The idea is that they can run their banking services at a loss by subsidizing them with revenue from other aspects of their business. The reason Walmart would do it isn't because they particularly want poor customers, but because they can price out competitors (established banks) and rapidly gain market share. Needless to say, they wouldn't do it as a public service (which is one reason why Baradharan thinks it'd be better if the post office did it, and not Walmart).

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5b10916de4b0d5e89e1e4824

Looks like a pedophile from Charlottesville wants to get into politics. Can this city ever have some normal news? We aren't this bad I swear.

It should, but America is broken and people are too crazy or exhausted to get outraged by this stuff anymore. I'm seriously thinking of applying for out of country postdocs.

This is why right-wing Protestant work ethic economic myths are so ****ing dumb. I think Trump actually believes the world will come crawling back to him.

I think he does sincerely believe that when it comes to a lot of issues. That's definitely his overriding assumption when it comes to the North Korea negotiations and with pulling out of the JCPOA. He isn't always wrong. North Korea wants some kind of negotiated agreement. It has both more to gain and more to lose than the US does.

I wouldn't presume to know what a person with dementia believes.

The US makes and does a lot of stuff that the rest of the world would be pretty damn uncomfortable giving up, like software and movies. I think somewhere your government figured that the US is so important that they can set policy to make domestic reinvestment compulsory without suffering any down-side. The thing is, the US isn't one big economic stewpot. It's highly regional, and different regions have different industries and trade balances. China, EU, Canada, Mexico, and Japan are all levying retaliatory tariffs against the United States, and they aren't targeting the states that can afford retaliation, they're targeting economically stressed export-dependent states like Pennsylvania. The US government isn't responsive to individual hardship, but either way, life is about to get a lot harder in the Midwest.

Really the issue is capex. The US government wants more domestic investment. The corporate tax break and jubilee were intended to encourage reinvestment (N.B. it backfired; approx half of that money has been discharged through dividends, and the other half as stock repurchases). The NAFTA sunset provision was intended to make the agreement seem too volatile for US firms to risk foreign investment, and since that measure was rightly rejected by Canada and Mexico, the steel and aluminum tariffs were imposed to encourage domestic production of those inputs. The problem is, it takes years to plan and build a factory, and once it's finished you need to operate that factory for many years in order to break even. Investors won't invest unless the math works out, and that means you need to convince them tariffs and volatility are big, important, and permanent. Everybody believes trade will be normalized again whenever Trump is removed from office, which isn't far off enough to factor these tariffs into investment decisions. Another thing investors need to consider is that, if those trade barriers do become permanent, they won't be one-directional. Even if those tariffs are large enough to offset the higher (and increasing) cost of production in the United States, that factory will only be able to serve the US market. A factory outside of the US will be able to serve the entire planet plus the US (subject to a tax). Depending on economies of scale, US demand, and price elasticity of US demand, for a lot of goods it will make more sense to continue making products outside of the United States and pass the tariff on to US consumers.

In other words: US domestic producers are now much less competitive. US infrastructure and capital projects are now much more expensive. US consumer goods prices will increase either a little or a lot, depending on how Donald Trump reacts to worldwide retaliation against him, and will stay that way until Donald Trump changes his mind or is no longer president.

Man, isn't it weird how Donald Trump always seems to do exactly what a foreign antagonist wishes would happen? ??

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/from-electricity-to-steel-trump-becoming-increasingly-active-in-trying-to-shape-the-economy/2018/06/01/c1a0692c-65b3-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html?utm_term=.0e967ef3689b

hmm, why does that sound familiar to me?

Sounds an awful lot like it's time to ~deflect~ and ~****post about liberals~

I didn't know what else to do with these...

im literally shaking right now how much carbon is on t h e s e me a t s

Decided in the landmark court case of My Ass vs. The United States.

Serious or not, this guy's trouble.

I have no idea what's going to happen and I've definitely lost the thread and lost interest. I just hope that whatever happens it's conclusive. It probably won't be.

The whole Trump-Russia thing used to seem much more containable and comprehensible. There was a coherent narrative that seemed to be slowly drip drip dripping out. At some point, it seemed to go off in a thousand different directions. I might've stopped paying much attention to it before then. I don't know. Somehow the Stormy Daniels story collided with the Russia investigation due to Michael Cohen. But.. ehhh...

Sometimes its as if by "Trump-Russia" people just mean "the thing that they're talking about TV all the time that I hope ends in impeachment". Despite the fact that Trump is a reality TV star it actually doesn't make good television. It's all a big distraction, and there are other things going on that are way more interesting and consequential.

Those stupid memos from the Congressional intelligence committee? That might've been when I truly stopped giving a ****, but I might've stopped before that.

Better than Kanye West?

[quote=The New York Times]
SEATTLE — Howard Schultz, the outspoken executive chairman of Starbucks, will leave the company at the end of the month, bringing to an end the tenure of a socially conscious entrepreneur who turned a local Seattle coffee chain into a global giant with more than 28,000 stores in 77 countries.

Mr. Schultz’s decision to retire, a plan he said he privately outlined to the board a year ago, will most likely stoke speculation that he is considering a run for president in 2020. He is frequently mentioned as a potential candidate for the Democratic Party and has become increasingly vocal on political issues, including criticizing President Trump last year as “a president that is creating episodic chaos every day.”

While Mr. Schultz, 64, typically bats away speculation about his political ambitions with an eye roll or a pithy answer, on Monday he acknowledged for the first time that it is something he may consider.

“I want to be truthful with you without creating more speculative headlines,” he told The New York Times. “For some time now, I have been deeply concerned about our country — the growing division at home and our standing in the world.”

“One of the things I want to do in my next chapter is to figure out if there is a role I can play in giving back,” he continued. “I’m not exactly sure what that means yet.”

Asked directly if he was considering running for president, he said: “I intend to think about a range of options, and that could include public service. But I’m a long way from making any decisions about the future.”

Mr. Schultz said he and the board had expected to announce his departure last month, but that plan was upended after an episode at a Philadelphia store in mid-April in which two black men were arrested after waiting inside one of the company’s stores without making a purchase. Last week, Starbucks closed all of its company-owned stores around the country for four hours for racial bias training, a program that Mr. Schultz had spearheaded.

The possibility that Mr. Schultz, who has spent three decades leading Starbucks, could run for president has become far more realistic with the election of Mr. Trump, a real estate developer and reality-television star before his political career.

Mr. Trump’s successful candidacy has set off a wave of speculation about business leaders eyeing a shot at the White House. Robert Iger, Disney’s chief executive, publicly said he had been considering running for president until he struck a deal to buy 21st Century Fox. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, is also thought of as a possible candidate, and Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks N.B.A. team, has said he planned to consider running as Republican, but would need to convince his wife first.
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“She asked me if I want to stay married,” Mr. Cuban said last November.

Under Mr. Schultz’s leadership, Starbucks has waded into debates over social issues such as gay rights, race relations, veterans’ rights, gun violence and student debt. Mr. Schultz was an early champion of the idea of a corporate executive as a moral leader as he sought to achieve what he described as “the fragile balance between profit and conscience.”

Still, Mr. Schultz cautioned against reading too much into his decision to leave Starbucks. “I want to be of service to our country, but that doesn’t mean I need to run for public office to accomplish that,” he said.

He stepped away from the chief executive role at Starbucks last April, handing the reins to Kevin Johnson. It was the second time that Mr. Schultz had made that move, having given up the role in 2000 to become chairman, only to return to the chief executive position eight years later.

His latest departure, however, is a greater separation than before. Myron E. Ullman, the former chairman of J. C. Penney, will become Starbucks’s new chairman, and Mr. Schultz will be given an honorary title of chairman emeritus.

Mr. Schultz said he planned to work on his family foundation and write a book about “social impact work and the efforts to redefine the role and responsibility of a public company.”

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, whose father was the lawyer who helped Mr. Schultz buy Starbucks in 1987, said, “Howard has built an amazing organization in Starbucks, and it’s exciting to consider what he might accomplish philanthropically.”

On Monday, just hours before Mr. Schultz planned to send a letter to the company’s 350,000 employees around the world announcing his decision, he visited Starbucks’s first store at Pike Place Market for the last time as its leader.

“I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years,” he said. “Taking my green apron off is hard. It is emotional. More emotional than I thought it would be.”

“I told myself a long time ago that if I was ever going to explore a second act, I couldn’t do it while still at the company,” he added.

Mr. Schultz’s legacy as an entrepreneur will be defined as much for his vision to create a global coffee chain as for his progressive approach to running the company — or, as he has often said, “to build the company my father never got to work for.”

Mr. Schultz, who grew up in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, said watching his father, a World War II veteran who became a truck driver and later a taxi driver, struggle to make enough money to pay for basics had led him to offer complete health benefits for full- and part-time employees and their domestic partners, a first for such a chain. He later provided stock options for part-time workers and offered to cover college tuition for students enrolled in online courses at Arizona State University.

“Howard proved that a company could be more successful and profitable by elevating humanity,” said Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments and a Starbucks director who will become vice chairwoman when Mr. Schultz steps down.

Under Mr. Schultz, the company’s financial success has been immense. Shares of Starbucks have risen 21,000 percent since the company’s initial public offering in 1992; an investor who had put in $10,000 then would have more than $2 million today.

Still, Mr. Schultz’s progressive approach to management has not been without criticism. The company announced two weeks ago that it would let customers and non-customers alike use its restrooms following the incident in Philadelphia, and it was soon criticized by some as putting its store managers in increasingly complex and difficult situations that they may not be properly trained to handle.

And Mr. Trump has criticized Starbucks as trying to be too politically correct, bashing the company for no longer selling Christmas-themed cups. “Maybe we should boycott Starbucks?” Mr. Trump said on the campaign trail.

For Starbucks, Mr. Schultz’s departure will most likely be seen — both internally and externally — as a new challenge. While Mr. Schultz had already handed over the chief executive title to Mr. Johnson, he largely remained the face of the company as he continued to champion the idea of Starbucks as “the third place” — a meeting ground between home and work that he modeled from coffee bars in Italy after he took a trip there in 1983.

Starbucks itself is transitioning in the United States from a fast-growing company to one that’s more likely to rise and fall with the rest of the economy. Still, it is growing wildly in China, where it is planning to open as many as two new stores a day. It is one of the few American companies that operate in China without a local partner.

Mr. Schultz, however, said his decision to leave now — even after the episode in Philadelphia — illustrated the complete confidence he had in Mr. Johnson, the company’s top management and its board.

“The timing was never going to be perfect,” he said.

At the original Pike Place Market store early Monday, with only a handful of customers looking on, Mr. Schultz leaned over to inscribe the wall next to an espresso bar he installed himself in 1987: “This is where it all began. My dream to build a company that fosters respect and dignity and create a place where we can all come together over a cup of coffee. Onward with love.”
[/quote]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/business/dealbook/starbucks-howard-schultz.html

More about trade.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2018/02/06/the-true-trade-deficit/

(N.B. I've known about this for ages, but since it's popped up in my news feed I'm gonna take the opportunity to rant about it.)



TL;DR: Trump is a dumb ****.

Let me expand on this a bit.

Donald Trump alleges that the US trade deficit is responsible for the woes of the American working class. What is a trade deficit? It's an imbalance between what the US imports and exports. The US having a trade deficit means the US imports more stuff than it exports. The theory is that, over time, money leaves the United States to acquire goods overseas, and that value is lost permanently. There's at least some basis for concern here; I've read some accounts that suggest the Roman Empire fell in part because of rich Romans' appetites for foreign luxuries. Anyway, this idea isn't new. Among others it was espoused by the social credit movement in the early 1900s.

So why is Trump a dumb ****?

Because the US doesn't actually have a trade deficit. It has an absolutely gigantic trade surplus.

Part of the reported US trade deficit is actually an artifact of the way the USTR calculates import and export values. Take the iPhone, for example, because it was used in the above article (although their numbers are wrong). When Apple receives a shipment of iPhones from China for sale in the United States, the recorded import unit cost is $800. But that's not what Apple pays China to make iPhones. Apple only pays them something like $7. In the end, over 70% of the value of each iPhone sold in the United States was created by American workers - less than 30% was added by foreign manufacturing and suppliers. However, when the iPhone is imported for sale, USTR considers the retail value only. The authors of the article estimate that the actual flow of goods/services deficit is about half what the USTR estimates when you correct this problem.

Here's another problem, though.

What governments and economists call "trade" doesn't cover everything that we plebians might consider trade. There's a whole ****load of value flowing in and out of countries all of the time, and official trade statistics account for very little of it. Economists have this idea called balance of payments, which is an index of those value inflows and outflows. The USTR trade statistics only account for physical goods and performed services - so if you buy an iPhone, that's an import, or if you live on the border and take a construction job in Canada, that's a service export.

But when a US bank gets paid back for a loan? When a US oil company gets paid dividends by its foreign subsidiary? When McDonalds gets paid Canadian franchise fees? That's not trade. Depending on exactly how they choose to structure their businesses (and they work very hard to achieve this), basically none of the foreign business activities of a US company shows up in official current account statistics. This is despite the fact that said activity is directly enriching US businesspeople and paying the salaries of high-skill US workers (i.e. exactly what normal, proper-thinking people would consider foreign trade).


So the problem isn't a trade deficit, because it doesn't actually exist. But there is a problem, and it's who this trade enriches. When an American buys an iPhone, 30% of the value goes overseas, 70% of the value goes to Tim Cook et al., and 0% of the value goes to that American, his family, his hometown, or even his state. So the US doesn't really have a trade deficit, it has a capital-doesn't-know-what-to-do-with-American-labor-and-doesn't-give-a-****-about-your-problems problem. And as the US clenches its ports shut, and the rest of the world retaliates, it's not gonna be the mega rich Americans with their under the table intellectual property trade-but-not-trade who take a haircut, it's gonna be the people who actually make and sell stuff.

TL;DR for the TL;DR: Brand billionaires like Donald Trump are the only winners in the US economy today, and Donald Trump is working to keep it that way.

So the trade deficit is nominal. I find that unsurprising, as it's basically a common theme of economics that any term they use has a precise definition, which when read colloquially, leads people into error. The academic's trap of communicating to the public.



So, basically, the rest of red America. Which is going to radicalize them further, which is going to make them susceptible to ever more fascist-sounding politicians, who are going to lie, give the police more guns and enrich their friends as fascists do. Oh, and I guess provide more antidepressants, fentanyl and OxyContin. Marx was wrong, opioids are the opiate of the masses, I guess.

Just wait, though. If we started ramping up guillotine production in Pennsylvania once all the steel jobs leave, maybe we can start a revolution at less cost.

I was reading recently that housing prices are taking off unbounded again, and the birth rate is low because now not even immigrants are ****ing. But the stock market is high so I guess we're good.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/06/06/jaw-dropping-report-reveals-rampant-wage-theft-among-top-us-corporations

I am so sick of these welfare queens stealing from hard-working Americans. Can we just throw them all in jail and throw away the key?

Hard to fathom that Walmart's labor fines amount to ****ing billions of dollars.

https://np.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/8p1lox/im_a_straight_guy_and_have_sex_with_my_landlords/

I'm not sure what the issue is here. Sounds like he was able to provide his surplus labor in fair exchange for goods, amirite?

I guess if you're a sexual predator landlord, having historically high rent prices is a good thing.

Various classical liberals wrote many times to the effect of: “The only legitimate purpose of government is to protect property rights”. They never said anything about protecting labor rights.



“If you think sex workers "sell their bodies," but coal miners do not, your view of labor is clouded by your moralistic view of sexuality”

used, of course, to argue for why prostitution should be legal, rather than to argue for why labor shouldn’t.

Labor will be used as a necessary sacrifice in the construction of guillotines.

Should we mention Sweden's Nazi party is polling at 20%? We should mention it.

Obviously 20% of Swedes are unhappy with how little the rich exploit them.

That’s not fair. I’m sure their various liberal parties have at least 60%.

The landlord and his son must have one ****ed up relationship.

lol why are these people not just calling themselves libertarians? In order to escape the left's "there is no conservatism that is not Trumpism" branding of the right?

Because classical liberalism is hundreds of years old, and libertarianism is sixty years old.

who cares what those weirdos call themselves?

Both descend from British utilitarianism, but classical liberalism comes from British empiricism and libertarianism comes from continental idiocy.



I do, but only because it sets me further apart from the average well-educated conservative who thinks liberals are "leftists".

I'm not sure how coherent "classical liberalism" is as a political ideology and I don't know how long the term has been around for and how consistently it's been used. The way that I see it, while people who call themselves "classical liberals" embrace 17th/18th figures like Locke, Hume or Smith as the progenitors of their ideology, what they are really advocating is a rollback to ideas about the role of government that existed before the invention of the welfare state and increased government intervention in the economy began in the first decade of the 20th century in England with the rise of so-called "New Liberals." They want to return to late 19th century Gladstonian liberalism, which featured laissez-faire economics, low taxes, few government protections of rights (labor rights, civil rights, etc). Obviously, I suspect many of them don't realize that that's what they're really asking for. It seems like people who embrace the term "classical liberalism" as a label do it because it serves a wider social purpose (namely, it provides a way for people of a certain disposition and outlook to rally together through a common political identification) rather than because there is a definite set of ideas associated with it. In other words, it's about branding.

Adding to this it seems as if Teddy Roosevelt was an American equivalent to British New Liberalism. He did a lot to redefine the role of American government to make it much more proactive (of course, FDR took this much further). I think people don't really appreciate just how stripped down and how limited government activities were before the early to mid 20th century. (It's not something that I fully appreciate.)

I'm pretty much in the same boat. It's helpful to think about the qualitative differences and the affirmative beliefs that underlie ideologies rather than trying to place them on a spectrum, as if the differences were merely ordinal. (As we've noted in the past.)

Actually, I take it back: classical liberals are people who talk about the logos and Jungian dream analysis.

I don't know anybody who identifies as a classical liberal today. If I did, I would certainly share your suspicion about their understanding of the term, but I don't and it's not really a strawman I'm interested in knocking down.

imo classical liberalism is mostly interesting because it's modern liberalism's basement. The whole pro-elite, help for me laissez faire for thee stuff never went away; it's baked deep in the DNA of even modern quasi-progressive liberal parties, and indeed, when they do the right thing they often don't reach for moralistic arguments for why they should be done, they reach for business arguments and reduce it all to capital and transactions. That's the utilitarianism. I find the whole thing fascinating. You see people ask questions like "why is there no Christian left", or "why do the conservatives have a big tent", and the fact that the modern political left is dominated by liberalism is a big part of it. The modern political right is dominated by some pretty ****ing evil people, but if you believe personal values matter, it's still a less alienating experience than dealing with people who do the right things for very wrong reasons.

(This is also why libertarianism identifies with the modern political right, even though they believe in pretty much everything that liberal parties do.)

Watching people try to bolt something inherently value-based like social justice onto liberalism has been a delightful spectacle.

Mmmm... I hadn't heard it put that way before. I like that... that's a lot more neutral and concise than a lot of other ways this idea is often described (for example, conservatives often say that a lot of social justice makes politics into religion, which is a loaded metaphor, although I think they want a lot of the other associations that come with it. Others will point out that the culture war dimensions of social justice breaks down the distinction between civil society and politics/the state which is a crucial component of the Anglo-American tradition).

Yeah I... it seems like liberals are often on the right as well as on the left. In America that's the case: until ideological conservatism collapsed, the movement was effectively made up of liberals who wanted to rollback the New Deal and the Great Society (not far from Gladstonian liberals, in many respects). In some other countries there are liberals on the right, too.

I think the fact that liberalism dominates the left has more to do with the fact that there is no real alternative. And I think that actually has to do with the cosmopolitan and internationalist character of late 20th/early 21st century liberalism. Workers movements and old Christian democratic movements often (although, of course, not always) worked within national contexts and had to do with rooting people in a common geographic area to it. Contemporary cultural attitudes on the left are largely opposed to the very kind of territorial rootedness that seems necessary for a politically mobilized workers movement that would work in a national context.

Even intersectionality/social justice seems to be geographically neutral, assuming that regional and local differences don't have a significant impact on how people of different ethnic backgrounds live, and acting as if the "lived experiences" of people of different groups are the same in all places. It divides people up into demographic "communities" that have no geographic basis and sometimes aren't even confined within national boundaries (for example, talking about Islamophobia as if it takes the same form everywhere, or, to use a domestic example, just the fact that we talk about the oppression and discrimination that African Americans face as if it is the same everywhere, despite the fact that they're dispersed throughout the country, and different states have profoundly different legacies when it comes to racial issues.)

I don't think I grasp what the Christian left question is asking. Of course, Christians do vote for Democrats. In many presidential elections more catholics have voted for Democrats than Republicans. About 40% of White Protestants voted for HRC. The catholic thing is especially surprising for your theory about liberalism, Jon, because of the long anti-liberal catholic intellectual tradition.

But still: obviously Christians don't make up a distinct bloc within the Democratic coalition as they do within the Republican party, suggesting that they don't vote as Christians (meaning, it's not the most salient feature of their identity in the same way as it is for the Christians on the right who make up the Republican-Christian bloc). And I suppose the reason why they don't make a distinct bloc in the Democratic coalition is because they generally agree with the left's position on social issues (or at least can tolerate it) and don't see a need to organize as if they were a bloc and to promote a distinct set of positions in the same way as Christians on the right do.