Hasn’t been implemented so how do you know the outcomes won’t be there? Real policy as you call often times fails to have intended outcome or has lots of unintended consequences.
You could say the same about progressive taxes. Without them, the most efficient do the work. With them, less efficient people below taxable income threshold will do more work.
That's the first valuable, novel insight I've heard about taxation in a long time. While I support progressive taxes for other reasons (fairness), I'd be interested in the economic impact.
(The research would have to use overall tax rate, not just 'income' tax (i.e., wage tax).)
There was a time before income tax… and there maybe a future without income tax. Or you can think of income tax as profit sharing with everyone’s required partner big brother. Remember corporate tax and payroll taxes are flat. the progressive part of income tax is really more targeted at consumption. so it’s really more of a progressive consumption tax. It’s easy to arrange a delay in taxes if you don’t need to consume, and are willing to run a business.
Almost no one really wants government to leave them alone. Everyone looks to government after a disaster. People rely on government for policing and most people for providing their children education. People rely on government to ensure the food supply is safe. These things are largely forgotten about by the people saying they want less government. There are contradictory views held by the people who say they want government to leave them alone. They have bought into a fantasy narrative that they are under attack by government and liberalism.
A sort of example might be Hong Kong when I was there thirty or so years ago under British colonial control. The tax rate was about 15% and the government was active in some areas like maintaining the roads, building housing and basic education and health care but otherwise left things mostly to the market. It did pretty well up until the takeover by China which wasn't due to any desire by the population to have China control things, but due to China wanting to take over and having a large military.
The voters in the U.S. who want government to leave them alone say they want this also want government to regulate aspects of healthcare they don’t like. They want government to regulate private businesses so that they can’t exclude their notion of what “free speech” means. They want government to crack down on all the people and things they disagree with.
Trumpism has proven that most American conservatives don't want that.
Republicans used to have a strong faction of fiscal hawks who advocated eliminating all the expensive non-military government spending: privatizing Medicare, cutting Social Security, etc. But Trump discovered that you can simply promise to eliminate the deficit while also promising to leave all those programs in place exactly as they are, and people will eat it up.
That left politicians like Paul Ryan in a weird place because they were pushing for a limited government that their constituents didn't want anymore.
I don’t believe you are correct. People who vote for a man as debased, self centered, sexually depraved, and criminally inclined as Trump are “wrong”. White men latched onto a horrible person as their savior. If that’s what they want then they deserve what comes. But the people who don’t want that should stick to their principles.
What does it say about Trump that so many of his lawyers and advisors ended up in jail and that so few former cabinet members endorsed him? What does it say about his supporters who cared not that he raped children with his pal Epstein?
Remember when Cruz and Lindsey Graham spoke honestly about Trump just before November 2016? Recall what they said then to what they say now. It’s a cult.
> People who vote for a man as debased, self centered, sexually depraved, and criminally inclined as Trump are “wrong”.
Maybe you're too young to remember Bill Clinton?
He was accused of sexual harassment by a number of women (including a rape). His relationship with Lewinsky (22 years old), is highly exploitive in terms of the power he held over her career. While he might have supported women's right politically, he was certainly exploitive in his personal life.
There were also a number of "questionable business dealings" in his past. Arkansas land deals, Whitewater, almost impeached by Congress for lying.
But I'm sure you'll say "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Republicans". Ok, then don't blame Trump voters when they think "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Democrats".
So while people got worked up, he got re-elected handily.
It's funny to me when people entirely overlooked Clinton's life because they liked him as a President and they liked his policies.
The Clintons earned $120 million in 10 years after he was President. Hilary gave 30 minute speeches at Goldman Sachs for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Clearly these were payouts for repeal of Glass-Steagal and other policies. He was a predator and not deserving of the adulation he got. She became senator for New York by having it basically handed to her.
It would benefit humanity if people were taught to be consistent in their views. If they understood that extremism is when the cause is more important than the truth.
But I'm sure you'll say "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Republicans". Ok, then don't blame Trump voters when they think "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Democrats".
You’d be wrong. I don’t have your apparent level of inconsistency.
Obama is the only 2 term President to have gotten a majority of the vote both times since Ronald Reagan. Our system had been broken in a sense (depending on your perspective). We’ve had candidates get a plurality and some a majority of the vote who did not get elected. I think the electoral system needs to be abandoned.
The U.S. is far more right wing than people thought. That Trump got a majority of the vote is a huge win for him. No one can claim his win is because of a backward electoral system and not because he is popular. This is huge. Democrats will be dead for 2 years minimum. Trump will be able to enact whatever legislation he wants to.
He is the President we deserve. The DNC needs to be abolished. Democrats had the opportunity to reform the system. It’s been over 100 years since the number of Representatives has been updated. They could have imposed election reform. They could have gotten rid of archaic Senate rules like filibuster.
> Democrats had the opportunity to reform the system. It’s been over 100 years since the number of Representatives has been updated. They could have imposed election reform. They could have gotten rid of archaic Senate rules like filibuster.
When? How? Any change like that in the last few decades would be very hard, and probably before that as well.
I don't disagree with you, I've argued "fixing the system should be #1 priority" for years, but even if the Democratic party wanted to, I don't see how they could have done so.
When Obama was President his first two years Democrats had clear majorities of both houses. But that fool was obsessed with “bipartisanship”. He acted as if the political norms of the 70s had not changed. Also, they haven’t even tried to fight for the things I mentioned.
In Obama's first term, the parties were not nearly as ideologically sorted as they were today. There was a Democratic majority of 257 in the House, yes, but 54 of those were members of the explicitly conservative Blue Dog Coalition. They wouldn't have agreed to vote for sweeping partisan reforms.
I think they would have gone for updating the number of a Representatives. But they didn’t even try to do such things. Obama kept trying the make a deal with Republicans and acted like it was the 1970s. In the end he saw what his efforts were worth when Republicans refused to even vote for his Supreme Court nominee.
Changing number of representatives would require a constitutional amendment and that wouldn’t have passed with enough states.
I don’t think number of representatives matters as it’s mostly representative of population. If the ratios are the same then I don’t think 435 vs 4035 matters.
> Changing number of representatives would require a constitutional amendment
No, the size of the House is determined by Congress; a century ago they decided to cap it at the current number, and never increase it since then, regardless of population increase.
> I don’t think number of representatives matters as it’s mostly representative of population
That's not the case, though. A quick look at constituents per representative across states is all it takes to see how stark that is.
It's extra important because the number of electoral votes each state gets is dependent upon their number of representatives.
Changing number of representatives would require a constitutional amendment…
You are wrong on this. You should look up Reapportionment Acts. The number of Representatives does matter in an electoral system and for other reasons. A Representative from California represents far more people than one from North Dakota. This is a major power imbalance in both electoral matters and in matters of federal legislation.
The number of Representatives hasn’t been updated in a 100 years.
> It’s been over 100 years since the number of Representatives has been updated. They could have imposed election reform. They could have gotten rid of archaic Senate rules like filibuster.
As much as I'd like to think the waning days of the 2022 Congress were wasted, I don't think this would have been feasible.
Manchin and Sinema refused to get rid of the filibuster. And with that in place, nothing else that you mention was possible.
> The U.S. is far more right wing than people thought.
Yup. In 2016 we thought Trump was an aberration, a temporary cultish fad. In 2020 we felt justified because he lost, but we ignored how barely he lost. And now, knowing everything about Trump there is to know, we've elected him again, and we can't even say he lost the popular vote this time. The GOP took the Senate, and may even keep hold of the House for at least the next two years. Thomas and Alito will likely retire from SCOTUS, and Trump will appoint young, carefully-chosen, extreme right-wing justices. The makeup of the court will be hard-right-majority for the rest of my life. I'm sure he'll also appoint more hard-right judges to the federal judiciary in record numbers.
This is who we are, and it's time we start accepting that. Dem leadership needs to internalize that and drastically change their strategy. I'm not sure
When Trump lost in 2020 his supporters accused Twitter, Facebook, etc. of censoring their voices. Laws were passed in Texas to combat this. Now the pendulum has swung the other way.
Stories like this need to be understood. It’s tiring hearing people in the U.S. say things like, “If you don’t love America then move elsewhere.” Moving elsewhere is an option for only a few people. It’s also necessary for most people to find a community of fellow immigrants. Locals won’t accept you (depending on where you go).
The United States stands to lose a lot more by formally entering this conflict.
I don’t believe this is correct. If Europe and the U.S. won’t defend Ukraine then what makes people think they’ll defend Taiwan? The U.S. is showing that it is not a reliable guarantor of security. Europe looks helpless and weak.
Suppose tomorrow it was announced that China has brokered a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia and that they will send peacekeepers to ensure compliance. Imagine the shitshow that would follow. As the war drags on and as Ukraine’s ability to fight wanes such a scenario becomes more likely.
> Suppose tomorrow it was announced that China has brokered a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia and that they will send peacekeepers to ensure compliance.
I literally do not think China has the international clout to make that happen. China is deep in kahoots with Russia, and any deal brokered by them is no more likely to hold than the previous treaties. Ukraine's ultimate goal is to have the same security that other NATO countries enjoy, and that's not something China has the authority to offer them in the first place.
The US isn't involved in Ukraine like they are in Taiwan. If Ukraine becomes occupied territory, it will be a tragedy but the United States will be okay. If Taiwan is occupied, the entire concept of American economic leadership will be inherently jeopardized and free trade in the Taiwan Strait will probably cease. This would also offer a deeply threatening staging location for attacks on other allies a-la Japan and Australia, whereas the territory of Ukraine is arguably less strategically valuable than Crimea or Georgia, let alone Taiwan. I guess only time will tell.
This has been the biggest disappointment of the Biden administration. The U.S. policy in this war has been to give Ukraine just enough weapons to keep the war going. It’s pathetic.
Yes, bots are doing at languages. In the U.S. it’s common for college level courses to have students use AI to generate papers. English is one of the most widely spoken languages. Your Instagram link doesn’t demonstrate anything. There is no reason to believe those are pictures of NATO troops.
That would help. A better way of tackling the issue is:
Governments must introduce permanent income and wealth taxes on the top 1 percent, ban or punitively tax carbon-intensive luxury consumptions —starting with private jets and superyachts— and regulate corporations and investors to drastically and fairly reduce their emissions.
