U.S. Politics 2016: "You Suck!!!" "No, you Suck!!!"

[Jaxom 1974]

7 minutes ago, r'hllor's dirtbag lobster said:

So, this whole not draining the swamp thing... is this what the right wing means by "cucks"?

I suspect the hardcore Trumpers think the choices are wonderful...

[SerHaHa]

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Lord Eddard,

Advocating for people to not be shot for happening to be black doesn't make a organization a "radical racial group".

The same group which marches to the tune of "what do we want, dead cops, when do we want them, NOW".  Among many other calls and actions of violence.  That pretty much defines radical.  Violence. 

 

Even those 2 BLM women who got in Sander's face at his rally, lunging and screaming at him and others, uttering threats the entire time.  And that's a tame example.

 

Nice try though.

[Castel]

43 minutes ago, Altherion said:

They are always pursuing their interests in any case. Quoting from the link in your quote of Tywin et al.:

How is this good for anyone except the politicians? This is how we end up with "bridges to nowhere" and rule by corporations (who are the ultimate source of most campaign cash). The new way is not good, but the old way was also bad and going back to it is not really an option.

 

The problem is: what does the "new way" give or do? 

Like, really: what is it? What new freedom has it offered (from say..donors)? Cause I see little change in that regard. 

[OldGimletEye]

Just now, LongRider said:

@OldGimletEye you really need to steal this line, it's a beaut!    

LOL.

It's gonna be a supply side miracle!!!!

It's gonna be something like the fairy tales conservatives liked to make up about Jimmy Carter. It goes something like:

The very liberal Jimmy Carter (arguably he was pretty centrist) came into Washington and started regulating everything (actually a lot of deregulation started under Carter) and he was tax madman (although he was considering cutting taxes) and he caused rampant inflation (no blame LBJ if you like and blame Richard Nixon too, but Carter didn't start it) and then Ronnie came ridin in from the West and solved the inflation problem (actually it was Paul Volcker a Carter appointee) and then he implemented yuuge tax cuts that caused mornin in America (nah. it was mainly monetary policy. I believe even Martin Feldstein came to the same conclusion in the 1980s), proving the wonder of supply side policies! (well again it was mainly monetary policy mixed in with a little right wing keynesianism).

So now roll about 30 years later and it will be something like:

Barack Obama came into office and ruined the economy (although the housing market started sliding about the second quarter of 2006, well before Obama came into office). The recovery was slow under Obama cause he was another clueless Democrat and everyone knows that Republican Presidents do better with economy (not true. See Binder and Watson. Or fuck just look that the data on the St. Louis Federal Reserve) and because of his big spending (we actually needed more spending at the time). If Obama had just managed the economy like Reagan did, everything would have gone spectacular (well, the Federal Funds Rate was much higher back in the 1980s making monetary policy more potent.)

And then Donald Trump, with his awesomy awesome business experience came strolling in, and he fixed the economy that Obama ruined. (well even though unemployment was much lower in 2016 and the third quarter of 2016 had pretty good growth). Like Reagan, he implemented supply side tax cuts (which will likely work, if inefficiently because there is a bit of slack in the economy, although not as much as there was in the past), proving once again the awesomeness of supply side economics( well except of course if you ignore Kansas).

[LongRider]

What remains to be seen is if Trump will raise taxes seven times like St Reagan did.   Revive a little forgotten history. 

[Altherion]

In non-Trump news, Nancy Pelosi has succeeded in keeping her post as House Minority Leader. She won just over two thirds of the votes which is a smaller fraction than she ever had when vying for this position, but nevertheless still large and almost exactly what she predicted. The people who opposed her campaigned partly based on her fundraising:

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It wasn’t all just about angling for positions. Some of Ryan’s main supporters, the dozen or so who stuck their neck out to endorse him publicly, stressed the need to change the way the House leadership does business. Pelosi is a master fundraiser, and much of the logic for winning under her leadership has revolved around keeping up with Republicans in the money arms race. But what do they have to show for it?

“We’ve bought into the money game,” Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch said. “As Democrats, if you’re really representing the working people in this country, I don’t think you’re ever going to win the money game. That’s won by Wall Street, and we’re not naturally allies if we’re doing the right thing in the Democratic Party.” He gave credit to Pelosi. “She’s been able to tap into the donor class, she’s been able to do that really well,” he said. “But that’s not the game we should be playing.”

Given that they lost, it looks like the strategy for the House Democrats will remain unchanged.

[OldGimletEye]

Just now, LongRider said:

Don't agree with this at all.  Public officials have to have more transparency than private the public is looking at their gov't officials all the time to make sure that they are being above board and how the money is spent.  Sure, it's common for people to assume the gov't wastes money, and when that happens we the public hear about it.  But that's not always the case for private firms.  Don't fall for the 'privatization will always be more efficient that gov't' meme because the truth is more complex than that.

Here's one, and only one article about the pro's and con's of privatization.  It's a real mixed bag and doesn't always work or meet the same goals a gov't agency would.  But hey, like trickle down economics and supply side economics, it's GOP gospel so one should approach it with caution. 

 

full disclosure; I'm a state worker, but any proposed infrastructure job scheme would not affect me.

One thing I'd like to add to the conservative story that if we just turn everything over to our Galtian high feudal over lords everything well just be awesome:

When we think about the rise of modern capitalism as we understand it, the place where it likely started was England.

It's true that parlement was able to put significant checks upon the monarch's powers to waste money. But, it is also true that nobody in Europe could tax and raise finance the way England could.

England might have checked absolutism early, but it was arguably the most fiscally centralized state in Europe. And in the Eighteenth century it taxed and borrowed probably more than any other European nation. And it arguably became the most successful capitalist economy in Europe.

Dinecco has a paper looking at state spending and growth during the 18th and 19th Centuries I believe. He didn't have actual fiscal data, but used war time casualties as a proxy for state expenditures. He generally found that higher spending states had greater economic growth. Of course this isn't an argument that we should waste money on military resources that we don't need. Nor is it a case for long term fiscal irresponsibility.But, it suggest that in many cases the state can help to solve many coordination problems that private actors will not. And expend resources on high value projects.

Reagan once said that no nation spent it's way into prosperity or something like that. But, that assertion doesn't seem to be true at all.

[Yukle]

37 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Barack Obama came into office and ruined the economy (although the housing market started sliding about the second quarter of 2006, well before Obama came into office). The recovery was slow under Obama cause he was another clueless Democrat and everyone knows that Republican Presidents do better with economy...

They'll probably still be cheeky enough to say that he was too black to be president. I still haven't forgotten the "#it'scalledthewhitehouse" campaign, run by perverted racists, who complained that black people had no place in power.

I know it's not representative of the Republican party, I just can't understand why people got over that atrocious response to Obama so quickly. I think they should still be disparaging the people who participated, making their names prominent and perhaps cross-referencing them with prominent Trump supporters.

[Martell Spy]

What Makes Today’s America Different From the Country That Incarcerated the Japanese?
A conversation with a historian about the slow creep of discrimination, from the U.S. government to church groups

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/what-makes-todays-america-different-from-the-country-that-incarcerated-the-japanese/508967/

Republicans Can’t Replace Obamacare, But They Might Be Able to Coerce Democrats to Do It for Them

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/republicans-might-coerce-democrats-to-replace-obamacare.html

 

Don’t Be Fooled: Donald Trump Will Never Walk Away From His Businesses

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/donald-trump-will-never-walk-away-from-his-businesses.html

[Rippounet]

3 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

When we think about the rise of modern capitalism as we understand it, the place where it likely started was England.

It's true that parlement was able to put significant checks upon the monarch's powers to waste money. But, it is also true that nobody in Europe could tax and raise finance the way England could.

England might have checked absolutism early, but it was arguably the most fiscally centralized state in Europe. And in the Eighteenth century it taxed and borrowed probably more than any other European nation. And it arguably became the most successful capitalist economy in Europe.

Dinecco has a paper looking at state spending and growth during the 18th and 19th Centuries I believe. He didn't have actual fiscal data, but used war time casualties as a proxy for state expenditures. He generally found that higher spending states had greater economic growth. Of course this isn't an argument that we should waste money on military resources that we don't need. Nor is it a case for long term fiscal irresponsibility.But, it suggest that in many cases the state can help to solve many coordination problems that private actors will not. And expend resources on high value projects.

Reagan once said that no nation spent it's way into prosperity or something like that. But, that assertion doesn't seem to be true at all.

That assertion has been debunked over and over again. I understand only a small fringe of economists still pretend that it's true. Same of tax cuts for the wealthy. But the media does a very poor job of spreading the truth by allowing many people who I would call "false economists" (i.e. intellectuals who have a superficial background in economics but are actually being paid by interest groups) a large voice in the public debate and not confronting them when they very obviously lie to the public.

I love Ha-Joon Chang (from Cambridge) because he makes economics so clear to the average joe.

On spending: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/13/living-within-means-economic-labour-john-mcdonnell
Some facts: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/hajoon-chang/economics-facts_b_5511565.html

Most especially:

 

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7. Capitalism did best between the 1950s and the 1970s, an era of high regulation and high taxes

Despite what we hear these days about the detrimental economic effects of high taxes and strong government regulation, the advanced capitalist economies grew the fastest between the 1950s and the 1970s, when there were a lot of regulations and high taxes.Between 1950 and 1973, per capita income in Western Europe grew at an astonishing rate of 4.1% per year. Japan grew even faster at 8.1%, starting off the chain of 'economic miracles' in East Asia in the next half a century. Even the US, the slowest-growing economy in the rich world at the time, grew at an unprecedented rate of 2.5%. Per capita income for these economies collectively have since then managed to grow at only 1.8% per year between 1980 and 2010, when they cut taxes for the rich and deregulated their economies.

 

And some choice quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/95227.Ha_Joon_Chang

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“Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are -- a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

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“The best way to boost the economy is to redistribute wealth downward, as poorer people tend to spend a higher proportion of their income.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

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“The top 10 per cent of the US population appropriated 91 per cent of income growth between 1989 and 2006, while the top 1 per cent took 59 per cent.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

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“Since the 1980s, we have given the rich a bigger slice of our pie in the belief that they would create more wealth, making the pie bigger than otherwise possible in the long run. The rich got the bigger slice of the pie all right, but they have actually reduced the pace at which the pie is growing.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

 

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“Gore Vidal, the American writer, once famously described the American economic system as ‘free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich’.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity

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“why do we need to make the rich richer to make them work harder but make the poor poorer for the same purpose?”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User's Guide

If you don't know Chang yet, read his books. He's extremely clear and quite funny. His books provide a wealth of information, examples, history and quotes to exchange with anyone who has been fed too many lies by the false economists. Even if you think you already know what he's talking about you'll be surprised to find just how garbage the right-wing economic agenda is and how well-documented its failure is.

[Martell Spy]

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2016/11/political-future-of-america-generations-diversity-tensions-000235

America: This Is Your Future
What's the country really going to look like in 30 years? Get ready for older, more diverse, and new tensions about who gets what

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/bernie-sanders-where-we-go-from-here-w452786

Matt Taibbi Interviews Bernie Sanders: Where We Go From Here

 

The Day After: Obama on His Legacy, Trump's Win and the Path Forward

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/obama-on-his-legacy-trumps-win-and-the-path-forward-w452527

[Altherion]

1 hour ago, Martell Spy said:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/bernie-sanders-where-we-go-from-here-w452786

Matt Taibbi Interviews Bernie Sanders: Where We Go From Here

This is long, but worth reading. Here are a few snippets:

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After the election, you called the anger Trump connected with "justified." When did you first recognize that sense of discontent and alienation was big enough to have the impact it did this past year?
I've seen it for years. I've seen a media, which has basically ignored the declining middle class, that doesn't talk about poverty at all, and has no sense of what is going on in the minds of millions of ordinary Americans. They live in a bubble, talk about their world, worry about who's going to be running 18 years from now for office. Meanwhile, people can't feed their kids. That's something I knew.

Talking about those issues, seeing that they resonated, that did not surprise me. How quickly they resonated did surprise me. How weak the Democratic establishment was, and how removed they were from the needs of ordinary people, that also surprised me.

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Is there any way to read that except as a massive repudiation of Democrats?
No. I can't see how any objective person can. It speaks to what I just mentioned; we cannot spend our entire life – I didn't, but others do – raising money from wealthy people, listening to their needs. We've got to be out in union halls, we've got to be out in veterans' halls, and we've got to be talking to working people, and we've got to stand up and fight for them.

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In your book, there are a lot of moments where you say things like, "Look at products like the iPhone. These are American inventions, but they're not made in America anymore." Some people will say, "This is nationalism. Why shouldn't liberal-minded people care about raising the standard of living for poor people in China, in India?"
I heard them. We ran into that big-time from corporate liberals. Two things here. I would say there are very few people in the United States Congress who have a more progressive outlook than I do in terms of global politics and international politics. I am deeply concerned about poverty in countries around the world, and I believe that the United States and other major countries have got to work to address those issues. But you do not have to sacrifice the American middle class in order to do that. I find it ironic that the billionaire class says, "We're worried about the poor people in Vietnam, and that's why we're sending your job to Vietnam." That's the billionaire class talking.

He is right on nearly all counts. It will be interesting to see to what extent he will be able to steer the Democrats in his direction. I would guess not much -- the influence of money is quite powerful.

[Free Northman Reborn]

2 minutes ago, Altherion said:

This is long, but worth reading. Here are a few snippets:

He is right on nearly all counts. It will be interesting to see to what extent he will be able to steer the Democrats in his direction. I would guess not much -- the influence of money is quite powerful.

I don't understand some of the questions posed to Sanders there.

Is the criticism of so-called "nationalism" implying that there is some kind of moral imperative for a "liberal" US citizen to be glad when two jobs are created in China at the expense of one working class job in the United States? If so, that is just obscene. Surely a US politician is elected to serve the interests of US citizens. 

[mormont]

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

This is long, but worth reading. Here are a few snippets:

He is right on nearly all counts. It will be interesting to see to what extent he will be able to steer the Democrats in his direction. I would guess not much -- the influence of money is quite powerful.

Sanders sees what he wants and expects to see. The objective evidence that these voters went to Trump (or stayed at home) over economic issues is scant.

[The Anti-Targ]

11 hours ago, Altherion said:

Climate change is not likely to be a major factor on the same timescale: it should have some impact (storms, droughts, etc.) in the next quarter century, but the really big stuff comes later. I don't think the system will be completely new; a lot of the old aspects are extremely difficult to uproot and it's not clear what the replacement will be (that's why I think of it as a redesign). Also, I'm not as optimistic as you are: there are many ways to screw this up so that it stays broken for a long time.

Also, I hate to break it to you, but while we do indeed have 5 billion years before the Sun engulfs the Earth, we only have about a tenth of that before the Earth becomes uninhabitable by large mammals such as human beings.

 

Sure there are some fundamentals of human interaction which are immutable. But the institutions of society and they way they operate and interact have to fundamentally change. Like corporations cannot operate on the maximising shareholder return model. Government and governance won't undergo the sort of overhaul that took advanced societies from Monarchy and aristocracy to democracy, because the actual fundamentals of democracy are the right way for society to operate. But there are a lot of elements of current democracy that people think of as fundamental, but which actually are not.

Yeah, I know the sun is heating up with time and we really "only" have 500 million years or so before the goldilocks zone moves beyond Earth's orbit. Hopefully we'll be well and truly on the space colonisation train by then. We might even decide that roaming the universe in big space arks is better than settling on a planet.

[Martell Spy]

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He is right on nearly all counts. It will be interesting to see to what extent he will be able to steer the Democrats in his direction. I would guess not much -- the influence of money is quite powerful.

The policies are what truly  matter, not the amount that donors are involved in campaigns. I've been very concerned about money in politics in the past. But this election is quite the moment of clarity. Does is really matter if the Koch Brothers were telling Trump to cut taxes for the wealthy on a massive scale and place bankers in key Cabinet positions, or if he's just doing it for shits and giggles? To the degree that donors are forcing their will on Democrats and diverting from a focus on inequality, it's important, both morally and politically.

However, it's not nearly the same thing that is going on with the Republican Party, where the party basically exists to continually redistribute wealth upwards. Republican donors and politicians are a closer match, because they both pretty much agree that all non Defense spending needs to be cut at all times.

The whole centrist Democrat thing wasn't just donor service either. It was a strategy adapted during a very conservative time in this country. Part of the reason it wasn't abandoned is because it was working and winning elections. However, this whole approach has become increasingly unpopular in the party and Clinton's loss is likely to accelerate it. What's the point in it if it's no longer winning elections?

[Martell Spy]

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Sanders sees what he wants and expects to see. The objective evidence that these voters went to Trump (or stayed at home) over economic issues is scant.

I think we agree that it was a very close election and it was lack of turn out that lost it. I recall being shocked to learn Sanders was beating Clinton among young women. It really raised my eyebrows when it happened. Why did this happen? And could it have something to do with our depressed turnout in the general?

[Liffguard]

31 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Yeah, I know the sun is heating up with time and we really "only" have 500 million years or so before the goldilocks zone moves beyond Earth's orbit. Hopefully we'll be well and truly on the space colonisation train by then. We might even decide that roaming the universe in big space arks is better than settling on a planet.

Keep in mind that 500 million years is pretty much the entire history of multi-cellular biology. That far in the future it probably doesn't make sense to talk about "we" or "us." Assuming we don't go extinct, whatever form our descendents take is likely to bear little resemblance to us.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

8 hours ago, SerHaHa said:

The same group which marches to the tune of "what do we want, dead cops, when do we want them, NOW".  Among many other calls and actions of violence.  That pretty much defines radical.  Violence. 

 

Even those 2 BLM women who got in Sander's face at his rally, lunging and screaming at him and others, uttering threats the entire time.  And that's a tame example.

 

Nice try though.

That's a perfect example of taking a few extremists and claiming their actions apply to the entire group.  If you support Trump is that really a method that should appeal to you?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Tywin,

I suspect Haley has her sites on higher office.  She does need some foreign policy experience.