Potpourri
==> In Noah Smith’s absence, he has a claque of lesser men (and women) blogging at his site. This guy, Peter Dorman, not only failed to acknowledge The Great Debt Debate of 2012 in his initial post, but he dismissed Nick Rowe’s futile attempts to educate him in the comments. (Oh, notice Gene Callahan et al.: This guy was certainly not taking the line that “yes the present generation can impoverish our grandkids in the OLG way using debt, but that has nothing to do with the debt per se.” Nope, he was shaking his head at the stupidity of anybody who thought there was any sense in which people alive today could live at the expense of people not yet born.)
==> On the other hand–and to Noah’s credit–Josiah Neeley is a modern day Jeremiah, preaching Niall Ferguson to the children of Keynes. Really, Neeley couldn’t have tried to defuse the situation any better than he did; he was funny and even self-deprecating, admitting he had been wrong on the euro just as Krugman had been. You can see what his humility and candor got him in the comments.
==> Peter Klein draws our attention to Bruce Bartlett’s even-handed discussion of those advocating a Treasury default. After reading this, I’m so glad I never posted my idea for a compromise in which the federal government only honors 3/5 of its bonds.
==> This fun Netflix customer service experience (sic) happened to my friend. He posted it on Facebook, ha ha that’s great Norman, and then next thing you know it’s on HuffPo.
==> This stuff about the Renewable Fuel Standard is even more absurd than you might expect from the feds:
The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) and the American Petroleum Institute (API) have filed lawsuits with the D.C. Circuit Court challenging EPA’s unrealistic 2013 cellulosic biofuel requirement under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS)—requirements that were released nine months late.
This year’s cellulosic mandate requires refiners to blend 6 million gallons into the nation’s fuel supply, but cellulosic ethanol remains essentially nonexistent. The actual amount of cellulosic ethanol available to refiners so far this year is closer to 142,000 gallons, far from the EPA’s 6 million gallon mandate. Despite the disparity between the mandate and reality, refiners are forced to pay fines for not meeting the requirements.
Bob, I was shocked to see the post by Peter Dorman. This was only one of the bigger debates of 2012.
I was shocked too, David, but then I was super duper shocked when he thought one would have to endorse every element of Nick’s model in order for it to have any relevance to the issue.
For simplicity’s sake, it seems to me that the statist argument about cost-free government debt is the same argument the MMTers make about spending almost unlimited barrels of funny money into existence: The policy itself creates the wealth and investments that pay for the policy. And without the policy, there would be no wealth or investment and we’d all shrivel up and die.
Just re-read Bob’s old post on the Great Debt Debate. Confirms my initial impression; it was a great post.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised or shocked. Not everyone reads everything in economics blogs. And most of us can’t change our minds as quickly and thoroughly as Bob did then.
But I’m still puzzled: what percentage of macroeconomists hold similar views to what Peter Dorman says there?
Nick Rowe wrote:
Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised or shocked. Not everyone reads everything in economics blogs.
And also, our posts weren’t exactly crystal clear, Nick. Remember, I studied your initial post on it because I was getting ready to smack you over the fence. It was only after I realized my first three attempts didn’t work, when I started to consider the possibility that you were right.
And even my beautiful diagrams were embedded in a lot of text, so I can see why someone wouldn’t bother wading through all of that.
I think Dorman’s post is correct. I’ve understood the OLG models just fine, but they don’t mean Dorman is wrong.
Oh, and Dorman absolutely does not claim what you say he does in your last line. This is Dorman: “my bottom line is that we borrow (disinvest) from the future when we leave it a combined per capita capital stock (produced, natural, human, social) less than we have inherited ourselves, and we invest in the future if we leave it a larger combined per capita capital stock.”
That is absolutely right. The only significance of the OLG models is they are a means to lower the future’s capital stock.
Gene Callahan wrote:
That is absolutely right. The only significance of the OLG models is they are a means to lower the future’s capital stock.
Nick Rowe, you be the one to tell Gene that we purposely picked OLG models that had no capital, to avoid precisely this confusion. Gene won’t ever talk to me again if I try to tell him he apparently learned absolutely nothing from all of that debate.
Oh look honey, it’s a participant in the OLG discussion claiming that they meant a now-obvious point “all along”.
That’s nice, dear.
Okay, that was unjustified, please ignore.
Gene: as Bob says, we deliberately assumed a world with no capital (and no foreigners and no distorting taxes) to show that there could be a burden on future generations despite no reduction in the future capital stock (and no increased obligations to foreigners and no increased tax distortions
And showed no effect that could not, as Krugman had claimed, be relicated with transfers. Further you used a criterion for “the future” that did not correspond to either any time or time period in the future. Using your definitions I showed how debt could enrich those futures.
Incentives Ken B, Incentives are key to understand why it’s done with IOUs and not unconditional transfers.
😉
That concedes the point skylien. Thank you.
…
I concede no more than I already have. I, from the start, conceded that technically you could do it with unconditional transfers, however that is just not going to happen.
For the same reason it is technically possible that I just go to work without getting paid, and that I go to the shops take same stuff but without paying. However to assume money therefore is not doing anything because we can mirror it technically with direct transfers without money would be kinda wrong conclusion…
I feel weird that you don’t get this obvious point, and that I have to repeat it, while you never bring any counterargument, except suddenly declaring “I win”…
Skylien: Krugman made a claim, seconded by Landsburg. That claim was that the debt effects could be replicated by transfers — the “Santorum tax”. Bob and Nick Rowe said Krugman was wrong. You have conceded Krugman was right.
No-one argued that a Santorum tax was likely or desirable.
Ken B. wrote:
Krugman made a claim, seconded by Landsburg. That claim was that the debt effects could be replicated by transfers — the “Santorum tax”. Bob and Nick Rowe said Krugman was wrong.
I don’t have time to get into this now, but for the record, I utterly reject Ken B.’s version of history here. I’m not saying he’s lying–I understand why he thinks this what happened–but I utterly reject this. To this day, I have seen no evidence that Krugman understands the OLG subtleties on this. I think he is viewing “future generations” as equivalent to “total production in a future year.”
Robert P Murphy wrote of Krugman’s Santorum tax column:
“As the above quotations clearly indicate, Krugman still thinks this is merely a distributional issue such that (say) some people alive in 2080 can be made poorer, but others must necessarily be made richer, by the level of interest payments that the government makes in 2080;…
The following simple counterexample shows that each of these points is wrong …”
I believe that’s a clear statement Krugman’s assertion is wrong.
I believe that’s a clear statement Krugman’s assertion is wrong.
Right, because Krugman *was* wrong. He wasn’t seeing how people today could live it up at the expense of people in 2080. Krugman was thinking no matter what we do today–absent investment issues–the people in 2080 can just stick it to each other, and so therefore we can’t possibly live at their expense. That is wrong, in the way the OLG models indicate.
OK I don’t know what got into me, I really have to walk away.
Ken B,
Krugman made the initial claim that “deficits don’t matter because we owe it to ourselves” and that the layperson has it wrong to assume that those can burden future generations in general with the exception of the crowding out mechanism.
First Nick and then Bob showed that is not true. Gene and you and if you say so also Landsburgh countered that deficits don’t matter because you can mirror it technically! with unconditional transfers. However as I repeatedly stated and also Bob below states yes you can mirror it, but debts matter because of incentives (not because of the crowding out mechanism!).
At no point have I or Bob or Nick conceded Krugman’s point that deficits don’t matter because we owe it to ourselves or because you can mirror it with unconditional transfers. I don’t see where you get this from. Being able to mirror it technically with unconditional transfers is completely beside the point.
Here is Bob making the exact same point:
“Right, it’s fundamentally about taxing and spending. But, it’s politically easier to spend more than you tax in a given period, hence the temptation to use deficit finance.”
skylien, read Bob’s comment just above and note “absent investment issues”. No-one has dismissed these as irrelevant, but they are not and never have been the point at issues. The whole debate is about other non investment issues. SO it’s no use you saying “but what about investment issues??”
It’s not just me who says Landsburg; it’s Landsburg http://kenblogic.blogspot.com/2012/11/writing-landsburg.html
Ken B,
Uhm, I think we talk past each other…
Yes, ‘investment issues’ (crowding out mechanism as mentioned by me above also) were never part of the debate. Krugman excluded them, Nick and Bob explicitly excluded them as well. Their counter example was purpose build to switch that effect off.
And I am also NOT saying “what about investment issues”…
Please read my comments again.
Incentives are not only important for investments…
Skylien, I recommend you walk away right now and spend time with your grandkids.
skylien: and their purported counter example failed to do that. Several of us have explained why; I did so in my blog posts linked on this page.
Frankly this is getting dull. If you or Bob can point out an error in my now year old numbers do so. But even in Bob’s example pick any row you want to stand for 2080 and count the apples. Bob’s example “works” by defining a future as something that does not correspond to either any future point in time or period of time when you look at the whole island.
Ken B:
Once again Ken B, the onus is on you to show how Bob’s model is inherently wrong, not for him to show you how your very different model is wrong.
It’s been a year that you have continued to fail to understand the difference between a model that is claimed as possible, and a model that is claimed as historically necessary.
I did that Major_Freedom, in three long posts on my blog linked here. And in none of your many many many repeats of the comment above — not a single one — have you cited any error in any of them.
I’m just waiting for the day where the EPA just goes ahead and mandates that global temperatures stop rising
Bob, did you see my contribution to that debate last year? http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/10/debt-and-burden-on-future-generations.html
I can’t remember. I only remember Voltron references. I’ll check it out.
It’s fairly dense, but I think we got at all the important issues.
I tried to understand Noah’s post last year, but I failed. That may be my fault.
I think what Noah is saying (but I’m not at all sure about this) is that if the government makes a debt-financed transfer to the current generation, but pays off that debt by increasing taxes on the same current generation before they all die, then there is no burden on future generations.
Is that what you were saying Noah?
OK Noah I just read your post, which seemed fine, but then the first comment a guy said to you:
If I’m skimming (lol) your post correctly, the gist is that the answer depends on present allocation of spending, with the implication being that greater net investment now in relation to entitlement spending could lead to future growth?
And you agreed with him.
So, like Nick and I said to Gene Callahan in these comments, no, that’s NOT what is going on in the OLG models. By construction, they don’t have physical saving or investment; there are no physical capital goods; it’s a pure endowment economy.
So it’s true, in the real world, one mechanism of how a government deficit today can impoverish our grandkids, is that gov’t spending could crowd out private investment, meaning our grandkids have fewer tractors. Dean Baker and Paul Krugman conceded that.
But Nick (following on Buchanan) brought up an entirely different element in all of this, something that Krugman and Dorman are still overlooking (I believe). To isolate this effect, Nick purposely didn’t have physical saving in his model. The reason I’m so confident they are missing it, is that I used to think exactly like they did on it, until Nick’s counterexample made me change my mind.
Sorry I “failed” to follow this blog. I noticed that Baker and Krugman disappear once Murphy gets his blinding insight about OLG and borrowing from the future. That’s one way to win a debate, isn’t it?
Just a thought experiment: suppose we live in a world in which people start off relatively poor and then accumulate assets as they grow older — maybe they have a thirst for wealth separate from their thirst for consumption. Maybe they are liquidity constrained and face rising age-wage profiles. (I am being outlandish, of course, but bear with me.) Thus those who purchase bonds are on average older than the population as a whole. Now rework your model.
Mr. Dorman,
(1) The “lesser” thing is obviously a joke; Noah is one of the few econo-bloggers who is as much of a wise*ss as me.
(2) Nick got Dean Baker to grudgingly concede the point and to amend his argument. I didn’t mean anyone who’s anyone should have read my blog, I was referring to the fact that this was indeed a humongous blogosphere eruption. Note David Beckworth’s shock in the first comment.
(3) You really are missing something crucial here, but your hostility and sarcasm are preventing you from seeing it. You don’t have to turn into a proponent of fiscal austerity; there’s nothing ideological on the line. But the argument you made in your post is wrong. Nick’s simple OLG model shows why it’s wrong. That’s how a counterexample works; you don’t have to think the world “looks like” the counterexample in all details.
1. (the lesser) is a joke too. I hope you got a chuckle.
2. There are a lot of econ blogosphere eruptions; I miss many of them. If it doesn’t show up on Economist’s View I’m likely to pass on by, and even if it’s there it may be a day when I think I should be doing what I get paid to do rather than cruising the blogs.
3. My objection is not ideological; I’ve posted some nice words about Hayek in the past, for instance. I think the OLG framework adds nothing to the analysis, and I’m quite serious when I say that you will not get “borrowing from the future” in an OLG if you don’t have systematic borrowing from younger people within each time period. (Nick admits as much in his time travel analogy.) If you think I’m wrong, write the model and show me.
Observation #1: There is nothing specific to the *government* issuing debt in Nick’s model. Start with individuals in cohort A each borrowing from one another and consuming their 100 apples. This is worth thinking about.
Observation #2: Compound interest magnifying claims over time does indeed lead to absurd results in an economy that does not grow (nominally) at a rate sufficient to generate the required means of payment. (A famous example is H. G. Wells’ When the Sleeper Wakes.) The result will surely be default. How does default alter the directionality of the borrowing? (It has no effect on directionality unless there is systematic bias within cohorts with respect to net credit position.)
To sum up, my argument is that credit relations establish borrowing on the part of the group of net borrowers from the group of net creditors. Nick says, suppose in each generation the first group is older and the second is younger. Then, yes, there is a compounding age bias, just as there would be a compounding class bias if creditors were wealthier and became even wealthier as they lent further to roll over existing debt. It’s not about the OLG framework but the assumptions you feed into it.
Observation #1: There is nothing specific to the *government* issuing debt in Nick’s model. Start with individuals in cohort A each borrowing from one another and consuming their 100 apples. This is worth thinking about.
Yes, there is something specific about government: It can tax people against their will.
In a voluntary credit market, no future person can be forced to reduce his consumption in order to satisfy the bonds held by an older person.
Gene Callahan was right–back when we argued about this–that there’s nothing intrinsic to government bonds in all of this; whatever way you allow “the present to live at the expense of unborn descendants,” you can mimic just with transfer payments and taxes, with no bonds. But for sure, there is something specific about the government doing it, rather than private sector arrangements.
But, the modest point Nick and I are making with these simple models, is that there really is a sense in which running up a deficit today is less politically painful than truly making “the current generation” pay for it through taxes. It’s because the people restricting consumption today (by lending the government money), believe that unborn people will be taxed to pay them off. That’s the sense in which it’s the easy way out to pay for government spending with bonds rather than taxes.
Peter: I’m trying to follow you there, but I’m failing.
If you want a counterexample to my counterexample, I can provide a simple one:
Assume an OLG model where people produce apples when young, cannot produce apples when old, and there is no way to store apples, and there are no other assets for the young to buy to save for their old age. In this case, a government debt could make all current and future generations better off. (This is an example of a world where the rate of interest is below the growth rate of the economy, so a Ponzi scheme is sustainable.)
Yes, this is an example of the young establishing claims on future output that will come due when they are old and will be satisfied by those who are young in this later period. Once again, however, you want to have young people buying bonds from old people during each period. I’m saying that this is exactly where the age bias comes from, period, and that in the real world the bias, to the extent it exists, is the opposite: in the aggregate the younger borrow from the older.
Of course, wealth discrepancies between the two groups are more pronounced and more consequential than age discrepancies.
Peter, if you have the time try skimming this article. The angle of viewing it as a future tax that we’re now valuing in present dollars, helped me to “see” it.
Again, there are a million moving parts in this, but I am still thinking the one little subtlety that Nick’s model isolates, is not getting through to you. Because if it had, you would say, “Ohhhhh, that’s pretty cool, even though I was making some true statements, I thought they implied more than they actually do.”
Bob, I’m beginning to think I understand why you and Nick can’t see what the problem is. The OLG convention is to posit a simple life cycle consumption model in which people save when they are young and liquidate their savings when they are old to finance their retirement. This liquidation involves selling assets to the concurrent cohort of young people. In principle you could set up an OLG model with other stylized consumption and investment behavior, but no one does it.
In every period the old are dissaving and the young are saving. Naturally, in such a model the government, when it issues a bond, is marketing to the young, and it competes with the elderly of the same time period who are trying to do the same thing. Then the young grow old and sell their bonds to the concurrent young of the succeeding cohort. They pocket the interest. When the cycle repeats, the next bond-sellers will pocket the compounded interest, and so on. Then we posit a final period in which the last generation to have the opportunity to acquire the bonds when they were young is now old, and the cohort after that picks up the whole tab. I get that.
It all results, as I said in the beginning, from the assumption that every bond transaction is a sale from the old to the young. Repeat, this is an assumption. Drop this assumption and you lose the effect. Suppose there is a small group of very rich people—we will call them the 1%—who buy all the bonds when they are first issued and have exactly the same age structure and life expectancy as the population as a whole. If there is a final period in your model—if the debt is extinguished at some point rather than being refinanced—the final cohort of taxpayers is stuck with the bill, the final cohort of 1% gets the proceeds, and there is still no intergenerational transfer.
One other point might help illuminate the situation. The reason that Krugman, me, and I’m sure lots of other economists know in our gut that we have to be right is that financial claims are simply claims on the supply of goods and services available at the time they are exercised. If some people have more claims than others they can acquire more goods and services, but the aggregate quantity simply is what it is. The only way you could say that the present borrows from the future is if our current aggregate consumption today will result in a lower aggregate consumption in the future. (And indeed this is a valid fear.) To think otherwise is to fail to understand the distinction between real and nominal. In a very simple model with no money but only apples, and with a fixed output of x apples per year, in the final year the output of apples will still be x. Only the distribution can change. If in that year the young are screwed while the old make out like bandits, it was only because you built in assumptions about the age structure of claims and their transmission that favored the end-state old at the expense of the young.
This is all so obvious (to me) that I feel weird writing it down and posting it, but apparently I have to. You seem to be stuck inside a modeling convention (OLG) that may be useful for other purposes (I’m not sure), but interferes with your ability to think in a straightforward way about this problem.
Peter, in your original post, you wrote:
So there you have it. At an individual level, borrowing is truly borrowing from the future. At a population level, borrowing is the creation of assets and liabilities across different people. People like King are committing a fallacy of composition.
That is simply wrong, as Nick’s simple OLG model shows–if by it you mean to imply (which of course you did, hence the title and tone of your post) that it is simple nonsense to think there is a meaningful way in which people today can live at the expense of unborn generations, deriving merely from issuing bonds and then taxing people in the future to retire the bonds. Nick’s example doesn’t have to be realistic, to show that your argument is wrong. That’s how a counterexample works. Like you, I feel weird writing it down, but apparently I have to.
OK, I have to be very brief, since your format is squeezing me into this itty bitty column.
Of course it is possible to devise specific patterns of lending and taxation that benefit near-term people at the expense of later-term people in a world where people live through multiple periods, even though each period has the same consumption. If you think that’s the issue, mount your trophy. I think the issue is whether fiscal deficits have this effect generally in the absence of particular, and counterfactual, assumptions about the age structure of net lending. I’ll let you win in the world of your counterexample if you’ll let me win in the world you and I actually live in. A deal?
“In principle you could set up an OLG model with other stylized consumption and investment behavior, but no one does it.”
Technically you could, but why would you if your goal is to produce one valid counter example, which is all you need.
And the assumption
“The OLG convention is to posit a simple life cycle consumption model in which people save when they are young and liquidate their savings when they are old to finance their retirement.”
doesn’t sound so unrealistic that it would make this counter example a mere technicallity which might be fun to know but literally never applies in the real world..
And one other thought. As your (Bob’s) example showed, earlier generations can “borrow” from later ones without any borrowing at all. Just create the right age biases in taxation and transfers within each time period. *Your example shows it’s not even about deficits.*
Peter Dorman wrote:
*Your example shows it’s not even about deficits.*
Right, it’s fundamentally about taxing and spending. But, it’s politically easier to spend more than you tax in a given period, hence the temptation to use deficit finance.
Incidentally, this is what I meant previously when I said that Gene Callahan had hit upon this as well. But as with you, it took much thrashing about to get to that point. It wasn’t as if you guys have been saying, “Yes we see exactly what Nick Rowe is talking about, he makes a great point, but we need to generalize it.”
Do politicians have the incentive to create this “right age biases in taxation to transfer within each time period”?
In other words you need the deficits because of the incentives.
In Australia it’s downright compulsory.
In the US they have Social Security which is much the same thing, and also compulsory.
You be the first. If you don’t have Microsoft Excel, let me recommend either OpenOffice or gnumeric.
I would guess the debt will grow in your model and a crunch year will happen. Some generation will lose either due to repudiation or the strain of paying it back. If any generation ends up the loser, then wealth transfer must have happened.
But counter-examples to this already exist as you admit elsewhere, so you must have other reasons.
Shipping a model would make it more obvious. 1% you say?
Peter:
Does a national debt constitute a “burden on the future”?
Depends what we mean by “burden on the future”:
1. If we mean “reduction in aggregate consumption in future *years*, then sure, it does not, unless it reduces investment, is borrowed from foreigners, or is financed by distorting taxes. No problem. That’s the standard “we owe it to ourselves” viewpoint (coming originally from Von Mises and Abba Lerner) that Bob and I used to think was the truth and the whole truth about the burden of the debt. (We now think it was a truth, but not the whole truth, because there’s a second way of looking at it.)
2. If we mean “reduction of the lifetime consumption or lifetime utility of future cohorts” then we get a very different answer. “Cohorts” is perhaps a better word than “generations”. And lifetime utility is a better metric than lifetime consumption.
And we think that the second interpretation is both important, and more important, than the first interpretation. Because economics is supposed to be about the welfare of people, not about whether things like aggregate consumption in particular years. For example, if a national debt causes lifetime consumption to stay the same, but people to consume too little when young and too much when old (which is what you may get when the rate of interest exceeds the growth rate and taxes are just high enough to keep the debt/GDP ratio constant) then it does make future cohorts worse off.
Yes, it’s not the debt; it’s the taxes to service the debt that are the problem.
The people who own the debt must be older when they sell it than when they bought it.
Nick Rowe wrote:
That’s the standard “we owe it to ourselves” viewpoint (coming originally from Von Mises and Abba Lerner) that Bob and I used to think was the truth and the whole truth about the burden of the debt.
Egads! No Nick, Mises explicitly repudiates Abba Lerner and the “we owe it to ourselves.” See this blog post.
What’s also interesting, Nick, is that there is something important in Mises’ earlier quotation, about the present generation paying for a war with current resources. I think the layperson who says deficit finance “makes our kids pay for it” doesn’t think that through.
So, the whole thing is really subtle. I’m not saying Mises had an OLG model in his head, but he does make a set of true statements on both sides of the issue, suggesting a pretty nuanced understanding.
Bob: sorry about von Mises!
When you read this, imagine I am talking in a high, squeaky voice, wedged into this very tiny column.
Anyway, we all agree, I hope, that the whole argument hinges on the distinction between periods and people, when people live across multiple periods. Beyond this, there seems to be a disagreement that Nick and Bob have to hash out whether The Model says that, in the general case, government debt is a burden on future people or whether it represents a singular case in which government debt *could* be a burden on future people.
My position from the beginning is that this boils down to the distribution between cohorts within each time period, beginning with the initial period. The OLG assumption is that in each period net payments are made from the younger to the older cohort (“earlier” people). If that’s the case, then earlier people do better than later people. (This difference may be bounded, as Noah suggests.) I question the empirical validity of the age distribution assumption; it was something I had looked into many years ago when I was using efficiency wage theories of the labor market and was interested in wealth effects on wage premia over the life cycle. I doubt that the age profile of wealth has changed all that much. Thus I conclude that, Nick notwithstanding, government borrowing, as an empirical matter, does not impose a relative burden on later compared to earlier people. My impression is that this argument is resisted because “everyone” writes OLG models differently.
Incidentally, the distinction between people and periods does not inform popular views of the burden of debt. As a classroom teacher, I can say from quite a bit of experience that, after I explain the simple accounting of debt as both asset and liability, *every* student who walked into class believing the standard story has walked out disbelieving it. No one thinks about whether earlier people are doing better than later people when they cohabit the same time periods.
I think Peter Dorman is making basically the same argument that I made in these posts, suing Bob and Nick’s example
http://kenblogic.blogspot.com/2012/11/my-latest-salvo-in-ongoing-war-at-free.html
http://kenblogic.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-war-on-public-debt-and-paul-krugman.html
“After reading this, I’m so glad I never posted my idea for a compromise in which the federal government only honors 3/5 of its bonds.”
Hehehe 🙂
That poor fraction gets such a bad rap.
I honestly appreciated the Bartlett post, because this nonsense is getting far too insane to continue treating with respect. Disagreements over Washington Monument Syndrome in particular cases? I can respect that. I have a lot more trouble with some of this other stuff.
The nonsense that is most frustrating to me is the equivocation of not increasing the debt ceiling, and outright default.
Virtually every news outlet is repeating this lie.
I agree – that’s been bothering me too I feel like I’ve been hearing more “deb ceiling” lately though so maybe some editors have caught on or something.
Daniel Kuehn:
I honestly appreciated the Bartlett post…
Literally LOL! Daniel, I don’t think any of us doubted that you would appreciate Bartlett implying a lot of libertarians are racists. 🙂
Having worked for Ron Paul and having written for The Libertarian Review for many years, you’d think Bartlett would have plenty of examples of racist Confederate libertarians to report.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bob_roddis/4161210353/in/set-72157600951970959
racists? what are you talking about? i missed that in his post,
There are still many in the South, where the Republican Party is now based, whose hostility to the national debt traces back to those days.
Right…
Can no one mention the South or the 14th amendment. I guess I just don’t think “racist” when I hear “Southern”.
This didn’t occur to me until your comment – is this all you mean, Bob?
That’s dumb.
“…those days.”
It doesn’t have to spelled out DK. It’s pretty obvious.
So what does “those days” in reference to?
Debt observation at the time of the Civil War.
No Daniel, it is quite clear. The South that is referred to in the article is implicitly tied to the first mention of it, which defines its relationship to the default issue and that reference is the ‘the defeated South’.
That’s what is meant by ‘those days.’