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    Here's hoping.

    In other news.

    The U.S. posted a $146.8 billion budget deficit in May, the largest for the month since 2009, as revenue declined.

    The budget gap rose 66 percent last month from a year earlier, the Treasury Department reported on Tuesday. Spending rose by 10.7 percent to $363.9 billion, compared with a 9.7 percent fall in receipts to $217.1 billion.

    The government is facing increasing borrowing in the coming years partly due to tax cuts enacted this year and the strain on social and health spending from an aging population. For the first eight months of the fiscal year, the fiscal gap widened to $532.2 billion, up 23 percent from last year’s $432.9 billion deficit.

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      https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1006906114259156992?s=19

      Pardon signal on Red

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        Dummy it down a bit: when they say 'split with team', did they split with him and say 'there's nothing more we can do for you...you're on your own now' or did he say 'I've got it from here' ?

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          Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
          Older people tearing up the structures that helped them advance (the new deal/LBJ legacy in the states, welfare state in Europe)is really fuckig depressing. The lies people tell themselves, that they made it on their own, that young people don’t know they are born. Most all older voters now grew up under Keynesian orthodoxy. Could expect govt freebies in education, housing or health (at least if the right colour or not a despised single mum). If born white from mid 40s to late 50s, one of the luckiest generation s that ever lived (North America and Western Europe of course). And kissed it away when cunts like thatcher and Reagan appealed to their wallets. The culture wars of Trumpism and Brexit completing the process of denying goodies to the next gen, through greed or blind stupidity and nastiness.
          About Keynes, I wouldn't mind people's opinions on this one.

          Didn’t Keynes get it mightily wrong with this "economics of abundance" theorised in 1930 (in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren), about how free markets would provide full employment, solve all economic-related problems and bring equality a century later? (so in 2030). As I understand, he basically thought that because capitalism would make the world rich and because people couldn’t possibly need more than the essentials (having a good job and being comfortable), capitalism would mature into a generous and equal system, almost a philanthropic philosophy, whereby all the profits accumulated would benefit everybody more or less equally, with plenty of free time thrown in for the average worker who would barely know how to fill that leisure time.

          So, from that angle, he got it wrong obvs. However, I'm not sure whether he did as he factored in unforeseen wars and potential significant population rises into his projections as a caveat, but I don’t know to what degree he thought the last two elements (wars and population growth) would interfere between 1930 and 2030. Well, he was right on this one (WWII), and population growth has been exponential since 1930 (it’s quadrupled).

          So, how should we see his super optimistic predictions that never really materialised? It is fair or unfair to consider that he did get that one awfully wrong?
          Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 13-06-2018, 20:50.

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            Also, of course, the Great Depression must have affected his projections, to what extent, I'm not sure. How advanced exactly was the Great depression when he wrote that in 1930?

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              Yeah, Keynes ain’t The Man, and Keynesianism often seems to have little to do with him. He was a liberal in the old sense, and his whole drive was to preserve the Empire and Capitalism. “Social Democracy” and counter cyclical spending was more the means to stop socialism or other extremes and preserve the system, than A New World Is Possible.

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                So it appears that Cohen is refusing to pay his lawyers for a significant volume of work that they have already done, which is a much less exciting reason for their withdrawal than a number of the other possibilities.

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                  Henry Winkler has to play him in the Hallmark biopic.

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                    Tbf to Keynes though, Western Europe in general, and certainly the UK, had the lowest levels of inequality and something like full employment in the seventies (more people are in work now, but shit tonnes are underemployed/forced to work more than one shit job) just as the wheels came off the post-war settlement.

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                      I have a conf call on Friday with someone from his lawyers' firm. That's my three degrees of separation.

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                        Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                        So it appears that Cohen is refusing to pay his lawyers for a significant volume of work that they have already done, which is a much less exciting reason for their withdrawal than a number of the other possibilities.
                        But nobody is going to doubt the truth of it. Cohen seems exactly the kind of scumbag who'd stiff people who work for him - learning from Trump.

                        My guess is that he agreed to cooperate, and at that point realised there was no point paying his lawyers because they weren't protecting him.

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                          Variety seems to be reporting that it is actually Trump stiffing Cohen's lawyers.

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                            Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
                            Henry Winkler has to play him in the Hallmark biopic.
                            I think you're thinking of early '80s Winkler. He looks like yer nan, now.

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                              Was more his ineptitude reminding me of Arrested Development.

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                                Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
                                Tbf to Keynes though, Western Europe in general, and certainly the UK, had the lowest levels of inequality and something like full employment in the seventies (more people are in work now, but shit tonnes are underemployed/forced to work more than one shit job) just as the wheels came off the post-war settlement.
                                I think you’re right here in that, in summary, in his 100 year-long predictions (1930-2030), he was roughly good in the first half but poor in the second (Seventies onwards), a game of two halves for Keynes then. He got it right up to the late Seventies (free market economy did bring prosperity, equality and more leisure time), but was way off beam for the rest, in his assumptions that capitalism would continue for ever to operate on the same "sharing mode" as it were.

                                I think he basically placed too much emphasis on past events, history largely informed his perception of what the future held. It works to a point but a century-long forecast was always going to be iffy. His overarching mistake here I think was to assume that greed has limits. He played down the risks induced by excessive individualism, the fragmentation of society and humanity’s insatiable appetite for the filthy lucre. In this respect, he reminds me of many football observers in the early 1990s when (ignoring the warnings of the Football Supporters' Association and others) they predicted that clubs would keep the same ticket pricing policy and not price out fans as "the Sky money is so huge that they won’t need to". Well, we know what happened to that prognosis.

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                                  Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
                                  Henry Winkler has to play him in the Hallmark biopic.
                                  SNL had Ben Stiller doing it, and he wasn't very good. Stiller looks much more like the Mooch, but he has disappeared from our lives. I also think they got Stiller more to do a Meet the Parents bit with De Niro as Mueller.

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                                    It does seem that Cohen thinks that the Trump Organization should be covering all of his legal fees, but it is equally true that a good portion of the investigation relates to his "extracurricular" activities.

                                    Cohen's expectations appear to be grounded much more in a belief that buying his silence his very much "worth it" to 45 than in any sense of a senior corporate official having his fees covered for claims relating to his corporate activities.

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                                      Though given that one of the issues at stake is whether the documents seized were privileged communications with Trump, and Trump's lawyers say they were, it doesn't seem a wholly unreasonable expectation.

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                                        So much for Schneiderman's successor going easy on Trump.

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                                          But the privilege review has already determined that the vast majority of what was seized isn't privileged.

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                                            It's all about who turns out. But is this Trumper in NY 1 in trouble?

                                            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Zeldin

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                                              He has reason to be concerned.

                                              Here’s some data

                                              One point to consider is that the MS-13 hysteria plays very well among Trumpists in Suffolk County, some of whom are the kind of people who feel that they are “under invasion” when they hear Spanish being spoken in the supermarket.

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                                                Cheers. I like the term "pivot county".

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                                                  https://twitter.com/leonhwolf/status/1007302616399872000?s=21

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                                                    Ursus' point about MS-13 and Suffolk County is a good one. Here in eastern North Carolina it is Hispanic people in general who are being stigmatized. The Reps are playing up the crime, taking jobs etc. card as hard as they can, in a manner not totally dissimilar to the tactics employed by the late, unlamented Jesse Helms of this parish.

                                                    El Trumpo and his acolytes have legitimized this race baiting. I have heard, in a grocery check out line, "If they can't speak English they should be deported." A native Mexican, who has lived with his family in this community for 9 years, was asked on the street by a total stranger if he was an "Illegal". The stranger then asked to see his green card. The upcoming election is only going to make matters worse. Candidates can wring their hands and disavow this behavior but as long as it might mean another vote they will they won't be unhappy for it to continue.

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