Elections; 2024
POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Friday, November 21, 2025 00:12
VIEWED: 206031
PAGE 468 of 514
What big gaps have opened up between Democrats and Republicans?
1) Confidence in both science and medicine was roughly similar between Democrats and Republicans all the way through 2018. Then both plummeted among Republicans, almost certainly due to COVID-era Trumpian disinformation about masks, vaccines, the origin of the virus, and so forth.
2) Confidence in the press wasn't very different until the spread of Fox News in the early 2000s. For the next 16 years Republican trust in the press was about 20 points lower than Democrats'.
This became turbocharged after Trump took office and went on his "fake news" crusade. For the last few years Republican trust in the press has been 60 points lower than Democrats'.
https://jabberwocking.com/heres-whats-changed-politically-over-the-pas
t-few-years/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:I have never found a Trumptard who understood that sellers set prices, not the President. Trumptards think the President sets price by magic and, therefore, they blame the President.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Wow. Gee....
I wonder why nobody ever mentioned inflation being a problem in the last 4 years.
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Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.
The same people who cannot understood that sellers have absolute control of the selling price, always raising the price to take the maximum, are the same people who cannot understand how to raise their own incomes. It is not surprising that people who are stupid about one thing are also stupid about a related thing.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I have never found a Trumptard who understood that sellers set prices, not the President. Trumptards think the President sets price by magic and, therefore, they blame the President.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Wow. Gee....
I wonder why nobody ever mentioned inflation being a problem in the last 4 years.
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Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.
The same people who cannot understood that sellers have absolute control of the selling price, always raising the price to take the maximum, are the same people who cannot understand how to raise their own incomes. It is not surprising that people who are stupid about one thing are also stupid about a related thing.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You are making false arguments of a 5th grader.
Go play with the kids on Twitter if you aren't willing to have an actual adult conversation about anything.
--------------------------------------------------
Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.
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I've had a little time to think about this...
Let's say, for argument's sake, that 100% of the blame is on the sellers for maximizing profits, even to the point of hurting their own bottom line in the long run if it means good quarterly ratings.
What does that say for subsidies such as tax credits for Electronic Vehicles or new windows on your home?
Or what does it say of food stamps? Would they ever have been able to get away with raising the prices to what they are today if the poorest of the poor weren't able to afford any of it anymore without that safety net in place?
Would the doctors have ever been able to charge what they do if insurance didn't exist?
Raising the minimum wage is more of the same. So long as the poorest can afford the increase in price, whether it's from wage increase or government programs, the prices will be hiked for everyone.
But the real problem is that outside of the 1%, the rest of us have been falling into a slow sink where we're getting closer and closer to that bottom without really realizing it's happening.
I remember when Jose Canseco was the first pro athlete to get a $1 Million per year contract. I have ticket stubs saved from when my dad would take us to Cubs and Sox games for $3 and $5 bleacher seats. League minimum is now $200k more than the salary of the President of the United states and most folk can't really afford to take their family to a baseball game, let alone enjoy several in a year.
I'm not arguing against you that a company isn't going to seek out maximum profit wherever it can. I'm just saying that none of your solutions of the past or proposed for the future are going to help anybody precisely because those companies are just going to absorb that profit for themselves.
Come up with a real solution to the problem. I'm all ears.
--------------------------------------------------
Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.
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I stopped trying to help Trumptards solve their problems. It is pretty obvious why their lives are full of hardships, setbacks, and disappointments, but never obvious to them. Hint: Trumptards are not as capable as they think and they don't put enough effort into making themselves successful. How do they handle fears and failures? By denial. There is an article about the psychology of climate denial but it also explains much about other behaviors from climate deniers.
https://theconversation.com/time-to-freak-out-how-the-existential-terr
or-of-hurricanes-can-fuel-climate-change-denial-242390
It is perfectly reasonable to vote for Trump when you believe he can fix it for you but not at all reasonable when you know the hard fact that you must fix yourself, which includes controlling the panic, the fears, and random urges pushing you around.
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
A dumb-ass, ex-drunk, 4-time college dropout called the election nearly 100% perfect from his attic while smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. (The only thing I got wrong was that Trump won the popular vote by well over 2 Million, not the 1 Million I predicted). None of you "brilliant" fucks with your half-Million dollar college degrees were able to do that. None of you were even close to reality.
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I've had a little time to think about this...
Let's say, for argument's sake, that 100% of the blame is on the sellers for maximizing profits, even to the point of hurting their own bottom line in the long run if it means good quarterly ratings.
What does that say for subsidies such as tax credits for Electronic Vehicles or new windows on your home?
Or what does it say of food stamps? Would they ever have been able to get away with raising the prices to what they are today if the poorest of the poor weren't able to afford any of it anymore without that safety net in place?
Would the doctors have ever been able to charge what they do if insurance didn't exist?
Raising the minimum wage is more of the same. So long as the poorest can afford the increase in price, whether it's from wage increase or government programs, the prices will be hiked for everyone.
But the real problem is that outside of the 1%, the rest of us have been falling into a slow sink where we're getting closer and closer to that bottom without really realizing it's happening.
I remember when Jose Canseco was the first pro athlete to get a $1 Million per year contract. I have ticket stubs saved from when my dad would take us to Cubs and Sox games for $3 and $5 bleacher seats. League minimum is now $200k more than the salary of the President of the United states and most folk can't really afford to take their family to a baseball game, let alone enjoy several in a year.
I'm not arguing against you that a company isn't going to seek out maximum profit wherever it can. I'm just saying that none of your solutions of the past or proposed for the future are going to help anybody precisely because those companies are just going to absorb that profit for themselves.
Come up with a real solution to the problem. I'm all ears.
--------------------------------------------------
Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
SECOND
I stopped trying to help Trumptards solve their problems.
Translation: I was wrong but I'm too chickenshit to admit it.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Trumptards get sued (see Trump), charged with felonies (see Trump), fired from jobs (Trump, again) because their brains are broken. Nothing short of extensive psychological therapy or brain surgery (or a bullet in the head) will improve their behavior.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
SECOND
I stopped trying to help Trumptards solve their problems.
Translation: I was wrong but I'm too chickenshit to admit it.
I Study Guys Like Trump. There’s a Reason They Keep Winning.
By Ben Rhodes | Nov. 8, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/08/opinion/republicans-democrats-trump
.html
Ben Rhodes was deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama and author of “After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We Made.” Free download from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Ben+Rhodes
In December 2019, I traveled to Hong Kong, where a heavy unease hung in the air. For months, young people had taken to the streets to protest the encroachment of the Chinese Communist Party on what was supposed to be a self-governing, democratic system. On walls they had scrawled: “Save Hong Kong! If we burn you burn with us!” All the protesters I spoke to knew their movement would fail; it was a last assertion of democratic identity before it was extinguished by a new order that saw democracy as the enemy within.
I met with a government official preparing to resign and told him I was writing a book about the rise of authoritarian nationalism. “The nationalism in the U.S. and Europe is somewhat different,” he told me. “Yours started with the financial crisis in 2008. That’s when liberalism started to lose its appeal, when people saw this wasn’t working. The narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed. This spilled over into China, too. This is when China started to think — should we really follow a Western model?” We were sitting in a hotel lounge, the invisible forces he described surrounding us: capitalism, but not democracy; cultural elites cloistered away from the working class. “The nationalist movements in East and West were both a response to the collapse of the Western model,” he added.
Everything I’d experienced told me he was right. Eight years serving in the Obama White House after the financial crisis felt like swimming upstream, against the currents of global politics. A radicalized Republican Party rejected liberal democracy at home, mirroring far-right leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary who spoke about installing “illiberal democracy” (a polite term for “blood and soil” nationalism) across Europe. In Russia, Vladimir Putin set out to undermine — if not dismantle — the liberal order helmed by the United States. In China, Xi Jinping began to shift Beijing’s strategy from rising within that order to building a separate one, drained of democratic values. Barack Obama’s political skills and cultural appeal allowed him to navigate those currents, but they didn’t always transfer to other Democrats.
Donald Trump’s first victory challenged my liberal assumptions about the inevitability of a certain kind of progress: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” For eight years outside of government, I have talked to opposition figures around the world and heard versions of the same story everywhere. After the Cold War, globalization chipped away at people’s sense of security and identity.
In the West, neoliberalism — that blend of free trade, deregulation and deference to financial markets — hollowed out communities while enriching a global oligarchy. Meanwhile, a homogenized and often crass popular culture eroded traditional national and religious identities. After 9/11, the war on terror was embraced by autocrats such as Mr. Putin, who used it as a frame to justify power grabs while forever wars fueled mass migration. The financial crisis came through like a hurricane, wrecking the lives of people already struggling to get by while the rich profited on the back end. Then social media’s explo
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I guess we're not Trumptards, not having been sued or fired.
*****
In part, a ridiculous rewrite of history.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
SECOND
I stopped trying to help Trumptards solve their problems.
Translation: I was wrong but I'm too chickenshit to admit it.
True.
Well... at least he had enough testosterone and/or self-delusion to stay on the website.
Ted's only presence here since they started counting the votes Tuesday night was to tell Brenda that everyone who voted for Trump is stupid and evil in the tag section.
--------------------------------------------------
Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.
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What do tax cuts on the rich accomplish? Can you guess?
By Kevin Drum | Nov 11, 2024
https://jabberwocking.com/what-do-tax-cuts-on-the-rich-accomplish-can-
you-guess/
"The economic consequences of major tax cuts for the rich" is a research study that came out a few years ago. But I missed it then and it's never too late to catch up. The authors set out to examine all instances of major tax reductions on the rich in 18 OECD countries between 1965 and 2015 and identify the results.
I don't want to keep you in suspense, so here's the impact of the tax cuts on economic growth:
There was no noticeable affect on growth. Or on unemployment. So what did the tax cuts accomplish?
Surprise! Lower taxes on the rich make the rich richer. And that's about it. Here it is in more detail:
We find that major tax cuts for the rich push up income inequality, as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The size of the effect is substantial: on average, each major tax cut results in a rise of over 0.7 percentage points in top 1% share of pre-tax national income.
On the income inequality side, the results do not closely align with the theory that the rich have greater incentives to work and invest when their taxes are cut, given that we do not find any statistically significant effects on growth, unemployment or investment from cutting taxes on the rich. Given our measure of income inequality includes both realized capital gains and labor income, it is also unlikely the results are being driven by tax avoidance, because a significant part of avoidance takes the form of shifting income into capital (Piketty et al., 2014). Rather, our results are most consistent with Piketty et al.’s argument that lower taxes on top incomes induce the rich to bargain more aggressively to increase their own rewards, to the direct detriment of those lower down the income distribution.
There you have it. Tax cuts on the rich just make them even greedier and more predatory. And we've got another one coming thanks to Donald Trump's huge success with working class voters. As H.L. Mencken put it, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." America's common people are about to learn that lesson anew.
(In Truth, the common folk learn nothing and understand nothing, but that would be too depressing for Democrats who believe the voters they are attempting to woo could never be that stupid.)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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