Kinja reply list

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rusholmeruffianMichael Harriot
9/12/18 5:56pm
I don’t think Gary Cohn cared about whiteness; I think he cared about getting taxes cut for the 0.1%, and damn the consequences for everyone else. If that meant embracing an idiot who’s also an unapologetic white supremacist, well...ends, means, yadda yadda.
Mattis probably still sees himself as the thumb in the dike. He probably could’ve been made SecDef under a Democratic administration, or at least either National Security Advisor or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Obviously race is inextricably intertwined from the distribution of wealth—check out the American contingent in the Forbes billionaires list sometime, after all—but ultimately it’s irrelevant to thinking of folks like Cohn or the anonymous staffer. They’d be perfectly OK with a POTUS who proposed sterilizing every white person with an IQ below 100 as long as he also got tax cuts through for the Kochs and Waltons.
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  LegHumperrusholmeruffian
  9/12/18 6:21pm
  Yeah, the only color dudes like Gary Cohn care about is green. Racism is just a handy tool for ringing as much money as possible out of the suckers, be they black, white or whatever, and to keep them from looking up.
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  The Ghost of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ AKA BabyStepsrusholmeruffian
  9/12/18 6:38pm
  DING! DING! DING!
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Prostate of Dorian GrayMichael Harriot
9/12/18 5:37pm
“Just run the presses,” Trump suggested. “Print money.”
Get your wheelbarrows ready for our new Weimar Republic.
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  rustynailerProstate of Dorian Gray
  9/12/18 5:51pm
  Well, at least he knew that US currency is created by running printing presses. Who really would have been surprised had Trump thought money was created from the butts of Leprechauns in Dodge City KS?
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  Bowl Better TalkProstate of Dorian Gray
  9/12/18 7:44pm
  I was going to go with Venezuela, but that works as well.
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Yes...They Are Real!Michael Harriot
9/12/18 5:47pm
I’m hoping this story is false. Because if it’s not...ho-leee shit!
Listen y’all. I have almost zero concept or understanding of how the economy works. I don’t even understand how refinancing a home loan works. Hell, I can’t figure out how to balance a damn checkbook (thank God for debit cards)!!! However, even with my embarrassingly remedial level knowledge on basic economics, thefe is one thing I am pretty sure I understand. I do understand that you don’t solve a national debt crisis by simply printing more money!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t this create some kind of huge inflation issue for consumers? And iirc(I could definitely be mistaken about this), didn’t other countries try the “print more money” solution before, with disastrous results? Basically crippling their economy. I only have a vague recollection of reading about this topic in high school. So I don’t remember which countries actually did this. I just remember I wasn’t good. And there was a war involved somehow or something? Does anyone here know what I’m talking about? Refresh my memory here somebody.
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  transcendentapeYes...They Are Real!
  9/12/18 6:51pm
  It’s happened probably hundreds of times throughout history with many countries, sometimes multiple times per country. Hell, you don’t even need countries, bank scares in the late 1800's were due to banks printing more currency than they could redeem. Currency only works if the people using it agree to value it for transactions.
  When the supply of currency increases faster than the supply of goods and services, the value of the currency decreases relative to those goods and services. People will demand more of it tomorrow than they did today for the same good. This is inflation. When this happens rapidly, then a run-away process occurs. If the dollar I have today will only buy fifty cents worth of today’s stuff tomorrow, then I will spend it today rather than saving it till tomorrow. But the guy I’m buying from knows this as well, so he’s not even gonna want to take my dollar today. He’ll want, say two dollars. This cycle happens with everyone, country-wide, for every single transaction. Prices rise faster than the supply of currency because the people no longer trust the currency to hold value. This is hyper-inflation, and will result in the collapse of the economic system.
  Most recently, this has occurred in Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
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  Yes...They Are Real!transcendentape
  9/12/18 7:06pm
  Thanks for taking the time to write out “Economy 101 For Dummies”. Based on this one reply, you appear to be more informed about global affairs than Trump.
  Transcendentape For 2020???
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Not Enough Day DrinkingMichael Harriot
9/12/18 5:51pm
I’m open for suggestions and alternative theories but what else could be the case?
There is one. Personal enrichment. When a former Comcast lawyer runs the FCC, a former coal lobbyist runs the dept of Interior, and a charter school lobbyist runs the education department a lot of people are making a lot of money by actively making the country worse.
Oh and the guy who would actually print the money is this guy, so I’m assuming only about half of what’s printed would actually make it into circulation and the other half would go directly into his and her personal accounts (after Trump gets his cut):
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  PooJavelinIsSickOfLosingBurnerPasswordsNot Enough Day Drinking
  9/12/18 6:26pm
  the other half would go directly into his and her personal accounts
  His???????
  If he doesn’t hand it all over, Mistress Louise won’t get the nipple clamps out!
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  MajorBurnNot Enough Day Drinking
  9/12/18 6:28pm
  Aw, it’s old “Angel Hair”, she’s probably been telling Steve how she saved all those people in that hotel in Rwanda she worked at.
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668beastblahblahMichael Harriot
9/12/18 5:39pm
Fun fact: Hitler also just printed a bunch of money. post 1945, a loaf of bread in Germany cost like half a million Deutsche Marks.
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  rustynailer668beastblahblah
  9/12/18 5:55pm
  You know who else just printed a bunch of money? Slave owning Confederates. So when you see MAGA hat wearing idiots waving Nazi and Confederacy flags you have to admire their ability to connect dots between the 3 regimes.
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  LegHumper668beastblahblah
  9/12/18 6:37pm
  I believe you’re thinking of Wiemar-era (1918 - 1923) hyperinflation, which preceded Hitler’s rise to power. A few minutes on Google tells me that Hitler’s economic policy was more along the lines of deficit spend and tax the conquered, than devalue the mark.
  Post-war (WW2, that is) Germany is generally considered a miracle of centralized economic planning because the west propped them up and prevented that kind (Wiemar) of economic collapse from happening.
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effdotMichael Harriot
9/13/18 12:19am
The part about the US being able to print money to fulfill its debt is true, as long as the debt was originated in US dollars. The problem is the hyperinflation that would follow if that happened and the disaster of the dollar no longer being the world’s reserve currency.

We have these record low interest rates coupled with zero inflation for years, and the Republicans wasted it on tax cuts and deficit spending. We could have raised taxes, paid down the debt at current rates, then borrowed at the essentially negative interest rate that was resulting from the value of the dollar and US Treasury Bonds. That borrowing could’ve been used to do so much, from bread-and-butter highway work to fixing Flint’s water (and other like projects). It was a window of opportunity to both pay down the Federal Debt AND get a lot of needed infrastructure work done, a once-in-our-lifetime chance to have our cake and eat it too.

Instead, we’re driving inflation, thus erasing that negative interest rate, borrowing heavily anyway, and spending it on tax cuts and other programs. The purpose of which is to restrain the Democrats once they gain power again, to prevent them from ‘spending poorly.’

This sick ideology is so rooted in stupidity, the same kind of stupidity that leads these Republicans to believe that the debt ceiling is like a credit card, instead of a number that represents the bills we have to pay based on the deficit spending those same Republicans are engaging in, under the absolutely lunatic banner of ‘austerity.’

Just. Dummies.
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  JonsLegioneffdot
  9/13/18 1:23pm
  This is an amazingly astute summation. Thank you for helping not make me dumber today!!
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  effdotJonsLegion
  9/13/18 1:48pm
  The part about printing money is the most disingenuous conceit of Republican lamentations about the debt ceiling. Not every country has its sovereign debt originated as their home currency; most (especially if the debt is via the World Bank) originate their debt in U.S. dollars. So, they have to obtain U.S. dollars on the currency exchanges, or via trade, or other methods.
  
  The U.S., as the literal source of U.S. dollars, doesn’t have that constraint. So this conceit about, “We can’t afford to raise the debt ceiling,” is ridiculous at its heart, because our debt is all based in U.S. dollars. I used to think that Republicans who were talking like this were using it as short-hand, as a way to say, “If we do that, we’ll cause hyperinflation.” I think some Republicans did understand that last point, but knew they couldn’t argue that point at the time those debt ceiling fights occurred—simply because our inflation was essentially flat in those times.
  
  But now, I truly believe that a lot of the Tea Party members of the Republican Party don’t understand that point about inflation. At all. Like Zero. They don’t understand that our debt is in our currency, and the implications of that.
  
  They also don’t understand what will happen if we are ever in the position where we borrow, say, Euros or Yuan instead of dollars. Or if other nations are unwilling to buy or be paid in our home currency, and instead will only trade in their home currency. Everyone needs dollars, right now, in the global market.
  
  The Republicans are dangerously close to upsetting that need. And the end result of that wouldn’t be an end to capitalism; it would just move that power away from the United States and to another country. Their stated aims of U.S. hegemony would be hurt, dramatically, by that turn of events. And anyone clamoring for a socialist revolution in the U.S. would also be hurt by that turn, because the net outcome would likely be a very different kind of capitalism here than we have in the present, with even less restraint. Something that would look closer to Russian capitalism, with a few rich oligarchs, a Soviet power structure, and a population with no recourse, with the whole economy dependent on outside trade. The problem with this for the U.S. is that we have on central commodity anymore to trade, other than U.S. dollars. Russia has oil; our main, best product in the world market is U.S. dollars at present.
  
  This is why I’ve concluded that Republicans are dummies.
  
  From my perspective, I’m honestly not sure if it is good for the world that our country has so much power, and so much influence on world markets. I do know that if I was, theoretically, a Republican who believed in U.S. hegemony, if I turned into the kind of person who was like, “America, Heck Yeah!” and wore a MAGA hat, then I’d want a strategy that would ensure American dominance. Destroying our credit rating, doing things to remove the use of the dollar as a reserve currency, and driving inflation don’t help with any of that, and hurt U.S. interests from that perspective.
  
  So, I end up concluding that Republicans are not just dummies, but big, huge dummies.
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Heroine SheikMichael Harriot
9/12/18 5:58pm
Your constant ignoring of the problematic nature of the Camacho administration is the real racism. #MATerryCrewsA
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  Mud's Not Yer Buddy, PalHeroine Sheik
  9/12/18 6:28pm
  President Comacho cared about the problems his citizens were facing and got the smartest man on Earth to help him and he listened.
  The President in Idiocracy is better than the one we have now. Let that sink in and crawl around your brain for a while.
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  C.M. AllenMud's Not Yer Buddy, Pal
  9/12/18 7:25pm
  It’s a horrifying thought, isn’t it? Some of the dumbest people ever portrayed in film were more competent at running a nation than Trump and his staff.
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What'sWhiteSalty&WetAllOverMichael Harriot
9/12/18 5:47pm
“Name a black Ivy League graduate who is as ignorant as Trump about the field in which they work”
Uncle Ben Carson
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  DyingHousePlantWhat'sWhiteSalty&WetAllOver
  9/12/18 6:08pm
  Technically Ben Carson’s starting career was in the field of medicine, where he excelled. He’s only shown his ineptitude in his political ventures. Trump is a failure as a businessman AND a politician.
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PooJavelinIsSickOfLosingBurnerPasswordsMichael Harriot
9/12/18 6:25pm
“…lack of basic understanding” about how the government works and what borrowing would mean.
From a man who claims to have ~~had Daddy buy him~~ a degree in Economics!
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  The Ghost of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ AKA BabyStepsPooJavelinIsSickOfLosingBurnerPasswords
  9/12/18 10:18pm
  I thought he had a degree in business (wharton). While I have my trouble with economists in certain areas but they are geniuses by comparison.
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Mud's Not Yer Buddy, PalMichael Harriot
9/12/18 6:30pm
“We should just go borrow a lot of money, hold it, and then sell it to make money,”
This sounds like something a man who owes money to the Russian mob would say
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