American Politics Discussion Thread

[darrelljs]

That’s a good article…I’m not sure it convinced me but it has some interesting data points. It’s a painful thing to raise prices and companies may by leading the target which would give a short term bump in profitability only. As you say, reasons to raise prices beyond current COGS increases would include rising wages (which tend to lag) or anticipation in future supply/transportation cost increases. Oil feels different, its so supply/demand driven that the war in Russia would lead to higher prices with or without underlying inflation.

Darrell

[Mjmd]

Again, I'm not trying to prove maliciousness (although again with human nature being what it is I highly suspect some %). But even without any greed involved its still a factor. Certainly not even in the top 3 reasons though.

[T-hawk]

So the big elephant in the room is the huge disruption to the supply chain from Covid.

If the inflation was caused by supply chain problems -- who caused those supply chain problems in the first place? The Democrats. By inflicting all the Covid shutdowns at the state levels. And longer term over decades, it was the Democrats that drove that manufacturing out of the US in the first place, by way of over-regulation and minimum wage requirements and union capture of industries.

That said, I'll agree that not all of it is exactly the Democrats' fault (the Covid stimuluses were started by Trump) - my point was more that how it's perceived is what matters.

Speaking of: if you don't believe vast majority of scientist or casually looking at any temperature charts of your choice by this time

I don't. Every one of those scientists and temperature charts is biased fake-news fear propaganda. Every one of those temperature records has all sorts of "corrections" and "adjustments" that construct the picture they want to tell. Of course scientists receiving grant money are going to "find" what the grantor wants them to find as an excuse to increase government power and overreach. We've been warned about impending climate doom for 50 years and exactly nothing has happened.

And again, my point wasn't the topic exactly as the Democrats' attitude towards it - the attitude of "fuck your life", to shut down or make difficult what you want to do in the name of elitist policy.

I mean lets be frank VA was flipped with good old fashioned alive and well racism disguised as CRT fear.

I have no idea where you got this, other than believing the fake news to see "racism" jump-scaring you from every crevice. The Trump administration enacted exactly zero policies that involve race in any way and yet you somehow still keep calling him that.

VA flipped directly from the previous governor saying "we don't think parents should influence what's taught in schools." Of course parents were rightfully outraged from that.

And again, whatever the reasons actually were, the point is the Democrats' attitude of "fuck off, we know better than you." That attitude is why they are getting hammered.

Transfer of power is one of the two key pillars of democracy.

And once again I remind you it's the Democrats who committed the insurrection, by illegally changing rules to favor their side.

[T-hawk]

And as for who is violating democracy - it was the Biden administration that blatantly and openly violated the Constitution with the federal Covid vaccine mandate. They said up front they knew it wouldn't hold up in court (and it didn't) and yet enacted it anyway. Both this unlawful tyrannical coercive authoritiative action, and the fuck-you attitude that goes with it, are why the Democrats will and should lose everything in sight in November.

[Mjmd]

Transfer of power is one of the two key pillars of democracy.

And once again I remind you it's the Democrats who committed the insurrection, by illegally changing rules to favor their side.

I'll get to the rest later, but for the 50th time, the PA rules were changed with support from Republicans and weren't challenged legally until after the election which is why the case was thrown out (ie we actually don't know if they were changed illegally therefore your argument is null). Now I'm never going to claim sides in power don't legally change election laws all the time. Republicans have legally been changing election laws to suppress votes quite regularly (again see my statement about people needing to learn sides in power change laws to favor them staying in power). What is dangerous to democracy is constantly stating election fraud theories of all sorts. You can't deny Republicans in official positions of public trust put out a vast quantity of election lies with nothing to back them up. They then used those lies to pressure state legislatures and attorney generals to throw out election results across multiple states. We know this occurred. This isn't speculation, this is known verified fact. We also know for a fact that Republicans were sending in alternate slates of electors with no legal basis for doing so. We also know for a fact Trump tried to get Pence to throw out the results. There is a lot of hard fact here. You yourself have admitted they tried to overturn the election. You are just trying to justify it in your own head. I get it. Humans don't like being wrong about "their side". I'm not going to claim Democrats are perfect. I won't claim they don't try to game the system (again historical problem we should really fix). HOWEVER, there is no argument you have presented that isn't full of holes that the Republicans trying to overturn the election was justified. I can of course continue to poke holes in your logic again and again and again if you really want. I get its hard to admit you don't have an argument, so you keep saying the same thing over and over again. Admit it. You can believe Republicans are right about everything else, but for this most important issue they are dangerous, have caused harm, and every indication is will continue to cause harm to our democracy. Even if you 100% believe Republicans are right about everything else, this one thing is above all that and you shouldn't be voting for them.

[darrelljs]

We've been warned about impending climate doom for 50 years and exactly nothing has happened.

You need to pay better attention .

Darrell

[darrelljs]

And once again I remind you it's the Democrats who committed the insurrection, by illegally changing rules to favor their side.

I’ll remind you again the Pennsylvania state legislature was dominated by Republicans.

Darrell

[Mjmd]

And once again I remind you it's the Democrats who committed the insurrection, by illegally changing rules to favor their side.

I’ll remind you again the Pennsylvania state legislature was dominated by Republicans.

Darrell

Facts don't matter to fascists to be fair. Its actually one of the key symptoms.

[Mjmd]

Ok, lets get to the things that don't matter (again in comparison to continuation of democracy).

If the inflation was caused by supply chain problems -- who caused those supply chain problems in the first place?  The Democrats.  By inflicting all the Covid shutdowns at the state levels.

To be fair Trump also announced support for shutdowns in mid March 2020. Trump gets bashed a lot for his Covid response (rightly so), but you do have to give him credit for of minimal effort / eventually doing something about. That being said, yes Democrats were the ones pushing for / it lasted longer in their states. I'll also note, this happened worldwide, so even if America had done nothing there would still be affects. I'm not sure if you have studied what happens to economies when they lose say 1% of their population, but in a short term economic impact its usually not great. Now longer term a human life regardless of moral value, also has economic value. I'll return to this a few times. While I know you don't value life on a moral level of them being human beings, a human life is worth quite a bit economically to a nation. So on a pure economic calculation how do you stack short term pain from shutdowns, with medium term pain of losing human capital, with medium term pain or inflation, with longer term pain of losing human capital. 

And longer term over decades, it was the Democrats that drove that manufacturing out of the US in the first place, by way of over-regulation and minimum wage requirements and union capture of industries.

HASTY GENERALIZATION FALLACY ALERT!!!! (probably a few more as well). So in general this is where not having a side might help each side see clearer / knowing some history / applying. This is going to be as short as I can..... I can't stress how both sides had power during this period and how you are just ignoring global macro economic factors. So history lesson is in order. Why was the US the prominent industrialized nation after WWII. Any guesses? If bombed out rubble comes to mind, you are correct! Almost every other industrialized nation was devastated. This created huge demand, which also led to high wages and strong unions. I've seen far left liberals blame capitalisms for the decline that came next and they aren't wrong, but also it would have been hard to stop even if we had gutted wages and regulations. A quick sidebar is to again mention more jobs have been lost to automation than overseas; end sidebar. So companies are moving low wage jobs to other countries. How do you prevent that? Protectionism ends poorly, so lets not go that way. If you are T-Hawk ruler of all how do you depress wages when they are high? Its telling that outside of depressions the % of Americans working minimum wage isn't really above 8% and often gets to the low 2-3% of the population. I'll argue for the min wage in a second, but even if it didn't exist, its unlikely we would have kept those low wage jobs. That isn't to say things like purchasing power, a weaker labor market (which has weakend and lessened unions) and wealth inequality haven't gotten worse. Some* of that again is due to overall macro economics and some of it is political decisions, but as T-Hawk doesn't like taxing the wealth or the min wage, I'll assume he doesn't care about those three anyways. However, overall US wealth and GDP has continued to increase and we have low unemployment (total # of jobs is also up), so while we have lost certain types of jobs, that isn't strictly a bad thing. What people mostly miss is the high paying (most of the time union) jobs you could get with a high school diploma. 

So should countries race to bottom? If they need capital and have high unemployment; maybe. If they are trying to develop more complex economies, business environments, and industries. Not so much. Contract law is essential to business. You have to have that. A long term stable political environment helps a lot and is an area where democracies are pretty good in (sidebar: we are in serious economic trouble if Republicans overthrow our Democracy). Regulations around health (including building codes) are good to a point. Again human capital is worth something on an economic level. Sure killing, maiming, or causing workers to be sick in the short term might make you more money, but in the long term its bad. Instead of competing for race to the bottom industries, countries would rather build up industries with high barriers to entry. You want industries that can't be moved easily. A key barrier to entry is technical capabilities, which includes education.

I'll also note something Republicans look completely the other way on and Democrats don't do enough on is consolidation of industries. Republicans shout "FREE MARKET" from the top of their lungs and then do nothing to stop duopolies / similar from forming..... 

Ok min wage argument. The reason banks are good is they are a force multiplier on amount of money in a system. IE one party holds an asset in deposited funds that the bank then loans to another party to do something with. Its being used multiple times. The money throughput of an economy is important. That is the reason the fed is also worried about liquidity of the market. Their responses are non direct and not focused. IE interest rate and quantitative easing help the economy, but what exactly is being done with that liquidity is out of their control. The reason direct payments / unemployment to prevent recessions is good monetary policy (although one that should be used sparingly), is generally people who don't have much money will spend it. It is money that gets directly injected into local economies. Its all about having money flowing through the economy. While yes capital investments are also key, no one makes capital investments in a lot of industries if there isn't an economy for that industry and a lot of economies rely on people buying things. Even if you are a production based society, someone somewhere has to be buying stuff. Even in a production based society, you want a dynamic diversified economy not solely reliant on one aspect so having some amount of consumer economy is good. Edit: note I didn't even have to go to moral argument here. I know T-Hawk simply doesn't care about morals, so I'm logically arguing on a pure economic theory basis.

paraphrased: "climate change is bull"

From a logical historical basis, we can look and go "when humans make changes to environments do things stay the same". Do we think outputting massive amounts of pollutants will have 0 effect? Without knowing any science or even history does the logic "we are doing something on a massive scale to the environment and none of the changes happening / predicted to happen are due to it". Please reread the bolded statement out loud for the absurdity of the argument. Obviously if you know a little history and science it helps. If you have studied geologic history for instance. If you know in history when an industry is threatened it often lies and misleads to protect itself. This is why I usually try the 50% argument with people. IE if we assume both sides aren't being truthful and we accept the truth is somewhere in the middle, how bad is it? At 25% we should be doing a lot more a lot faster. Also, as Darrelljs points out, the sheer number of once in a 100 year or similar events happening should be a good indicator. Its not like basic science of hotter atmosphere leads to more energy is hard to comprehend. 

I have no idea where you got this, other than believing the fake news to see "racism" jump-scaring you from every crevice.  The Trump administration enacted exactly zero policies that involve race in any way and yet you somehow still keep calling him that.

VA flipped directly from the previous governor saying "we don't think parents should influence what's taught in schools."  Of course parents were rightfully outraged from that.

I didn't research all of these, because UM there are a lot. Again, even assuming some liberal bias and we throw out half, its a lot. Also, did you listen to him?
https://civilrights.org/trump-rollbacks/

VA race had a heavy emphasis on CRT. Something not actually taught in the schools, but again being used by the right as a way to label anything about racial history. Kids should learn history. History is uncomfortable. The point in my mind is to try to do better going forwards. The way generational math works and the way people are, everyone has some right bastards in their family history, but also has people who did good things. What are we going do? How are we going to act? Lets try to avoid past mistakes a little? Maybe?

[superdeath]

paraphrased: "climate change is bull"

Id also note, can always look up what happened to the climate when various volcanoes erupted in the past. The amount of pollutants they churned out, and how much we are pumping out daily. The Earth can be, and is being changed by our industrial society.