A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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I doubt Trump will be talking about this.
Paul Ryan Thanks Koch Network Donors For Helping Pass Tax Cuts That Benefit Them
At a lavish resort near Palm Springs, California, on Sunday, the biggest donors in the billionaire Koch brothers’ powerful political network turned their eyes to a video from Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan. “We would not be in this unique position if not for the hard work and devotion from everyone in the Koch network,” said Ryan to some of his party’s biggest financiers, the Washington Post reported Monday.
http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/paul-ryan-thanks-koch-network
-donors-helping-pass-tax-cuts-benefit-them-2646810
T
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Quote:What government is supposed to do during a economic depression, if the people running government know what the fuck about how an economy really works, is increase spending on infrastructure projects to put people back to work, but the states controlled by the GOP and the federal government did not do that, except when the Democrats beat the shit out of the GOP. Instead, the GOP controlled states were firing employees, firemen and police and, in general, making things worse. The Federal government wasn't much help either. Do you remember how the angry GOP crapped in their pants when the Democrats prevented GM and Chrysler from bankruptcy and the firing hundreds of thousands of their employees and the employees of GM's and Chrysler's suppliers?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
hmmmmm... no mention of quantitative easing in there. Surely that has something to do with it, even though I'm sure Trump won't mention it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_2008%E2%80%9310_automotiv
e_industry_crisis_on_the_United_States
The Democrats could not do much because of the GOP's obstructionism in Congress, so the Federal Reserve had to lower short-term interest rates to encourage people to keep buying stuff so that the economy did not collapse even worse than it did. Once the short-term interest rate got to zero, the Federal Reserve had run out of options other than quantitative easing, where it gives $Trillions of cashy money that they printed in exchange for Treasury bonds. The cash was to keep people buying stuff so that the economy doesn't completely collapse. But the GOP was violently opposed to quantitative easing because Republicans, at least those in the lower 99%, have no true understanding of how anything actually works. They have delusions, which not only screw-up government but also their financial lives, making them poorer than they ought to be.
www.investopedia.com/terms/q/quantitative-easing.asp
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Once again, I'm not a Republican.
Don't try to disguise your insults, Second. You're not half as clever as you think you are.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:And I'm not half as rich as you are either, Mr. Genius 6ixStringJack. In other news:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Once again, I'm not a Republican.
Don't try to disguise your insults, Second. You're not half as clever as you think you are.
The Russian Sanctions Act bill passed 419-3 in the House and 98-2 in the Senate. In other words, virtually every Republican in Congress supported it. Now Trump says he’s not going to bother with it. So far, there’s been barely a peep about this from Republicans or 6ixStringJack. Does that make 6ix a Republican? Who knows when he repeats most of the same mistaken ideas a Republican does except not admitting to being a Republican. Here’s The Hill with the Russian Sanctions Act bill story:
Democrats excoriated Trump, whose campaign is the subject of a special counsel investigation over possible collusion with Russia, for declining to follow Congress’ directive. Some Republicans also expressed concerns about the lack of new sanctions.
….Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Mnuchin he hopes the administration issues new sanctions soon, and said in a statement that “it is clear the administration is working in good faith, and I am committed to applying pressure, as needed, to ensure further implementation.”
This is yet another bit of evidence that Republicans have fallen ever further into the Trump black hole over the past six months. In August they were willing to openly and unanimously defy him by imposing sanctions he opposed. Today, when he blows them off in the most cavalier way possible, a few Republicans mumble a bit about Russia being a bad actor but then shrug their shoulders. Whatever Trump wants to do is OK with them.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/01/republicans-have-all-but-given-
up-on-opposing-trump/
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
And I'm not half as rich as you are either, Mr. Genius 6ixStringJack.
That could very well be one of the most true things you've ever said on this board.
I don't actually believe you have any money Second. I don't think anybody here does, beyond the human tenancy to give a tiny bit of trust that somebody is who they say they are as long as that trust can't somehow burn them.
If you are rich, you are the most pathetic person I've ever met. What? All the money in the world isn't enough? That money doesn't actually buy you the ability to actually do something to help people you claim to care about but don't actually give a shit about? You need to come to a long dead forum with less than a dozen regular posters and brag about it every day and insult them?
Let me make this absolutely clear to you right now.
I
Don't
Believe
you.
Period.
I don't think anybody else here should either, and I doubt many of them do.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:You're always talking about which personalities offend you of people using pseudonyms. Think about something more tangible that could change your life if it was structured correctly. Trump's infrastructure plan is not the correct plan:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
And I'm not half as rich as you are either, Mr. Genius 6ixStringJack.
That could very well be one of the most true things you've ever said on this board.
I don't actually believe you have any money Second. I don't think anybody here does, beyond the human tenancy to give a tiny bit of trust that somebody is who they say they are as long as that trust can't somehow burn them.
Trump gave a big number, $1.5 trillion, for infrastructure spending in his SOTU address. But a leaked draft of his plan says that it will involve only $200 billion of federal money. The rest is supposed to be induced spending from private investors. That’s quite a trick. How does it work?
www.axios.com/draft-white-house-infrastructure-plan-1516644555-0d43f41
7-6ccd-43f7-9eae-3ccbe711314d.html
The answer is that it doesn’t work. Private investors won’t spend on public infrastructure unless guaranteed a return. This only works if they’re given ownership, and the ability to collect future revenue from the public.
First point: lots of infrastructure just can’t work that way. There’s no way to turn sewer systems, protective levees on rivers, and lots of other stuff (flood control in Houston) into profit centers.
Second, even where it does work — say, on toll roads and bridges — that private investment doesn’t come free; it’s in return for the ability to collect fees from the public, which is just taxation in another form. And there’s no evidence that doing public investment this way saves any money. On the contrary, it usually ends up costing taxpayers more than just having the government build the thing.
Wait, it gets worse. Where does even the $200 billion come from? It’s not at all clear that it’s new money; much of it would probably be money that would have been spent on public projects anyway.
What this means is that we aren’t talking about a program to build infrastructure so much as a plan to convert what should have been public projects into private ventures, presumably with big tax breaks.
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By the standards Trump used to trash the Obama era, the Trump era has been another economic nightmare. “Ninety-four million Americans are out of the labor force!” he complained last year. That was true at the time, if you included students, retirees and the disabled, but today, 95.5 million Americans are out of the labor force. “Over 43 million Americans are on food stamps,” Trump said last year. This year, it’s over 42 million. “Our trade deficit in goods last year was nearly $800 billion!” Trump marveled. Under Trump, the trade deficit is increasing.
Trump has addressed this largely by changing the criteria by which he evaluates the economy. No longer does a healthy America require closing the trade deficit, drastically increasing the labor force participation rate, or making the labor market so robust nobody needs social assistance. Instead, Trump points to a record-high stock market.
But the stock market first hit record high territories under Obama, and Trump-era market performance has actually lagged its Obama-era average. Whether you want to characterize current economic trends as fantastic or terrible, they simply aren’t very different from the trends we saw under Obama. In the fourth quarter of 2017, the economy grew 2.5 percent relative to where it had been a year ago. That’s worse than Canada or Mexico did last year. Maybe the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico should be tooting their horn louder than Trump? Maybe Trump needs lessons from his neighbors on how it is done?
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/30/16945146/trump-economic-reco
rd
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You're always talking about which personalities offend you of people using pseudonyms. Think about something more tangible that could change your life if it was structured correctly. Trump's infrastructure plan is not the correct plan:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
And I'm not half as rich as you are either, Mr. Genius 6ixStringJack.
That could very well be one of the most true things you've ever said on this board.
I don't actually believe you have any money Second. I don't think anybody here does, beyond the human tenancy to give a tiny bit of trust that somebody is who they say they are as long as that trust can't somehow burn them.
Trump gave a big number, $1.5 trillion, for infrastructure spending in his SOTU address. But a leaked draft of his plan says that it will involve only $200 billion of federal money. The rest is supposed to be induced spending from private investors. That’s quite a trick. How does it work?
www.axios.com/draft-white-house-infrastructure-plan-1516644555-0d43f41
7-6ccd-43f7-9eae-3ccbe711314d.html
The answer is that it doesn’t work. Private investors won’t spend on public infrastructure unless guaranteed a return. This only works if they’re given ownership, and the ability to collect future revenue from the public.
First point: lots of infrastructure just can’t work that way. There’s no way to turn sewer systems, protective levees on rivers, and lots of other stuff (flood control in Houston) into profit centers.
Second, even where it does work — say, on toll roads and bridges — that private investment doesn’t come free; it’s in return for the ability to collect fees from the public, which is just taxation in another form. And there’s no evidence that doing public investment this way saves any money. On the contrary, it usually ends up costing taxpayers more than just having the government build the thing.
Wait, it gets worse. Where does even the $200 billion come from? It’s not at all clear that it’s new money; much of it would probably be money that would have been spent on public projects anyway.
What this means is that we aren’t talking about a program to build infrastructure so much as a plan to convert what should have been public projects into private ventures, presumably with big tax breaks.
lol...
I'd tell you to stay on topic, but we all know by now that this would fall on deaf ears.
I bet your Asperger's goes over swimmingly at those regular board meetings that you head up in your day to day operations.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:6ix, the topic is the same old "Democrats Only". It is not about your touchy personality or your uninformed opinions.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'd tell you to stay on topic, but we all know by now that this would fall on deaf ears.
Wages are easy to measure, so many studies focus on them for the sake of methodological simplicity. But there is more to life than cash wages, and studies show that immigration has significant indirect benefits.
One example is what happened in the 1960s when the United States decided to eliminate Mexican guest workers from America’s agricultural labor force. These guest workers, called braceros, were heavily present in some states, like Texas and California. Other states, such as Georgia and Wisconsin, had a few braceros. Some had no braceros whatsoever. By comparing wage trends in high-exposure, low-exposure, and no-exposure states, the researchers were able to show that kicking out the guest workers had no real impact on farm wages.
That doesn’t mean the laws of supply and demand were magically repealed. It means that landowners changed their strategy. For some crops, like tomatoes and sugar beets, producers were able to switch to more mechanical harvesting techniques.
For other crops — including asparagus, fresh strawberries, lettuce, celery, and cucumbers — mechanization techniques were not available, and production simply fell. Wages did not rise; instead, Americans learned to live with reduced produce variety.
Immigration skeptics often pivot from the labor market economics to the notion that immigrants — especially the dreaded undocumented — are a drain on public resources, thus keying in to longstanding racial perceptions of the welfare state. Trump went so far as to falsely claim on the campaign trail that undocumented workers are actually receiving more generous public services than America’s veterans.
This idea plays a critical role in holding together the political coalition of conservatism — selling the idea that cutting taxes is compatible with financial support for Social Security because there will be plenty of money for the elderly once we get rid of the foreign-born leeches.
But it’s completely false. Unauthorized workers receive few if any public services (they ride the bus, but they’re ineligible for social assistance programs) but contribute to the tax base. Indeed, since people living and working in the United States illegally are often paying Social Security taxes without collecting benefits, they are the great heroes of the US Treasury.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/30/16934726/trump-immigration-v
alues-decline
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The closest Trump got to the poetry one expects from a formal presidential speech came at the beginning, when he said “to everyone still recovering in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, California, and everywhere else — we are with you, we love you, and we will pull through together.”
Back on planet Earth, FEMA announced today that it’s ending food and water shipments to Puerto Rico. About a third of the island still lacks power.
The Puerto Rico saga is marginal to American politics because Puerto Rico itself is a marginal part of the country — an island physically separated from the mainland, whose residents lack representation in Congress or the right to vote in presidential elections.
But the sad state of that island is worth dwelling on, because the devastation of Hurricane Maria remains the one real crisis that Trump’s dealt with that hasn’t simply been self-inflicted. He’s been inattentive, ill-informed, dishonest, and ineffective, capping it with last night’s solemn pledge of solidarity that’s totally disconnected from the actual reality on the ground.
Most of the problems Trump is ignoring are chronic rather than acute, and if the country needs to suffer through a few more years of neglect we’ll make it. Puerto Rico is facing acute problems and the president is, likewise, doing nothing.
If we’re lucky, those of us on the mainland won’t have to find out what it’s like to live through that. But Trump makes it clear on a daily basis that if we ever do, there’s no way he’s going to rise to the occasion.
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