Saw a brief clip of a Sanders rally last night, and it sure sounds to me like Team Sanders has accepted mathematical reality, even if the campaign’s most ardent supporters haven’t. Sanders talked about the establishment vs. political revolution as usual, but he didn’t attack Clinton as he had in New York. Yesterday, I received an email update from the local Sanders organization with this:
Why do we keep fighting to the 2016 Democratic National Convention?
Because we have a chance of putting Bernie’s platform as the Democratic Platform for the next 4 years.
This is the 2012 Democratic Platform that was decided at the 2012 DNC.
Help make Bernie’s platform the Democratic Platform!
We need to keep fighting for delegates who will fight for his platform at the DNC in July.
So now it’s about influencing the platform rather than winning the nomination, which was the original idea anyway. I take this as a sign that despite the bloviations of various campaign functionaries, Sanders is clear about the top mission, which is keeping the Orcs out of the White House and away from Supreme Court picks. This is a good thing.
Aimai
Fantastic! Fight on Bernie!
Iowa Old Lady
Iowa anybody-but-Trump anecdote: Mr IOL was out playing bridge yesterday with a Republican couple among those present. They said that the husband’s parents were the only Republicans they knew who liked Trump. All their other R acquaintances said they wouldn’t vote.
AnonPhenom
As long as Hillary remains a gracious winner and Bernie a good sport about losing the RWNJ are toast.
Now lets all fall in love and for the sake of civilization, this time, fall in line.
Arm The Homeless
I think this will be the beginning of the great shake-out within the Bernie camp. What you will see over the next month or so are the truly left-wing, committed activists making their peace with the DNC and Clinton. What you will also see are the ratfuckers, Jill Stein dead-enders, and the confused Paulites scurry around trying to find increasingly odd fig-leaves to rally some portion of Bernie’s crowd towards straight up chaos. The H.A. Goodman’s of the world are going to take this to the mat, because their own failed ideologies can’t exist without eager, but confused people jumping on band-wagons.
We will really get to see the person Bernie claims to be by the end of May. Will he put in the work like Clinton did in 2008 for Obama? I highly doubt it. But can he convince enough of his lucid fans to pull the lever and work towards change within the Democratic Party? More than likely. Let’s get one thing straight, all the plans that Liberals and Progressives have, all hinge on keeping an orc off SCOTUS, it’s the seed from which all other things are possible. Kill the seed, everything else is doomed, help to nurture it and we can hope for a thousand more Bernies to bloom in the future.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
But doe the platform actually have any meaning in the real world? I mean, have some fun and read the platform of the Texas Republican Party sometime – it makes Jade Helm nutters seem reasonable.
Besides, I don’t think I’d care much for the platform of the Sanders partisans, to tell the truth.
Free College is genuinely stupid as ideas go, as are pie in the sky single payer, divest and penalize wealth and burn it all down policy proposals.
srv
Hillary’s army drones on – it’s like Game of Thrones, you can cheer all you want, but you know it is going to end badly.
MattF
It’s likely that Bernie has had a sit-down with his pollsters, and they’ve laid out his situation in words of few syllables. I don’t really see very much space between H and B in terms of realizable policies
Arm The Homeless
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Yeah, platforms don’t matter, and increasingly prime-time speeches at the convention don’t matter.
When the Bernie folks talk about platforms, what they really mean is guaranteeing themselves future work within the party, and an orderly, profitable exchange of donor and volunteer lists. Because that’s what matters in the end, the GOTV mechanisms.
gf120581
If there is, as rumored, a conflict going on in the Bernie camp on how to proceed, this may be a sign Devine is prevailing over Weaver. Which is good. Devine, after all, is a long-term Democratic functionary (although given his long track record of failure, I don’t know why he keeps getting hired) and therefore is thinking about the party’s future (and thus his future). Comic Book Guy, on the other hand, is loyal to no one but Bernie and therefore is in full-blown “I’ll burn this fucking place to the ground if my guy doesn’t get it mode.”
For Bernie’s sake and if he wants this “revolution” he keeps yapping about to have any prayer of actually meaning anything, he needs to ignore Weaver and be pragmatic.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
I have been chuckling over the American Crossroads “Anybody but Trump” ads with a lackluster “you might hate Ted Cruz, but he’s the only one with some actual delegates” plea. These ads are targeted at Indiana primary voters.
Also causing me some chortles are the Kentucky and Indiana primary ads touting challengers as “OUTSIDER conservatives”, in order to distinguish them from insider conservatives who are apparently insufficiently loyal to conservatism.
I’m going to surmise that “I’m a conservative” will be about as welcome a phrase in political discussions of the 2020s about as much as “I’m a liberal” was in the middle of the 1980s.
Kay
Anyone who believed that many voters and donors were going to be dismissed by the Democratic Party as “Berniebros” is not living in the real world and all about “getting things done”. There just isn’t this high bar of “loyalty” or whatever. Showing up at a rally or making a donation or signing up on a website is more than the vast majority of people ever do:
The List is the coin of the realm and the prize list is voters who are also donors. They get their own category on canvass lists because it’s something less than 10% of people. It didn’t happen with Clinton voters in ’08 and it won’t happen with Sanders voters in ’16. There’s no loyalty test.
JMG
Sanders is not a conventional pol, but he is a veteran pol, a man with decades of experience in Congress. I’d be shocked if he didn’t play the game the strong runner-up for a nomination is supposed to play. But he also might be a prisoner of his donor list to some extent. California’s the biggest state, so I assume many of his donors live there. That creates some pressure to at least give them a chance to vote for him too.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Sanders lost on Super Tuesday because of the delegate rich South, where he was rejected overwhelmingly by the Democratic base voters. He was never going to catch up. He’s done nothing since except dismiss those voters and flail around with bullshit justifications about why he didn’t or couldn’t compete. He’s blinkered, and lashes out when called on it. Maybe he pulled Clinton to the left, but she exposed his left flank, big time, on race and the nature of the changing country, and he simply has been incapable of speaking to it. Running against Obama’s legacy was willfully stupid. If he won’t see the role race plays in income inequality, he’s really not worth paying any more attention to.
Arm The Homeless
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class:
At least we got some really good Punk music from this reaction. What would a right-wing Dead Kennedy’s look and sound like, and would they bother covering up their swastika tats?
Schlemazel Khan
I posted this because I have one kid that is still in Bernie or bust mode
gf120581
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Yeah, that’s a pretty good reason why he was always doomed to failure. You really can’t run a successful outsider campaign when (a) the party you’re running in controls the WH and (b) said president is really popular with the party’s voters.
Having surrogates who bash Obama constantly doesn’t help either. Why he didn’t kick Cornell West to the curb long ago is beyond me.
Really, Bernie’s surrogates have been nothing but trouble for him. If it’s not West, it’s his Hollywood idiots like Sarandon, Robbins, and Rosario Dawson.
Jeffro
@AnonPhenom:
Both of which, while not a lock, are quite likely to happen, so…I like my toast with jam, please.
LOL
I can’t wait to catch up with the wingers in my family (who were convinced that Bernie was going to nuke the Dems in general and HRC in particular, go third party, and/or even join up with Trump in an anti-establishment arson fest) and see what they think about this turn of events. Too bad, so sad. Looks like one party’s interested in governing, and the other is still arguing over how Kaisch’s name is to be pronounced…
Kay
@JMG:
Young voters move a lot and they all have cell phones. They’re impossible to find if you don’t know where they are, and if they vote in a primary (or are contacted by a campaign to vote in a primary) they’re easier to find. IMO, it would be crazy to not let Bernie Sanders find them. There’s no guarantee they’ll vote for Clinton, let alone “become Democrats” (whatever that means) but if Clinton doesn’t know where they are that’s almost a guarantee they won’t.
RaflW
@Schlemazel Khan:
Nader is and always has been an egotistical fuck, wrapped in an old cheap suit for effect. He happened to be right about this, and it has been really bad for the country. What a pustule. I really disliked him before 2000, I’ve hated him ever since.
And he brings disgrace on the name Ralph, which makes me hate him all the more.
jim parente
I have a really dumb question here, totally off topic. I would love to share articles from BJ but when I click fb share, a totally different article shows up. Please tell me what I’m doing wrong! I know it is my fault! I went to catholic school and I date Jewish Women!
yellowdog
If they are fighting until the convention then they are nothing better than GOP enablers. If Sanders wants a voice at the convention and influence on the platform, he cannot do it by disparaging Clinton and using right wing talking points against her up until the convention. He has to endorse Clinton at the end of the primary season and encourage his followers to fight for the Democratic Party candidates, up and down ballot.
Kay
@Schlemazel Khan:
I have one too. He doesn’t consider himself a Democrat, because he’s not. He canvassed for a Democratic mayor, so I consider him more engaged than 99.9% of people, but self-identification is up to the person.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@gf120581:
The common thread of all those surrogates – especially Cornel West – is some kind of personal acrimony against Obama, and none of whom, including the great man himself, have accomplished one millionth of the things to make people’s lives better that PBO has, in less than 8 years. Their inability to offer any unqualified respect or praise for his accomplishments and failure to acknowledge the unprecedented obstruction he faced because of his race is a tell. Resentment? Racism? Jealousy? Whatever the psychological underpinning is, it’s not a good look.
Hal
I don’t blame Sanders campaign for not throwing in the towel until they actually lose or are very close to losing. Anything can happen and all that. I just think that some of his supporters need to cut the whole fraud talk, and using super delegates to win even if Sanders is way behind.
Betty Cracker
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: From reading your comments over the years, my guess is you’re a good bit more conservative than many Democrats. Nothing wrong with that. But there’s nothing wrong with those who list a bit more to port fighting for their agenda either. It’s a big party.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@gf120581:
He didn’t kick Cornell West to the curb because he agrees with him.
Kay
@yellowdog:
Just as a practical matter, if Sanders drops out does primary participation drop dramatically? Should the risk of a fight be measured against the benefit of people updating their registrations, coming out to vote, engaging in issues, self-identifying as “liberal” ?
Hal
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: If only Obama had given west a good seat at the inauguration instead of that hotel worker.
JMG
@Kay: You are of course right. I can also see that Sanders might feel obligated to run as long as there are states that haven’t voted because of his supporters. They took him a lot farther than he ever expected, and I hope he’s grateful if nothing else. He would want to be able to shut down his campaign only after saying to his voters “we did everything we could.”
MattF
@gf120581: There are pathologies on the left as well as on the right. We’ve generally been spared the left-wing crazies because of the recent bias of the Overton window– but with an actual (mild) leftist in the picture, you get the usual combination of good news and bad news.
Iowa Old Lady
It’ll be interesting to see when Warren and Obama endorse Clinton. I can see that Obama might want to stay above the fray, though he does want his legacy protected. Warren urged Clinton to run though. She could endorse as soon as the last primary is over.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Hal:
I mean, really – this is the guy you have as your AA community outreach surrogate? Explain to me like I’m 5 years old, why Sanders chose him of all people?
The Ancient Randonneur
@jim parente: What post appears in the the little share pop-up? I see the correct post in the window. I don’t share political stuff on FB so I didn’t hit the button to send it.
Kay
@JMG:
I agree. If they want to go after Sanders or his campaign team, PUNCH UP, not down. Punch Weaver, who is making the big bucks and seems like a jerk. Don’t punch some 20 year old who made a 3 dollar donation. Going after Sanders supporters is insane. It’s political malpractice.
ThresherK
My gut instinct tells me that any decent political cartoonist gets a regular shout-out on this blog.
On the opposite side, Digby (Her Essentialness) has introduced to the work of one Ben Garrison. That ‘toon is verging into The Onion territory.
RobertDSC-Quad Intel Mac
I wonder if Sanders will pull a Chris Christie and make his speech at the convention all about himself. I would he rather not speak at all, but that’s not going to happen. I’m tired of his old shouty ass already. Get off the stage, loser.
Gin & Tonic
@jim parente: BJ hates FB. This is a good thing.
MikeBoyScout
All’s well that ends well.
Eyes on the prize
ThresherK
@MikeBoyScout: Titus Andronicus.
Downton Abbey.
(Wait, we’re not just posting Shakespeare plays and PBS miniseries?)
(I keed. Yeah, I’m keeping the big picture in view.)
RaflW
@JMG:
I don’t really see why the first of those three is true, particularly given the latter two. He strikes me as very conventional, just with a label that is mildly different. Having policies that are further left isn’t unconventional, it’s just standard left policy promulgation.
Germy
@Hal:
I have always suspected that the people on my teevee, radio and Official® news websites who tell me who I should like and who I should not like are often motivated by personal issues. Perceived slights (real or imagined). How much of politics is really personal, when it comes to the professional opinionmakers (the folks who get paid good money to jabber about what the rest of us only jabber about during brief breaks in front of the breakroom microwave)? Is it true that Christopher Hitchens’ hatred of the Clintons could be traced back to some personal “insult” that occurred early in their career (wouldn’t grant interview, etc.)?
I’m not saying it’s the ONLY motivating factor. But…
gf120581
@Iowa Old Lady: I imagine Warren stayed out of it so she can serve as an ambassador later to heal any breaches between the two camps. A wise choice, as she’s ideal for doing so.
different-church-lady
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
What else did he have to work with?
gf120581
@Germy: Oh, it’s definitely a factor, especially in the Beltway. At times DC comes off as the world’s largest high school, with all the sniping and petty feuds that go with it.
Another example is in why so few of his colleagues support Bernie, even progressives (he has only one fellow Senator and a handful of House Reps endorsing him) is because he’s apparently really hard to get along with on a personal level. Look at Barney Frank’s recent stories, or Chuck Rangel’s comment about how he knows no one who’s had a conversation with Sanders, but knows “several people who have been lectured to by Sen. Sanders.”
Germy
@ThresherK: Holy crap! I checked his cartoons in google images. “The Shrine of Gib Me Dat”??
His work can be considered a hate crime.
Stella
@Iowa Old Lady: Obama has all but officially endorsed HRC already.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@Betty Cracker:
Dunno how conservative I am:
– want to lift the cap on Social Security taxes and include passive income;
– long supported decriminalizing marijuana and emphasize treatment over prosecution of drug users;
– long advocated demilitarization of the rank and file of police forces, including a return to revolvers as sidearms;
– pro-union and wish to end legal prohibitions on sympathy or general strikes;
– pro gun registration, with two week waiting periods and mandatory reviews on purchases by those who have had mental health treatment. Also want to close private sale loopholes and restore manufacturer and seller liability;
– pro affirmative action on gender, race and ethnicity in schools, public employment, institutional and corporate hiring;
– pro COLA raises on minimum wage with much beefier OT rules to also extend to the salaried;
– greater public investment in infrastructure;
– imposition of a federal transaction tax on stock trades;
– federal prohibition on commodity speculation by those who are not end users or control no facilities to receive or warehouse the commodities;
– tailoring back privatization and restore government function to workers employed by and supervised by government;
– criminal justice reform by shortening sentences, emphasizing training and reintegration;
– restructuring the military away from the 1948 Key West accords, shrinking the Army, expanding the Navy and Marines, and taking tac air from the Air Force and giving it to the Navy and Marines;
etc., etc.
I’d say I’m solid mainstream Democrat.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@different-church-lady:
Killer Mike. LOL
Schlemazel Khan
No, he was not even close to right on the first part. We did not move left, we did not nominate a leftist in 04 or in 08 and the LIV still see both parties as about the same. The se4cond half though is sure right.
OzarkHillbilly
Before I go I want to wish the Hubble Telescope a Happy 26th birthday. What an amazing scientific acheivement. Hard to believe it has been that long and still doing cutting edge science.
MattF
@Germy: There’s a few winger cartoonists out there. I generally avoid them because blood pressure, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.
oldgold
At this point, the mountebank, Cornel West’s star is so used up, he couldn’t get an audition for Dancing With the Stars.
Germy
@MattF: They really do remind me of the Onion cartoonist who is hilariously and purposefully wrong on every issue.
I imagine the RW cartoonists have better job security, despite their complaints about the PC media keeping them down.
Germy
@oldgold: West still draws big crowds. Speaks at colleges and people line up to hear him.
At least that’s what I noticed when he came to my area. YMMV.
Schlemazel Khan
@ThresherK:
I had a vision while reading Digby on that post. When she says their constituency is dug in I got a flash of Japanese soldiers in caves, long after the defeat was obvious still clinging to the belief that this was a fight they had to win. I’m sure 80 years from now (assuming humanity makes it that far) some wingnuts will be discovered in holes in the back country & they will need Alex Jones or Glenn Beck to appear in person because they know the radio they get only tells lies about the war being over.
Matt Rogers
Despite being behind in the delegate count, Bernie sanders continues to draw the big crowds. He drew his biggest of the campaign in Brooklyn. 38,000 people showed up to hear why Hillary Clinton isn’t so great.
He continues to have some big fans in the left wing of the Democrat Party. Free healthcare? They like that. Free college? They REALLY like that. Higher taxes on those who already pay most of the taxes, and going after capital formation? Very popular.
Of course the price tag for these programs is astronomical. High spending, high taxes? It’s ruined democrat sociali st countries like Venezuela.
Math has its own reality, despite the high flying promises of Bernie.
Just something to think about.
Mike E
@MattF: Mallard Fillmore
RaflW
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: West is a youth outreach surrogate and a left wing outreach surrogate (venn diagram overlap is high there).
I watched him at our UU national convention last year. The Prius driving set love him.
Betty Cracker
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: If I’ve misclassified you, I apologize. IIRC, you’ve got some fearsome firepower at home, and you’re pretty quick to go all “get a jerb, hippie” on folks here, which is what gave me that impression.
Anyhoo, the point is, the party should have room for mainstream Dems as well as people who think tuition-free college, single-payer, etc., are worthy objectives. We better, or we’re sunk.
Shawn in Showme
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
There are a significant number of black men who are not Obama fans. They feel the Prez has done very little to address the needs of the black community and of black men in particular. They feel that Obama has showed more concern for other groups, like gays and middle class white women, than he has for his own people. Yet black men continue to be gunned down by trigger happy cops, black families are increasingly gentrified out of their own neighborhood and the prison industrial complex steals the lives of a whole generation of black men. The likes of Cornel West will always have a receptive audience under those conditions.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
It’s good that Bernie’s finally starting to dial it back a little. I haven’t received an e-mail like that yet – the latest I got was about the Verizon strike. Before that (also yesterday) it was about a local rally that was going to “continue to fight for every vote”.
Yesterday I heard a rebroadcast of a Trump rally in Delaware. It was almost comical, his rambling, repetition, demagoguery, and lack of specifics. Only he can beat “Crooked Hillary”.
Sorry about the shouting – it’s the way C-Span makes their transcript from CC:
It’s all double-think. He’s running a cult. He treats his people like he’s a leader of 5 year old children. “We’ll play outside all day and have cake and ice cream and stay up late and go to Disneyworld every weekend and NO ICKY GIRLS ALLOWED and …” :-/ Everything is easy to fix with slogans, everything will be great for us (for certain, unspoken, values of “us”) at no cost.
(Hillary had 20,000 more votes than Donnie in the Florida Primary.)
Cheers,
Scott.
scav
@OzarkHillbilly: I’ll second you with some probably very off-key harmonizing for the Happy Hubbleday. Or, probably better, a dedicated, congratulatory silence, followed by whooping.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@gf120581:
Al Giordano has said that if you happen to overhear someone ask Elizabeth Warren what she thinks of Sanders, “you’ll get an earful”. Sanders is not the person you want anywhere near your pet programs if you need a shoulder to the wheel. Not only should Hillary ignore him, I wish she could stuff him in a wood chipper live on stage at the convention.
MattF
@Mike E: And Prickly City. Daily in in the WaPo, no less.
Schlemazel Khan
@OzarkHillbilly:
The good news is that Hubble is being replaced by a new model, the Webb Telescope will have a bigger mirror, better optics and, much more importantly, be at a higher orbit (because it won’t be launched by that damned shuttle). I expect great things to follow.
different-church-lady
You know, I’d like to join the spirit of this post and give Sanders some props.
But then I read things like this…
…and I think, “Oh fuck you, dude.”
J.
Taking my about-to-turn 18-year-old daughter, who is taking AP Government and will vote for the first time this year, to hear Hillary this afternoon. She (my daughter) was a Bernie supporter. But after reading their plans and what it would take to enact them and what the probable financial result(s) would be and looking into their backgrounds she became a Hillary supporter. Is she in love with Hillary? No. Neither am I. But the more the Bernie Bros bash Hillary and her supporters (my daughter is afraid to say she supports Hillary for fear of being verbally and possibly physically attacked by her classmates — and even some of her relatives; shameful), the more we find ourselves supporting Hillary. I only hope this atmosphere of hate towards Hillary and her supporters abates before the general election.
oldgold
@Germy:
Have you read the ‘Duke and Dauphin’ chapter of Huckleberry Finn?
gf120581
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Warren is the type you want if you’re actually trying to get something done.
Sanders, on the other hand, is that guy who prefers to stand to the side and complain that you’re not doing it right.
MattF
@Schlemazel Khan: Mentioning ‘optics’ in the context of the Hubble is a bit worrisome, though. They really have to get it right the first time with the Webb telescope.
schrodinger's cat
So how is Trump’s makeover coming along? Is MSM pimping him as presidential, now?
NotMax
Stop the
worldelection, I want to get off.gf120581
@J.: I don’t like comparing Trump and Sanders, because for whatever his flaws, Sanders is a far better person than Trump could ever be, but their diehard supporters are disturbingly similar at times. Granted, Sanders supporters haven’t hurled death threats like Trump supporters have, but the harassment and rage at anyone who doesn’t supporter their Dear Leader? That’s almost interchangeable at times.
Germy
@oldgold: Many years ago. Were they the confidence men/actors?
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Shawn in Showme:
Remember what happened when he defended Henry Louis Gates who was arrested trying to break into his own house? Or said that Trayvon could have been his son? The country suffered mass hysteria and a psychological breakdown. There are really no avenues open for Obama to be a symbol of black men, and he’s not a dictator who can effect local injustices. He visited a federal prison and has pardoned more black men than any other president, and has honored black arts, literature, music, sports and theater.
schrodinger's cat
@MattF: Is that a Scots-Irish telescope?
schrodinger's cat
deleted. Double comment.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@different-church-lady:
Clearly, had the poor voted, they’d have voted for him, which is why the will of the voters should be disrespected and the nomination handed to him, as the subject of the greatest number of positive internet memes.
He’s what happens when you hand out participation medals across a half a generation of schoolchildren.
Mike J
Also keep in mind that the winner almost always helps the loser retire campaign debt, but is in no way required to.Bernie is blowing through money to bus people who can’t vote in for rallies. I think he, or at least Tad Devine, has figured out who is going to write the checks to pay off vendors.
Schlemazel Khan
@MattF:
One of my “favorite” stories from my time with NASA:
in 1993 a shuttle mission was launched to save the Hubble, it was successful.
For the cost of that one rescue mission using STS NASA could have built 3 Hubbles and launched 2 of them using Atlas boosters to a higher, better orbit. But we were stuck by Congress with that white elephant & it stunted our space program badly.
Miss Bianca
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Eww, messy. How about just wheeling him out in a Hannibal Lector-style face mask?
@oldgold: yeah, and well…you know what happened to them (wince).
schrodinger's cat
@gf120581: The finger wagging and the shouting are similar. May be they are both going deaf. That doesn’t explain the finger wagging, though.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@Schlemazel Khan:
Congress killed the supercollider, too.
gf120581
@Mike J: I’d say Devine. Bernie’s not a guy I trust on anything money-related.
Germy
Sanders/Clinton debate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROBTDSK46aU
A short clip from the Bad Lip Reading folks.
Miss Bianca
@gf120581: Yeah, they have.
Matt Rogers
Whether it’s Bernie or Hillary, neither plans to address the 800 pound gorillas in the room: our national debt, and the looming entitlements crisis.
We are rapidly reaching the stage where we “run out of other people’s money” just as Margaret Thatcher predicted.
Is a Greece type crisis next?
Just something to think about.
Mike J
@Arm The Homeless:
They would make songs attacking Jerry Brown.
ruemara
@Germy: White people. Largely white people. Cornell West is the caricature of intellectual blackness that white upper class leftists like hearing from because he says things they agree with. He’s anti establishment, focuses on economics. If there’s one thing this ridiculous campaign season has taught me its that we have those on the left who follow a hate the right folks siren song too.
I’ll reserve my applause for good Bernie Sanders if he ever appears. The man is a typical pol. He’s done nothing much legislatively, yelled a lot at.the right targets, yet taken the same type of dirty money to hang on to power. He can’t or won’t reign in his surrogates, so that doesn’t say feel the math to me. His true believers are busy filling leftist blogs with “articles” being shared like gospel about how he’s won, will win, $Hillary cheated, etc., etc., so we’ll see how that is to be undone. Considering I watch several campaign people and just about all my friends are big into Bernie, and I see what they’re saying, yeah I won’t hold my breath. As far as controlling the Dem platform, Jesus H Christ. A platform of “bold ideas” that also have zero path legally without a level of either increased unitary executive power or total dominance at Federal, state and local levels by Democratic to progressive style politicians? OK, how about nope? Nothing he says is pie in the sky, it’s just sketched with so few details and so little reality of what it would take that it couldn’t be done with a severe level of icky compromise and incremental progress. Nope. Not trusting this guy and his style with anything worth doing.
schrodinger's cat
@Matt Rogers: Concern troll is concerned. We are not going to have a Greek style crisis because we control our own monetary policy and money supply.
rikyrah
@Shawn in Showme:
And yet, if you ask those same people what BLACK program that the President could have done WITHOUT Congress, they have nothing. Outside of the President’s Executive Order on deportation, everything else that they complain about that was done for”others” was changed permanently through Congress, which is how this President prefers to do things. He does not want people at the ‘whim’ of who is President.
Baud
I hope the primary ends soon. I think there are regulars here who don’t comment as much because of the acrimony.
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: Snarling jackals have hurt fee-fees? Impossible.
Mike J
@gf120581:
Devine is one of the vendors who wants to make sure the campaign pays off vendors.
rikyrah
@Shawn in Showme:
And they don’t like to be reminded that when it comes to the Justice Department, Eric Holder basically had to rebuild it from scratch.
Matt McIrvin
@RaflW: It’s kind of like the way that the German Communists said “after Hitler, us”… and if you lived in the eastern part of Germany, that prediction was actually correct! It’s just that it took a world war, millions of people murdered in death camps and the whole country being bombed into rubble, invaded and divided among its enemies…
Kathleen
@Germy: I think some of that (for some people) is also “how do I most effectively brand myself in order to cash in on TV appearances, books and consulting gigs”.
Schlemazel Khan
@Matt Rogers:
I am so tired of this argument, I’d almost rather argue that the Civil War was not about slavery and I have no intention of even trying because if you believe that your understanding of economics is so limited that there would be no foundation to build from. Anyone else feel like banging their head against the wall for this guy?
or were you being sarcastic? In which case I am sorry.
gf120581
@rikyrah: It’s bad enough that a good chunk of Sanders supporters seem to have no idea how legislation is accomplished (Sanders will take care of everything by…magic, I suppose), but Sanders, despite decades in DC, seems to be equally clueless. His stock answer to how he’d expect to get his goals through a Congress that is either partially or wholly GOP controlled is “revolution” or something like “bring a million people outside Mitch McConnell’s office and show him and he’ll be cowed into supporting me.”
Yeah, unless those million people (a) vote and (b) are from KY, Mitch isn’t going to give a fuck.
Mike J
Leicester score!
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat: We’re softies. The jackels thing is just a sign to scare off the riff raff.
different-church-lady
@ruemara:
Amen. I laid down my marker on that months ago.
hamletta
@Matt Rogers: I think you should pursue another avenue of employment. You’re a really lousy troll.
Germy
@Kathleen: I hadn’t thought of that but it’s true. Even the ones who pretend to be middle of the road are still pushing their own brand.
D58826
Crooksandliars has a link on my twitter feed about the missing 125 voters in Brooklyn. It seems Bernie was right they were removed from the rolls illegally. Only it wasn’t Hillary supporters but a GOP BOE clerk who did the deed. The article said that she skipped a step in updating changes of address/deaths. Whither it was done intentionally or not, the article doesn’t say. The cynics suspect it was intentional. Her little contribution to GOP voter suppression. The expectation is she will be fired.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@rikyrah:
It seems to me after looking back through this primary cycle, the people who are the biggest supporters of Hillary are the people who understand how anything, especially government, works. Trump, Sanders, Paul, Cruz supporters all seem to have some weird, fantastical idea of what a president’s power actually are, including Green Lantern power. It’s like everyone missed that day in 4th grade, and every day in civics since.
MattF
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Speaking of the SSC… An old friend of mine was a high-level staffer in the 90’s Congresses, and years later we talked about the failure of the SSC. She told me that one of the counts against it was that high-energy physics was never really a concrete priority. I countered that by noting that no one should have claimed that high-energy physics would be the only benefit from the project– the SSC would have seduced-and-educated a generation of scientists and engineers who would then move on to other areas. But, she told me, the advocates of the project never made that argument– which is just astonishing.
MattF
@Matt Rogers: No it isn’t.
Kathleen
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Also, too, his mentoring program.
different-church-lady
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: It was GW Bush. They all watched him do whatever the fuck he wanted, and thought “Oh, that’s how the presidency works”
Chyron HR
@Matt Rogers:
Bingo.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@MattF:
Tunnel vision among the advocates.
If it was up to me, every big science project would include advocacy pieces from one 15 year old kid, one young parent, one middle aged parent, one empty nester and one retiree who would explain why the notion of this project excites them, even though they have no involvement in science beyond general knowledge.
Kathleen
@rikyrah: Excellent points from both comments.
Mike J
@D58826: Hillary won Brooklyn. If the missing voters were counted, it almost certainly would have just run up her total.There’s no reason to believe that the missing voters wouldn’t have voted the same way everybody else in their neighborhoods did.
Germy
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Do they still teach civics?
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Matt Rogers:
Nope. There is no debt nor entitlement crisis. The national debt is what created the strength of the national economy. See PK’s recent blog on Hamilton. We need to increase “entitlements” like Social Security and Medicare. See Atrios’s comments on this.
Nope. There’s too much money sitting in safe unproductive “investments” and too little demand for real economic activity – that’s why interest rates and inflation are so low.
Nope. The US controls its own currency. Greece doesn’t.
Not really. These things have been addressed many, many times over the last 5 years or more. The truth is out there.
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
scav
@hamletta: That’s the problem with the new digital economy. All the speed bump positions have been outsourced and that leaves a lot of people wondering around off the streets.
Kathleen
@Germy: Yup. Lots of competition in pundit land. If I had no scruples whatsoever it would be worth pursuing. Really. Think about it. All you have to do is develop your persona, show up, and spout crap. That’s it. Perfect grift.
satby
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Great platform. We should have you run for something. With Baud.
HRA
As a long time reader and sometimes comment here, there is one thing I would like to see happen during this election race. It is to stop the disgusting comments against what you perceive to be your enemy in this primary. You go over the edge in publicly wanting murder to be committed.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Germy:
Only if you teach yourself by paying attention to you know, politics.
Roger Moore
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Slim pickings. African Americans favored Clinton by a huge margin, and establishment African Americans even more so. There just aren’t many recognizable names among African Americans who were willing to work with Sanders, so he had to go with what he could get.
D58826
@Mike J: Oh, I know. That’s what makes the fraud/voter suppression/ disenfranchisement charge even more absurd. I just think it’s ‘funny’ that a GOPer was at fault.
J R in WV
@RaflW:
And more recent research has showed that the Corvair, an advanced design car which was killed by Nader’s attack on it’s driving safety, which was what first gave Ralph Nader some publicity, was actually as safe as any other sports car of the day, and safer than many. So GM’s advanced design of the period was killed for no gain in safety at all. Just to build up an environmental/safety advocate’s reputation with hot air.
Pretty sad. The remaining Corvairs – higher end models were even turbocharged, very unusual for their era – are quite the collector’s item today.
And the peak and finale of Nader’s career was that he gave us 8 years of the Presidency of W, the Unable President. What a way to go down in history. I suspect Mr. Nader feels the burn of that reputation, and will to his last days. Which is a good thing!
gf120581
@Roger Moore: Which is also probably why he had to go with the likes of Tad Devine as a strategist, despite Devine’s long history of being associated with failed Democratic candidates. Options were slim. (Weaver was a special case; he’s been Bernie and no one else.)
Iowa Old Lady
@HRA: I used to read a blog about a TV show I liked, and one rule there was that other commenters were not the topic. The topic was the topic. I’ve thought about that often this primary season, and tried to adopt that as my MO. Sadly, that isn’t to say I don’t enjoy reading an occasional spat.
gogol's wife
@different-church-lady:
Whoa, that’s bad.
Matt Rogers
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Denying mathematical reality won’t make the problem go away. We can’t have our cake and eat it, too: the baby boomers retiring will wreck our entitlement programs if we don’t seriously restructure them. You can get much better returns from your money in mutual funds for example than you will ever get from Social Security. And it would pay for itself.
Medicare is in even worse shape. We need to bring in the competition of the private sector and introduce consumer choice to the program.
Every man, woman, and child in this country owes nearly $60,000 thanks to the national debt and this continues to grow. We can’t go on like this for ever, somebody will have to pay the piper.
Your idea of doing this by going after capital formation will only make the problem worse by ruining the financial services sector.
Just something to think about.
satby
@Iowa Old Lady: ahh, I’m Irish. We like a good brawl every once in a while.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@satby:
I could be the blunt Joe Biden his otherwise low energy campaign needs…
satby
@Matt Rogers: is this our token Republican troll for the day?
Germy
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: I was in elementary school in the 1960s. I remember civics. They showed us filmstrips (beep! advance to next picture) about our rights as citizens. Illustrations of scary-looking government types trying to force their ways into a private residence. They told us about search warrants, freedom of speech… the whole works.
There was one filmstrip in particular, I remember it to this day. I think I was in 4th grade when they showed it. A very dramatic explanation of our bill of rights, with expressionistic illustrations of our rights being violated. I think the subtext was “they do this in Russia, they can’t do it in America” I wish I could see it today just to relive the experience.
satby
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: yeah, you know how to throw a few elbows. Baud is much too nice for the likes of us.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@Matt Rogers:
You moron – go stick your arm in a trash compactor while guzzling Drano and cyanide. Your brand of conservatism is a mental order that justifies culling.
Matt McIrvin
@MattF:
I was in high-energy physics at the time, and a lot of the problem was that pretty much all scientists who were in something other than high-energy physics loathed the SSC (and, by extension, high-energy physicists). They saw it as taking a huge chunk of a limited and shrinking pie. There wasn’t really a lot of buy-in from the scientific community in general.
And, as a consequence, I have to say I was ambivalent myself. You could make that argument, but then some other scientist would say that if you took all that money and just gave it to the NSF instead, you could do a lot more to stimulate research in other areas, than you could do with the SSC. Of course, that NSF funding wasn’t going to happen either.
Mike J
@satby: I think when DougJ gets bored with blue on blue fire, he drops a few of these in.,
Schlemazel Khan
@Matt Rogers:
So you really are that stupid, how sad. There are a million places on the Internet that can easily explain why you are wrong but in order to read them you will have to pull your head out of your ass and actually learn some economics. If the methane poisoning has not done too much damage already you might actually be able to learn something useful.
Germy
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Thank you Scott. You’re better at logically explaining this issues than I am.
Someone should invent a Scott App that calmly responds to the Margaret Thatcher comments that appear everywhere.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@satby:
*cackle*
ThresherK (GPad)
@Germy: You…searched that out? As a merely rhetorical point, exactly what did you expect?
It’s sub-Ramirez territory, isn’t it?
Germy
@satby:
Baud in 2020: Let The Healing Begin. Not too early to begin the campaign.
Iowa Old Lady
@satby: I’ll hold your coat.
Germy
@ThresherK (GPad):
I merely googled his name, then switched to google images. It’s full of his cartoons. The cartoon I mentioned is on the first page with a bunch of other cartoons. I didn’t want to visit his site or any of his sponsors. He probably twitches with glee with every new click.
Matt McIrvin
I know the debt guy is a troll, but his argument is one that gets taken seriously in the national press, so it’s still worth reading this:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-04-18/america-is-nowhere-close-to-having-a-debt-crisis
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Germy:
Film strips! Wow, yes I’m sure we saw the same ones. 4th grade definitely – in Massachusetts it involved field trips to the local Revolutionary war memorials and the state house I think. Also watched all the space launches on a TV that got wheeled in from a closet somewhere. To this day, though, I’m still learning about the many things we weren’t taught – the things that appear when you flip the rocks over and peer into the memory hole. The things that mostly involve race.
MattF
@Schlemazel Khan: Note, in particular, the recent Krugman column… where Krug notes that the original advocate of national debt was… Hamilton!
gogol's wife
@Germy:
That’s the funniest thing I’ve seen since Cockney Trump.
ThresherK (GPad)
@Schlemazel Khan: Now all I can imagine is a radio service from Imperial Japan telling those scattered Japanese holdouts on those little islands that the war is still undecided, well into the ’60s, and the reality (surrender, treaty, etc) is a lie.
A spiritual ancestor of today’s right-wing media
SiubhanDuinne
@HRA:
Since you didn’t use your reply function to direct this comment to someone specific, the assumption is that you’re addressing either the front-pager (in this case, Betty Cracker) or the collective dozens of commenters on this thread. Betty certainly neither said nor implied “publicly wanting murder to be committed,” and I can’t find and don’t remember anyone else expressing a similar wish. **
If I’m misinterpreting your comment, I apologize. In any case, I agree that wishing for murder to be committed — even rhetorically — is at best unhelpful and at worst may incite actual violence.
** I forgot the wood-chipper suggestion. Maybe that is what you had in mind.
Davebo
I’m curious about Mattress Mac’s new gimmick.
Anyone living around Houston can tell you about Mattress Mac. He’s sort of an icon here. This isn’t his first “bet” promotion. This one is spend 2k or more on a mattress set and pick the party that will win the presidential election and if you’re right you get it for free. In the past he’s done this with football teams making the Super Bowl and where the price of oil will be on a certain date but this one seems to carry more liability.
Historically, he loses millions on these promotions. Last October, he forked over $4 million to customers who bought $6,300 worth of furniture during his “Leap of Faith” promotion tied to the Houston Astros’ season.
He’s wildly successful here so obviously he can afford it but it seems he loses big bucks on all of these parlay promotions yet he keeps doing it.
Germy
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
True. They did a great job with civics, but history class was a fairy tale. It wasn’t until I was well into my 20s that I learned the true story. And there’s still gaps in my knowledge that I’m trying to fill.
So many heroes in our history who were completely ignored by the textbook historians.
ThresherK (GPad)
@Germy: You’re a braver man than I. One could come up with $2 of change by pawing thru a line of portajohns at a music festival, and it would be a less disgusting endeavor.
MattF
@Davebo: Maybe he’s getting a subsidy from Big Mattress.
patroclus
@Matt Rogers: Under Democratic government, you can certainly make more money in investments than from SS. Under Republicans, like Bush, you can lose half your wealth. The ACA extended the life of Medicare by 8 years; SS is solvent for 14 or more years. The annual deficit has declined precipitously under Obama, as it usually does under Dems (albeit not Republicans). Your prescriptions sound like an amalgam of Alan Simpson and Grover Norquist, two well-known Granny-starvers.
Just something to think about.
ThresherK (GPad)
@satby: You misread. That’s not Republican territory, just SensibleCentrism(TM).
Mike J
@Davebo: Maybe he needs to get furniture out the door because he knows where the wood comes from.
Germy
@patroclus: Step 1: Slash funding for a government program.
Step 2: Point to the program and call it ineffective
Step 3: Express concern about the looming crisis in the program, which can be solved by eliminating it.
trollhattan
@Matt Rogers:
The gorilla is climate change, “Matt.”
You’re welcome.
MattF
@Mike J: You remind me… I had a woodworking shop in junior high, where the teacher was well-known for disciplining students for ‘wasting wood’. “You think wood grows on trees?”
J R in WV
@Germy:
Garrison draws pictures of unmistakable anti-semitic origin, the huge-nosed Jew stealing from everyone, pulling commenters who speak of the jewish as racists speak of the danger of the ni@@ers among us. He seems to believe as the Bundy Bunch believes, that the Federal government is only allowed to own the District of Columbia, so the ranchers should be given the publicly owned lands in the western states.
This guy is a hate monger, not a cartoonist. He has the right to propagate his hate with his drawings, but we don’t have to like his politics, which crawled out from under a rock near the Love Canal, a famous poisonous chemical dump from the 1950s and ’60s.
RaflW
@gf120581: Hectoring jerks who don’t get along with others usually make poor leaders. I’m sure there is plenty of high school cafeteria drama in D.C., but Sander’s inability to find many collaborators in the Senate, make even transactional friends among folks with similar goals, or build consensus on bills or policy are important factors in selecting a president, IMO.
trollhattan
@Chyron HR:
Aww damn, I just needed “weakened military” for the blackout.
trollhattan
@J R in WV:
We should encourage him to work up some Mohammed treatments and launch an international book tour. He clearly has things to say that need saying.
D58826
@Germy: I remember those. I don’t think we ever got to the last frame, either the light bulb burnt out or the film melted. After that it was back to practicing sharpening our quill pens.
ThresherK (GPad)
@J R in WV: Two people here have clicked on him, and I won’t be 3rd. What carp platform is given to this guy?
I mean, all anyone needs to know about Ramirez is that he’s at IBD, and that’s all I need to know about IBD.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Germy:
And so many “heroes” who were highlighted by historians who turned out to be genocidal **cough**Jackson**cough** monsters.
Baud
@satby:
Slander! Lies! How low will this primary sink?
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Matt Rogers: Does someone go bankrupt when they take out a 30 year mortgage to buy a home?
Just something to think about.
Cheers,
Scott.
Davebo
@MattF: @Mike J:
Dunno. I think maybe he figures Hillary is a lock but that since this is Houston most will pick the GOP.
More likely he’s just made so much money over the years he can afford it.
RaflW
@Matt Rogers: Ohh boy.
1. The rich ‘pay most of the taxes’ but they have the most capacity, and often pay lower marginal rates than working folks.
2. Capital formation in this economy is a joke and has been for quite a while. We’ve done decades of lower taxes to facilitate business expansion, but mostly what we get is tax-advantaged stock plays, M&A activity, and economic skim such as carried interest earnings for the already rich as well as lots of forms of rent-seeking. We need higher taxes to fund a significant infrastructure rebuild of our country. That would be the deployment of capital needed, not corporations sitting on billions and doing long-term-useless but stock-option-holder-enriching share buybacks.
I’m sick to death of this bullshit capitalist myth that raising taxes always is bad for the economy. Sometimes it is. Like when top marginal rates were 91%. That was a problem. But these days? Nope. Sorry. Wrong policy solution.
Mike J
Remember last week when the daughter of the Sandy Hook principal endorsed Hillary?
ThresherK (GPad)
@D58826: Film strip? We had to make do with oil-burning magic lanterns. And that was before they invented the emergency exit.
Felonius Monk
@Matt Rogers:
This is gratuitous bullshit akin to Palinesque word salad. I doubt you even know what this assemblage of important sounding words means, but since it was probably pulled from the pages of National Review or something similar, most discerning people know it is pure flatulence.
Baud
@Mike J: That’s so awful.
D58826
@RaflW: While I’m not suggesting we go back to 90%. the economy did pretty well in the 50’s and 60’s with that rate in effect. I would be happy to see us go back to the rates under Saint Ronulus the Unready.
this from wikipedia
schrodinger's cat
@Matt Rogers: Someone seems to have memorized their talking points well. Good job!
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@RaflW:
Hell, for that matter, if the free marketeers gave two fucks about economic activity, they’d be chomping at the bit for a tax policy that favored actual paid dividends instead of the love shown to numbers fakers by favoring capital gains on anything but the longest held items or emergency liquidations. The favoritism could be shown only those dividends which were distributed AND either spent or invested in an entity not affiliated with the dividend payer. There’d be a little gamesmanship, but you’d get enough obedient compliance to get a real economic boost as the velocity of money increased.
Baud
@D58826:
Some liberals unfortunately believe that those high marginal rates also applied to capital gains taxes. They didn’t. Capital gains during that period were taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income.
Suzanne
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Agreed. I am floored by the number of people who think that Bernie Sanders will just magically enact his agenda if he were elected. Dude hasn’t been very effective in a long career.
I even voted for the dude (HRC won my state by a lot and I was happy to show that I support democratic socialism), but I have to say that I have no doubts about her knowledge and ability to work the levers of power. I don’t love her by any stretch, but I certainly will vote for her and volunteer and give her some money for the general. Go Hillz.
? Martin
How have we missed the story that Ted Cruz’s dad was probably the guy on the grassy knoll? It’d be wrong not to speculate.
D58826
@Baud: True but we can bump cap. gains at the same time. I don’t know if its practical but what I would like to see is the lower cap. gains rates for real investments in new jobs or technology not vulture capitalism or speculation. . So the venture capitalists who bankrolled Bill Gates would see a low capital gains tax rate when they first sell their stock. On the other hand the speculator, probably using borrowed money, who bought Microsoft at 50 in 2008 after the meltdown and then sold at 100 five years later, gets no special treatment.
Mike J
@D58826: Let’s start with a 200% rate for assets held less than one second, dropping to the lowest rate after, I dunno, 30 years or so?
Baud
@D58826: I don’t know if it’s still true, but there used to be a line drawn between short and long terms capital gains. I think one year was the line.
Not sure exactly how you draw the legal line between real investors and speculators.
Michael Bersin
@gf120581:
“…At times DC comes off as the world’s largest junior high school, with all the sniping and petty feuds that go with it….”
Fixed it for you.
D58826
@Baud: As I said I don’t know if its practical but would be nice to see Wall Street get back to raising capital to grow the real economy rather than being Las Vegas east used to growing mansions in the Hamptons and trust funds in the Caymans.
? Martin
@Baud:
True, 25%. But the capital markets were incredibly different then. Instruments like mutual funds and stock options hadn’t been invented and investing was limited to a small part of society. And the world was capital poor then – incredible sums had been converted to bombs during the war and to paving roads after the war. So we had a situation where we had a surplus of labor (globally – lots of unemployed people in europe and japan) but needed cash so we taxed labor and encouraged investment.
Jump forward to today and things look completely different. We are drowning in capital. Negative interest rates from central banks means that you have people paying money just to hold onto their cash rather than invest it in something that could be productive. We have about 6 trillion dollars doing absolutely nothing – not paving roads, not building hospitals or schools, or factories or anything. And many US sectors are very efficient with capital now. You can rent surplus manufacturing capacity, surplus data capacity all very inexpensively and easily so they often bypass the credit markets altogether.
It’s hard to argue that government couldn’t find a better use for that money. No, not 90% because our economy is not the 1950s economy (the tax argument by many liberals tends to be as wrongly simplistic as the flat tax from the right), but we can look at the strengths and weaknesses of the current economy and tax it appropriately.
Bob In Portland
The system works.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Suzanne:
What has astounded me this time is that the same people who slagged Obama about not getting their ponies then, think Bernie will this time because reasons. A Bernfeeler friend my age thinks it’s because personal racism hindered Obama, and that Sanders wouldn’t be so handicapped, even though Dems had way more favorable territory in 2009 because they held Congress (for a minute and a half, but still). I spent hours online explaining why it wouldn’t work that way – but Bernfeeling is an article of faith, not reason, and that the country hasn’t been able to get nice shiny socialist things because it’s been waiting for 30-years-in-Congress Bernard Sanders to finally rise from his backbench and finger wag the nation into doing the right thing and voila! Free college and single payer will be within our reach! It’s really been something to watch the light dawn that it isn’t that simple, and that there may actually be benefits to having a party apparatus working for you when you need their delegates.
Matt McIrvin
@Davebo: He probably sees the promotions as loss leaders to keep his name in people’s minds. If, as you say, he’s wildly successful, maybe the promos are part of that.
Baud
@? Martin:
I don’t disagree. One of the systemic pressures contributing to privatization is to desire to find ever more places to park capital.
burnspbesq
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class:
The platform will be the benchmark against which the extent of Clinton’s betrayal of the One True Progressive Faith will be measured. And that betrayal will become the progressive excuse for staying home in 2018.
Doug R
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: If it works elsewhere, it’s not a dumb idea. I like starting with two year colleges and seeing how the midterms shake out.
D58826
@burnspbesq: I was glad that I was sitting down and not drinking anything when I read one article on Salon that said Obama was simply the third term of George W.
I think we might have to start talking about leftwingnuts as well as their cousins the rightwing version
? Martin
@Baud: It’s one year. Long term rate is either 15% or 20% depending on income tax bracket, and short term rate varies from 28% to 39.6%.
The fixed brackets made sense when everyone did their taxes on paper and the math was difficult. With computers, having a fully dynamic tax rate makes much more sense. Simply define a function that goes from say 90% for assets held less than a minute to 15% for those held for 20 years. You can put an additional variable on the cost basis of the asset so that small investments are taxed a bit less than large investments.
@D58826: It’s impossible to tell ‘real’ investments from vulture capitalism. What people want is some kind of tax deduction/penalty for the investor based on the % of revenue that goes to payroll tax – if their investment increases the % of payroll tax paid, their rate goes down, if it decreases it, their rate goes up. Unfortunately, those two taxations happen on opposite sides of the corporate firewall – as an investor I’m not directly responsible for payroll, and there’s no way for that number to get in my taxes. And what happens when the economy turns and capital is scarce again? Then you want people investing in infrastructure which will have no recurring payroll benefit. That’s really what befell New Orleans – labor but no capex because investors are unwilling to have their investments flood again and investors aren’t responsible for preventing the flood – government is. It’s tricky.
Gbbalto
@Davebo: Good chance that he is hedging his bets. Big furniture store here in Balto offered full refund to customers over the Superbowl weekend if either team ran the first or second half kickoff for a touchdown. Ravens did so, customers got hundreds of thousands in free furniture, but store had hedged its bet probably for a few thou because odds were so against that play. Someone lost big, just not the store.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
The nits, they must be picked!
@? Martin:
Eh? Wikipedia says the rate was 28% after 1978. Reagan cut it to 20% early on, then it was raised back to 28(33)%.
Vanguard’s 500 Index Fund started 8/31/1976.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Mike R
@burnspbesq: Best prediction of the day, well done.
Doug R
@jim parente: Just copy the url and paste it it into your Facebook ” what’s on your mind? “
? Martin
@Baud: Agreed. And that problem ultimately points to a highly inefficient return of capital to society in the past. Basically, taxes on capital were too low (starting in the 80s) and now we’re stuck trying to tax wealth. And that wealth can easily afford to evade the IRS. Invariably, we recognize the failures of the past, and try to institute the solution we should have put in place in the 80s and then wonder why it doesn’t work, because we’re solving the past economy and not the modern one. I’ve yet to hear a single politician anywhere demonstrate any insight into how the modern economy works.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@burnspbesq:
I saw that movie in 2010, and it sucked. I’m going to hate the sequel even more.
D58826
@Baud: I have a savings account they can park some of it in :-) :-)
Eric U.
@D58826: I was just thinking we should have a higher tax bracket for the highest earning individuals. It’s a little ridiculous that people like me, albeit solidly in the upper 10%, have to pay the same marginal rate as someone making my net worth every year. And the way that many tax breaks phase out seems particularly harsh on people like us. We have to have an accountant because of that, which is ridiculous. Punt that upstairs a little. It has occurred to me that republican tax policies are designed to keep everyone below the $1,000,000 a year level feeling like our tax system is too burdensome. And it’s working.
Baud
@? Martin:
Would that function take into account the income of the taxpayer? Seems to hurt crowdsource investors.
WaterGirl
@Germy: I’d like to hear the president explain it just that way in the state of the union address. Does he get one more? I think yes, but I’m too lazy to look it up.
Matt McIrvin
@MattF: …I also remember (as I think I’ve said before) having an interesting conversation about the SSC with an admiral who was, at the time, the head of the Office of Naval Research. I told him point-blank that, while I’d love for the SSC to be built, I had to admit that the actual physics it was studying had almost no chance of having any practical applications whatsoever, civilian or military. He refused to accept that; he said that the history of science offered abundant evidence that when people said that kind of thing they were often wrong, for reasons nobody could even imagine at the time. (But I still can’t imagine what such an application would be.)
That said, the technology development involved in such projects often has spin-offs. The World Wide Web was invented by a contractor at CERN, a high-energy physics lab, though it has nothing inherently to do with high-energy physics.
D58826
@WaterGirl: No he has given his last. Maybe Hillary can in Jan. 2017
HRA
@SiubhanDuinne:
I also did not specify one person for the reason of how vitriolic some people are reacting in several unseemly ways. No, I was not addressing Betty Cracker. I look for her posts to appear and I do enjoy them. Yes, that turkey one did get to me as over the top along with a remembrance of the Palin clip when she stood before one that went viral.
? Martin
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Then we shall pick those nits!
1950s capital gains rates: http://federal-tax-rates.insidegov.com/l/35/1950
And Vanguards Index 500 fund (which I own some of and which Warren Buffet has advised his heirs to invest all of their money in) was not in the 1950s and 60s as you note. In fact, it showed up when cap gains were high and falling.
The rate on cap gains started going up in 1968 and was cut from 39% to 28% in 1979 – under that neoliberal Jimmie Carter (a number of economic things that people fault here really happened under Carter).
oldgold
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Unfortunately, I am overly familiar with the tax code. Your wiki quote is incorrect/ incomplete. And, it is too complex to set out the capital gains tax rules here.
My opinion is that passive income, including capital gains needs to contribute to the FICA taxes. Obama care opened the door to this a bit. More needs to be done.
There have been proposals to place a minuscule tax on Wall Street trades. The money that could be raised is astounding.
WaterGirl
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
That was one of the things that enraged me about Susan Sarandon when she was on The Nightly Show last week. Even when the regular guys from the panel raised that issue, she sat there with a smug, arrogant, simpering look on her face to show that somehow she believed savior Bernie would somehow be able to give everyone their ponies. I really wanted to smack her. (Figuratively, of course.)
Johnny Coelacanth
@Bob In Portland: “The system works.” Unlike anybody in your family.
Uncle Cosmo
@scav: So today Hubble has to come off its parents’ health insurance, huh? :-/ And you know replacement polices ain’t cheap for health care requiring house calls 340 miles straight up…
WaterGirl
@D58826: Damn! I was thinking they were early January. Sigh. I doubt I’ll be watching any Hillary state of the union addresses, but I hope to god she’s the one giving them and not a Republican.
edit: I will have to rely on you guys here to know what she’s saying. Or maybe my dislike of her will fade over time, but at this point I can’t even listen to her speak more than a few words.
trollhattan
@Johnny Coelacanth:
Heh. Mine only works with lots of fiber, otherwise. …
Applejinx
@? Martin: Nice to see people rising to our new DougJ mirage: personally, I’m convinced this guy is intentionally baiting people into siding with Bernie’s economic program, as ambiguous as it is, by hammering on the realities and specifics that Bernie never mentions (being a decently effective populist politician who KNOWS you can’t start wonking at people).
Bernie always would’ve needed wonks to get this stuff done, and would always have made big concessions. You’re a fool if you think otherwise and you’re still fighting the primary battle if you insist on pretending he would’ve gone off and tried to implement pure air and fluff. That’s not how it works and you know it. Hillary just tends to propose the wonk version, pre-toned-down to avoid mockery. Bernie’s never given a fuck about mockery because he’s not interested in conceding stuff in advance.
I’m still waiting for the Balloon Juice post about Charles Koch endorsing Hillary ;) I wrote on twitter, he’s right: he’s greedy and evil, not stupid and blind. People so easily forget these RW demons are thinking people with some dumb assumptions: OF COURSE Hillary would be not only (arguably) the best Democrat but also the best Republican in the field.
I think some of it is, Koch would rather run against Bernie. I think he’s smart enough to see the backlash effect, but he’s also telling the simple truth. Hillary would be an unthinkably liberal Republican, completely unable to be in the party as it stands, but by the same token better than Reagan and Nixon (the one who made the EPA, remember?). She would be a jump back to when they didn’t utterly suck, which is why she’s not a Republican the way it’s calculated today.
The last I’ve heard, Bernie’s asserted he’s going to be a Democrat for life (through I think a statement by Weaver). That’s cool with me. I’d join him were I not already a registered Democrat, but this is exactly what’s needed. I see a bunch of Hilbots (particularly economically rightwing ones, which covers a lot of ground in a world where the Republicans are batshit insane) are really upset at the idea of Bernie’s platform getting traction in the party.
Good.
It’s a package deal. Because Bernie’s voters will be joining the party and composing basically half of it, you don’t get to run Third Way economics anymore (like our new troll espouses). If ANY of what he has to say seems persuasive, go do more current research, try Piketty, Mark Blyth, you name it. Too many assumptions are deeply tainted and we need serious re-adjustment, which would not happen if Hillary watched all the Bernie votes just go away and vote third party and to hell with ’em.
Sorry, the calls are coming from inside the house. We will give you a MASSIVE victory but the new Democrat is way more liberal than people are used to, especially w. economics. And that will honestly, truly, help our economy and not hurt it. Go check out some Mark Blyth. He talks very scottish and is easy on the ear for an American to listen to.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@? Martin: I guess it comes down to which time period one was addressing in D58826’s comment. I thought you and Baud were talking about Reagan.
Cheers,
Scott.
? Martin
@Baud:
Define income. Steve Jobs drew a salary of $1 as Apple CEO. He was worth billions. Mitt Romney probably has an income near zero as well. Rich people don’t usually get rich on income, and because it is taxed higher, they aggressively avoid taking income.
You really want that variable to be wealth, but that’s taboo. Using aggregate cost basis (across all investments you are taking gains on) in that formula is probably the most sensible. Small investors can’t afford to invest large sums, and taxing large investors at lower rates for small sums probably is fine. By making it an aggregate cost basis, or total income (not AGI), instead of paying that rate per investment (each investment is taxed at its own rate) the variable would apply to all – so you couldn’t take a million dollars in gains split up across 1,000 thousand dollar investments and pay a low rate on each, they would be scaled according to that million dollars (or million dollars + income).
All that said, all of these things should happen after the colossal loss of tax revenue from deductions is addressed. Limits on or elimination of the mortgage interest deduction, probably most deductions on employer provided health insurance (now that the exchanges are here), and a few others. Keep charitable giving, child credit, and all other itemized deduction and go with a reasonable standard deduction.
And I would continue to argue that rather than balance cap gains as we are discussing, that discussion should happen in the context of corporate taxes. Set corporate taxes at zero (since they are true providers of labor) and hike up cap gains even more to compensate (because our MOTUs aren’t job creators). So you shift all corporate taxation to the shareholders and you eliminate all of the discussion about offshore cash and tax policy. That would also have the effect of reducing the income inequality within the organization by blunting the benefits of stock options.
Bottom line, we want our businesses to have better cashflow and we want our investors to not have the free ride. We’re doing this backward.
Uncle Cosmo
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: You mean the Supercorrupting Stupidcollider? That’s what I heard scientists with no skin in the game were calling it at the time…
@Schlemazel Khan: Um, IIRC what “stunted our space program badly” was the gummint’s insistence that the Space Shmatte be used for both civilian & millitary purposes. DoD insisted that the Shmatte be sufficiently maneuverable upon late launch abort to avoid landing in an unfriendly country with classified hardware on board. That’s where the damn delta wing came from, among other cost overruns.
Also, KHAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!
Applejinx
@Baud: I follow crowdsourcing things as a creative/artist/writer/programmer type person, so I’ve been paying a lot of attention to how the economics of crowdsourcing actually works.
Currently it’s almost all about what you might call ‘conceptual capital’. If you’re going to re-do some treasured classic videogame, that’s a good bet. In no way is crowdsourcing a way to start up little hopeful people or companies and help them grow. It’s just popularity as applied to angel funding, with the angels being hapless individuals: sometimes it leads to unpleasant failures. Think of crowdfunding as like a sort of credit card processor, maybe.
@? Martin: I love this. No brackets, even claim it is a ‘flat tax’ or ‘single tax’ system! Just use an algorithm. Probably can’t say ‘flat’ when the whole point is how it’s not, but it should be a big PR win to claim you got rid of brackets. It’s kind of like getting off welfare vs. basic income, where your desired result is not to have gotchas waiting where if you succeed a little more they whack you in a particular way. Make it a smooth curve of diminishing returns as you get stupidly wealthy. Computers are great at this.
D58826
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I was just talking about the income tax rates. I know Jimmy was responsible for some of the early de-regulation efforts
? Martin
@oldgold:
I’m okay with this idea as well. I’m a bit more in favor of a continuous function for cap gains that strongly disincentives flash trading. The reason is that those transactions tend to not be small in size, so hitting their scale rather than frequency should work equally well, and would carry down to a host of other things.
The question is whether we need more friction on the pace of transactions or on the effects of that pace due to scale. You can’t move the market much on small transactions, so the pace is a bit less of a problem in my view. And I’m a bit wary of the transaction tax becoming an easy thing to screw with. I guess put another way, if you want a change in cap gains, why not solve both problems with one function rather than piecemealing it together and complicating things?
Uncle Cosmo
@Baud: Remember, when you cross antipathy and acrimony you get antimony. Which is, mmm, elementary….
Bob In Portland
@Johnny Coelacanth: Your classist insult is quite similar to racist insults tossed out by Trump supporters. It has been noted. I imagine you must feel superior because of your better station in life.
Your attitude is why nothing will change under Clinton. You don’t really care about poor people. Things will just get worse. Thanks, Johnny, for revealing yourself.
Applejinx
@? Martin: Maybe between the strong showing Bernie’s made, and what Trump’s doing, the idea of taxing wealth isn’t so untouchable after all.
Suppose if it was all wealth, and the times at which Trump went bankrupt he’d have paid no taxes because he blew all his money trying to do stuff that didn’t work? I think it’s fascinating how him going bankrupt is supposed to reflect poorly on him, yet him going around doing YUGE things like he always did, is clearly better for the economy and country than parking it in stocks as wealth.
We WANT people to be out doing things rather than parking wealth in safe places and leaving it. Global capital is way more ‘parked’ than it should be: the stuff that could be done if there was a business case for spending it on projects and things! It would be amazing.
The purpose needs to be ‘do things’ rather than ‘park it’, especially now that vast sums can be amassed through weird banker tricks that produce nothing. It’s ridiculous. This is why both Sanders’ and Trump’s scorn of investors resonates with people.
D58826
@Uncle Cosmo: Get the vaudeville hook for this guy>
Applejinx
@HRA: I’m used to people acting that way, it’s why I left for a while.
I do think it’ll have to stop before we can get the coalition together to completely stomp the Republicans and start putting together a Sanders-influenced Dem platform (which it already is, so no problem there) and then sticking with it. Bernie can come home to Vermont and may well remain a Democrat for life at this point, but you gotta accept his people make up half the Democrats now. It’s either kick them all out to vote third party, or respect ’em and try to work around the handwavey policy fantasies.
Think of it as signal flags meant to steer the taxiing 747 of Democratic governance. You need the signals but the airplane doesn’t literally fling itself thataway as if the flag was some tennis racquet. That’s not how that works :) And you can’t signal by moving the flag exactly as far as the plane will go, otherwise the pilot can’t read the direction.
Uncle Cosmo
@Matt Rogers: You sound like a man in dire need of a trip through a wood chipper, troll.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Uncle Cosmo: Citing the SSC to be an upgrade to FermiLab outside of Chicago would have made a lot of sense. Congress sticking it in the middle of nowhere at Witchiwacky, Texas showed that it mainly ended up being a boondoggle.
One could also argue that the superconducting magnet technology wasn’t ready for the SSC. CERN uses some superconducting magnets on the LHC, but they’ve still not reached their full potential (23 years after the SSC was cancelled.)
Cheers,
Scott.
? Martin
@Applejinx: The challenge taxing wealth is that you get this painful cycle where people need to liquidate assets in a relatively short period, which has a downward effect on markets. And that inevitably leads to the question of ‘which wealth is taxable’. Should the Koch Brothers be forced to divest some of their own company simply to cover the tax burden? Should someone be forced to sell their house for the same reason (property taxes are a wealth tax) and Prop 13 here in CA was presented here as a way to keep grandma from having to sell her house to pay her taxes. You will get a strong backlash against the idea. If you exempt certain assets, then you’ll get a shift from one asset class to another – people buying homes to shelter their wealth. And the estate tax is another wealth tax that doesn’t have a lot of support.
Ultimately you’re choosing between two approaches: tax the act of accumulating wealth (income, cap gains) to limit wealth, or tax the wealth itself (usually) to limit the transference of that wealth to others (gift tax, estate tax, etc). We live in a country where the aspiration to wealth is very strong – and we have countless government activities to encourage that. It’s a bit hypocritical to have a policy to limit wealth while state governments are out there running Powerball. We need to figure out what our core message here is.
Aimai
@Kay: they are in school, by and large. She can find them.
Eric
@Schlemazel Khan: or this: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0114787/plotsummary?ref_=m_tt_ov_pl
Marc McKenzie
I take this as a sign that despite the bloviations of various campaign functionaries, Sanders is clear about the top mission, which is keeping the Orcs out of the White House and away from Supreme Court picks. This is a good thing.
Well, at least the good Senator is clear about that. In the case of some of his supporters….no, not so much. Some are still clinging to the “Bernie or Bust!” meme, perfectly content to let Trump and the GOP bend the country over the fence and some are even bringing up the “Hillary is worse than Trump!” line.
Hillary will be gracious, just as she was to Obama in 2008. But the writing is on the wall. Bernie fought the good fight, and God bless him for it, but the math does not lie, no matter how many times one hurls insults at Hillary.
Bob In Portland
Why is Obama still pushing TTIP in Europe?
Marc McKenzie
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: The common thread of all those surrogates – especially Cornel West – is some kind of personal acrimony against Obama, and none of whom, including the great man himself, have accomplished one millionth of the things to make people’s lives better that PBO has, in less than 8 years.
Yep. And in West’s case, he’s gone full racist on Obama.
Obama got a helluva lot done despite the massive opposition he had. You would think that people would look at that and look at the man’s long list of achievements, but noooooo….
Applejinx
@? Martin:
Sounds like breaking up ‘too big to fail’ to me. I don’t think we could’ve acted against wealth before now, but the time may be right.
One thing about it, it would sure as hell pay for anything we wanted to do government-wise. Replace the state highway system with high-speed capsule-tubes or supersonic monorails from the future? Bam. Easy. People wildly misunderstand what the numbers for this actually are. Wealth is outlandishly out of balance with what people even think it is, much less what they want it to be.
We could put wealth to be what only the 1% WANT it to be (never mind what they think it is: the distribution they themselves want the world to have!) and pay for all Bernie’s wild ideas from that alone. Wealth is truly, truly bonkers now. Nobody’s really up to speed with how to deal with that.
Marc McKenzie
@Schlemazel Khan: Oh man, I remember reading that from Nader and all I could think of was, “Seriously, f*@! that guy.”
Of course, what was left unsaid then–and now, by the Bernie or Bust crowd–was the awful cost of such a move. Two wars, the worst terrorist attack in American history, the loss of American prestige around the world, f*@!ing over millions with the stem-cell research ban, Ashcroft, Gitmo, the financial screwups…and the loss of thousands of lives. All of that from 2001 to 2009.
Someone should’ve asked St. Ralph if it was worth it. Someone should ask the Bernie or Bust crowd now if they are willing to accept the cost of their flawed idea.
Major Major Major Major
@Applejinx: I don’t know if they’re half, but they’re certainly a good amount. I don’t imagine incorporating some Sanders stuff will be a problem. The Bernie folks have seemed quite sanguine since Tuesday which seems to have chilled everybody out a little bit, myself included. Bernie (mostly his supporters) get/got on my nerves, mostly because in my cohort it’s Paul/Stein types that I was hearing from most vocally, but man that is/was annoying.
I dunno. Anyway, my evil overlords at the DNC have pretty clearly indicated that there’s plenty of room for Bernistas in the party as long as they aren’t the “burn it down” dumbfucks, so I guess we’ll see if they’ll take yes for an answer. I’m talking about the new folks, not the more liberal preëxisting Dems.
D58826
A long piece over on KOS about the impact of the GOP style of government/taxes and science related to the recent floods in Houston. Looks like less government and low taxes means more floods. One more reason to make sure a democrat lives in the WH next year.
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/4/24/1518498/-Houston-We-really-can-t-do-this-every-year
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
One would think he might. But I seriously doubt it.
The righteous who never think through their cause only see the start and the end, and never, ever the middle, the sausage making. They are idea people, not manufacturing people. They know the what, never the how. They aren’t practical, they are dreamers. We need those people. They give us direction and goals, but they are very, very bad working in a position that by it’s very nature requires the how, the sweat, the work part, the details.
The idea is so grand that the details will take care of themselves. They don’t of course. And it isn’t that the people are necessarily wrong with the ideas, but ideas without execution equals nothing.
MomSense
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class:
His “policies” are so vague as to be completely useless for the purpose of incorporation into the national platform. Many, many years ago I served time on a platform committee and you don’t just add things. Committees of people have been working on the platform for a really long time.
If is is a face saving talking point for Sanders, I get it. Otherwise it is silly.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Major Major Major Major:
Oooh!
The Curse of the Diaeresis!.
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Davebo:
You answered your own question.
He’s highly successful. He’s factored in the cost of the promotions as a cost of doing business. It’s not the millions he gives away, it’s the $2-4K (or more) people are spending on bedding. For a $200 product cost to him. He wouldn’t be successful if he was giving away more money that he was raking in.
Applejinx
@Major Major Major Major: I think it’s absolutely absurd to talk about burning it down at this point. We’re not looking at some ideologue in Hillary Clinton. If anything, she is MORE responsive to the will of the electorate than Bernie could ever be: he just happens to coincide with where the electorate is now.
Fundraising wise? Half. And that includes PACs and big donors. It’s quite breathtaking, really, and it’s a major opportunity for a powerful coalition that didn’t really exist before. People coming out hard left have radically increased the amount of campaign money on tap for the Democrats. It’s not a small change. Started with Obama, but has continued.
Sorry about the bern-it-downers. I have them all over my Facebook and all I can do is keep patiently spinning them with a ‘no, we’re half the Dems, move in and own the place’ message.
The ones worth a damn will do the work to put forward and support left-wing concerns in a way that Democrats can use.
The ones that are useless, need to wave their fists and yell and then they’ll do fucking nothing and you shouldn’t fear their rhetoric. I have one example in my own family. He is now a bern-it-downer talking third party (which Bernie is NOT going to do, never was) but back when it mattered, this guy took pains to tell me I could not ‘guilt’ him or he’d just cut me off. I had to not suggest that he should go out and volunteer, or give money, or do ANYTHING other than make a bunch of noise on Facebook, and he was particularly sensitive to not being shamed for refusing to go volunteer or take time out of his day to work for the Bernie campaign.
So we did it without his help (he may have donated, in fairness: I wouldn’t ask, pretty sure that too is not cool)
And now he’s the guy telling Bernie to run third party, and I’m the one who went and worked my ass off in New Hampshire because it mattered, and I’m grateful Bernie is still about the issues and is working to get his faction represented in the party platform (it already is). Because it matters.
I say, allow even these people to be in the Dem tent, and Bernie can tell them to do like he does and stay Dem and vote Dem and stay engaged, work to change our toxic failing politics. I could say fuck ’em, but let them stay even with their big talk.
I can tell you one example where the big talk meant nothing. Some of these people won’t lift a finger to help you and can be safely ignored.
Ruckus
@patroclus:
He’s not going to think about it. He’s maybe not even capable of thinking about it. He probably feels like he has thought it out but of course with faulty information, a curious lack of reasoning, and without cognitive thinking ability, he’s not going to come to a reasonable conclusion.
Applejinx
@MomSense: Nah, you have to have topic headings. It’s like the ‘Saving America Forever Act’ or the ‘Things Should Be Better And Good Act’, except it’s more like ‘Break Up The Banks That Are Too Big To Fail Act’. It’s labels.
Somebody will be needed to check that the stuff under the label bears some resemblance to what’s advertised, but there’s no reason not to use the Populist Labels for such purposes. It’s topic headings, summaries. Gives you a good idea of what can go under those categories, and what can’t.
D58826
@Ruckus: And what is the ‘goal’? Is the goal universal affordable healthcare that Europeans take for granted or is it single payer? It seems to me that the goal is universal care. When I’m in the ER I really don’t care if the bills are paid by Obamacare, single payer or the tooth fairy. If Obamacare on steroids gives us European level care then I say go for it. If Obamacare transitions to single payer then that’s fine also. I realize the how is important but if there are multiple ways to get to the universal care then lets not get hung up on a ‘my way or the highway’ argument.
Major Major Major Major
@Ruckus: Quickest person I ever added to the pie filter.
Ruckus
@Baud:
Not as many things were considered capital gains though. That the nominal rate was lower was not all that bad, it did increase investment in capital, such as machines and factories, which required workers. In concert with the high personal income rates, it kept money in circulation, working instead of sitting.
Major Major Major Major
@D58826: In some of the states that are doing Obamacare right we’re already at European levels.
oldgold
@? Martin: Did you know there already is a financial activities tax (FAT)? It is infinitesimal and is used to run the SEC.
Brachiator
@oldgold:
To clarify, do you mean that net investment income should be subject to FICA? And at current FICA rates?
Kay
@Bob In Portland:
Because they’re negotiating it next week in NYC.
Meanwhile:
US policymakers will “step in” when pigs fly.
I can’t find the 600k, or 1.2 million, or 2 million new (net) jobs. Free traders are really shameless liars. They will say and do anything to pass one of these deals. I love the specificity- 600k, and 1.2 million. Every deal, same story.
Mnemosyne
But when all is said and all is done,
Clinton has beliefs
Trump has none
Robert Sneddon
@Applejinx:
Actually no. The amounts reported as being raised by by the Sanders campaign have been applied exclusively to his campaign for the nomination and are similar to the amounts SoS Clinton has raised for her nomination campaign. SoS Clinton has also worked to raise substantial amounts from those Evull Big-Money Hollywood fundraisers for down-ticket races as well as starting to fund her eventual run for the White House. In two years time the fundraising effort will start again for the mid-terms and a bunch of at-risk Democratic Senate seat races and two years after that there will be the next Presidential race and more down-tickets eating up another billion or so.
I don’t expect many of the folks who have contributed to Sanders will dig deeper into their pockets and pull out another couple of thousand bucks for Clinton’s actual run for the Presidency in November and they almost certainly won’t provide cash and support for the Blue Dogs and DINOs that President Clinton will need to get anything done in Congress and vote on her Supreme Court choices over the next four or eight years. That will be down to the PACs and the $10,000 plate rubber-chicken events, as always.
D58826
@Kay: A lot of our national problems would be a lot less pressing if
.
oldgold
A FAT tax of .01% would raise $250-300 billion a year. If dedicated to Social Security and Medicare, rather than raising the age and slimming the benefits, we could go the other way.
Ken
@RaflW: intellectually, he’s over. Professor Dyson basically ripped him to shreds a few years ago in TNR. This was DuBois vs Washington stuff.
Brachiator
@? Martin:
The problem here is that a deliberate policy to limit wealth is contradictory and self-defeating. You end up reducing tax revenues for whatever general welfare programs you think are good and necessary.
Major Major Major Major
@Ken: But he criticizes liberals from the left, so he must be intellectually pure!
I hate ‘public intellectuals’. Unless Daniel Dennett counts as one.
Elie
@Ruckus:
Its the narcissism and self centeredness, and lack of real insight into themselves that makes even their great ideas, impossible to adopt cause you can’t collaborate with them… they are always “right” and “better” and the sausagemaking (as you term it), that is essential to implement anything in a complex and diverse political and electorate reality is impossible with them involved in any way. They believe that their ideas not only make them special, but better than you or anyone and do not want in fact, cannot abide even a tweak to what they think of as perfection. They have a very Manichean view of reality. Both Bernie and Nader probably have deep seated personality issues that at this point, are unfixable. Best you can do, seriously, despite their great ideas and energy, is try to lift what you can of the best but keep them at arm’s length…
Ruckus
@D58826:
The entire point. The start and the goal is in the idea. The middle is what is missing. Take health care. You don’t want to know about money when you need open heart surgery. You want to know how soon can I get it, is the person with the knife any good, will my life be better, how long will that take. Money never enters the equation. Except that it is always there anyway. The elephant in the room. People in need rarely care about the money, not the amount, not who pays, not when it gets paid. The point I’m making is that the how it gets paid is important to the providers but not to the provided, at least not at the time the procedure is needed. That’s why health care should be a non profit (in the way we mean non profit corp in this country) commodity, paid for by all of us by taxes, equally it proportion to our ability to pay. It doesn’t have to be all government employees, like the VA, but it should not be care according to how much you have.
OK I went off the rails a bit there.
I was talking about having dreams and ideals and not having any kind of details. You are saying that details don’t really matter but they very much do. Sanders goal is that we all pay for everyone’s healthcare. But he has no details on how to do that other than end what we have and collect taxes. There are millions of details to doing that. Not the least of which is that lots of people will lose their jobs and are not in a position to just start a new one with the magic government program that he has not devised nor has any details about. They won’t be paying those taxes.
Goals are first but details are vital to making a goal work. If done wrong the goal will never be reached but if not done at all it is absolute, there is no meeting the goal. And it gets worse as the goal gets bigger. And health care is a huge goal.
Bob In Portland
@Brachiator: Ah yes, the free market.
If the economy doesn’t serve the bottom 75% then the system isn’t working for most people. Who benefits if the top 1% is accumulating wealth? Who doesn’t? Who hasn’t for the last forty years? The connection between Wall Street and Main Street no longer exists.
burnspbesq
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
No kidding. I hope like hell that I’m wrong about this, but …
NR
@burnspbesq: It’s nice to see that folks here have smoothly transitioned from “Obama can’t fail, he can only be failed,” to “Hillary can’t fail, she can only be failed.” If nothing else, you guys are consistent.
Ruckus
@Elie:
Well….
I think that you have to take the ideas one at a time an try to apply at least the gross details to them. See if the goals are desirable and then if you can find a way to make them work. That’s how progress is made. You don’t jump to the end goal in one fell swoop, you make small leaps and steps, if only because we often don’t have the technology to move in one leap. Or that the details are so diverse that we can’t see all of them at one time. Or implement them all at one time. Or even pay for them all at one time.
But you need the ideas, the grand schemes. They are the goals and the direction, they just are not the answers. 2+2=? If you don’t know how can you figure out what A+B+C/F*X*sine of Z=? You have to know the details, you have to go through the process, you have to think it through.
oldgold
@Brachiator: It should pay some FICA tax, but at a substantially reduced rate.1.0% raises a lot of money.
I would like to see the awful FICA abuse S-Corps allow ended.
Brachiator
@Bob In Portland: Sorry, your spewing of Bernie-isms is not relevant to anything that I wrote. And I didn’t write anything just about the free market. You would have the same dilemma in a total Socialist system if your aim was to limit wealth as much as possible.
burnspbesq
@Applejinx:
Good luck getting 38 state legislatures to raity the necessary Constitutional amendment.
burnspbesq
@NR:
What the ever-loving fuck are you on about, idiot?
D58826
@Ruckus: Hmmmm. I think you misunderstood or I didn’t explain it right. My point is the same as yours and that is the details are important. Universal health care is the goal. Single payer/Obamacare on steroids or some other plan is where you start getting into the details or maybe the broad brush approaches(big details at this point). If you fixate on single payer as the only way and it isn’t practical or there is no political support then that is a problem.
Brachiator
@oldgold:
I agree with you on this.
I’m still pondering an additional tax on investment income. We already have the Forms 8959 and 8960. How much revenue have they raised?
Ruckus
@Elie:
I probably missed the point you were trying to make a bit.
Yes I see these two (and there are many others) as exactly like you describe. Because of them and those like them we sometimes throw out good ideas because of the inflexibility and lack of depth of their process. They are based on ego and self, not on moving forward. They think they are about moving forward but because they haven’t thought through the process and details and because the idea is so “proper,” and of who they are, they won’t allow any details or deviation from that idea, which is what happens when you actually do the detail work. We were all thinking single payer/universal health care when President Obama started discussing it. But he knew that getting there in one leap was impossible, because he did the work. So we have the ACA. It’s not perfect but it is far better than it was and can be improved, like SS was. Would it be nice to be everything to everyone up front? Absolutely. Can that be achieved? No. Life is a compromise. It works better when more people understand that.
NR
@burnspbesq: You’re already blaming 2018 (an election that’s not even lost yet!) on liberals. You said that the losses in the 2018 election will be because liberals stayed home because a hypothetical president Hillary was insufficiently pure or something. Not because a hypothetical president Hillary might have done something that led to losses in 2018.
Therefore, your position is that Hillary cannot fail, she can only be failed. That’s what I’m on about. Idiot.
Ruckus
@D58826:
I sort of got that, going back and reading both comments. But I was commenting on ideas, goals and how you get them done and you were making a political comment on Sanders. We are talking about the same thing but from different directions.
ETA And I did go off the rails there.
Bob In Portland
@burnspbesq: They’ve smashed all the mirrors at Balloon Juice! burnspbesq is baffled, confused, and so he must strike out. He’s another reactionary. The general behavior here against dissenters is on par with any fascist formation.
Right now Obama is over in Europe pushing TTIP. I would bet that no one here at Balloon Juice has even noticed this. No one seems to object.
Bob In Portland
@burnspbesq: I wonder if there’ll be anything in the Dem platform against these disastrous trade agreements. What say you, angry one?
D58826
@Ruckus: NP. I was trying to make the general point by highlighting a specific point in the campaign.
RaflW
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: TY, TriContinental Corp, is a closed-end mutual fund with an IPO date of 01/05/1929. I’ve held shares since about 1969 (well, my mom held them in a UGMA back then as I was less than 3 years old…).
Mutual funds have indeed been around longer than Martin thinks.
Denali
@Memosyne,
Love your haiku(if it is one).
D58826
@RaflW: There was an episode of MASH that equated mutual fund salesmen with used car dealers. Not sure how true but I seem to remember that they were not well thought of in the 50’s
oldgold
@Brachiator: Not much, the rate is too low and the threshold too high.
I would pass on this, in exchange for FAT tax. I really do think it is the answer for shoring up and improving Social Security and Medicare.
The S-Corp change would not raise a lot of money, but it
pisses me off seeing surgeons claiming a salary of $20K/ year.
Applejinx
@Brachiator: There’s a whole lot of gray area between what we’ve got, and taxing wealth ‘as much as possible’. Just sayin’.
Again, how about taxing it until the hyper-rich have as much of global wealth as they think they already have?
Go to the section marked Estimated and Ideal Wealth Distribution by Income and Political Affiliation
Look up Estimated (>100K).
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/09/americans_have_no_idea_how_bad_inequality_is_new_harvard_business_school.html
You literally can’t get a more skewed intended distribution of wealth across economic classes, no matter what demographic you look at, and that’s what they THINK it is (everyone, uniformly, thinks it OUGHT to be notably more uniformly distributed). And yet here we are: the reality is unthinkably more outrageous than that. Unimaginably more out of balance. It’s obvious, look at how everything’s collapsing.
And there are still people thinking it’s because rich people don’t have ENOUGH money.
If you imposed that ‘what rich people think they have’ distribution on the US through the tax code, the amount of tax revenue and ability to undertake civil engineering projects, start businesses, free college, single payer etc. immediately becomes a nonissue. You’d probably also be doing Universal Basic Income, whereupon suddenly there’s customers and you can start businesses and have someone to sell TO.
And yet here we are. Because we have to constantly, all the time, give the incredibly wealthy far more than they even THINK they HAVE, let alone what they think is right. How is this even sane?
And of course it’s not, it’s snacking-on-tire-rims insane.
burnspbesq
@NR:
Your view is ahistorical. Mine isn’t.
burnspbesq
@Bob In Portland:
I have my reasons for opposing the TPP, but your blanket characterization of trade agreements as “disastrous” is moronic.
jim parente
@Gin & Tonic: Thanks for clarifying this. Given my background, I still feel guilty! ;-)
redshirt
@Matt Rogers: I haven’t read the thread but in comment 286 I am going to sincerely tell this obvious troll how wrong he is, in detail….
Just something to think about.