Discussion: Watch Stephen Moore Get Schooled By Erin Burnett With His Own Past Comments

[rsheehan52]

A masters in economics from a school that offers a Ph.D. is typically viewed as the booby prize.

[castor_troy]

@cervantes

Are you sure you’re not a Republican?

I’m pragmatic.

[cervantes]

@jacksonhts

Stephen Moore is a Voodoo Economist with a Master’s Degree. In order not to insult any graduates of the university from which he obtained his MS, I will not judge what tier its Economics Graduate School is. But I suspect it is not an Economics powerhouse.

George Mason.

Need I say more?

[bulldogliberal]

Between Cain and Moore, Cain looks like a Nobel Laureate and Cain is a legitimate jackass. Stephen Moore takes stupidity to levels even Beavis and Butthead could not have contemplated. Simply to get to a zero (0) IQ, Moore would require several intense years in a college curriculum. The Trump Administration is a sick, twisted joke on the planet that we may survive.

[castor_troy]

@randyabraham

But my question was about its function as a backer of currency and a monetary system.

Well, a few thousand years of gold and other precious metals being accepted as stores of value is a pretty good track record.

But due to its limited nature, once economies outgrew the supply, it would have acted as a severe brake on development. The worldwide growth of the past several decades is significantly helped along by detaching us from that supply. Certainly has its own set of risks, but we seem to be living our lives just fine.

[tena]

Well Cain has withdrawn his name. He apparently has a tad more self-awareness than one would think.

[dangoodbar]

Stephen Moore gives Dumb a bad name.

That said, in regard to the Fed, this will not be the first nor the last time hacks are running the Fed.

I remember in 1975 visiting a friend majoring in Economics at the University of Chicago attending a lecture by Milton Friedman. Friedman was arguing that America should get rid of the Fed and just increase the money supply every year by 3%. The basis for Friedman’s argument was the blundering and bumbling that he said was the Fed. He gave examples that had the class laughing but pale in comparison to what happened when Reagan picked a chairman.

Alan Greenspan, Fed chairman for over two decades was, as Harry Reid said, “the biggest hack in all of Washington”. Greenspan took two contrary views on monetary policy, one to tighten money in the face of surplus when Clinton was president to keep the economic boom from reaching far enough down in the economy to be politically beneficial, and a second in the face of huge deficits when Bush was president to create a housing bubble to hide the economic disaster that was Bush Jr. that would blow-up into the great recession. I mean without Greenspan’s housing bubble there would have been a president John Kerry.

The point being this will not be the first time, nor will it be the last, partisan hacks will control the Fed. My own view is that good fiscal policy (Clinton) and bad fiscal policy (W Bush) are more important than Fed policy which is why in spite of the Fed working to undermine Clinton and prop up George W Bush, Clinton was a great economic president and Bush Jr. was the worst president of my lifetime if not American history.

[mg_10011]

Feature. When Nixon took US off gold standard, the ability to run trade deficits and budget deficits was one of the reasons to do so.

[jacksonhts]

Or, that the person could never finish the PhD thesis. My wife’s old boss at a research institute was such a case. She was originally hired as his right hand by the institute director to help free him up to perhaps finish it. One of my favorite Junior High/High School teachers and one of my Junior High/High School classmates and college classmates were never able to finish the dread PhD Thesis. My wife did, and defended her thesis 8 months pregnant with the only child we had.

[emjayay]

“Bush Jr. was the worst president of my lifetime if not American history.” You mean until now, I presume. Although waging the unprovoked Iraq war on the wrong country and based on lies is kind of hard to beat.

[jacksonhts]

“The night is still young” as far as Donald J. Trump’s claim on that title.

[yskov]

@kovie

How do we fix that so it never happens again?

Well, the Constitution addressed this problem by requiring Senate confirmations. So Trump’s end runs around both the letter and the spirit of those laws, his pushing of the envelope “actings” and his extra-legal appointments, his mass firings, his outright outsourcing to private cabals of decision makers (e.g. the VA) - all of those are on the whole a direct and open power grab against the Congressional branch.

And on top of that, as @maxwellsdemon points out, it is critical to address the underlying corruptions and distortions that weaken the democratic balance against autocracy. All those local-ish issues like the shape of state districts and local polling station placements and registration laws, all those small favors for large donors over the interests of the larger population - all of those local quirks and corruptions bubble up and eventually are concentrated in a power grab by the likes of Trump. And then there’s the archaic Electoral College imbalances to seal the deal.

All those small issues and local quirks bubble up and become concentrated as they rise. You can’t just hope to decapitate the problem with some grand national court decision or amendment. The pressure from below will still be there. Meanwhile the media is essentially standing in the middle of a forest and acting surprised every time they see a tree. It’s not entirely their fault; their very purpose is to see those trees and hopefully to describe them in detail. But not pointing out that they are part of a vast and growing forest is more than a little misleading.

/well-mixed metaphors, lol.

[maxwellsdemon]

@emjayay

“Bush Jr. was the worst president of my lifetime if not American history.” You mean until now, I presume. Although waging the unprovoked Iraq war on the wrong country and based on lies is kind of hard to beat.

Hand grenade versus the thousand cuts

[yskov]

He was always going to be the outrage bait here, to be switched to the real pick, less horrible by comparison.

[theod]

He has always been a shameless liar. This is just one more proof point. And it’s why a shameless liar like †Я☭mp pays attention.

[yskov]

Plus, we can be using a monetary system modeled in DnD,

[ottnott]

@mattinpa

One thing, I don’t go strutting around proclaiming my economics expertise, being quite aware I have none. But objective experts in general tend not to push easy answers because they know easy answers tend to have serious drawbacks. It’s like a law of physics or something.

You don’t have to have economics expertise (I know, because I am an expert in not having it) to ask some good questions. Like…how is a basket of commodities better than what the Fed does now, which includes looking at price changes on pretty much everything consumed in the economy, including labor? Like…why peg the value of an enormous number of dollars to a something of much smaller value and therefore easier to manipulate and more sensitive to temporary conditions like weather and labor disputes? Like…do you have some examples of a modern economy doing this successfully? Like…what is the problem this change is supposed to address, and is there evidence it can address it better than do current methods? Like…what is the effect of a peg if the population grows at a different rate than does the supply of commodities?

Like…what if your preferred approach to monetary policy is in direct conflict with your boss’s fiscal policy?

[ottnott]

@cervantes

George Mason.

Need I say more?

Only that George Mason hired Kavanaugh to teach a class this summer at its Antonin Scalia Law School.

[mrcomments]

If we had a gold standard in 2008, the entire global economy would have collapsed. This guy is a non-stop laugh machine.

[rascal_crone]

It’s actually a useful ductile metal - just because humans are into adorning themselves with rocks and alloys and metals shouldn’t blind people to it’s excellence