A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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There has been little coverage of one of the most revealing aspects of the SOTU: what Trump said about the menace of America’s historically large government debt.
But wait, you may object — he didn’t say anything about debt. Indeed he didn’t — not one word. But that’s what was so revealing.
After all, Republicans spent the entire Obama administration inveighing constantly about the dangers of debt, warning that America faced a looming crisis unless deficits were drastically reduced. Now that they’re in power, however — and with the deficit surging thanks to a huge tax cut for corporations and the rich — they’ve totally dropped the subject. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff, explained to G.O.P. members of Congress why debt wouldn’t get a single mention in the SOTU: “Nobody cares.”
And you know, he’s kind of right. It’s not just Republicans who suddenly seemed to stop caring about debt. For years deficit scolds dominated discourse inside the Beltway; much of the news media treated the urgency of fiscal austerity as an unquestioned fact, abandoning the usual rules of reportorial neutrality and plunging into outright advocacy. Yet since Trump’s election those voices have become oddly muted.
Republicans just pretended to be deficit hawks as a way to hamstring Obama’s agenda. And "centrists" reserve passionate concern about debt for times when Democrats hold power.
Three times since 1980, Republicans railed against budget deficits when they were out of power, then dropped all their concerns and sent the deficit soaring once they were in a position to cut taxes. Then when it’s the Democrats’ turn, they’re expected to clean up the Republicans’ red ink rather than address their own priorities.
https://twitter.com/tarapalmeri/status/1092865402034634754
www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/10/16/government-spending-ho
w-rising-federal-debt-deficit-impact-americans/1589889002/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The only chunk I take out of anybody's ass is out of cows. Did you not pay attention to what business I am in? It is natural gas and cattle and only the cattle complain. I pay every human who works for me at least 50% more than they could make doing the same work anywhere else. (Come to think of it, I might be accumulated weriously bad karma with Hindoos holy cows.)
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My Firefly personality test said that I am Jayne. I have lived the following scene between cattle and Jayne:
Simon is walking down the cargo bay ramp. The ramp's covered in cow pies. Simon's carefully picking his way around them, but Jayne herds some cattle past him, and Simon stumbles into some cow poo.
JAYNE: 'Bout time you broke in them pretty shoes.
(to cattle)
Yah! Get along!
Simon ignores Jayne, walks off the ramp.
MAL: You know, they walk just as easy if you lead 'em.
JAYNE: I like smackin' 'em.
http://firefly.shriftweb.org/scripts/107.shtml
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The only chunk I take out of anybody's ass is out of cows. Did you not pay attention to what business I am in? It is natural gas and cattle and only the cattle complain. I pay every human who works for me at least 50% more than they could make doing the same work anywhere else. (Come to think of it, I might be accumulated weriously bad karma with Hindoos holy cows.)
We knew that CC would like that.
He was all but sucking Bezos's dick the other day.
He loves his rich betters, as long as they pet his head and tell him that Twump is a vewy bad man.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:6ixStringJack, did it bother you that Republicans attempted to repeal health insurance protections for people with preexisting conditions? Did you laugh out loud at all those sick people that almost lost their insurance? The GOP protects insurance companies, but Democrats stopped the GOP:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
He loves his rich betters, as long as they pet his head and tell him that Twump is a vewy bad man.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Speaking privately to his donors, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy squarely blamed Republican losses in last year’s midterm elections on the GOP push to roll back health insurance protections for people with preexisting conditions — and in turn blamed his party’s right flank. McCarthy’s comments, made in a Feb. 6 conference call from which The Washington Post obtained partial recordings, represent a vindication of Democratic efforts to elevate health care as an issue in last year’s campaign.
….“When we couldn’t pass the repeal of Obamacare the first way through, an amendment came because the Freedom Caucus wouldn’t vote for” the original House bill, McCarthy said. “That amendment put [the] preexisting condition campaign against us, and so even people who are running for the very first time got attacked on that. And that was the defining issue and the most important issue in the race.”
To McCarthy, this is about a feud between the Freedom Caucus and the rest of the Republican Party. But it’s more than that: it’s an admission that Republicans did, in fact, try to repeal protections for preexisting conditions. This is something they have routinely denied ever since they did it.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/02/mccarthy-yeah-we-tried-to-kill-
protections-for-preexisting-conditions/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Consider the biggest ticket on progressives’ wish-lists: Medicare for All. This could mean different things, and if it’s basically allowing private-sector buy-in then there’s no problem. But if it means replacing private insurance with free public coverage, you need offsetting revenue.
Why? In 2017, private insurance paid about a third of America’s medical bills — $1.2 trillion, or 6 percent of GDP. Having the government pay those bills directly, without a revenue offset, would therefore be a spending increase – a fiscal stimulus – of 6 percent of GDP.
Suppose that interest rates nonetheless didn’t rise. Then this stimulus would have a multiplier effect, probably raising GDP, other things equal, by 9 percent.
Unemployment would fall somewhat less than this, because tighter labor markets would pull more people into the work force. That’s why “Okun’s Law”, the relationship between growth and changes in unemployment, has a slope less than 1 – usually estimated at around 0.5, although when I run the regression on recent data I get around 0.8. But even so, to increase GDP by 9 percent we’d have to see the unemployment rate fall by more than 4 points, that is, go negative – which of course isn’t possible.
And don’t tell me that we can pull lots of people who were previously out of the work force into employment; Okun’s Law already takes that effect into account.
But if the economy can’t expand as much as a multiplier says it “should” after an unfunded introduction of Medicare for All, what would happen? Inflation. Big time. Either that or the Fed would have to raise interest rates by a lot, crowding out a lot of private investment. That might be justifiable if the public spending itself takes the form of investment, say infrastructure. It’s less defensible if it’s for social insurance, no matter how pressing the need.
More at www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opinion/how-much-does-heterodoxy-help-progr
essives-wonkish.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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You will definately have to draw a line in the sand and say who you believe is and who is not "progressive" in the Democratic party.
You and I both know why Democrats continue to lose to Republicans, and you've said it yourself before. Republicans, at least for the most part, have a single direction, where Democrats are a hodge podge of a bunch of miscellaneous crap these days that are usually at odds with each other.
I do hope that you're not saying that "Democrats" in general are in favor of Med4All, because that simply is not true at all.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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He's funny alright! File it under: "Drunk loudmouth at a bar knows how to fix America." He's a living breathing Onion story.
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Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
He's funny alright! File it under: "Drunk loudmouth at a bar knows how to fix America." He's a living breathing Onion story.
Anything in particular you don't agree with on these videos, or are you just spewing diarrhea of the mouth again?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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