Trump is so going to win.

'

The MIC (military industrial complex) doesn't exist in the real world

 

Another nail: 58% call Bribed Joe's presidency a ‘failure.’

'Can the polls get worse for President Joe Biden? Yes.'

'Rasmussen Reports simply asked if Biden’s presidency so far has been a success or failure, a base test for his reelection. Some 58% said that Biden has failed. Another 18% called it “mostly unsuccessful.”'

Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

'By comparison, voters, in general, approved of Trump. 56% called Trump’s presidency a success.'

 

Lol.

 

Increasing the minimum wage is one way of increasing the workers' share of income. I think a negative income tax is preferable.

The system is at fault. Students are better educated than their predecessors, and society is overall better educated than it was fifty years ago.Technological advances are tipping the market balance in favor of capital.

It should be adjusted by taxing those with higher incomes, particularly those benefitting by increasing asset values.

You're blaming better educated and at least as motivated victims. I can hardly begin to tell you how wrong you are in your judgment. I taught high school students and adults over several decades--economics, how to create and operate a business, accounting, computer science. Lots of folks don't enjoy learning this stuff. These are some of the subjects you typically have to study and perhaps even master to be successful in business. Students today are just as willing to postpone gratification as they ever were. The narrative that says there are a lot more lazy people is flat wrong.

The problem is people can't keep up with machines.

The Constitution doesn't address this issue.

FDR promoted union activity and this greatly increased the return to workers and thereby reduced the need for government programs, the exact opposite of your conclusion.

 

You're victim blaming. Russia is the aggressor.

You're a neo-isolationist.

I first ran across the "concept" when I working against the Vietnam War. Not opposing all war, I morphed into "the enemy" with these folks who also opposed our involvement in Vietnam.

 

I saw a New York Times article today which seems to suggest that the Democracies of the Western world are not taking their responsibilities seriously and are not reacting to threats in the world.

As Putin Threatens, Despair and Hedging in Europe

 

A negative income tax is nothing but a government 'subsidy'... in other words, welfare!

We disagree... students in American public schools are scarcely educated at all. Today's public schools are little more than barely-governable daycare centers. You say you were a teacher... did your students write, speak, and reason like half-witted morons who couldn't even do 4th-grade arithmetic in their heads? Maybe you were just lucky....

Instead of taxing people on unrealized gains (which is where I think you're headed with that), it would be much more fair to adopt an entirely new U. S. Tax Code -- without any loopholes, 'shelters', deductions, exemptions, exclusions, 'carried interest', etc.

If students today are smarter, better educated, and more 'gifted' than ever before, why are so many of them living at home with Mommy and Daddy, unable to do much of anything but learn to perfect the art of becoming hopeless parasites...?

You could say essentially that the same disadvantages should have ruined the ambitions of younger people, like Zuckerberg, Musk, Chesky, Snyder, Blecharczyk, and a host of others. Instead, they used 'machines' and their systems to make themselves rich!

No, you're right. The Constitution did not provide for creation of national handout-welfare systems. So, why the hell do we have them?

FDR championed the concept of government interference with the healthy functioning of our capitalist, free-market systems. You mentioned the fact that the Constitution did not mention welfare systems -- and it didn't provide for government to meddle with free-market enterprise, either!

Worse, FDR was the earliest architect of the whole quid-pro-quo concept of "vote for me and I'll give you free-stuff" that Democrats have used for 90 years to get and keep power. But, never forget the warning of one of our greatest Founding Fathers:

 

You know nothing. Russia warned for decades not to expand NATO. You know nothing of the 14,000 killed in the Donbas by Ukraine. You know nothing of the peace agreements agreed to in the Minsk Accords. You know nothing of the US coup in 2014. You know nothing of Ukraine’s massive military buildup prior to Russia’s invasion.

You only know western state propaganda.

 

It is what it is.

Your words suggest you may be thinking we should eliminate or greatly reduce government programs (subsidies) to individuals. Changing the nature of these programs provides many advantages as is the case with a negative income tax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax#:~:text=In%20economics%2C%20a%20negative%20income,blue%20arrows%20in%20the%20diagram.

Ending current supports could spark tremendous unrest and would almost certainly be the undoing of most elected officials behind the cuts. You would sweep away the 40% of Medicaid going to support home services, care home and skilled nursing for indigents? Obamacare subsidies? What would you cut? SNAP? Public education?

An exaggeration true of some communities, but entirely wrong about some American schools. One of the better K-12 school systems actually border Los Angeles City Schools. This is the community.

Palos Verdes Peninsula

This is the median home price in the Peninsula cities: Palos Verdes Estates, $3.13M; Rancho Palos Verdes, $1.6M; Rolling Hills Estates, $1.8M; and Rolling Hills, $4.5M.

As you might guess, the people who live in the area can afford private schools.

The school district.

Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District

Having taught school, I'm not sure we've got the model right, but we're headed in a better direction.

My students, high school and adult, were a mix of working class to high-income.

I'm a university-trained economist. I don't "do" unrealized capital gains.

Because rents and home prices have increased way faster than inflation.

Because charity wasn't enough in 1930-33 to keep people from starving.

It doesn't address welfare or government spending.

 

So what? They have no right to tell Eastern Europeans they have to live under Russian threat.

You're gaslighting the forum. Putin is a thug and war criminal.

 

Well, Bribed Joe is certainly on pace to lose, that's for sure.

'After previously refusing to meet with Speaker Johnson, the drooling vegetable Biden now says he is "happy" to meet with him to discuss the border and Ukraine aid.'

I think the vegetable mostly wants to discuss Ukraine aid.

Bribing Joe Biden was the best money Ukraine ever spent.

'President Biden pivoted on Monday, saying he would be "happy to meet" with House Speaker Mike Johnson -- after White House staff rejected the Louisiana Republican's recent requests to discuss pending Ukraine aid and US-Mexico border policy changes.'

'"Sure, I'd be happy to meet with him if he has anything to say," the 81-year-old president told reporters on the White House lawn as he returned from a long weekend at his Rehoboth Beach, Del., vacation home.'

'Biden's willingness to meet comes after his aides repeatedly rebuffed Johnson over the past month.'

"We welcome the president's reversal and openness to meeting with Speaker Johnson about the best path forward for securing the nation. It's long overdue," said Johnson spokesman Raj Shah.

"We look forward to hearing from the White House when he'll be available for a one-on-one meeting that the Speaker has requested for weeks."

 

A very well-written post, I must say, and I agree in spirit (if not altogether in other ways) with much of what you say.

Look... I know full-well that we cannot, and at this point should not, undo all the welfare 'safety-net' constructions that Democrats put together over the last 90 years. Some of them, which prescribe EARNED benefits for those who pay into mandatory government systems all their lives, are indeed beneficial -- and at this point, people do justifiably rely on them (Social Security and MediCARE come immediately to mind).

Your chart showing the increase in the price of housing in the United States is a very important one, but for reasons I've never understood, the Federal Reserve System, our wonderous central bank that controls everything of any real importance in the economy, chooses NOT to take the price of houses into its calculus of what the rate of "inflation" is. Add that bizarre omission to hundreds of others, including food and energy, and it's easy to see that our central bank sees what it WANTS to see, and disregards the rest.... Too bad Burr didn't shoot Hamilton years earlier, because then we may never have been saddled with a damned "central bank" at all....

The public schools? They're a multi-faceted failure, to be sure, with no specific, single cause. But it's certain that the 'one isolated instance' of the Governor of Massachusetts having to call in the National Guard to control a completely out-of-control student population in a Boston suburb (Brockton) isn't as unique as one might think. There are horror stories in every large city about situations like the one in Boston, and they're only going to get worse as our whole society continues to decay and disintegrate.
Link: https://nypost.com/2024/02/19/us-ne...violent-students-sex-and-drugs-in-classrooms/

Back in the ancient day when I went to high school, anyone committing acts of violence like those in Brockton would be permanently expelled and eventually incarcerated in a 'reform school' -- and that would be the end of that! It worked then... why wouldn't that work now? Some say that punishment, per se, doesn't work... but it can, if consistently and vigorously applied.

Anyway, back on topic.... No, Trump is not going to win -- period! It's hard to imagine anything more poorly run that the entire Republican Party has been ever since the installation of Geriatric Joe as president. It's not just been a matter of 'shooting themselves in the foot' -- it's been more like having both legs hacked-off with dull machetes! And worst of all, they've done it to themselves! Now, in November, they'll lose -- because of Democrats shoveling out 'free stuff', because of their own suicidal opposition to 'abortion', and yes -- because of Donald Trump.

All that, and even yet worse is that fact that nobody in either major political party who can win this year is worth a damn -- NOBODY! So, nothing will really get any better, and nobody is happier about that than our opponents throughout the world... and there are a LOT of them!

 

We're headed in the next few decades to widespread unemployment as computer technology puts tens of millions of workers out of a job permanently. Government support programs will be more important than ever.

My preferred solutions that include a negative income tax won't work when tens of millions of jobs disappear. I don't what we'll do with the unemployed.

We need a central bank. Blame Congress, state and local governments, and our politics for rocketing rents and home prices. It's all very complex and here is a paper on the impact of monetary policy on home prices and rents.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/ifdp/files/ifdp1248.pdf

Other factors include the price of land, zoning laws, government subsidies, government land policy, and on and on.

Public education is better than it was fifty years ago, but IMO not good enough. I support school vouchers providing they're for enough money that poor parents can choose a decent private school without having to pony up money they don't have.

Discipline is a problem in schools. In the Olden Days, misbehaving kids were told to "get a job." Today, they try to keep them in school.

I don't like Old Joe or the Orange Oaf.

Trump will never quit, so I'm hoping Old Joe will quit before the DNC in August. (Yeah, I know... )

 

It is not about riots it is about attacks on democracy-- disrupt the peaceful transfer of powor and trying to unlawfully subvert an election. The only crew in modern history to have done that was Donald Trump and his co-conspirators

 

44,000 infrastructure projects across america. Chips manufacturing facility coming to new york soon due to the chips act To help relieve the fact that Taiwan has a chokehold on chips manufacturing Which means if China took over Taiwan , it would be a tremendous disadvantage to the united states. Trump and his four years with both houses under his thumb did neither.

 

I don't know if the Orange Jackass has a chance of getting elected, but why don't you actually start about something other than ginned up scandals?

How about you MAGA types tell us what you're going to do about healthcare, education, foreign policy, rounding up illegals here, street crime, the "war on drugs," and so forth.

Putin is a war criminal and I wonder why you're supporting him reaching his objectives.

 

yep, only people building noose for Pence cause he did not steal the election for Trump

dems condemned the comedian, the right should do the same

 

The Chips act is a huge step in the right direction, and this Congress needs to do more. Instead, it's overtly concerned about controlling the power of the executive branch.

 

Trump's past election and what looks to be a looming re-election is evidence that the Class Warfare of too much of the Left, is failing.

GOOD: Class War Isn’t Working Out for the Democrats. “So why are Democrats, the putative party of the people, so disconnected from their historic base? One reason may be that, for many in their increasingly well-educated pool of support, things are going swimmingly. Pollster Scott Rasmussen has done a deep dive on ‘the one percent’—urban dwellers with post-graduate degrees and incomes over $150,000. These, by a four-to-one margin, support Joe Biden and his climate policies and progressive agenda. These professionals, particularly women, are increasingly the base of the Democratic Party.”

Bubbled, Cocooned, Rich, Privileged, Disconnected, Gentry.

 

Those of us who would genuinely like to "make America great again" need to do a MUCH better job of articulating how this could be done during the reality of the 21st-century. We are not the same people we were 50 years ago -- that much I know for a fact! And there's no point in arguing about whether most of us were 'better-off' back then, because I KNOW we were... I lived it!

But, so very much has changed in just the past 25 of those 50 years, and you made a very good point in your Post #1313, saying that, "We're headed in the next few decades to widespread unemployment as computer technology puts tens of millions of workers out of a job permanently. Government support programs will be more important than ever." That much alone indicates a stark, fundamental change in reality in this country. And if this 'new reality' is mishandled, it will mean much more than the mere ruination of the lives of many millions of Americans -- it may mean that the vast majority of us will indeed become the "Proles" that Orwell described so well in his classic story, "1984".

And as bad as that could be, at least with the right policing technology, it could be 'manageable' -- except for the fact that today and in the near future we'll be dealing more and more with adversaries who are smarter, better educated, and much better organized to deal with their own futures -- and with us! And, no, not all the "Maga's", "RINO's", or the 'wokesters' in both our major political parties can stop it now. We made one too-many mistakes in our choice of leadership, starting with "W" Bush, and now there will be consequences on a scale not seen for over a hundred years....

And, yes, "Putin is a war criminal" -- but it's worse than that. He's a smart, powerful, very well-educated war criminal! Between him and Xi Jinping, I can see an 'axis' that may very well drum the U. S. out of the entire Eastern Hemisphere in the next ten years!

 

I worked as a Von's grocery clerk in 1964 for $3.05/hour. That would be $30+/hour in 2024, way more than clerks make today. A lot of workers are falling out of the middle class because our economic system is rigged against workers. I don't see any effort by either party to fix the problem. Instead of being able to support themselves, we have increasing numbers of workers dependent upon government.

Yes, if we don't figure this out, We could see things get worse.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden are prime examples of our political deterioration.