Jimmy Carter and Hamas

[writing irish]

Finally, I am familiar with Carter's Windfall Profits Tax, which went though in 1980 and is generally considered a failure. It didn't bring in as much revenue as its proponents thought it would and it's reasonable to think that it contributed to a shortage of domestic oil.

However, the Windfall Profits Tax is an entirely different matter from the price control issue. I'm guessing that they got muddled in your brain at some point. Making a mistake about economic news from almost 30 years ago is hardly something worthy of scorn, but you manage to inspire scorn anyway by spouting inaccuracies with all the gravitas of Moses descending from Mount Sinai.

Fact. (thunderclap) Not opinion, fact. (lightning flash, thunderclap)

You know, if you wouldn't place yourself on such a high pedestal, you wouldn't splatter fail all over the board every time you hit the ground.

 

[The Big Ragu]

WI, I never claimed Jimmy Carter was the father of price controls. You are confusing energy crises, and bringing what Nixon did in 1971 or 1973 has nothing to do with Jimmy Carter's feckless policy in 1979. They are TWO DIFFERENT discussions. Calling me wrong because I didn't muddle presidencies and shift the conversation to Nixon is ridiculous.

You'll get no argument from me. Price controls were bad idea when they were instituted by Nixon. They were also a bad idea when they were Carter's immediate response in 1979. What Nixon did was actually worse and had longer-reaching effects. But I wasn't having that discussion, so to be sarcastic and call me wrong for not giving a history of energy policy throughout the 1970s, when i am having a conversation about Jimmy Carter and 1979 is ridiculous.

Once again, though, even with your shifting the conversation and muddling 1973 and 1979, you are wrong. Carter proposed removing price controls AT THE END of his administration. It was typical Jimmy Carter: "A little too little, a little too late." It was actually Reagan who deserves the credit on this one. He removed all price controls on oil (and the whacked system that had come into place in which not all crude was priced the same). He did this in 1981. Carter was flailing away at the end, and his proposal was a response to the fact that inflation was out of control and he didn't have a clue about what to do about it.

Once again, facts are facts. When Carter came into office, the price of a barrel of crude was $14. When he left it was $35. This wasn't ENTIRELY Carter's fault. And I don't have the inclination to give you a history lesson you are going to ignore. I might bore Spnited, too. But his "energy policy" was a mess on every level and made things worse. Among other things, it include, an $88 billion synfuels subsidy program, which was enacted and amounted to $88 billion Pished away.

The guy was living in la la land, which was why things became such a mess. In the malaise speech I keep linking to, he suggested that high oil prices weren't the problem. It was American's fault for their tendency "to worship self-indulgence and consumption." That is how he came up with his conclusion that Americans suffered a "crisis of confidence." It probably never occurred to him that their president was a major source of it.

His energy policy amounted to putting solar panels on the White House and putting a wood-buring stove in the White House. Reagan got rid of both of them -- as he did the price controls (sorry, Carter was NOT the president who did this, despite some rhetoric at the end of his presidency when he was flailing away at an inflation problem) -- and allowed the market to deal with the fact that oil is a fixed commodity, we can't control the price, there is a great deal of demand, and therefore prices are going to be a function of supply and demand. Reagan was lucky because OPEC fell apart, so there was plenty of supply in the 80s, and demand actually spiked off a bit, so prices were relatively low. But it wasn't any batship presidential policy--including a half dozen of Carter's crazier ideas that never saw the light of day--that could do that. It was the marketplace.

Carter never understood that. If you want to discuss the energy crisis of 1979, which was where we WERE--and how Carter made it worse--I am happy to. If you want to muddle history, this will drag all over the place. And I don't have the time right now, as fun as it is.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

Jesus Christ, he's at it again.
This is the point where any discussion with this guy goes spinning off the rails. He knows what he knows, facts be damned, and if you don't agree with him, well, you don't know history, even though this guy writes as though he's never picked up a history book in his life. WI demonstrates that he's simply wrong about the price controls. Even provides a handy chart. And then the discussion becomes "Well, Carter didn't do it fast enough." We get a song and dance about the "malaise" speech again. (Carter's approval rating actually went up -- albeit to 37 percent, immediately after the speech.) And, of course, the "marketplace," which is never wrong, and never subject to private manipulation, only that of the government. "Muddle histroy." From this guy.
Wowser. Again.

 

[JR]

WI, I never claimed Jimmy Carter was the father of price controls.

course Carter did the dumbest thing imaginable to pour gasoline on the fire (no pun intended) -- price controls, which created one of my earliest memories -- lines around the block and rationing for people to fill their cars with gas.

Well, actually you did.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

WI, I never claimed Jimmy Carter was the father of price controls.

course Carter did the dumbest thing imaginable to pour gasoline on the fire (no pun intended) -- price controls, which created one of my earliest memories -- lines around the block and rationing for people to fill their cars with gas.

Well, actually you did.

This is a four-word post.
I predict the greatest response-to-post comparative word count in the history of SportsJournalists.com should be arriving shortly.

 

[The Big Ragu]

WI, I never claimed Jimmy Carter was the father of price controls.

course Carter did the dumbest thing imaginable to pour gasoline on the fire (no pun intended) -- price controls, which created one of my earliest memories -- lines around the block and rationing for people to fill their cars with gas.

Well, actually you did.

JR, What you quoted isn't me saying anything of the sort. I NEVER SAID that Carter was the president who first instituted price controls on oil. Never. I never would have, because I am as critical of the failed policy of Richard Nixon (and subsequently Ford and Carter who didn't end the price fixing and the Kafkaesque pricing that had different barrels of oil costing different amounts based on political backroom dealing) as anyone on earth.

But Nixon's price controls, and the problems they created, have nothing to do with the conversation that had been going on on this thread. I'd be happy to talk about Nixon, if that is what the thread had been about. But that is 1973, not 1979. And that is muddling the conversation we were having. We were talking about Carter in general, and that somehow devolved into the crisis in 1979 and Carter's response. And Carter's immediate responses were several fold. First we cut off all imports from Iran (no criticism of this). Then he instituted more price controls as a short-term solution. Then he gathered a bunch of economic advisers and started flailing. Then he made that speech, where he said, "OK, we should get rid of all price controls... but it's the oil companies that are gouging us, so we need to tax the hell out of them." In between, he had all kinds of batship ideas that luckily Congress didn't sign off on. I could dig up a chronology of exactly what he did and how it made things worse, but as I said, the bottom line is exactly as I typed it. The price of a barrel of oil was $14 when Carter entered office. It was $35 when he left office. How much of that was actually Carter's fault is open to some debate. But he has generally been acknowledged as a failure who made things worse and *was* responsible for a chunk of that -- the skewed sample of people who dominate this board aside.

 

[The Big Ragu]

WI, I never claimed Jimmy Carter was the father of price controls.

course Carter did the dumbest thing imaginable to pour gasoline on the fire (no pun intended) -- price controls, which created one of my earliest memories -- lines around the block and rationing for people to fill their cars with gas.

Well, actually you did.

This is a four-word post.
I predict the greatest response-to-post comparative word count in the history of SportsJournalists.com should be arriving shortly.

Someone takes four words to post bullship? Sorry that I can't dispell it with four words.

How's this for four words: You're a swell guy.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

WI, I never claimed Jimmy Carter was the father of price controls.

course Carter did the dumbest thing imaginable to pour gasoline on the fire (no pun intended) -- price controls, which created one of my earliest memories -- lines around the block and rationing for people to fill their cars with gas.

Well, actually you did.

JR, What you quoted isn't me saying anything of the sort. I NEVER SAID that Carter was the president who first instituted price controls on oil. Never. I never would have, because I am as critical of the failed policy of Richard Nixon (and subsequently Ford and Carter who didn't end the price fixing and the Kafkaesque pricing that had different barrels of oil costing different amounts based on political backroom dealing) as anyone on earth.

But Nixon's price controls, and the problems they created, have nothing to do with the conversation that had been going on on this thread. I'd be happy to talk about Nixon, if that is what the thread had been about. But that is 1973, not 1979. And that is muddling the conversation we were having. We were talking about Carter in general, and that somehow devolved into the crisis in 1979 and Carter's response. And Carter's immediate responses were several fold. First we cut off all imports from Iran (no criticism of this). Then he instituted more price controls as a short-term solution. Then he gathered a bunch of economic advisers and started flailing. Then he made that speech, where he said, "OK, we should get rid of all price controls... but it's the oil companies that are gouging us, so we need to tax the hell out of them." In between, he had all kinds of batship ideas that luckily Congress didn't sign off on. I could dig up a chronology of exactly what he did and how it made things worse, but as I said, the bottom line is exactly as I typed it. The price of a barrel of oil was $14 when Carter entered office. It was $35 when he left office. How much of that was actually Carter's fault is open to some debate. But he has generally been acknowledged as a failure who made things worse and *was* responsible for a chunk of that -- the skewed sample of people who dominate this board aside.

The defense rests.
Call me Kreskin.
Oh, and when we were talking about "Carter" and the hostage crisis, and you were demonstrably full of Fail on the historical details of the episode, you simply stopped responding. It "devolved" because you stopped talking about something you knew nothing about and then started talking about something you know very little about. Which is an improvement, I guess, but it leaves unanswered the fascinating question of why "bringing the hostages home alive" is an insufficient metric by which to measure success or failure in that episode.

 

[The Big Ragu]

Nah. I'll call you a jackash. Five words. Must be true.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

I am grieved.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

And "generally been acknowledged as a failure"?
Well, with some others, maybe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_United_States_Presidents#Scholar_survey_results
And there seems to be some dispute about these "prosperous" times in which we live, especially compared to The Carter Years, in which Every Bad Thing was invented.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-04-21-bushrating_N.htm?csp=34

 

[JR]

When you say, "Carter did the dumbest thing imaginable to pour gasoline on the fire -- price controls" you're not just implying that Carter instituted it, you're stating it as fact. Or maybe you don't actually understand English as she is wrote.

You're like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. First you deny it and then try and cover it up with some cockamamy bullship baffles brain windbaggery. (For further evidence see: Canadian health care; unions destroyed the auto and newspaper industries; NAFTA created tariffs).

Now, if history tells us anything, you'll go back and hide under the kitchen table.

Oh, and anyone who says Carter is the worst president in our lifetime was either never around during Carter or has been asleep for the last eight years.