BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

Democrats have the overturn Citizens United vote locked up.
Democrats have the allow abortions up to the final minute for any medical reason locked up.
Democrats won the rich vote, 400,000$ and up.


Somehow for some reasons along the way they lost the confidence of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck, who represent the majority of Americans. Many of whom either voted for trump or simply did not vote at all.

I believe something close to 97 million did not vote.

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Somewhere along the line Democrats have become the party of the rich and those who feel entitled to whatever.

Trump seems to have tapped into the voters who want the government to step in and stop "creative destruction" that goes along with free and open capital markets. They want the government to protect them from fierce market forces that at times destroys jobs and companies. He is winning the votes of those who believe free trade or immigration or fill in the blank damages America rather than is the cure for many of what ails us.

 mikeh, on 2016-November-14, 21:17, said:

60% of Uber drivers are blacks(20)/hispanics(18)/asians(17)/other non-white(5).
Why do they discriminate?

 cherdano, on 2016-November-15, 10:52, said:

The result of neoliberal policies on workers was explained by Alan Greenspan in testimony to Congress:

Quote

The Clintons (both Bill and Hillary) were proponents of neoliberal policies. Where they failed was in not providing an adequate safety net for affected workers by pinning the minimum wage to productivity growth and providing for that increase by taxing a portion of the increased wealth from those productivity gains that went almost entirely to the 1%.

 jonottawa, on 2016-November-15, 11:17, said:

Your history is incorrect. The rot started with Reagan.

Edit: It has been perpetuated by both Democrats and Republicans.

 andrei, on 2016-November-15, 11:27, said:

Does that sentence have meaning? If so, what?

 andrei, on 2016-November-15, 11:27, said:

Do you have an opinion?

 hrothgar, on 2016-November-15, 06:37, said:

Sure, her conversion to Catholicism was revealed definitely after the date of this article which was 2013.

In any case, what does a person's religion or non-religion have to do with their political views? It should be a non-issue.

One of the tactics, that Kirsten documents in her book, which the illiberal left use to delegitimize liberals who question or criticize liberal doctrine is to label them "closet conservatives". Evangelical Christians tend to be conservative. So trying to label Kirsten an evangelical certainly looks like a good example of this ploy to me.


edit - Same source as your article, an article entitled "Pope Francis' Latest Convert: Kirsten Powers", 10/9/2015

 jonottawa, on 2016-November-15, 11:17, said:

Hmmm....I know it is useless to argue reality with you but it is amusing, in a sad way, to make the attempt.

The USA enjoyed enormous competitive advantages over the rest of the industrialized world by the early 20th century. It has a large, rapidly growing internal market. It has near-infinite (it seemed to those at the time) natural resources and a rapidly growing workforce, supplemented by massive immigration. Almost by definition, immigrants tend to be the ones who are more risk-friendly than the people who stay at home, and more willing to work hard. This has nothing to do with ethnicity and everything to do with being the sort of person willing to make the decision to leave home for a strange land.

WW1 increased the competitive advantage, in part by bankrupting the main European protagonists, and in part by allowing the US to stay on the sidelines, selling goods and lending money to the protagonists, with the result that by the end of the war, the main European economic powers were either defeated militarily, and about to suffer the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles, or hugely in debt to the US.

The Great Depression, altho largely a creation of mistaken fiscal policies by the US, France and the UK, impacted the entire industrial world. The US suffered greatly, but Germany, already weakened by the results of the war, suffered horrific inflation and profound political instability, with the results we all know. France and the UK, already impoverished, fell further behind.

Then WW2 occurred, and once more the US was able to sit on the sidelines and make a huge amount of money. The Depression ended with the outbreak of WW2, in part because the Allies, and in particular, the UK were forced to buy food and war materiel from the US, which used that money to expand its industrial base.

The end of WW2 saw virtually all industrial societies, other than the US, in ruins, both physically and economically. In addition, all such countries, as with WW1, suffered the loss of very large numbers of physically and mentally fit men, while the US, with a larger starting population, suffered both absolutely and relatively few casualties.

Thus it was that the 1950's saw the USA enjoying unparalleled economic success. It was absorbing an ever-increasing share of the world's resources, and dominating the economic life of many other countries. This was the era in which politicians could say, with no irony intended or understood, that what was good for General Motors was good for America.

However, as time went by, the battered economies of former foes rebounded, in large part due to American aid. Make no mistake...America didn't help rebuild Western Europe or Japan out of altruism, but out of an openly acknowledged desire to prevent the spread of Soviet influence.

The law of unintended consequences took hold. Both Germany and Japan had seen massive destruction of infrastructure. Thus, when they rebuilt, they did so with the latest technologies and equipment, giving them significant competitive advantages.

In addition, and partly as a result of communist ideology and partly due to the collapse of colonialism (which almost always created significant economic drains on the economies of the colonizers, despite the hoped-for advantages of cheap access to resources and markets for goods), many of the countries that used to roll over for American exploiters began exercising some independence. A late but important aspect of this, was the rise of OPEC in the early 1970s, when oil-producing countries decided to stop the oil companies (largely but not only American) from controlling prices.

So the rest of industrialized world began to catch up. This was a big problem in the 1980s, with Japan, but has become even more of a problem in recent years because of China.

At the same time, innovation has destroyed millions of jobs. Back in the 1970s such was predicted, but most then said that this would lead to a leisure society. What went unaddressed was how the unemployed would pay for this leisure.

We do have a leisure society....for the very wealthy and their offspring. Mitt Romney, for example, deducts from his income tax more expenses for his wife's showhorses than most people earn in a year.

An anecdote: back in the 1980s my then-firm acted for the buyers of a sawmill, that had employed more than 100 people. They shut it down for about 6 months, and then re-opened, and invited some of the lawyers to tour the renovated facility. The owner proudly told us that they could now utilize well over 90% of any given log, rather than the approximately 85% previously, and that they had doubled output and cut their employess down by 75%. This was all because they had invested in technology.

Those 70-80 high paying union jobs were lost forever.

The same thing has happened to Detroit. Take a look not at cityscapes but at assembly lines in automobile factories. Where 50 years ago one saw a long line of busy workers, earning high wages and benefits, one now sees rows of robots, with very few humans around.

The same is true in warehouses.

Even in supermarkets, we now see self-checkout stations, and of course the need for bank tellers is a fraction of what it used to be due to ATMs.

This has nothing to do with which party is in power.

Blaming the Democrats for Detroit is simply idiotic.

Blaming trade deals is only slightly less idiotic. Protectionism never works. It has been tried countless times since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and it always produces worse results than does freer trade. That is not to say that there are no costs. Obviously, free trade will destroy jobs in industries now rendered non-competitive. So the US textile industry is decimated. Ok, what about the truckers, railroad workers, importers, wholesalers and retailers of imported textiles? They now have jobs that, in large part, didn't exist. What about the hundreds of millions who now have quality products available to them at a fraction of what it used to cost?

Trump and other protectionists never look at the totality. Voters who pine for the good old days can be forgiven for their ignorance, because politicians keep them ignorant.

The failings of the politicians lies not in making free trade deals but in refusing to provide proper assistance for those who would suffer. This is largely a Republican position, since the only way to provide these protections and retraining is by government intervention. There is no profit in this for the winners of the trade deals, and the losers are by definition out of business or unprofitable.

I could go on, but I have better things to do than try to educate an intentionally ignorant ideologue.

 rmnka447, on 2016-November-15, 11:42, said:

Childish insults aside, that was a fairly good post, Mike. I was trained in business school to be a 'free trade' acolyte too, but reality intervened. I think 'protectionism never works' is a HUGE overbid. The German economy pre-WWII flourished, in part due to protectionism. The Chinese economic ascendancy was fueled in part by protectionism. But I think we'll get lost in the weeds if we start arguing about that.

What I don't get is:

If blue-collar, low-skilled jobs are vanishing, why does it make economic sense to flood the country with millions of unskilled immigrants who will vote for politicians that allow in countless more unskilled immigrants? (Or if you disagree with any of the premises of this question, please explain.)

Or do you acknowledge that immigration (of unskilled potential workers) TODAY does not make economic sense and should only be done for 'humanitarian' reasons? And should it continue (as 3rd world overpopulation marches on) until our own standard of living drops to a 3rd world level or until when? And if there is a logical stopping point, what makes you think we'll stop once we reach that point?

Or to pursue this to its logical extreme: If you could wave a wand and teleport the 50 million poorest people on earth to Canada over the next 5 years, would you do it? If someone's answer to that question is no, does that make her a racist?

Another poor 'misunderstood' Hillary supporter

NSFW!



http://www.wibc.com/...police-officers

"This is a sign of not only a demented woman, but a dangerous and sick society, one that we just simply have to fix. We should at least not allow it here in Indianapolis

This comes out of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Two Des Moines officers were [recently] killed in an ambush-style attack. And in this coffee shop is...Melyssa Jo Kelly. She's older, she's in her sixties, and she's white... . She's being disruptive, she's being rude, she's being asked to leave by the owners of the coffeehouse. She refuses to leave.

The cops come and here is this woman, this 65-year-old white woman, and she starts taunting the police. Why are you taking your life out on a cop? Two cops get murdered and your response is 'good' because somebody else is in a hospital bed? The things don't relate.

She instigated every step of the way. She wanted a physical confrontation and then she wouldn't leave. And yes, after being asked by the owners to leave, she's screaming and yelling like she's being oppressed.

If this is how people are really treating cops, we have a societal problem that is bigger than I ever thought. The good news is, I don't think this is anything in the mainstream."

Thank God someone who RESPECTS law enforcement will be our next president.

http://thehill.com/b...nton-snubbed-us

 jonottawa, on 2016-November-15, 13:03, said:

The German economy pre-WWII 'flourished' for a number of reasons, and only for a limited time. Ask anyone familiar with the economy 1919-1932, and few would claim it was flourishing.

It improved, statistically, after Hitler came to power but why?

It is a truism of the modern industrial economy that war and war preparation is 'good for business', and Hitler spent the first 7 years in power rebuilding, illegally, the German armed forces.

He also instituted a public policy of full employment (for males, excluding Jews) and did so in a manner similar to that employed in the Soviet Union....there were a lot of street cleaners working for municipalities and the state and federal governments, as I understand matters. Of course, employment in the security forces also accounted for significant job gains.

In short, I am not at all sure that it is a good idea to hold out Nazi Germany as a good example of the effectiveness of protectionism.

The Chinese economy did use protectionism, as did (and does) Japan. I think it fair to argue that protectionism can be a benefit to an economy if that economy has available to it a significant internal market, starts from a relatively low level, and is the subject of intense state promotion.

I think it fair to argue, in reply, that Japan's policies ended up hurting the country, which has been in recession or near-recession for some 25 years now. Admittedly, there are many reasons for that. It has an aging population, few resources, and faces competition from S. Korea, China, India, etc that simply didn't exist 30-40 years ago.

China is becoming less protectionist as its economy matures. I think it generally agreed amongst most economists that China's habit of undervaluing its currency ended a number of years ago, and that was one of its main protectionist methods, making imports relatively expensive.

Protectionism was tried by most industrialized countries in response to the Depression, and most economists, these days, agree that such steps made a bad situation into a catastrophic one. Again, it wasn't the only issue: a tightening of the supply of capital was a major problem, and underlies the QE embraced by the US, and others, since 2008.

As for your point about unskilled immigrants, once again you merely spout right wing talking points, aided by hyperbole.

No US politician has announced a support for admitting millions of unskilled immigrants. HRC did, in one speech, apparently say that her dream was a world with open borders. So what? That wasn't a claim that all border controls should be eliminated: it was at worst (or at best) an expression that in an ideal world, we could live without the borders, economic and political, that we now have. Idealistic and unattainable? Yes. An expression of a desire to see unrestricted immigration....not in the least, and only an ideologically driven idiot would argue otherwise.

Historically, immigrant populations tend to be law-abiding and hard-working and entrepreneurial. While Trump pointed to violent criminals, and while they exist, violent crime in the US is far more prevalent amongst native-born citizens than amongst immigrants, and even more so than amongst illegal immigrants. Once again, reality and right-wing talking points share nothing in common.

As for stealing jobs, that is at least a debatable claim. Most undocumented immigrants work at jobs that either aren't attractive to non-immigrants or that might not even exist otherwise, since the pay and conditions are so bad.

Undocumented immigrants don't get to vote. Documented immigrants don't get to vote either (some do, in some elections, but none do in Presidential elections), until they are citizens. So you have invented a non-existent bogeyman, in terms of millions of unskilled immigrants coming in and voting. Ask anyone who has tried to get or actually got a green card, and pursued citizenship, how 'easy' that process was.

As for whether it makes sense to allow immigration, it is important to define terms. Refugees may technically be a subset of immigrants, but it is an error to speak of millions of unskilled worker immigrants when what you mean is millions of unskilled refugees.

Every country limits immigration and has legitimate, and illegitimate, reasons for doing so. Racial profiling, which was routine 100 years ago, is imo illegitimate. Skill testing.....does the immigrant offer skills of use...is imo legitimate.

Refugees pose a different problem because the decision has to be influenced by morality.

Despite right wing nonsense, the US has been incredibly selfish in terms of accepting refugees from the Middle East and Africa. Canada, a tenth of the size of the US in population terms, and even smaller in terms of size of economy, has taken in more Syrian refugees than the US. And how many have committed terrorist acts? None.

Yes, there have been and will continue to be issues in Europe, but compare, say, allowing 10,000 refugees into the US with allowing 3 million into Europe, and I think one can see that the US can likely afford to be orders of magnitude more generous without risking the problems that have arisen in Europe.

Your last paragraph reveals how devoid of logic your arguments are. Canada has a population of a little over 30 million people. Nobody has suggested allowing 1 million people into the country over the next 5 years, and you raise, in argument, the idiotic notion that maybe 50 times that would come in, and that anyone opposed to that idea would be labelled racist?

We could invite 50,000,000 highly skilled, liberal thinking, wealthy Western Europeans and Americans into the country and I suspect 99.9999% of Canadians would be vehemently opposed. We couldn't fit them in, physically, or in terms of infrastructure. It would the equivalent of the US taking in 500,000,000 people.

You accuse me of childish insults but you make posts that reflect, usually, the intellectual capacity of a spoiled 8 year old, devoid of logic and reason, and full of right wing lies and distortions, and expect to be treated as an adult?

You want to debate...that's fine. But contrary to what right wing 'thinkers' appear to believe, proper debate requires a degree of intellectual honesty. Why not try some?

 andrei, on 2016-November-15, 11:27, said:

who said they do?

and don't tell me that the only racism blacks face is from whites.

what you really say is that 80% of uber drivers are not black. Explain the apparent discrimination against blacks on the basis of a non-racist explanation. While you're at it, explain the Air BnB results too.

Regarding the immigration discussion in this forum, it sounds like both sides are for immigration, immigration with some form of limits.


However the debate in the outside world seems to be should we have something close to open borders or zero borders.


Hopefully when it comes to immigration something like the following will actually happen....I hope

1) Trump one way or the other starts to build his wall, yes it is silly but bare with me.
2) hard core criminal immigrants start to be deported or going to jail in bigger numbers
3) ok ok once we at least have the perception, true or not, of tougher enforcement of the border we get down to the real work.
4) an increase in legal immigration, some pathway to citizenship. I point to Kennedy/Bush proposal as a first step.


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As an aside to the question does Canada have room for 50 million or America for 500 million, sure we do. Keep in mind some of us are going to become immigrants to Mars or wherever in the future.

As to the question are some of these blue collar or white collar jobs coming back...no...see robots....

 mike777, on 2016-November-15, 15:54, said:

Indeed. That's what my last question was meant to establish.

 jonottawa, on 2016-November-15, 16:53, said:

Hmmm. Does your Churchill quote mean that you believe that the lower the number one finds acceptable, the more disreputable one is?

btw JOn....Churchill was the son of an immigrant. I suppose some might call her an "unskilled" immigrant.

 PassedOut, on 2016-November-15, 17:03, said:

I believe that is the point.

 billw55, on 2016-November-15, 10:03, said:

I've said many times that Trump was my seventeenth choice among the Republican candidates. Did I fail to mention it in this thread?

 jonottawa, on 2016-November-15, 13:03, said:

Manufacturing jobs are in decline. That doesn't mean that blue-collar, low-skilled jobs are in decline, it's just that most of them are in the service sector. Meanwhile, from what I know basically all serious studies agree that, for example, Mexican immigration is beneficial not only for the US economy, but also for low-skilled native workers.

Your general question of "How much immigration is beneficial and workable?" is genuinely a tough one. But I do think it is clearly above the current US immigration rate (which isn't all that high anyway). Economically this is obvious to anyone who looks at this seriously. And I think the cultural problems of immigration brought up e.g. by conservative intellectuals are overstated.

My own perspective is partly formed by the fact that I grew up in a smallish town full of 1st and second immigration immigrants (maybe 40% of the population). Was that completely without problems? Well, every kind of neighbour can be a problem, and occasionally that can play out along national or ethnic lines. And of course there are cultural differences that, e.g., could make the life of some of my Turkish classmates more difficult. Just lay the "Western German society vs rural Muslim turkish society" on top of a normal teenager vs parents conflict and you get the idea.
But you can work that kind of problem out, and live with others, and in my town only a tiny minority would have thought that immigration per se had been a bad idea.

Here's what I don't understand: Why do folks think that I should identify more with rural working class whites than with Mexican immigrants?