Do Teabaggers Suffer From The Dunning–Kruger Effect?

[MCP-001]

My apologies, MCP. I didn't mean to jostle you back there in the 19th Century.

What I read in your post is a lot of hysterics and anger. Calm down a second and breathe.

I'm interested in knowing, from your perspective:

1. What specific goals you have for our nation.
2. What problems and obstacles lie in the way of those goals
3. How those problems and obstacles can be overcome to reach the stated goals.

I'm not angry or hysterical about anything right now.

Actually I've had a pretty relaxed day off.

So, I'll quickly answer your questions:

1.) To see our nation go back to the principles that allowed it go grow and prosper. Government spending only what it needs to spend [[see Art 1, Sec 8). People allowed to keep what they earn and spend it as they see fit.

2.) Progressives [[or whatever they prefer to call themselves this week) attempting to shoehorn the "From each according to their ability need, to each according to their need" mindset onto our republic. I have absolutely no objection to people freely giving whatever they feel is appropriate to anyone else. I do have an objection to people using government to take from others to give to whomever/whatever they feel is more "deserving".

3.) See #1

[ejames01]

That is so simplistic. The U.S. is a very complex country and it is located on a very complex world. Everything that we take for granted is regulated by local, state and the federal government. The only places that are not are countries like Somalia. That every man for themselves BS is just a fairy tale.

I'm not angry or hysterical about anything right now.

Actually I've had a pretty relaxed day off.

So, I'll quickly answer your questions:

1.) To see our nation go back to the principles that allowed it go grow and prosper. Government spending only what it needs to spend [[see Art 1, Sec 8). People allowed to keep what they earn and spend it as they see fit.

2.) Progressives [[or whatever they prefer to call themselves this week) attempting to shoehorn the "From each according to their ability need, to each according to their need" mindset onto our republic. I have absolutely no objection to people freely giving whatever they feel is appropriate to anyone else. I do have an objection to people using government to take from others to give to whomever/whatever they feel is more "deserving".

3.) See #1

[ghettopalmetto]

So, I'll quickly answer your questions:

1.) To see our nation go back to the principles that allowed it go grow and prosper. Government spending only what it needs to spend [[see Art 1, Sec 8). People allowed to keep what they earn and spend it as they see fit.

And which principles are those? A stable economy? A military capable of providing for our national defense? An infrastructure that allows our market economy to function profitably? Equal opportunity for all?

I'm sure you're well aware that the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia was smart enough to realize that they could never anticipate what our 21st century society would be like, so they intentionally left the Constitution flexible enough to accommodate us. If we took your literal interpretation, airplanes and computers would be illegal, since they're not mentioned in the Constitution. You right-wingers need to stop confusing the framework of our government with actual codified law.

[oladub]

gp, A stable economy might be an option if the federal government and its private bank sidekick ,the Fed, would refrain from screwing the economy up with massive deficits and ridiculous unconstitutional wars. Not all of us are as content with 10% official unemployment, expanding wars, and massive deficits that failed to create jobs that were promised to keep unemployment below 8%.

The flexibility you suggest should be the ability to modify the Constitutions by amending it rather than by ignoring it. The Constitution does not forbid things. It does the opposite. It promotes the progress of science and useful arts. You are confusing 'things' with 'federal powers'. Time for review. The Tenth Amendment forbids the federal government from exercizing powers not given to it but it does not forbid new products such as airplanes and computers. Also, you confuse right wingers with libertarians. Think of right wing neocons as wanting bigger government just like liberals.

[gibran]

Think of right wing neocons as wanting bigger government just like liberals.[/quote]


Neocns want a bigger world order..and that came with a price tag...so spot on Ola.

[ghettopalmetto]

gp, A stable economy might be an option if the federal government and its private bank sidekick ,the Fed, would refrain from screwing the economy up with massive deficits and ridiculous unconstitutional wars. Not all of us are as content with 10% official unemployment, expanding wars, and massive deficits that failed to create jobs that were promised to keep unemployment below 8%.

Wait a second. You lost me. I missed the part where you described what the federal government and the Federal Reserve did to create this recession.

We're in a period of depression economics--the normal rules don't apply. As I've stated on another thread, the stimulus package was too small [[Thanks, Obstructionist Republicans!) to have the needed impact on GDP in order to boost employment.

From macroeconomics:

GDP = C + I + G + EX - IM

Where:

C = consumption spending
I = investments in capital
G = government expenditure
EX = exports
IM = imports

So let's see. We had a condition where:

1. Consumption spending by consumers decreased and the rate of savings rose.

2. Investments decreased, as banks stopped lending money.

3. [[EX-IM) is a negative number, since we apparently believe that we don't actually need to produce goods in this country.

So you tell me--how the hell are we supposed to get out of recession without temporarily increasing government spending???

[Sstashmoo]

Quote: "how the hell are we supposed to get out of recession without temporarily increasing government spending???"

Spending our way out of this is quasar stupid. Throwing money at a poor model without changing the conditions that put it there, is simply inviting continuance and more debt.

Tariffs on imported goods would be where I would start. It is simple, they can sell their goods here, but not undermine domestic manufacturing in the process. This can be fixed without spending a dime.

[ghettopalmetto]

Quote: "how the hell are we supposed to get out of recession without temporarily increasing government spending???"

Spending our way out of this is quasar stupid. Throwing money at a poor model without changing the conditions that put it there, is simply inviting continuance and more debt.

Tariffs on imported goods would be where I would start. It is simple, they can sell their goods here, but not undermine domestic manufacturing in the process. This can be fixed without spending a dime.

What's the "poor model"?

Okay, let's take your suggestion and impose tariffs on imports. Let's impose tariffs high enough such that imports match the level of exports. Then the equation becomes:

GDP = C + I + G

You would still have drops in consumption spending and investment, and thus, a shrinking GDP.

[Jimaz]

Politics aside, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a fascinating phenomenon. It highlights an epistemological asymmetry [[masquerading as a symmetry) between those who know that they know and those who don't know that they don't know. Each feels certain that they're correct but one certainty comes from meta-knowledge and the other from meta-ignorance. The emotional certainty may be equal but the epistemological certainty is not.

[oladub]

gp, Any family or individual or government can easily learn from experience that overspending leads to problems. Formulas aren't necessary. If you spend too much, you will suffer. The Fed has a long history of creating cheap credit which always leads to economic bubble. Bubbles eventually burst and produce consequent economic downturns until the market corrects itself. Our federal government complicates things with deficit spending, foolish spendthrift programs like Fannie and Freddie that encourage unwise behaviour. If something is subsidized, we get more of it. So we have businesses using cheap money to construct houses we don't need and people who are not credit worthy being put into them - and that is just the housing sector. Everyone from these purchasers to the producers are out on a limb and get shook off the first time the wind blows. It blew. They started falling off. Then the idiot Bush and Obama administrations started borrowing more money from China, printing counterfeit money, and messing with statistics to do more of what caused the mess in the first place as a remedy to the mess they created. This never works. The only way to correct problems in the market is let them go away instead of feeding them. That is what Volker did under Carter although his action had a lot to do with Carter being defeated.

You are contradicting your illustrious leader when you say the money wasn't enough. It was the Dear One's own administrative spokesperson who said that Porkulus was necessary to prevent umemployment from climbing over 8, or was it 8.5%.

It is mathematically impossible for the federal government to pay off its debt. I assume that our government will have to either get into a World War or devalue our currency. If we get to the other side of that, the federal government should cut its spending significantly, issue commodity based money to replace our federal reserve debt notes, and otherwise behave in a way that will allow Americans to live at the reduced standard of living necessary to pay off the Bush/Obama debts. The government needs to comprehend its own incompetence
Economic Black Hole: 20 Reasons Why The U.S. Economy Is Dying And Is Simply Not Going To Recover

[ghettopalmetto]

Oladub, I agree with [[some of) your rationale for the cause of the recession. Yes, there were a lot of people encouraged into buying As Much House As Possible, without much regard for ability to repay loans once the low introductory interest-only payments were over. We can't forget the unregulated complex derivatives market on Wall Street, which most traders don't even fully understand. From what I've read, it was a combination of these two factors that greatly destabilized the financial system.

Once the TARP money arrived, though, the banks hoarded it away instead of lending it. Thus, you have companies who can't make payroll or capital investments, those businesses lay people off, tax revenues decrease, state and local governments start to suffer, until you get to our current situation. The hoarding is a result of bad lawmaking on the part of Congress, and President Bush, for not insisting that TARP money be for lending purposes only.

Obama may have believed that his stimulus package was enough to keep unemployment below 8.5%. He was obviously misinformed if that's the case. The level of spending passed was insufficient to boost GDP to where unemployment would be stemmed to acceptable levels. Still, the package passed, at about 5% of GDP, was better than nothing. The worst part about it is that it makes a new Jobs package very politically unpalatable, when it could have been undertaken in a larger version of the previous package.

I think the biggest misunderstanding is that using government spending in order to lift the economy out of recession is only intended as a temporary measure, as it was used during the New Deal and World War II. We were fortunate after World War II, though, in that our manufacturing economy took off and our exports increased, giving a "permanent" boost to GDP. It's noteworthy, though, that much of that growth in manufacturing and exports would not have happened without 1) the construction of the Interstate Highway System and 2) the need to rebuild Europe and Japan after the war.

We will NEVER be able to reduce our deficits or debt until we get our GDP growing again. For the time being, that means temporary deficit spending until Consumption, Investment, and Exports get some influx of capital so they can rise. Once the GDP starts growing, though, we do need to rectify our trade imbalance [[which is a subject I won't touch on at this time) and start reworking the federal budget [[another subject beyond the scope of this post).

Going back to the spirit of the thread title, though, this is not as simple as "gimme my tax dollars back so I can spend 'em at Walmart". In my opinion, we really do need to embrace more modest standards of living, and we need to start giving a shit about the products on which we spend our hard-earned money.

[barnesfoto]

BTW, how's that Hope & Change working for you now?

Good question, I'd say it's like having a president that has one eye vs. a president that is blind...But as the old saying goes, in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

I disagree with about 60 percent of what the janitor is doing, [[see Ola's post on funding the dysfunctional government of Yemen) whereas I disagreed with 99 percent of what the chimp was doing. Of course, if I wanted to live in a land with leadership that I agreed with 99 percent of the time, I would go live on one of the uninhabited Northern Marianas Islands.

BTW, what has your party done to change anything lately? Since your party is basically one congressman and a bunch of guys on the internet, I'll take a wild guess and say "nothing". But your question sounds remarkably like the question posed by the sick cult's retard-savant, Ms Sarah Palin.

Are you excited that the retard queen has endorsed your candidates son? [[I'll hold off on the blindness references, as ironically, the guy's an ophthalmologist!)
There must be somewhere where a three party system is giving citizens more choices in leadership...A country with a real conservative party, a real wishy-washy centrist party and a real left wing party...Oh right, there's Mexico.

[oladub]

gp, I was agreeing with you more than normal too but am otherwise ok. Setting aside my concerns about the 10th. and sitting here in my Obama t-shirt to get into Obamathink, I would have preferred the President to have spent his Porkulus differently. When his administration first came out with the idea of Porkulus, they were going to do a lot of construction work with it just as Roosevelt had built dams and post offices. The Obama people were talking about rail lines, a wind power infrastruture, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. Right away, their ideas were attacked because those were mostly male jobs. So much of the money wound up, instead, helping shore up local governments which wouldn't put themselves on a diet. Those governments did not have to tighten their belts and very little infrastructure got built.

I don't know how we can get people to spend but they everntually will. A lot of stuff just wear out. When the old heap becomes unreliable, people will start spending for new cars - or anything else. I think that it is necessity that forces people to start spending again. It was not only Europe that needed new everything after the war. Our GI's came home and needed everything to start up families. Eventually, whoever still has money will have to start spending again in this recession too. Meanwhile, [[remember I am still siting here watching Obama Girl videos and licking the screen a little to forget about the 10th Amendment) infrastucture is a great way too spend even printing press money because even if it doesn't dramatically increase national employment, at least would have something to show for the spending that would benefit and pay back Americans for decades.

[MCP-001]

That is so simplistic. The U.S. is a very complex country and it is located on a very complex world. Everything that we take for granted is regulated by local, state and the federal government. The only places that are not are countries like Somalia. That every man for themselves BS is just a fairy tale.

"every man for themselves" is a gross over-simplification.

Yes, government loved to regulate everything.

But ask yourself; does it really need to?

Having government stick its nose into minutia details regarding what everyone does on a daily basis is a major contributing factor to life becomming more complex.

Having government stick its nose into the affairs of other nations is also a major contributing factor to the world being in the shape that it's currently in.

Ask yourself this: How would the world be if the US didn't engage in entangling alliances beginning in, say, the 1890's to today?

[MCP-001]

And which principles are those? A stable economy? A military capable of providing for our national defense? An infrastructure that allows our market economy to function profitably? Equal opportunity for all?

I'm sure you're well aware that the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia was smart enough to realize that they could never anticipate what our 21st century society would be like, so they intentionally left the Constitution flexible enough to accommodate us. If we took your literal interpretation, airplanes and computers would be illegal, since they're not mentioned in the Constitution. You right-wingers need to stop confusing the framework of our government with actual codified law.

Why?

Where do you get that airplanes and computers are even remotely a function of government?

I don't recall ever making that claim.

[MCP-001]

Good question, I'd say it's like having a president that has one eye vs. a president that is blind...But as the old saying goes, in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

I disagree with about 60 percent of what the janitor is doing, [[see Ola's post on funding the dysfunctional government of Yemen) whereas I disagreed with 99 percent of what the chimp was doing. Of course, if I wanted to live in a land with leadership that I agreed with 99 percent of the time, I would go live on one of the uninhabited Northern Marianas Islands.

BTW, what has your party done to change anything lately? Since your party is basically one congressman and a bunch of guys on the internet, I'll take a wild guess and say "nothing". But your question sounds remarkably like the question posed by the sick cult's retard-savant, Ms Sarah Palin.

Are you excited that the retard queen has endorsed your candidates son? [[I'll hold off on the blindness references, as ironically, the guy's an ophthalmologist!)
There must be somewhere where a three party system is giving citizens more choices in leadership...A country with a real conservative party, a real wishy-washy centrist party and a real left wing party...Oh right, there's Mexico.

I'll tell you what, if I had a party, then I can answer your question.

Political parties are a distraction to to voters to divert them from researching the candidates and knowing where they really stand.

Case in point #1: Blue Dog democrats. What do the rest of the democrats fell about them [[especially after the failure of health care "reform")?

Case in point #2: Pro-Choice republicans. What do other rank and file republicans feel about them?

But, if you want to be a rubber stamp and follow someone just because of a letter after their name, be my guest.

[rb336]

Having government stick its nose into minutia details regarding what everyone does on a daily basis is a major contributing factor to life becomming more complex.

And what "minutia" might those be? In many instances it may be a choice between an ultimately accountable government vs. a wholly unaccountable private-sector entity whose only objective is to make its masters rich at whatever cost. I'll pick the former every time

Having government stick its nose into the affairs of other nations is also a major contributing factor to the world being in the shape that it's currently in.

Ask yourself this: How would the world be if the US didn't engage in entangling alliances beginning in, say, the 1890's to today?

hmmm....
A Nazi-run europe for one thing

[rb336]

I'll tell you what, if I had a party, then I can answer your question.

Political parties are a distraction to to voters to divert them from researching the candidates and knowing where they really stand.

Case in point #1: Blue Dog democrats. What do the rest of the democrats fell about them [[especially after the failure of health care "reform")?

Case in point #2: Pro-Choice republicans. What do other rank and file republicans feel about them?

But, if you want to be a rubber stamp and follow someone just because of a letter after their name, be my guest.

blue dogs are kowtowed to by the dems, giving them inordinate power. Big difference between reps and dems -- the dems margianalize the progressives [[even trying to oust one of their own) while the reps flock to the curry the favor of their most extreme groups

[Papasito]

The founding fathers were frowned on some 235 years ago.
Some people called them warmongers, radicals, neocons, ect.
Truth is, if a group is supporting real change, ie: fair taxes, smaller government, more freedom,
they may be closer to America's pulse than we give them credit for.

[MCP-001]

And what "minutia" might those be? In many instances it may be a choice between an ultimately accountable government vs. a wholly unaccountable private-sector entity whose only objective is to make its masters rich at whatever cost. I'll pick the former every time



hmmm....
A Nazi-run europe for one thing

A couple of examples:

How about requiring that Americans go through the yearly ritual to prove exactly what they have earned [[and thereby waving their Fourth & Fifth Amendment Rights in the process) and then submit a copy to the federal government?

Or, how about the federal governments sticking its nose into the banking industry [[i.e. CRA) and almost cause the collapse of the entire industry?

Or even how about the federal laws put in place to prohibit competition among insurance companies [[i.e. purchasing health insurance across state lines).

Get the point?

As for the Nazi Germany thing [[I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and not invoke Godwin's Law here) remember, if we didn't get involved in WWI, Adolph Hitler wouldn't have risen to power.

All that needed to be done here was to have Wilson keep his campaign pledge and keep us out.

The European powers didn't have a grudge against us before we got ourselves involved.

Basic History 101 here...

[MCP-001]

blue dogs are kowtowed to by the dems, giving them inordinate power. Big difference between reps and dems -- the dems margianalize the progressives [[even trying to oust one of their own) while the reps flock to the curry the favor of their most extreme groups

So explain the current flap over the governor's race?

[ghettopalmetto]

Why?

Where do you get that airplanes and computers are even remotely a function of government?

I don't recall ever making that claim.

Airports, the FAA, ARPAnet--none of those things are in the Constitution. So I guess they're illegal, huh?

[rb336]

So explain the current flap over the governor's race?

what flap?

[rb336]

How about requiring that Americans go through the yearly ritual to prove exactly what they have earned [[and thereby waving their Fourth & Fifth Amendment Rights in the process) and then submit a copy to the federal government?

now that is just about the goofiest argument I have heard on that subject

Or, how about the federal governments sticking its nose into the banking industry [[i.e. CRA) and almost cause the collapse of the entire industry?

actually, it is the exact opposite

Or even how about the federal laws put in place to prohibit competition among insurance companies [[i.e. purchasing health insurance across state lines).

now that is one I agree with

As for the Nazi Germany thing [[I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and not invoke Godwin's Law here) remember, if we didn't get involved in WWI, Adolph Hitler wouldn't have risen to power.

Godwin's law doesn't apply, no one or thing is being compared to Nazis. as to the supposition, that is unknowable

The European powers didn't have a grudge against us before we got ourselves involved.

and they didn't after, either. don't know how great it would have been for the US to have the Kaiser running Europe and most of the middle-east

Basic History 101 here...

Everything you learned in History 101 is wrong [[Yes, I think there actually was a book in that series)

[MCP-001]

Airports, the FAA, ARPAnet--none of those things are in the Constitution. So I guess they're illegal, huh?

I'll tell you what. You find the section citing its authorization, and then well talk about that.

As for your "examples".

Neither were the Wright Brothers. Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Or even Al Gore!