Just think of it this way. With Amazon being the staple for many upper middle class buyers, the leftover cardboard is perfect recycled material for Americans to build their own housing.

There's really not much to worry about. We'll go through a catastrophe, things will adapt, we'll move on. The only thing we can do is pray future catastrophes won't be as bad as WWII (they will be).

Just to be clear, the lack of investment is pretty much objective:

https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/02/news/economy/paul-krugman-tax-cut-apple-buybacks/index.html

And yuh, rentiers are pretty good at pricing to extract as much as they can. The demand for housing is pretty inelastic in much of the U.S., without pretty strong zoning deregulation or whatever people are going to be limited.

So I read what some HBR people are saying about stock buybacks:

https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-case-for-stock-buybacks

Disregarding that many of the recent buybacks are not using excess capital but are leveraged, gambling future profit against today's projection (never wise), let's recognize that this article is only speaking from the perspective of microeconomics:



The question isn't whether stock buybacks make sense with excess capital, but why that excess capital exists to begin with. Any firm having excess capital for too many quarters is a terrible sign for your economy. It's a classic marker of monopoly power. The question you should ask is why there aren't competitors undercutting the other firm, taking from the profits and creating better conditions for consumers. So when they say:



Really? For accusing others of putting the cart before the horse (which may be true), that's exactly what they're doing here. Is it really stock buybacks producing value, or is what we're seeing instead that companies with the excess capital to buyback stocks aren't facing competition, i.e. have more monopoly power and so don't need to reinvest to remain competitive?



I'd like to invent an economic idea here, called the "liquidity of stupidity". Sure, the people receiving the profits from the buyback can reinvest, and many do. These economic arguments presume though that it takes zero time for these transactions to occur. Financing isn't instantaneous, the stock buyback isn't translated into investment the next day. It takes time for investment capital to trade hands. I wonder what term this has and whether it's been studied, because it seems obvious to me that people discount the inefficiency of cash trading hands between banks versus it being invested by the company. Who knows where the line is?

In any case, do we really think companies will buyback stock if that money will be reinvested in a competitor? Think long and hard about this, because either answer will depress you.



This is probably the best argument they have, but I'm a bit skeptical that CEOs are really sweating an 11% stake over a 9% stake.

You know how Trump supporters are all anti-globalization? I wonder what they'd say if they could figure out that the "surprising" trend towards women's rights in Saudi Arabia is a result of global finance. Since the Saudis have finally realized an economy based solely on oil export is a bad idea in face of shale oil and fracking, they're trying to peddle off their oil company (for 2 trillion, lol) and are liberalizing to appeal to NYSE and London exchangers.

I mean as much as I'd hate to admit it, the liberals are winning on that front.

His plan calls for a VAT. (Which I suppose is a way of saying that middle class people would pay for it.)

You guys sure got over that report quick. I'm proud of you.

I really don't see what the big deal is. I was hardly surprised at the (apparent) outcome of the investigation, which, btw, is still not public.

https://crooked.com/articles/william-barr-punked-media-mueller/
https://www.lawfareblog.com/how-understand-end-mueller-investigation-hint-you-cant-yet

Robert de Niro and Alyssa Milano haven't weighed in either

It's worth considering that Mueller isn't out to try and basically libel a sitting president, and the justice department isn't going to indict a sitting president. They might be hoping spineless Republicans actually agree to impeachment.

When are you going to admit that you're a Trump supporter?

You don't have to be a Trump supporter to be a Go Red Team, Boo Blue Team type of thinker. The Blue Team wants a damning Mueller Report, so if it's not damning, there's an opportunity to jeer at the Blue Team.

Who's the "you guys" you mention, Wookie? I honestly couldn't tell if you specifically meant Reid or RJ or Jon or if you meant something more general.

You know, Donald Trump is being uncharacteristically quiet and reserved about this whole thing

He's a dignified winner, Steven.

Not many #resistance warriors here.

But then again, does anyone actually own that label? Seems like even the core people you think of as being part of the resistance — someone like Benjamin Wittes, who is regularly on MSNBC — try to disassociate from it.

I will support Trump when he's right but that never had anything to do with this bogus investigation. I never really had any idea why anyone actually believed the collusion narrative although, oddly, I wasn't really going to be surprised if it turned out to be true. I really had very low expectations of Trump. Actually, that's a very dramatic understatement.

I honestly hope the Russia thing is true, it would be only fair, not to mention ironic, considering how actively the US meddles/has meddled in other countries' politics (including, ironically, in the great late USSR. Remember Yeltsin?).

haha, wtf. At least 34 people have been indicted as a result in part due to the investigation of the Special Council, including several members of Trump's campaign team.

lol, you're not supposed to believe the "collusion" narrative, because it's a superfluous term that Trump deliberately uses to refer to his own putative legal troubles, but which has no precise legal meaning in this context.

God you guys are so easy to fool, it's embarrassing.

Anyone feel like playing "spot the fallacy"?

Allow me to backpedal a bit on that. For whatever reason the Democrats in Congress are also using the term, which strikes me as a weasel word whether or not it's Democrats saying it or Trump defending himself against the charge of it, because the term is too vague (I can see on Wikipedia that it has a meaning in corporate law, but nothing about government).

The investigation wasnt about Russia collusion, it was about obstruction of justice. Trumps new AG ordered Mueller not to determine obstruction. What did you think the outcome was going to be?

Hah, somehow everybody seems to have forgotten all about that (not to mention the circumstances and reasons for initiating the entire investigation in the first place).

In other news (and in the alternate reality), some Republican from Alabama explains to the House floor how the Fake News Socialist Media lied about collusion because they are National Socialists.

Wow, that's uncalled for. They'e only allowed to call Trump a nazi, not the other way around.

Yeah, it's so weird when people call nazi a Trump.

I bet you didn't read far enough to glean this guy's truly asinine justification for the association: his deduction is that because the left is "socialist", then "national socialists" are something owned by the left. And then he goes on to quote Mein Kampf to back this up by explaining how "fake news" is an example of Hitler's strategy of making a "big lie". (It would be mildly interesting if it wasn't so mind numbingly stupid.)

So yeah, I don't really have too much of a problem calling a spade a spade. But how can you do that if you're too dumb to know what either one is...

To be fair, the national socialists were socialist in the only way republicans will voluntarily understand the term.

Edit: The national socialists were the only noteworthy party opposed to radical austerity measures. That’s what socialism means to them.

What I love is how there’s basically no sunlight between the Republican and Democratic parties at all. The methods and beneficiaries differ, but the politics and aggregate outcomes are always the same.

So two people on the “left” agree that they dislike the direction the Democratic Party is headed. They both mean totally different things, but just nod knowingly to each other without thinking about it. It’s super fascinating. I bet this was what political discussions were all like before the delusion of common interest was destroyed.

Hard to imagine that this would be happening under a Democratic administration https://www.axios.com/justice-trump-court-affordable-care-act-unconstitutional-ab8bf281-65fc-4b91-8606-d1f3f65818d6.html

There are always victims from these sorts of investigations. Typically process crimes resulting from offenses such as lying to the investigators on matters that might not have even been related to the subject of the investigation itself. Not defending it, just stating a fact. I have no idea what the indictments were for in this case. Too many to keep track of anyway.



I really don't know what your talking about. You guys here have been going on about collusion forever. I really never gave it much more weight than a conspiracy theory because it sounded asinine. I don't know who it is you think I identify with when you lump me in with "you guys". I used the term "narrative" because I thought it was less inflammatory than "conspiracy theory". I regret the choice.



Well, that's most likely due to long established DOJ policy but the idiotic coverage over the last couple years has been focused on collusion and completely debunked by the report at least as summarized by Mueller as quoted by the AG.

That's because politics is now just a means of cultural identification which is used as a tool by the powerful to consolidate social power, and by the weak as a hedge against their insecurities. Reality is a most unwelcome intrusion on these activities, and the entire narrative has been cooperatively framed in such a way as to minimize its relevance.

This was really driven home to me when I noticed that both sides consistently leave their best arguments on the table in favor of terrible straw men. People don't just have no interest in changing other people's minds, it feels like they actually don't want to. The idea that the other guys are real people who have the agency to change their minds spoils the narrative. Instead, you see a lot of people gate-keeping their own political positions, which seems like bizarrely irrational behavior if you take it at face value.

You'd think this would result in radically different parties, but actually it just means that people only care about a few, often meaningless identity issues to the exclusion of all else, and politicians are almost completely unaccountable when it comes to huge swaths of policy. I expect they are so busy playing games with their electorate that they don't really have time to bother thinking for themselves on real policy issues, and everyone ends up drifting to a common orthodoxy.

Aggregate outcomes.

The main difference between ACA and not-ACA is who pays for poor/unemployed people with prior conditions. Without ACA, it’s paid by hospitals. With ACA, it’s paid by healthy individuals. (I know this is an old GOP straw man, so keep in mind when I say that I’m really talking about a bunch of things including the new equilibrium price established by the individual mandate price floor. That is the ultimate result, though.)

Obviously the Democrats aren’t going to rally against their most (only?) noteworthy legislative achievement in 20 years. But they’re trying to achieve a social goal (everybody gets healthcare) on top of market mechanisms (produce the profit maximizing quantity of healthcare) so even though they believe very different things, the outcomes aren’t going to be very different from another party that’s tweaking he same variables with an eye on slightly different goals. And that’s, like, the only thing the democrats know how to do. So that’s kind of a problem.



Billionaire liberal says: “Yep, I acknowledge the systematic historical injustices that have produced our culture and economic system. Terrible stuff, what happened. I get to keep all the money tho”

I saw this on the /news section of 4chan the other day, which I previously assumed hadn't been completely subsumed by morons (since there is still a lot of resistance to Trump on that board), but, quite to the contrary: a discussion of Andrew Yang was almost exclusively dominated by posts about whether or not having been circumcised makes your e-penis superior or not. Not even a single post talked about Yang himself at all, or even one post daring to discuss whether or not he's a good candidate in general (let alone a discussion about his more substantive policy positions), but for whatever reason this topic is incredibly exciting to them.

Look at Paul Manafort. The guy has arguably been committing crimes for years, and only recently his past has caught up with him, as a result of this investigation. And no, it's not just about lying to investigators. Of course, catching somebody in a lie (somewhat like finally getting Al Capone on his tax returns) about their deeper crimes is a decent consolation prize for the prosecutor (although seemingly not in the case of Trump himself).

I mean, it's like circumcision is the "abortion" hot button issue of 4chan or something...

“Process crimes” is such a delightful, Fox bubble euphemism. It wasn’t a real crime, like the kinds of crimes black people commit. It was some good, honest, hard-working light fraud.

Hey, if it didn’t concern the area the prosecutors were investigating, they should have pled the fifth, ya? Maybe it’s not as “process” as you think.

Also, lol, Manafort was (among other things) charged with money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the United States, and pleaded guilty to the latter (as well as witness tampering).

I assumed that you meant something like this, and while I take your point, despite the fact that both parties are locked into market fundamentalism when it comes to social issues (if you can even talk about Republicans trying to address social issues), the Democrats' goal to increase the number of people who have health insurance vs. the Republicans' goal of trying to decrease that number makes it difficult for me to agree that there's "no daylight" between the parties.

Isn't the idea that Trump offered during the 2016 GOP primaries of allowing insurance companies to compete with each other on the private insurance markets across state borders a decent idea that actually would've kept prices down? Like, I think at the time he pitched it as "they're going to compete!", but it seems like the real advantage isn't that competition would bring prices down as much as consolidation would.

If you have a number of different insurance companies competing with each other in a poor state, they're probably not going to get many customers, which means that they'll have to charge higher premiums to the customers they do get. But health insurance is something which is a lot more efficient to provide at scale, given that it works by having healthy people who don't need healthcare subsidizing the people who do. If your potential pool of customers is national, rather than only state-wide, then you could get a lot more people paying into the system, and probably from a wider range of income levels, which means lower premiums for everyone.

(EDIT: added this to a new post for enhanced readability!)

If there’s one consistent thing I’ve seen about Republicans, it’s an overriding belief that efficiency and profitability dictate prices (i.e. that prices are cost-plus). I have every reason to think Republicans have good faith belief that increasing health insurer efficiency will make health insurance more affordable and therefore increase enrolment, not decrease it. This is why competition is good (prices drop because they have to work harder), consolidation is good (prices drop because they can eliminate redundant tasks), dropping people with pre-existing conditions is good (prices drop because their marginal costs drop). This is all idiocy, it’s not how market economies work, but this is what I think they believe.

The lobbyists are all liars who know better, and Republican politicians are a bunch of short-sighted power-crazed madmen, but the scaffolding of the party, the people who really set the direction, are true believers. I really doubt you can pull off a social club that big who would knowingly support policies that they truly, honestly believe will make life worse for themselves and everyone else.

So the Republicans think more people will get insured if you tweak variable X (industry profitability) and Democrats think more people will get insured if you tweak variable Y (price floor), the net result is... what? American businesses still fronting the costs themselves, private profit leeching out of the system every time money changes hands, costs increasing in pace with decreasing competition (something happening in all industries regardless of policy). In the short term, a lot of people can get health insurance (assuming they are in the “growth sector” of people too poor to be working at a company with insurance as a benefit, but making enough to pay for it). In the medium term I don’t know what difference it will make, and in the long term you’re gonna end up at the same spot regardless because capitalism has a single equilibrium point.



Sorry, I think I lost track. Are you saying this is what Republicans think, or you? This isn’t how markets set prices!

re: if you can even talk about Republicans trying to address social issues, of course Republicans address social issues. You don't see them as issues because you'd prefer most of them not be solved (and I really do agree with that).

But there's the thing. They'd crack the same damn joke about Democrats. Republicans are worrying about jobs in the developing world Appalachians, passing tariffs to bring coal and steel back to American workers. Meanwhile Democrats are globalizing those jobs away and telling people that GDP is up so everything is fine. Because, yeah, despite being functionally illiterate Trump voters, those hillpeople somehow still manage to understand what Pareto improvements mean better than any living Democrat.

It's just a thought I had about something that might improve Obamacare (although that's not something Democrats are still trying to achieve).