A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 108 of 725

PREV PAGE 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 NEXT PAGE

1KIKI

Sunday, May 13, 2018 1:56 AM

You missed one important aspect of redirecting the military proper - jobs.

"The projected active duty end strength in the armed forces for fiscal year 2017 was 1,281,900 servicemembers, with an additional 801,200 people in the seven reserve components."

The military proper is a total of roughly 1.3 million jobs. That's 1.3 million people not receiving unemployment.

Thanks for not answering the question.

Perhaps someone else could chime in, since SECOND can't address the actual topic.

We could redirect the military - from pointless, money-wasting adventures overseas, to useful, value-producing work at home.

It seems a modest proposal, and non-partisan, in that neither side has any financial or cultural reason to be more against it than the other. Set aside your preconceptions about whether or not it might be implemented.

Would it work? Is this a way to improve the value the members of this society receive from the society, within the bounds of our current economic system?

SECOND is a troll because it constantly misrepresents what people post, fails to address their actual positions, and resorts to personal attacks when its brain isn't working (which is most of the time).

6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, May 13, 2018 5:50 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
You missed one important aspect of redirecting the military proper - jobs.

"The projected active duty end strength in the armed forces for fiscal year 2017 was 1,281,900 servicemembers, with an additional 801,200 people in the seven reserve components."

The military proper is a total of roughly 1.3 million jobs. That's 1.3 million people not receiving unemployment.

Thanks for not answering the question.

Perhaps someone else could chime in, since SECOND can't address the actual topic.

We could redirect the military - from pointless, money-wasting adventures overseas, to useful, value-producing work at home.

It seems a modest proposal, and non-partisan, in that neither side has any financial or cultural reason to be more against it than the other. Set aside your preconceptions about whether or not it might be implemented.

Would it work? Is this a way to improve the value the members of this society receive from the society, within the bounds of our current economic system?

I'd be for this if those funds and personnel were re-directed and no longer actually "in" the military. I'm thinking somewhere along the lines of putting all of that to use fixing the failing infrastructure of the country. Say, once you've served your four year stint you have a nice paying, but heavy work job waiting for you that will teach you a trade. If you so choose.

But if you think the gun nuts are bad now, just try to put 1.3 million soldiers patrolling up and down the streets of the country and watch donations to the NRA increase by a factor of 10 overnight.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

1KIKI

Sunday, May 13, 2018 5:58 AM

"just try to put 1.3 million soldiers patrolling up and down the streets of the country"

I wasn't thinking of any military-style work. Just work on public lands like restoration and conservation, or for public projects like infrastructure, or in public hospitals in underserved areas.

SECOND is a troll because it constantly misrepresents what people post, fails to address their actual positions, and resorts to personal attacks when its brain isn't working (which is most of the time).

SIGNYM

Sunday, May 13, 2018 2:05 PM

Quote:
[ SECOND brings up Veblen, who (btw) points out that it is people LIKE SECOND who are the real parasites who are disrupting the system. Why are people LIKE SECOND allowed to be parasites? Because the rules of the game allow it.

A REAL loss, for SECOND, would be something like nationalization of gas fields, where the rules of the game are knocked out from under SECOND. But neither establishment Dems nor Repubs are about to change the rules of the game, because they too sustain crooked politicians, who parasitize the parasites. It's a whole ecology of parasites! - SIGNY

The Communists called Capitalists intestinal parasites - SECOND

They did? I never knew that, Why don't you find me some quotes, seeing as you seem to know a lot more about it than I do.

Quote:
The better analogy, which is nastier yet truer, would be Capitalists are Dairymen with the Workers being Milk cows. When there is a drought and the pastures aren’t producing enough grass to keep the entire cow herd fed, Dairymen send part of their herds to the slaughter house because paying for grain (instead of free grass) to feed the excess cattle is expensive.

Hmmm... I think it's a stupid analogy. It would only work if, in your analogy the dairy herd plowed the fields; grew harvested and siloed their own grain; built their own milk barn and milking equipment; milked themselves and trucked the milk to market; and managed the operation ... and THEN the dairyman took money from the sales for himself, and selected some of the herd for slaughter.

Because in reality producers do all the work of production. THAT's the problem with the rentier class, as Veblen saw it ... they don't do anything productive. Put another way, they can't possibly justify their outsized wealth based on their production.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Sunday, May 13, 2018 4:22 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
I had a VERY SPECIFIC suggestion as to how to improve people's lives without trying to create a worker's utopia or have massive redistribution of wealth, and it involved re-purposing the military. SECOND has managed to not actually discuss my post at all.

But it does certainly snark and troll at every post.

SECOND is a troll.
I'm a troll because I have no respect for your thinking? Too bad.

www.vox.com/2018/5/10/17339180/sheldon-adelson-congressional-leadershi
p-fund

Most recently, he has reportedly threatened to veto the upcoming farm bill unless it imposes stringent new work requirements on recipients of SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, still commonly referred to as food stamps.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that new work requirements plus other restrictions proposed by House Republicans would end up denying or reducing nutritional aid to around two million people, mostly in families with children.

As Paul Ryan put it, SNAP and other programs create a “hammock” that “lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.”

Able-bodied SNAP recipients who should be working but aren’t are very hard to find: A vast majority of the program’s beneficiaries either are working — but at unstable jobs that pay low wages — or are children, elderly, disabled or essential family caregivers.

www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/opinion/trump-food-stamps-agriculture.html

So what is your complaint? Or do you not know after presenting somebody else's thoughts as your own? Those who are working will qualify under "work requirements" so they will not be effected.

SECOND

Sunday, May 13, 2018 4:54 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:

Thanks for not answering the question.

Perhaps someone else could chime in, since SECOND can't address the actual topic.

Your questions are of zero interest to me. If I answer one, it will be followed by an even less interesting question. I have seen a thousand times where these so-called "conversations" go on fireflyfans.net -- to nowhere. This is where I want to go and Signym suggested it:

Republicans are offended by John Maynard Keynes. And why would they be? Money. Keynesian macroeconomics calculated how much government money needs to be spent to get the effect Democrats desire and the huge amount offends Republican sensibilities. Republicans wish the effect could be created by keeping the Federal budget approximately the same, or even shrinking the budget, and instead moving money from one part of the national budget to another or negotiating "better" international trade agreements. Republican wishful thinking never works, but Republicans keep dreaming that this time it will because they really hate to see more money spent to solve an economics problem.

From Signym’s childhood storybook by Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, Chapter IX, "The Heresies of John Maynard Keynes"
https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/12143671/The_Worldly_Philosophers_._R
obert_L._Heilbroner_._epub
www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers-Economic-Thinkers-Seventh/dp/06848
6214X/

Starting in the middle of Chapter IX: Thus the paradox of poverty amidst plenty and the anomaly of idle men and idle machines. At the bottom of a slump there was a heartless contradiction between a crying need for goods and an insufficiency of production. But the contradiction was purely a moral one. For the economy did not operate to satisfy human wants—wants are always as large as dreams. It turned out goods to satisfy demand—and demand is as small as a person’s pocketbook. Hence the unemployed were little more than economic zeros; they might as well have been on the moon for all the economic influence they exerted on the marketplace.

To be sure, once investment declined and the economy shrank in size, social misery appeared. But not—as Keynes points out—effective social misery: the nation’s conscience would not do as an effective substitute for enough investment. Rather, since savings declined along with investment, the economic flow turned over evenly, quite unaffected by the fact that it was smaller than it used to be.

A peculiar state of affairs, indeed a tragedy without a villain. No one can blame society for saving, when saving is so apparently a private virtue. It is equally impossible to chastise businessmen for not investing when no one would be so happy to comply as they—if they saw a reasonable chance for success. The difficulty is no longer a moral one—a question of justice, exploitation, or even human foolishness. It is a technical difficulty, almost a mechanical fault. But its price is no less high for all of that. For the price of inactivity is unemployment.

. . . Here, then, was the gloomy diagnosis of John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money:

Quote:
First, an economy in depression could stay there. There was nothing inherent in the economic mechanism to pull it out. One could have “equilibrium” with unemployment, even massive unemployment.

Second, prosperity depended on investment. If business spending for capital equipment fell, a spiral of contraction would begin. Only if business investment rose would a spiral of expansion follow.

And third, investment was an undependable drive wheel for the economy. Uncertainty, not assurance, lay at the very core of capitalism. Through no fault of the businessman it was constantly threatened with satiety, and satiety spelled economic decline.

Certainly it was an unsettling outlook. But it would have been utterly unlike Keynes to content himself with making a diagnosis of gloom and letting it go at that. With all its prophecy of danger,

SECOND

Sunday, May 13, 2018 5:15 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
[ SECOND brings up Veblen, who (btw) points out that it is people LIKE SECOND who are the real parasites who are disrupting the system. Why are people LIKE SECOND allowed to be parasites? Because the rules of the game allow it.

A REAL loss, for SECOND, would be something like nationalization of gas fields, where the rules of the game are knocked out from under SECOND. But neither establishment Dems nor Repubs are about to change the rules of the game, because they too sustain crooked politicians, who parasitize the parasites. It's a whole ecology of parasites! - SIGNY

The Communists called Capitalists intestinal parasites - SECOND
They did? I never knew that, Why don't you find me some quotes, seeing as you seem to know a lot more about it than I do.

Quote:
The better analogy, which is nastier yet truer, would be Capitalists are Dairymen with the Workers being Milk cows. When there is a drought and the pastures aren’t producing enough grass to keep the entire cow herd fed, Dairymen send part of their herds to the slaughter house because paying for grain (instead of free grass) to feed the excess cattle is expensive.
Hmmm... I think it's a stupid analogy. It would only work if, in your analogy the dairy herd plowed the fields; grew harvested and siloed their own grain; built their own milk barn and milking equipment; milked themselves and trucked the milk to market; and managed the operation ... and THEN the dairyman took money from the sales for himself, and selected some of the herd for slaughter.

Because in reality producers do all the work of production. THAT's the problem with the rentier class, as Veblen saw it ... they don't do anything productive. Put another way, they can't possibly justify their outsized wealth based on their production.

"Because in reality producers do all the work of production."

You're wrong, Signym. Producers do NOT do all the work of production. As one example, Ford's F150 truck production line is temporarily closed because a supplier of magnesium parts is closed.
www.freep.com/story/money/business/columnists/josh-linkner/2018/05/12/
josh-linkner-ford-f-150/603778002/

And it is not just one magnesium part. Auto companies buy tires and wheels and seats and preformed floor rugs and rolls of steel and . . . from other suppliers. If any of those suppliers fail to deliver, then Ford has to close an assembly line.

Originally my analogy was that capitalists are cattlemen rather than diarymen. The workers get to be the cows in the analogy. I know the cattle industry, but I didn't like the idea that the only way to make money was to send the cattle (the workers) out to slaughter. That is cannibalism, not capitalism, and that is why I switched the analogy to the dairy industry, because it milks the cows (the workers). But if grocery stores sell less milk, the dairy industry will shrink and the the milk cows (the workers) will go to slaughter (workers get fired). I suppose you could imagine a loving government rescuing the cows from slaughter by moving them to a government owned pasture. The government could do the same to fired human workers, but the pasture closes after 26 weeks. That is not long enough.
www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-long-unemployment-benefits-now-last-
in-each-state-2014-1

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

CAPTAINCRUNCH

Sunday, May 13, 2018 5:51 PM

You seem to have understood zero of what I posted - I may not get use to that.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
You'd want the US gov to run our oil and gas? You expect anyone to believe that?
Did I say that? No, I didn't. How about this: THE GOVERNMENT becomes the ultimate "rentier" for natural resources, and companies pay THE GOVERNMENT for the right to "develop" these natural resources. That would allow the government to stop collecting income taxes, for example.

If you don't think that's a realistic idea, that's how things work in MOST oil- and gas-producing nations, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, and the North Sea nations Norway, Britain, Denmark, Germany, Nederlands.

Quote:
Do you think all rental land owners are parasites?
Yes.
Next?

More examples of your "let's just wing it" thinking, completely devoid of any real logic or real world experience.

You say you didn't say you want the Gov to run our oil business, just own and rent the land. Then you say you think all land renters are parasites. Owning the land and renting it would in effect put them in charge of our oil since they would be the arbiters of who gets to drill where, how and other such rules. I continue to think you are just eating up our time here with no real intent other than to practice your typing.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Where would people live if they couldn't rent or lease?
In their own homes, which they could afford if they weren't being parasitized from morning to night?

How would they earn enough capital to afford these housing resources?

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Clearly, in your vigorous defense of "consumers" (instead of "producers") you too consider yourself to be a parasite. No wonder you defend parasitism so vigorously!

Another complete miss - just the opposite. I never defended consumers. I pointed out that you and Kiki never (that I recall) hold them accountable for their actions.

I have no idea what you mean by "parasite" - it seems to keep shifting and might even be used just as a place holder for "insult."

CAPTAINCRUNCH

Sunday, May 13, 2018 5:55 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
"just try to put 1.3 million soldiers patrolling up and down the streets of the country"

I wasn't thinking of any military-style work. Just work on public lands like restoration and conservation, or for public projects like infrastructure, or in public hospitals in underserved areas.

I'd rather see unemployed citizens get those jobs. The Dems are proposing Gov jobs, but it will probably be shot down and maybe even for good reasons.

SIGNYM

Sunday, May 13, 2018 8:27 PM

Quote:
SECOND brings up Veblen, who (btw) points out that it is people LIKE SECOND who are the real parasites who are disrupting the system. Why are people LIKE SECOND allowed to be parasites? Because the rules of the game allow it.

A REAL loss, for SECOND, would be something like nationalization of gas fields, where the rules of the game are knocked out from under SECOND. But neither establishment Dems nor Repubs are about to change the rules of the game, because they too sustain crooked politicians, who parasitize the parasites. It's a whole ecology of parasites! - SIGNY

The Communists called Capitalists intestinal parasites - SECOND

They did? I never knew that, Why don't you find me some quotes, seeing as you seem to know a lot more about it than I do. - SIGN

Well! So much for your insinuation that I'm a communist because "they" called Capitalists intestinal parasites and I called rentiers parasites!

Quote:
The better analogy, which is nastier yet truer, would be Capitalists are Dairymen with the Workers being Milk cows. When there is a drought and the pastures aren’t producing enough grass to keep the entire cow herd fed, Dairymen send part of their herds to the slaughter house because paying for grain (instead of free grass) to feed the excess cattle is expensive. - SECOND

Hmmm... I think it's a stupid analogy. It would only work if, in your analogy the dairy herd plowed the fields; grew harvested and siloed their own grain; built their own milk barn and milking equipment; milked themselves and trucked the milk to market; and managed the operation ... and THEN the dairyman took money from the sales for himself, and selected some of the herd for slaughter.

Because in reality producers do all the work of production. THAT's the problem with the rentier class, as Veblen saw it ... they don't do anything productive. Put another way, they can't possibly justify their outsized wealth based on their production. - SIGNY

You're wrong, Signym. Producers do NOT do all the work of production. As one example, Ford's F150 truck production line is temporarily closed because a supplier of magnesium parts is closed.- SECOND

A "supplier" of magneisum parts is a PRODUCER of magnesium parts. Furthermore, the supplier of magnesium stock from which the parts were made is a PRODUCER of magnesium, as is the PRODUCER of electricity and fuel needed to refine the magnesium. I don't care how far back or wide wide you go in the production chain, but one producer feeds another. We must be talking about entirely different things.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

PREV PAGE 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 NEXT PAGE