Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, September 29, 2022
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67 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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I wish only to note that Madame Truss & Co are doing great things to help back-stop for EU on internal solidarity. As yesterday Finance Ministers meeting demonstrated, now for the ralcitricant far Right parties (See Italy), EU can say ‘you are welcome to become UK…’ Ireland’s comments most delicious.
As I was nodding off last night I was thinking about the devastation in Florida and the millions of people suffering there, and how this is going to happen to them with increasing frequency. The state needs leadership at every level who will do whatever it takes to build up storm walls and other infrastructure where it would be useful, and provide assistance in moving people away from areas we cannot save. Unfortunately, Ron Desantis is almost completely unsuited to do any of this. It hit me though, that it was almost inevitable that Florida would end up with someone like him at a time like this, along with similarly incompetent officials at every level. Faced with almost overwhelming choices, voters opted for someone who attacks the messengers talking about hard choices and hard work. They went for someone who instead gets them worked up about nonsense that doesn’t really affect them. Essentially he is saying, “Never mind those losers who are constantly spoiling the fun, look over here and see what the blacks, and immigrants and gays and trans people are doing! Spend your time and your rage thinking about these instead!”
@Lounsbury:
Well, that’s cheering.
“If you can’t be a good example, you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.”
Bank of England has intervened with pledge to no-limits on bond purchases.
Initial plan: £65bn over 5 days!
Reason: gilt price collapse was threatening to take out the pension funds.
The currency drop is bad; the gilts drop is worse.
Much worse.
At least Governor Bailey is still sane.
But the Bank will now be following up with base rate rises of considerable magnitude.
The problem there is judging the balance: not enough, sterling continues to slide etc.
Rising yield on govt. bonds will drive up the cost of repaying the hugely ballooning debt.
Mortgage rates at indeterminate level x will take the floor out from under the housing market.
And over the past 30 years the housing market has come to be THE primary investment of the majority of the population; if it goes negative equity, problem is near as big as the pension funds going belly up.
Not to mention the property collateral behind a lot of small business loans.
Property market balloon needed deflating: but preferably not by blowing it up with TNT.
Truss and Kwarteng, and the idiot Tory members who voted for Truss, need pelting with rotten veg.
Sunak was not a great alternative choice, but at least he was sane.
Much more of this and I’ll be joining the “Come back Boris, all is forgiven” chorus. (Nah.)
*sobs*
*drinks*
@JohnSF:
Your suggestion that the inmates were running the asylum were confirmed for me yesterday morning when I saw the £ was worth $1.01, for the first time in my life.
All I can say is good luck over there, you’re going to need it. Interesting times indeed.
@JohnSF:
@Flat Earth Luddite:
I don’t get it. They keep pouring gasoline on the fire, and it burns hotter instead of going out.
@MarkedMan:
Who knew that after only 40+ years of kicking the can down the road, you’d run out of road?
@Kathy:
https://youtube.com/shorts/XZGdsRsOSoU?feature=share
@Lounsbury: @JohnSF: Nothing to see here: Truss allies’ curious excuses for financial meltdown
Vladimir Putin
Remainers
The Bank of England
(the lack of) Fracking
HS2
Keir Starmer
@Flat Earth Luddite:
Was that a tourist rate conversion?
Currently seeing £1 = $1.086 London markets; I think it bottomed out at around 1.070 Tuesday pm.
Both sterling, gilts and FTSE all seem to recovering a bit after Bank intervention.
Except now Truss is coming out with more of her cosplay Thatcher act again, the ninny.
“The lady’s not for turning.” always tickles the tummies of the Tories.
Traders, not so much.
And the markets all slide again.
Can’t she just SHUT UP?
Katie Brain, consumer banking expert at the financial information firm Defaqto in The Guardian:
@MarkedMan: That water lapping at your door? It’s a hoax, not real at all.
Tucker Carlson speaking at Sonny Barger’s funeral just goes to show what a farce the Hell’s Angels have become. My cousin is rolling over in his grave. Repeatedly.
@JohnSF:
Thanks for the clarification. Obviously, I didn’t have my glasses on. But seriously, she seems determined to keep throwing petrol on the fire. Sigh.
@MarkedMan: To quote Benjamin Franklin: “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”
@SC_Birdflyte:
This is a quote applicable to a lot of different cases right now.
Engineer creates AI-powered roach-killing laser turret.
You want Skynet? Because this is how you get Skynet.
Guess the world will have to learn again the hard way that a) indulging in self-pity gets you nowhere b) allowing people with conspiracy theories to run everything ends up with all sorts of problems, and c) Mama Nature doesn’t care what you think.
It used to be that there was enough feedback from reality that people who started going down conspiracy rabbit holes or anything else which was Not True would either get immediate social feedback, legal feedback (law suits) or….end up dead, which is what happens when the physical world provides feedback.
Personally, my feeling is that we’ve indulged people acting like trolls for too long and allowed the concatenation of crazy via the internet.
The kids are alright:
@JohnSF:
Must have been. Bank of America’s walk-in exchange rate this morning is $1.0248 for the pound.
@JohnSF: And Truss seems to have doubled down on the crazy in her BBC radio interviews this morning.
Considering how much of Britain’s GDP is propped up by the valuation of the real estate market it seems to me the very last area you want to start throwing sticks of dynamite into is the area of rates for mortgages. Or is Truss imagining that selling off most of London to people who can afford the cash (a.k.a. Russians looking for anywhere outside Russia to invest and oil barons from Qatar) is A Good Idea?
Michelle_BYoung
Where’s the lie? ☠️
@grumpy realist:
Several people have pointed out that Margaret Thatcher was a lot more cautious than Truss’s pantomime version; waited until fiscal position was stabilised before cutting tax.
And had the backstops of North Sea Oil surging up to peak, nationalised industries that could be sold off, the massive political/economic gains from selling council housing to tenants at a discount, and the European Single market being put in place.
Janan Ganesh in the FT (paywalled) argues that, in her recklessness, Truss is more like Reagan.
But, she foolishly ignores some basic realities:
By the time Reagan came to office, the Fed had already done a lot of the work to put inflation back in a cage.
The USA is a continental scale economy; the UK alone is not.
Most important of all, the dollar is the international reserve currency, and beneficiary of the petro-dollar effect, with a virtually bottomless market for Treasury bonds.
Sterling has not been in that position since the 1900’s.
Ganesh’s final para:
@SC_Birdflyte: I can’t find a link but NPR had a report some months back on a town that was experiencing increased environmental events because of climate change. The mayor (supervisor) was a long serving, patient and reasonable guy who felt the time had come to start discussing how to deal with the inevitable. But real estate agents and some home owners realized that if it was discussed openly it would depress real estate prices, so they banded together and hired political consultants who ran a smear campaign against the guy and destroyed his reputation. Nothing personal, just business.
@JohnSF:
Specifically due to leveraging of UK pension schemes
FT Alphaville from yesterday is lovely reading
Now as unlike some of my cousins once removed, I am not British pension scheme exposed, this is just a fun read.
For those British pension scheme exposed, should really be calling for change of government, for this mad folly.
@JohnSF: Ganesh’s article is quite good, I think accurate on that Tory fringe self-delusion.
Also to note that Madame Thatcher’s moves were in an entirely different economic context, and of course enough of actual economic sense to properly understand the interest of the common market, rather than blundering reactionary romanticism about a mythical economic past in Empire that didn’t actually work…
The problem with ideologues is that they are blind to diminishing returns (and even returns going negative) on an idea or policy. Arguably Thatcherism was an appropriate tonic for GB of late 1970s malaise.
@grumpy realist: United Kingdom has gotten in essence a Tory Corbyn.
In a series of interviews on local radio stations, the UK prime minister insisted she would not change course on the economy, saying lower taxes were vital to stave off a recession. But a sell-off in sterling and government bonds resumed as she spoke.
@JohnSF:
A fundamental feature of TERF brain is they can’t shut up about anything ever and they are never wrong about anything ever.
I bet Joanne is hard at work on 4K page time of how a woman with stubble murdered the English* economy.
@grumpy realist:
I don’t think it’s necessarily that we coddled trolls, but that certain bad actors found that they could weaponize the loonies for their benefit. The problem is once weaponized, the nuts decided they wanted to run the show. Look at Paul Ryan or Kevin McCarthy, those two aren’t full on whacked out loons, but both are dumb enough to think they could steer the freedom caucus nuts to get what they want. It always ends badly for them and worse for us.
*I fully understand the difference between UK and and it’s various parts. English was intentionally was chosen.
**wooo! Edited to fix bad quoting!
Whenever I hear someone whining “bUt NoBOdy wANts to WorK” I wonder if it’s bosses like this horrible woman who are having trouble hiring. She deserves to have every one of these employees leave for a better work environment.
Florida CEO urged staff to work through Ian. Then she took it back.
It gets better…we see what’s important to her:
Yeesh. What a dreadful work environment.
@JohnSF: @Lounsbury:
I see that a visit to London is now on sale. The dollar and pound almost equal? That’s a huge discount to visit the UK. When I lived there in 96 it was almost 2-1.
1-1? That’s nuts. Never thought I’d live to see that.
@Jen:
“Whenever I hear that nobody wants to work/work hard.” I always mentally add in “for what you want to pay them. I figured that out as a kid in high school when farmers were bitching that no one wants to pick crops. I don’t understand why people think they are entitled to slaves.
I desperately need an assistant or an associate to take up some of the crap I don’t have time or want to do. But if I were to do that, unless I paid them less then minimum wage my nice comfortable salary would evaporate. All I’m left with is a mountain of work and the thrill of telling my partner that I want to procure exactly 12 clones of myself and watching her shudder at the implications of that.
@EddieInCA: Some friends of mine are taking a grand tour of Europe with their 4 children. They originally only planned to be in the UK for 3 or 4 days. I’ll bet they are discussing a longer stay now.
@EddieInCA: My husband now wants to go to the UK on vacation, using this logic.
My only question: will Scotch be going on sale soon? 😀
@OzarkHillbilly:
Oh, they’re anything but “silent” these days…
@JohnSF: The only thing I know about Truss is the amazingly awkward video of her announcing that she is going to China to open new pork markets.
She doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in that clip. It’s like the Job Bush “please clap” moment, but without the self-realization.
https://youtu.be/srHNcNoEJ9g
Oh, god, there’s more. I fear you are doomed.
@Gustopher:
Yes.
It’s quite horrifying.
Manages to make good old Theresa May, of blessed memory, seem positively chilled and spontaneously eloquent.
But her mannerisms are the least of it.
By all accounts, she has a mind that runs on rails, with only ambition, and membership-pandering, occasionally operating the points switching.
@Beth:
It’s GamerGate. It’s always GamerGate.
The stupidest, most banal complaints ramped up to stalking and violence. It became the template for the alt-right, and Trumpism/Q.
Somehow, the turning point in America was about “ethics in video game journalism”, which really meant that a bunch of incels had to deal with women who weren’t just pixels designed for their pleasure, and found the whole thing revolting.
@JohnSF:
All I can say is: I’m really looking forward to this week’s episode of Mock the Week. 😀
Just now right outside the office, I was handed a flier for a cable/paid TV plus internet service, which promised to carry all world cup games.
I was polite, and just said thanks and waited til I got inside to throw it in the trash. I didn’t even say “You know, I’d pay extra for a service that promised to carry no soccer soccer games at all, ever.”
@Mu Yixiao:
To quote Han Solo:
“Laugh it up, fuzzball.”
😉
Meanwhile, Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner slides in the stiletto:
I like Angela Rayner. 🙂
Steppin’ razor.
@Gustopher: The pork markets thing is just gold.
And good lord.
@grumpy realist: @JohnSF:
[cracker Being a Lefty Trigger Warning for Lounsbury] Is she a Tory? Doesn’t that answer the question?
@Jen: Nobody took this idiot aside and murmured anything about what she would be on the hook for if any of her forced-to-stay-at-work workers got hurt due to this? And that no, it wouldn’t fall under any liability insurance that she was holding?
Dumb bitch.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: No it doesn’t – puerile political tribalism apart, gets broader Tories wrong.
@Jen: UK visits have gotten materially cheaper and one does need the FX … dare I say “hard currency” now? … rather badly.
@JohnSF:
I’ll be honest: MtW (RIP) is my primary source for British political news. 😀
@Beth: “I desperately need an assistant or an associate to take up some of the crap I don’t have time or want to do. But if I were to do that, unless I paid them less then minimum wage my nice comfortable salary would evaporate.”
Now you’re sounding like what Luddite tells lawyers he knows when they ask him for advice on hiring staff. They normally respond “I just don’t understand why I can’t get a bi-lingual paralegal for minimum wage; it’s $15/hr now, you know. That should be enough.”
@Lounsbury: Okay. So who are the Torries telling her to STFU and why don’t they have a better press agent?
@Mu Yixiao: Better than a roach-powered AI-killing laser turret, which I assume a rival lab is working on.
@Mikey: All too true.
The new Innuendo Studios video seems relevant to this site’s usual divide of mainstream-lefties vs. progressives.
https://youtu.be/wCl33v5969M
The whole moderate-lefties don’t like to be reminded of their privilege and keep trying to win over the “respectable conservatives” rather than the progressive anti-racist wing, with minorities being used as pawns. It’s a bit over simplified*, like a lot of the Innuendo Studios stuff, but good.
I was reminded of their GamerGate and Alt-Right Playbook videos (which are excellent**), and wanted to see what they’ve been up to.
——
*: they lack nuance, and never address the fact that people are usually in multiple buckets at different times of the day, let along in their life.
And the current video misses people like me who acknowledge that we benefit from white supremacy, and want to tear it down, but at a non-revolutionary pace while resting confidently assured that we have so much privilege that we can afford to give up a lot of it and still be playing life on easy mode. I am a special snowflake combining the worst aspects of progressives and liberals!
**: someone here other than me used to love those, and shared links back in the day. Might have been Teve Tory (RIP)
——
ETA: copying links on my phone always gives me a bit of anxiety that I’m accidentally sharing a link to some Transformers video or something.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Actually, Truss and Kwarteng both seems to genuinely believe that their cargo-cult Thatcherism (or rather Reaganomics) can genuinely spark an revival of domestic economic potential via tax cuts, de-regulation and “unleashing free enterprise”.
What is striking is how much they repudiate the past dozen years of Conservative government policies.
They want to “run a risk with the fisc”, as it were, in order to put a booster under growth, which is then happily expected to wipe out the deficit.
Though some in the ERG camp would also welcome a crisis-enforced emergency public spending axe.
Here’s hoping they take Alex Jones for every penny he has, had, or ever will have. If he’s got any dreams? I hope they take them to.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Dynamics of the Conservative party, and exigencies of Parliamentary and Party system as found in UK.
The genuine “sell it all and damn the hindmost” crew are more likely to have been in Sunak’s camp (or Osborne’s, back in the day) than Truss’s.
The most dangerous thing about the ERG (who Truss has become the front for) is that they have a plan to “Make Britain Great Again”™ and they really believe it will work.
One key point: the Vote Leave crew, led by Gove and Dominic Cummings, and fronted by Johnson, always despised the ERG as boneheaded idealogues with no idea about a modern economy or political antennae.
Other key point: the Johnson purge of the “Remainers” took out a key Parliamentary core of the “Realist/One Nation” faction.
And also: Truss was not voted for by the majority of MP’s.
They voted Sunak 137, Truss 113, Mordaunt 105 then went to the membership, who went for Truss 57% to 43%.
But to VONC a PM of your own party is a career ending step for an MP; it is a non-survivable event.
UK parties are far more tightly disciplined than in the US, or in many European countries.
Just going to leave this here as Matt Bernius bait. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/29/prison-release-covid-pandemic-incarceration/
Speaking of political “non-survivable events”.
Latest polling YouGov/Times
Labour have a 33 point lead
Thirty! Three!
Lab: 54 (+9)
Con: 21 (-7)
Lib: 7 (-2)
Green: 6 (-1)
Ref: 4 (+1)
And mark you, this is before the interest rate hike, before peoples mortgages go up, before the energy cost rises are fully in place for consumers, before people start using energy at winter levels, before the annual pay rise comes in below price level, before people start looking at booking a holiday overseas.
So it’s not unrealistic to expect actual votes might not be far off 44 to 33 say; if so plugging that into a basic electoral prediction gives Labour a 350 seat majority.
LOL.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Who?
No idea what you mean by press agent. They certainly are speaking clealry and loudly to Financial Times.
So inside baseball for Grumpy Re: our property taxes.
I went to the Assessor’s office today and after being shuffled around a bit I was finally handed off to the person who drew the short straw and had to deal with attorneys today. I had a very pleasant conversation with them about what version of screwed my client is. After that, I was like, can I ask you an off the record question about when the tax bills are coming out. Her response was “Between the turkey and the tree.” I was like, so after the election. At that point she litterally put her hands over her ears, started backing away and shouted “WHAT! I CAN’T HEAR YOU. I’M LEAVING.”
Never change Cook County.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Yeah, just cause I understand doesn’t mean I don’t have to like it. Lol. I have hit on one potential solution to some of my manpower issues. I have a friend who’s like a brother to me. He’s had to take on lots of crappy Uber eats deliveries to make ends meet. I told him that I would pay him for piecemeal work on an as needed basis. I told him I would be just as abusive as Uber Eats, but I’d pay slightly better.
@JohnSF:
Just to clarify: an intra-party support for a leadership challenge or forcing resignation by Cabinet coup (as happened to May and Johnson) is very different from a Parliamentary Vote of No Confidence.
The first is an “internal” matter; it may earn you the wrath of a powerful enemy, or scupper you own chances (see Sunak re. Johnson) but it may be forgiven by the party in terms of your continuing to be an MP.
Voting with the Opposition on a confidence motion will get you booted from the party.
That means you can’t stand on that ticket for MP.
Unless you have very, very high levels local name recognition and personal support, and can get a local team up and running, you are toast at the next election.
Even if you win once, your chances of pulling it off twice are vanishingly small, unless you can arrange a party switch and win.
Or maybe get switched to a winnable seat. Possible; highly unlikely.
(I can only recall it happening once; apart from the special case of the SDP)
Generally speaking, VONC your team, your life in politics is over.
That’s a big step for a politician to take.
(Especially as a large number have the souls of weasels in the first place)
@JohnSF: Yes. The people who vote for FG believe crap like this, too. I’ve just run out of patience with them.
@JohnSF: IOW, you have to go along to get along so that the complaint that people who make the complaint I did above are not being fair to the whole is JUST. SO. MUCH. BULLSHIT.
@JohnSF: For those scoring at home, JohnSF is providing an example of what a hierarchical party with control of its label/nomination process looks like.
Trump is a moron but you know who are bigger morons? People who still do business with him
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Understand, I DO get that the choice is either 1) pick the least worse cohort and then hold your nose as you vote to support noxious policy choices or 2) get out of the game altogether. It’s similar to the issue of racism that @Gustopher referred to above. The system is so suffused with half-assed policy choices that mostly [Lounsbury Trigger Warning!!!] serve the interests of owners of capital that fighting for better economic policy becomes like fighting to defeat racism. We’re so enmeshed in the status quo that no alternatives exist in any practical sense. So, laissez les bons temps roullez!
Embrace the dysfunction, love the dysfunction, become the dysfunction.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: That reminds me of the headhunter who tried to hire me for a bilingual (Japanese/ English) patent legal position in Las Vegas with a salary of $45K…
(He probably understood that it was a ridiculous salary but his clients definitely didn’t. Hey, guys–if you want to hire someone away from a place like Chicago, you’re going to have to be competitive with Chicago. I talked with my office manager later and we both agreed that they would have to be offering $145K-$160K. Silly people. Wonder if they ever filled the position?)
@Beth: I’ll keep your information in mind. Roughly monthly I keep checking the relevant website and it keeps saying: “we don’t have the info yet.” So either Cook County has stashed all the data somewhere in a cellar until after the election or someone else is doing so for them…?
@grumpy realist: or it could have been a deliberately bogus attempt to search for a US National to justify a work visa…
It’s Baaaaaack! Gasoline over $4/gallon!
Just in time to haunt us for Halloween.
Gas at two stations in town jumped from $3.999/gal to $4.199/gal overnight.
Several other petrol purveyors are still at $3.999/gal.
One place that I drove by an hour or so ago was still $3.699/gal.
Just yesterday I pulled into the Kroger for a fill up after seeing the sign $3.699/gal. By the time I parked the pump said $3.999/gal. Fortunately I had enough gas points to get a 20¢/gal discount.
@Mister Bluster: Woodland, WA at the Safeway store had regular for $5.06 cash price. Credit is usually 1o cents a gallon higher.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:..$5.06/gal
There’s a Chevron not far from my brother in Phelan, California that is $6.69/gal.