U.S. Politics: Gar Nicht Trump's Traumschiff!

[DMC]

6 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

Like can McConnell just decide that the judiciary just submits articles of impeachment and then the Senate votes but refuse to permit any oral arguments?  

He can do almost whatever he wants.  Could put a chihuahua up there next to Roberts to bark in proceedings.  I'm not entirely opposed to this, btw.

6 hours ago, Paladin of Ice said:

Giuliani, I feel, would get on the stand and blow the entire administration to pieces while he thinks he's giving the perfect defense. Republicans might even agree to put him on because they think they can get him to be the fall guy all by himself.

It's tempting to get Bolton up there too, because I'm sure he has no loyalty to this admin, but if he actually wanted to testify and say anything meaningful he would have simply done it instead of asking the court to block it.

I know all the arguments for why one shouldn't investigate a prior administration criminally, but in this case I think an exception has to be made. When these guys are out of power, every single high ranking member of the Trump admin has to swing for their actions.

Yeah, it's very difficult to anticipate what Giuliani's testimony would look like, but he can very easily be cast as the fall guy regardless, which is another reason why such efforts are rather futile.  Bolton, again, while I think that could be compelling, I just don't trust him.  He is still, somehow, highly respected and even revered among the neocon jackasses.  If he submitted particularly damaging testimony, all that "legacy" he clings to would be washed away, or at least drowned out.  I agree that there are valid reasons to continue investigating this after Trump leaves office.  Iran-Contra is precedent for doing so.

4 hours ago, Fez said:

Point being, people are obsessing too much over the present and doing that logical fallacy (I forget the name) where they assume that whatever is currently happening is the way that things always have been and always will be.

Obviously this point is true generally.  But I don't think it's fallacious to expect there not to be much movement in public opinion when it comes to Trump.  There's a ton of (dare I say every) reasons to adopt that assumption.

4 hours ago, Altherion said:

I agree with you, but if this is true, then it tells us all we need to know about the nature of these proceedings as perceived by the Democrat leadership: this is nothing more than a political show and the time is coming to clear the stage so that a different political show can take place in January.

Or they simply recognize the reality of the situation in that public opinion is not going to moved and thus any attempts to provide more evidence to the feckless GOP Senate are completely pointless.

4 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I’m not sure that’s a great comparison, because Hillary was still a part of the establishment and her supporters were always going to come around. That’s not the same with Sanders’ supporters.  They were the outsiders and had no reason to uphold party loyalties.

Well, it's pretty clearly the best comparison we got since presidential primaries were nationalized in 1972.  Kerry and Dukakis wrapped up the nomination by Super Tuesday.  Bill Clinton's only threats - Tsongas and Brown - went away rather quietly.  80 and 84 are interesting examples, but the former was dealing with an incumbent mired in the Iran Hostage Crisis and the latter led to such a landslide in the general election that it's hard to say anything would have helped Mondale.  Even if you ignored the issues of comparing it to the GOP's primaries, there's not a lot there either.

Anyway, I don't think Hillary being more establishment makes 2008 a poor comparison - just the contrary.  It makes it more likely her supporters would move to the GOP candidate, and they indeed did at higher levels than Sanders supporters in 2016.  But still, the impact was minimal.

4 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

That said, I’m not surprised the data is inconclusive, but that’s because this is more about theory than statistics.

I've read a lot of papers on how primaries affect general elections.  (BTW, most use Congress as the population under study.)  Written a couple myself, recently helped a colleague on one that is now published.  The theory sections are always damn short, because the logic isn't exactly groundbreaking.  You don't need a formal model to demonstrate the validity of the premise that tougher primaries may hurt the nominee in the general election.

[Ormond]

6 minutes ago, DMC said:

He can do almost whatever he wants.  Could put a chihuahua up there next to Roberts to bark in proceedings.  I'm not entirely opposed to this, btw.

 

Gracious, what do you have against chihuahuas?

[DMC]

5 minutes ago, Ormond said:

Gracious, what do you have against chihuahuas?

They're not real dogs!

[James Arryn]

Bolton is saying the WH blocked his twitter account. Which, no biggie, but otoh Bolton is saying something, which might have interesting implications. 

[Ran]

I'd guess it was something similar to the Nikki Haley situation, described here. Bolton's shilling for his book and sems to be painting it as nefarious somehow, and sure, animus from the White House might have led to them stalling him on it or something. But I wouldn't make too much of this. He needs to listen to what Fiona Hill said and testify before Congress.

[argonak]

I'm not sure really how important these primaries are.  the election isn't about Warren, Sanders or Biden.  It will be about Trump.  A hundred more than a usual re-election campaign will be, this election will ONLY be about Trump.  Nobody is changing their minds about Trump because the other person has or doesn't have a plan for medicare for all.  Frankly, I'm amazed there's anyone on the fence left.  Either you've already made your decision, or you're just not paying any attention at all.

[Rippounet]

23 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

I have to say that I COMPLETELY disagree.  In the absence of an arm's length transaction it is impossible to know what the intrinsic value of an asset is.  It is quite true that Duff & Phelps and the accounting firms make a small fortune benchmarking third party equivalents.  But strangely enough, you can end up with quite different answers depending on (1) the choice of methodologies (and there are several), (2) the input assumptions (including, e.g., investment horizon, discount rate, definition and choice of comparables, if a comparable methodology is appropriate etc. etc. etc.).  You say "no problem, we'll just tell taxpayers what methodologies and assumptions are permissible."  Well, that's sort of what each country's transfer pricing regulations try to do. And I will also say, my experience with the people who set up these valuations (and it is relatively extensive) is my comment above - magic masquerading as truth - TO BE CHARITABLE.  My cynical view, born from experience, is that a taxpayer's view of valuation is the bid, and the government's is the ask, and frankly it simply starts a negotiation towards a settlement.  THIS IS TERRIBLE POLICY. 

I understand and respect your position. You're a professional underlining the complexities of valuation, just like in a different context I could be explaining how complex assessing a student's work is.

However, our discussion is highly political. It's generally recognized that huge concentrations of wealth translate into political power. And in my eyes the political side of things trumps the technical one. For instance:

Quote

A taxpayer's bill should not depend on how good their (or their hired guns') negotiation skills are.  But what this sets up is exactly that.

You're talking about negotiation. I'm thinking in terms of balance of power. States can be terrifying entities and they can definitely ensure that the negotiation is completely one-sided if they want to. If the state is acting on behalf of the 99% with the support of the 99% then there will not be much of a negotiation...
Basically you're talking about the way things are now and I mostly understand what you're saying. But my point is precisely that this is part of what would have to change if a wealth tax should ever become a reality. It's what I meant earlier by "a level of arbitrariness for billionaires."
A different way to put it is that I am not kidding when I say I'm a socialist. It also means on some level I am not a liberal. I do not care if the system is fair to billionaires, the entire point is that it should not be. I see the world in terms of socio-economic relations of power, and the wealth tax as a weapon to shift the balance of power back toward the 99%.
But I don't even think one has to go that far to make a wealth tax work. Eight countries still have one. Surely they have figured some things out.

And to be clear: I wholeheartly agree with you about taxing wealth transfers (inheritance & gifts). In fact this was my position for a looong time, after taking an economics 101 class in college... But practicality aside I wonder if we have the time to let the current generation of billionaires die out. I am genuinely worried that more than social justice is at stake. I'm sure my illiberal position will not necessarily find 100% support here, but the alternatives to a serious wealth tax may be far worse.

21 hours ago, Ran said:

I don't think anyone can credibly contest that Buffett and Gates and so on don't actually have a legal right to that money they have. They obviously do.  It may be a problem that this is the case, but it doesn't mean the equitable way to fix it is to confiscate that wealth you consider excessive when what should be addressed are the presently-legal things that shouldn't have been legal in the first place.

That was kinda @sologdin 's point earlier: reform the system rather than punish the people who benefit from the system.
And that would be fine if not for three things: i) the people who benefit from the system will never let it be changed, many have been extremely efficient at preventing even the tiniest changes (or rolling some back), ii) punishing the people who benefit from the system is in fact a way to change the system (it's just not the best one), and iii) time may very well be an issue, so the quickest solution may be the best one, however impractical it might be.

You're correct that Buffett and Gates have a legal right to their money. That's part of the problem. The rule of law has been built to protect the 1%. There's even a historian's theory that in the US this was by design from the very start. It's a slightly dodgy theory, but it's not complete fantasy either.
Anyway, constitutions and laws can be changed. The 99% still have that power - for now.
Especially when you take a step back and seriously consider what we're talking about.

What's a billion dollars? I'm not sure anybody here really knows. I happen to know a couple of millionaires, hard-working people who earned every penny of their wealth. I can imagine people earning and deserving tens of millions. A narrative that someone deserves hundreds of millions is already stretching my suspension of disbelief. But billions? How in the world could anyone deserve as much wealth as entire countries? What contribution to humanity could possibly justify more wealth than anyone can possibly spend in a lifetime?
As I pointed out in another recent thread, it's been demonstrated that the human brain is bad with numbers. We do not understand what a billion dollars represents. And I for myself am convinced that every single person defending billionaires is really thinking about millionaires.
And yes, I get that this isn't "real" money that can be used or spent. But in terms of influence and power it's almost as if it was. That is the whole point of my position: we are not talking about money, we are talking about power.

And let's add a veneer of credibility to my radical position. I think many people have missed the entire point of Piketty's work (the media hasn't helped). The core of his theory is ridiculously simple: r > g. When the returns on investments are higher than the growth of the economy as a whole you get an ever-increasing concentration of wealth. But I think people don't realize how profound r > g really is. We tend to accept that the benefits of economic growth and the continuous rise in productivity have been captured by the 1%, that the fruits of the creation of wealth are not shared. But from the start Piketty has gone further than that. His Capital already warned that if the trend continues the accumulation of wealth by the 1% will be at the expense of the 99%. It's not just that the 99%'s wealth will stagnate... They will get poorer. Quite often, what economists who criticize Piketty are really trying to claim (behind all their jargon) is that this point has not been reached yet and that things aren't that bad just yet.
I wouldn't be so sure.

And of course, none of this is purely academic. Why has Piketty just published a history of inequalities and detailed the ideologies that seek to legitimize them? Because he is now trying to warn about the political consequences of such concentration of wealth. You don't need to be a political scientist to know what they are: a weakening of political institutions, less democracy, political polarization and the rise of "populist" or extremist ideologies, strife... etc. Because inequality has real-world consequences.
Should I even add global warming on top of that?

So yep, I am advocating for a confiscatory tax. Confiscate the hell out of that wealth and bring back the welfare state at the speed of Musk's hyperloop train, and build a green new deal that would make FDR's ghost gape in awe. I do not believe this to truly be a radical solution, I think it's actually the reasonable solution. It's the compromise we can offer to the 1% before shit really starts hitting the fan because if history is any guide, high levels of inequality do not end well and humans don't exactly act peaceful when the room's temperature is 2°C too high.

 

[Ran]

Here's what I don't get: in the 1920s, we had more wealth inequality than we have now. Various things resulted from this, but ultimately a number of policies and factors led to decades of a reduction in inequality. No one's wealth had to be confiscated by a wealth tax in the U.S. for the share of wealth of the 1% to go from 28% in the 20s to 8% in the early 70s.

So when you tell me that confiscation of wealth is the only way to fix things, it seems to fly in the face of history and starts to feel Messianic rather than grounded.

 

 

[Rippounet]

9 minutes ago, Ran said:

So when you tell me that confiscation of wealth is the only way to fix things, it seems to fly in the face of history and starts to feel Messianic rather than grounded.

My using of the term is ironic: you're the one who said 6% would be confiscatory. To me it's a ridiculously small percentage.

Part of what happened to reduce inequality was this.

[Ran]

Yep. High marginal tax rates. Antitrust action. Strong unions. SEC regulations. And so on and so forth. All things that are likelier to be restored to those levels than seeing a wealth tax come into existence.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 hours ago, dornishpen said:

I think what she said was antisemitic (which was part of a pattern, not a single incident), but a lot of the response to her (and Tlaib) was islamophobic and racist. There are a lot of right wing Jews, orthodox (big overlap), Israel hawks who are otherwise liberal domestically who are willing to overlook Trump's antisemitism because they like that he moved the embassy, recognized the Golan annexation, said West Bank settlements are legal and so on. Actually there is even some flat out denial of antisemitism, usually with arguments about his daughter and son-in-law.

Eh, it's your right to view it that way. I just think she used really poor language while addressing a legitimate issue. As to the rest of what you wrote, conservative Jews are just as happy as conservative Christians to engage in a Faustian bargain with Trump.

Quote

My family is orthodox, 

Sorry about that.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, DMC said:

Anyway, I don't think Hillary being more establishment makes 2008 a poor comparison - just the contrary.  It makes it more likely her supporters would move to the GOP candidate, and they indeed did at higher levels than Sanders supporters in 2016.  But still, the impact was minimal.

But you're also ignoring the Sanders supporters who didn't vote. I was more worried about losing them than dealing with a Sanders-Trump voter.

[DMC]

3 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

But you're also ignoring the Sanders supporters who didn't vote.

I mentioned them when Ormond asked - those voters that group always tends not to vote, regardless of who is the Democratic nominee or how drawn out/damaging the primary was.

ETA:  The statement "those voters always tend not to vote" was sufficiently stupidly constructed to motivate me to edit.

[felice]

11 minutes ago, Ran said:

No one's wealth had to be confiscated by a wealth tax in the U.S. for the share of wealth of the 1% to go from 28% in the 20s to 8% in the early 70s.

If you're willing to wait 50 years, don't mind a Great Depression to kick things off, and expect real GDP to increase by a factor of 7 over that time and wealth-equalising policies to remain in effect continuously, sure.

[Rippounet]

27 minutes ago, Ran said:

Yep. High marginal tax rates. Antitrust action. Strong unions. SEC regulations. And so on and so forth. All things that are likelier to be restored to those levels than seeing a wealth tax come into existence.

Basically half-a-dozen measures that will each be fought tooth and nail by the right and be far more complicated to explain and sell to voters.

But the real problem is:

40 minutes ago, Ran said:

So when you tell me that confiscation of wealth is the only way to fix things

Not once have I said it was the only way to fix things. I only said it was the quickest.
OTOH I did write:

Quote

To my eyes it doesn't matter that much if the proposal is actually impractical if it starts a movement that eventually gets a more practical measure implemented.

In other words, the wealth tax is just a symbol. It's simple, it's catchy, and it's very explicit.
Piketty himself was very clear that it would work best with a number of complementary measures (including of course high marginal tax rates).
So when I wrote that I think we should "confiscate the hell out of that wealth" I couldn't care less if in the end it turned out that of all measures the wealth tax was the least effective.
We just have to start somewhere. If it's only strategy we disagree on then it's really not that much.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

11 minutes ago, DMC said:

I mentioned them when Ormond asked - those voters that group always tends not to vote, regardless of who is the Democratic nominee or how drawn out/damaging the primary was.

ETA:  The statement "those voters always tend not to vote" was sufficiently stupidly constructed to motivate me to edit.

Never edit, especially when you botch the punch line of a joke!

2 hours ago, DMC said:

They're not real dogs!

If you can drop punt the creature over a fence, it's not a real dawg. 

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Tywin et al. said:

If you can drop punt the creature over a fence, it's not a real dawg. 

My parents have had two Havanese for a few years now.  I was not excited when they told me they got the first one, but they've grown on me.  Now I'm wondering if I could punt them over my parent's house's fence.  Get back to you after Christmas.

[Fragile Bird]

Somebody on CNN spoke to someone in the WH counsel’s office (I don’t know if this means on off-the-record conversation with Kellyanne) and bizarrely, they seem to think that either the Democrats are not actually going to vote to impeach (fantasyland!), or if they do, when it goes to the Senate, Senate leadership will announce the whole process in Congress was illegitimate and dismiss the impeachment application as groundless, or if it goes to trial and Justice Roberts issued the subpoenas to witnesses the WH doesn’t want to appear, the Senate, with it’s Republican majority, will simply overrule the subpoenas, a power they have.

Did you hear Trump’s interview with Fox this morning, among other grievances he had against the former Ukrainian ambassador was the ‘she refused to hang my picture’. Apparently the real story is that all embassies were delayed until late 2017 because Trump couldn’t be bothered to sit for an official photo.

In other news, Sen. Marsha Blackburn was attacking Lt. Col. Vindman on Twitter. Picking up on Trump’s alliterative habit, she tweeted ‘Vindictive Vindman is the “whistleblower’s” handler’.

Are there no military bases in Tennessee? I keep hearing there’s lots of support for Trump in the rank and file, do they think attacks are ok because the people being attacked are high ranking?

[Jace, Extat]

11 minutes ago, felice said:

If you're willing to wait 50 years, don't mind a Great Depression to kick things off, and expect real GDP to increase by a factor of 7 over that time and wealth-equalising policies to remain in effect continuously, sure.

I'm no econominimologist, but when people talk about the 'Great Recession' and how bad it was I feel like they forget that like entire towns and cities would be standing in soup lines during the Depression. Even the name 'Great Recession' has always seemed superfluous, something coined by the excitionist news cycle and embraced by the layman who wanted to believe they lived through something truly trying.

They didn't have food to eat during the Great Depression. Losing your house to a crooked mortgage and then seeing your job go overseas is awful, but as far as I'm concerned when the government has to liberalize in order to stop massive swathes of the population from starving to death there's a certain level of severity involved that has not been experienced by very many people still alive.

Am I wrong? Do some of our more economically minded minds have a truth bomb to drop on me about how the Recession was, in fact, comparable?

[Zorral]

4 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Never edit, especially when you botch the punch line of a joke!

If you can drop punt the creature over a fence, it's not a real dawg. 

Also, these doggies are hysterical and not very bright,  often vicious, for no outside reasons,  just what undiscernibles prickle their overbred nervous system and underdeveloped brain. 

https://giphy.com/gifs/mean-chihuahua-19x5KTWn0Vfmo