): "OK. And just as a follow-up, Apple has enough net cash, I think, to buy Tesla like more than 3x over. Is there anything that Apple does or has, besides having more money than they know what to do with, that could be helpful in Tesla's mission to accelerate the transition to shared autonomy in sustainable transport?"... The time Adam got even Elon to roll his eyes.... "OK. And just a follow-up then, on space but not on Mars but more Earth, Earth (inaudible)." Elon R. Musk, Tesla, Inc.���Co-Founder, Chairman, CEO and Product Architect: "Oh God. Come on, let's not get���space. Come on." Adam Michael Jonas.... "No, it's actually���it's really relevant. I was just curious is there anything that SpaceX is doing that���or enabling that could be advantageous to Tesla's mission to accelerate sustainable transport?" The time Adam again willed for a SpaceX and Tesla tie-up (Q1 2018): "Some argue that SpaceX could offer Tesla a resilient cybersecure pipe for this precious vehicle data and a potential competitive advantage."... The time Adam felt the love, and suggested Tesla collaborate with the military (Q2 2018): "Hey. everybody. First is, there's so much love and respect for colleagues and Wall Street analysts on this call. It's almost���it is lifting my spirits. What can I say? I got 2 questions. The first is for the Autopilot team.... This same technology, with a few tweaks, have some pretty obvious military capability. Do you see any risk that US companies will ultimately not be allowed to operate weapons grade AI-based technology in a market like China and vice versa?... Who do you think would be a more formidable competitor over time, BMW or Amazon?" To be fair to Mr Jonas, everyone has a right to change their minds. But with a price target of 230, versus Wednesday's 192.73 close, perhaps it's time he also updated his model...

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