StrangeSox

I'd be in favor of fed policy that spent $40B/month or whatever on direct checks to every American instead of on securities.

do it

columbine, of course, had an armed Good Guy to shoot the Bad Guys

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Jan 4, 2013 -> 11:00 AM) They'll like this idea until it's used against them in the future. that's always been the danger with abolishing or curtailing the filibuster, but it absolutely needs to be done. It didn't exist for a long time in this country and it didn't exist in its current form until recently.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 4, 2013 -> 10:40 AM) Every other team emphasizes turnovers. Every other team tries to turnover the ball and return kicks/punts for touchdowns. Lovie just happened to have maybe the best special teams coach ever, the best return man ever, and some really good defensive players. But good defensive players don't magically cause stupid QB's to throw terrible pick-6's. Every other team emphasizes those things, but few if any other teams have produced nearly as consistently at those things as the Lovie Smith-coached Bears have.

The big issues in macroeconomics: the fiscal multiplier The classical position may be restated as saying that the fiscal multiplier is zero. The core of New Classical economics is the reassertion of this claim. If workers are unemployed it was either because they are unwilling to work at the going wage or because some artificial barrier (unions or minimum wages) stops wages from adjusting to their equilibrium level. To the extent that Keynesian policies worked, New Classical economists like Lucas argued, it was by generating unanticipated inflation and tricking workers into accepting wages that were higher in nominal terms but lower in real terms. Before the current crisis, New Keynesians conceded a fair bit of ground to the classical view, but argued for a positive multiplier, though not necessarily greater than 1. One way of putting this is that public expenditure partially “crowds out” private spending. But most NK advocates thought fiscal policy unnecessary, since monetary policy had the same effects and was easier to manage. I criticized the New Classical view last time, but the dominant idea in European and many US policy circles is even worse. It’s, the theory of expansionary austerity put forward by Alesina and various co-authors that the fiscal multiplier is substantial and negative. That is, cutting public expenditure will increase output. This claim has no real theoretical basis and almost no empirical support, being based largely on anecdotal evidence and on a few studies that have not stood up to criticism. I took it apart in the paperback edition of Zombie Economics – the relevant section was published here

They haven't used everything at their disposal. They've had a relatively weak fiscal policy. We've also been dealing with a global recession and various responses to it (mostly bad, see Europe) that affect our economy as well.

yeah, fiscal and monetary policy aren't the same thing. Even if the government was only 5% of GDP prior to the recession, you'd still need counter-cyclical fiscal policy in response to a financial recession.

absolutely, that would have been OKC levels of bad.

so...do you have any evidence of the government crowding out the private sector recently?

their bombs failed, didn't they?

155,000 jobs added last month, revised unemployment rate stable at 7.8% http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/05/business...s-7-8.html?_r=0

QUOTE (GoodAsGould @ Jan 3, 2013 -> 11:24 PM) I'd find another mode of transportation in that case, unless I was traveling overseas in which case the night before I'd stay up to sleep in the plane. But, that is a ridiculous comparison anyways and really I am wasting my time responding to someone that would compare turning a phone off for 15 minutes to being forced to close your eyes for an entire flight. It's not just phones. why shouldn't I be able to read my ebook during taxi-ing, take-off and landing? How is that different from someone reading a physical book or magazine during those times from a "you should be able to put it away for 15 minutes!!!" perspective?

QUOTE (IlliniKrush @ Jan 3, 2013 -> 05:48 PM) If it was THAT big of a deal, as someone mentioned, they'd go around and turn them all off, confiscate them, or not let them on the plane at all. I'm pretty sure plenty of people stop using their device, but just throw it in the pocket in front of them, etc. this is exactly what I do!

Right, the world revolves around the 34th installment of "REPEAL OBAMACARE!" and also letting the VAWA expire

Right, that's my point. It'd be no different than simply abolishing the filibuster.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 3, 2013 -> 03:21 PM) Could be, but justified homicide is by its nature going to be less likely given the pretty high burden you have to meet. The study specifically addressed this potential issue but did not find support for it.

btw from the study: Finally, we perform several exercises to examine the possibility that additional reported criminal homicides induced by the laws were in fact legally justified, but were misreported by police to the FBI. We conclude on the basis of these findings that it is unlikely, albeit not impossible, that all of the additional homicides were legally justified but were misreported by police as murder or non-negligent homicide.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 3, 2013 -> 03:19 PM) Well since SYG is a defense to homicide the assumption in the vast majority of cases is going to be homicide, with a jury deciding if it was justified or not later on. So yes, I could see those numbers being skewed that way. Or it could be as the Trayvon situation originally was going to be: absolutely no trial and minimal investigation, quickly ruled a "justified homicide."

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 3, 2013 -> 03:17 PM) Did you look at the original study? What does he mean by "police statistics?" Just because the City of Chicago classifies a shooting as a homicide doesn't mean later on at trial that can't become a justifiable homicide. For all we know he's using what police initially think of a case, not the end result. The original study, linked in both Balta's article and by me above, states that they use FBI UCR data. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime...ed-offense-data

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 3, 2013 -> 03:14 PM) And really I don't see how that increase jives with concealed carry laws. Why wouldn't homicides in concealed carry states, versus Illinois for example, be higher? It's the availability of the gun in the vigilante scenario, not the availability of a defense. People don't sit there and ponder whether they can get away with shooting someone to death in the middle of an altercation. They don't think "hey, this is a close call, maybe I can get away with it!" They do the shooting and then try to use the SYG law as a defense, just like they would try to use any potentially available defense at their trial. I don't buy that having SYG on the books makes people more likely to shoot someone else. There's another explanation out there that just hasn't been found. It can adjust social attitudes and those who carry a gun on a broader level than specifically considering something in the heat of the moment. Maybe you carry more frequently, maybe you feel more confident in confronting someone (Treyvon, Jordan Davis) with your weapon because you believe, in the back of your mind, that the law is on your side. Why are you so sure that there's another explanation that hasn't been found? There could be, of course, but I see no good non-ideological reason for assuming that there must be.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 3, 2013 -> 03:09 PM) Which would be interesting, but it appears your study looked at how police classified the shootings, not the eventual trier of fact at a trial. here is the actual study: http://econweb.tamu.edu/mhoekstra/castle_doctrine.pdf but you'd need for the police classifications to be systematically biased one way or the other for that to matter. If, on the whole, the number of murders falsely categorized as justified homicides is roughly equal to the number of justified homicides falsely categorized as murder, then there's no problem. Do we have a reason to believe that the police would, on the whole, bias their classifications one way or another? That bias need not be conscience, but I don't know of a good reason to presume it exists and is strong enough to influence the results.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 3, 2013 -> 03:00 PM) We'll agree to disagree on the first part of that response, but with regards to the study that's basically a "we don't know" answer. That's what I thought when I first heard it on the radio yesterday, but after re-reading it I see that they're saying something else. That part I quoted started off by positing several different potential causes, but they ultimately ruled the others out. Criminals weren't bringing more guns/becoming more violent themselves and there wasn't an uptick in justifiable homicides. SYG seems to have increased the likelihood of violence/death overall but without a corresponding increase in legitimate cases of self-defense, meaning there's more unjustified vigilantism going on.

there's a post over on Volokh that's friendly to Corbett's cause, but the comments are generally not very kind: http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/02/pa-gov-co...-its-sanctions/ the complaint is available here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/550546-corbett.html It mostly amounts to whining about how this will hurt PSU Football and how awesome PSU Football is.

criminals don't deserve extra-judicial deaths (death period imo but w/e), but the study looked at justifiable homicide rates as well to balance that out. further in the NPR story: