A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:Do you know who the patron saint of Democrats is? FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Your whole premise is based upon spending just as many taxpayer dollars as we do today, but to train troops at home and give them low paying jobs. I don't see any point at all to any of this.
He was President during much of the Great Depression, when the financial system and the economy collapsed at the same time. FDR's plan was to print money and put it in the hands of the average person. He was basing his policy on Keynes' work, who suggested that injecting money into the economy would improve it. But rather than undirectedly tossing money into "the economy" or (worse) tossing money at the wealthy (trickle down) FDR believed that money should be directed to the poor. THEIR demand (for food, clothes, homes, refrigerators, cars etc) would lead to a resurgence in manufacturing (of said items) leading to an increase in employment and a further increase in demand ... a reverse of the negative spiral that propelled the Great Depression in the first place. He called it "pump priming".
One way to direct money at the poor were various "public works" projects, where the government would pay people to put in infrastructure. My grandfather, who was a carpenter before the Great Depression, got a job on public works. He helped put in a railway overpass, which I traveled under at least once an month. There was the public works of rural electrification, infrastructure, the building of the Hoover Dam, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. We have been living off that infrastructure ever since
Now. Do THESE jobs take away from private jobs? Absolutely not. There is no for-profit business that would invest in public roads, public bridges, public waterways, and environmental conservation. Why? Because these are PUBLIC goods, and there's no profit in it. Even though infrastructure and environmental conservation form the basis of long-term wealth, "monetization" of these factors would simply kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.
The programs that KIKI suggests sound very similar to the various public works and conservation programs that FDR implemented lo these many years ago, which formed the basis of our prosperity. I don't see anything wrong with the idea .... unless, of course, you can find an alternate (private, for profit) way to reconstruct our environment and infrastructure.
-----------
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
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What you're talking about is entirely separate from the military, and I don't necessarily argue against it. Although it would have to pay more than army wages, and it shouldn't clothe and house people doing it either.
Kiki is talking about people handing over at least 4 years of their life under 24/7 direct management from the Military, housing non-combat duty soldiers on American soil on the taxpayer dime. Huge difference.
I'd be open to discussing your idea. I think that current military should get first dibs (downsizing our current military), and then vets should get 2nd dibs. Still leaves me out in the cold personally, but I do see a lot of benefit to this overall for the country.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Because I wanted you to know I read what you wrote. As typical, you had nothing to say about what Trump did, but you were offended. You've got really thin skin and a really thick skull.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Why quote me then post that?
Is the simple fact that your name brought up in the previous post justification enough to segway into whatever random thought pops up in that little pea brain of yours?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Now to continue what I am interested in, the Trump flip-flop for his personal profit and how foreigners can use Trump's greed to manipulate American policy. As I recall, 6ixStringJack voted for Trump and 6ix should have anticipated what would happen. I certainly did:
ZTE and the Iran Nuclear Deal
Barkley Rosser | May 16, 2018 7:37 am
https://angrybearblog.com/2018/05/zte-and-the-iran-nuclear-deal.html
The whiplash that many observers have felt on learning of President Trump’s about-face on China’s ZTE telecom company from condemning it as violating US national security and violating sanctions rules by selling to North Korea and Iran has been pretty easily explained by our soon thereafter learning that China has provided a mere half a billion dollars to a project in Indonesia where Trump interests are deeply involved. This is probably the most blatant violation of the Emoluments Clause of the US constitution yet, but do not hold your breath that anything formal will come of it, despite widespread outrage. Rather his backers will accept that this is necessary for obtaining Chinese support in dealing with Kim Jong-In in the possible forthcoming summit. This is supposed to trump all other considerations.
Of course the supposed forthcoming summit and related events, such as the recent release of hostages held by North Korea, have been trumping Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran, which has been praised by his supporters as an action that “fulfills a campaign promise” and thus just simply wonderful. However, a little noticed aspect of this in the US is triggering considerable reverberations abroad. It is the hypocrisy that while Trump seems to be blithely forgiving ZTE for breaking already in-place sanctions against Iran, he and members of his administration such as John Bolton have been unyielding to the Europeans that all of their companies must cease any economic dealings with Iran ASAP now that Trump has scuttled US participation in the deal, even though it is widely accepted in Europe that Iran is in full compliance with the deal. The spectacle of the freshly arrived US ambassador issuing an immediate “order” to German companies to immediately comply with US demands on this has raised especial hackles.
Pretty clearly the Europeans need to identify some budding Trump Organization project somewhere on the planet that they can dump a pile of money into so that their companies can get exemptions like ZTE has from having their markets in the US cut off if they continue to operate in Iran.
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:Why not?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
What you're talking about is entirely separate from the military, and I don't necessarily argue against it. Although it would have to pay more than army wages, and it shouldn't clothe and house people doing it either.
Quote:Well, in the FDR plan there were "regular" jobs available to build infrastructure, paid for with Federal deficit money. But there was ALSO the Civilian Conservation Corps, which ran something like the army in that housing, food, and clothing were provided. I assume it's because they may have been working in areas with no regular housing. So there seems to be a great deal of overlap between KIKI's idea and FDR's. Maybe it's the whole military chain of command/ military justice that bothers you. It would bother me too. People who work in non-combat jobs should be subject to Constitutional ... not military ... law.
Kiki is talking about people handing over at least 4 years of their life under 24/7 direct management from the Military, housing non-combat duty soldiers on American soil on the taxpayer dime. Huge difference.
As an aside, at the time that the infrastructure was being built, it must have seemed like a TREMENDOUS waste of Federal deficit dollars! After all, the economy was so stalled out that nobody could really take advantage of all of those roads and bridges! Roads, canals, bridges to nowhere, with no traffic. They must have seemed at the time like the Chinese "ghost cities" that everyone's always laughing about, or the "One Belt One Road" program that Chinese have going: A lot of investment with no immediate utility.
-----------
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
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Quote:Trump said quite frequently during his campaign that he thought NATO was unfairly burdening the USA. Maybe breaking the Iran deal is just Trump's wily way of causing a deep rupture between the USA and the EU so they won't lean so heavily on us. It's possible that Trump is getting EXACTLY what he wanted.
It is the hypocrisy that while Trump seems to be blithely forgiving ZTE for breaking already in-place sanctions against Iran, he and members of his administration such as John Bolton have been unyielding to the Europeans that all of their companies must cease any economic dealings with Iran ASAP now that Trump has scuttled US participation in the deal, even though it is widely accepted in Europe that Iran is in full compliance with the deal.
-----------
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
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Quote:That's how bots disseminate their nonsequiter drivel.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Why quote me then post that?
Is the simple fact that your name brought up in the previous post justification enough to segway into whatever random thought pops up in that little pea brain of yours?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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America’s Dismal Turning Point
By Paul Krugman, May 16, 2018
www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/opinion/americas-dismal-turning-point.html
Austin Frakt had a very interesting piece in the Upshot the other day, on U.S. health spending – and U.S. health — in international perspective. Everyone knows that U.S. spending is more or less literally off the charts compared with everyone else, while many are aware that we have also diverged, in the wrong direction, on measures like life expectancy: we’re falling further than further behind the rest of the advanced world.
What Frakt points out is that it was not always thus. The dismal U.S. combination of high costs and poor results only began to emerge around 1980, which poses a mystery:
https://ourworldindata.org/the-link-between-life-expectancy-and-health
-spending-us-focus
What changed? In a subsequent post, Frakt suggests that U.S. exceptionalism may be related to income inequality. And it’s true that income inequality began its huge rise just about the same time that U.S. health care apparently went off the rails:
Income Gini Ratio of Families by Race of Householder. All Races
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=jS8B
But it’s not just income inequality. Lots of things had an inflection point around 1980. For example, regional convergence – in which poor states closed the gap with rich states – also came to a dead halt or even went into reverse around the same time. Incomes in Mississippi relative to Massachusetts:
Per Capita Personal Income In Mississippi/Per Capita Personal Income In Massachusetts (“I’d paste the graph here, but why bother? See the original editorial.” - second )
Meanwhile, circa 1980 financial leverage began its huge climb, with household debt relative to income soaring (and setting the stage for the 2008 financial crisis):
Image
And, of course, political polarization made its big move, again at more or less the same time:
Image
So 1980 was an inflection point for a lot of things in America. That can’t be an accident. And it’s also almost surely not an accident that this turning point coincided with the election of Ronald Reagan.
A good guess, surely, is that the whole story is connected with the rise of modern movement conservatism, which brought with it unequalizing economic policies, retreat from antitrust, financial deregulation, and more.
And surely most people would agree that soaring medical costs, rising inequality, financial crises, regional decline, etc., are bad things; so you might think that all of this would suggest to everyone that something was wrong with the newly dominant ideology. But here’s the thing: conservatives don’t see it that way. Not only do they continue to regard Reagan as America’s savior; they haven’t changed their ideas, or indeed come up with any significantly new ideas, for the past 35 years.
It would be nice if commentators who accuse Democrats of lacking new ideas knew something about this history.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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If I had to take a guess I'd say the REAL inflection point occurred around 1969. That's when the line turns around from "going lower" to "going higher". That's what "inflection point" means. (Well, technically, IIRC an inflection point is where the second derivative crosses zero.)
At that time LBJ (a Democrat) was busy spending money on BOTH the Vietnam War AND his "Great Society". That led to inflation, so that by 1973 Nixon had to take the USA off the gold standard (again. FDR originally took the USA off the gold standard in 1933). Going off the gold standard meant that money could be inflated ... i.e. created by the banks without restriction. At that point, one's "access to money" becomes THE defining factor in whether your ascent to wealth remains on-par with the wealthy. And since the wealthy always have better access to freshly-created (at-the-moment un-inflated) dollars they will always get richer faster. Both Democrats AND Republicans were complicit with this scheme.
Quote:FIFY
It would be nice if commentators who accuse Republicans of lacking new ideas knew something about this history.
-----------
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
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Quote:I was 17 years old in 1969, the year Signym says the Inflection Point began. You moved that point from 1980 to shift the blame to Democrats. I am not believing Signym's alternative history because I was in Texas in '69. Nixon was President then. He committed treason by extending the Vietnam so he could get elected in '68. Personally, if I had known I would not have volunteered for Vietnam.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
If I had to take a guess I'd say the REAL inflection point occurred around 1969. That's when the line turns around from "going lower" to "going higher". That's what "inflection point" means. (Well, technically, IIRC an inflection point is where the second derivative crosses zero.)
At that time LBJ (a Democrat) was busy spending money on BOTH the Vietnam War AND his "Great Society". That led to inflation, so that by 1973 Nixon had to take the USA off the gold standard (again. FDR originally took the USA off the gold standard in 1933). Going off the gold standard meant that money could be inflated ... i.e. created by the banks without restriction. At that point, one's "access to money" becomes THE defining factor in whether your ascent to wealth remains on-par with the wealthy. And since the wealthy always have better access to freshly-created (at-the-moment un-inflated) dollars they will always get richer faster. Both Democrats AND Republicans were complicit with this scheme.Quote:FIFY
It would be nice if commentators who accuse Republicans of lacking new ideas knew something about this history.
www.commondreams.org/views/2014/08/12/george-will-confirms-nixons-viet
nam-treason
Nixon also toke the U.S. off the gold standard. Nixon’s treasury secretary and former governor of Texas John Connally said "My philosophy is that all foreigners are out to screw us and it’s our job to screw them first." Connally convinced Nixon to unleash the infamous Nixon Shock upon Europe’s unsuspecting political leaders. At the end of a crucial weekend of consultations with key advisors, President Nixon decided to make a startling announcement on live television: the global monetary system, which America had designed and had been nurturing since the end of the war, was to be dismantled in one fell swoop. The calendar read Sunday, August 15, 1971.
And in a sentence still resonating across Europe today, Connally summed it all up succinctly, painfully, brutally: “Gentlemen, the dollar is our currency. And from now on, it is your problem!”
Europe’s leaders realized immediately the gravity of their situation. They responded quickly with a sequence of knee-jerk reactions that led them from one error to the next, culminating forty years later in Europe’s current circumstances.
That's chapter one by Yanis Varoufakis, And the weak suffer what they must? : Europe’s crisis and America’s economic future.
https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/19792529/And_the_Weak_Suffer_What_The
y_Must_by_Yanis_Varoufakis_EPUB
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Path out of the identity vs. economic politics quagmire
There are more poor white people than poor black people in America, but the poverty rate for blacks and Latinos is more than twice as high as it is for whites.
Booker said that “we’ve destroyed the dignity of work by commoditizing workers,” going on to discuss some of the main themes of David Weill’s book The Fissured Workplace through which companies increasingly outsource the low-status job functions inside their own workplaces. So whereas Kodak’s office might once have been cleaned by janitors who were employed by Kodak, and seen as members of the team by their colleagues, today’s firms would more likely subcontract to a building services company that would employ low-wage workers who lack the benefits and job security of their white-collar not-really-colleagues.
This, like the rest of most of what Booker talked about, is unquestionably an issue that disproportionately impacts black and Latino workers. But it’s not an explicitly racial issue, so Booker didn’t racialize it.
www.vox.com/2018/5/17/17357360/cory-booker-american-progress
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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