Jimmy Carter post President life goal is almost complete

Politics
23

TANGENT

I was pretty young then but remember that the economy sucked, Carter’s hands off in the ME was a total failure, high unemployment and 18% COLAS were bankruped SS (Carter did nothing about it. The SS crisis magically appeared when he was gone). Inflation based wages and taxes hastened the US starting to import a lot of stuff and we had once exported.

In the midst of that runaway inflation (high prices) and its resulting poverty (people want stuff they can’t afford), an expanding group of economists, including such now obscure greats as Bob Mundell, Jude Wanniski and economics writer Henry Hazlitt began to gain traction. They stated that government intervention far grom being a cure for problems created by the market, increases demand causing people to snap up all the available "stuff,’ making prices higher in the process. Indeed, causing people to dump their college savings, max out their credit and artificially increase demand beyond what the public actually wants is often the specifically stated INTENT of government intervention.

With a number of Nobel Laureates to their fame, they stated that focusing on the supply-side of the VERY SAME equations economists were already using, showed that less government means MORE STUFF and LOWER PRICES. More stuff, lower prices, less poverty, an end to one year 18% COLA increases amidst declining SS revenues etc… American employers can afford to employ American employees who can afford to buy American made stuff. The preCarter days sound like an unrealistic fantast world.

Unfortunately perfectly valud supply-side economics, complete with its tight-money gold-standard lite policies got dumbed down into SOME tax rates are so high they actually reduce tax revenues, which got politicized and bastardized by my GOP falsely claiming that ALL tax cuts always and everywhere will create a Laffer effect.

It’s crying shame when politicians take ahold of valid supply-side economic science and bastardize it. Supply-side’s opponents are so obviously wrong and can, somewhat easily, be defeated. Even the Keynesians eschew the name and have re-styled themselves as hyphenated Keynesians, (neo-Keynesians, post-Keynesians etc.)

The demand-siders can be defeated much more easily than the charlatans who sold out real supply-side economics from the inside. It may take several generations before the truth and the trust, can be restored.

24

Henry Hazlitt. I recognize that name.

I can’t stand Austrian economites (that is spelled correctly).

There is no such thing as “intervention”. It is absurd for people to apply the label to things like the minimum wage, labor rights, environmental protection, and net neutrality while never using it to describe intellectual property, foreclosures, debt collection, enforcement of arbitration clauses, enforcement of non-disclosure agreements, enforcement of non-compete clauses, and land covenants.

25

Thank you for replying.
Point for recognizing Hazlitt!

He was neither an economist (technically) nor an Austrian (at all) though.

He was a newspaperman, specifically a columnist who favored free markets an felt artificially increasing demand was a dumb idea.

Picture a John Stossel of the 1930s and you won’t be too far off.

The Austrians loved him, but they are only one school of free-market advocates.
hat doesn’t

more later.

26

There were no blackhawks in the desert. He however was 100% responsible for launching a mission that had zero chances of success with equipment that wasn’t up to the job.

28

In the mid 70’s it was an uphill battle for even middle class families to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads.

Prices were rising so fast on basic goods we were living paycheck to paycheck just hoping to get by. It wasn’t the economy of today where people were throwing their money away on crap they didn’t need, runing up debts they couldn’t pay for toys.

It was a real struggle for just the basics.

I had for example to replace a pair of fencing pliers I’d paid 18.50 for in 72 in 79 and the same pair of pliers then cost over 80.00.

It was a really tough decade to get through, no matter how much money you made you just couldn’t stretch it far enough to make a living.

29

Imagine in 1976 the SS system had to pay out $100 here and a $100 there, then “suddenly” (4 years later) all those $100 payments are 45-percent higher!!!

Either the creators of SS predicted that way back in the 30s when they created social security, or, by 1981 Social Security woukd “suddenly” be on the verge of bankruptcy, and would “suddenly” have to fix it.

30

My aunts and uncles were buying houses and cars around then They were that age.

Imagine home prices, rents, cars, gas erc etc. all increasing in price 18% in a single year, 45% in four. Anyone here feel like buying 45% less house or 45% less car? 45% less furniture in your house? 45% less food.

Inflation doesn’t quite work that way, but that’s how they felt!

And of course if you’re trying get a home loan or a car loan, or student loan you are facing 18% interest rates. YIKES!

31

In 76 we bought a new home on a 20 year mortgage at 12.5% and we only were able to do that because my dad had excellent credit, and was a veteran.

We also got a hell of a buy on the place because it had been on the market for 3 years and nobody else could get approved that had applied.

Even at that we had to come up with 30% down to get a rate that “low”.

Inflation and interest rates were both completely out of control and then gas prices went nuts on us again making it even harder to get by. In less than a year farm diesel went from .12c to .60c/gal and then Carter’s idiotic Soviet Grain Embargo bankrupted half the farmers in the country basically destroying the small family farm.

32

(Music and movies were better)

I was in little league baseball and boy scouts at the time and lived it vicariously through my parents aunts and uncles. But . . . umm . . . things were so bad even my friends from LL and scouts, right alongside with knowing Stretch Armstrong and their Evil Knieval toys, could tell you what the prime rate was and how high inflation was.

I have to imagine seeing one’s kids grow up that like that puts a chill in a parent’s heart.

33

My dad drove himself nearly completely out of his mind trying to keep it all together for us. We were lucky, we had both a pharmacy and the farm and managed not to lose them both.

He worked 80-90hr weeks and us kids worked full time plus going to school to help out. If we weren’t in school we were working at the store, on the farm, or both.

From first grade on my brother and I would alternate days opening the store with dad before school, working on the farm, or going back in at five and working until the store closed at 8pm in the summer and 7pm in the winter.

My grandparents had it even tougher raising their kids through the Great Depression.

34

Not really disputing, but here’s a bit of trivia. By 1936, while the pillars of the New Deal were still stuck in courts (I’m not even sure they were called the “New Deal” until Roosevelt’s 2nd term hegan in 1937) the depression was technically over.

The nominal and inflation adjusted GDP had already returned to 1929 levels.

UNEMPLOYMENT was still high, near and on the way to 20%, but the depression was over for the 80% of Americans who kept their jobs.

In fact 1929 was the height of the economic boom, and by 1936 that same amount of “stuff” was being bought and sold, they same amount of income was being earned . . . . . only THEN it got divided 4 ways instead of 5.

My first town on Long Island, (Selden NY) was built then, as a vacation village. New Yorkers who kept their jobs, could afford everything they had at the height of the boom AND could afford a vacation bungalow in a country woods.

The men who built them, were sad hard cases, they worked 12 hour days, slept in tents and were paid a loaf of bread etc, because anything beats living under a bridge eating garbage, but for the OTHER 80% happy days were already here again . . . and surpassed.

Weird, huh?

35

Sorry for the length of that last one. I babble even more when I am tired.

36

Inflation wasn’t terrible then, the problem was that no one had any money to spend.

There’s good and bad in just about everything, and the good that came from WWII was it created the America that was the industrial giant of the world. Correspondingly it created a huge move towards industrialization and mechanization of agriculture which also put us in the position of leading the world by many times over as the leading agricultural producing nation on earth as well.

The two combined to make the US the unquestioned economic super power of the world.

Sadly, we keep choking off that amazing wealth creating machine year by year, regulation by regulation.

37

I disagree.

Inflation at even 10%/year freakin hurts bad. Remember not all employees get an automatic inflation adjustment in their pay and those who do get it after a year.

Imagine trying to save for college etc…

Now imagine the cost of US steel and cars rising at 10% a year, but the cost of foreigb steel and Volkswagens and Toyotas does not. It’s one thing if over the course of 40 years our industries die, workers grow up planning to work in other-than-steel-and-cars.

It’s another thing if your entire industry dies out from under you when your 10 -20 years into it.

And of course the overall measure of economic health is “what are the possibke trade-offs” between interest and inflation.

If the choices are 0-10, 5-5, or 10-0 the economy is weak.

When the choices were 0-36, 18-18 or 36-0, that is ghoulishly bad and normal people become doomsday preppers.

38

You’re misreading me. The context there was the depression era.

Inflation in the seventies was a killer, look back to the example of the fencing pliers.

Even though we were middle class we lived mainly on home canning, wild game, and meat we grew on the farm.

Fortunately living int he rural part of the country we had that option. People in the cities did not.

39

Agreed.

Except …“no one had any money to spend” over simplifies the depression, not wrong just oversimplified.

The traditional picture of the depression was hypothetically, unemployed men, standing outside a closed factory. They’d work for a pittance, (labor supply wasn’t the problem.) The mill is fully intact and operable (capital wasn’t the problem(, but no one had any money/desire to buy stuff the mill would produce. (lack of demand was the problem).
:point_up: again, not wrong, just oversimplified.:point_up:

Since 1936 GDP was the same (slightly higher) than 1929 GDP, at the height of the ‘unsustainable boom,’ by definition people had money and people spent it.

The unemployment rate however shows that people spent money in less labor-intensive ways.

Year Real GDP (2009 dollars)

1929 $1.057 T
1930 $0.967 T
1931 $0.905 T
1932 $0.788 T
1933 $0.778 T
1934 $0.862 T
1935 $0.939 T
1936 $1.061 T
Source: BEA, National Income and
via

40

I get it, I just didn’t feel like we needed to go back over it at length so yes I was simplifying.

By 36 the worst of it was over. A big part of that came from the “New Deal” and we were already ramping up war production both for ourselves on a very limited basis and in preparation to support our allies as Roosevelt was smart enough to see what was coming.

I have a long list of criticisms for Roosevelt but his management of the crisis and ability to see the scope of the coming war to do whatever he could to prepare for it was amazing.

Now he flat pissed all over the Constitution in numerous ways to accomplish both but he did a masterful job of it all the way around.

41

I bought my first house durig the Carter years.

The mortage rate on a 30 year fixed was 18.5% on a VA loan.

42

Must have been what, about 79/80?

1 Like
43

Tbh, Jimmy Carter is a much better representative for evangelicals.