Election 2016

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Apr 14, 2016 6:42 am

I love Craig Mazin's sick burns on Ted Cruz, but all the movies he has cowritten have been awful. It's seriously one of the worst filmographies in Hollywood.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Apr 14, 2016 7:16 am

Koumei wrote:
Dominicius wrote:Trump is primarily a real estate guy
Trump is primarily an ass-hat who was loaned a huge amount from his dad at good rates and has ended up poorer than if he just put it all in an account and let it build interest. He has gone bankrupt multiple times, and every time it's the people around him who pay for it - businesses going under, many people becoming unemployed, a lot of people left unable to receive payment for services already rendered or goods already delivered and spent. And then he just hits up a friend for a loan and uses his reputation and name to get a spot on TV where he can make some noises and somehow get money again (fuck the people who worked for him and are left with nothing to show for it).

Don't think of any of his ideas as part of a great clever scheme. It's all off-the-cuff bullshit from a madman who is incompetent at his current level of responsibility, let alone being elevated to run a country.

If you start with the position of him being in any way business-savvy or intelligent or competent, your premise is flawed and any result it leads to will be wrong.

About all Trump has managed to do is find a way to make money by licensing his name, remain an iconic "good businessman" despite multiple bankruptcies, and parlay his dad's money into his kids actually having some idea of what the fuck they're doing. Pretty much the best thing you can say about Trump is that he is an accomplished bullshitter. And while I can see bullshitting as an advantageous skill for a president, it should definitely not be their only skill.

Dominicius · Post by **Dominicius** » Thu Apr 14, 2016 9:04 am

Trump is a fucking billionaire. Going bankrupt is standard procedure in business because not all initiatives are going be successful. The real trial is then recovering from a failure and learning your lessons so that your next project can yield better results.

So no matter how many times you call him an idiot it will still not change the fact that is several times richer than his father was and is now a respected businessman, which would not be the case if he actually was mentally stunted.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu Apr 14, 2016 12:06 pm

Dominicius wrote:Trump is a fucking billionaire. Going bankrupt is standard procedure in business because not all initiatives are going be successful. The real trial is then recovering from a failure and learning your lessons so that your next project can yield better results.

So no matter how many times you call him an idiot it will still not change the fact that is several times richer than his father was and is now a respected businessman, which would not be the case if he actually was mentally stunted.

Dude, you are delusional. More than 70% of his business gains by capital involved the shell company filing for bankruptcy and him keeping his large salary for several years, and often a chunk of the capital.

He has never "recovered from a failure" because the failures are ones where he stole a bunch of money from other people and then used that money to hire better lawyers than them to explain to the judge that they really should have known better than to give him all the money and expect his shell corporation to pay him back, so it's their fault and they get nothing.

Someone did a calculation of the amount of wealth he was given by his father, and then showed that he had actually more than doubled what standard investment strategies produced in the same period, where that period was up to like 1990 or something, and then, in the last 26 years, he has substantially underperformed standard investment strategies and would have more money if he had just stopped doing literally any of the things he did in the last 20 years.

The best thing you can say for him is that he was a good business man at a specific scale, but that when his money reached a larger scale he was overwhelmed and became a shitty business man.

The most true thing you can say about him is that he rode a specific bubble and stole a bunch of money from people, and since most people realized they should stop letting him steal their money, he has had to invest more capital into stealing smaller amounts of money, and it's not working anymore.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Thu Apr 14, 2016 1:23 pm

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/2/9248963/don ... index-fund

https://www.quora.com/Did-Donald-Trump- ... kable-rate

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/st ... umps-fath/

There is a lot of information to parse through.
---

I am still looking for the calculations that Kaliek mentioned.

icyshadowlord · Post by **icyshadowlord** » Thu Apr 14, 2016 1:52 pm

With the amount of slandering anyone with publicity has, I've started taking EVERYTHING with a bucket of salt.

Nobody can really disagree with this though; No matter which way you look, the political system over in the US is a bloody clusterfuck.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu Apr 14, 2016 3:26 pm

Leress wrote:I am still looking for the calculations that Kaliek mentioned.

You actually linked to a thing that links to the previous calculation and goes over their own.

It basically says the same thing I said, except, the actual date is 1982 (I was going from memory).

The original I saw was

https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/54699 ... ng-nothing

He outperformed the SP 500 investments from 1974 to 1982 going from 40 million to 200 million. Since then, over the last 34 years, he has grossly underperformed against those investments, sitting at some number around 3 and 4 billion, as compared to the 8 billion he would have had investing.

Now if I had 200 million dollars, in 1982, I wouldn't care how much I was underperforming. But I also wouldn't be claiming to be a good business man either.

And when you consider that he makes a bunch of money from selling shitty books . . . that can only mean his investments/real estate projects are even worse than that.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Thu Apr 14, 2016 3:45 pm

Yeah, I didn't have access to the article that you've linked.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Thu Apr 14, 2016 5:11 pm

Dominicius wrote:Trump is a fucking billionaire. Going bankrupt is standard procedure in business because not all initiatives are going be successful. The real trial is then recovering from a failure and learning your lessons so that your next project can yield better results.

So no matter how many times you call him an idiot it will still not change the fact that is several times richer than his father was and is now a respected businessman, which would not be the case if he actually was mentally stunted.

Given hundreds of millions of dollars and three decades, anyone can be a billionaire. That's how compound earnings work. It is simply factually true that Trump has pissed away about four billion dollars by "being a businessman" instead of liquidating his father's assets and putting his money in safe, low-yield alternatives. On top of that, his bankruptcies have cost investors an amount of money that is comparable to his entire net worth. He's taken on more risk for less money and he's still lost more than $3 billion dollars of other people's money to top it all off.

Donald Trump is probably the single worst businessman in the Forbes 400. Virtually his entire career is a string of failures and not-quite-successes, and in practical terms he is hemorrhaging money like a shanked piggy bank. Donald Trump is actually a stellar example of how little merit matters in the allocation of wealth; he inherited a considerable empire from his father and despite what are clearly his best efforts still hasn't managed to burn it to the ground.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu Apr 14, 2016 6:07 pm

That is partly incorrect DSM, if he had just done that with his Father's money, he would have pretty much exactly the amount h does now. It was if he had done that in 1982, after a couple successful ventures of his own, that he would have more money.

But either way you swing it:

a) He bats exactly average for success with his own money, by stealing lots of money from other people over the course of 42 years.

b) He succeeded very well for 8 years, then failed spectacularly for 34 years. Also he stole a bunch of other people's money and bankrupted them.

His record is... shit.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Tue Apr 19, 2016 5:20 am

Out of curiosity, why are caucuses specifically very undemocratic? Are they more or less democratic than New York's "tyrannical" policy of requiring party affiliation to be declared last October in order to participate in today's primaries?

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Tue Apr 19, 2016 5:22 am

In order to be counted for a caucus you must set aside several hours to stand on one side of a room or another. In order to be counted for a primary, you just have to set aside like half an hour to turn in your ballot. Caucuses unsurprisingly end up with significantly lower voter participation than poll-based elections in the exact same area.

Mechalich · Post by **Mechalich** » Tue Apr 19, 2016 6:15 am

Also caucuses tend to have less caucus locations than primaries have locations (and no voting by mail) which means that if you don't have a way to get to one (and get back from one and these things have a tendency to end after buses shut down for the night) you don't get a say. Also if you're a resident of a state that holds a caucus but aren't able to physically be in that state during the caucus you don't get to vote either. Or even if you are in the state but can't show up specifically during a very small window to participate in the caucus then you don't get to vote - this affected me personally since I work the evening shift and was working during my state's caucus. The window for a primary is at least theoretically much larger.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Apr 19, 2016 6:15 am

Caucuses take a long time, so people who work and can't get time off cannot participate. Note that in places that aren't Arizona, working people can vote on their lunch break, and even there they can mail in a vote.

Caucuses involve a lot of standing and shouting, meaning that many handicapped and frail people simply cannot participate.

Caucuses have no secret ballot, which means that they are open to voter intimidation. Other people know who you voted for and are able to take revenge if they want or imply that they might before your vote is finalized.

Basically Caucuses are all bad and if you think that getting people involved in their government is an abstract good you should be opposed to them in all circumstances.

-Username17

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Apr 19, 2016 12:11 pm

Also something that may or may not apply to all caucuses, but in Texas you would literally have a local meeting which would select representatives which went to a regional meeting which selected representatives who went to a larger regional meeting which selected the people who went to the state caucus. So it costs multiple days, and involves picking people you have never met before, know nothing about, and will never see again to represent your interests based on an hour of conversation at most. And if someone lies... Then congrats, you just picked the Trumper who claimed he was going to vote for Cruz.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Tue Apr 19, 2016 8:28 pm

Yeah, caucuses are bullshit. The longer and more arduous the voting process, the less people will be involved. People have shit to do, and there are a fuckton of states in which your employer is not even required to give you time off to vote (or the time they do give you is unpaid, or etcetera etcetera fuck you etcetera etcetera).

But New York is one of the most undemocratic states in the country, and is probably even worse than most caucus states. Other than photo ID's, if you name some shady election practice a Republican state government has been sued over, odds are good New York already does that thing. No early voting. No election day registration. Excuse-only absentee voting. No preregistration for those who will be of age at the time of the election. National, state, and local primaries are each held a couple weeks apart for no reason other than to reduce turnout. Party affiliation needs to be declared six months in advance. The board of elections has been sued for purging or changing voters' party affiliations without their knowledge or consent, preventing them from voting in the primary.

New York's election laws are designed so that voters can't get really angry and motivated and flip a primary. Really, that's it. If one of the candidates said something you felt passionately about during the first Democratic primary debate, and you wanted to register a bunch of people to vote for or against that candidate on the basis of what they said, fuck you you have two weeks left before registration closes good luck. It's a system meant to protect incumbents and restrict the franchise to a small pool of people who are consistently politically motivated. It's honestly a miracle that New York consistently and overwhelmingly turns out for Democratic presidents, because the state is already running most of the Republican handbook on voter suppression. And yeah, when the turnout drops because it's not a presidential election, the state elect a disproportionately large number of Republicans given its insanely blue-friendly demographics, which the New York Democratic party consider a small price to pay for kicking their own voters out of their own primaries so they don't have to think about what the lowly plebs want.

New York is just fucking awful. Fuck that state.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Apr 19, 2016 9:05 pm

There is only a little bit of hyperbole in DSM's New York rant. You have to register a CHANGE in party affiliation six months in advance, but newly registered voters only have to sign up four weeks on advance. It's an anti-ratfucking measure, and I am only tepidly against it.

Nevertheless, caucuses are so incredibly bullshit that Washington State's turnout of less than 10% this year is fucking HALF the worst primary turnout in New York of the last twenty years - which was 19%. And recall that that's even including the fact that New York's presidential preference hasn't mattered in most of those elections (New York generally votes late when both the Republican and Democratic nominations are generally decided by unassailable margins or even outright majorities).

The highest turnout caucuses are still twice as disenfranchising as the most exclusionary primaries.

-Username17

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Wed Apr 20, 2016 3:35 am

FrankTrollman wrote:It's an anti-ratfucking measure, and I am only tepidly against it.

New York politicians are generally more moderate than their counterparts elsewhere. For fuck's sake, New York City had a republican mayor (okay, Bloomberg ran as an independent for his last term, but what-the-fuck-ever) for twenty straight years, and they broke that record by electing democrat Bill de Blasio... who is right now trying to drum up support for privatizing (read: gutting) the city's public housing. Holy shit. If that's the democrat, just imagine what the republican would have done! Actually, you don't have to, I'm going to tell you; Joe Lhota campaigned on privatizing (read: gutting) the city's public housing. He is also pro-choice and pro-same-sex marriage. He hates Donald Trump so much (specifically for his proposed Muslim ban) that he wanted the local Republican Party chair to strike him from the primary ballot using an obscure rule and a flimsy justification. The biggest difference between Bill de Blasio and Joe Lhota is that Joe Lhota will tell you he believes in fiscal conservatism while Bill de Blasio just wants to stab you in the back with it.

There's a lot of BS excuses you can make about New York's unique demographics, but honestly it's probably got more to do with the fact that they are so wildly successful at voter suppression that their primaries aren't ideologically competitive and absent other pressures 90% of all politicians naturally regress into the same variety of mildly corrupt centrist asshole. It is less about "keep your Republican peanut butter out of my Democratic chocolate" and more about "haha I shat in a reeses cup wrapper and you're going to have to eat it." These are not anti-ratfucking measures. The people in charge are the ratfuckers, and all the disenfranchising bullshit is to make sure the voters don't oust them and replace them with someone who genuinely represents their interests. Bill de Blasio is right now trying to kick poor minorities out of their homes, and he's not even fucking remotely scared of whether or not this might hurt him in his next primary. And it probably won't, because his next primary will have abysmal turnout and it will be wildly unrepresentative of New York democrats as a whole.

New York is the perfect example of how antagonistic the relationship between political parties and the people they represent can become. Well, no, the Republican party is the perfect example. But the NYSDC is the horrifying reminder that huge chunks of the Democratic Party's leadership look at us the exact same way.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Apr 20, 2016 7:15 am

The extra turnout from the Sanders/Clinton matchup brought out enough democratic voters to flip a state senate seat from red to blue on a special election. That is precisely the kind of thing that a Sanders campaign is good for. Here is hoping he stays in the race through California so we don't end up getting stuck with a bunch of republican vs republican races thanks to California's stupid top two primary system.

Sanders lost New York by more votes than the entire caucus of Washington State, so he has no chance of winning. But the contest has the very real chance of drumming up enough voters for our side to deliver victories for our side down ballot that are important.

Sanders should really be concentrating more on that coalition building, but I will take what I can get.

-Username17

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Wed Apr 20, 2016 12:26 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:The extra turnout from the Sanders/Clinton matchup brought out enough democratic voters to flip a state senate seat from red to blue on a special election. That is precisely the kind of thing that a Sanders campaign is good for. Here is hoping he stays in the race through California so we don't end up getting stuck with a bunch of republican vs republican races thanks to California's stupid top two primary system.

He will. He's already spinning his loss as "earlier, we were down by 50 points, but we came along and picked up more delegates than in many previous races" as opposed to "the gap between the delegates I have and the delegates I need just widened". So, it looks like he's in this for the long haul. If NY didn't knock him out, he'll be in this until CA.

This effect of lots of blue voters going and also voting on something else reminds me of the general election and the prospect of a 3rd party run. Over the last six months, a bunch of friends and relatives of mine said they hoped Trump would run 3rd party because it would hand the election to the Democrats. While I agree that's true, it seems that they already have an edge (at least over Trump, and I thought Cruz as well). If Trump runs 3rd party, I could see a lot more voters going and pulling the red lever for various congressional seats. The last I'd heard, it looked like the Senate was going to flip blue come 2016 (for the same reason it flipped red in 2014), but with a 3rd party run, I don't know if that would happen.

Side note: I've heard numerous times that even if Sanders doesn't win the primary, if he enters the convention with "enough delegates", he still has some say in what goes on the party platform. How does this work? Is there some set magic number?

ETortoise · Post by **ETortoise** » Wed Apr 20, 2016 1:10 pm

DSMatticus wrote:Bill De Blasio... wildly unrepresentative of New York democrats as a whole.

From what I remember, Bill De Blasio ran (and was received by the voting population) as the most liberal of the major candidates. Christine Quinn was the early favorite but her endorsement from Bloomberg associated her with his unfavorable policies. I honestly don't remember much about Thompson, even though he ended up getting the second most votes. Other democratic candidates included Anthony Weiner and John Liu, who both had scandals in their recent history.

The major issues in the election were Stop and Frisk and income inequality and De Blasio ran on the liberal side of both of them.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Wed Apr 20, 2016 8:01 pm

In a just world, having Art Laffer on your campaign staff would be a knock-out: http://www.salon.com/2016/04/18/ted_cru ... l_laugher/

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Apr 20, 2016 8:05 pm

In both the Democratic and Republican conventions, the party platform is hammered out by the delegates and then the whole ponderous document is voted on. Unlike the declarations for presidential nominee, delegate votes on platform line items aren't pledged before hand. So the pet issues of individual delegates are simply the pet issues of whatever people happen to show up.

Obviously there is usually going to be some sort of ideological sorting - you can probably bet that people who signed up to be delegates for Cruz are going to be sympathetic to Cruz's message. But they won't necessarily be sympathetic to ALL of his message. Did they sign up to be Cruz delegates because they really like Ted Cruz's stance on punishing rape victims and spanking little girls? Or do they really like how he got the government to pay all its bills late as an ineffectual protest against poor people getting health insurance? Someone could be a delegate for Cruz because they are a fanatic on one of those issues even though they are soft on the other, and the horse trading they'd be willing to do would be totally different. It's also totally possible to be a faithless delegate - someone who signed up to be a delegate for one candidate even though they have no intention of supporting that candidate's platform and just were willing to pretend to support a candidate to get onto the convention floor.

Anyway, Hillary is to the left of 70 percent of the party, which means that there is less daylight between Clinton and Sanders than there is between Clinton and the entire right flank of the Democratic establishment. This means that I am actually not certain that the average Sanders delegate is less likely to support actual Hillary platform proposals than an average Clinton delegate is.

Yes, many Bernie delegates are going to demand single payer or nothing (the US will not implement single payer, because it is halfway into getting universal health care with a Bismarkian system, which also works). But I suspect the number of bluedog delegates who signed up for Hillary might be a larger problem. It is a very plausible scenario that Hillary Clinton's key platform demands have a higher rate of support among the delegates that signed up to support Bernie Sanders than among the delegates that came to support her

Post by **fbmf** » Wed Apr 20, 2016 10:35 pm

the US will not implement single payer, because it is halfway into getting universal health care with a Bismarkian system, which also works

Explain, please.

Game On,
fbmf

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Apr 20, 2016 11:08 pm

fbmf wrote:
the US will not implement single payer, because it is halfway into getting universal health care with a Bismarkian system, which also works
Explain, please.

Game On,
fbmf

Health care is very much unlike the computer industry or the car industry. Few people plan to be health care consumers. And the consumers don't have much ability to get information about the products and services they are consuming from anyone but the provider. Very roughly you don't know when you're going to be sick and you are not a doctor so the perfect information model of rational markets is 100% wrong for healthcare.

But it's worse than that. Medicine is a necessity but the consumers are sick and injured people - the cohort of the populace who are not working and have no income. So traditional pay to play contracts of capitalist societies simply fail, over and above the basic immorality of bankrupting cancer patients it is wholly ineffective.

The fundamental structure of paying for healthcare must therefore be to transfer wealth from the working healthy population to the sick and infirm. It has to be like that or it won't work. And while you pay for sick old people to get care while you are young and working, ideally you'll be old and sick yourself one day. It's not a pyramid scheme, it's rolling liabilities.

Anyway, there are three basic systems of providing universal health care. The simplest is national health system. The government collects taxes and uses those taxes to run hospitals and clinics. The next simplest is single payer. That is where the government is an insurance company that pays all the medical bills and your taxes include your insurance premiums. And the most complicated is Bismarkian, where everyone is required to get a policy from an insurance company, and the government subsidizes the policies of those who can't afford them and regulates the insurance companies.y

That last system sounds like Obamacare because it is. But it's also Germany, Holland, and Czechia. It's named after the creator of the first universal health care system - German Emperor Otto von Bismark. It is more complex and expensive than the other two systems, but it is what America gets because two hundred million Americans get health insurance through their employer and asking them to all simultaneously renegotiate their contracts is a non starter. Also because their are private hospitals all over the country and asking congress to find the trillions of dollars to buy them all out and nationalize them all is not gonna happen.

-Username17