Jump to content

U.S. Politics 2016: It Can't Happen Here


Mr. Chatywin et al.

Recommended Posts

Just now, Swordfish said:

Ohhh.. Even better. I don't know that one.  Same basic story?

Not really. It's more about accepting those that look differently than you. Or not to judge a book by its' cover. Weird looking mutant bird gets ostracized and bullied by the rest of the barnyard animals until it manages to save them all from a fox or a wolf or some other predator, if memory serves.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Not really. It's more about accepting those that look differently than you. Or not to judge a book by its' cover. Weird looking mutant bird gets ostracized and bullied by the rest of the barnyard animals until it manages to save them all from a fox or a wolf or some other predator, if memory serves.

Makes me hungry for Turducken.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

Correction: nobody cares as long as they are promised decent jobs and those promises are kept. I think you are drastically underestimating how central the economy (in the sense of the fortunes of ordinary Americans, not the usual averaging which ties the definition to the 1%) is to Trump's success.

But we just saw the largest median income jump in history in the Census Bureau report about a month or so back. Combine that with the continued  steady recovery in jobs and yet the average American either didn't care or ignored it. Will be interesting to see how much people pay attention when it becomes clear Trump was selling snake oil and they voted against their own self interests. I'm still absolutely gobsmacked that he managed to position himself as some sort of populist hero. That and the general sentiment of his supporters that he was honest and just told it like it is. Total disconnect between perception and reality there.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

17 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

OK, I'm gonna need your parents phone number.  This is unacceptable.

I was raised on something better. Don't be jealous!

18 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

There are many versions of the story.  I like the one where they all get eaten by the fox, but I was a weird kid.

Now it all makes sense!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, at least it's not Palin:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/2016/12/09/mcmorris-rodgers-trumps-interior-pick/95197748/

Also, more down to earth people will be advising Trump on the economy. Oh wait, I lied:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/business/dealbook/goldman-sachs-no-2-seen-as-a-top-economic-adviser-to-trump.html

@Altherion,

On a separate note, how do you think Trump's pick for Labor Secretary is going to go over with the working class people who got him elected, considering Puzder's against the minimum wage and he's the guy that wants to lead the charge on putting people out of work via automation? 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The assumption here is that the working-class people got Trump elected, AFAIK, that's not really true. Most of his support was from the republican core (IE: middle-upper middle class white people, with a higher-than-median income) Clinton failed to really energize "her" electorate more than Trump got a huge surge in popularity. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-08/a-better-theory-to-explain-financial-bubbles

Quote

In much of the economics profession, it’s still almost taboo to even consider this kind of human mistake. Most econ models are still based on rational expectations, the idea that people don’t systematically make errors when forecasting the future. This idea was advanced by many star economists of the 1970s and '80s, including the highly influential macroeconomist Robert Lucas. But in finance theory, economists have had more freedom to experiment. So a small but increasing number of papers are asking how markets would behave if investors improperly extrapolate recent trends into the future.

Rational expectations is often used cause it makes the the math simpler. Just stick a big fuckin E() operator before the variable of interest and carry on. I’m not sure though where mathematical tractability crossed over into religious fervor with some people.

Anyway rational expectations and efficient market hypothesis and all that jazz was pretty firmly believed, I’d argue, by “true conservatives” (and well maybe some more liberally minded people to be fair. But, hey, at least they didn’t cling to it like a conservative with a gun, worried Obama was going to take it away after hearing a fake news story, after it was pretty clear something went awry). Hence no or little regulation required!

And then of course, the wheels came flying off. Turns out that the "Bush Boom" didn't quite pan out.  Of course the fact that it didn't might have just left a little bit of egg on the face of some people.

Hence that is why they invented the CRA did it!!! story, I’d imagine. Although, I’ve never been sure how the CRA did it story every held in a purely rational expectations world, though maybe Rush Limbaugh explained it, and I didn’t tune in that day.

Anyway, it turns out that rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis may not be how things always work.

It’s a fuckin shocker, I know.

So why am I bringing this up? Cause if people don’t really price assets by rational expectations, then it makes the case for Dodd-Frank stronger.

But, under Trump it is going away.

But, perhaps, the good news is that we don’t have worry about the next financial crises anyway, as we’re all likely to die of heat stroke first.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, Tywin et al. said:

Also, more down to earth people will be advising Trump on the economy. Oh wait, I lied:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/business/dealbook/goldman-sachs-no-2-seen-as-a-top-economic-adviser-to-trump.html

Quote

He would probably have to sell his Goldman holdings to avoid conflicts of interest with his new role, which would normally generate a big tax bill immediately. But tax regulations allow executive branch appointees to roll the proceeds of such a sale into Treasury securities and defer capital gains taxes.

Now why would he do that? Nobody else is these days.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

But you know what? It really doesn't matter. Call the developing fetuses "adults" if you want. I would still support legal abortions with minimum regulation. If there's an adult human being whose life depends on his/her feeding tube attached to my stomach, I get to decide when or if I pull the feeding tube out.

Since the father is 50% responsible for the genetic material used to create that life, and also responsible financially and otherwise for it should it be born, shouldn't he have the same right to terminate that life, if you believe you have that right?  What's the difference between whether or not that life is inside your body or outside of it, it's still yours, and father's as well.  Why do you get a special right to execute it, while the other party responsible for 1/2 of the parts of creating it doesn't?

Quote

 

The Republican field was actually pretty strong this year, especially compared to prior years. We had Jeb Bush, a successful and somewhat popular Governor with a lot of financial backing. We had Rubio, a young, attractive up and comer with good demographics from a good state. We had the tea partyer Cruz. Any of those would have been a strong candidate in another year. 

Trump not only beat them, he beat them handily and fairly quickly. Now, part of that is because of how the republican primaries are built - winner take all systems when there are a LOT of candidates basically fall apart when someone is more popular than anyone else but less popular than the field. But that doesn't discount how strong Trump was. 

I don't know that he's the new normal in personality - but I think he's absolutely closer to the new normal for Republicans. I think you're going to see a lot more overt racism, a lot more nationalist fervor, a lot more overt speaking to white people, a lot more overt sexism, and far more combative systems between politicians. You already saw this quite a bit with the tea party politics; what this normalizes is no compromises, no matter what, because each side sees the other as basically evil. 

 

Well said.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The move by the Presidential Inauguration Committee to ask the National Park Service to bar mass protests after the inauguration (which the NPS has acceded to) is quite disturbing.

I'm not sure your interpretation of events here is accurate.  You may want to check your sources.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...