Warren Buffet speaks common sense; alarms most Republicans

[Fake Boris]

The deficit is irrelevant to this discussion. If raising taxes on them closes the deficit, fine, but since it doesn't alter the total quantity of goods and services and since it doesn't redistribute any of those goods or services it cannot actually increase the real wealth of any people.

I don't understand.

A: Deficit, X amount of goods and services.
B: No deficit, X amount of goods and services.

Why would you take A over B ?

[giblets]

I don't understand.

A: Deficit, X amount of goods and services.
B: No deficit, X amount of goods and services.

Why would you take A over B ?

How does the deficit make people worse off?

[Fake Boris]

Are you joking?

[giblets]

Are you joking?

I'm not taking a position on whether deficits are bad. I'm asking for you to explain how it makes people worse off.

[BlackCat]

Uhmn, they have to pay higher taxes ?

[Ben Kenobi]

Well I see the "Ben Kenobi is wrong" meme has started.

[rah]

It never really ends.
and your consistency is amazing.

[notyoueither]

Interesting theory, but I think that it would demand an extremely intelligent person to be able to impersonate an imbecile year after year without any faults. Therefore he must be for real despite the drawbacks it makes on humanity

My impression is that he has gotten significantly worse over time.

He also expressed a growing alienation from his community around the time of his conversion. Increasing irrationality may indicate that he has become unhinged.

[C0ckney]

kuci, i'll respond to the other stuff later when i have more time, but really...

The price of food rises only because the wages of the poor are expected to rise. If those expectations are mistaken the price will fall again; if those expectations are correct the rise in price will be efficient. The prices can't stay high indefinitely unless real people actually spend more money on those goods.

are you seriously saying that rises in prices of basic goods do not make the poor worse off? obviously in theory this might happen if wages also rise by the same amount, but you need to do more than state the obvious here i'm afraid. aeson has pointed out that people in hi 3rd world country suffered because prices rose and wages did not. i can tell you now that in my 3rd world country (again not the poorest) the same thing happened, prices rose and people made do with less, cut back on things etc. if even if you don't want to take our word for it, it's clear that higher prices, leading to lower standards of living, were one of the factors leading to the unrest in the middle east and north africa.

maybe kuci could have stopped the whole arab spring in its tracks if he'd only explained how everything was cool because wages would go to cover those things people now couldn't afford...

[Ben Kenobi]

He also expressed a growing alienation from his community around the time of his conversion. Increasing irrationality may indicate that he has become unhinged.

That was 6 years ago. Are you sure it isn't just because you hate the Catholic church?

[BlackCat]

Are Kuci for real ? I mean, claiming that price on food goes up because it's expected that poor people gets richer ? Are he trying to compete with Ben ?

[Kuciwalker]

are you seriously saying that rises in prices of basic goods do not make the poor worse off? obviously in theory this might happen if wages also rise by the same amount, but you need to do more than state the obvious here i'm afraid. aeson has pointed out that people in hi 3rd world country suffered because prices rose and wages did not. i can tell you now that in my 3rd world country (again not the poorest) the same thing happened, prices rose and people made do with less, cut back on things etc. if even if you don't want to take our word for it, it's clear that higher prices, leading to lower standards of living, were one of the factors leading to the unrest in the middle east and north africa.

maybe kuci could have stopped the whole arab spring in its tracks if he'd only explained how everything was cool because wages would go to cover those things people now couldn't afford...

Short quick answer: absent some sort of sinister global monopoly on the production of food, the price of food can't rise unless the number of dollars being spent on food actually rises or if some kind of external circumstance (bad weather, etc.) reduces the supply of food. Since most food isn't even a very storeable commodity it is hard even for futures prices to cause a rise in food prices based only on expectations of future demand.

Since people who aren't poor spend a much, much smaller portion of the marginal extra dollar they earn on food (and since the rich people who are theoretically getting all of these benefits from QE spend almost none of their marginal extra dollars on food, and aren't numerous enough to have a big impact anyway), the only explanations for rising food prices that remain are 1) a bunch of poor people got a lot more money and are now spending it on food (quite plausible given economic growth in the developing world) or 2) some natural disaster resulted in smaller harvests, etc.

QE obviously doesn't cause #2; inasmuch as it causes #1, how is it possibly a bad thing? Some specific poor people who didn't start earning extra money are worse off, but lots of other poor people who did earn extra money are better off.

[notyoueither]

Evidence that incomes of at least a large number of 'poor' people increased greatly would help.

[BlackCat]

I'm happy that Kuci has explained how and why food prices goes up and that we can ignore such things like production costs (oil prices etc).

Actually, in the Kuciverse we could easily reduce the price of food by making people poor (that is poor people need to get poorer, not the rich ).

[Dinner]

He's for real and generally pretty smart but wrong in the details of this specific example. The cost of inputs for agriculture are going up (petrol based fertilizer, insecticides, pesticides, fungicides, transportation costs, costs of equipment, etc...) so that's one reason costs have been trending up, some products have been hit by bad weather (floods in China, drought in Russia and Australia, cyclones in India & Australia) so that's another reason certain items have gone up, government policy is driving up prices as well (40% of the US corn crop is now converted to ethanol, at a lose, in order to make the corn lobby happy), and then finally demand is up. It's not really the expectation of increased 3rd world demand so much as it is real measurable increases in 3rd world demand especially in China and India; they're importing vast amounts of just about every food stuff you can think of where as both were more or less self sufficient just a decade ago.