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Open thread Nov 13, 2012

Dan Crawford | November 13, 2012 11:17 pm

Tags: open thread Comments (9) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
9 Comments
  • amateur socialist says:
    November 14, 2012 at 9:10 am

    I have a question I would like to address to Beverly or one of the blog’s other legal experts.

    I have been very interested in the multi-state compact path to a national popular vote for the presidency. As many are aware, this scheme leaves each state who joins the compact free to continue allocating their EC votes as they do now unless and until a number of states numbering 270 EV join the compact. Then the law requires all the states to allocate their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. It creates a scheme for a popularly elected president without mucking about with the constitution, and is also fully compliant with the constitution. A neat trick.

    My question is – once this occurs, does this also create a legal protection argument for uniform voter registration and poll qualification on a national basis, at least wrt the presidential election? If I understand the SCOTUS “thinking” in Bush V. Gore in 2000 the justices didn’t see an equal protection argument because the electoral system implicitly creates unequal protections that the federal government is powerless to address. Or have I badly misunderstood the legal issues?

    I have been thinking that the multi-state compact that provides for popular election of POTUS might be a way to force uniform voter registration and qualification. So you get 2 badly needed reforms for the price of one, another neat trick. But maybe I don’t understand the legal questions involved.

  • amateur socialist says:
    November 14, 2012 at 9:16 am

    Ack. Poor proofreading. I meant to ask “does this also create an equal protection argument” not legal protection.

  • Mcwop says:
    November 14, 2012 at 10:36 am

    Two older but precient papers very well worth the read, and not very long.

    ****************************************

    From April 1999
    Can Goldilocks Survive?
    by Wynne Godley and L. Randall Wray

    http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/pn99_4.pdf

    By most accounts, the surplus will continue indefinitely. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is projecting a rise in the federal budget surplus through the next 10 years from 1.2 percent of GDP for 1999 to 2.8 percent for 2009. Such projections are, of course, contingent on continued economic growth and unchanged budget policies.

    What we wish to do here is to take the CBO’s projections (which are not substantially different from those used by the administration) at face value and determine what they mean for the private sector. As we will explain, government budget surpluses imply that the private sector must have an offsetting deficit. The financial situation of the domestic private sector is made worse because of the United States’s international payments imbalance. Indeed, it is becoming widely recognized that there are two black spots that blemish the appearance of our Goldilocks economy: low household saving (which actually has fallen to zero) and the burgeoning trade
    deficit. However, commentators have not yet discovered the links between public sector surpluses, domestic private sector deficits, and international current account deficits. Once these are understood, it will become clear that Goldilocks is doomed.

    ****************************************

    From May 2005
    SOME UNPLEASANT AMERICAN ARITHMETIC
    by WYNNE GODLEY

    The private sector balance was negative 2.2 percent in the first quarter of 2005—some 4 percent
    below its long-term average—mainly because there has been a furious housing boom financed by exceptionally high borrowing. It is noteworthy that between 1952 and 1997, there was
    not a single whole year during which the private sector balance was negative. If, during the next four years, the private sector balance were to recover halfway to normal (i.e., to zero), implying a large fall in private expenditure relative to income, and if the deficit in the current account remains at 6 percent, the general government deficit must rise to equal the current account deficit, that is, it must rise to 6 percent. This number follows
    arithmetically because, as already pointed out, the budget deficit is equal, by definition, to the current account deficit plus the private sector balance. If the private sector balance were to return to its long-term average (plus 1.8 percent), as might easily happen if the housing boom were to collapse, the government deficit would have to rise to nearly 8 percent of GDP.

    Neither of these figures for the budget deficit is credible, given the administration’s firm commitment to cut the federal deficit in half during the next four years. Yet without such
    renewed fiscal stimulus, the United States will, at best, encounter a prolonged growth recession under the (conservative) stated assumptions about international trade and the private sector balance.

  • Bruce Webb says:
    November 14, 2012 at 11:12 am

    I am very leery of ostensibly macroeconomic claims that start out with the words “By definition–“. Because it too often results in the world being adjusted to a Procrustian I-S curve. For example I have seen claims that income inequality is in “real” terms a myth, because “by definition” wages are always and everywhere set by the Iron Fist of the Invisible Hand exactly at the level of ‘Marginal Labor Productivity’. Which among other things allows you to prove that raising minimum wage inevitably causes job losses.

    Which is what happens when you let your static textbook definitional identity ignore the historic role of pricing power over wages by employers being able to draw on the legal and at times military power of the government to forcibly restrain wages.

    Now people way smarter than me, or at least infinitely better credentialed, and who share my political goals, people like Dean Baker and Hank Aaron have patiently explained (or at least informed me) that federal surpluses arithmetically imply domestic savings deficits, and similar relations that govern foreign trade and total public borrowing. Everything nets out to zero. By definition. Because that is what the Book says.

    Well from where this ignorant peasant stands that sounds all too much like the Evident Truth that almost got Galileo burned before he publicly recanted Heliocentrism. But God and the Invisible Hand move in mysterious ways and if I was meant to understand I guess I should have earned the magic robes that adorn the High Priests of Economic Theory, I.e. the robe and PhD cap marked by the mystical golden signs “I-S”.

    Because all this undertrained former historian sees is a privileging of a certain economic system and it’s textbook justifications over the actual historical record of times and places other than Northern Europe and the U.S from the 18th to early 20th century. That is Ricardo and his reductionist comrades are not automatically my Ex Cathedra authorities.

  • Bruce Webb says:
    November 14, 2012 at 11:13 am

    BTW I didn’t get a Captcha. Maybe because I commented using a Google ID.

  • nanute says:
    November 14, 2012 at 11:33 am

    Bruce, I have a question for you: Who is this “pseudo intellectual fuck” named David Michel?

  • mmcosker says:
    November 14, 2012 at 11:49 am

    Bruce, read Steve Keen’s “Debunking Economics”. He spends some time discussing issues with neoclassical approach to min wage.

  • Bruce Webb says:
    November 14, 2012 at 7:14 pm

    Nanute. You got me. Apparently he is a veteran of other flame wars, luckily none of which were on my own posts. But while I can put up with a significant amount of Wingnut talking points (often for the educational opportunity for others) there is not much room for outright potty mouths and still less homophobic misogynists. And zero room for people who brag they were just out to get people to rise to the outright troll bait. Well as I suggested “love THAT!” coupled with moderated deletion. Because anyone who wants to bring a rubber knife to a bloggy gun fight deserves every bit of scorn they can get. Kind of the blog equivalent of “You can’t quit me! I’m fired!!” Clueless yet prescient.

  • Dan Crawford (Rdan) says:
    November 14, 2012 at 8:09 pm

    Looks like a good decision Bruce.

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