What Could the Republicans Do to the Economy that Could Be Worse than Obama?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

He has followed the Japanese model, and, as a result, we should expect the Japanese result: twenty-plus years of stagnation.

1. It's better than the Russian model.
2. You're aware that the effect of the Lost Decades on actual living standards for most people in Japan has been less than dramatic, right?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's less that it made no difference to living standards and more that surprisingly many people were disinclined to care as much as one might expect.

The conspicuous consumption in Japan in the eighties didn't quite become locked into the national perception of what standards of living should be, at least not to the extent that it did in the United States. People certainly liked having loose cars and fast women at their beck and call (I'm not sure why exactly), but the cutbacks in the nineties actually became more or less permanent even when the economy on paper started to improve; this was seen during the early-to-mid-00s recovery period as frugality and playing safe rather than inherently a problem.

It's damaging to Japan's economic standing in the world and to pretty much all relevant balance sheets--there would be no sense denying that--but from the perspective of actual Japanese people, particularly younger people who for obvious reasons don't have a particularly rosy view of life in general, it has more in common with some sort of strange neo-Kamakura wabi sabi ideal introduced to supplant the now-impossible neo-iki of the eighties.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

He has followed the Japanese model, and, as a result, we should expect the Japanese result: twenty-plus years of stagnation.

1. It's better than the Russian model.

The failures of command economies to efficiently allocate resources, and, financial bubbles popping in market-oriented economies are different in kind. Had every Japanese company gone bankrupt, their factories would still be there.  Had the USSR collapsed, the factories would still be there, but, they couldn't produce output at a proper rate.

I said 'Russian', not 'Soviet'. I meant 'Russian', not 'Soviet'.

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And, you're aware that their national debt has ballooned to achieve nothing, right?

When their day of reckoning comes, and, it will if they continue on their deficit/stimulus path, Japanese living standards are apt to decline.

They should have taken the pain. Sure, a lot of Japanese companies would have failed. But, they came back from being fire-bombed to ashes, and, they could have come back from a financial meltdown.
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Serious question: Have you ever studied Japan at all?

They did take the pain. That's what Takeshita popping the bubble before it popped on its own was. Their policies since then haven't been particularly good but Japanese people don't socially construct 'living standards' the way you or I would and the Japanese economy is structurally different to the American one, because Japanese society is structurally different to American society.

The main crisis facing Japan is its birthrate, not anything economic.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Lol, Obama's tax cuts.

Republicans, you are marketing geniuses. Absolutely love it!

The baseline was for the tax cuts to expire. The policy change from the baseline was to extend those cuts. Obama signed those cuts into law. He owns them.

Even though he didn't want them and only gave them away to your side as a bargaining chip so that you would ratify a comparatively uncontroversial arms treaty and allow gays into the military like three-quarters of the country had been asking you to?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Lol, Obama's tax cuts.

Republicans, you are marketing geniuses. Absolutely love it!

The baseline was for the tax cuts to expire. The policy change from the baseline was to extend those cuts. Obama signed those cuts into law. He owns them.

Even though he didn't want them and only gave them away to your side as a bargaining chip so that you would ratify a comparatively uncontroversial arms treaty and allow gays into the military like three-quarters of the country had been asking you to?

But that's part of the problem too: we spent the entire month of December passing an arms treaty with Russia and allowing gays in the military instead of passing a 2011 budget. That lead directly to some of the chaos this year in Congress.

And btw.. Obama was going to cave on the Bush tax cuts the same way the GOP was going to cave on cutting Planned Parenthood funding in the budget debate earlier this year. In each case, the poltical cost of making the opposite decision would have likely outweighed its political value.

I know, I know. It's still idiotic for Bob to refer to them as 'Obama's tax cuts'.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Lol, Obama's tax cuts.

Republicans, you are marketing geniuses. Absolutely love it!

The baseline was for the tax cuts to expire. The policy change from the baseline was to extend those cuts. Obama signed those cuts into law. He owns them.

Even though he didn't want them and only gave them away to your side as a bargaining chip so that you would ratify a comparatively uncontroversial arms treaty and allow gays into the military like three-quarters of the country had been asking you to?

If you have excuses for the fact that he owns them, so be it. Regardless of any excuses offered, Obama owns the current tax rates.

Because you say he does. Got it.

I, on the other hand, like most people who aren't batsh**t insane onanistic hacks, say that Addison Mitchell McConnell Junior, for better or for worse, deserves most of the credit or blame for the current tax rates, and hence 'owns' them as much as anybody 'owns' anything in politics.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Hmm. My background is in language, literature, and culture, and I'm currently doing a lot of work with the Genpei Wars, so I might be a little inured to a forward-looking perspective right now. There isn't much that can happen to Japan that will be as bad as or worse than the Genpei Wars (I realize this is a bizarre perspective to take, but if you'd recently watched Atsumori for the first time...).

For what it's worth, the new Prime Minister, Noda, who was the old (for given values of 'old') Finance Minister, is (or is at least perceived as being) one of the more competent people to navigate Japan's structural problems. I really do think that the birthrate and how fast the population is aging is a bigger problem than the debt, not in the sense that the debt isn't a problem, but in the sense that the aging population is make the debt very real, much more so than it would be otherwise, for the reasons that you articulated.

(Noda also comes from an impoverished background by Japanese standards, roughly comparable to Joe Biden's, which may affect his outlook.)

Also, there's a profound crisis of political leadership in Japan in general. They've had seven Prime Ministers in as many years.

Nakagawa, the Finance Minister who killed himself shortly after leaving office, was considered highly competent and had personal problems, namely heavy drinking, which was also what led to him resigning.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Serious question: How stupid do you think I am in asserting that you are asking a serious question?

Obviously not as stupid as you in fact are. Again: have you studied Japan, asshole?

There's a reason I'm willing to talk on a relatively high level with Wonkish1 and not with you. Can you guess what it is?