No. They're hypocrites because they call themselves the American Civil Liberties Union but then turn around and work AGAINST the foundational civil liberty itself.

Correction: They work against what you believe is the foundational civil liberty. They don't agree with you. The fact that your opinion and their opinion differ is not hypocrisy. It's a reflection of the fact that you and the ACLU are not the same being. If I hate peanut butter and my sister eats a peanut butter sandwich, she is not a hypocrite. She just likes peanut butter.

As much as I tend to side closer to you than the ACLU on the gun rights issue, I hardly see the fact that the ACLU disagrees as hypocrisy. You can argue that they're wrong and that it would be a good thing for them to duplicate the NRA's work, but that's about as far as I'd take it.

Doesn't matter. Throwing NORTHERN journalists in prison for criticizing the war is unconstitutional in the extreme.

I won't say it was good policy, but the Constitution explicitly says that habeas corpus may be suspended in case of rebellion or invasion.

If you understood anything about economics, you would know that tax cuts often increase revenue, by encouraging people to put their money to work (and earn more) rather than trying to shelter it.

The key word here is "often." In a case like this one, the marginal propensity to consume each dollar rebated is very low.

Check out this chart [heritage.org] and see how revenues go up after the Reagan tax cuts.

We were also coming out of a long period of stagflation. Try finding a long run trend between tax rates and GDP growth that indicates that they're a net positive for revenue. Especially when the velocity of money is low.

The government does NOT create JOBs.

So you're suggesting that, for example, an engineer at Lockheed Martin making a satellite system that the government will use for imaging is unemployed?

According to the Obama administration, their "stimulus" plan is supposed to "create or save" 3.5 million jobs. That's about $220,000 per job!!

I don't think it's particularly reasonable to assume that 100% of stimulus spending will go to labor and none of it to capital. If I pay a guy $1M to pave my front yard with gold, he's not walking away with a $1M salary.

Is this the same Nobel committee that gave the Peace Prize to Arafat for his heroic efforts in Jew-murdering?

No, it would be the committee that reviews medical advances.

Well, they are not spending on their military, that's for damn sure. Oh, and dental care appears to be out too!

The data you're looking for is simple: What percentage of GDP is spend on health care? I cannot find any source that plausibly suggests that the US spends a smaller percentage of its GDP on health care European countries in general. Uwe Reinhart does good work on this topic.

No, I said LESS THAN $400 a month. I've never spent more than that. It may actually cost more than that, but I have a job that helps me pay for my health insurance. So yeah, I'm ignoring my employer contribution...

Well, there's your problem.

...and I know, you are going to tell me that if my employer didn't pay that, they'd pay me more, right? Uh, wrong. Jobs that pay less almost always offer less in benefits, with the exception of temporary or contract jobs.

Let's not compare a job with medical benefits to a job without medical benefits. That's just ridiculous. The question you need to ask yourself is, would you command a higher pay for the same work if your employer didn't have to pay for your health care? Are you suggesting that when they figure out how much they can offer you, that they aren't factoring in the extra several thousands of dollars a year they have to pony up to Blue Cross? If so, I'm willing to bet that you don't believe the same thing about the employer contribution to social security.

And while you're explaining it, please explain how the CRA did not contribute.

Actually, I'd like an explanation on this one. Let's say you run a bank. Let's say that the government wants you to make a loan that you don't want to make (let's say... filthy poor people in minority neighborhoods) because you know it won't be profitable. Do you:

a) Do the bare minimum and lobby Congress to stop it?
b) Leverage yourself to death and make as many of those loans as you possibly can?

If you can explain why profit maximizing firms chose B over A, simply because the CRA existed, I'd be interested in hearing it. More to the point, it's worth looking into which financial entities made the majority of the securitized subprime loans. Hint: They weren't subject to the CRA. The CRA links are political chaff.

That being said, the general "deregulation" bugaboo is not something that can be laid neatly at the feet of conservatives. People have been making noise about the potential dangers of allowing an unregulated insurance industry to develop since before Bush was in office. Nobody in charge seemed interested in doing much about it over a couple of administrations and several congresses.

So please, tell me genius, if the economy sucked during Bush's eight years, as you stated, how was there an increase in tax revenue when taxes were cut?

I don't see how it's surprising to see tax revenues increase after a downturn reverses. In fact, that's exactly what I would expect.

If you're seeing a long run trend indicating that tax cuts pay for themselves, you're probably prone to pareidolia.

Instead they claim [aclu.org] that "In our view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue." One doubts they would make the same claim about the regulation of free speech, hence they are hypocrites.

So what you're saying is that because they believe X is true while you believe that X is false, they're hypocrites because they act as though X is true? I'm pretty sure that two distinct entities can hold contradictory beliefs without being hypocrites.

Hypocrisy would be, "We believe that gun rights are a major civil liberties issue, but we work against them because we're evil liberals!"

The question is, what's the payoff vs the punishment? If the risk is suspension and I'm going to put a murder away, I might do it. If the risk is that the murderer goes free, it does away with the incentive to do it. Instead of increasing the punishment, you simply do away with the reward entirely.

So there is what? An external source of money and debt entering this closed economic system?

Well, yes. That's one of the properties of fiat currency. It's potentially infinite over an infinitely long period of time. We're not going to run out of integers. The question is, what does that debt represent in things that actually are scarce?

This bubble is simply the result of the bank's (forced) reaction to that law.

Sigh. I'm going to present to you my usual list of questions that follow from this assertion:

1) What percentage of the subprime loans were originated by lenders who were not subject to the CRA? Hint: Most of them.
2) Let's say you're a bank and the Bad Old Liberal Government makes you loan to X number of filthy poor people. You know that those loans will not be profitable. Do you:
a) Loan out the bare minimum
or
b) Leverage yourself up to the eyeballs and make as many of those unprofitable loans as you possibly can?

Your assertion seems to be that the correct answer is (b) and that banks are not profit maximizing institutions. This does not pass the laugh test.

It was not "just" a bank that stopped doing it's homework, it was primarily freddie mac and fannie mae, who did so under direct orders from house democrats, supported, first by Jimmy Carter then Bill Clinton (and opposed, ineffectively like most things he did, by George Bush).

I'm not going to suggest that FM and FM didn't purchase bad loans. They did. But there are a couple of points that your analysis is missing:

1) Their portfolios did not underperform the market as a whole, so it strains credulity to pin them down as the cause.
2) Their share of the mortgage market was *declining* through the housing bubble run-up. You'll never guess who was on the rise during that period. Unless you guess, "non-bank entities who securitize loans and who also aren't regulated by the CRA," of course.

What we're dealing with is a system-wide failure to properly analyze risk. The idea that things would have been any better with out the GSEs or without an obscure piece of Carter-era regulation (that didn't seem to cause any problems for decades) is simply political chaff.

No not really. My post might have had a small error, but the key point is not nullified. ----- If Bush's wars cost 600 billion according to the Congressional Budgeting Office, and Obama has spent $1150 so far with another ~800 billion planned with proposed mortgage and bank TARPs, then he will have spent 3 times as much as Bush in just 1 year.

A mere $600B? What a steal! We should have bought three or four at that rate!

I agree, he's an idiot at saying paying someone to dig and fill holes is needed, Smart is spending money carefully. Dumb is making jobs for the sake of making jobs.

No, dumb is criticizing expert opinions without actually... well... actually reading what those opinions actually are.

I think that this debate is a bit on the academic side. We're not actually paying people to dig holes and fill them up. We're paying them to do useful things. The whole "dig holes and fill them up again" argument is simply to illustrate that the primary purpose is not to get cool stuff but rather to employ stagnant resources and re-stimulate demand.

I understand what you're saying, and now that you wrote what you did, I understand what the politicians might be thinking, but if digging and filling holes is so good, then why don't the politicians just blindly dumps billions in public transit or paying off the debt?

The short answer: They aren't paying people to dig and fill holes. They are paying for things like public transit. The point is to stimulate aggregate demand by putting useful productive capacity to work where it might otherwise be wasted.

As for why they don't pay down the debt, that's the opposite of what they're trying to accomplish. Without getting into the economic details, the "right" thing to do would be to take on debt when things are bad and pay it off when things are good. It's often difficult to get the government to get around to the "pay it off because things are good" part of it, but that's not necessarily a crisis either.