The General American Politics Thread

[Tani Coyote]

10 minutes ago, shdowhunt60 said:

You're aware of what you're implying then, aren't you? That the whole Republican party is racist? I mean, do you have ANY idea of how absurd that sounds?

I'm implying that catering to racists is what allowed it to return to relevance. The same way FDR catering to them let him pass half of his policies.

Remember: the South, with all its history of Jim Crow, is the centerpiece here. Let's review the fact 40% of Alabama said no to repealing miscegenation laws in 2000. 38% of South Carolina said no in 1998. Even assuming a lot of those people have died off, we're still seeing a pretty large demographic of principled racists. It's not a stretch to assume we'll see similar amounts across the South, which is the foundation for the GOP's power.

That's just principled racism and doesn't factor in opportunistic racism. 30% of ALL Americans believed they had a right to discriminate in housing in 2008. Blacks in America are routinely given worse terms in housing, credit, job offers, virtually everything. Whether it's principled racism, statistical racism, or just not giving a damn about minorities, there is a serious damned problem in America on this subject.

What demographic does the War on Crime hit the most? The War on Drugs? The privatization of prisons? The devolution of federal relations with the Indian Tribes? Voter fraud laws? Cuts to welfare? The "let the market decide" approach to every single god damned issue that gives a blank check to be a total asshole to people just because of what they look like?

It's not white people. The Republican Party is objectively racist at best and subjectively racist at worst.

[caseykz]

Fixed prices can hurt your farmers, hence increasing inequity. Minimum wage may drive up your prices but you might improve equity.

 

[Tani Coyote]

19 hours ago, caseykz said:

Fixed prices can hurt your farmers, hence increasing inequity. Minimum wage may drive up your prices but you might improve equity.

 

One of the contributors to the Depression is overfarming had dramatically dropped prices, plunging 1/4 of the nation into poverty. Fixed prices on agricultural goods made sense with that in mind. The free marketeers were too dumb to take a moment and say "hey maybe we should cut production!" Uncle Sam has to spank his nephews sometimes.

[caseykz]

4 hours ago, Raccoonatic Ogilvie said:

One of the contributors to the Depression is overfarming had dramatically dropped prices, plunging 1/4 of the nation into poverty. Fixed prices on agricultural goods made sense with that in mind. The free marketeers were too dumb to take a moment and say "hey maybe we should cut production!" Uncle Sam has to spank his nephews sometimes.

A price floor and not a price ceiling?! That changes the whole thing. 

[Tani Coyote]

You know, I really must say.

The way this election has unfolded speaks to the character of the candidates.

Bernie periodically narrows Clinton's lead, but Clinton's likely to be the nominee short of something extraordinary in California and elsewhere. And yet, he stays in to continue bringing attention to his issues.

Cruz and Kasich? They dropped the moment it looked like there was no further reason to keep going. Rather than try and keep the rest of the GOP's ideas in mind, they threw in the towel and retreated to their estates to sit things out.

I'm sorry, but the message I'm getting is this: Bernie actually cares about his supporters. Cruz and Kasich just wanted to get in the Oval Office.

[Conando]

Or at least it means Bernie cares about keeping some form of healthy discourse in the Democratic party. The Republican side has been a mess the whole way through, it was seriously hard to keep track of what any of the candidates actually wanted for the party, they were too busy attacking Trump (which seems like it's exactly what Trump wanted).

[shdowhunt60]

1 hour ago, Raccoonatic Ogilvie said:

You know, I really must say.

The way this election has unfolded speaks to the character of the candidates.

Bernie periodically narrows Clinton's lead, but Clinton's likely to be the nominee short of something extraordinary in California and elsewhere. And yet, he stays in to continue bringing attention to his issues.

Cruz and Kasich? They dropped the moment it looked like there was no further reason to keep going. Rather than try and keep the rest of the GOP's ideas in mind, they threw in the towel and retreated to their estates to sit things out.

I'm sorry, but the message I'm getting is this: Bernie actually cares about his supporters. Cruz and Kasich just wanted to get in the Oval Office.

Which is something the disenfranchised right has been saying for a long while now.

Honestly, I don't know how to feel about this. Having a leader that is invested can be good by virtue of them wanting to do their best. But the road to hell is ever paved with good intentions.

It doesn't make me like him any more as a prospective leader. He's still far too utopian for my liking, nevermind that he's a marxist. He has this vision of a perfect plan laid out for this perfect society where nobody is too poor or nobody is too rich (because people having monetary wealth is a bad thing?). A lot of his movement seriously reminds me of a cult, and the sheer level of fanatacism that his followers display honestly scared the shit out of me.

I think his dedication makes me respect him more as a person, because he clearly wants to do something he thinks is good, but I don't think that necessarily makes for a good president. Hell, I liked Obama -as a person-, but I think he was a seriously awful president.

[Patticus]

Sanders has fallen into quite the political conundrum - he is simply too strong a candidate to bow out, yet he is not strong enough to topple Clinton's delegate lead and snag that nomination. Of course, I mean, nobody really expected Clinton to be unseated, she's a political titan and nothing short of that never-coming FBI indictment could hope to stop her from running. In any other election cycle, though, Sanders might be the presumptive nominee by now, but Clinton's here and she is, but he's still winning states and she's caught in a political quagmire all her own.

Come the convention, Sanders is going to have to bow out and rally his supporters around Clinton. First, however, he's going to have to negotiate with the Clinton camp and the DNC about the party platform, and maybe submit a Minority Report on the convention floor. He's almost certainly going to have the delegate numbers to influence the platform heavily, even if he isn't destined for some cushy cabinet posting, or the Veep slot.

shdowhunt60: People keep accusing Sanders of being a Marxist, or a Communist, with a utopian dream of an impossibly perfect society. I've yet to see or hear anything from him that shows that he wants anything other than to make American society as it is now freer and more equitable within the framework of a modern capitalist democracy - change this thing, expand that, etc.  I will grant you that his rhetoric has been pretty lofty, but people like that - they like having a grand vision presented to them, even if it isn't super-practical. But no, it's no utopia, his policies can't make a perfect world, but they can bring America into line with much of the rest of humanity, and make its people freer and maybe a good bit wealthier too.

People having monetary wealth is a good thing, when society at large doesn't suffer for it. I mean, take wages as an example: CEO pay has been skyrocketing for decades, with little in the way of vast productivity jumps to really justify all of it, while average worker wages have stagnated, despite their productivity going up. That's wrong, and it's bad economically because the people at large will always be bigger and better investors in the economy than some clique of billionaires who send their money offshore at every opportunity, and who aren't hundreds of millions of people buying more stuff every day in response to feeling wealthier. But still we cater to the billionaires, because they've got everyone convinced that as "job creators," they will create jobs when their taxes are reduced, despite that not being how the economy works, nor how they have behaved in response to previous tax cuts. Jobs are created when demand exists, not when we give money to a wealthy person in the hopes that maybe they'll hire a new maid.

[Hyp3hat]

1 hour ago, shdowhunt60 said:

Which is something the disenfranchised right has been saying for a long while now.

Honestly, I don't know how to feel about this. Having a leader that is invested can be good by virtue of them wanting to do their best. But the road to hell is ever paved with good intentions.

It doesn't make me like him any more as a prospective leader. He's still far too utopian for my liking, nevermind that he's a marxist. He has this vision of a perfect plan laid out for this perfect society where nobody is too poor or nobody is too rich (because people having monetary wealth is a bad thing?). A lot of his movement seriously reminds me of a cult, and the sheer level of fanatacism that his followers display honestly scared the shit out of me.

I think his dedication makes me respect him more as a person, because he clearly wants to do something he thinks is good, but I don't think that necessarily makes for a good president. Hell, I liked Obama -as a person-, but I think he was a seriously awful president.

People being rich isn't bad, but economic inequality is. You simply cannot trust the free market to ensure economic equality for all citizens, because the market looks after the rich. Trickle Down economics is a myth. Corporate greed has crippled the economy more than once in the last 100 years, and this has real tangible effects on the young and poor - the actual value of the minimum wage is lower than it was before (in 1969, for instance, the minimum wage adjusted for inflation was $10 an hour, and under Reaganomics that adjusted value decreased rapidly) (and nowadays nearly half of minimum wage earners are 18-25), for instance, and corporations would rather keep it that way rather than look after their workers. Why else would McDonalds be so vehemently against raising the minimum wage in Seattle (I think, they had all those protests)? It's not like they're strapped for cash. 

Put it this way - it's not unreasonable or utopian to suggest that anyone who works 40hrs a week should be guaranteed to afford a roof over their head and feed their children, is it?  Because that's not happening for a lot of young people all over the western world (myself included, at points in my life), and Bernie Sanders wants to change that. 

I think his pushing the Democratic agenda leftward through his campaign is all around a good thing, and clearly has support amongst younger voters who suffer directly from Neoliberal policy - this grapple for the mythical political 'centre ground' has completely bollocksed up UK politics, for instance, to the extent that our Bernie equivalent (Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leader, who won the leadership with a huge mandate of young people) is seen as a disaster for the party for daring to suggest that Austerity is failing.

[shdowhunt60]

10 hours ago, Hyp3hat said:

People being rich isn't bad, but economic inequality is. You simply cannot trust the free market to ensure economic equality for all citizens, because the market looks after the rich. Trickle Down economics is a myth. Corporate greed has crippled the economy more than once in the last 100 years, and this has real tangible effects on the young and poor - the actual value of the minimum wage is lower than it was before (in 1969, for instance, the minimum wage adjusted for inflation was $10 an hour, and under Reaganomics that adjusted value decreased rapidly) (and nowadays nearly half of minimum wage earners are 18-25), for instance, and corporations would rather keep it that way rather than look after their workers. Why else would McDonalds be so vehemently against raising the minimum wage in Seattle (I think, they had all those protests)? It's not like they're strapped for cash. 

Put it this way - it's not unreasonable or utopian to suggest that anyone who works 40hrs a week should be guaranteed to afford a roof over their head and feed their children, is it?  Because that's not happening for a lot of young people all over the western world (myself included, at points in my life), and Bernie Sanders wants to change that. 

I think his pushing the Democratic agenda leftward through his campaign is all around a good thing, and clearly has support amongst younger voters who suffer directly from Neoliberal policy - this grapple for the mythical political 'centre ground' has completely bollocksed up UK politics, for instance, to the extent that our Bernie equivalent (Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leader, who won the leadership with a huge mandate of young people) is seen as a disaster for the party for daring to suggest that Austerity is failing.

Corporate greed has been facilitated by government regulations prohibiting the success of smaller businesses and only allowing the larger ones to thrive.

I don't know how "trickle down" economics got into this, that's a completely irrelevant discussion, but my stance is that I disagree with it on the grounds that it exists as a form of confirmation bias. Reagan set out to prove that reducing taxation on the rich helps the economy, which is true, but that's not "trickle down" economics. That's basic fucking common sense. Higher taxes hurt the economy, and the rich disproportionally represent the nation's income taxes as-is. This is always a bad thing, you tax the rich, the start finding ways to avoid paying, up until they decide to leave. Look at countries like Denmark and China where the rich are leaving due to high taxes. If these people are carrying most of the tax burden, do you really want them to leave?

This is why we have the Laffer Curve.

Secondly, most full time jobs WILL give you a livable wage. If you want financial security, there's only three things you have to do.

1. Graduate High School

2. Get a full time job.

3. Don't have children before you're married.

Really. That's it. You don't need college, either. In fact, college is probably detrimental to this. Why? Because college is expensive. Always has been. And a lot of well paying jobs don't require a college education in the slightest. I have no plans to go to college, certainly not given the fucking mess that a lot of universities are.

[Hyp3hat]

See, 'reducing taxes on the rich helps the economy and therefore everyone else' is sort of what 'trickle down economics' means. Being nicer to the rich helps everyone, right? Greater economic prosperity affects everyone, but not in the way you think. 

But the rich will leave anyway, because there's always somewhere with cheaper taxes. It's why Swiss Bank Accounts are a punchline, why Apple, Google and Amazon screw their taxes in the UK, why this happened https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers 

It's common sense, but we used to stone witches and believe the earth was flat. Common sense changes, and late stage Neoliberal capitalism is one version of it. 

I mean, all I can say to your second point is;

1. Why should someone who couldn't graduate high school not be financially secure? If they work a full time job, they should be able to live. There's plenty of reasons why someone couldn't get a high school diploma, they may be disabled, they may come from a shit neighbourhood or a shit home, but they shouldn't be denied a decent life because of that. How is that utopian? If someone works, they should be able to survive. 

2. What if your full time job doesn't cover your expenses? I pulled 50 hour weeks, 6 days a week, taking 12 hour days when I could at my minimum wage job to just pay my rent, bills and eat. Everyone at my pay grade was fighting for longer hours. People have to get second jobs to survive, I did, as did nearly everyone else at my job. We shouldn't have done, though. 

3. In the words of John Lennon, 'Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans'. People have kids by accident, shit happens. Guess they're destined to be poor forever, and you might end up with 1. again. 

An actual effective way to solve a lot of these issues, besides 'corporations are people, my friend' would be a Universal Basic Income, which is actually borne out of various experiments and studies across the globe.

IDK, mate, maybe you should go to college, you could learn a lot. Not just about yr major, but about everyone else. 

[Tani Coyote]

1 hour ago, shdowhunt60 said:

Corporate greed has been facilitated by government regulations prohibiting the success of smaller businesses and only allowing the larger ones to thrive.

In the absence of such regulations, those small businesses would inevitably gobble each other up and the process would repeat. We romanticise Mom and Pop stores, but the truth is guys like Wal-Mart are just the inevitable result of market forces. You ultimately end up with a few large guys in most sectors, with a few smaller niche guys.

The wealthy absolutely do have undue influence in government policy though; elections should be publicly-funded to take the money out of politics.

Quote

Reagan set out to prove that reducing taxation on the rich helps the economy, which is true, but that's not "trickle down" economics.

This is only partially true.

When it comes to tax reductions, it is tax cuts on the poor and middle class that are the most useful, because they have more marginal utility and thus more usefulness in consumption terms.

Furthermore, tax cuts in a time of economic prosperity is a TERRIBLE idea. When times are good, you're supposed to slow the expansion of the many supply, not increase it. This is basic economics.

Quote

Higher taxes hurt the economy, and the rich disproportionally represent the nation's income taxes as-is. This is always a bad thing, you tax the rich, the start finding ways to avoid paying, up until they decide to leave. Look at countries like Denmark and China where the rich are leaving due to high taxes. If these people are carrying most of the tax burden, do you really want them to leave?

We got along just fine through the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s with a combination of high taxes and a fairly robust welfare state. Booms, busts, everything. It sounds to me like the exact percentage of taxes isn't really relevant to the economy, so much as what's done with the taxes.

This is also a bad precedent to set. The wealthy try to weasel out of their social obligations, so we should lower those obligations? Can you imagine doing this for any other crime?

The wealthy get the most benefit from society. It is perfectly fair to expect them to pay more.

Sure, they pay more in income taxes. But it's their wealth that changes the equation. They can accumulate wealth much more easily than the poor. This is reason to tax them more, because they are the ones benefiting from society's existence. The wealthy man has a lot more to lose from a stateless society than the rank and file worker. If he is not willing to pay for the upkeep of the state, the state has good grounds to confiscate ALL of his property, because he is a freeloader.

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1. Graduate High School

This is easier said than done, as poorer families frequently put pressure on their children to drop out. I can only imagine where my father would be if he hadn't grown up in poverty.

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2. Get a full time job.

Again, easier said than done. The market is constantly expanding and contracting.

Then you have a shitload of hiring discrimination if you are not a white male.

Then you have the fact capitalism requires a perpetual supply of unemployed people in order to function.

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3. Don't have children before you're married.

Abstinence only doesn't work. Doubly so since a lot of poor parents choose to have children early for the sake of having control over something in their lives.

Should you wait until you can support yourself? Of course; not many disagree with that. But once the kid's out, they're out. I don't know about you, but I think it's unethical to make sure the child isn't provided for. Sins of the father and all that.

A welfare state won't cause a bunch of Octo-Moms either, since most welfare recipients only have 1 or 2 children, the American average. They really are regular people who are down on their luck, not the lazy demons they get depicted as.

Quote

Really. That's it. You don't need college, either. In fact, college is probably detrimental to this. Why? Because college is expensive. Always has been. And a lot of well paying jobs don't require a college education in the slightest. I have no plans to go to college, certainly not given the fucking mess that a lot of universities are.

Education is the biggest determinant of income. Avoiding college is a fantastic way to shut many doors.

[Nepenthe]

If the rich paying their fair share like everyone else in this country hurts the economy because they will find ways to not pay it or simply leave, then taxes aren't actually the problem. It's the rich people being greedy shitstains that's the problem, and we should make it undesirable and difficult to be a greedy shitstain. "Oh no, I can't afford my fifteenth yacht because I have to pay a little bit back of what I've taken through utilizing publicly provided systems and infrastructure I certainly didn't build to run my sheisty business, like police and military protecting my bloated ass from the employees I'm screwing over with stagnant wages."

This is why people don't like the rich sometimes.

[Tani Coyote]

6 minutes ago, Nepenthe said:

If the rich paying their fair share like everyone else in this country hurts the economy because they will find ways to not pay it or simply leave, then taxes aren't actually the problem. It's the rich people being greedy shitstains that's the problem, and we should make it undesirable and difficult to be a greedy shitstain. "Oh no, I can't afford my fifteenth yacht because I have to pay a little bit back to the country what I've taken through utilizing publicly provided systems and infrastructure I certainly didn't build to run my sheisty business, like police and military protecting my bloated ass from the employees I'm screwing over with stagnant wages."

This is why people don't like the rich sometimes.

I mean really, for all their wealth, it is rather surprising so many don't have a decent education.

French Revolution? Good stuff.

Treat the poor well. It's really nowhere near as expensive as it's made out to be.

This is where Machiavelli had his hopes too high. He called on his ruler to be intelligent and cunning and think long-term.

The wealthy who throw a fit over higher taxes and more services are NOT thinking long term. They prefer to instead wage a massive propaganda war depicting the poor as lazy and unfit of anything resembling compassion. All nicely wrapped up in a mythical American Dream narrative that completely ignores the various forms of social stratification.

[Nepenthe]

I don't understand how paying taxes is such an issue (beyond vague theories I've heard of about immediate comparison to your social circles enticing one to want to acquire more wealth, but I'll need to read more into that.) A single person making $75000-$100000 a year after taxes is basically set forever; there's literally no more marginal utility to be gained between your quality of life (food, water, shelter, electricity, Internet access, education, entertainment, etc.) or your general emotional well-being, so any extra money after that isn't actually going to do much of anything, especially if it's sitting somewhere and not being returned into the economy. But there are people who make exponentially more than that and are throwing shitfits about paying taxes back into the country that allowed them to get where they are. I just don't fucking get it.

[Tani Coyote]

14 minutes ago, Nepenthe said:

I don't understand how paying taxes is such an issue (beyond vague theories I've heard of about immediate comparison to your social circles enticing one to want to acquire more wealth, but I'll need to read more into that.) A single person making $75000-$100000 a year after taxes is basically set forever; there's literally no more marginal utility to be gained between your quality of life (food, water, shelter, electricity, Internet access, education, entertainment, etc.) or your general emotional well-being, so any extra money after that isn't actually going to do much of anything, especially if it's sitting somewhere and not being returned into the economy. But there are people who make exponentially more than that and are throwing shitfits about paying taxes back into the country that allowed them to get where they are. I just don't fucking get it.

My guess is right wing logic.

Right wing logic leans heavily on one constant: humans are bastards.

You can't tax people because they won't want to work, because money is all they care about. You can't legalize drugs, because then everyone will become addicted, because we're all hedonists kept in check by the good Daddy Government. You can't have a small, well-trained police force, because everyone will commit crimes without a massive, militarized force. You can't make welfare unconditional, because most people are lazy and will quickly quit their jobs. We can't implement a system besides capitalism, because we are far too self-absorbed to make it last. You can't pursue peaceful resolutions in foreign policy, because every other nation is eager to stab us in the back. And so on.

This is why conservatism quickly falls apart in the face of data. A lot of people - poor, middle class, wealthy, etc. - don't mind paying taxes, especially when there are good services in exchange. Likewise, the data supports softer drug policy, less policing, more welfare, more diplomacy, and different economic structures. It would appear the actual constant is that for all our flaws, we will largely be intelligent, diligent, and basically what most would call "good."

But of course, I'm sure all this data is part of a vast left wing conspiracy and the few organizations that cling to right-wing policy are the last bearers of the light of truth in a time of left-wing darkness.

Occam's Razor is a good approach, I think. Most conservative ideas are flat out wrong.

Folks talk about listening to the either side. This makes sense for pragmatic reasons. But morally, it makes the false assumption each side has equal value in discussion. The sooner most right-wing ideas die, the sooner humanity will be better off. It's no surprise conservatives are hostile to robust education funding, because it would very likely lead to the demise of their current stature.

[Candescence]

Here's the funny thing: the "undeserving poor" narrative, I believe, was started by Nixon, but only AFTER he was convinced to abandon a full-scale universal basic income scheme after one of his advisors (a hardcore Ayn Rand fan) presented him with a report about a sorta-similar scheme from the UK around the time of the Industrial Revolution with the premise that said scheme was a massive failure, except the royal commission declaring the scheme a failure was enormously biased and used incredibly faulty evidence.

Yes, Nixon was going to introduce a universal basic income scheme. NIXON.

The US and the entire western world could've have one of the best ways to eliminate poverty and reduce inequality decades ago, had it not been for a dodgy royal commission over a century earlier and an Ayn Rand fan. Well, now I know what else we can blame Ayn Rand for.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

4 hours ago, Hyp3hat said:

2. What if your full time job doesn't cover your expenses? I pulled 50 hour weeks, 6 days a week, taking 12 hour days when I could at my minimum wage job to just pay my rent, bills and eat. Everyone at my pay grade was fighting for longer hours. People have to get second jobs to survive, I did, as did nearly everyone else at my job. We shouldn't have done, though. 

I have to come in and second this, because I'm currently doing that right now myself. My minimum work week is 61 hours, 6 days a week, working 10 hours on average. And I'm looking to increase that to better pay rent, bills, and eat without having to worry about stretching the rest of my funds, which is quite frankly ridiculous to do for basic necessities.

Shit's not fun, but we gotta live somehow.
 

My guess is right wing logic.

Right wing logic leans heavily on one constant: humans are bastards.

Wat?

I lean on that logic, and I'm anything but right-wing.

[Nepenthe]

If you inherently believe that humanity is evil, then current American right-wing logic and proposals make sense because it assumes any systemtic safeguard or allowance of freedom will be abused to the point of a significant societal downturn: "Transgender women will rape cis women. Gay marriage will destroy religious freedom. Black people will kill you and rob you. Muslims will blow up Americans." It goes on and on. However, that doesn't seem to be true. If statistics, lowering crime levels, and increasing quality of life the world over aren't enough, just think about it: If all 7 billion people on this planet were, without a doubt, backstabbing shitheads with no reasonable ethical and dare I say biological safeguards in place, that there was a high chance literally anyone could fuck you over severely, why ever leave the house? Why ever make friends? Why ever do anything that involves another human being?

We have a tendency to become psychologically numb to stimuli which is constant, unchanging, or irrelevant (sensory gating), and that includes the good things that happen. Most people in this world get through the day without impeding on others. I expect people who I interact with to greet me, to go on about their business if they don't, for employees and public servants to help me when I need it, to drive safely enough to get home, to avoid situations which could cause them trouble, and in general just be nice people. Daily life is a relative somewhat boring constant, but the important thing to remember is that it is more often than not good. On the other end, I don't expect unpredictable events like shootings, explosions, and terrorist attacks and the like. These things stick with me for far longer than the constant stream of times I have not been shocked by something, to the point that I forget or downplay that the aftermath of these things tend to display an overwhelming societal push to help and ease the pain. Remember: Significantly more people on and around the time of 9/11 donated their time, skills, talents, money and prayers towards relieving the effect than the 3000-something people who died that day. If humanity were awful, 9/11 would just be another Tuesday.

In general, it's easy to become biased from unexpected trauma and just conclude that humanity as a whole is a piece of shit, but it throws us all under the bus and, on a smaller scale, leads to political policies that are harmful in the long run because they assume guilt and fault where there is little to none.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

Yeah, see, I actually don't believe in any of that shit regarding black people, transgenders, gays, muslims, and what not, or that humanity is "evil" per se - I actually believe that stuff can apply to any person regardless of who they are. It doesn't mean everyone will do it, but that enough of them will. Strickly pinning all of that on people of color, other religions, women, and the LGBTIQ community is less a belief that humans are bastards and more that those making such bigoted beliefs are making excuses to justify being such bastards against such communities who frankly just want to live decent lives without being harassed for who they are.

I believe that humans are bastards because at their worst they can be selfish, myopic, and apathetic to anything that doesn't match their beliefs. Basically people who will spit on the Golden Rule and show no empathy if you believe in something they don't (e.g. religious or irreligious), aren't something they are (black or white, man or woman), and so forth. That not saying people aren't capable of good, and that's not saying that everything is against you, but that is saying the whole reason those safeguards exist is because not only are there some people will do some heinous shit to those who aren't like that if left unchecked, and that oftimes those who will seek justice will fail to get it because of the system in place that ironically bars the so called bastards from doing such heinous shit is selective in how it goes about that justice (as in, there's obvious evidence of wrongdoing, but they don't care).

But just because literally anyone can fuck you over doesn't mean you shouldn't leave the house, it means you should be careful and not be too trusting of people in the event they potentially fuck you over; you involving yourself with friends and other human beings means you found some people who frankly won't fuck you over. And just because you don't expect unpredictable events doesn't mean they won't happen anymore than they will. The belief in itself is a safeguard just in case you're proven right and something bad like the above does happen - if you're proven wrong, all's good and you can go about your day. 

You don't have to be outright paranoid of specific people to believe humans can be bastards. It's not all black and white, which quite frankly is another factor I believe humans are bastards because many of them believe in such binary terms that they don't consider that things might (tho not always) be more ambiguous than what they make it out to be, and risk causing the very problems they sought to prevent without understanding things outside their perspective.

[shdowhunt60]

9 hours ago, Raccoonatic Ogilvie said:

In the absence of such regulations, those small businesses would inevitably gobble each other up and the process would repeat. We romanticise Mom and Pop stores, but the truth is guys like Wal-Mart are just the inevitable result of market forces. You ultimately end up with a few large guys in most sectors, with a few smaller niche guys.

The wealthy absolutely do have undue influence in government policy though; elections should be publicly-funded to take the money out of politics.

They are publically funded. That's why congressmen and candidates spend hours a day thumbing through phone books and sending e-mails begging for donations so that they can campaign for the next election.

9 hours ago, Raccoonatic Ogilvie said:

This is only partially true.

When it comes to tax reductions, it is tax cuts on the poor and middle class that are the most useful, because they have more marginal utility and thus more usefulness in consumption terms.

Given that the poor don't pay income taxes as-is, what is there to cut? Once again, north of %50 of the nation's income taxes are paid by the the upper %10, exactly how much do you think it is that the rest of the country contributes? I'll give you a hint, it's not very much in the slightest.

9 hours ago, Raccoonatic Ogilvie said:

We got along just fine through the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s with a combination of high taxes and a fairly robust welfare state.

That welfare state is one of the biggest parasitic cancers of our society today. Baby boomers are living it off from welfare payments being put forward by the younger generations, which due to the fucked up way this ponzi scheme is structured, Generation X and Millennials cannot hope to put enough money to actually support.

Seriously, fuck the Baby Boomer generation and their welfare state.

9 hours ago, Raccoonatic Ogilvie said:

This is also a bad precedent to set. The wealthy try to weasel out of their social obligations, so we should lower those obligations? Can you imagine doing this for any other crime?

Once again, they TREMENDOUSLY over-represent in income taxes collected. I seriously can't fucking blame them that when people start grabbing at THEIR money, that they start doing there damnedest to fight it off.

9 hours ago, Raccoonatic Ogilvie said:

The wealthy get the most benefit from society. It is perfectly fair to expect them to pay more.

They get the most benefit from taking the most monetary risk and managing resources that you and I cannot possibly hope to comprehend.

9 hours ago, Raccoonatic Ogilvie said:

This is easier said than done, as poorer families frequently put pressure on their children to drop out. I can only imagine where my father would be if he hadn't grown up in poverty.

Since when? Most cases of high-school drop-outs I've seen were from bad ethics, usually coming from the children themselves, and not any pressure coming from the family. This might have been true in before the time of "No Child Left Behind" and when kids stopped going to school after they learned how to read and write to help out on the farm, but this is neither here nor there.

9 hours ago, Raccoonatic Ogilvie said:

Again, easier said than done. The market is constantly expanding and contracting.

It's actually a lot easier than you think. The past 5 years of my life has been swallowing that red pill and realizing I've been fucking around, and there are, and have always have been, jobs out there in high demand that pay out of the ass.

9 hours ago, Raccoonatic Ogilvie said:

Then you have a shitload of hiring discrimination if you are not a white male.

9 hours ago, Raccoonatic Ogilvie said:

Then you have the fact capitalism requires a perpetual supply of unemployed people in order to function.

wat?

No, Capitalism has leeway for unemployment, because it's fucking realistic and realizes that you cannot possibly hope to address the needs and demands of everyone.

9 hours ago, Raccoonatic Ogilvie said:

Abstinence only doesn't work. Doubly so since a lot of poor parents choose to have children early for the sake of having control over something in their lives.

Then they're stupid.

Look, I'm not being unrealistic here. Hell, my parents were a beatnik that dropped out of High School and a nerd who got out of the Army early when Clinton took over. Neither of them had any sort of direction in their lives, or knew whatever the fuck it is they were doing, and they fucked one night, condom breaks, and I happened 9 months later.

And that was stupid.

Hell, they didn't even particularly like one another, and they married and divorced right away after. It took them 20 fucking years for them to get their lives together, and I had to grow up under that.

If I were to have children, that is not the kind of life I would want for them. And to have children just for the sake of having control, is fucked up in itself.

9 hours ago, Raccoonatic Ogilvie said:

Education is the biggest determinant of income. Avoiding college is a fantastic way to shut many doors.

And truly? My mom dropped out of High School, and didn't get a diploma till over a decade after the fact. Now she's a project manager at the federal reserve of San Francisco.

Employers don't care about college as much as they do about work history and experience. 

Oh - and:

Avoiding this and being lectured about how rape is bad is absolutely priceless. :^)

[Nepenthe]

8 hours ago, shdowhunt60 said:

They are publically funded. That's why congressmen and candidates spend hours a day thumbing through phone books and sending e-mails begging for donations so that they can campaign for the next election.

Correction: Congressmen and candidates spend significant amounts of time asking for donations because the voting system has been hijacked by special interests and corporations- solidified by Citizens United- who pump millions more than what public donations and funding can afford to do into their preferred candidates for the sake of being able to host meetings, rallies, and advertising campaigns that fit their specified agendas. This isn't a public sector problem in such that public funding isn't or cannot work; it's a "rich people are gaming the system for their own benefit yet again" problem.

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Given that the poor don't pay income taxes as-is, what is there to cut? Once again, north of %50 of the nation's income taxes are paid by the the upper %10, exactly how much do you think it is that the rest of the country contributes? I'll give you a hint, it's not very much in the slightest.

The marginal tax rates for middle class people (which I'm calculating as less than $100,000 for a single household) is three brackets going up to 25%. But from around $100,000 to $400,000+, the brackets only go up to 39.9~40%, which when you consider the concept of marginal utility, capital gains, the fight against estate taxes, corporate and off-shore tax havens, (remember: income is not the only taxable thing, and rich people are usually not paying what they actually owe on paper), this is a little ludicrous. The top earners of the country in the 50s were paying around 90% of income taxes after a certain bracket threshold and we were doing pretty darn well economically in part due to that, nor were they bitching about it and threatening the country that they would leave. 

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That welfare state is one of the biggest parasitic cancers of our society today. Baby boomers are living it off from welfare payments being put forward by the younger generations, which due to the fucked up way this ponzi scheme is structured, Generation X and Millennials cannot hope to put enough money to actually support.

.... Do you actually know how impossible it is to "live it" off of welfare due to the amount of money you actually get from it on top of the employment and spending stipulations of each program????

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Once again, they TREMENDOUSLY over-represent in income taxes collected. I seriously can't fucking blame them that when people start grabbing at THEIR money, that they start doing there damnedest to fight it off.

If rich fucks think they're somehow magically entitled to every single dollar that could theoretically be theirs, they can instead run their business off of an uncharted island. If they're able to formulate, build, and sustain the infrastructure and economic systems necessary to do that all by themselves, then I won't have a problem with them not paying the taxes they should be paying. Hell, tell me how to do that.

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Since when? Most cases of high-school drop-outs I've seen were from bad ethics, usually coming from the children themselves, and not any pressure coming from the family. This might have been true in before the time of "No Child Left Behind" and when kids stopped going to school after they learned how to read and write to help out on the farm, but this is neither here nor there.

High schools populated by poor people tend to lack the supplies, qualified faculty, and infrastructure necessary to sustain good schooling habits because most high schools are funded by the taxes of the district they exist in versus being equally funded by the state (aka, rich schools for the rich kids, poor schools for the poor kids); subsequently these schools exist in an environment of poor economic opportunity, higher crime rates and/or overpolicing, and the potential for disastrous economic downturn for any given individual in case of an emergency (illness, death in the family, disability, etc.) that is more likely to force people to drop out in order to sustain their household. My dad dying almost forced me to drop out of college because- surprise surprise- having your income suddenly halved when you are barely middle class is going to be more harmful than it would be to a family making $1 million+ a year. Do some people drop out for dumb reasons? Of course. Does this mean poor kids have the same opportunities as middle class kids or rich kids? No.

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No, Capitalism has leeway for unemployment, because it's fucking realistic and realizes that you cannot possibly hope to address the needs and demands of everyone.

So you're admitting that unemployment is inevitable. Which, yes, I agree with, that's true. But how do you reconcile that with any belief that if everyone simply worked harder then everyone would have a job?

Besides, what about the businesses' end? Hiring practices are not the best. Even after you've accounted for human biases in the interview process that have been statistically shown time and time again ("Wait, Mr. Anderson is a black guy? Oh dear...") you've got to account for the absurd amounts of experience necessary for entry level jobs due to the sudden pushback against just fucking training people, as well as glass ceilings for different groups that may force people to hop around in jobs, thus leaving voids that are harder and harder to fill. And it goes on and on.

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Employers don't care about college as much as they do about work history and experience. 

Which tends to happen when people are already living in an environment with access to networking, connections, and the economic and technological infrastructure to work and move around in it (hint: something white and/or rich people are more likely to have than other people, because let me tell you all of the high school dropouts on my mom's side of the family that got fucked over despite their work ethics after the fact. 8D!) It also doesn't help that a great deal of work experience, internships, and networking opportunities happen where? You guessed it: college, that expensive thing a lot of people- particularly drop-outs- usually can't afford.

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Oh - and:

Avoiding this and being lectured about how rape is bad is absolutely priceless. :^)

What does this have to do with anything?

[Tani Coyote]

On 5/12/2016 at 9:49 PM, ChaosSupremeSonic said:

Yeah, see, I actually don't believe in any of that shit regarding black people, transgenders, gays, muslims, and what not, or that humanity is "evil" per se - I actually believe that stuff can apply to any person regardless of who they are. It doesn't mean everyone will do it, but that enough of them will. Strickly pinning all of that on people of color, other religions, women, and the LGBTIQ community is less a belief that humans are bastards and more that those making such bigoted beliefs are making excuses to justify being such bastards against such communities who frankly just want to live decent lives without being harassed for who they are.

I believe that humans are bastards because at their worst they can be selfish, myopic, and apathetic to anything that doesn't match their beliefs.

Then you're not saying humans are bastards. You're saying SOME humans are bastards, and others can periodically be bastards.

The reason guys like Locke argue in favor of popular government is that yes, while we make mistakes, we will generally be able to compensate for each other's moral and logical failings. This security is not as present with an oligarchy or dictatorship.

We do need some police to rein in the bad folks, this is the easiest case to make. But the proportion of bad people is vastly overestimated by conservative elements.

On 5/12/2016 at 2:35 AM, shdowhunt60 said:

Given that the poor don't pay income taxes as-is, what is there to cut? Once again, north of %50 of the nation's income taxes are paid by the the upper %10, exactly how much do you think it is that the rest of the country contributes? I'll give you a hint, it's not very much in the slightest.

Actually a lot of the poor pay taxes but get it back through welfare or similar benefits. It's an inefficient system but it is what it is.

The rest of the country contributes its labor that capitalists get most of the profit from. And then those same capitalists whine when they're expected to make sure their laborers don't have to worry about starving or homelessness.

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That welfare state is one of the biggest parasitic cancers of our society today. Baby boomers are living it off from welfare payments being put forward by the younger generations, which due to the fucked up way this ponzi scheme is structured, Generation X and Millennials cannot hope to put enough money to actually support.

More reason to merge it into a citizen's income with all these other programs.

 

On 5/12/2016 at 2:35 AM, shdowhunt60 said:

Once again, they TREMENDOUSLY over-represent in income taxes collected. I seriously can't fucking blame them that when people start grabbing at THEIR money, that they start doing there damnedest to fight it off.

They get the most benefit from taking the most monetary risk and managing resources that you and I cannot possibly hope to comprehend.

They'd have nothing to manage if not for the labor of their employees.

Take care of your poor. If that's too much for a person, they're a failure as a human being and have no place in our society.

The whole basis of forming a society is for our collective benefit. No one is saying you can't make more money than anyone else, but when you start to eat into other people's basic living standards for the sake of profit, there's a serious problem.

Remember. Even a champion of private property and liberty like Locke said you were free to rob a rich man's fields to feed yourself. Human lives are superior to property in basically any moral system.

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It's actually a lot easier than you think. The past 5 years of my life has been swallowing that red pill and realizing I've been fucking around, and there are, and have always have been, jobs out there in high demand that pay out of the ass.

And only so many people can fill them. You will have a chronic mass of unemployed no matter how good the system. Meanwhile, supply and demand will keep wages low in certain sectors.

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I'm not really seeing how this is relevant other than trying to paint discussion of proven white male privilege as somehow illegitimate.

The data is all there. Employers prefer to pass over women and non-whites. "Equal opportunity" is a myth.

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wat?

No, Capitalism has leeway for unemployment, because it's fucking realistic and realizes that you cannot possibly hope to address the needs and demands of everyone.

Capitalism needs unemployment because when there's a shortage of labor, workers can demand better terms, pay, etc. This inevitably cuts into profits.

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Then they're stupid.

And that was stupid.

Hell, they didn't even particularly like one another, and they married and divorced right away after. It took them 20 fucking years for them to get their lives together, and I had to grow up under that.

If I were to have children, that is not the kind of life I would want for them. And to have children just for the sake of having control, is fucked up in itself.

Why did you have to be punished for their mistake? Why did they have to be punished for their mistake?

That is what I'm getting at here.

Is it irresponsible to have children prior to supporting them? Why yes, I don't think anyone's disputing that. But it's not an excuse to make the poor's lives Hell. Especially since it isn't THAT expensive to ensure everyone's cared for.

Also, here's the big whammy:

Why is parenting not treated as a job?

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And truly? My mom dropped out of High School, and didn't get a diploma till over a decade after the fact. Now she's a project manager at the federal reserve of San Francisco.

I'm happy for you. My father is also a dropout, and up until recently was running his own successful, six-digit company.

My Dad still pressed for me to get through college.

Why? Because anecdotes and personal experience are inferior to data: education is more or less always a boon. Associate's and Bachelor's Degrees have become a dime a dozen due to their supply, but the data still says they help your opportunities dramatically.

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Employers don't care about college as much as they do about work history and experience.

That's not what the data says, I'm afraid. Education is the biggest determinant of income.

By which I mean, if you don't have any, your opportunities for better pay are vastly curbed.

It used to be possible to not go to school and actually retire with a fair amount of change. That time has passed, because the economy has restructured in such a manner that most unskilled wages have dropped dramatically.

[Tornado]

On 5/11/2016 at 7:26 AM, Hyp3hat said:

Why else would McDonalds be so vehemently against raising the minimum wage in Seattle (I think, they had all those protests)? It's not like they're strapped for cash.

McDonald's Corporation is not strapped for cash, but that is irrelevant outside of the 15% of the McDonald's restaurants in the entire country that they are in charge of payroll for.

 

 

On 5/11/2016 at 6:59 PM, Hyp3hat said:

IDK, mate, maybe you should go to college, you could learn a lot. Not just about yr major, but about everyone else. 

People who have gone to college specifically to learn economics as a major still argue about this highly subjective concept, so knock off the attitude.

 

 

21 hours ago, Nepenthe said:

If rich fucks think they're somehow magically entitled to every single dollar that could theoretically be theirs, they can instead run their business off of an uncharted island. If they're able to formulate, build, and sustain the infrastructure and economic systems necessary to do that all by themselves, then I won't have a problem with them not paying the taxes they should be paying

This isn't really a justification for why wealthy people shouldn't want to pay the least amount of taxes just like everyone else does.

[Candescence]

In a way, it's somewhat bizarre that universal basic income isn't an established system, since many people on the left and right find it appealing - it reduces inequality and effectively eliminates poverty, helps future-proof society for a mostly-automated economy that effectively eliminates most human labor, allows more people to go into professions that don't provide immediate financial support (various arts, academia, etc) and vastly simplifies the welfare system along with making it more efficient.

Though I think the main root causes are free market libertarians loathing the mere thought of people not "earning the right to escape from poverty", notions that unemployment will skyrocket if people don't need to work (which is disproven by basic income experiments, which show that unemployment really only drops slightly, and that's mostly due to students choosing to focus on studies and mothers and/or fathers staying at home to look after their children), and established nonsense about "underserving poor" and "bootstraps" and that garbage. I wouldn't be surprised if Randians tried to point to the Speenhamland experiment and the practically fraudulent royal commission that deemed it a disaster. Thankfully, such bullshit is easier than ever to take a sledgehammer to.