Election 2016

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Wed Sep 09, 2015 3:31 pm

Also, the reason for using "Jeb!" instead of "Jeb Bush"* is to distance himself from his last name. A lot of people don't like his brother, and others still don't like the thought of dynasties.

* The B in Jeb actually stands for Bush (Jeb are his initials for John Ellis Bush). So, saying Jeb Bush is kind of like saying ATM machine or PIN number.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Sep 10, 2015 7:35 am

What are the chances that republican voters go into the Primary voting booths and actually decide that, as entertaining as Trump is, they'd rather go with the boring guy with an actual record to look at which sort of lines up with their desires, and shows he knows, at least theoretically, how to govern, ie, Jeb!?

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Thu Sep 10, 2015 8:32 am

If republicans knew the records of the republican candidates, they wouldn't vote republican in the first place.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Sep 10, 2015 8:57 am

Well, ok, a history of cutting taxes and spending, which, as dumb as it is, is what republicans (are told to) want.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Thu Sep 10, 2015 9:00 am

ishy wrote:If republicans knew the records of the republican candidates, they wouldn't vote republican in the first place.

You say that, but for a lot of voters it's much more a tribal thing than anything else. You go to someplace in the Deep South like Alabama, and they can agree with all the politics of the Democrats and still can't bring themselves to vote Democrat. Group identity pressure is strong.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Thu Sep 10, 2015 9:38 am

Republicans vote Republican because they're Republican. That's the entire story. Policy-wise, Republican voters are just super-racist Democrats. But they aren't voting based on policy, they are voting based on brand, and the people running the brand are corrupt fraudsters who give the voters none of the things they want and spend billions of dollars convincing them that it's better this way and hey the other guys are the enemy anyway so it's not like you can vote for them.

Trump is doing so well specifically because he has managed to run a more popular platform (more racism, less tax cuts for billionaires) without being kicked out of the Republican brand. Meanwhile, the Republican party is trying to run on less racism (because demographics are fucking them) and more tax cuts for billionaires (because their entire raison d'etre is the redistribution of wealth upwards to their corporate masters), and absolutely no one is excited about any of the mainstream Republican candidates except "centrist" media fuckwads.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Fri Sep 11, 2015 7:59 pm

In the latest news, Mike Huckabee cites the Dred Scott decision and CNN reveals the top 11 draft picks for its debate next week.

In less serious news... Finding stupid things that GOP candidates do/say is so easy, whether in or out of context, that even in a media environment pretty damn saturated with centrists, you can turn on to a newspage and just see a screen full of GOP candidates saying stupid shit against two articles talking about Hillary Clinton's email non-scandal. So sometimes I deliberately tune in to the right-wing hype machine to see what they're saying, and I think it's informative:

http://observer.com/2015/09/despite-cli ... -for-2016/

Basically, even the tribal affiliates of the GOP recognize the party has serious problems, and no amount of bashing Clinton for non-problems is going to win this election.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Mon Sep 14, 2015 12:28 pm

Rick Perry "suspends" his 2016 campaign

So, who will absorb his <1% of the poll votes?

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Mon Sep 14, 2015 5:26 pm

RobbyPants wrote:So, who will absorb his <1% of the poll votes?

Ted Cruz, the other Texan in the race.

Post by **fbmf** » Tue Sep 15, 2015 12:42 am

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall ... economy/2/

Came across this seeming "debunk" of Bernie's economic policies, but I don't know enough about Economics to really make sense of it. Can someone more economically with it than me read and comment?

Game On,
fbmf

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Sep 15, 2015 1:13 am

So first, notice that it is some advocate of Sanders, not Sanders, that is being responded to.

Secondly, I'm not going to read all that, because that guys has some super shitty writing, but addressing the preamble, he claims that between 30%-70% of a corporate sales tax will have to be paid by workers having reduced wages. This statement is nonsense on about 14 levels. 1) 30% is pretty minor, and might even be acceptable even if it meant just the lowest paid workers. 2) That classification of lost pay for workers includes anyone paid a salary, such as CEOs. Of course CEOs might take a paycut. 3) I'm not worried about McDonalds shafting their workers to pay corporate income tax if at the same time we institute a $15 minimum wage. That clearly means they can't have their wages cut, because they will have to be increased. 4) Some percentage of a tax will be against sharehodlers! (Yes, obviously, that is a good thing).

EDIT: He goes on to assert that no corporations are using tax havens to claim US profits, which is of course, literally the dumbest thing ever, corporations report all their expenses (even those from outsides the US) in the US, and none of their profits. This is obviously what this is about, not taxing foreign profits.

Then he claims based on some paper he wrote that any speculation fee on certain kinds of wall street trades would signficantly shrink the economy. Such that other taxes would reduce by more than is gained. This is the kind of stupid as shit thing that conservatives are always saying without evidence. Color me unsurprised that someone who led with "it would be an atrocious travesty if Bernie Sanders was elected" thinks that all taxes shrink the economy more than they bring in without any evidence.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Tue Sep 15, 2015 1:18 am

Depends what is meant by tax breaks. Things like depreciation have to be allowed, as does the credit for foreign taxation paid on foreign profits. But if there are egregious tax breaks on offer then sure. Although I seriously doubt that there’s $113 billion to be had just by cleaning up around the edges. And do note from the above: some part of corporate income tax is paid by the average worker in the economy that levies that tax. Given the CBO’s estimates then some $30 billion to $70 billion will in fact come from working people: which is quite a lot of dimes really.

Basically, Bernie wants to end tax breaks and subsidies the government gives to Big Oil companies, which earn $TEXAS amounts of profit, especially with the opening up of federal lands for drilling, the oil rush in the Dakotas, etc. The reason gas prices are so low is in part because we're in the middle of an oil boom. The main complaint Worstall has is that this might mean that the companies pass the costs of losing those tax breaks on to consumers, so gas prices might rise (Worstall surprisingly leaves out subsidies entirely).

Whether Bernie's math would work out or not requires an accountant, but from a pure economics perspective it's tricky; for the tax cuts/subsidies to be less expensive to the American consumer than to discontinue them, the costs passed on to the consumer would have to be higher - which, granted, when you're talking about transportation needn't be too high, but you'd need a serious mathematical crank-out to figure that one.

Up to you really, I’ve no major opinion either way.

Estate taxes generally only hit people that are superfuckingrich, which is why the superfuckingrich invented trusts and museums and crap to cache their wealth away from estate taxes. It really only affects the Mitt Romneys and Paris Hiltons and Waltons and Bushes of the world, though.

This one I approve of heartily. I’m all in favour of reducing the tax rates on dividends and capital gains. For that’s what standard taxation theory does in fact say, that they should be taxed less than income from direct labour. And the problem is that currently in the US they are taxed more heavily. That Bernie Sanders doesn’t know or understand this isn’t a great reflection on either his intellectual firepower or the skills of those briefing him.

Worstall is playing a weird bit of hookey here; capital gains are taxed depending on your tax bracket. The things is that long-term capital gains are a lower effective tax rate than your regular income tax - so Bernie is right, taxing all income regardless of source the same would bring in a shitload more taxes. Worstall is trying to claim that the taxes on corporate income also applies to the dividends paid out to stockholders and shit - so Worstall is just blowing smoke out his ass.

Not all that important either way. Whatever really.

The Bush Tax Cuts for the top two percent only affects like a couple thousand people. Those are the people that have benefited the most from tax cuts.. So Worstall is correct that 98% of Americans wouldn't notice this, except that millions of dollars in taxes from the top 2% would suddenly be going into the economy. Worstall is just being disingenuous.

There’s a problem with this. Which is that Social Security isn’t simply a tax, it’s an insurance policy. Which means that if you’re going to charge people more for buying their insurance then you need also to increase their payouts from their policy. Fine with the idea that contributions should be uncapped as long as payments out are also uncapped. But that’s not something that I think he has in mind.

There's two parts of this, though I don't know that Worstall cares. The first part is that most of Social Security runs on debt that Americans owe themselves in the form of Treasury securities; it's unlikely to "run out of money" by having more people paying out than are paying in, and the only reason we're running a shellgame like taking money out of your paycheck now to pay you later is because that's the only way to do it without literally printing money and giving everyone over the age of 65 or whatever a pension.

The second part is that millionaires don't give a shit about social security. It's a tiny part of their income that goes into it, because there's a cap, and they get a tiny amount out of it when they hit retirement age. Of course, they tend to live longer than poor people, so they could end up drawing more than they pay in, which is a problem. Bernie basically wants to use uncapped Social Security as an additional tax on rich fuckers so that they help subsidize the aged poor; Worstall basically wants to (by uncapping the monthly payments) make Social Security into a de facto capital gains fund that the government can't tax.

This one is very definitely counter-productive. For two reasons. The first being that if it is true that China has deliberately undervalued the yuan then this actually benefits US consumers. They get to buy stuff from China more cheaply. So, if we insist that they raise the exchange rate of the yuan then the things that Americans buy will become more expensive: that dimes from the pockets of working Americans.

Bernie basically wants a Tobin Tax. The thing is that at very high levels of arcane economics, like international finance and currency speculation and manipulation, you can make a profit without doing any work or producing any goods.

Say you have US$100. The trading ratio for yuan is 1:10. So you make the trade and have Y1,000. Then you <do arcane economics thing> and the ratio goes to 1.01:10. You trade back your yuan for dollars, and you now have US$101 dollars.

Sounds silly to make a fuss of $1, right? But imagine that you're trading in a volume of millions of dollars. At a million bucks, a ratio flux of 1% will earn you $10k...and you've produced nothing for that money. A Tobin tax would apply to the earnings from that kind of currency fuckwizardry, and basically eliminate the profit to discourage that kind of activity because it's unproductive.

Worstall considers this "unproductive" because their are unfortunate Chinese millionaires that would be inconvenienced if they couldn't easily move their money into foreign markets, particularly not if they can't make a profit on it.

Well, yes, obviously.

Kind of easier said than done, so I'm not entire with Bernie on this one. These defense programs are "wasteful" only in that the money would be better spent on other programs, not that the money is spent. Pure research and weapons development programs at the Pentagon are actually pretty good for the economy as a whole. I would definitely shut down the F-35 if the money could go into, say, grants for education.

That’s slightly more problematic. The profits that the drug companies make pay for their research and development into the next generation of interesting drugs to cure our diseases. That’s why we even have a patent system for drugs. So, it’s not obvious that cutting the amount we pay for drugs is a no cost solution. There will be some corresponding decline in the amount the drug companies have to spend on new drugs to cure the diseases we can’t treat yet.

News flash! Drug companies are like other companies, and they do greedhead profit-driven bullshit all the time. Saying that the poor defenseless companies will have to slash their R&D if they lower prices is a bullshit argument. It's why the US has to have orphan drug programs, because otherwise companies figure the cost of researching and making a drug is too expensive to continue treating the bastards dying from whatever the drug treats.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Sep 15, 2015 6:48 am

Tim Worstall is a member of (and candidate for) the UK Independence Party and the Adam Smith Institute. That's like if he ran for congress for the Reform Party and was a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Except British.

Everything he has ever said has been stupid and wrong. And he keeps getting paid because he says things extremely rich people want to hear. The end. You might as well try to untangle the arguments of Arthur Laffer.

-Username17

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Tue Sep 15, 2015 7:39 pm

Things just got interesting in the PA Senate Race.

Up until a few months ago we were looking at a rematch between the incumbent, a neo-Santorum banksta: Pat Toomey and Joe dolphin mounted lasers" Sestak...

A few months back, blandly competant connected Democratinc staffer Katie Macginty announced her bid to make it a contested primary.

But now, Braddock Mayor John Fetterman has thrown his hat in the ring.

This guy is the Ivy Leaguer in the race

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 12:35 am

Trump's face gets quite red when he's attacked.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 2:24 am

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 12:08 pm

I forget how hawkish the GOP is, sometimes. I listened to some of Carly Fiorina's early remarks on how she'd deal with Russia. Basically, she wants to ramp up our military and everything we have stationed over in Europe to send a strong message.

All I can think of is "Yeah! Remember how we won the Cold War by kicking the Soviet Union's ass militarily and not through diplomacy?". I suppose if Obama had spent the last six years ramping up the military to threaten Putin, the GOP would be talking about how we need to find a peaceful, diplomatic way to deal with things.

Shady314 · Post by **Shady314** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 3:19 pm

That's ridiculous. They'd just say he hadn't ramped up enough or had ramped up in the wrong way.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 5:01 pm

Shady314 wrote:That's ridiculous. They'd just say he hadn't ramped up enough or had ramped up in the wrong way.

True. I sometimes forget that their complaint to austerity not working is "not enough austerity" and their complaint about deregulation not working is "not enough deregulation".

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 5:01 pm

RobbyPants wrote:I forget how hawkish the GOP is, sometimes. I listened to some of Carly Fiorina's early remarks on how she'd deal with Russia. Basically, she wants to ramp up our military and everything we have stationed over in Europe to send a strong message.

Curiously, at these moments, budgetary concerns never seem to pop up.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 7:17 pm

Polls of people just after the debate showed about half of people giving the win to Trump and a quarter giving the win to Carly Fiorina. All other candidates fight over the scraps, so they all clearly lost. Given the stark choice to declare either Trump or Fiorina the winner, the media has universally tripped over their own dicks in the rush to declare Carly Fiorina the winner of the second debate.

-Username17

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 7:35 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Given the stark choice to declare either Trump or Fiorina the winner, the media has universally tripped over their own dicks in the rush to declare Carly Fiorina the winner of the second debate.

-Username17

You sure that's universal?

After the last one any given media source either declared Trump the winner xor was ultimately owned by Rupert Murdoch.

This time I've been much too busy to watch the spin in action.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 9:24 pm

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 10:21 pm

I know that in the totally-not-representative microcosm of conservative idiocy known as my house, my mother wound up liking Trump a little less and Fiorina a little more. As I was standing in the kitchen heating up leftover dinner after getting home from my game, I was overhearing the debate and noticed that Trump basically represents "Entertaining, Charlie Sheen style, Racist Crazy" and Fiorina basically represents "Professional, Merely Conservative and Delusional Crazy."

I also could tell that the primary is really probably going to come down to those two.

If people select Handsome Boy ModelingFiorina in the primary, whats the impact of that going into the actual election?

Is that even likely? For Fiorina to win the primary over Trump, or is the primary most likely going to pump out Orange Hair PieceTrump For President?

Does the current clown car of republican candidates even actually stand a chance of one of them getting elected to president, or has the GOP shot themselves in the dick yet again?

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 10:31 pm

Fiorina is still running for Veep.