Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

[dcarrigg]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

Inflation comes in 2 flavors. Cost-push and wage-push.

Thanks to that crooked clown Amos L. Mazzant III, nobody will get overtime pay ever again in America. What mighty power a random gavel in east Texas wields. I hold zero, I mean zero, hope for wage-push inflation. Actually, after yesterday's judicial ruling, I think you'll see wage deflation. Keep in mind, the one quarter Obama had where quarterly wages went up was last one, and that was only because of the upcoming rule that said you couldn't salary people making under $47k. Now that that rule is toast, Walmart will cut its managers' wages back down under the bar, and so will McDonalds and everyone else. That brief aberration where they raised wages in preparation for the new rule coming into effect Dec. 1st is now over. They are free to undo it. And since the overriding ethos still is to punish the working and middle classes as hard as possible--since rents are still ridiculously high--since debt loads are high as ever--since homeownership and retirement savings and income are at a postwar lows--since nobody can afford medical care--there is no way in hell inflation is coming from stagnant, stinky wages.

Which leaves one source: Costs. But these are easy to juke too. You just rebalance the basket so that housing only counts for 5% (even though it's 50% of real life family's costs), or so that transit only cost 2%, then you over-count the value of some electronic doo dad, add in some hedonic adjustments, take out commodities, and voila...what inflation? Costs are going down, don't'ch'a know? And so long as you can juke that stat, you don't have to give out COLAs for social security or any more money in any program ever.

No, I don't think we'll be seeing inflation any time soon. It's a creditor's world, baby. FIRE still got it by the horns.

I think the people predicting inflation are getting way ahead of themselves.

[sunpearl71]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

Inflation is sometimes understood as devaluing a currency via printing (deficit spending), and other times understood to be rising prices. You are suggesting both forms. You're probably right!

Very good summary Shiny.

I think there's a third factor that connects these two, price of oil: Currency devaluation results in an increase in oil price, which leads to rising production costs and hence prices paid by consumers (directly or indirectly).

Given the current US domestic oil production situation, this may not have a major effect (again due to tariffs and/or export restrictions).

Britain however, should it decide to follow the US' lead, doesn't have the same luxury due to declining North Sea oil production.

[jk]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

Inflation comes in 2 flavors. Cost-push and wage-push.

Thanks to that crooked clown Amos L. Mazzant III, nobody will get overtime pay ever again in America. What mighty power a random gavel in east Texas wields. I hold zero, I mean zero, hope for wage-push inflation. Actually, after yesterday's judicial ruling, I think you'll see wage deflation. Keep in mind, the one quarter Obama had where quarterly wages went up was last one, and that was only because of the upcoming rule that said you couldn't salary people making under $47k. Now that that rule is toast, Walmart will cut its managers' wages back down under the bar, and so will McDonalds and everyone else. That brief aberration where they raised wages in preparation for the new rule coming into effect Dec. 1st is now over. They are free to undo it. And since the overriding ethos still is to punish the working and middle classes as hard as possible--since rents are still ridiculously high--since debt loads are high as ever--since homeownership and retirement savings and income are at a postwar lows--since nobody can afford medical care--there is no way in hell inflation is coming from stagnant, stinky wages.

Which leaves one source: Costs. But these are easy to juke too. You just rebalance the basket so that housing only counts for 5% (even though it's 50% of real life family's costs), or so that transit only cost 2%, then you over-count the value of some electronic doo dad, add in some hedonic adjustments, take out commodities, and voila...what inflation? Costs are going down, don't'ch'a know? And so long as you can juke that stat, you don't have to give out COLAs for social security or any more money in any program ever.

No, I don't think we'll be seeing inflation any time soon. It's a creditor's world, baby. FIRE still got it by the horns.

I think the people predicting inflation are getting way ahead of themselves.

i agree with what you say. you've described the manipulation of the cpi. the pce deflator is less manipulated. and i'm not sure the bond market pays that much attention to ANY standard reported metric, so the tips spread is the best measure there.

if we're talking "inflation", i guess we should specify what we're measuring. i'll stick with the tips spread since it is least subject to manipulation. even if the fed is manipulating the whole treasury curve, the tips spread is determined by the market. on second thought, i'm wrong in a way because the tips are priced off the cpi, so we've come full circle and i'm chasing my tail.

so maybe you're right, dc, that because of the manipulation of the index we will not see any significant report of inflation.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

so maybe you're right, dc, that because of the manipulation of the index we will not see any significant report of inflation.

There's only one reason left for them to do it and let it happen, and that is as a part of a coordinated effort to dismantle Social Security (it makes the out years look scarier so you can cry that the trust fund is broke).

But you've got to go back something like 27 years to find 4%+ inflation. There was still a Berlin Wall back then. The Simpsons was debuting. The War on Drugs was just beginning. Walmart just opened its first superstore. NWA's Straight Outta Compton had just hit the streets. And the Nikkei was trading at nearly 40,000 because Japan was going to take over the world...

That's how long it has been since inflation happened in America. A standard low-inflation environment is structural now. Almost a cornerstone.

It's going to take a hell of a lot more than a corporate tax cut / marginal incentive to get it to go.

[llanlad2]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

There's only one reason left for them to do it and let it happen, and that is as a part of a coordinated effort to dismantle Social Security (it makes the out years look scarier so you can cry that the trust fund is broke).

But you've got to go back something like 27 years to find 4%+ inflation. There was still a Berlin Wall back then. The Simpsons was debuting. The War on Drugs was just beginning. Walmart just opened its first superstore. NWA's Straight Outta Compton had just hit the streets. And the Nikkei was trading at nearly 40,000 because Japan was going to take over the world...

That's how long it has been since inflation happened in America. A standard low-inflation environment is structural now. Almost a cornerstone.

It's going to take a hell of a lot more than a corporate tax cut / marginal incentive to get it to go.

Minimum wage increases and increased competition for jobs will drive up wages. I imagine a low inflation environment was considered structural from 1930-1950 as well. I believe it is political.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

Minimum wage increases and increased competition for jobs will drive up wages. I imagine a low inflation environment was considered structural from 1930-1950 as well. I believe it is political.

Minimum wage increases are not going to happen outside of a very small number of cities. The Federal Minimum Wage certainly will not be going up under Speaker Ryan and Majority Leader McConnell. Most states will not increase it either.




Labor competition is irrelevant so long as there's an endless pool of Asian labor. Real wages will not improve at the median or below. Certainly not on the order of 4+% annualized. I am very certain about this.

[llanlad2]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

Minimum wage increases are not going to happen outside of a very small number of cities. The Federal Minimum Wage certainly will not be going up under Speaker Ryan and Majority Leader McConnell. Most states will not increase it either.

I thought a lot of minimum wage increases had already been voted for on a state level with annual increases included? A lot of the increases are pretty substantial and above 4%. And it's not only in Democrat states that they've been enacted. Why haven't wages been dropping?

http://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-a...age-chart.aspx

Labor competition is irrelevant so long as there's an endless pool of Asian labor. Real wages will not improve at the median or below. Certainly not on the order of 4+% annualized. I am very certain about this.

Tariffs and threats thereof are what will drive employment up. Asian savings are going to flow back to the US. Deals will be cut that allow the Chinese/Asians the ROW to invest their treasury savings in large scale infrastructure projects. Investment in long term toll booth (mostly green) energy projects will be substantial.

Do you think that will have no effect on wages? The US has reached peak cheap Asian labour dependence. It's also aiming to get past cheap Middle-East oil dependence.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

I thought a lot of minimum wage increases had already been voted for on a state level with annual increases included? A lot of the increases are pretty substantial and above 4%. And it's not only in Democrat states that they've been enacted. Why haven't wages been dropping?

http://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-a...age-chart.aspx

That's a few western states - CA, OR, WA, and AZ along with DC and NY. It's a good chunk of the country. Maybe 15% of it. But it's not all of it. Nobody else is even headed for a penny over $11 an hour, never mind higher. And there is still time to cancel those proposed phase-ins.

To put that in perspective, TX, VA, WI, PA, ND, SD, OK, NV, MN, KY, KS, IA, IN, ID, AL, LA, MS, WY and GA all have minimum wages at $7.25--the lowest it can go. That's closer to 20% of the country.

The other 25 states are predominantly mid-sized states and are set to have min wages somewhere between $7.50 and $11 per hour between now and 2018, which makes sense.

Tariffs and threats thereof are what will drive employment up. Asian savings are going to flow back to the US. Deals will be cut that allow the Chinese/Asians the ROW to invest their treasury savings in large scale infrastructure projects.

I'm not ruling this out as impossible. It remains in the improbable category for me for now until I actually see any action on it. Even if you are right, it takes years to bring operational factories online in the US. We're talking 2020 or later before any of that probably could manifest.

Investment in long term toll booth (mostly green) energy projects will be substantial.

Highly unlikely. The market has been a bloodbath for anything green all month. Investment is rapidly leaving green energy projects. It's more likely the Obama green energy bump will have been like the Carter one, the Republican congress will strip out the incentives, and the industry will die again, as it did after Reagan ripped the solar panels off the Whitehouse.

Do you think that will have no effect on wages? The US has reached peak cheap Asian labour dependence. It's also aiming to get past cheap Middle-East oil dependence.

You are assuming the US, its corporate leaders, and/or its politicians actually care about the majority of the populace or the middle or working classes generally. They don't. Not at all. They don't care about what country you're from. Only your pedigree and the numbers in the your bank account. When they meet in Davos, they dream of erasing national lines. And they feel worse for poor Asian labor than they do their people back home, who they think are fat, lazy slobs who have it too good and don't know what's good for themselves.

Believe me, nobody is looking out for any US interests other than the interests of US millionaires and better. The rest of us, well:

[jk]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

gary shilling's take is that everything that could be offshored [in terms of profit] has already been offshored. it's too late for those industries. the value of u.s. manufacturing continues to rise [swollen by e.g. pharma and other high value, low labor products as someone (you?) pointed out]. u.s. manufacturing employment isn't growing and i doubt it will be. we are transitioning away from industrial employment in the early 21st century just like we transitioned away from agricultural employment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

a lot of service jobs are low skill and low wage. they're not just burger flipping; they're also bedpan washing.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

gary shilling's take is that everything that could be offshored [in terms of profit] has already been offshored. it's too late for those industries. the value of u.s. manufacturing continues to rise [swollen by e.g. pharma and other high value, low labor products as someone (you?) pointed out]. u.s. manufacturing employment isn't growing and i doubt it will be. we are transitioning away from industrial employment in the early 21st century just like we transitioned away from agricultural employment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

a lot of service jobs are low skill and low wage. they're not just burger flipping; they're also bedpan washing.

The robot thing is a fantasy. You could add 500,000 manufacturing jobs in the US for iPhones alone, and it would only increase the price something like 12-15% at current profit margins. But so long as it increases the price at all, they'll keep building them in China. China, and even moreso India, I like to point out, are gaining millions of manufacturing jobs per year.

I think the 'robocolypse' of jobs story only sells in the US because we have offshored nearly all our labor-intensive manufacturing to Asia. I think if you told people in south and east Asia that robots were coming to take away all the manufacturing jobs, they'd laugh at you as another new five million jobs popped up this year, then they'd ride their bikes to the Levis factory where they worked on an old Singer sewing machine.

It's not like there's not a lot of real (not pharma or bedpans) work that needs to be done in America. Pharma is a giant joke. Mostly ponzi schemes and BS drugs like this that I guarantee cause more harm than they fix.

We need massive investment in existing roads and bridges, water systems, wastewater treatment, the energy grid, our housing is old and still largely uninsulated or poorly insulated by world standards, we still don't have a decent train network outside the BOS-WASH corridor, even then, South and North stations still don't connect in Bos, the curve at Stonington in CT ruins the speed, just like the curve outside Penn St at NYC, and a whole bunch of other small projects are necessary and useful. Nearly all of our ports need dredging and our piers and wharfs could use expanding. Our airports are ancient, hubs are overpacked, and facilities are crappy. We could use a massive build-out of 10gb/s+ fiberoptic networks. It wouldn't hurt.

It just requires capital. But the public sector will not give out the capital. The private sector is too busy pumping VC into scams like Theranos and 25 different versions of dog toy surprise delivery websites and Uber to care about anything actually useful. Even Trump's idea for tax breaks to get them to do something actually useful will just end up making stuff with tolls so high nobody but the fanciest of people (doctors or better) can use the infrastructure, which is stone cold stupid. Half of the economic problem with the articles of confederation was that erecting a bunch of tolls kills real commerce. Now, you can't drive on an interstate road without paying a pile of ceiling-less congestion tolls. And we're erecting more all the time. Stupid, stupid, stupid, but it's a creditor's economy, ripe for rentiers, and the rest of us will suffer.

There's plenty of manufacturing jobs out there that robots suck at. And there's plenty of useful work to be done in manufacturing and construction. And there's plenty of ways it could be done to ramp up commerce. But the greedy little piggies want their share right away. They want tolls from day 1. They're not content to get the inside track on land along the offramps and set up a McDonalds to catch travelers. They want a toll booth right there to keep travelers away and keep the working class off the roads forever. They don't want to facilitate them traveling and spending money. They want to punish them and keep them at home in their dilapidated, rented apartments.

In the end, I agree with you jk in what the results will look like. More and more working people will end up wiping rich people's asses for less money than it takes to rent a refrigerator box and they will be miserable and unhealthy and stressed and their lives will get worse and worse and worse every year and generation. But I don't think there are any outside forces like technology or globalism that just exist outside of politics that are forcing this to happen. I think it's deliberate policy. What they want is convergence. And they want to follow it up with maximum inequality. Obviously they don't actually care about GDP growth. If they did, they'd be panicking at Davos about how abysmal it has been throughout the developed world for the past 30 years, and economists would be seriously questioning their fundamental assumptions since then. But that is not happening. The orders keep being, "Double down, more tolls, more user fees, drive down wages, more tax cuts for the rich, higher rents for everyone else."

No, what they want is 2 classes. Patricians and plebeians. The more dehumanized and miserable and beat down the plebeians are, the better. They don't even care if economic growth goes negative. The goal is domination. They want to end the Republic. They want to end Democracy. They want to rule. They want unlimited and arbitrary power.

Who is they? The billionaires. The people who actually run the show. There are only about 1,000 of them. Far fewer than there are legislators. And they are far more powerful. But still, they chafe under the fact that legislatures and courts exist. And they are not content to simply be given special treatment. They want them gone. Or at least, they want to be completely and formally above them...they don't particularly care if some system to sweep up and punish us Plebeians exists.

[jk]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

i agree with you, dc. robots can only compete with expensive labor, not with cheap labor. "the global labor arbitrage" [sounds so tidy] lowers living standards in the u.s. while raising them in ldc's = convergence. in the process it more and more makes the u.s. social structure look like that of an ldc.

[santafe2]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

In the end, I agree with you jk in what the results will look like. More and more working people will end up wiping rich people's asses for less money than it takes to rent a refrigerator box and they will be miserable and unhealthy and stressed and their lives will get worse and worse and worse every year and generation. But I don't think there are any outside forces like technology or globalism that just exist outside of politics that are forcing this to happen. I think it's deliberate policy. What they want is convergence. And they want to follow it up with maximum inequality. Obviously they don't actually care about GDP growth. If they did, they'd be panicking at Davos about how abysmal it has been throughout the developed world for the past 30 years, and economists would be seriously questioning their fundamental assumptions since then. But that is not happening. The orders keep being, "Double down, more tolls, more user fees, drive down wages, more tax cuts for the rich, higher rents for everyone else."

What you describe dc is much less abusive than the life Native Americans have lived since the first white folks showed up on the continent. Then black folks became the largest economic engine in the US with their free labor. There are more abuses but fast forward to the 21st Century and white folks are under pressure. It's taken 400 years for us to observe the problem, but possibly we should be expected to recognize a trend.

White folks in the US just elected the king of toll roads. Native Americans did not vote for the new racist leader. Black folks understand slavery and 9 out of 10 voted against it. The toll road has always been in place but white folks are only now beginning to pay the toll.

When you say "working people" you mean white working people. People of color have been "wiping rich people's asses" for Centuries. Either you stand up for equality or experience "maximum inequality". You stand with people of color or your toll road is coming.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

When you say "working people" you mean white working people.

I most certainly do not. I mean precisely what I say, not what imagine I meant 'between the lines.' I've called out Woodsman for this, and now I have to do it to you too. Stop trying to read any agenda into what I'm saying. In fact, stop reading into what I'm saying at all, and just read what I'm saying.

People of color have been "wiping rich people's asses" for Centuries. Either you stand up for equality or experience "maximum inequality". You stand with people of color or your toll road is coming.

Even if I were as purely selfish as you apparently think I am, do you really think I ever truly trusted the Proddies around here to keep me and mine on the white side of the ledger?

I mean, have I not built any reputation around here over a decade?

Was I not saying this in 2012...

Or calling out things as I saw them back in 2014? Hell, Santa, you were right there too!

And it's not like I wasn't calling out sexism where I saw it over the years. Here's one from 2015 that popped to mind.

I suppose, the broad difference between us, Santa, is more in approach and method than ideology. I actively try not to call people names or label people. I try to point out--often through a little bit of joke or anecdote or image or song rather than anger--that the words they chose or the line of thought they took was off or hurtful or otherwise askew.

But me, I've always been one for lifting my countrymen up. And maybe that puts me in a nationalist place at times...that is, I don't think you'd ever see me arguing that it's good if the people of Detroit suffer so long as the people of Dhaka can have more jobs. So if that's what upsets you, fine, I'm open to the criticism. But I'd much rather see a healthy, vibrant and growing middle class with a smaller, shrinking, and waning billionaire class for all races and genders you could imagine than the alternative. I'm also an outspoken proponent of affirmative action, probably one of the only ones on here. It makes perfect sense in the context of our country's history.

I have no problem if the poor gain on the middle class, if the whole thing's shooting up and compressing the inequality spread generally.

I have big problems if the middle class are being pushed down to the poor level, as the whole thing is coming apart and stretching out the inequality spread generally.

And if you spend your time attacking your friends on the left wh osee things through a class lens rather than only through an identity lens, you're going to miss the forrest through the trees. Because real monsters like Peter Thiel who would take women's right to vote away, destroy Democracy, legalize segregation, and destroy the middle class economically for their own ends are out there and they have real power far beyond anything I can wield typing into an internet forum.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

Mike Whitney chimes in...
"Trump’s Economic Plan: This Isn’t Going to Work"
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/...going-to-work/

[vt]

Re: Mother Jones Interviews Van Jones

Obviously we have reached the end of the line on journalism. There are no independent sources of news anymore. Instead we have two warring camps that are propaganda machines for the right and left. No one trusts conventional media of the networks, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, BBC, etc.

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/...y-shady-group/

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-1...sian-propagand