ex-President Trump

No i mean what blahblah told you is the Lucas critique.

You can't just say "look this is what happened so what happened is caused by X Y economic policies so if you hadn't done it, it would be different more of the kind I like".

You 1) can't claim tricle down has been used until you define it objectively.

And 2) even after an objective definition, and a verification that trickle down as defined actually happened in the last 20 (or 40 or whatever timeframe you want to examine) years, you can't claim "see this economic aggregate? it behaved in this way because of trickle down" (that's the Luca critique).

I haven't been following the thread. I just responded to what I responded to, which was a defence of trickle down economics.

So how do you suggest we evaluate economic policies, if not by the results they produce when applied?

It's a little bit of both.

that's Sims and Sargent nobel prize in 2011 (among others) trillion dollar question.

Evaluating macroeconomic policies honestly is incredibly hard.

As i mentioned above sometimes you are blessed with pseudoexperiments. Ie sometimes two very similar places try different things at the same time. Like two neighboring states in the USA with similar economies , one tries to implement a minimum wage the other doesn't. Bingo, that's a honeypot for actual economists, you can try to ascertain some actual effects of introducing a higher minimum wage by using difference in differences analysis.

Sometimes you don't have that, and the control group is more nebolous, but you can still try it. Like after the GFC you can cluster togheter countries that did more than X deficit, and the rest, starting with only countries over Y per capita gdp and so on, to try to answer the question "was doing a lot of deficit in the follow up of the GFC good for the economy".

Results won't necessarily be generalizable to all follow ups of crisis and so on, but it's plausible you get at least a hint of the truth by doing that, IF the 2 groups have very different macro outcomes controlling for the deficit.

It's complicated, which doesn't mean it's impossible to ever find any proposition with truth-values (=predictive power) when studying economic reality, but which means it's extremely easy for anyone to massage test design or simply disregard some of the epistemology which i tried to convey above, to come out with a result you wanted to begin with.

I'm not some sort of intellectual heavyweight who is about to challenge Nobel prize laureates, but it seems to me that if I propose theory X because it will have effect Y, and it fails to have effect Y, or it has the opposite effect, it's fair to say that X is likely to be ineffectual.

I think luciom did a good job answering your question, but I'd like to add that there are certain laws in this world that are widely accepted as truths by the people who study certain fields and aren't paid by a government that we can also accept as truths. Examples being gravity, the earth is round, being fat is less healthy than being of average weight and that taking more money away from the most productive people in a society to give to the least productive members of a society will slow economic growth long-term.

Are we also postulating the axiom that "taking away from the most productive people in society" and "trickle down economics" are synonymous? That's a lot of things you want to axiomatically stipulate there, blahblah Michael.

Did he really just equate an economic theory to a law of physics? Heeeeeeeeeehawwwww.

I wonder if blahblah would be happy to add "religion is fake and a dumb**** theory for the hard of thinking" in the spirit of his other immutable laws of nature. If not, why not, blahblah?

Random question from a European who obviously don't know everything about how the US election system works, nor have I lived there and felt the effects of someone's politics.

But why is Donald Trump so controversial, and why is there a big fraction of people + 99% of mainstream media who seems to completely hate everything with his politics and evertyhing the man stands for?

I know that 'MAGA' has become almost a swear-word for some, but is it really that bad to want the best for your own country, and to prioritize it's issues strongly before considering helping other countries? And is it really so bad to want a secure border with strict control on who gets granted asylum or not?

From what I see online, people are pouring into USA from all kinds of countries now, Russia, Turkey, China... the list goes on. Obviously not all these people are desperately fleeing from something, but rather seems to target getting into the US specifically due to the relaxed rules, lots of benefits, and no oversight from anyone as soon as they have entered. I assume most people agree this is not a sustainable situation if allowed to continue for years and years, which it seems it will if Biden remains in charge.

Even from the outside I can see that Trump has the potential to be a contoversial figure. He probably has a gigantic ego, he says a lot of strange stuff at times (but so does Biden), his handling of Covid was disasterous, and obviously one can question his rethoric around January 6th 2021 (although he did say to make their opinion heard peacefully on twitter eventually - but maybe too late?).

Anyway, that is neither here nor there. I know that many of the replies will just be 'insurrectionist' and 'dictator' and similar, but are really his policies so bad? Or is it just the man himself and his loyal following that has become hateworthy for so many?

For an observer, although I think it's sad that there are no better options than these two for people to vote on, I would think Trump is by far the lesser of two evils this coming November.

Fact is trickle down has to be defined, which neither blah blah nor you did, before we can claim it has been applied, before we discuss which effects if any it had and so on.

I think blahblah claims that welfare to unproductive members of society decreases economic growth (*compared to the counterfactual of the same taxes being invested, or being left in the hands of people who produce more than the median). That's a claim we can check if it was tested in literature and so on but i am not sure you agree that's trickle down.

But a clear question to you, do you think economic growth is higher if , given X amount of taxes collected, a bigger portion is spent into increasing the quality of life of unproductive members of society, or if the same amount is spent on scientifical research or infrastructure? there isn't only the "either you collect or not", you need to check all other possible allocations.

I would accept a qualitative answer , like an argument you make with logic, at least to begin the conversation, but i have a hard time envision a logic in which making poor people live a little better is more friendly to GDP growth than investing in research and infrastructure. After all in literature we do have clear links between investment and economic growth, and poor people living better is consumption, infrastructure and research is investment.

What's your logic to claim that if society taxes productive people more, and spends that to help dirty poor people, mentally ******ed people, very elder people and so on live better lives, this is conductive to a higher GDP 20 years from now than a society where the same taxes go more toward infrastructure and research? please guide me through your logic thanks

I have no idea why you think I disagree with any of the above. Certainly not through anything I said.

Ok so you agree with blah blah than in general it is quite easy to claim that welfare toward unproductive members of society (unlike temporary welfare to get potentially productive members back to producing) does decrease economic growth compared to alternative allocations.

So what was your issue with him? you seemed to disagree with blahblah claim .

See you need to understand Liberals or Democrats as they are called . What they would like is to jail Trump without a trial, end the electoral college, stack the supreme court, ban voter ID, censor free speech, approve the candidates that can run and than they have saved democracy

I was talking challenging blahblah about trickle down economics and you are talking about investing in science and infrastructure. I'm not seeing the connection.

That if instead of taxing an extra (Example) 100 billions from very productive people, to spend on consumption for poor people to make them live better, you don't take those 100 billions, a good portion of them will be ... spent on research and infrastructure, which is what companies do, and the 100 billions saved by the people who would have otherwise paid those in taxes primarily go in stocks and real estate (and real estate is actual real investment as well).

So leaving the 100 billion in Musk, bezos and so on hands, instead of using them to improve the consumption of poor people, will be better for gdp growth.

Higher gdp growth does push unemployment down benefitting many of the poor as well (not all of them, only those capable of being part of production).

That's trickle down thesis.

This presupposes that money is not fungible and that extra tax revenue is somehow magically earmarked for welfare programs. What if we give poor people money and build fewer nukes instead? Or do less of something else we spend taxes on? Or tax the 100b but put it in those same R&D and infrastructure programs instead of giving it to poor people? It seems like a highly disingenuous argument.

And yes, I generally disagree that taxing the ultra-wealthy less makes poor people better off. That's not me making an argument that I personally want to give poor people lots of free money. That's me making an argument that the trickle down thesis is disingenuous self-serving horseshit perpetuated by the rich.

We have two political parties who have been at odds of one another for a long time. Although both of these parties claim their #1 goal is to do what is best for the country their real #1 goal is always staying in power and reducing the power of the other party.

One way to do that is to treat a politician on the other side like he is crazy/old/has dementia (biden) or is a crazy/mean/hateful person (trump). Biden has shown signs of mental decline so the right jumps on that and trump has said hateful things so the left jumps on that while both parties try to exaggerate the problem of the other politician to their base.

At this point the left can't admit that some of trumps ideas would actually be good because they are all-in on the idea that he is crazy/mean and they don't want to humanize him. They are trying their best to make this election more about how nice/mean the 2 candidates are (which is why 90% of what you hear about trump are personal attacks) and trying to put policies on the backburner.

Lol

No it doesn't. It's about welfare to unproductive people vs other allocations (including leaving the money into private hands to begin with).

As for the "nuclear weapons vs welfare to unproductive people" that's a very complicated thing to test because it goes beyond normal domestic macro considerations and into existential risk, geopolitics and so on.

I don't think it would be impossible to have a logic argument in favor of significantly reducing defense expenses and using that money to increase welfare to unproductive people but it's not easy to see why that would increase gdp growth. But it might, or it might not matter much (ie gdp growth being close if you spend on defense more or on unproductive people more).

That wouldn't be a counterpoint to trickle down though. Rather to massive defense spending.

As for the rest keep in mind that a policy can still be self serving even without lying about it.

If you want to buy cannabis legally you might push for cannabis legalization, and you would be able to claim several true things that are positive for society if cannabis gets legalized, your self serving role in advocating for that policy wouldn't make it false that, for example, society would spend less on incarceration of non violent people if cannabis was fully legal to produce, sell and consume.

Dude, giving billionnaires tax breaks doesn't help the poors. Cut it out, you're smarter than that. That's really my only substantive point in this whole exchange.

I know you believe this but it reads like a troll post written on purpose to make rightwing people look bad. I mean some radical leftists do ask for some of what you wrote sure, but claiming democrats in general want to jail Trump without trial while they just indictment him federally and a trial is ongoing is... weird.

Yeah man, it's the 99% of right wingers, like lozen, who give the rest a bad name.