Will Trump be Re-elected?

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Will Trump be Re-elected?

Trump is more effective than people are willing to admit [ala Scott Adams] and will be re-elected.
24
37%
Hillary will run again in 2020, and thus Trump will beat her again.
3
5%
Trump will cause the GOP to lose one or both houses of congress in the mid-term elections.
6
9%
The Dems in congress will be so insufferable, Trumps wins by a small margin despite them.
15
23%
Trump will choose not to run for re-election, since he never really wanted the job anyway.
7
11%
Trump is a disaster and will lose by a landslide.
5
8%
Trump will not only lose, but will lose to a candidate so far to the left that people will wish he'd stayed.
3
5%
Other, please elaborate.
2
3%
 
Total votes: 65
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by Kbg » Fri May 10, 2019 10:30 am

I think there is so much dishonesty when it comes to pensions. I’ll mention a couple thoughts for my area of work.

The military is a young persons profession by and large. After WW2 the system was revamped to force people out at younger ages based on rank. Heart attacks and strokes were a very common occurrence amongst the professionals during the first year of the war. It should stay that way. Recently the system was changed to be more like the normal world. This was also tried in the early 90s with disastrous retention results.

Locally, do we really want 60 year old line police officers or firefighters?

I don’t profess to know where the exact line is but a system needs to recognize these aren’t lifetime professions in the traditional sense.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by jhogue » Fri May 10, 2019 3:08 pm

My point was simply that many military and first responders retire in their 40s—and most of them probably should. I would also point out that most of this population of retirees go on to develop second careers and really can’t be tagged as hangers-on with “outsized pensions.”

Other professions do not have the same physical demands and those in good health may continue working into their 70s and 80s. Warren Buffett (now age 88) does not draw a pension or Social Security (as far as I can tell) and nobody at the recent Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting called for his resignation or retirement.
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A stock trader asked him, "Groucho, where do you put all your money?" Groucho was said to have replied, "In Treasury bonds", and the trader said, "You can't make much money on those." Groucho said, "You can if you have enough of them!"
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by WiseOne » Sat May 11, 2019 1:15 pm

Military, police, and firefighters absolutely deserve their early pensions. I'm talking about MTA workers (e.g. train drivers/conductors/the guy who sits in the subway elevator and pushes buttons) or equivalent. They get to draw pensions early at a discounted rate once they've done their 20 years of service, but they can pump up their final pension basis by doing a lot of overtime in their last year. Many end up retiring on close to the same salary they earned working full time.

https://nypost.com/2019/04/24/lirr-reti ... s-pension/

However, the poor slob working full time at McDonald's for minimum wage is the one we're discussing here...just saying that I don't think such a person exists in this city, at least not for long. There are too many easier or more lucrative routes to self-sufficiency, including things like qualifying for SSI. That's the thing about a complex system, it's too easy to game it.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by jhogue » Tue May 14, 2019 3:51 pm

WiseOne, your MTA pension freeloader is clearly an outlier who has spent the last 30 years studying up on how to game the pension rules in the one city in the country where monopolistic unions continue to prop up a bizarre system for the benefit of fewer and fewer workers. I suppose this sort of pension scheme will disappear in our lifetimes.

Defined benefit pensions used to be altogether common in the USA. Since then, there has unquestionably been a nation-wide shift toward defined contribution pension schemes. It seems to have worked quite well for Wall Street types looking forward to stashing away their next bonus, but not necessarily so well for the middle and working classes.
“Groucho Marx wrote:
A stock trader asked him, "Groucho, where do you put all your money?" Groucho was said to have replied, "In Treasury bonds", and the trader said, "You can't make much money on those." Groucho said, "You can if you have enough of them!"
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by moda0306 » Tue May 14, 2019 4:48 pm

jhogue wrote:
Tue May 14, 2019 3:51 pm
WiseOne, your MTA pension freeloader is clearly an outlier who has spent the last 30 years studying up on how to game the pension rules in the one city in the country where monopolistic unions continue to prop up a bizarre system for the benefit of fewer and fewer workers. I suppose this sort of pension scheme will disappear in our lifetimes.

Defined benefit pensions used to be altogether common in the USA. Since then, there has unquestionably been a nation-wide shift toward defined contribution pension schemes. It seems to have worked quite well for Wall Street types looking forward to stashing away their next bonus, but not necessarily so well for the middle and working classes.
This brings me to something I've realized since working in business tax... and that's that Employer-based contributions are woefully under-used, but mostly because I don't think workers value them that much. The maximum for a SEP or 401k Profit Sharing is 25% of an employee's wage income. That means 20% of an employees compensation can be not only free from their income taxable income, but also free from BOTH sides of FICA/Medicare, which amounts to 7.65% for each party (employer/employee), or 15.3% total.

The former can be accomplished through employee contributions (lowered income tax), but not the latter. That means that the "penalty" between employer and employee for employees not valuing (and/or employers not providing) an employer contribution to retirement, is resulting in at least 15.3% of missed opportunity to help both parties save tax money.

Further, if you go with a 401k option, but very richly fund the Profit-Sharing portion, you can accomplish all that, but also have a vesting schedule too, which helps "vest" the employee with the future of the company to a certain degree that's not very possible in other ways.

I think these are drastically underused tools. It's a shame we live in a society where both employers and employees are too short-sighted to use/value these things. Even if we're seeing stagnant real wages, and if we have to accept that as a part of reality, it still makes sense to shift contributions from employee to employer.

Of course, municipalities should structure their damn pension so somebody can't game it in the final years. Hard to blame anyone for gaming a Pension like that. Don't even give them the option.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by Kriegsspiel » Tue May 14, 2019 11:03 pm

moda0306 wrote:
Tue May 14, 2019 4:48 pm
This brings me to something I've realized since working in business tax... and that's that Employer-based contributions are woefully under-used, but mostly because I don't think workers value them that much. The maximum for a SEP or 401k Profit Sharing is 25% of an employee's wage income. That means 20% of an employees compensation can be not only free from their income taxable income, but also free from BOTH sides of FICA/Medicare, which amounts to 7.65% for each party (employer/employee), or 15.3% total.

The former can be accomplished through employee contributions (lowered income tax), but not the latter. That means that the "penalty" between employer and employee for employees not valuing (and/or employers not providing) an employer contribution to retirement, is resulting in at least 15.3% of missed opportunity to help both parties save tax money.
YUP. When I was operating as an LLC, I contributed the maximum legal amount to my individual 401k. It was awesome.
Further, if you go with a 401k option, but very richly fund the Profit-Sharing portion, you can accomplish all that, but also have a vesting schedule too, which helps "vest" the employee with the future of the company to a certain degree that's not very possible in other ways.

I think these are drastically underused tools. It's a shame we live in a society where both employers and employees are too short-sighted to use/value these things. Even if we're seeing stagnant real wages, and if we have to accept that as a part of reality, it still makes sense to shift contributions from employee to employer.
What do you mean by the bolded.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by moda0306 » Wed May 15, 2019 9:14 am

Kriegsspiel wrote:
Tue May 14, 2019 11:03 pm
moda0306 wrote:
Tue May 14, 2019 4:48 pm
This brings me to something I've realized since working in business tax... and that's that Employer-based contributions are woefully under-used, but mostly because I don't think workers value them that much. The maximum for a SEP or 401k Profit Sharing is 25% of an employee's wage income. That means 20% of an employees compensation can be not only free from their income taxable income, but also free from BOTH sides of FICA/Medicare, which amounts to 7.65% for each party (employer/employee), or 15.3% total.

The former can be accomplished through employee contributions (lowered income tax), but not the latter. That means that the "penalty" between employer and employee for employees not valuing (and/or employers not providing) an employer contribution to retirement, is resulting in at least 15.3% of missed opportunity to help both parties save tax money.
YUP. When I was operating as an LLC, I contributed the maximum legal amount to my individual 401k. It was awesome.
Further, if you go with a 401k option, but very richly fund the Profit-Sharing portion, you can accomplish all that, but also have a vesting schedule too, which helps "vest" the employee with the future of the company to a certain degree that's not very possible in other ways.

I think these are drastically underused tools. It's a shame we live in a society where both employers and employees are too short-sighted to use/value these things. Even if we're seeing stagnant real wages, and if we have to accept that as a part of reality, it still makes sense to shift contributions from employee to employer.
What do you mean by the bolded.
My bad for the lack of clarity on the bolded.

I tend to assume that the general consensus around the abandonment of Employer-based retirement contributions has been the stagnation of real wages income, and that being an easier place for employers to abandon expense without actually lowering an employee's paycheck. My point was that even IF we have to suffer that stagnation, it'd still be better to do more employer contributions if the employee was going to save the money anyway.

Obviously eventually this will drag against their budget, and even more obviously, as pug mentions, people just don't value dollars they don't see, even if taxed higher. Especially depending on the type of employee you're hiring.

That said, I see it even on middle-high incomes where one would think there's more appreciation for savings, tax strategy, long-term employment, etc. However the other thing I see is a complete lack of motivation by many (not all) employers to understand much less communicate the benefits to their employees. I'm sure this is a bit of a chicken/egg thing, and I'll even grant that more of the problem probably lies in the employees than the employers.

So yeah pug I totally understand what you're saying. You can only try so much. It's more of me wanting to shake some wisdom/foresight into employees (and some employers) to appreciate the more nuanced elements of how a compensation package can be structured.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by jhogue » Wed May 15, 2019 10:06 am

I think moda and MangoMan are both right. In some cases employers either don’t set up pension plans for their employees or perhaps don’t explain their advantages very clearly. On the other hand, many employees don’t seem to rationally value each component. It is easy enough to see on paper that:

Net Compensation = Salary + Benefits + Profit Sharing - Taxes

Nevertheless, I have seen multiple instances where workers underutilized or just plain refused to sign up for tax deferred compensation. They preferred cash now to more money and less taxes later. It is even true among college professors-- who one would think are well-educated as a group and capable of calculating their net worth and the net present value of future benefits.

Somewhere in there I think there is a self-selected dividing line between future haves and have nots. Also an explanation for general dissatisfaction with how 401k etc. plans have worked out in actual practice. Many-- particularly those on this forum-- have figured it out. I’ll bet that virtually all of us know people who abjectly insist on leaving money on the table.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by moda0306 » Wed May 15, 2019 1:12 pm

I tried to tell a client (employer) to look at it this way with her profit sharing...

She can either spend $110 to get her employee about $60 of cash (even if the did a pre-tax 401k they'd still only get $92.35). Or she can spend $100, and put $100 into an account that the employee will SEE, but it only be hers to take with her at a slow-ish vesting rate, the remainder of which she knows she'd be leaving behind if she left the company.

Even $3k-$5k could be really tough to kiss goodbye to because you wanted to take another job.

Even if the employee THINKS they want the $60 more, which I think if properly explained many would take the retirement, I think one could make the argument that it's the profit sharing they'll truly regret losing and will motivate them to be more "invested" in the future of the company, even if it's only a subconscious realization. Of course I bring this up as completely debatable as behavioral economics never ceases to prove me wrong. :)

If you have people you want to retain, Profit Sharing plans can be a great way to save on taxes, help them save on taxes, and give them a "poor-man's" version of golden handcuffs.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by jhogue » Wed May 15, 2019 6:25 pm

moda,
When an employee leaves before the end of the vesting period, what happens to the funds that they forfeit? Does it go to the other employees?
“Groucho Marx wrote:
A stock trader asked him, "Groucho, where do you put all your money?" Groucho was said to have replied, "In Treasury bonds", and the trader said, "You can't make much money on those." Groucho said, "You can if you have enough of them!"
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by Kriegsspiel » Wed May 15, 2019 10:20 pm

Man, I still don't get what you guys are saying. Is it basically to allocate your employees dividends, like shareholders?

I do know that you can shield a lot of income from taxes with the currently available programs: HSAs, IRAs, and 401ks. $28,000 between them, even more if you run your own LLC.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by Kriegsspiel » Thu May 16, 2019 8:10 am

Ok I have it now. It then leads to a couple questions...

You're saying it's a better program than 401ks because it avoids payroll taxes. Basically throwing out SS and Medicaid? What about for people who were in the workforce paying payroll taxes and don't have a profit sharing account; without a new bottom on the pyramid the SS fund is going to dry up. You don't think the federal government would throw a wrench in the works?

Second, why would it be easier to get an employee to participate in profit sharing vs. the current practice (AFAIK) of opting out, as opposed to opting in, to a 401k? It seems like it would be the same self-selectors, as jhogue put it, who would do either one after they figured out the advantages and disadvantages of profit sharing and/or 401ks.

EDIT: or maybe so few people will participate in payroll tax-free profit sharing that the effect on SS is negligible, and the people smart enough to take advantage of the tax shield just win really hard.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by Kriegsspiel » Fri May 17, 2019 10:43 am

Kriegsspiel wrote:
Thu May 09, 2019 4:18 pm
Something (somewhat related) that gets me is how many people refuse to leave high COL locations when they aren't earning the high incomes that would justify it. Like, if you are working in one of those bad jobs, especially because you've reached your Peter Principle ceiling, you will vastly improve your life by going and doing it in a low COL location. I'm thinking people like warehouse workers, retail workers, fast food, those kinds of things. You could live a fairly middle class lifestyle working at a fast food joint for 30 hours a week in a large portion of the country.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by moda0306 » Fri May 17, 2019 11:31 am

Kriegsspiel wrote:
Fri May 17, 2019 10:43 am
Kriegsspiel wrote:
Thu May 09, 2019 4:18 pm
Something (somewhat related) that gets me is how many people refuse to leave high COL locations when they aren't earning the high incomes that would justify it. Like, if you are working in one of those bad jobs, especially because you've reached your Peter Principle ceiling, you will vastly improve your life by going and doing it in a low COL location. I'm thinking people like warehouse workers, retail workers, fast food, those kinds of things. You could live a fairly middle class lifestyle working at a fast food joint for 30 hours a week in a large portion of the country.
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This type of stuff is obviously obscene compared to it's big-city counterpart in 1960 or so.

I'd be curious to know how the more small-town and rural counterpart compares to its 1960 doppleganger in-terms of cost vs median income.

Yeah, ipads & air conditioning are great and all, but the big ones that people need to afford to rise above and have a hope of financial security are their rent, food and transportation costs. If those three are over-taking real wages at the lower quintiles, then we have a problem.

Not to say that personal responsibility couldn't help get folks out of these messes, but advocating that on a macro-scale is essentially asking people to abandon their social and family networks. Folks didn't have to do this in 1960 to afford the basics. Further, one of the most effective ways to help keep living costs down is a solid family and social network. As atomized units moving into a town we don't know, we've lost a good chunk of the economic foundation that we were hoping to reclaim in the first place. Further, on less of a financial and more social/phychological basis, I tend to think beyond a certain percentage of the population who generally dislike their home town or want a different, more independent life experience, expecting mass, scattered movement to be the solution to wage stagnation seems simultaneously mostly counter-productive as well as an extremely cryptic way to solve the "stagnant real wages" problem.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by Kriegsspiel » Fri May 17, 2019 10:23 pm

moda0306 wrote:
Fri May 17, 2019 11:31 am
This type of stuff is obviously obscene compared to it's big-city counterpart in 1960 or so.
Yea that's what I think too. Seeing people talk about how CHEAP places were back then, California especially, makes me feel... not nostalgic, but something like that.
I'd be curious to know how the more small-town and rural counterpart compares to its 1960 doppleganger in-terms of cost vs median income.
It would be region-dependant. There are tons of places throughout the Midwest and South where you can buy a house on a McDonald's salary, like I was saying before. But a small town in California? No, the comparison is pure silliness.
Yeah, ipads & air conditioning are great and all, but the big ones that people need to afford to rise above and have a hope of financial security are their rent, food and transportation costs. If those three are over-taking real wages at the lower quintiles, then we have a problem.
Food seems fairly similar across the country. Transportation seems dependent on personal choices; not just whether you decide to buy a small 4 cylinder or a luxury SUV, but whether you choose to live somewhere you don't need to spend a lot on gas, tolls, or whatever.
Not to say that personal responsibility couldn't help get folks out of these messes, but advocating that on a macro-scale is essentially asking people to abandon their social and family networks. Folks didn't have to do this in 1960 to afford the basics. Further, one of the most effective ways to help keep living costs down is a solid family and social network. As atomized units moving into a town we don't know, we've lost a good chunk of the economic foundation that we were hoping to reclaim in the first place. Further, on less of a financial and more social/phychological basis, I tend to think beyond a certain percentage of the population who generally dislike their home town or want a different, more independent life experience, expecting mass, scattered movement to be the solution to wage stagnation seems simultaneously mostly counter-productive as well as an extremely cryptic way to solve the "stagnant real wages" problem.
Housing is the big one and really reflects the supply and demand law. If people insist on fighting the law of supply and demand (say, by all wanting to live on the California coast), I don't know that there's a solution to that. I know I rag on California a lot. I know people there want to live near their families who WERE fortunate enough to have been born back when it was affordable to live there. But if they're competing for housing against other people who make more money than they do, and the other people can pay more for the housing... what's there to do? I think it's the difference between living in a country that hasn't been fully settled, and a full world, as Herman Daly might say.

I did not expect moda and Tucker Carlson to have so much in common.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by jhogue » Sat May 18, 2019 1:52 pm

See “The Myth of Wage Stagnation” in the op-ed page of today’s Wall Street Journal.

The authors” argument is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not accurately account for the massive substitution effect stemming from the near-universal adoption of innovations like cell phones.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by dualstow » Sun May 19, 2019 6:41 am

jhogue wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 1:52 pm
See “The Myth of Wage Stagnation” in the op-ed page of today’s Wall Street Journal.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-o ... 1558126174
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by WiseOne » Sun May 19, 2019 11:52 am

Thanks dualstow! One of these days I'll have to cave and subscribe to WSJ. They publish a lot of good stuff.

I detect an undercurrent in the article to propose indexing Social Security and other pensions by chained CPI in order to gradually cut benefits going forward.

Certainly we all agree that technological innovations have improved our lives tremendously in the last half century. You could argue, though, that along with the improvements cited has come a big increase in mandatory spending, which ends up feeling like you're increasingly squeezed for cash. For example, you can't buy a car with the limited accouterments that we were accustomed to in the 1970s. Same is true of a house in most situations. And, with the increase in proportion of college graduates, you really have to play the game if you want a career beyond being a cashier or burger flipper. It's also increasingly difficult to navigate modern society without a smartphone. Then there's medical, dental, and vision care expenses, eating up a lot of those 30% of employer benefits before you even start getting to the after tax costs.

So it's a case of not being able to put the genie back in the bottle. You can theoretically maintain your standard of living on reduced wages wrt inflation, but that's a lot easier to do in theory than in practice.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by dualstow » Sun May 19, 2019 2:59 pm

My pleasure, Soph.
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Good read. As a pedestrian, I liked the previous entry, too: “Obstacle Course.”
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by jhogue » Mon May 20, 2019 7:17 am

No doubt former US senator Phil Gramm has a partisan axe to grind, but he has some impressive company. I seem to recall that Alan Greenspan also favored a re-calibration of the BLS indices a number of years ago. If I am not mistaken, he suggested that the current indices overstated inflation and would cause a rise in entitlement expenditures in the federal budget. Prophetic, isn't it?

I still find it bizarre that politicians can cry that there has been nothing but wage stagnation for the past 50 years and yet real median net worth in this country has increased by 172% in the same time period. How are those simultaneous trends even possible?
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A stock trader asked him, "Groucho, where do you put all your money?" Groucho was said to have replied, "In Treasury bonds", and the trader said, "You can't make much money on those." Groucho said, "You can if you have enough of them!"
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by WiseOne » Mon May 20, 2019 8:47 am

Trump's aggressive posture towards Chinese telecomm firms like Huawei is having a lot of repercussions. These are widely reported but when I started hunting for the administration's rationale for instituting the blacklist, there was very little info to be found. Just a few comments about Trump being unpredictable.

Except this 2012 NYT article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/us/u ... hreat.html
In the latest development to highlight the sensitive terrain that the United States and China are navigating on economic issues, a House committee issued a blistering bipartisan report on Monday that accused two of China’s largest telecommunications companies of being arms of the government that had stolen intellectual property from American companies and could potentially spy on Americans.

The House Intelligence Committee said that after a yearlong investigation it had come to the conclusion that the Chinese businesses, Huawei Technologies and ZTE Inc., were a national security threat because of their attempts to extract sensitive information from American companies and their loyalties to the Chinese government.
There was never any action following this report. So is the blacklist perhaps a reasonable (though ham-handed, as per usual) action after all? I guess it depends on how bad the effect on US tech companies is in the long run, compared to the activities outlined in the report (which it appears, makes Russia's hacking of the DNC server look like small potatoes in comparison).
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by pmward » Mon May 20, 2019 12:33 pm

WiseOne wrote:
Mon May 20, 2019 8:47 am
Trump's aggressive posture towards Chinese telecomm firms like Huawei is having a lot of repercussions. These are widely reported but when I started hunting for the administration's rationale for instituting the blacklist, there was very little info to be found. Just a few comments about Trump being unpredictable.

Except this 2012 NYT article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/us/u ... hreat.html
In the latest development to highlight the sensitive terrain that the United States and China are navigating on economic issues, a House committee issued a blistering bipartisan report on Monday that accused two of China’s largest telecommunications companies of being arms of the government that had stolen intellectual property from American companies and could potentially spy on Americans.

The House Intelligence Committee said that after a yearlong investigation it had come to the conclusion that the Chinese businesses, Huawei Technologies and ZTE Inc., were a national security threat because of their attempts to extract sensitive information from American companies and their loyalties to the Chinese government.
There was never any action following this report. So is the blacklist perhaps a reasonable (though ham-handed, as per usual) action after all? I guess it depends on how bad the effect on US tech companies is in the long run, compared to the activities outlined in the report (which it appears, makes Russia's hacking of the DNC server look like small potatoes in comparison).
I think the only part of the "trade war" that makes sense to me is this, there is legit theft of IP and intelligence going on that is a threat to national security. I think what we have brewing is not a trade war, but a Cold War between China and the U.S. that has been building for many years. Instead of being in the form of a nuclear arms race like we had with the Soviet Cold War we instead have a Cold War through cyber, technology, and now trade/economic warfare. Both sides also seem to be willing to inflict pain on themselves in order to harm the other.

As Ray Dalio says, anytime you have two countries that are close enough to being the top power it can't help but lead to warfare of some kind or another as a test of strength; it's innate human nature that the current leader feels threatened by the upcoming power, and the upcoming power wants to try to assert itself at the top of the pack by displacing the current leader.
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jhogue
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by jhogue » Mon May 20, 2019 2:51 pm

1. War between great powers is not inevitable. The USA surpassed the UK in GNP in the 1880s, becoming the world's leading economic power, but the two have never fought a war against one another since then. Since then, the USA/UK relationship has been characterized by cooperation rather than conflict.

2. I detest China's present party-led corrupt police state, but Chinese officials do not see themselves as trying to displace the USA as global hegemon. Rather, they see themselves as trying to secure their rightful place in their region and the world. They are also mindful that China's weakness in the early 20th century paved the way for Imperial Japan's murderous occupation of China from 1937-1945. Hard to argue with that.
“Groucho Marx wrote:
A stock trader asked him, "Groucho, where do you put all your money?" Groucho was said to have replied, "In Treasury bonds", and the trader said, "You can't make much money on those." Groucho said, "You can if you have enough of them!"
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by pmward » Mon May 20, 2019 3:42 pm

jhogue wrote:
Mon May 20, 2019 2:51 pm
1. War between great powers is not inevitable. The USA surpassed the UK in GNP in the 1880s, becoming the world's leading economic power, but the two have never fought a war against one another since then. Since then, the USA/UK relationship has been characterized by cooperation rather than conflict.
While the UK and US have not directly fought in the modern era, the U.S. being key in winning WWI and WWII for them kind of displaced them by default, especially with Bretton Woods agreement. Up until Bretton Woods the U.K. had hegemony/reserve currency status, so we did not surpass them in the 1880s. In Dalio's theory once a country asserts itself at the top of the food chain by winning a big war other countries back off and cede power for a time. However, what caused a lot of the turmoil of WWI and WWII? It was countries in Europe and Asia having this fight over power, which also plays right into Dalio's theories.
jhogue wrote:
Mon May 20, 2019 2:51 pm
Chinese officials do not see themselves as trying to displace the USA as global hegemon. Rather, they see themselves as trying to secure their rightful place in their region and the world.
I wouldn't be so sure about this. Case in point "Made in China 2025". Also see how they are directly trying to challenge the U.S.'s hegemony by having an oil contract denoted in RMB. They are so far the first and only country to challenge the petrodollar outright. They have also been a huge buyer of gold over the last 10 years. You better believe they are trying to position themselves as the next world reserve currency, especially since all foreign countries have been less than thrilled with the U.S. dollar ever since the GFC (and the current run the USD has been on the last few years has not been helping us out any in this regard).

China is not playing to compete, they are playing to win. China has the ability to be patient and play the long game; it's their style. So they just keep taking the steps to be in a position to capitalize on any future weakness we show. They are also banking on the fact that Trumps time is limited, even if he gets a second term. They are more than willing to wait out a different president to negotiate with. The Trump administration is the only one on borrowed time. Our administration time limits are the reason we've always gotten a raw trade deal from China in the past, and why we will have to accept a raw deal from them again in the future.
Last edited by pmward on Mon May 20, 2019 5:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Will Trump be Re-elected?

Post by D1984 » Mon May 20, 2019 4:37 pm

jhogue wrote:
Mon May 20, 2019 7:17 am
No doubt former US senator Phil Gramm has a partisan axe to grind, but he has some impressive company. I seem to recall that Alan Greenspan also favored a re-calibration of the BLS indices a number of years ago. If I am not mistaken, he suggested that the current indices overstated inflation and would cause a rise in entitlement expenditures in the federal budget. Prophetic, isn't it?

I still find it bizarre that politicians can cry that there has been nothing but wage stagnation for the past 50 years and yet real median net worth in this country has increased by 172% in the same time period. How are those simultaneous trends even possible?
Where are you getting your data for median net worth? The latest Survey Of Consumer Finances (the Fed does them every three years) from 2017 (for 2016) shows median family net worth at $97,300 ; see https://www.federalreserve.gov/publicat ... /scf17.pdf

The survey above does show that median net worth did increase around 16.3% from 2013 to 2016 but stayed flat or even dropped a bit from 2010 to 2013. For data from 1988 to 2010 see http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/wow%E2%80 ... -the-hole/ and notice that the Great Recession chopped off some two decades' worth of net worth gains.

Since the above data start around 1988 or 1989 and go to 2010 I did try to find some pre-1988 data; if you go to https://www2.census.gov/library/publica ... p70-22.pdf it shows a median household net worth of $35,752 in 1988 (in 1988 dollars) and $37,012 in 1984 (in 1988 dollars). If you go to the Minneapolis Fed's website and see what $37,012 in 1988 dollars equals in 2016 dollars (2016 dollars to try and compare accurately with the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances data from above) then you get $75,100 in 2016 dollars; that's only an increase of 29.56% and a far cry from 172%. Unless there was some huge boom in median net worth from 1973 to 1984 (doubtful as that was the time of two big recessions--1973-75 and 1980-82--and double-digit inflation and stagflation) I don't see how median net worth could've increased that much.
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