Velocity Raptor posted:

So how long until all these dumbass laws cause businesses to up and leave deep red states?

evilweasel posted:

Modern Monetary Theory seems - as commonly discussed - to veer from trivially true things to wildly incorrect assertions based on misunderstanding those trivially true things. It is much like the laffer curve - it is trivially true that at 0% tax and 100% tax you're probably getting no taxes, and your ideal tax rate is somewhere above 0% and below 100%. That is trivially true and useless. The conclusion drawn from it - lower taxes, get more revenue! - is, as everyone here knows, entirely false.

People who appear to not be economists have seized on modern monetary theory to argue, basically, (1) if a country issues debt denominated in its own currency, that debt doesn't really matter - you can always print more money to satisfy it. Further, that (2) because the sovereign issues currency, taxes and spending aren't really "taking" and "spending" money in the way you envision it, but instead "destroying" and "creating" money.

Combined, these are used to effectively advocate that debts/deficits aren't really relevant.

When MMT is correct, it is basically trivially correct in that it is not wrong, per se. (2) is basically this - sure, you can think of it that way and just by thinking in that way you have not said something technically wrong. It is not, however, a useful way to think about government taxing and spending at all. (1) is in a sense trivially true - yes, a government can inflate its currency to nothingness and thus effectively abolish its debt. But in a more accurate sense, you are effectively saying "you don't have to declare bankruptcy to eliminate your debts! just commit suicide!" It is a fantastically stupid approach. A country can just default on its debt! Just ask Argentina, which does it with such regularity that if you have an Argentinian government bond you are legally considered a sucker. Defaulting on your debt is bad, but it is infinitely better than hyperinflating your own currency to basically (but not technically!) default on your debt - because you get all the downsides of defaulting on your debt AND you have wrecked your ability to issue your own currency for the foreseeable future, at great additional cost to your economy.

How Should You Think About Taxing And Spending Of A Government?

If you want to understand taxing/spending/deficits, a dumb model where you are creating and destroying currency isn't helpful. Instead, eliminate the model and go straight to what is actually happening. A government requires labor and materials. Our government employs hundreds of thousands of people. It has immense amounts of material things procured for it (e.g. road building materials, military hardware, or just plain computers for those hundreds of thousands of workers). That labor and materials comes out of the wider economy. A government must have a mechanism for obtaining it.

That doesn't have to be by money! The government can simply compel labor - for example, the military draft. A government can compel labor in other ways - ancient governments would require forced labor from free people as a form of taxation, or just enslave some portion of the people under its control. It can simply obtain material in kind - for example, medieval kings might just requisition food for their army as they passed through instead of paying for it.

But at the end of the day, the government takes goods and services from the wider economy. Over human history we have learned which methods are better at causing less collateral damage (randomly requisitioning poo poo-tons of goods - not a good method) and/or are more moral (it is, generally, frowned upon to run your government with slaves these days). We have, generally, settled on taxation: citizens pay taxes in money (not goods), and the government uses that money to purchase goods and services in the market like any other market participant. That money can be its own locally-printed currency, or it can be commodity currency (e.g. gold). But at the end of the day, the principal reason we do things this way instead of directly compelling the provision of goods and services is that it works much, much better - people prefer to pay currency than be compelled to labor and you can get specialists, taxing in money instead of taking the goods you need encourages rather than discourages the production of those goods.

But everything the government uses, it has taken from the wider economy. It has done so directly (seizure of the goods it wants, compulsory labor for services) or indirectly (cash taxation, and payment for services and goods), or something in between. At the end of the day, any method of funding a government involves this transfer. You can model it in different ways, but that's the core thing that is occurring. As long as the government is paying for goods and services, the money for that is coming from somewhere.

How Does Our Government Work?

Our government, as everyone knows, taxes people to obtain money, and spends money on goods and services. But our government spends more on goods and services than it takes in in taxes. Where does that excess come from?

In our system, it comes from the holders of US debt. If I buy a government bond, I forego some goods or services I could have, in exchange for a promise I will obtain money from the government in the future to obtain goods and services. The expectation is that this payment (denominated in dollars) will allow me to purchase approximately equal or greater goods and services in the future. Purchase of US government debt is voluntary: it is not a tax (requiring everyone to purchase debt would just be another form of tax).

You pay interest on that debt. How much interest depends on the market for capital. For the past decade+, that interest has been effectively zero or negative because we have been in a demand slump. This is not usually the case: when there is more demand for capital than capital, you will pay higher interest rates.

How Does Taxing and Spending Impact The Economy?

Taxing acts as a drag on the economy. It has to: it's taking goods and services out of the economy (indirectly). Spending, on the other hand, generally acts as a boost to the economy - you are increasing demand for goods and services and offering a profit to provide them.

When you're spending more than you tax, you can be benefiting the economy. If you are taxing more than you are spending, you can be reducing the economy (this can be beneficial when the economy is in a bubble). That's not always true, but it's generally true.

Keynesian economics - the basically correct form of economics - says that over the long term you should borrow money in recessions to benefit the economy, and then overtax and pay that money back in boom times, to deflate the economy. This is because recessions are usually demand-driven - there is less demand for goods and services than the economy could supply, so you create new demand. Further, boom times are also generally demand driven - there is more demand for goods and services than the economy can supply, so you need to reduce that demand (to avoid creating asset bubbles).

Overall, you should not run a deficit because you want to be most efficiently matching the money you take out vs. you put in.

What Are Alternatives To Issuing Debt?

Sometimes a country wants to spend more than it can tax, and it can't or won't issue debt. It can then fund its spending by "seniorage" - printing new money. The government takes in $100 billion, it prints $50 billion, and then spends $150 billion. Where did this additional $50b of goods and services come from?

It came from the only place it can: the wider economy. The government got $150b of goods and services, so in some way it extracted $150b of goods and services. The only question is how.

Generally speaking, it did this by inflation. It made its currency worth less: $1 of currency before the creation of the additional $50b bought you more goods and services than it does today. What you have effectively done is instituted a tax on cash holdings. This is considered a tremendously bad idea, generally speaking, because it is how hyperinflation happens. If the government is simply minting currency to pay its debts, that currency will generally trend rapidly towards being worthless. It's not hard to evade this implicit tax - you just trade your local currency for a different one. A rich person with WeimarBucks sells them and buys dollars, and puts those dollars in a bank account - and thus doesn't pay this tax. But that enhances the drop in value of the currency (many people want to sell it; few people want to buy it) and you get a hyperinflationary spiral.

At the end of a hyperinflationary spiral, you effectively lack the ability to issue a national fiat currency. This is a bad thing, because a national fiat currency does a lot of natural balancing of imports and exports that smooths out the country's business cycle. If your country uses the currency of another nation, that can seriously damage your economy if the economy of that nation doesn't match yours the currency will move the opposite way it should, deepening recessions and inflating asset bubbles.

Now, sometimes - when you are in a recession where demand for goods and services is lower than the economy can supply - you don't cause inflation. Here, you are doing exactly what Keynesian economics suggests you do - you are creating artificial demand. You've just done it through a different method. This unusual case is what has happened since the financial crisis. The Fed has printed a lot of currency and used it to create artificial demand. The key thing here is that the Fed is kept very separate from the rest of the government so that the Fed doesn't get pressured to create money to fund the government - instead, it uses its money creation powers only to balance the economy (and, it is paired with the power to effectively destroy that created money at the appropriate time - something governments operating via seniorage generally do not do). This is all well understood by Keynesian economics and is why the Fed - despite republicans - has taken this course since 2008. It is not something MMT has shown anyone.

What Does Modern Monetary Theory Tell Us?

Nothing.

On debt - yes, you can fund your government, if it issues debt in its own currency, by printing new currency to inflate that debt away to nothingness. You have now effectively defaulted on your debt - that you did not "technically" do so won't matter to anyone. But you also ruined your ability to issue new fiat currency. That was a stupid thing to do as well, because you can just say "guys we're not going to pay our debt, sorry" without wrecking your currency as well. Either way, you're not issuing new debt anytime soon.

What does it tell us about our deficits? Nothing. The MMT answer is basically "it doesn't matter" or "it doesn't matter until it causes inflation". The first is nonsense. The second is trivially true but Kenesian economics already told us that.

MMT appears to be a backlash to Republican economics, which tells us that our deficit means we are spending too much. MMT wants to preserve and enhance our spending, so it says "deficits don't matter".

But does our "structural" deficit (the deficit we run overall, not just today) actually tell us? It tells us that we are spending too much or our taxes are too low. And the actual answer is (b) - our taxes are too low. The deficit should be fixed not by cutting spending, but by increasing taxes.

Republicans believe you can't raise taxes. People advocating MMT appear to have accepted that principle, which is a stupid principle. It is arguing to, essentially, ignore the deficit. But we shouldn't! We've fixed our deficit in my lifetime - when President Clinton raised taxes. We re-created it again in my lifetime - when Bush II cut taxes. We would trivially fix the deficit by returning to Clinton-era tax rates, and have plenty of room to grow spending. There is no reason to accept this stupid republican principle of "never increase taxes" and create a new, stupid, economic theory around it.

People tend to argue MMT in opposition to Republican economics, say republican economics are stupid, therefore MMT is right. Yes, republican economics are stupid. But they're not real economics. Keynesian economics is the gold standard, not the babble of the republican party, and you need to do better than that, not "it is an immutable law of the universe American taxes cannot go up".

We agree our government needs to supply more goods and services than the taxes it raises pay for. We should not solve that by some nonsense about how money isn't real and we're creating and destroying it every second where the conclusion is a laffer-curve esque "we can just have a free lunch!" We should just fix it by raising taxes.

Kraftwerk posted:

1. How do you efficiently tax people in this globalized era where it’s trivial to hide your money off shore. Or create legal entities that exist out of US tax jurisdictions despite the bulk of their revenues coming from America? It seems to me that if you raise taxes they’ll just find new ways to make their tax liabilities go to 0. At best you can try to eliminate tax credits so you aren’t paying Amazon to be rich.

Data Graham posted:

I'm sure we all remember the South Park take, which was "just hit the kids more and they'll shut up"

Epicurius posted:

Its in reference to Adderal, which, while not methamphetamine, is an amphetamine. Its one of the drugs used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which is a chronic mental condition usually diagnosed in children that affects things like mental focus, concentration and impulse control .

It started being diagnosed heavily in the 90s and there was a backlash, with some people saying that it was ovediagnosed and a lot of the people who were diagnosed with it were just undisciplined. Hence the 'handing out meth like candy ro misbehaving children'.

skull mask mcgee posted:

Epicurius posted:

Quorum posted:

Yeah, the idea that using medically well-supported stimulants to treat a disorder with serious and often invisible effects on every aspect of life is basically the same as handing out meth is really harmful and stigmatizing. It's a version of the same old lovely cultural narrative that America loves to tell about every other mental health issue-- you just need tough love, you just need to try harder, you just need to stop relying on drugs to fix your problems. With ADHD specifically, the fact that it's a developmental disorder means it's often identified during childhood, but families with money and access to medical resources are far more likely to get their kid diagnosed, which contributes to an image that it's a fake disorder made up to let rich parents drug their kids. That's not true, and reinforcing that narrative only contributes to keeping less-privileged people from accessing care and maintaining the image of ADHD as a rich white kid thing.

BigBallChunkyTime posted:

Republicans: "The government should not interfere in the affairs of private business! The free market will decide!"

Also Republicans: "No, not like that!!"

evilweasel posted:

When MMT is correct, it is basically trivially correct in that it is not wrong, per se. (2) is basically this - sure, you can think of it that way and just by thinking in that way you have not said something technically wrong. It is not, however, a useful way to think about government taxing and spending at all. (1) is in a sense trivially true - yes, a government can inflate its currency to nothingness and thus effectively abolish its debt. But in a more accurate sense, you are effectively saying "you don't have to declare bankruptcy to eliminate your debts! just commit suicide!" It is a fantastically stupid approach. A country can just default on its debt! Just ask Argentina, which does it with such regularity that if you have an Argentinian government bond you are legally considered a sucker. Defaulting on your debt is bad, but it is infinitely better than hyperinflating your own currency to basically (but not technically!) default on your debt - because you get all the downsides of defaulting on your debt AND you have wrecked your ability to issue your own currency for the foreseeable future, at great additional cost to your economy.

evilweasel posted:

Republicans believe you can't raise taxes. People advocating MMT appear to have accepted that principle, which is a stupid principle.

BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:

twitter buys a lovely-rear end tilt-a-whirl in panama city sticks a food truck selling 10 dollar elephant ears and twitter bird plushies and bans DeSantis out of spite.

A GIANT PARSNIP posted:

Can Manchin be pointed to as the deciding factor for any vote that was bad for the democrats? I get that it’s easy for people to be pissed at him but as far as I can tell he has never been the deciding vote for the GOP or against the Democrats. It’s actually kinda impressive how well his little song and dance continues to work, and as Manchin himself has pointed out all the mud that progressives throw at him just helps him get re-elected.

Ither posted:

I don't think this is actually true.

I heard Stephanie Kelton talk on the Majority Report sometime back, and I believe she mentioned taxes.

evilweasel posted:

Modern Monetary Theory seems - as commonly discussed - to veer from trivially true things to wildly incorrect assertions based on misunderstanding those trivially true things. It is much like the laffer curve - it is trivially true that at 0% tax and 100% tax you're probably getting no taxes, and your ideal tax rate is somewhere above 0% and below 100%. That is trivially true and useless. The conclusion drawn from it - lower taxes, get more revenue! - is, as everyone here knows, entirely false.

People who appear to not be economists have seized on modern monetary theory to argue, basically, (1) if a country issues debt denominated in its own currency, that debt doesn't really matter - you can always print more money to satisfy it. Further, that (2) because the sovereign issues currency, taxes and spending aren't really "taking" and "spending" money in the way you envision it, but instead "destroying" and "creating" money.

Combined, these are used to effectively advocate that debts/deficits aren't really relevant.

When MMT is correct, it is basically trivially correct in that it is not wrong, per se. (2) is basically this - sure, you can think of it that way and just by thinking in that way you have not said something technically wrong. It is not, however, a useful way to think about government taxing and spending at all. (1) is in a sense trivially true - yes, a government can inflate its currency to nothingness and thus effectively abolish its debt. But in a more accurate sense, you are effectively saying "you don't have to declare bankruptcy to eliminate your debts! just commit suicide!" It is a fantastically stupid approach. A country can just default on its debt! Just ask Argentina, which does it with such regularity that if you have an Argentinian government bond you are legally considered a sucker. Defaulting on your debt is bad, but it is infinitely better than hyperinflating your own currency to basically (but not technically!) default on your debt - because you get all the downsides of defaulting on your debt AND you have wrecked your ability to issue your own currency for the foreseeable future, at great additional cost to your economy.

How Should You Think About Taxing And Spending Of A Government?

If you want to understand taxing/spending/deficits, a dumb model where you are creating and destroying currency isn't helpful. Instead, eliminate the model and go straight to what is actually happening. A government requires labor and materials. Our government employs hundreds of thousands of people. It has immense amounts of material things procured for it (e.g. road building materials, military hardware, or just plain computers for those hundreds of thousands of workers). That labor and materials comes out of the wider economy. A government must have a mechanism for obtaining it.

That doesn't have to be by money! The government can simply compel labor - for example, the military draft. A government can compel labor in other ways - ancient governments would require forced labor from free people as a form of taxation, or just enslave some portion of the people under its control. It can simply obtain material in kind - for example, medieval kings might just requisition food for their army as they passed through instead of paying for it.

But at the end of the day, the government takes goods and services from the wider economy. Over human history we have learned which methods are better at causing less collateral damage (randomly requisitioning poo poo-tons of goods - not a good method) and/or are more moral (it is, generally, frowned upon to run your government with slaves these days). We have, generally, settled on taxation: citizens pay taxes in money (not goods), and the government uses that money to purchase goods and services in the market like any other market participant. That money can be its own locally-printed currency, or it can be commodity currency (e.g. gold). But at the end of the day, the principal reason we do things this way instead of directly compelling the provision of goods and services is that it works much, much better - people prefer to pay currency than be compelled to labor and you can get specialists, taxing in money instead of taking the goods you need encourages rather than discourages the production of those goods.

But everything the government uses, it has taken from the wider economy. It has done so directly (seizure of the goods it wants, compulsory labor for services) or indirectly (cash taxation, and payment for services and goods), or something in between. At the end of the day, any method of funding a government involves this transfer. You can model it in different ways, but that's the core thing that is occurring. As long as the government is paying for goods and services, the money for that is coming from somewhere.

How Does Our Government Work?

Our government, as everyone knows, taxes people to obtain money, and spends money on goods and services. But our government spends more on goods and services than it takes in in taxes. Where does that excess come from?

In our system, it comes from the holders of US debt. If I buy a government bond, I forego some goods or services I could have, in exchange for a promise I will obtain money from the government in the future to obtain goods and services. The expectation is that this payment (denominated in dollars) will allow me to purchase approximately equal or greater goods and services in the future. Purchase of US government debt is voluntary: it is not a tax (requiring everyone to purchase debt would just be another form of tax).

You pay interest on that debt. How much interest depends on the market for capital. For the past decade+, that interest has been effectively zero or negative because we have been in a demand slump. This is not usually the case: when there is more demand for capital than capital, you will pay higher interest rates.

How Does Taxing and Spending Impact The Economy?

Taxing acts as a drag on the economy. It has to: it's taking goods and services out of the economy (indirectly). Spending, on the other hand, generally acts as a boost to the economy - you are increasing demand for goods and services and offering a profit to provide them.

When you're spending more than you tax, you can be benefiting the economy. If you are taxing more than you are spending, you can be reducing the economy (this can be beneficial when the economy is in a bubble). That's not always true, but it's generally true.

Keynesian economics - the basically correct form of economics - says that over the long term you should borrow money in recessions to benefit the economy, and then overtax and pay that money back in boom times, to deflate the economy. This is because recessions are usually demand-driven - there is less demand for goods and services than the economy could supply, so you create new demand. Further, boom times are also generally demand driven - there is more demand for goods and services than the economy can supply, so you need to reduce that demand (to avoid creating asset bubbles).

Overall, you should not run a deficit because you want to be most efficiently matching the money you take out vs. you put in.

What Are Alternatives To Issuing Debt?

Sometimes a country wants to spend more than it can tax, and it can't or won't issue debt. It can then fund its spending by "seniorage" - printing new money. The government takes in $100 billion, it prints $50 billion, and then spends $150 billion. Where did this additional $50b of goods and services come from?

It came from the only place it can: the wider economy. The government got $150b of goods and services, so in some way it extracted $150b of goods and services. The only question is how.

Generally speaking, it did this by inflation. It made its currency worth less: $1 of currency before the creation of the additional $50b bought you more goods and services than it does today. What you have effectively done is instituted a tax on cash holdings. This is considered a tremendously bad idea, generally speaking, because it is how hyperinflation happens. If the government is simply minting currency to pay its debts, that currency will generally trend rapidly towards being worthless. It's not hard to evade this implicit tax - you just trade your local currency for a different one. A rich person with WeimarBucks sells them and buys dollars, and puts those dollars in a bank account - and thus doesn't pay this tax. But that enhances the drop in value of the currency (many people want to sell it; few people want to buy it) and you get a hyperinflationary spiral.

At the end of a hyperinflationary spiral, you effectively lack the ability to issue a national fiat currency. This is a bad thing, because a national fiat currency does a lot of natural balancing of imports and exports that smooths out the country's business cycle. If your country uses the currency of another nation, that can seriously damage your economy if the economy of that nation doesn't match yours the currency will move the opposite way it should, deepening recessions and inflating asset bubbles.

Now, sometimes - when you are in a recession where demand for goods and services is lower than the economy can supply - you don't cause inflation. Here, you are doing exactly what Keynesian economics suggests you do - you are creating artificial demand. You've just done it through a different method. This unusual case is what has happened since the financial crisis. The Fed has printed a lot of currency and used it to create artificial demand. The key thing here is that the Fed is kept very separate from the rest of the government so that the Fed doesn't get pressured to create money to fund the government - instead, it uses its money creation powers only to balance the economy (and, it is paired with the power to effectively destroy that created money at the appropriate time - something governments operating via seniorage generally do not do). This is all well understood by Keynesian economics and is why the Fed - despite republicans - has taken this course since 2008. It is not something MMT has shown anyone.

What Does Modern Monetary Theory Tell Us?

Nothing.

On debt - yes, you can fund your government, if it issues debt in its own currency, by printing new currency to inflate that debt away to nothingness. You have now effectively defaulted on your debt - that you did not "technically" do so won't matter to anyone. But you also ruined your ability to issue new fiat currency. That was a stupid thing to do as well, because you can just say "guys we're not going to pay our debt, sorry" without wrecking your currency as well. Either way, you're not issuing new debt anytime soon.

What does it tell us about our deficits? Nothing. The MMT answer is basically "it doesn't matter" or "it doesn't matter until it causes inflation". The first is nonsense. The second is trivially true but Kenesian economics already told us that.

MMT appears to be a backlash to Republican economics, which tells us that our deficit means we are spending too much. MMT wants to preserve and enhance our spending, so it says "deficits don't matter".

But does our "structural" deficit (the deficit we run overall, not just today) actually tell us? It tells us that we are spending too much or our taxes are too low. And the actual answer is (b) - our taxes are too low. The deficit should be fixed not by cutting spending, but by increasing taxes.

Republicans believe you can't raise taxes. People advocating MMT appear to have accepted that principle, which is a stupid principle. It is arguing to, essentially, ignore the deficit. But we shouldn't! We've fixed our deficit in my lifetime - when President Clinton raised taxes. We re-created it again in my lifetime - when Bush II cut taxes. We would trivially fix the deficit by returning to Clinton-era tax rates, and have plenty of room to grow spending. There is no reason to accept this stupid republican principle of "never increase taxes" and create a new, stupid, economic theory around it.

People tend to argue MMT in opposition to Republican economics, say republican economics are stupid, therefore MMT is right. Yes, republican economics are stupid. But they're not real economics. Keynesian economics is the gold standard, not the babble of the republican party, and you need to do better than that, not "it is an immutable law of the universe American taxes cannot go up".

We agree our government needs to supply more goods and services than the taxes it raises pay for. We should not solve that by some nonsense about how money isn't real and we're creating and destroying it every second where the conclusion is a laffer-curve esque "we can just have a free lunch!" We should just fix it by raising taxes.

Killer robot posted:

Yeah, as I've seen it MMT people acknowledge the need to raise taxes when raising spending, just they view it as less directly connected and think debt is a useless metric for gauging when or how much to tax.

fool of sound posted:

You really should read this article, the headline is burying the lede on this guy being completely unhinged

quote:

“I went to jail for battery. Does that really make me a criminal? Time will tell.”

fool of sound posted:

Kansas Rep. Mark Samsel arrested for battery after physical altercation with student

You really should read this article, the headline is burying the lede on this guy being completely unhinged

evilweasel posted:

Keynesian economics is the gold standard [of economic theories]

quote:

“I went to jail for battery. Does that really make me a criminal? Time will tell.”

fool of sound posted:

Kansas Rep. Mark Samsel arrested for battery after physical altercation with student

You really should read this article, the headline is burying the lede on this guy being completely unhinged

fool of sound posted:

Kansas Rep. Mark Samsel arrested for battery after physical altercation with student

You really should read this article, the headline is burying the lede on this guy being completely unhinged

evilweasel posted:

I should note there might be some merit to MMT in other aspects, like refining Keynesian predictions or the like - just not at all in the way it is used in political discourse.

TLM3101 posted:

Did... did he knee someone in the groin because God's supposedly speaking to him?

And he's a State Representative?

What the actual, simmering gently caress is wrong with Kansas?!

Grouchio posted:

It's a flat land where corn and god reigns over it.

Grouchio posted:

It's a flat land where corn and godHe Who Walks Behind The Rows reigns over it.

TLM3101 posted:

Did... did he knee someone in the groin because God's supposedly speaking to him?

And he's a State Representative?

quote:

In a Snapchat post shared with The Star, Samsel wrote that “it was all planned.”

“Every little bit of it. That’s right. The kids and I planned ALL this to SEND A MESSAGE about art, mental health, teenage suicide, how we treat our educators and one another. To who? Parents. And grandparents. And all of Wellsville,” he posted.

a.lo posted:

Is it appropriate for a state representative to speak to a class of high school students to make babies and procreate

Zwabu posted:

fixed

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

They need something like 4-5 extra seats to not only offset Sinema and Manchin but to have a reasonable chance (they'd really need something like 7-9 more seats in the Senate to make it a near sure thing) at also offsetting the other Blue Dogs who'd probably vote it and other Progressive changes like $15 min. wage down.

There is like maaaaybe 1 seat the D's (in PA going by Sabato's map) can get in the Senate in 2022 and the others are all varying degrees of increasingly longer shots. But even a repeat of 2018's very pro D voting probably won't get them another 4-5 seats in the Senate.

And 2022's Senate election map is a class III which is considered a favorable map for D's. 2024's is going to be very favorable for R's though unfortunately so its not reasonable to get your hopes up too high even then.

Space Cadet Omoly posted:

No, it is also not appropriate for a state representative to knee a high school student in the balls.

haveblue posted:

In which occupation is it the most appropriate to knee a teenager in the balls? Asking for a friend

Otteration posted:

It's mostly wheat and sunflowers but if you are ever sentenced to drive across the state the flat horizon will do things to your brain.

Remember though that Kansas has moved a bit left lately...can't find a decent link, so any help would be grounds for hugs.

This guy needs help, but we still need a vaccine for the Q brain worms too.