New York Times, CNN, others barred from press briefing

[Pat Mustard]

Actually it wasn't Germany under the nazis never returned to the economic levls of 1928, and for the ordinary Germans levels of prosperity pretty much stayed at Depression levels.

The nazis had fucked the German economy by 1937, at the very latest.

That's not entirely true.  The nazis used the arms build up as one vast and unending stimulus package to restore Germany to full employment.  They did succeed in returning Germany to near full employment by 1938.  So for those Germans who were out of a job during the depression, the standard of living certainly improved under the nazis.

Hitler returning Germany to full enployment is a myth. Even putting aside the fact that there were large numbers of people in concentration camps from 1933 onwards, he reduced Jewish, Roma and African Germans to a state of permanent unemployment, he made it very hard for women to either get or hold jobs outside of working in agriculture (on the family farm) or domestic service (with the number of women taken out of the workforce there were less people employed in 1938 than in 1933).

And the final nail in the coffin was the mass near slave labour press gangs used by the nazi government to pad out employment figures, working millions of men into illhealth and early graves building the autobahns for nothing more than they'd have gotten on the dole.

Mass workfare and padding of numbers does not a full employment economy make.

[Mr Greene]

Btw, this looks suspiciously like trump's plan to tank the long term economic efficiency and productivity of the American economy through an autarchish effort to erect trade barriers, create wasteful jobs at home in areas where Americans are far less efficient than their foreign counterparts, while adding temporary boost to demand for economic activity by an inflationary arms buildup and Un-financed infrastructure program.  

Hitler was willing to trash the fundamental underpinning of German economic efficiency because he wanted to make Germany ready to fight a war of conquest at the earliest possible time, and if he wins that war he could simply pillage the rest of Europe afterwards to make up for the long term loss of German economic productivity.

What is trump's plan to make up for the long term damage to American economic efficiency resulting from making American economy reliant on those things which other countries do better and therefore Americans shouldn't do at all, while trashing the rationalizing and wealth generating trade?   Does he plan to invade and pillage Mexico?

Somehow it wouldn't surprise me to see him confiscating the wealth of muslims and latinos.

[Anomalocaris]

There were 6 million unemployed in Germany in 1932.  

The number of concentration camp inmates in Germany before 1939, while very large by the standard of political repression, was very small by the standard of impact on the economy.  In 1939 there were less than 10,000 people incarcerated in the camps.  The number of inmates didn't really rise very steeply until after 1940.   A large percentage of the Jews were removed from major professions under the nazis, but the total number of Jews living in Germany in 1932 was less than a million.  So the removal of Jews from employment didn't come close to offseting the increase in employment overall.

The mass mobilization for public works project nonetheless created employment, although at the cost of inflationary pressure.

The number of women in the workforce in Germany was never very high before 1939.

The Large number of mostly foreign slave labor incorporated into the German economy was largely a wartime phenomenon.  It was largely inapplicable to pre-1939.   Incidentally, impressed foreign slave labor is a phenomenon made necessary by the existence of near full normal employment.  It is not a thing used to pad employment figures to create the impression of full employment.

So the fact is the nazis did create a large net increase in employment Between 1933 and 1938.  But they did not create a large sustainable increase in net productivity.  So Germany was staring at renewed inflation again by 1939.  Had Hitler not started a war, Germany would likely be back in a severe economic crisis by 1940-1941.

Again, what the nazis did with the economy between 1933 and 1938 bear a striking resemblance to what trump is proposing to do and what the supposedly "conservative" GOP is pivoting instantaneously to embrace.  Short of a war, what is trump's plan to deal with the inflationary pressure and reduction in overall productivity of American economy that comes with his contempt for trade and his atavistic employment formula?

At the bottom end, for a few years, the scraps may be spread a little more evenly, but so will the poverty.  The net impact of moving jobs back to America is to make those uncompetitive workers work again for a while, but make the economy less efficient by making those things the economy ought not to be doing represent an ever larger proportion of what it does.  It also makes daily cost of living of those on the bottom of pay scale who have jobs higher because American made refrigerators and iPhones are not better or has more utility than those made in Mexico or china, they just cost more while offering nothing more.

In the long run, it is pretty clear the growth of national economy will decline due to loss of trade, embracing of make work projects like the wall, and injection of inefficient jobs that should be better done by other countries back into the US.  It seems inconceivable that even those fat cats who supported trump would continence any reduction in their inflated share of the national economy.   Would the billionaires accept a long term loss in the growth of their wealth?  Probably not.  What they would insist on is an even greater share of the nation's total wealth to offset the reduction in growth rate in the nation's total wealth.

So those idiot trumpomatic morons in the blue state should know what trump is offering them is in effect a path to working harder on things that's not worth doing while taking a ever smaller share of a smaller pie.

[I_am_not_mafia]

This puts the whole thing about Fake news and barring mainstream media into perspective. And it's also extremely worrying. It's a long read but I had real trouble putting my tablet down every time the boss walked by at work.

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network