What is today’s disease?
I failed history and literature. Not that I don’t understand, too lazy to read 
Is why I choose to do engineering… no need to read textbooks, just remember a few concepts taught, practice a few problems, A+ plenty of time to go disco and mess around
Indivisble by zero. No data so can’t do.
I just saw this article this morning. I think Brooks summarized it pretty well.
Ten years ago, I would have been aghast at this leftward shift. But like everybody else, I’ve seen inequality widen, the social fabric decay, the racial wealth gap increase. Americans are rightly convinced that the country is broken and fear it is in decline. Like a lot of people, I’ve moved left on what I think of the role of government and income redistribution issues. We surely need to invest a lot more in infrastructure and children.
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Noah Smith on the “Presidential Time” theory of political science and whether Biden is the Reagan of the Left:
Lol, let’s celebrate the complete removal of fiscal constraints and bottomless spending. I’m not sure how anyone thinks that will end well. Let’s just do everything we think is a good idea and not worry about the cost or effectiveness. I can’t wait for the reaction when none of this is effective on addressing the issues. Of course, the answer will be we didn’t spend enough, and we need to double down and spend even more.
If China wasn’t already set to blow past the US before, it will be now. Americans will think they never have to do anything. They can just kick back and demand more and more free stuff from the government. There are no more fiscal restraints, so just print the money so everyone gets more for free.
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Instead of bottomless tax cuts we can make badly needed investments in our children and infrastructure. We are going back to the American golden age of the 40s and 50s. I expect this wave to last at least 30 years. Maybe in our 80s the pendulum will swing back, like it always will.
Point to the tax cuts that actually caused lower tax revenue. The cost of tax cuts gets repeated so often it’s hilarious. It’s as bad as rising interest rates cause home prices to decrease. Just because tons of people repeat something over and over doesn’t make it true.
The infrastructure thing is a joke. Projects cost 3-6x more than original estimates, so we never get as much as promised. Just look at the bay bridge with an original budget of $1B and final cost over $6B. We literally can’t afford infrastructure with that sort of gross budget mismanagement. Your solution is to give even more money to people who horribly mismanagement it. I think we can all safely predict it’ll end in failure.
If you pretend inflation doesn’t exists, then sure. Instead of nominal dollars, look at the middle column where they anchor to 2012 dollars.
Government tax receipt is about 16% of GDP. Historically we can easily do 17 or 18% with breaking a sweat. Nobody is getting “crushed”.
Wow. So your 1% is going to pay for a spending increase that’s 5-10x that much?
I’m still waiting for someone to explain why America thinks it can have Scandinavian style social programs with only the 1% paying for them. The middle class in those countries pay effective income tax rates that are 8x what Americans pay. Plus, their VAT is higher than our sales tax. Maybe someone can point to the country with those benefits that funds it by taxing the 1%.
Then there’s the issue of ignorance about the actual programs considering those countries have school vouchers and tons of students attend private schools. Yet, the same people saying we should copy those programs are against school vouchers.
Might as well promise everyone a flying unicorn too. It’s an equally realistic promise.
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Yeah there are 11 million illegal immigrants in the US
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/31/politics/migrants-us-southern-border/index.html
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Once these success stories travel back home, 2 million is just the beginning.
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Next step will be creating a path to citizenship and creating more democrat voters.
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The ultimate outcome is you would be booted out of USA because those voters don’t like conservatives like you, since they will eventually be the overwhelming majority, they can pass any laws vs conservatives.
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It’s all relative. You might think you are not a conservative, but who knows. Whatever the overwhelming majority does not like will get booted.
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- These millions will boot out the low skilled legal workers in the market OR/AND reduce the low paid workers ability to negotiate for higher pay for the low skilled.
- Each of these illegal worker brings with them 2-3 dependents who are supported by US tax payers directly or indirectly(school, healthcare etc)
- Bernie and AOC and their ilk will cry hoarse that low salary is due to lack of minimum wage, totally ignoring the supply side of the equation.
- Those US citizens who were booted out jobs will demand jobs.
- Democrats will increase taxes in response to support them. Both in terms of government spending to create meaningless jobs(dig a ditch and fill the ditch kind of jobs with no returns) and government support in terms of food stamps and unemployment.
- Democrats will increase minimum wage(in effect reducing low skilled jobs available & replacing them with automation). AI will further decrease low skilled jobs.
- These low skilled people(majority/90% of them) their progenies will require at least 2 generations to compete effectively in the market, hence more taxes required for supporting them since they are legal now.
- Even if life is bad in USA it’s much better than their home countries and they continue coming because they know of these policies + birthright citizenship.
- MSM will refuse to highlight these.
- Rinse and repeat.
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Even In a pandemic with high unemployment and forbearance of mortgages, Democrats encourage open borders for their own political benefit totally kicking to the curb the low skilled and lowly paid voters who vote for the Democratic Party.
This direction honestly terrifies me. It’s literally mob rule with the government as the enforcement bully.
It’s the complete opposite of everything this country has been about. It was about an opportunity to work for things not an entitlement to free things. Some how we’re being told this is progress.
We don’t even have freedom of thought or expression anymore, since people get fired for saying anything that’s not approved by the PC police. If that’s does scream authoritarian dictatorship, I’m not sure what does. The scariest part is the mob is always changing the definition of what’s acceptable. The mob also clings to info that’s later proven wrong.
There will either being a huge backlash against it, or we’ll end up too far down the slope to recover. This is the pivotal time in America’s history in term of remaining the world’s dominant economic power. You can’t stay on top when you tell half your population they don’t need to work or produce output.
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Let’s face it low skilled manufacturing will be done in East Asia or South Asia and maybe Africa and won’t come to USA. IMO, most of these people’s next generation/s will not be ready to do high skilled jobs for an advanced level economy like USA. Hence they will have to do relatively lower paid jobs. Hence their frustration will boil over in 15-20 years. The governments in order to “cool down” such new frustrations from these new voting public will have to support them in order to get reelected.
That’s been happening for 20 years. Real household income was flat for decades until Trump’s tax cuts and policies. That’s why tying Hillary to Bill and NAFTA was so successful in the rust belt.
We also had the first time in decades that the bottom 25% of earners had the largest wage increases. Now the left wants to reverse all of that in the name of progress? I call BS. They realize a self-sufficient population has no use for their ideology.
The entire agenda is about destroying capitalism and increasing government control. Of course, no one would vote for that. They have to convince us it’s being done to protect us. That’s why we have climate risk. The author of the green deal admitted it isn’t about the environment but destroying capitalism. They just need something people will vote for to do it, so they need people to fear climate risk.
Of course, no one here will deny that it’s about destroying capitalism. Most posters think we urgently need to address climate risk. They’ve bought into the fear, and destroying capitalism is an accepted casualty. I’d think long and hard about destroying the economic system behind the biggest economic power for over 100 years running. The idea of replacing it with a system known for government abuse and widespread poverty is insane. Now if someone claims we’d be copying Sweden and not Venezuela, then I’d suggest they do some actual research on Sweden. The left loves to site them, but the policies proposed are completely different.
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They want dependents on the govt.
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