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comedyblissoption posted:gives the appearance of elitism and snobbery The only election that I can recall where "which candidate would you most likely to have a beer with" wasn't a salient point is maybe Obama in '08, and I only bring that up because the country was so fed up with Republicans that I think any candidate, even Hillary, would have won. Clinton vs. GHW Bush and Dole (exemplified with his "I feel your pain" line), GWB's folksy demeanor vs. the stiff wooden demeanor of Gore and Kerry, and Obama vs. the out-of-touch plutocrat Romney. It's shocking just how much it matters...
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Apr 22, 2017 00:47
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Huma Abedin is Gary Walsh from Veep literally came into the thread to post this ahahahahah drat
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Apr 22, 2017 00:50
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well no presidential candidate for decades was actually going to work in the interest of poor or middle class people, so maybe giving the impression you would is good enough fdr won landslide victories because he actually helped working people even though he was the most blue-blood man possible
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Apr 22, 2017 00:53
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Shear Modulus posted:well no presidential candidate for 
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Apr 22, 2017 01:04
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just a reminder that the democrats owned a majority in both houses of congress for the vast majority of the years between FDR and the 1990s
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Apr 22, 2017 01:21
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comedyblissoption posted:just a reminder that the democrats owned a majority in both houses of congress for the vast majority of the years between FDR and the 1990s Notice how they lost both when they began adopting Clinton third way-ism in the 90s.
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Apr 22, 2017 01:27
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Alienwarehouse posted:Notice how they lost both when they began adopting Clinton third way-ism in the 90s. Truly a winning strategy especially with their gently caress unions and gently caress working class voters mindset.
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Apr 22, 2017 01:30
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clinton obama come back and lead us, the democrats still control public offices somewhere in this country
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Apr 22, 2017 01:51
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Montasque posted:Goldwater girl till the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DgJZADHsyg
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Apr 22, 2017 02:51
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I always felt there was a lot of similarities towards how the dems ran this past campaign, past couple of years to how Jimmy Carter was acting during the late 70's. "Oh hey. I'm out of work. I can't find gas to fuel my car. You're telling me to crank down my heat during a brutal rear end winter. Please..we elected you t help us Mr. Carter" "You know what? it's YOUR fault! You guys have been living too high off the hog!" Kinda reminds me how Hillary, and her surrogates were dismissive of people who were struggling economically.
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Apr 22, 2017 04:22
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Carter started off trying to take an interventionist approach to the economic problems of the late 70s, but was stymied by an obstructionist congress that wouldn't approve his measures. Carter wasn't astute or charismatic enough to pin the blame on congress, so the whole country ate poo poo. Boy doesn't that sound familiar...
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Apr 22, 2017 05:21
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Carter was pretty far to the right of Congressional Democrats at the time. He responded to the oil crisis with pretty big austerity measures. He actually started the deregulation binge that Reagan kicked into full gear. The biggest economic shittiness during the Carter years was due to Paul Volcker crashing the economy to reduce inflation caused by the oil crisis.
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Apr 22, 2017 05:41
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also carter helping Indonesia commit genocide was not good.
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Apr 22, 2017 05:42
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yes but i was talking specifically about domestic economics
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Apr 22, 2017 05:44
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my bad
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Apr 22, 2017 05:47
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the authors of Shattered call that red goldwater arrow in the hrc2016 logo as 'an arrow pointing forward', not an arrow pointing towards the right
1994 Toyota Celica has issued a correction as of 05:57 on Apr 22, 2017 |
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Apr 22, 2017 05:46
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Shear Modulus posted:Carter was pretty far to the right of Congressional Democrats at the time. He responded to the oil crisis with pretty big austerity measures. He actually started the deregulation binge that Reagan kicked into full gear. i mean articles like that are often indulgent mental exercises but yeah, Carter was kind of a fluke who ran against his own party. everyone was expecting Nelson Rockefeller or Ted Kennedy to get elected that year.
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Apr 22, 2017 06:01
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zeal posted:the authors of Shattered call that red goldwater arrow in the hrc2016 logo as 'an arrow pointing forward', not an arrow pointing towards the right https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7K9k84R5ok
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Apr 22, 2017 06:10
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Wikkheiser posted:I saw one article comparing Carter to Trump Okay, I signed up for Audible to listen to Shattered. I'm only three chapters in, and it's pretty good. On the eve of Trump announcing he was running, he called Bill Clinton (as the gears were already fully spinning in Hillary's camp) for candid advice and an assessment on running. Bill, who probably had better reading on the public mood than Hillary ever did, nonetheless didn't see Donald as a threat and freely gave him advice. Bill really just likes it when people want to talk to him. Another funny thing is that it seems like Hillary early on knew Bernie would have been a threat more than any of her senior staffers believed. And she immediately knew he would matter way more than Martin O'Malley. There's too much stuff in the book. If you're on the fence on reading it, go ahead and read it. Echo Chamber has issued a correction as of 06:46 on Apr 22, 2017 |
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Apr 22, 2017 06:43
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Echo Chamber posted:The idea of both Carter and Trump being disjunctive presidents is very enticing. That was pretty cunning of Trump, getting campaign advice from an experienced enemy who has no idea that he is going to run.
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Apr 22, 2017 06:56
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Apr 22, 2017 07:00
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Carter started off trying to take an interventionist approach to the economic problems of the late 70s, but was stymied by an obstructionist congress that wouldn't approve his measures. Carter wasn't astute or charismatic enough to pin the blame on congress, so the whole country ate poo poo. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jimmycartercrisisofconfidence.htm This speech is kinda the one people like my  father would reference and go "Yeah he was a loving moron". He's also referenced this "Sweater Speech" which he, and other conservatives routinely mock for how ridiculous it seemed for the timehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmlcLNA8Zhc I can see what Carter is trying to do. He's clearly trying to channel FDR, but it just feels so toothless and like he's trying to blame the American people for their problems, not the leadership that has so badly abandoned them in their time of need. He's begging them to "sacrifice" more when people are struggling, having very little left to sacrifice. He's also giving this speech during a time period in the 70's where the winters were especially brutal. a little hard to tell people "hey crank down the heat" when there's a world record blizzard outside. I'm trying to remember if FDR was kinda urging things in a similar manner. It never felt like that in retrospect, in fact it felt like he was trying to do quite the opposite with the "new deal" programs he had put in place. It's really sad that the modern democrats have no interest in doing that and instead seem to always go down the path we're talking about.
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Apr 22, 2017 07:09
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Kennedy was arguably the first step on the road to neoliberalism, since his administration was the first to pioneer the "lower income taxes will create greater revenues" line of reasoning.
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Apr 22, 2017 07:12
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Echo Chamber posted:The idea of both Carter and Trump being disjunctive presidents is very enticing.
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Apr 22, 2017 11:10
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Kennedy was arguably the first step on the road to neoliberalism, since his administration was the first to pioneer the "lower income taxes will create greater revenues" line of reasoning. Edit: it's also more useful to cut taxes on those who will actually use their money in economically useful ways and not hoard it in offshore bank accounts comedyblissoption has issued a correction as of 11:16 on Apr 22, 2017 |
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Apr 22, 2017 11:14
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comedyblissoption posted:I actually buy this line of reasoning It worked during the Kennedy administration, which is exactly why everyone who matters still believes in it. There is of course a point of diminishing returns where lowering the income tax won't generate more revenues, because the incentive to invest drops beyond a certain threshold. Especially when the tendency of the rate of profit to fall realizes a crisis point, during which it's more sensible to hoard money for use later when the rate of profit is restored. After the crisis of capital though, the people who are gaining new incomes are the same class which had their income taxes slashed - the rich. The wealth just continues accumulating into the upper classes of society without a redistributive mechanism that used to be adequately funded by taxes on the wealthy.
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Apr 22, 2017 11:42
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I agree taxes are a convenient way to force a redistributive mechanism for the failures of capitalism and makes it much less likely politicians can make convincing arguments about why we need to gut our social welfare programs. Lowering income taxes for the wealthy isn't necessarily in itself bad. I would more blame the gutting of social welfare, austerity measures, the concentration of power by ignoring anti-trust, more rent-seeking behavior, and implementing policies incredibly hostile to the working class and that undermine labor. To be fair, those policies are enacted because the wealthy spend huge sums of money lobbying and bribing the governing body for those policies, and the more money they keep the more money they have to lobby...
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Apr 22, 2017 11:54
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comedyblissoption posted:I agree taxes are a convenient way to force a redistributive mechanism for the failures of capitalism and makes it much less likely politicians can make convincing arguments about why we need to gut our social welfare programs. Those programs are defunded because they represent capital assets that could be purposed in the private sector towards generating more private wealth. The only government programs that remain untouched are those which are vital to the interests of capital, like military expenditures and infrastructure. The practical realization of neoliberalism as the hegemonic ideology, is that even the essentially necessary goods & services of the state like the military & infrastructure can be partially privatized. Those programs are restructured so that private capital can profit directly from government expenditure rather than consequently.
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Apr 22, 2017 12:14
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I agree w/ all that, but that isn't in itself an argument against slashing income taxes for the wealthy. The hoarding and wealth accumulation argument is a good one though. Giving the wealthy the reins to allocate resources and also giving them the option to simply hoard it and not spend it can exacerbate economic crisis. The wealthy on an individual level (but maybe not aggregate) are heavily economically incentivized to hoard and not spend during crisis times as demand plummets and many investments become riskier. The public sector desperately needs those reins during those times. I could make an argument that the government in theory with a fiat currency could just subvert the wealthy hoarding and spend money during crisis via printing currency to stimulate useful economic activity. Unfortunately, the government today during crisis under presidents such as Obama accentuate the wealthy hoarding and spend money via printing currency to...directly benefit wealthy interests while arguing for austerity for everyone else. comedyblissoption has issued a correction as of 12:43 on Apr 22, 2017 |
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Apr 22, 2017 12:38
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I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that our political professionals are themselves either capitalists or moneyed professionals. Obama was a millionaire before he became president, so why would it be in his interest to devalue his own cash reserves? The fact that Trump was a billionaire businessman was considered a qualifying trait to those who buy in to a culture that venerates the wealthy.comedyblissoption posted:I agree w/ all that, but that isn't in itself an argument against slashing income taxes for the wealthy. The point, I guess, is that those programs considered non-essential to private capital are targeted for cuts, because that's how tax cuts get funded. At some point the accounts have to balance at least enough for the government to make good on its interest payments to service the debt, and it's not the rich who are going to bite the bullet and make a sacrifice when they're the ones who already command the reins of power.
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Apr 22, 2017 12:49
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The wealthy are wealthy because of the appropriation of surplus value, if you're not taxing them enough you'll never get the money necessary to fund any realistic welfare schemes. Think of the rich as kind of like a siphon, sucking value from everyone below them - if you don't suck back, it has to accumulate up top.
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Apr 22, 2017 12:52
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Even if you got the rich to 'spend more' through capital incentives and such, that wouldn't actually solve anything, because that spending would mostly be in investments, and would represents an increasing share of total economic wealth. Return on investment would eventually fall, until the losses outpaces whatever capital incentives you place, and hoarding behavior would ressume. That's even assuming you could resist the inevitable ruling class political backlash, through funding of think tanks, political campaigns and such.
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Apr 22, 2017 12:56
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All of that sounds nice, but even letting people accumulate massively more wealth than others, even if everyone had a thorough social safety net, is inherently playing with fire. People get envious easily.
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Apr 22, 2017 12:55
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well this is where we get into super controversy territory and where I say with a fiat currency, you don't actually need to balance the federal budget in a traditional sense. you don't need to actually justify tax cuts with government cuts. you don't need to actually justify new programs with new taxes. you can still service the debt because you can just print money like we've already been doing ever since the USD became a fiat currency. of course printing money can cause inflationary forces, but guess what we've been printing money and experiencing inflationary forces and we've been fine. you just need to control inflation in such a way that people are still willing to use your currency. I will acquiesce it is possible this show of being concerned about balancing the federal budget makes it so people are less worrisome that you're gonna suddenly print so much money it makes their current holdings useless, though. but again, I cite obama recently willing trillions of dollars into existence. somehow, nobody meaningful complained when it was used to benefit the wealthy...
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Apr 22, 2017 12:59
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got any sevens posted:All of that sounds nice, but even letting people accumulate massively more wealth than others, even if everyone had a thorough social safety net, is inherently playing with fire. People get envious easily. "Envy" isn't quite as relevant as the realized suffering caused by the creation of a steadily growing impoverished underclass. Even ignoring the environmental impact, the unceasing process of accumulation and the inescapable crises of capital are precisely why capitalism is unsustainable as a social model. Eventually one tiny group has everything while the vast majority has almost nothing, and those tensions have to come to a head.
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Apr 22, 2017 12:59
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Printing money as a solution to budgetary shortfalls leads to hyperinflation, which reduces your possibility of taking future loans to approximately zero - no one's going to lend you money, if you pay them back in a future where the principle + interest is worth less than the principle. Using inflation to pay off debts doesn't make creditors happy. QE works because said inflation is benefiting the banks, the creditors that get screwed are pension funds ie proles.
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Apr 22, 2017 13:05
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I think I might buy these arguments and recant thinking the government could theoretically just generate money with fiat currency to counteract the "anti-everyone else" forces of the wealthy in times of crisis. If you think of taxes as just a lever to control a somewhat zero-summish game (within reason) of how much to allocate generated wealth between the public sector, labor, and capital, then slashing taxes for the wealthy means giving them more and more of the generated wealth. This necessarily means less generated wealth for the public sector. This means the public sector has much less power to control how that generated wealth is used. However, the public sector in theory has the lever of just printing money. This is still in a sense a form of indirect economic income tax on the wealthy and labor. It is a coarse-grained lever because it effects both labor and the wealthy together. This coarseness on introspection is bad. This potentially dangerous lever however only works as a form of indirect income tax if it is continuously used even when not in times of economic crisis so that it is a continuous and expected indirect tax. If you only use this lever in terms of economic crisis, you commit economic suicide because you'd have to generate so much money to counteract the resource holdings of the wealthy that people using your currency lose faith in it and abandon it. In effect in this scenario, the wealthy hold much of the power. They might even get you to use your money printing power to just directly benefit them in effect being an indirect economic tax on the non-wealthy!
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Apr 22, 2017 13:15
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comedyblissoption posted:well this is where we get into super controversy territory and where I say with a fiat currency, you don't actually need to balance the federal budget in a traditional sense. you don't need to actually justify tax cuts with government cuts. you don't need to actually justify new programs with new taxes. you can still service the debt because you can just print money like we've already been doing ever since the USD became a fiat currency. of course printing money can cause inflationary forces, but guess what we've been printing money and experiencing inflationary forces and we've been fine. you just need to control inflation in such a way that people are still willing to use your currency. Fiat currencies derive their value from credit, meaning that the government's ability to service its debts are why the currency has value. If you don't tax people to service those debts, then your inflation will go out of control and nobody will buy into your money. Governments have a massive amount of wiggle room when it comes to printing money and taking on debts to honor its obligations, but it's not infinite. The last thing you want is for speculators to panic and think their cash reserves are going to become worthless in the near future. QE doesn't cause hyperinflation because that new money goes towards honoring the banks' existing obligations. They guarantee solvency for the banks at the expense of their creditors, and that new money doesn't circulate because it just sits in existing accounts.
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Apr 22, 2017 13:16
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also keep in mind that there is extra context that the public sector HAS to spend money that never existed before to keep up with generation of wealth in the economy unless you want to experience the effects of deflationary forces. there is no other way for this "new money" to be generated.
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Apr 22, 2017 13:19
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Wikkheiser posted:*snaps fingers*
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