A Few Shorters

I'm out soon, but let's catch up a little so hopefully I can do today's output in a single separate post late night. Also, it gives Dhalgren time to think of a reply to Megan going all Ann Althouse on him.

Did World War II end the Great Depression?:

The Great Depression indisputably ended during World War II, which is when the output gap closed. But was it causal? Like everything else about the Great Depression, it's really hard to know.

I'm stumped. What possible counter-narrative could she have in mind this time? War profiteering actually ended the Great Depression?
Oh, and "everything" about the Great Depression is "hard to know". Like, I assume, the causes, and whether Hoover and the Gilded Age really caused the crash. It was probably liberals and/or communists.

More on unemployment:

Interestingly, the argument I had with Dean Baker over makework jobs is a mirror image of the debate over the poverty rate, in which conservatives "prove" that there's no such thing as poverty because we really spend quite a lot on poor people, and liberals point out that it still sucks to be poor.

Heehee. Dean Baker kicked your ass in debate, Megan. You might want to not keep calling attention to that fact, even if you're pissed off about it. Also, it's not at all like that "debate".

Again, this is fundamentally a debate over what we're trying to measure. If the poverty rate is supposed to be a measure of how many people are trying to live on the puny incomes that fall beneath the line, then of course conservatives are right: it doesn't measure that very well.

Oh, it is like that "debate", in that Megan is wrong both times.

For shame:

As a self-appointed arbiter of what's proper, Megan is entirely in favor of attempting to use shame to coerce others to do what she wants them to do. She's not, however, willing to let anyone else do the same to her, because she is special and excused from needing to meet the societal norms she wants to push on others. This isn't cognitively dissonant, as much as it may seem so to the rest of us, because Megan considers lower economic classes to be different species.

A living wage:

Every figure you've ever seen about real income going down since the mid 70s for the vast majority of the country is just anecdotal evidence that bullshit scrubs away easily.

Sign of the times:

This just in; fuck farmers.

Home sweet home:

The administration's release talks a lot about "responsible homeowners", but very few responsible homeowners have payments that amount to 43% of their monthly income.

Yeah, fuck those people. They totally brought it on themselves, especially the ones who fell for predatory lenders.

And away I go.