Which is the perfect encapsulation of his entire worldview.
Americaâs yield curve has inverted again - a sign that bond investors are concerned to hear that US factory output is shrinking.
The yield on 10-year Treasuries is now 1.59%, compared to 1.6% for two-year Treasuries.
Typically the longer-dated debt would trade at a higher yield, giving a better rate of return to make up for the risk of lending for longer.
US factory sector suffers first contraction since 2009
Newsflash: Americaâs factory sector is shrinking for the first time in almost a decade â a sign that the trade war with China may be hurting.
Data firm Markit has just reported that its US manufacturing PMI has fallen to 44.9, down from 50.4 in July.
This is the first time since September 2009 that this PMI has dropped below 50.0 â the point that separates expansion from contraction.
He wonât be pleased to hear that two Fed policymakers - Kansas City Federal Reserve President Esther George and Philadelphia President Patrick Harker - have told CNBC they donât see the case for additional interest rate cuts following the centralâs bank quarter-point cut in July. More here.
Tim Moore, Economics Associate Director at IHS Markit explains what it means:
âAugustâs survey data provides a clear signal that economic growth has continued to soften in the third quarter. The PMIs for manufacturing and services remain much weaker than at the beginning of 2019 and collectively point to annualized GDP growth of around 1.5%.
âThe most concerning aspect of the latest data is a slowdown in new business growth to its weakest in a decade, driven by a sharp loss of momentum across the service sector. Survey respondents commented on a headwind from subdued corporate spending as softer growth expectations at home and internationally encouraged tighter budget setting.
âManufacturing companies continued to feel the impact of slowing global economic conditions, with new export sales falling at the fastest pace since August 2009.
âBusiness expectations for the year ahead became more gloomy in August and remain the lowest since comparable data were first available in 2012. The continued slide in corporate growth projections suggests that firms may exert greater caution in relation to spending, investment and staff hiring during the coming months.â
Huckabee is joining Fox News. I guess the whole becoming the governor of Arkansas thing didnât pan out.
Iâm amazed anytime anyone with a career to ruin takes a job in the WH these days. Like all Trump operated businesses the talent is distinctly fifth rate.
Question?
Does StephGrisham like Beer!
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Thereâs the empirical data you need to know that nuking the filibuster is the correct play.
Nuking the filibuster is not optional. Allowing it to stay is a direct choice to get nothing done. Itâs very popular with Senators of both parties because it makes them powerful and it makes them rich. Thereâs a lot of lobbyist money to soak up for blocking stuff from happening after all.
I donât care what we have to do to get rid of it. Itâs evil and it needs to go. Any Dem Senator thatâs against removing the filibuster is more or less indistinguishable from Mitch McConnell in practice. I donât give a damn about what you say your positions are, its extremely obvious exactly who you are if you donât enthusiastically help remove the filibuster.
This message is not extreme and it needs to become mainstream among Democratic voters ASAP. We need to primary every single Dem Senator that stands in the way of filibuster reform. Itâs literally the best litmus test I know of for whether someone has the countries best interests at heart or not.
I think youâre looking at this in a vacuum. If the Dems get the Senate by 52-48 in 2020, and nuke the filibuster and pass a bunch of good legislation great. But if the American people reject that legislation, and the GOP flips both House and Senate in the next cycle it could be a huge problem.
There are definite strategic reasons why it should not be nuked (think of what these monsters would do with an easy passage of everything they like like that), but the only reason Mitch is wanting to keep it is because he knows that once the GOP loses power (2 cycles of House/Senate/Prez losses) it will be gone forever. So, if rules master Mitch wants to keep it, it means it should go. The only reason he hasnât nuked the filibuster already is because heâs afraid of what would get passed on his side of the aisle.
Didnât he refer to Netanyahu as âyour prime ministerâ when speaking to some American Jewish group at one point, like heâs the Pope or something? Thatâs quite a telling slip.
Yeah thatâs going to be the argument from the Senators that want to keep it. They are 100% wrong.
See the really toxic thing about the current political meta is that nothing ever gets done. This is because itâs much easier to prevent the other side from doing anything they want to do than it is to get something done yourself. This allows politicians from both parties to run on platforms that have no practical basis in reality⌠because what they are running on wonât ever get done.
What makes this toxic is that it allows politicians to run platforms that are designed to 100% appeal to partisans on their side without any regard for whether those ideas would actually be good policy⌠Because what matters is how popular they are with their own partisans before it gets done without any regard for how popular it would be with the larger public after it gets done.
This is enormously beneficial to politicians and incredibly detrimental to voters. It also more or less nullifies the whole purpose of having a representative democracy. Your representatives are supposed to get elected and then go and make decisions for the country on the basis of what would lead to good results. What we get instead is a carefully focus grouped set of policies that probably wouldnât work but sound good to a specific slice of the population.
Iâd love to see the GOP get their agenda enacted⌠as long as it could be rolled back quickly and efficiently the next cycle after the backlash against the results of their actual policies.
Itâs also hugely beneficial to the GOP because the Senate is already a very anti democratic institution that heavily overrepresents rural low population states that are very red. Making it so that you need 60% of that body to get anything done makes the prospect of enacting any major legislation basically impossible.
The Democratic pro filibuster arguments are just incredibly dishonest IMO and exist to allow âmoderateâ (really corrupt corporatist) Democratic Senators to keep their absurd level of power (and thus earning potential) to block stuff.
If you win a majority in both houses and the presidency you should be able to get stuff done. Full stop. If the stuff you do proves popular you should get reelected. You shouldnât be able to run on how great your ideas would be if it werenât for those dastardly Republicans/Democrats and win reelection ad nauseum without ever moving the ball while the status quo becomes more dystopian by the day.
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It goes beyond all that strategically when you consider that the GOP can enact its biggest policy priorities in reconciliation and avoid the filibuster. They passed the tax cut with 51 votes and they could have repealed the ACA with a simple majority, as well, if not for failing to keep their caucus together.
The president can unilaterally deregulate through the executive, the Senate can pass tax cuts in reconciliation, they can rip apart Democratic priorities through reconciliation, and most of their other priorities are about blocking changes rather than implementing new laws.
As a result they currently have a landscape where:
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They have an electoral advantage in the Senate due to the fact that it over-represents rural areas.
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They need a simple majority to pass all of their legislative priorities.
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The opposition needs 60 votes to pass most of their legislative priorities.
Thatâs why Mitch doesnât want the filibuster nuked, and itâs why itâs the only major norm he has ârespected.â
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Yeah, I agree with a lot of this, but the kinds of things the filibuster canât be stopped on right now are things you wonât begin to know the impact of until 4 or 5 years down the road (big agenda items).
If they decide they want to indefinitely detain babies Guantanamo style, vote for it, and the President likes it, even if the courts might think itâs unconstitutional, it will probably go. I think the negative of what the GOP can do will cost thousands and thousands of lives.
You can go back and look at the ACA as the only real data you have for this. In 2010, the Tea Party fringe group gained an enormous amount of power just running against the ACA. There was just enough power to stop them by the Democrats, but it was a war that was waged until, well, 2017. Now people will be astonished if the ACA is taken away, even those who hate Obamacare. When I would argue with people about it, I would say no one should go bankrupt because they canât pay their medical bills, and pre-existing conditions shouldnât keep you from being able to buy affordable insurance. That meant nothing to them then, but you can sure bet it means something to them now.
The problem is the staggered election cycles in the Senate. Every two years, there could be a complete rollback of major agenda via voting if the American people donât want it. This would very obviously make for a more voter involved government, but could also cause a great deal of harm in the kind of environment we live in right now. Thatâs not even mentioning how short sighted and stupid so much of our current voting population is.
Still, just go to this default position. If any GOP member, former GOP member, or independent says the Democrats âshouldâ or âshouldnâtâ do something, just go the opposite. Youâll be right a huge amount of the time, because they never have our best interests at heart, itâs always theirs.
Iâd like to get rid of the filibuster, but doing so does scare me. Look what happened with the SC when it was gotten rid of for that (and now weâre effed for 30 years unless these people die earlier than expected). In my opinion, getting rid of the filibuster allows the country to be more polarized not less polarized. It also would likely make government wildly more inefficient and expensive going back and forth every few years. If we get the Senate in 2020 or 2022, I definitely think it should be done, but I think a lot of thought should be given to the ramifications of that if things go really wrong.
Not getting anything done ever is way more dangerous than passing something that doesnât work and never having to talk about doing that thing again (because now it polls like shit because itâs been tried and failed).
Our current setup is killing 40k people a year with guns and 60k people a year with opiates⌠and thereâs no chance that weâre going to fix either of those things with the filibuster in place.
I think that like anything big some bad stuff could result, but the filibuster is very clearly awful for everyone⌠and a big part of why voters are checked on on politics is because nothing ever gets done. It drives down turnout a lot when thereâs no realistic shot of anything happening.
The only reason Mitch isnât nuking the filibuster every possible time is because they donât have the House and he doesnât want to blow his load for no reason. He did this already for judicial appointments, right?
The federal budget contains around 30bn Euros as contribution to the EU budget. There are no direct transfer payments to other Euopean countries. All the other payments in relation to the Euro-crisis like contributions to the ESM have been taken care of until 2014 afaik. They definitely are not part of the federal budget.
Lots of people are calling on the German government to increase spending. My favorite was a New York Times article last week that compared tea party deficit hawks to our deficit-ban âSchuldenbremseâ (literally debt break). To paraphrase it âWhile tea party deficit hawks turned out to be hypocrites as soon as the Obama era ended, Germans turned out to be stupid enough to really mean itâ.
But that is not really the point of my remark concerning the Trump tweet.
If you are a progressive and against nuking it that makes basically no sense for the obvious reasons that Cuse pointed out. I mean JFC how can you not understand that with a filibuster there is roughly a 0% chance of any progressive policy becoming law in our lifetimes. Nunnehi is basically saying âbut what if we actually pass something progressive and then get destroyed in the next election!!!â. My response to that is who fucking cares at least we will have accomplished something which would be a first. I for one think we should try actually doing something rather than just cowering in fear of consequences we donât even know will happen.
Even if we win the Senate, the House and elect Warren or Bernie it is very likely nothing that we spend all our time talking about wanting will actually happen without nuking it. So why in the world would we possibly ever be against that. Itâs just more of the same Washington Generals level thinking that has us where we are today.
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But he didnât do it to the legislative filibuster even when they had the House and it would have been in their short-term (two years) interest. The reason is that the legislative filibuster is strategically advantageous to the GOP.
Just put it this way⌠Go through the next few election cycles and pick winners/losers in th Senate and attempt to get the Democrats to 60 votes. Good luck.