CO-04 (Special Election)
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(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
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President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
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CO-01 (Denver)
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CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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90%
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(R) J. Sonnenberg
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(R) Jeff Crank
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(R) Gabe Evans
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State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
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20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
February 04, 2010 09:49 PM UTC
11 Comments
In an interview on the Mike Rosen Show today,the mayor said “a recession like this is really driven by people’s mental state.”
That must be the mental state created by massive job loss and a total lack of confidence in the economy.
what “confidence,” or the lack thereof, is? You very cleverly dissed…yourself.
in the economy isn’t just a “mental state”. It’s based on real data.
Mayor Hickenlooper believes that the recession is being driven by people’s bad feelings.
My lack of confidence in the economy isn’t because of bad feelings. It’s based on real economic facts.
Or Mike Rosen’s.
Out of context it makes Hick’s comment sound like Phil Gramm’s “mental recession” remark from the 2008 campaign. Of course, Hick isn’t McCain, and he knows a thing or two about economic matters.
But given HTAT’s record of posting distorted Republican talking points, I’m going to concur with your comment.
I’m pretty sure that’s the point Hick was trying to make.
Not that the recession is “Just all in our heads”
“lack of confidence” is “just” a mental state, and obviously so. It isn’t increased unemployment, for instance (the sentence makes no sense for a reason: “Lack of confidence is unemployment”), though it may be caused or contributed to by increased unemployment. Like most mental states, it is a response to non-mental external stimuli. But “lack of confidence” itself is very clearly a phrase indicating a mental state.
I’m not commenting on Hickenlooper’s statement, which I find completely unimportant, or on the causes of the recession, which is a complex issue meriting the in-depth discussions it often receives. I was, and am, merely commenting on a lame attempt at a partisan “gotcha!” that blew up in the getter’s face.
Let’s settle this, you are both correct. A recession is driven by both psychology and market forces. They go hand in hand. The housing market collapsed partially due to faulty perceptions of never ending house price appreciation and market mechanisms that promoted complicated/risky financial instruments such as mortgage backed securities (RMBS + and the next domino to fall, CMBS) and the media amplified the fear and severity which led to an overall economic collapse including the services industry, small business and government.
you’re completely right about the causes of recession. But that’s not what I was commenting on (see second paragraph in my post to which you responded). My comment was on a strictly semantic matter, something generally of limited relevance, such as when someone undermines his own argument by not understanding the implication of his own words. I never made any argument about the causes of recessions, so I can not have been either right or wrong on that point. 🙂
The challenges we face economically have very little to do with confidence and everything to do with reality; the reality of job losses and the housing bubble that continues its collapse with residential strategic foreclosures and commercial real estate foreclosures that are just the tip of the iceberg. We are in for some serious economic challenges and we do ourselves a disservice by listening to economists that refuse to consider reality in their mathematical models or their tried and false theories.
Hinkenlooper is idolizing the century old economic theory and talking points that are flawed and corrosive. As with Hinkenlooper it is beyond the comprehension of the American people that these economists are wrong and have always been wrong and furthermore don’t even believe themselves what they are saying. We have idolized economics, an ideological profession, as a science but whose agenda exists to help the middleclass accept that corporations are for our own good while dismantling any chance we have of a recovery. How can these demagogues be so mistaken and yet having so much power over our accepted wisdom?
First off there is no such thing as a free market or free market policies. With our taxpayer dollars, we PROTECT (get that tea baggers we are protectionists) most large corporations from competition. Because of our government’s infrastructure these protected companies’ lengthy patents are protected, compliments of our tax dollars. And through regulation we also protect the telecoms, the banks, the airlines, the defense contractors and big agriculture. And second economists’ mathematical models don’t consider reality; as in the models relied on by economics in academia don’t consider the very real and expensive cost of investments otherwise known as sunk costs when they talk about market equilibrium and the cost to produce one more unit being the optimal cost for a given product. Pleeeeze, are you for real?
When are we going to stop listening to these economic charlatans and realize they are feeding us deceit; deceit that have very real consequences in our flawed way of thinking?