American Government Thread 2: RIP John McCain, 81

jebaited

This face gonna get a lot of use this administration.

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Shrug, just like most other policies, tax cuts can be implemented well or poorly.

Just five short years ago, our economy was floundering and unemployment hovered around 10 percent. Since then, we’ve added 245,000 people to our labor force and the unemployment rate has been slashed almost in half. That’s a whole lot of folks who are better off now than they were then. And there’s no doubt that their improved fortunes are attributable to our tax cuts.

In other words, North Carolina legislators showed the nation how to successfully implement tax cuts that grow the economy without destroying the state budget. This is a sharp contrast to everyone’s favorite tax-cut boogeyman, Kansas. There, after the passage of dramatic tax cuts in 2012, total state spending increased almost every year. Between the budget years of 2010 and 2018, Kansas lawmakers increased expenditures by almost 25 percent, from $5.3 billion to $6.6 billion. And even in the face of declining revenues, the legislature failed to rein in spending. You don’t have to be an economist to understand how this would lead to a budget crisis. It’s a shame, because the ingredients for economic success were there. The year Kansas enacted its tax cuts, more than 15,000 small businesses opened, the most the state had ever seen in such a short time. The following year, the state’s unemployment rate dropped from 5.5 percent to 4.9 percent. Over the same time period, its economic outlook jumped from 26th to eleventh in the ALEC rankings.

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That’s good, but doesn’t change my point:

Kansas decided to do all these things in the Memeist way they possibly could. At the federal level it is kind of similar. People always talk about lowering taxes but we never have an adult conversation about cutting spending and what that would legitimately look like.

I’ll definitely read that later but we just need less memes in politics. We already have libertarians. No more room for memes anymore.

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Taxes are generally already lowered to the point of inanity. Most services that are funded are funded for a reason. People have been taking an axe to the government for a long time now… thinking that there’s still substantially more water to squeeze from that rock is weird.

Chris Cillizza with a heated takedown of Trump’s approach to reality:

but then again, I don’t think or anything else reaches that 30%.

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It’s like they don’t understand math.

Do you have any real world examples of that? Because I can point to a few examples of welfare and strict gun laws having the opposite effect that was intended…

Well, I am alive because welfare enabled my mother to keep me fed as a child. So that seems nice.

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I meant, more like statistical evidence, not anecdotal. Look at the cities with the highest crime rate (Detroit, St Louis, Oakland, Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta, Baltimore, Stockton, Cleveland) what do they have in common? Hint: it starts with a D…

Correlation =/= Causation

Also, what is your measure? Just raw numbers, per capita income, by 1,000 people? I assume you are talking about violent crime.

Take your pick. How do cities with the strictest gun laws have the highest murder rate?

I liked this comment from truendymion:

Oh, you mean like rigging the primary for the nomination? *cough, cough Hillary! And gerrymander is a Rep only thing?

I mean SuperDelegates were a thing, a part of the landscape all candidates had to deal with. Much like Hillary in the end won the popular vote but got fucked by delegates. Is that part rigged?

I think everybody is glad that the superdelegates madness is going away. Then again, you kinda wish that the Republicans had had superdelegates to provide a level of … oversight. Voting for a person not a party is weird.

AcidicEnema:

there is something creepy about the Left’s conviction that they have a monopoly on truth and common decency.

I’ve known a lot of great conservatives and a lot of asshole liberals, as I’m sure we all have. I do think that a number of conservative policies tend towards being selfish, exclusionary, and/or Asshole, but that’s just a POV. I don’t know how you look at the child detention problem and think ā€œthis was a decent and good solutionā€. I don’t know how you look at a $20 trillion dollar debt, give away another $2 trillion to the rich, and think ā€œthis was a decent solutionā€.

Somebody said that it’s not that people think Republicans are themselves racist or sexist because they voted Trump… the concern is that that’s apparently not a disqualifying factor for your candidate.

I am asking you for the criteria backing your point good sir. I’d rather state a position where I know we are talking about the same thing. All of those things could make a radically different breakdown.

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Yes. Hillary had the nomination virtually clinched before anybody else announced.

That means that regardless of what the rest of registered democrats thought, Hillary was basically going to win.

Also, republican states receive the most welfare.

Let me get an AYYYYmen.

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That fact alone was God King BS.

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There’s a difference between biased and factual and biased and counterfactual. My political group used to rotate between CNN and Fox News back in the day, but then Fox kinda went off the rails. The opposite of MSNBC’s trajectory I guess. (In fairness, MSNBC was largely started by my employer in the building that I worked in so I’m generally not going to comment upon them and should not. But it was cool seeing the studio spaces as I would head to meetings.)

Still doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of the media in the US leans left. I mean, even this dumb ass comment:

Stay factual and nobody really gives a fuck about your bias. It happens.

Every major TV news outlet is basically in their pocket.

I don’t know what that means. What does that mean? Does this mean that Sinclair doesn’t exist? Do I need to link that horrifying robot video of everybody on Sinclair stations reading their statements in sync?

The current US two party system has near irreparably broken any chance at sensible political discourse in this country.

I think there’s one party that has consistently been more anti-science than the other. I’ll take the anti-GMO anti-vax point on the chin, right-wingers can enjoy taking climate change denial economic denial now drug denial on the chin.

It feels like the wave of Wokedom starts on the liberal side and slowly makes it over to the rest of the people on the conservative side. I liked Pelosi saying she’d put marijuana legalization to a vote: it certainly hasn’t caused the end times in WA or CA.

I always thought that Obama’s coming out of his first term in Congress/literally nowhere to usurp the contest away from Hillary and Edwards was some top tier underhanded skulduggery levels of fuckery, myself.

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White privilege, micro-aggressions, and systemic racism have no factual basis.

That’s partly true but the Left exaggerates.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/11/17/red-states-tax-takers-blue-states-tax-makers/

White privilege stops the moment people notice you are poor.

Real talk.

If you think otherwise, you’ve never been poor and White.

But systematic racism DOES exist. It is practically woven into the fabric of the MidWest and the South.

And systematic racism is a thing that has primarily aggressed against Blacks in this country, followed by Latinos, and Asians.

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You wanna take giving hormone blockers to pre-teens on the chin too? You can also take anti-nuclear power which would long run benefit the environment on the chin too.

Both parties are A-OK with technology so long as the NSA can use it to spy on us. So they aren’t that anti-science ultimately.

No, people really give a fuck about the bias. That’s why CNN and MSNBC don’t help anybody. Instead of doing better, they’ve attempted various degrees of Fox News but for the left. Considering I spent a substantial amount of time watching all three channels just to see how people communicated, yeah I can throw those two stations under the bus for free.

The newish right wing news options are fairly new all around. But when the Bush Jr years were nice and strong, they didn’t do a good job to try and give people a semblance of normalcy.

Cool then, lets cut the DEA. Hilariously enough though:

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U.S. has plenty of civil rights laws. How does a poor white guy benefit from affirmative action?