U.S. Elections: The Trumph of the Will

[lancerman]

24 minutes ago, TheKitttenGuard said:

News coming in that it is Tim Kaine is the VP pick.

Like I said, Warren as VP was a pipe dream.

[Altherion]

3 minutes ago, Dickwad Poster #3784 said:

Okay - but you stated that this was the only goal. What's the source? The auto bailout had the primary effect of keeping about 200,000 jobs in existence as the main goal. You believe that was an ancillary goal, right? If so, provide a source.

Furthermore, the other 5 health insurance companies (as well as United Health) have beaten the S+P 500 for the last 17 years barring one year, so putting in the ACA isn't a particularly good argument there. There isn't even strong correlation. 

The main thing you continue to fail to do is demonstrate that these were being done not to stop inequity. Which doesn't appear to be supported by anything. Shockingly the stock market also went up substantially during the FDR's New Deal - was that being done to simply boost stock prices and inequity?

I did not say it was the only goal, I said it was the primary goal. I do not sit on the counsels of the ruling class so I cannot tell you for sure what they were thinking. However, everybody has access to the results of their actions. Either the goal was primarily to improve the fortunes of the elites and they fully succeeded or the primary goal was to reduce inequality and they completely and utterly failed. This is not true of FDR and the New Deal.

[Kalbear]

7 minutes ago, Altherion said:

I did not say it was the only goal, I said it was the primary goal. I do not sit on the counsels of the ruling class so I cannot tell you for sure what they were thinking. However, everybody has access to the results of their actions. Either the goal was primarily to improve the fortunes of the elites and they fully succeeded or the primary goal was to reduce inequality and they completely and utterly failed. This is not true of FDR and the New Deal.

But...it did reduce inequality. Quite a bit. How are you measuring complete and utter failure? 

That said, things can have multiple goals at once. The ACA's primary goal was neither to improve equality or to improve stock prices - it was to give more people better  health care than they have now while saving the US money. Those were the stated goals. They had metrics to indicate if they were on target or not. And they actually have been! And have done even better than expected ,actually. The auto bailout was absolutely a measure to reduce inequality, because if 200,000 people lose their jobs that's going to make things more unequal. And it worked! It clearly can't be a complete and utter failure in that regard, either. Median income has been rising as well, though as swordfish says it's hard to say that policy x resulted in a rise of median y. Then again, it's hard to say that policy x resulted in an increase in inequality, either.

Under Obama the minimum wage increased, taxes on the rich increased, and then almost any policy that had anything to do with wealth redistribution was mercilessly killed by congress for the next 6 years. Again, you say that they should have done more - but you still have no suggestions as to what, and oddly you're somehow saying that the stock prices for the last 8 years are dependent solely on what happened in the first two years of the term. How does that work?

[TrackerNeil]

5 hours ago, Mudguard said:

The ACA goal is to increase health insurance coverage and not to address income inequality, and as Altherion points out, the wealth transfers are not just to the poor.  Overall, for health insurance to work, you need lots of young and healthy people to participate, and these people tend to be relatively poor, in order to subsidize the elderly sick, who tend to be relatively wealthy.  How this balances with the increase in Medicaid, which helps the poor, and subsidies to offset to cost of purchasing insurance for the poor is not clear.  

It might be clearer if the ACA had not been rewritten by the Supreme Court so that the Medicaid expansion was optional. Even as it stands, that was a massive transfer of wealth to the poor, who are the ones using Medicaid. In addition, the ARRA was also a wealth transfer measure in many respects, putting tens of millions more towards Medicaid, and a $25 billion subsidy of health care insurance premiums for the unemployed under COBRA. That measure also extended unemployment benefits, funded job training for disabled Americans, paid for school lunch programs and job training and Meals on Wheels...the list goes on and on. And yet the 111th Congress did little to advance the cause of equality? If none of these count, then what does?

[Altherion]

44 minutes ago, Dickwad Poster #3784 said:

But...it did reduce inequality. Quite a bit. How are you measuring complete and utter failure?

It's simple enough: consider the average incomes of the bottom 90%, top 1% and top 0.1%. Note that the recession itself struck the 1% and 0.1% particularly hard (look at the 2007 to 2009 drop), but they reaped nearly all of the benefits of the recovery (compare 2009 to 2014) so we're almost back to the levels of inequality from before the recession.

[Jaxom 1974]

2 hours ago, R'hllors Red Lobster said:

Who is that? Another 'speech wr

 

2 hours ago, Xray the Enforcer said:

Yo you keep my friend Mindy out of this goddammit. She's the only good thing (besides pizza and Wu Tang Clan) to come out of Staten Island.

Oh shit. That's hilarious. And Mrs. Jax's name...

[Jaxom 1974]

Can someone point me back in the direction of an article on Gary Johnson that was posted once upon a time  (I think). It illustrated how he wasn't nearly the savior Berners were looking for after Clinton secured the nomination. 

[Kalbear]

3 hours ago, Altherion said:

It's simple enough: consider the average incomes of the bottom 90%, top 1% and top 0.1%. Note that the recession itself struck the 1% and 0.1% particularly hard (look at the 2007 to 2009 drop), but they reaped nearly all of the benefits of the recovery (compare 2009 to 2014) so we're almost back to the levels of inequality from before the recession.

So...you're saying that the policies of 2009 directly led to the wage growth in 2014, but none of the policies from 2011-2014 did.

And that makes sense to you as proof?

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

I don't really see your point about GM stock prices.  As far as I understand it, they formed a new company and people who owned the old GM stock were SOL.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Kaine's fine. You don't need to take risks when you're in front. 

[Inigima]

So, does anything in this DNC email leak actually matter? Reddit is in a tizzy, but that doesn't mean much. Major "real" papers or news sites don't seem to be reporting on it.

[mormont]

Well, I imagine the people whose credit card and social security details were included in the leak think it matters.

Other than that, there seem to be some emails that suggest members of the DNC were dismissive of Sanders. I've seen people jump from there to the conclusion that the primary was rigged against him, but nothing in the emails I've read backs that up.

[straits]

I've got an unrelated comment to throw in. Has anyone seen this?

 

https://www.hillaryclinton.com/trumpyourself/

 

I'm assuming a number of people had to approve this segment of the website. Why would anyone think that a statement like "What has Donald Trump said about people like you?" is a good thing to say?

[mormont]

2 hours ago, Inigima said:

So, does anything in this DNC email leak actually matter? Reddit is in a tizzy, but that doesn't mean much. Major "real" papers or news sites don't seem to be reporting on it.

To follow up on this, I have now read a story about one of these emails from a Brad Marshall, which suggests getting someone to ask Sanders about his faith.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/22/email_indicates_dnc_wanted_bernie_sanders_asked_about_god.html

Quote

It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.

That's the first I've seen of someone behaving in a way that's undeniably out of line, actively seeking to intervene in the contest in a way I would assume is at the least inappropriate for a DNC official. Marshall is, rather weakly, trying to suggest the email doesn't refer to Sanders but it clearly is about him.

[TrackerNeil]

2 hours ago, mormont said:

Well, I imagine the people whose credit card and social security details were included in the leak think it matters.

Other than that, there seem to be some emails that suggest members of the DNC were dismissive of Sanders. I've seen people jump from there to the conclusion that the primary was rigged against him, but nothing in the emails I've read backs that up.

Oh boy...something to keep the flame burning for another ten years. It won't matter that none of this much affected how Democrats voted; to some, the very fact that Clinton won the primary is itself evidence that the primary was rigged.

[Altherion]

5 hours ago, Dickwad Poster #3784 said:

So...you're saying that the policies of 2009 directly led to the wage growth in 2014, but none of the policies from 2011-2014 did.

And that makes sense to you as proof?

No, that is not what I am saying -- in fact, I have no idea where your first statement even comes from. Let me simplify it for you: the wages of most Americans have been stagnant from 2009 to 2014 (and in fact for much longer than that, but let's just focus on this). This is true whether you consider the mean wage of the bottom 90% (which increased by less than 1%) or the median household wage (which decreased by slightly over 2%). On the other hand, during the same time interval, the mean wage of the upper 1% grew by 15% and that of the 0.1% grew by 24%. That is why inequality has increased from 2009 to 2014.

[Altherion]

2 hours ago, Inigima said:

So, does anything in this DNC email leak actually matter?

I think the religion one is the best people have found so far. There's also this one wherein the DNC Communications Director (Luis Miranda) replies to an email containing an anti-Sanders article with "Let's get this around without attribution" and this one wherein they consider weaving a couple of the Sanders' campaign mistakes into "a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess." The latter doesn't happen because "the Chair has been advised to not engage." Advised by whom, I wonder?

[lancerman]

2 hours ago, Inigima said:

So, does anything in this DNC email leak actually matter? Reddit is in a tizzy, but that doesn't mean much. Major "real" papers or news sites don't seem to be reporting on it.

It depends on what is in there once the media has time to sort through it and find whatever the juicy bits are. It's like 20,000 emails that just came out the other day. Republicans are sorting through it as we speak.

[DunderMifflin]

Most of the damaging ones so far are about just trying to stop Bernie from taking any Hillary votes. Not exactly groundbreaking news, but just some concrete evidence of the rigged system most already know about.

There's a couple of bizarre ones, one looks as if the Hillary campaign sent checks to DNC. Another equally bizarre one about a fake Trump ad.

 

Then there's the much broader conspiracy that Russia is trying to manipulate the US election.

 

I'm all about conspiracies, I'm like 2 notches below David Icke but some of these are even shocking to me.

 

[Inigima]

1 hour ago, DunderMifflin said:

Most of the damaging ones so far are about just trying to stop Bernie from taking any Hillary votes. Not exactly groundbreaking news, but just some concrete evidence of the rigged system most already know about.

I mean, that's bad enough, isn't it? The DNC isn't really supposed to have its thumb on the scale.