Current Affairs General US politics (ie, not POTUS related)

[Martin Alvito]

Pelosi rejects stock-trading ban for members of Congress: 'We are a free-market economy. They should be able to participate in that.'

Insider asked Pelosi about Conflicted Congress, an investigation that found 57 members of Congress and 182 senior staffers violated the STOCK Act.

www.businessinsider.com

Lovely

Tricky issue. We definitely don't want to see Congress flouting the insider trading laws. On the other hand, an outright ban on trading is a good way to ensure that no one with securities experience runs for Congress, and Lord knows the members broadly have little enough grasp of financial markets and economics as it is.

 

[TheBigIguana]

Tricky issue. We definitely don't want to see Congress flouting the insider trading laws. On the other hand, an outright ban on trading is a good way to ensure that no one with securities experience runs for Congress, and Lord knows the members broadly have little enough grasp of financial markets and economics as it is.

No one that has worked on Wall Street can run for congress? Not seeing an issue there...

 

[Martin Alvito]

No one that has worked on Wall Street can run for congress? Not seeing an issue there...

Somebody has to regulate them, and it's not enough to just know a put from a call. Congress needs to have enough expertise to actually carry out its oversight functions. They tend to fall short in regulating financial markets both because of conflicts of interest and because the members without conflicts don't actually understand what they're trying to regulate. The crooks write the loopholes into the laws, and the rest of the members aren't long enough on knowledge to perceive the loopholes.

Without the crooks, the members would accidentally write the loopholes in, or get snookered into writing them in by lobbyists and their ilk. What we need is a system that produces some honest cops that understand the beat.

 

[TheBigIguana]

Somebody has to regulate them, and it's not enough to just know a put from a call. Congress needs to have enough expertise to actually carry out its oversight functions. They tend to fall short in regulating financial markets both because of conflicts of interest and because the members without conflicts don't actually understand what they're trying to regulate. The crooks write the loopholes into the laws, and the rest of the members aren't long enough on knowledge to perceive the loopholes.

Without the crooks, the members would accidentally write the loopholes in, or get snookered into writing them in by lobbyists and their ilk. What we need is a system that produces some honest cops that understand the beat.

Have we ever tried a system that doesn't have Wall Street influence? I think we should try before saying it won't work.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Have we ever tried a system that doesn't have Wall Street influence? I think we should try before saying it won't work.

As long as politicians are taking campaign contributions whose sources they don't have to account for (via 501(c)) the system will have Wall Street influence.

We can debate a hypothetical endlessly without result. There isn't a resolution to this one. I'm saying that effective regulators need to understand what they regulate. You're more concerned about corruption.

At the end of the day, so long as the voters aren't holding the members accountable for the system they create, it doesn't really matter which of us is right about which approach produces a superior outcome.

 

[TheBigIguana]

As long as politicians are taking campaign contributions whose sources they don't have to account for (via 501(c)) the system will have Wall Street influence.

We can debate a hypothetical endlessly without result. There isn't a resolution to this one. I'm saying that effective regulators need to understand what they regulate. You're more concerned about corruption.

At the end of the day, so long as the voters aren't holding the members accountable for the system they create, it doesn't really matter which of us is right about which approach produces a superior outcome.

There are people who study these things and don't have Wall Street ties. It can be done.

 

[Martin Alvito]

There are people who study these things and don't have Wall Street ties. It can be done.

Academics like Warren rarely run for Congress, and almost never have overlap in their narrow area of focus with economic expertise. The ones that do are almost invariably law professors, which qualifies them to write the text of legislation but not to design it, if you can see the difference.

As an example, Warren knows little about markets, less about mechanism design and demonstrates her ignorance all the time through her policy proposals. She knows what she wants to accomplish, and they're noble goals, but she doesn't know how to get there.

I don't want the entire Finance and Banking committees in the Senate to be comprised of insiders, but I do want one or two people in the room that can tell the rest of them when something is a really bad idea that won't work from a practical perspective. It's not enough to hear that from experts in public testimony - they need to hear that in closed-doors discussions where decisions are made. It's not realistic to expect that we're going to start electing economics professors that are legitimate experts, so we're stuck with the next-best substitute.

 

[TheBigIguana]

Academics like Warren rarely run for Congress, and almost never have overlap in their narrow area of focus with economic expertise. The ones that do are almost invariably law professors, which qualifies them to write the text of legislation but not to design it, if you can see the difference.

As an example, Warren knows little about markets, less about mechanism design and demonstrates her ignorance all the time through her policy proposals. She knows what she wants to accomplish, and they're noble goals, but she doesn't know how to get there.

I don't want the entire Finance and Banking committees in the Senate to be comprised of insiders, but I do want one or two people in the room that can tell the rest of them when something is a really bad idea that won't work from a practical perspective. It's not enough to hear that from experts in public testimony - they need to hear that in closed-doors discussions where decisions are made. It's not realistic to expect that we're going to start electing economics professors that are legitimate experts, so we're stuck with the next-best substitute.

See you're approaching this from the standpoint of what is currently being done has some degree of effectiveness and I just wholeheartedly disagree with that. There is nothing that has to be preserved.

 

[Martin Alvito]

See you're approaching this from the standpoint of what is currently being done has some degree of effectiveness and I just wholeheartedly disagree with that. There is nothing that has to be preserved.

I mean, it beats Bitcoin.

A low bar, to be sure, but I do want some people in the room that know what has worked and what has not in the past, and why. I don't want it to be the majority, or anything approaching it.

 

[BlueTX]

What we need is a system that produces some honest cops that understand the beat.

So instead of "Defund the police":

Better cops, Better communities...
Better Congress?

Might be something there.

 

[Martin Alvito]

So instead of "Defund the police":

Better cops, Better communities...
Better Congress?

Might be something there.

I know, right?

CNN Exclusive: Jan 6 investigators believe Nov. 4 text pushing 'strategy' to undermine election came from Rick Perry

www.cnn.com

Looks like Rick Perry is the guilty party on the text advocating out-and-out ignoring the election results the night of. Makes sense - it looks like it's written about as well as you'd expect from a man that coultn't recall one of the Cabinet departments he promised to cut, then agreed to be in charge of it.

 

[BlueTX]

I know, right?

CNN Exclusive: Jan 6 investigators believe Nov. 4 text pushing 'strategy' to undermine election came from Rick Perry

www.cnn.com

Looks like Rick Perry is the guilty party on the text advocating out-and-out ignoring the election results the night of. Makes sense - it looks like it's written about as well as you'd expect from a man that coultn't recall one of the Cabinet departments he promised to cut, then agreed to be in charge of it.

We produce an amazing array of dimwitted pols in this state.

 

[Martin Alvito]

We produce an amazing array of dimwitted pols in this state.

My father has a story about lobbying in Austin for open container laws in vehicles back in the early '80s (pre-drunk-driving crackdowns) and being told by one of the legislators from the western part of the state that "Look, I have a whole bunch of constituents with a bunch of open road and nothing else to do."

About fifteen years later, I would find myself in Raleigh lobbying for .08 and vehicle seizures in the case of injury accidents after a drunk driver at .10 killed a classmate of mine, and a guy from the western part of the state with about the thickest accent you ever heard asked, "What about the wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiife?" He would go on to explain that he had constituents who only owned one car for their household, and he was hanging his opposition to .08 on the seizures portion of the legislation. Quality logic that.

 

[BlueTX]

My father has a story about lobbying in Austin for open container laws in vehicles back in the early '80s (pre-drunk-driving crackdowns) and being told by one of the legislators from the western part of the state that "Look, I have a whole bunch of constituents with a bunch of open road and nothing else to do."

About fifteen years later, I would find myself in Raleigh lobbying for .08 and vehicle seizures in the case of injury accidents after a drunk driver at .10 killed a classmate of mine, and a guy from the western part of the state with about the thickest accent you ever heard asked, "What about the wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiife?" He would go on to explain that he had constituents who only owned one car for their household, and he was hanging his opposition to .08 on the seizures portion of the legislation. Quality logic that.

Folks around here and in other large Western states used to measure the distance between cities by the number of beers one would consume in that time. Houston to Dallas was a six-pack drive. San Antonio to El Paso might require the whole twelve-pack.

I went to visit a mate while he was in college in Lubbock in the mid-80s. Couldn't buy any alcohol in the county. But no one gave a damn if you went just outside of the county to the strip of stores that looked like a mini Las Vegas of Booze and drank in your car all the way back to uni. Such a weird place I call home.

Very sorry to learn of your classmate.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Folks around here and in other large Western states used to measure the distance between cities by the number of beers one would consume in that time. Houston to Dallas was a six-pack drive. San Antonio to El Paso might require the whole twelve-pack.

I went to visit a mate while he was in college in Lubbock in the mid-80s. Couldn't buy any alcohol in the county. But no one gave a damn if you went just outside of the county to the strip of stores that looked like a mini Las Vegas of Booze and drank in your car all the way back to uni. Such a weird place I call home.

Very sorry to learn of your classmate.

Yup, that was more or less the culture. Big state is big. I think the guy in question was from somewhere in the vast wasteland between El Paso and Austin.

Appreciate the sympathy; it's been a loooooong time and I didn't know her all that well, truth be told.