The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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beantownbubba
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by beantownbubba »

dime in the gutter wrote:we get the elected officials we deserve. always.

trump is no exception.
As always, the truth.
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beantownbubba
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by beantownbubba »

Meanwhile, the potentially biggest development in American politics in quite some time is receiving far less attention than it deserves: The Kansas legislature overrode the Governor's veto of the budget, which imposes some new taxes. The potential for a seismic change in the political landscape that this presents is mind-bending. What if tax cuts are not THE ANSWER? How it plays out is anybody's guess but it could turn out to be a key turning point in 21st century politics.

OTOH, by saying that I am implicitly buying into the exaggerated belief in the ability of governors/state governments to significantly impact their states' economic development which in turn raises the possibility (likelihood?) of misinterpreting or over-interpreting the results of the "Kansas experiment." Even so, the apparent recognition that tax cuts do not automatically lead to economic growth at a level which can sustain necessary services (or make them unnecessary) is potentially huge.
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John A Arkansawyer
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by John A Arkansawyer »

beantownbubba wrote:Americans like to believe that we are uniquely generous and kindhearted. Leaving aside the question of whether nations can ever be either of those things, I have argued for a long time that the basis for the kinds of policies that support that belief has been the reality and assumption of the ever-expanding pie. The pie stopped expanding a long time ago. The remaining pie is being distributed ever more unfairly. These are fundamental, long-term realities. They effect everything. Yet the conversation/analysis tends to ignore this big picture while focusing on various fights over the scraps. This is a really, really bad thing. It is one of the things that makes Trump so damaging. For example, he wants to bring back coal jobs but the coal industry is dying no matter what he does. The loss of coal industry jobs has had brutal effects on real people. Promising to bring back those jobs sounds wonderful. But that causes the focus to be on the best way to bring those job backs or the right balance between economic growth and environmental protection when the real question is what do we do next when whole industries are disappearing?
I think it's a little worse than that. The pie was expanding some, but it was also just being grabbed and cut up. It was based on having taken someone else's homeland and exploiting it, then forcefully bringing other people from their homeland and stealing their labor. The first literally cannot be done again, and the second shouldn't be.

Thinking about "coal jobs" is, I think, the wrong way to look at it. What I see instead is people who want to live in a place and want jobs in that place. The level of trust that would allow replacing jobs we can't afford any more with jobs we can is just not there. I remember where my mom's side of the family came from, Newton County in Arkansas, had the hippies move in. There was a high level of cooperation between them and the old-timers for a long time. Then in the mid-nineties, the hippie Newton County Wildlife Association signed on with a group that took a hard line of no cutting of any timber whatsoever. That completely broke the ties between the two factions, and the hippies lost out. Why? Because people who had lived there knew that, in hard times, being able to snake out a few logs was the difference between eating and not eating.

(The hippies had tried to put in some local industry, but it was mostly tourist-oriented, and the locals and old-timers knew that tourist money had traditionally gone away in bust times.)
beantownbubba wrote:The future asserts itself in its own way and it's a juggernaut that has to be acknowledged, not ignored. The US has traditionally been great at that. But we're blowing it. It is inconceivable to me that we are ceding control of the renewable energy future to China by continuing to bet on old technologies. Renewable energy offers one path to those elusive good jobs everyone talks about while also being great for the environment and having other benefits, yet other countries are moving faster and further than we are. They will get and keep the good jobs that go w/ that kind of development while we will get the secondary jobs like installing solar panels. Worse, leadership now creates a platform from which to continue to evolve and grow and create new technologies and industries. Once a country falls behind it becomes very, very difficult to catch up. But we keep arguing about pipelines and strip mining which are all about the past.

Countries have a fundamental problem: Capital is transient and global, countries are fixed. For a long time this was not a problem for the US because capital tended to migrate here. But now it doesn't, at least not so overwhelmingly. One of the spinoffs of this fundamental reality and problem is the debate over free trade. The Democrats have a real problem (well, ok, that should be in the plural, but let's focus on one): They are imho correct about the long-term benefits of free trade. But free trade policies as implemented these days are virtually synonymous w/ significant job losses, especially among the traditional core of the party, the working class. But instead of embracing free trade, explaining why (including why it will be good for working class people) and working to fix the problems it causes, Democrats spend their time running away from their votes for NAFTA, etc, making them look ridiculous.
I think it's a little more complicated than that. Globalization was indeed inevitable, but the speed at which it happened was somewhat under our control. Other nations were smart where the United States was stupid. Bush 41 pushed through NAFTA and Clinton made it happen fast as he could (in part because his original patron, Don Tyson, profited handsomely from it); Clinton pushed through most favored nation status for China and Bush 43 made it happen even faster and more drastically than Clinton did NAFTA. The speed with which Clinton pushed NAFTA depressed the labor market, but Bush 43's tilt to China moved the manufacturing away. Now it's going to take something drastic to rebuild a manufacturing base in the US now that the labor markets are coming back into equilibrium, if that can be done.

Some capital is transient--though you can regulate it to some extent--but some capital, like natural resources, is fixed. You can't move the Hoover Dam. People want that sort of security and that's what Democrats are not acknowledging. The greenfields of unspoiled North America won't come back, and neither will the post-WW II boom. Promising an expanding pie is a false promise. Scaling down from Silicon Valley distortions of an inevitable, unstoppable bright future built on fart apps and talking instead about policy designed to not make things worse, to keep people from (for instance) losing their homes to the twin predations of medical bills and unlimited debt collection (which is killing several of my friends right now), that might be convincing, and better yet, might just work to slow the bleeding while we try to rebuild.

As it is now, though, we've made a virtue of uncertainty and individualized risk. More a fetish than a virtue, in my opinion. Staying hungry is one thing, and it has its points; starving to death is another, and has no point at all. But that myth is very attractive to people who can profit by it, who have deep enough pockets to ride out the waves that drown others, that wreck smaller ships from which they can later take salvage.
beantownbubba wrote:Equality is a worthy and important goal but very hard to achieve. It has never existed in the history of the world. The US has been engaged in a long-term experiment of breathtaking audacity by simply acknowledging the goal as worth striving for. But there are no blueprints, no tried and true solutions. I suggest that a little more humility in acknowledging the difficulty of the problem(s) and the uncertain effect of proposed solutions (as well as the humility to admit that some solutions have not worked or have not worked well enough to justify accepting the problems they cause) would go a long way. There is no one answer and there is no "common sense" obvious path. We need to continue to work at it with the understanding that we're in uncharted territory, which requires flexibility, openness, cooperation, good faith, less defensiveness and lots and lots of humility.
The US has had a long-term experiment based more on social equality than economic equality. We've expanded the franchise and all that goes with it steadily, with only the post-Reconstruction era as a backward movement. (So far. We'll see about the next few years.) But having the vote doesn't mean you get economic security, any more than the right to sit at the lunch counter means you can afford the hamburger.

That's where the fight that might win happens. And this is at least as big as you say it is:
beantownbubba wrote:Meanwhile, the potentially biggest development in American politics in quite some time is receiving far less attention than it deserves: The Kansas legislature overrode the Governor's veto of the budget, which imposes some new taxes. The potential for a seismic change in the political landscape that this presents is mind-bending. What if tax cuts are not THE ANSWER? How it plays out is anybody's guess but it could turn out to be a key turning point in 21st century politics.

OTOH, by saying that I am implicitly buying into the exaggerated belief in the ability of governors/state governments to significantly impact their states' economic development which in turn raises the possibility (likelihood?) of misinterpreting or over-interpreting the results of the "Kansas experiment." Even so, the apparent recognition that tax cuts do not automatically lead to economic growth at a level which can sustain necessary services (or make them unnecessary) is potentially huge.
That is a pretty good start on the local level. Can it be applied to the national level? Is it too late to apply it? I'd like to try it and find out.
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Zip City
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Zip City »

Excellent points by JohnA and btb. Refreshing to wake up to.

It brings to mind a cartoon that most people have probably seen:


Image


I've seen this debated by both sides, but have come to the conclusion that there is an inherent problem in most people's understanding of it: everyone thinks that they are the tall guy, not the short guy. The reality is, we are ALL the short guy. Shit, a guy like Trump is probably the medium guy. The 0.1% at the top are the tall guy.

But with any talk about economic equality, there is something about human nature that doesn't quite want it. If you're near the bottom of the economic ladder, but there is someone even lower than you, you bristle at the idea of them being raised to your level by "artificial" means. It's a big factor in so many poorer people being against the minimum wage. If you have worked at your job for 10 years and make $12/hr, and the new woman just started last week and makes $10/hr, you would both benefit from the minimum wage being raised to $15/hr, yes? But the idea of the new woman jumping up to your level without the sweat and years put into the job somehow seems unfair.

I don't know the way around that.
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beantownbubba
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by beantownbubba »

John A Arkansawyer wrote:Some capital is transient--though you can regulate it to some extent--but some capital, like natural resources, is fixed.
I am talking specifically about money and other financial instruments. And while capital in that sense can theoretically be regulated, I'm pretty sure it can't be regulated successfully, at least not for any length of time.
John A Arkansawyer wrote:The US has had a long-term experiment based more on social equality than economic equality.
I don't think the US has ever been about experimenting w/ economic equality. The economic correlate to social equality is economic opportunity. Success on that score has been spectacular in some cases and woeful in others but even w/ respect to the failures, very few people in this country want or expect economic equality (see zip's last post as well).
John A Arkansawyer wrote:Thinking about "coal jobs" is, I think, the wrong way to look at it.
I don't think I get your point here other than to say that you're right that people generally prefer that the good jobs come to them. The coal jobs reference was very specific because it represents not just lost jobs, but a dying industry w/ significant environmental impact, which makes it very hard to see the forest (the future) for the trees (the immediate calamity) and to develop appropriate policies. The larger point is that bringing back jobs in the face of long-term economic realities is somewhere between really hard and impossible and almost always bad policy.
John A Arkansawyer wrote:Globalization was indeed inevitable, but the speed at which it happened was somewhat under our control.
Interesting point.
John A Arkansawyer wrote:we've made a virtue of uncertainty and individualized risk.
It's not too much of a stretch to say that balancing uncertainty and individualized risk on the one hand and the safety and security needed for the smooth and successful operation of society is the history of the United States. It's certainly legitimate to come out at different places along the continuum but what I don't understand, and what I assume you mean by your "fetish" characterization, is people who insist that the right balance is virtually unlimited uncertainty and risk which time and time again has been proven to be disastrous for society.
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John A Arkansawyer
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by John A Arkansawyer »

beantownbubba wrote:
John A Arkansawyer wrote:Some capital is transient--though you can regulate it to some extent--but some capital, like natural resources, is fixed.
I am talking specifically about money and other financial instruments. And while capital in that sense can theoretically be regulated, I'm pretty sure it can't be regulated successfully, at least not for any length of time.
It most certainly can and at one point was, when we had a sufficiently high income tax rate. When that was collapsed, beginning with Kennedy (not my favorite president), the revenue that used to become government spending instead became capital accumulation of a very fungible sort. That policy wasn't thought of as regulation, I don't believe, but it did regulate. That cat is out of the bag now and probably can't be caught. Or maybe it can be built up to again slowly, if we manage to keep rule of law and avoid becoming a kleptocracy.
beantownbubba wrote:
John A Arkansawyer wrote:Thinking about "coal jobs" is, I think, the wrong way to look at it.
I don't think I get your point here other than to say that you're right that people generally prefer that the good jobs come to them. The coal jobs reference was very specific because it represents not just lost jobs, but a dying industry w/ significant environmental impact, which makes it very hard to see the forest (the future) for the trees (the immediate calamity) and to develop appropriate policies. The larger point is that bringing back jobs in the face of long-term economic realities is somewhere between really hard and impossible and almost always bad policy.
My point was less about jobs coming to people than about jobs which cannot easily leave people. If your job is no longer bound to a physical location, then some level of trust has to replace the security of a job that cannot move, or other things go out of balance.
beantownbubba wrote:
John A Arkansawyer wrote:we've made a virtue of uncertainty and individualized risk.
It's not too much of a stretch to say that balancing uncertainty and individualized risk on the one hand and the safety and security needed for the smooth and successful operation of society is the history of the United States. It's certainly legitimate to come out at different places along the continuum but what I don't understand, and what I assume you mean by your "fetish" characterization, is people who insist that the right balance is virtually unlimited uncertainty and risk which time and time again has been proven to be disastrous for society.
I was thinking in particular of a guy whose specialty is diversity training who had a tweet or maybe a Facebook post earlier this year directed at white guys without jobs telling them that no one had promised them tomorrow. The tone of his remarks rang to me exactly like a CEO telling people that their jobs were going to be cut. We've tilted way too far in terms of individualized risk and away from socialized risk. The level of extreme insecurity which accompanies individualized risk is driving, in my opinion, much of the very funky behavior we've been seeing, more so than the ever-lessening ability to get ahead.
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beantownbubba
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by beantownbubba »

John A Arkansawyer wrote:The level of extreme insecurity which accompanies individualized risk is driving, in my opinion, much of the very funky behavior we've been seeing, more so than the ever-lessening ability to get ahead.
Agreed.
John A Arkansawyer wrote:It most certainly can and at one point was, when we had a sufficiently high income tax rate.
This is getting to, and maybe beyond, my knowledge base but I think the counter-argument here is that high tax rates as a form of capital retention can't be sustained because of the level of cheating and avoidance that it causes/encourages and because the amount of investment/growth that it discourages outweighs the cash collected. I don't think the Kennedy tax cut was a response to the former (I believe tax avoidance/cheating was pretty much a minor problem at the time). I'm not sure, but I think the second rationale was a factor motivating the cuts. Like I said, I'm out of my comfort zone here but I think that's the theory.
John A Arkansawyer wrote:My point was less about jobs coming to people than about jobs which cannot easily leave people. If your job is no longer bound to a physical location, then some level of trust has to replace the security of a job that cannot move, or other things go out of balance.
Thanks. Now I get it. That nicely plays into your point copied first in this post (the last point in your post).
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by John A Arkansawyer »

beantownbubba wrote:This is getting to, and maybe beyond, my knowledge base but I think the counter-argument here is that high tax rates as a form of capital retention can't be sustained because of the level of cheating and avoidance that it causes/encourages and because the amount of investment/growth that it discourages outweighs the cash collected. I don't think the Kennedy tax cut was a response to the former (I believe tax avoidance/cheating was pretty much a minor problem at the time). I'm not sure, but I think the second rationale was a factor motivating the cuts. Like I said, I'm out of my comfort zone here but I think that's the theory.
I was already way out of my league when we started talking about economics ;-) , but I'm pretty sure that if you give a cheater a head start, he'll just cheat some more. It's like in Sometimes A Great Notion where the guy says, "All I want is my fair advantage." So do I, brother, so do I. I'll say a little more about the second part at the bottom.
beantownbubba wrote:
John A Arkansawyer wrote:My point was less about jobs coming to people than about jobs which cannot easily leave people. If your job is no longer bound to a physical location, then some level of trust has to replace the security of a job that cannot move, or other things go out of balance.
Thanks. Now I get it. That nicely plays into your point copied first in this post (the last point in your post).
I think that the security level could be ratcheted up, but that'd take the very well-to-do accepting things like lower rates of return on investments and a decreased ability to collect rents (both literal rents on property and rent-taking behavior in the more general sense). And that'd mean being more honest about economic growth and its limits, and that starts getting into Un-American Behavior. But while I don't live in Hope, it is only a hundred miles down the road.
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beantownbubba
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by beantownbubba »

John A Arkansawyer wrote:I think that the security level could be ratcheted up, but that'd take the very well-to-do accepting things like lower rates of return on investments and a decreased ability to collect rents (both literal rents on property and rent-taking behavior in the more general sense). And that'd mean being more honest about economic growth and its limits, and that starts getting into Un-American Behavior. But while I don't live in Hope, it is only a hundred miles down the road.
As I've said, I think it's crucially important for there to be a consensus view that growth is stalled and the pie is being split too rapaciously. But that doesn't mean that I think growth is a pipe dream. Call me 50 miles away from Hope. But that's the maddening thing about Trump, or at least one of them: He's doing the exact opposite of what's necessary. Why has the US been able to reinvent itself economically multiple times? I'd argue that the key drivers are new technologies, new immigrants and education (and the general openness of society but that's a little squishy for current purposes). He's leading us away from THE most promising new technologies (renewable energy and batteries; so far he hasn't done anything particularly bad to robotics), he's making war on immigrants and rejecting their value and he's out to gut education. Hmmm, maybe I'm walking backwards up that road towards you, JohnA.

Whatever the promise of new technologies, there is the very real possibility that new technologies will be so automated that even if high growth is reignited, employment will continue to lag. Addressing that requires, first of all, honestly acknowledging the possibility and confronting it (same point as yours, JohnA), and in order to do that, some level of trust and confidence in each other and in our government. Again, we're going in the wrong direction.
John A Arkansawyer wrote:but that'd take the very well-to-do accepting things like lower rates of return on investments and a decreased ability to collect rents (both literal rents on property and rent-taking behavior in the more general sense).
While that's true as a general proposition, the practical realities we were just talking about make implementation difficult: If higher rates of return are available elsewhere, capital will head to those places and it is very hard if not impossible to prevent that through legislation or rule-making unless one assumes a society that is generally much less free and not much like the best parts of the current model (and it would still be unsustainable imho).
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by pearlbeer »

beantownbubba wrote:
John A Arkansawyer wrote:Some capital is transient--though you can regulate it to some extent--but some capital, like natural resources, is fixed.
I am talking specifically about money and other financial instruments. And while capital in that sense can theoretically be regulated, I'm pretty sure it can't be regulated successfully, at least not for any length of time.

I don't know if I agree or disagree with btb's statement, but if we cannot regulate financial instruments successfully, it challenges Democracy itself.

The US is a Democratic government with a Capitalistic economy. The only way for the Government (the people) to have a check on corporate power is regulation. We've seen the power of regulation dramatically degraded since Regan (and arguably, before). The lack of corporate oversight has degraded to the point where 'corporations are people'. This influence leads to rapidly increasing economic disparity and the power (money at this point) being held by an increasingly small number of people.

What's more...the promises of deregulation have hardly ever been kept. When deregulation fails, the people hold the bag and bail out the corporations. The airline industry has struggled for decades, including multiple bailouts. We've bailed out the auto industry a number of times. Don't get me started on financial and banking bailouts. Because corporations are (by definition) motivated purely by profit, these bailouts are often, if not always, funded with public debt, fueled by promises of future growth. This process...continued unchecked, leads to a dark place. The 'boom and bust' economy we've lived with for the last century or so is not sustainable.

Our Democracy is precariously close to being considered a Capitalistic-Democracy, or worse a Plutocracy. There is a tipping point somewhere and I'm worried that we may have passed it. If the majority or even vocal minority of the nation continues to see the Government as the enemy, we're fucked. Losing the power to effectively regulate is something that will be extremely difficult to regain.

There are two films that are worth watching, which explain this is greater detail:
- Requiem for the American Dream (Noam Chomsky)
- Idiocracy (Mike Judge)
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Zip City
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Zip City »

Related: House Republicans are trying to dismantle Dodd-Frank as we speak
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beantownbubba
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by beantownbubba »

pearlbeer wrote:
beantownbubba wrote:
John A Arkansawyer wrote:Some capital is transient--though you can regulate it to some extent--but some capital, like natural resources, is fixed.
I am talking specifically about money and other financial instruments. And while capital in that sense can theoretically be regulated, I'm pretty sure it can't be regulated successfully, at least not for any length of time.

I don't know if I agree or disagree with btb's statement, but if we cannot regulate financial instruments successfully, it challenges Democracy itself.

The US is a Democratic government with a Capitalistic economy. The only way for the Government (the people) to have a check on corporate power is regulation. We've seen the power of regulation dramatically degraded since Regan (and arguably, before). The lack of corporate oversight has degraded to the point where 'corporations are people'. This influence leads to rapidly increasing economic disparity and the power (money at this point) being held by an increasingly small number of people.

What's more...the promises of deregulation have hardly ever been kept. When deregulation fails, the people hold the bag and bail out the corporations. The airline industry has struggled for decades, including multiple bailouts. We've bailed out the auto industry a number of times. Don't get me started on financial and banking bailouts. Because corporations are (by definition) motivated purely by profit, these bailouts are often, if not always, funded with public debt, fueled by promises of future growth. This process...continued unchecked, leads to a dark place. The 'boom and bust' economy we've lived with for the last century or so is not sustainable.

Our Democracy is precariously close to being considered a Capitalistic-Democracy, or worse a Plutocracy. There is a tipping point somewhere and I'm worried that we may have passed it. If the majority or even vocal minority of the nation continues to see the Government as the enemy, we're fucked. Losing the power to effectively regulate is something that will be extremely difficult to regain.

There are two films that are worth watching, which explain this is greater detail:
- Requiem for the American Dream (Noam Chomsky)
- Idiocracy (Mike Judge)
Financial activity can and is regulated. There's the SEC, the Federal Reserve, whatever the FDIC is called now, etc etc etc. That's about the ways in which capital may be raised and how certain institutions (mostly banks) can use the funds they hold (that's greatly simplified of course). Zip's subsequent post about the House attack on Dodd-Frank is directly on point: Dodd-Frank regulates the behavior of financial institutions in many ways. I'm talking about where capital is employed: Which countries, which industries, which companies, and where capital is held when it's not being used, like offshore havens (the Caymans, Jersey, etc).

I never cared for Dodd-Frank; there's a lot in the bill not to like and some missed opportunities to have done better. But to dismantle it w/out intending to closely regulate financial institutions is beyond the pale. It's like 2008 never happened for these folks. I truly can't understand how anyone can say after 2008 that no regulation is better than some (or even a lot) of regulation. This is not about a disagreement about "free market philosophy" v. "over regulaton;" this is willful blindness and amnesia and is dangerous beyond measure. It's worse than Dodd-Frank itself and I think that says it all.

Other than the fact that the world has clearly gone crazy already, I'd find it hard to believe that Trump supporters think this is ok. As always they are on the front lines and will be the first ones to have their blood spilled. Just crazy.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by LBRod »

Zip City wrote: If you have worked at your job for 10 years and make $12/hr, and the new woman just started last week and makes $10/hr, you would both benefit from the minimum wage being raised to $15/hr, yes?
Not if the work is only worth $10 an hour, and the new person gets laid off. The move to $15 minimum is a job killer.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Zip City »

LBRod wrote:
Zip City wrote: If you have worked at your job for 10 years and make $12/hr, and the new woman just started last week and makes $10/hr, you would both benefit from the minimum wage being raised to $15/hr, yes?
Not if the work is only worth $10 an hour, and the new person gets laid off. The move to $15 minimum is a job killer.
Difficulty: you're trusting the CEO's when they tell you what labor is "worth".

And it hasn't been a job killer in the states/cities that have already implemented it
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Cole Younger
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Cole Younger »

Zip City wrote:I'm not going to even respond to your longer post, Cole, as it will just end up being a fight
In a way that's disappointing. But I also applaud you for taking that route rather than just launching into an attack.
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Cole Younger
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Cole Younger »

Bubba and John A, thank you for your responses. Very well written, thought out, and very reasonable. I love reading y'all's posts.
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Zip City
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Zip City »

Cole Younger wrote:
Zip City wrote:I'm not going to even respond to your longer post, Cole, as it will just end up being a fight
In a way that's disappointing. But I also applaud you for taking that route rather than just launching into an attack.
I wouldn't attack. It just seems clear from your post that there is no way for me to respond without sounding like I'm lecturing you, and I don't think you're interested.
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Cole Younger
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Cole Younger »

Zip City wrote:
Cole Younger wrote:
Zip City wrote:I'm not going to even respond to your longer post, Cole, as it will just end up being a fight
In a way that's disappointing. But I also applaud you for taking that route rather than just launching into an attack.
I wouldn't attack. It just seems clear from your post that there is no way for me to respond without sounding like I'm lecturing you, and I don't think you're interested.
Ah, ok. Well it's up to you, man. I'm all ears er eyes if you want to but I think it is almost certain we just aren't going to see eye to eye on that stuff. And that's no big deal.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by LBRod »

Zip City wrote:
LBRod wrote:
Zip City wrote: If you have worked at your job for 10 years and make $12/hr, and the new woman just started last week and makes $10/hr, you would both benefit from the minimum wage being raised to $15/hr, yes?
Not if the work is only worth $10 an hour, and the new person gets laid off. The move to $15 minimum is a job killer.
Difficulty: you're trusting the CEO's when they tell you what labor is "worth".

And it hasn't been a job killer in the states/cities that have already implemented it
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstal ... 47544d2b5c
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Zip City »

He says about half a dozen times in that article that their data set is incomplete and not what they need to make the kind of analysis they want.

That said, there also hasn't been enough time for the market to adjust. I fully expect some panic when labor costs go up, but for things to self-regulate over time.

Either way, I'm not going to support a stagnant, non-living fulltime wage for anyone.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Tequila Cowboy »

LBRod wrote:
Zip City wrote:
LBRod wrote:
Difficulty: you're trusting the CEO's when they tell you what labor is "worth".

And it hasn't been a job killer in the states/cities that have already implemented it
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstal ... 47544d2b5c
Most estimates say that in 5 years time that data will turn around largely due to the increase in income actually increasing revenue for the businesses. It's not a zero sum game. The author of the piece even admits to the data being incomplete.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by sactochris »

LBRod wrote:
Zip City wrote: If you have worked at your job for 10 years and make $12/hr, and the new woman just started last week and makes $10/hr, you would both benefit from the minimum wage being raised to $15/hr, yes?
Not if the work is only worth $10 an hour, and the new person gets laid off. The move to $15 minimum is a job killer.



That hasn't been the case in Seattle.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by beantownbubba »

Cole Younger wrote: Nah I can't say I agree with you, Smitty. If we were all in this together we could just live and let live. That isn't enough anymore. I don't understand the transgender thing, ok? Dont get it. Now that doesnt mean I want to harm any of these people. If I saw somebody who fits that description, I would venture to say that I would be quicker to stand up for them, even if that meant getting into a fight with whoever was tormenting them, than a lot of the people who run their mouths about supporting them. But that's not even enough. I'm not even allowed to say that a guy dressed as a woman is still a guy. That makes me a bigot. So I can either lie, or I can admit that while I would never mistreat one of these folks, I think it is weird and risk being called a bigot.

I'm not going to refer to somebody as "ze" or "zee" or whatever. That isn't a word. And I'm sorry, I think it's silly...

You aren't even allowed to ask questions about global warming because if you do you will be called a "denier". That's religious rhetoric but that's the word that gets used.
Last point first: "Denier" may have religious roots, but it has been used regularly for some time in at least one other political/historical instance: to describe those who claim that the the Holocaust never happened. It means somebody who deliberately chooses not to believe something that's demonstrably true by overwhelming evidence because their personal agenda would be harmed by accepting the truth (or advanced by proclaiming their opposition to the truth). It was also used to some extent in the "controversy" over Obama's birthplace.

After thinking about it for a bit, I decided that the transgender thing is worth a little more discussion. Mostly, I continue to be puzzled by the outsized attention matters of gender and sexuality continue to generate. A quick internet search turns up the fact that there are about 1.4 million self-identified transgender people in the US. That's less than one half of one percent of the population. I think it's fair to say that transgendered folks tend to gravitate to big cities. I've lived in big cities my entire life and I don't think I've met more than a handful of transgendered people. I doubt most people in the US have ever met any. Why do they capture so much of our collective mindshare?

Knowing you to the extent I do, CY, I have absolutely no doubt that you would in fact stand up for a threatened transgender person because it's the right thing to do. But why do you have an opinion on whether a guy dressed as a girl is still a guy? How do you know? Why does it matter? We're not talking about people who simply like to dress up. We're talking about people whose very identity is different than the bodies they live in. Given the roles that gender and sexuality play in our development and our individual identities that strikes me as excruciating torture. I can't believe that anyone would voluntarily choose all the difficulties and hardships involved in being transgender; we're not talking about folks who are trying to scam their way into the girl's locker room to glimpse some boobs. If there's any truth to that, why can't we just leave these people alone rather than adding to their burdens and interfering in their lives?

I remember being a typical know it all teen during the early days of the feminist movement. I thought that objecting to the use of the male pronoun to cover both genders was absurd. A ridiculous, minor point that detracted from the seriousness of legitimate feminist concerns. It was simply a convention and a well understood one; everyone knew to mentally convert "he" into "he and she" whenever the context required, there was no confusion in communication. Why make life harder by having to adopt awkward language and constructions? What was the big deal? I was wrong. Really wrong. [I think that's largely accepted today so I'm not going to explain why, but I'd be happy to if it's not as clear as i assume it is.] And while the culture has not settled on a single way to be more inclusive and that occasionally leads to convoluted or ungrammatical sentences, it's really not a hardship to say "he or she" or use the written term "s/he" or other equivalents.

Even ignoring the slurs, during my lifetime African-Americans have been called at least colored, Negroes, blacks and African-Americans. By and large, we've all adapted to the changes w/out complaint or difficulty on the theory (I assume) that people should be called what they want to be called. One can imagine a world in which ever finer distinctions called for an ever expanding array of terms which could become hard to keep up with much less use effectively. But I really don't think we're there; I suggest that there's room in the world for another pronoun. A lot of people w/ a stake in the game prefer "they;" apparently some prefer "ze" (I'm not familiar w/ that one). I suspect things will evolve until the large majority settle on a specific term in the mysterious way that happens in many contexts. Why does it matter if the term settled upon is a pre-existing word or a new one? New words are added to the dictionary every year. Old words develop new meanings all the time and most people don't object most of the time (I personally hate that "literally" has often come to mean "figuratively" and I can remember the way older folks cringed as "ain't" became an accepted usage). Either way, new word or new meaning, what's the big deal?

My niece may be transgender, it's still not clear and she suffers greatly for her ambiguous status, both internally and externally. For now she's dressing more like a boy, though in an understated way that's largely ambiguous and could be seen as a female "style," and she prefers to be called by a male derivative of her given name. It's sometimes hard to remember to use the right name and it's really hard and awkward to remember to adjust pronouns (w/in the family we've settled on her name instead of pronouns, e.g. Joe went to the store and Joe [instead of he or she] bought some bread. My use of female pronouns here is just for convenience and clarity, I wouldn't use them (or would try not to) in actual conversation w/ or about her. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass and i forget way too much and it often sounds strange to the ear, but I think it's worth the effort and inconvenience. It seems to me to be a matter of respect for her as a person/individual, it communicates support for her and it's a recognition that it's important to her her while not asking very much of me.

I agree w/ you CY that "tests" for progressive purity have reached absurd and unsustainable levels, like that college student you cite. But I don't think this is that.
What used to be is gone and what ought to be ought not to be so hard

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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Cole Younger »

beantownbubba wrote:
Cole Younger wrote: Nah I can't say I agree with you, Smitty. If we were all in this together we could just live and let live. That isn't enough anymore. I don't understand the transgender thing, ok? Dont get it. Now that doesnt mean I want to harm any of these people. If I saw somebody who fits that description, I would venture to say that I would be quicker to stand up for them, even if that meant getting into a fight with whoever was tormenting them, than a lot of the people who run their mouths about supporting them. But that's not even enough. I'm not even allowed to say that a guy dressed as a woman is still a guy. That makes me a bigot. So I can either lie, or I can admit that while I would never mistreat one of these folks, I think it is weird and risk being called a bigot.

I'm not going to refer to somebody as "ze" or "zee" or whatever. That isn't a word. And I'm sorry, I think it's silly...

You aren't even allowed to ask questions about global warming because if you do you will be called a "denier". That's religious rhetoric but that's the word that gets used.
Last point first: "Denier" may have religious roots, but it has been used regularly for some time in at least one other political/historical instance: to describe those who claim that the the Holocaust never happened. It means somebody who deliberately chooses not to believe something that's demonstrably true by overwhelming evidence because their personal agenda would be harmed by accepting the truth (or advanced by proclaiming their opposition to the truth). It was also used to some extent in the "controversy" over Obama's birthplace.

After thinking about it for a bit, I decided that the transgender thing is worth a little more discussion. Mostly, I continue to be puzzled by the outsized attention matters of gender and sexuality continue to generate. A quick internet search turns up the fact that there are about 1.4 million self-identified transgender people in the US. That's less than one half of one percent of the population. I think it's fair to say that transgendered folks tend to gravitate to big cities. I've lived in big cities my entire life and I don't think I've met more than a handful of transgendered people. I doubt most people in the US have ever met any. Why do they capture so much of our collective mindshare?

Knowing you to the extent I do, CY, I have absolutely no doubt that you would in fact stand up for a threatened transgender person because it's the right thing to do. But why do you have an opinion on whether a guy dressed as a girl is still a guy? How do you know? Why does it matter? We're not talking about people who simply like to dress up. We're talking about people whose very identity is different than the bodies they live in. Given the roles that gender and sexuality play in our development and our individual identities that strikes me as excruciating torture. I can't believe that anyone would voluntarily choose all the difficulties and hardships involved in being transgender; we're not talking about folks who are trying to scam their way into the girl's locker room to glimpse some boobs. If there's any truth to that, why can't we just leave these people alone rather than adding to their burdens and interfering in their lives?

I remember being a typical know it all teen during the early days of the feminist movement. I thought that objecting to the use of the male pronoun to cover both genders was absurd. A ridiculous, minor point that detracted from the seriousness of legitimate feminist concerns. It was simply a convention and a well understood one; everyone knew to mentally convert "he" into "he and she" whenever the context required, there was no confusion in communication. Why make life harder by having to adopt awkward language and constructions? What was the big deal? I was wrong. Really wrong. [I think that's largely accepted today so I'm not going to explain why, but I'd be happy to if it's not as clear as i assume it is.] And while the culture has not settled on a single way to be more inclusive and that occasionally leads to convoluted or ungrammatical sentences, it's really not a hardship to say "he or she" or use the written term "s/he" or other equivalents.

Even ignoring the slurs, during my lifetime African-Americans have been called at least colored, Negroes, blacks and African-Americans. By and large, we've all adapted to the changes w/out complaint or difficulty on the theory (I assume) that people should be called what they want to be called. One can imagine a world in which ever finer distinctions called for an ever expanding array of terms which could become hard to keep up with much less use effectively. But I really don't think we're there; I suggest that there's room in the world for another pronoun. A lot of people w/ a stake in the game prefer "they;" apparently some prefer "ze" (I'm not familiar w/ that one). I suspect things will evolve until the large majority settle on a specific term in the mysterious way that happens in many contexts. Why does it matter if the term settled upon is a pre-existing word or a new one? New words are added to the dictionary every year. Old words develop new meanings all the time and most people don't object most of the time (I personally hate that "literally" has often come to mean "figuratively" and I can remember the way older folks cringed as "ain't" became an accepted usage). Either way, new word or new meaning, what's the big deal?

My niece may be transgender, it's still not clear and she suffers greatly for her ambiguous status, both internally and externally. For now she's dressing more like a boy, though in an understated way that's largely ambiguous and could be seen as a female "style," and she prefers to be called by a male derivative of her given name. It's sometimes hard to remember to use the right name and it's really hard and awkward to remember to adjust pronouns (w/in the family we've settled on her name instead of pronouns, e.g. Joe went to the store and Joe [instead of he or she] bought some bread. My use of female pronouns here is just for convenience and clarity, I wouldn't use them (or would try not to) in actual conversation w/ or about her. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass and i forget way too much and it often sounds strange to the ear, but I think it's worth the effort and inconvenience. It seems to me to be a matter of respect for her as a person/individual, it communicates support for her and it's a recognition that it's important to her her while not asking very much of me.

I agree w/ you CY that "tests" for progressive purity have reached absurd and unsustainable levels, like that college student you cite. But I don't think this is that.
...and THAT is how you make a case for the other side of an argument without lecturing the person you are speaking to. Thank you, Bubba. Very thoughtful and well reasoned post. And I agree with a lot of it. I actually agree with most of it. Got to run right now so I will address it in detail later but I just wanted to acknowledge it right away.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Zip City »

This is why I leave it to the more eloquent posters. Nice post bubba
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by LBRod »

Zip City wrote:This is why I leave it to the more eloquent posters. Nice post bubba
True that, Zip.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by John A Arkansawyer »

beantownbubba wrote:My niece may be transgender, it's still not clear and she suffers greatly for her ambiguous status, both internally and externally. For now she's dressing more like a boy, though in an understated way that's largely ambiguous and could be seen as a female "style," and she prefers to be called by a male derivative of her given name. It's sometimes hard to remember to use the right name and it's really hard and awkward to remember to adjust pronouns (w/in the family we've settled on her name instead of pronouns, e.g. Joe went to the store and Joe [instead of he or she] bought some bread. My use of female pronouns here is just for convenience and clarity, I wouldn't use them (or would try not to) in actual conversation w/ or about her. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass and i forget way too much and it often sounds strange to the ear, but I think it's worth the effort and inconvenience. It seems to me to be a matter of respect for her as a person/individual, it communicates support for her and it's a recognition that it's important to her her while not asking very much of me.
You'll note my references to "the kid" as opposed to using a straight-up "he" or "she". If we were talking, I'd by saying the kid's name a lot, too. It is difficult for me, and I teach this stuff. It gives me a lot more sympathy for my mom who, after I started using my first name instead of my middle name back in 1970, usually kept using my middle name till, well, when she died earlier this year. She almost always put John on birthday cards, but in speech, not so much.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by beantownbubba »

Perhaps you need to be a certain age to find this interesting and intriguing, but I am and I do: Today's NYT featured an op-ed by none other than Paulina Porizkova, aka Mrs. Rick Okasek. W/out saying it in so many words, the piece was essentially about how backwards the US is when it comes to issues of gender equality, especially compared to Sweden. Her characterization of French men is most amusing.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by tinnitus photography »

speaking of today's sunday paper, there was an article about how the Netherlands has much different cultural norms in regards to parenting than the US, a lot for the better. mainly focused on building responsibility of kids from an early age, ie anti-helicopter parenting.

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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by John A Arkansawyer »

Speaking of capital (it fails us now), Doug Muder's invaluable Weekly Sift has a very interesting article up this week:

Social Capital and Inequality

Inequality is different this time, because the rich are usurping a different kind of capital.

For a long time, most thinkers in the West accepted poverty as natural. As Jesus said: “The poor you will always have with you.” But by 1754, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was writing an entire discourse on the origin of inequality and blaming it largely on the practice of recognizing land as private property.
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
Thomas Paine, who in many ways was the most radical of the American revolutionaries, observed the contrasting example of the Native American tribes — where he found no parallel to European wealth or poverty — and came away with a more nuanced model of the connection between inequality and landed property, which he published in 1797 as Agrarian Justice. He started in much the same place as Rousseau:
The earth in its natural, uncultivated state, was, 
and ever would have continued to be 
THE COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man 
would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life-proprietor with the rest 
in the property of the soil, 
and in all its natural productions, 
vegetable and animal.
But Paine also recognized that the development of modern agriculture — which he saw as necessary to feed people in the numbers and diversity of activities essential to advanced civilization — required investing a lot of up-front effort: clearing forests of trees and rocks, draining marshlands, and then annually plowing and planting. Who would do all that, if in the end the harvest would belong equally to everybody? He saw private ownership of land as a solution to this problem, but believed it had been implemented badly. What a homesteader deserved to own was his or her improvement on the productivity of the land, not the land itself. If the land a family cleared became more valuable than the forest or marshland they started with, then the homesteaders should own that difference in value, but not the land itself.

Society as a whole, he concluded, deserved a rent on the land in its original state, and he proposed using that income — or an inheritance tax on land, which would not be as clean a solution theoretically, but would be easier to assess and collect — to capitalize the poor.
When a young couple begin the world, 
the difference is exceedingly great 
whether they begin with nothing 
or with fifteen pounds apiece. With this aid they could buy a cow, 
and implements to cultivate a few acres of land; 
and instead of becoming burdens upon society … would be put in the way 
of becoming useful and profitable citizens.
Paine argued this not as charity or even social engineering, but as justice: The practice of privatizing land had usurped the collective inheritance of those born without land, so something had to be done to restore the usurped value.

In one of my favorite talks (I published versions of it here and here), I extended Paine’s idea in multiple directions, including to intellectual property. Just as Paine would buy a young couple a cow and some tools, I proposed helping people launch themselves into a 21st century information economy. Like Paine, I see this as justice, because otherwise the whole benefit of technological advancement accrues only to companies like Apple or Google, reaching the rest of us only through such companies. A fortune like Bill Gates’ arises partly through innovation, effort, and good business judgment, but also by usurping a big chunk of the common inheritance.

Avent. And that brings us to Ryan Avent’s new book, The Wealth of Humans: work, power, and status in the twenty-first century. There are at least two ways to read this book. It fits into the robot-apolcalypse, where-are-the-jobs-of-the-future theme that I have recently discussed here (and less recently here and here). Avent’s title has a double meaning: On the one hand it’s about the wealth humans will produce through the continued advance of technology. But that advance will also result in society having a “wealth” of humans — more than are needed to do the jobs available.

Most books in this genre are by technologists or futurists, and consequently assemble evidence to support a single vision or central prediction. Avent is an economic journalist. (He writes for The Economist.) So he has produced a more balanced analysis, cataloging the forces, trends, and possibilities. It’s well worth reading from that point of view.

But I found Avent’s book more interesting in what it says about inequality and social justice in the current era. What’s different about the 21st century is that technology and globalism have converged to make prosperity depend on a type of capital we’re not used to thinking about: social capital. [2] And from a moral point of view, it’s not at all obvious who should own social capital. Maybe we all should.
That's the start of it. It's well worth your time. I'm still thinking it over.
The sooner we put those assholes in the grave&piss on the dirt above it, the better off we'll be

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