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On February 03 2016 13:33 ticklishmusic wrote: But she's not a lying bitch. The entire cold, awkward, calculating thing is like Jeb's low energy tag-- completely made up. I've heard story after story about how Hillary has been a pretty solid retail politician and has connected well with small (50-100) groups of voters. She doesn't look great in the huge rally/speech situations which are the ones that get really covered.
And my impression is that a lot of Bernie supporters haven't taken a good look at her record or her platform. Krugman actually had a great piece about some of them buying into the entire rightwing smear campaign against her, hilariously a couple of the top links in r/politics and r/bernieforpresident are from The Blaze right now.
Hillary has three problems with voters on the progressive side in my estimation.
One is that she is a centrist who has a record of supporting things progressives despise, particularly with matters regarding the power of the state such as the Iraq War resolution and a tacit acceptance of the Patriot act and domestic spying.
Two is that, though she has proposed reasonable measures intended rein in Wall Street and bank excesses, her close ties to it both personally and financially through donations from that industry call into question her willingness to vigorously pursue real change there. In fact her proposals, almost none of which have passed or even gotten co-sponsors, seem almost as though they are smokescreens that provide the appearance of attempts to reform, but with no real chance and no true effort/political capital expended. To the skeptical person you can imagine her telling the Goldman-Sachs directors that she defuse political crisis Y by proposing banking regulation X in congress, but never to worry as it will never pass.
Third, about a quarter to a third of the population has been convinced by the right-wing media that she is guilty of all kinds of shit that has never actually been proven and for which she has been investigated and exonerated multiple times by her political opponents. My best friend from middle-school and his entire family literally believe she murdered or had murdered around 12 or so people. I suspect my Mother-in-law believes this too. Oh, and BENGHAZI!!! Hillary famously talked of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" and it was true. Media forces on the right have been consistent for 25 some years now in skewing their coverage of the Clintons so as to tarnish them in any way possible, to always cast aspersions and call into doubt, to use innuendo or outright misrepresentation. It has been effective. Which then leads to the practical consideration of whether you want to support a candidate who in the general election is going to be running against a machine well-oiled and prepared to hammer away at her with innuendo and insinuations that have been developed and honed over 25 years and for which there is a huge base of suggestible voters who have been prepared to receive this message.
ALL THAT SAID, every time I hear her speak on a subject, whether it is through campaigning or ffs in congressional testimony, I find myself thinking that she is a remarkably smart and knowledgeable person who in spite of her downsides would be a superb and highly-capable choice for president. By far the best qualified and most competent out of all the candidates, Dem and Repub.
I agree that she is remarkably smart and capable. Your analysis is pretty accurate too. Frankly if she just admitted all the crap she's done to get where she is (not by line item for political crucifiction) and genuinely wanted to move past the type of politics from which she was forged into (in any other election other than her two runs at president) the single best political machine since her husband I'd vote for her, and I bet Sanders would to.
He's only running because he has the inclination she isn't going to do that and that the American people are ready for it. Her most recent lines of attacks are indicative that he is right about that. I happen to agree with him.
I think if we all took a step back from our ideologies we could admit the whole damn circus (specifically the rhetoric and political games) on all sides of the aisle and the media has us all distracted from the very basic shit we can, should, and need to change.
On February 03 2016 19:44 DickMcFanny wrote: You'll always have people who make less and people who make more, it's the scale of inequality that's so perverse. When 62 people have the same as the lower 3,5 Billion, something is terribly wrong. Meaning on average, one of the richest people has the same amount of money than 56 Million of the poorest. Whoever makes apologies for that must have had American education inflicted upon them.
Statistics like that are so dumb and just for headlines. Someone who gradated from Havard and has student debt + a mortgage has a lot of negative equity. That person would be considered one of the poorest in the world. edit: Basically anyone who has more than 1$ is richer than X million people in the world.
not it's not just dumb. your example is. capitalism 101 teaches us that it's not a zero sum game. money was transferred in exchange for a value. that value is education, and not just any, but harvard education.
and I would even argue that 300k in debt is fine, strictly economically speaking (yes that's kind of perverted on many other levels), as long as you are a graduate from harvard and not a complete muck up that does nothing with the opportunities this education gives you.
so no, in your example those people are NOT poorer. quite the opposite.
Yes that was kind of my point. According to that particular statistic the Harvard educated guy with student debt and a mortgate would be poorer than a random guy in Africa who has 1$ in savings. Which is obviously not true and thus it's a useless statistic. If you want to argue that there is too much inequality there are other numbers which are better to use. The one where x amount of people own more than the lower x billion is just for headlines.
On February 03 2016 19:44 DickMcFanny wrote: You'll always have people who make less and people who make more, it's the scale of inequality that's so perverse. When 62 people have the same as the lower 3,5 Billion, something is terribly wrong. Meaning on average, one of the richest people has the same amount of money than 56 Million of the poorest. Whoever makes apologies for that must have had American education inflicted upon them.
Statistics like that are so dumb and just for headlines. Someone who gradated from Havard and has student debt + a mortgage has a lot of negative equity. That person would be considered one of the poorest in the world. edit: Basically anyone who has more than 1$ is richer than X million people in the world.
not it's not just dumb. your example is. capitalism 101 teaches us that it's not a zero sum game. money was transferred in exchange for a value. that value is education, and not just any, but harvard education.
and I would even argue that 300k in debt is fine, strictly economically speaking (yes that's kind of perverted on many other levels), as long as you are a graduate from harvard and not a complete muck up that does nothing with the opportunities this education gives you.
so no, in your example those people are NOT poorer. quite the opposite.
Yes that was kind of my point. According to that particular statistic the Harvard educated guy with student debt and a mortgate would be poorer than a random guy in Africa who has 1$ in savings. Which is obviously not true and thus it's a useless statistic. If you want to argue that there is too much inequality there are other numbers which are better to use. The one where x amount of people own more than the lower x billion is just for headlines.
The billions of people living in poverty and working for a dollar a day do not have vast intangible wealth which is skewing the numbers. I don't see how it's relevant. The point is that there are people with $70,000,000,000 when there are billions of people without $70. Those billions of people do not have less than $70 because they took out loans to get through law school, they have it because they're living in abject poverty.
Sure, you can bring up that many people in the West have negative net worth. It's not untrue. However it's also not even slightly relevant. When we talk about the population living in poverty there is no overlap with the population who own a $300k house but due to putting zero down and variations in the housing market now owe $320k on it.
On February 03 2016 13:33 ticklishmusic wrote: But she's not a lying bitch. The entire cold, awkward, calculating thing is like Jeb's low energy tag-- completely made up. I've heard story after story about how Hillary has been a pretty solid retail politician and has connected well with small (50-100) groups of voters. She doesn't look great in the huge rally/speech situations which are the ones that get really covered.
And my impression is that a lot of Bernie supporters haven't taken a good look at her record or her platform. Krugman actually had a great piece about some of them buying into the entire rightwing smear campaign against her, hilariously a couple of the top links in r/politics and r/bernieforpresident are from The Blaze right now.
Hillary has three problems with voters on the progressive side in my estimation.
One is that she is a centrist who has a record of supporting things progressives despise, particularly with matters regarding the power of the state such as the Iraq War resolution and a tacit acceptance of the Patriot act and domestic spying.
Two is that, though she has proposed reasonable measures intended rein in Wall Street and bank excesses, her close ties to it both personally and financially through donations from that industry call into question her willingness to vigorously pursue real change there. In fact her proposals, almost none of which have passed or even gotten co-sponsors, seem almost as though they are smokescreens that provide the appearance of attempts to reform, but with no real chance and no true effort/political capital expended. To the skeptical person you can imagine her telling the Goldman-Sachs directors that she defuse political crisis Y by proposing banking regulation X in congress, but never to worry as it will never pass.
Third, about a quarter to a third of the population has been convinced by the right-wing media that she is guilty of all kinds of shit that has never actually been proven and for which she has been investigated and exonerated multiple times by her political opponents. My best friend from middle-school and his entire family literally believe she murdered or had murdered around 12 or so people. I suspect my Mother-in-law believes this too. Oh, and BENGHAZI!!! Hillary famously talked of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" and it was true. Media forces on the right have been consistent for 25 some years now in skewing their coverage of the Clintons so as to tarnish them in any way possible, to always cast aspersions and call into doubt, to use innuendo or outright misrepresentation. It has been effective. Which then leads to the practical consideration of whether you want to support a candidate who in the general election is going to be running against a machine well-oiled and prepared to hammer away at her with innuendo and insinuations that have been developed and honed over 25 years and for which there is a huge base of suggestible voters who have been prepared to receive this message.
ALL THAT SAID, every time I hear her speak on a subject, whether it is through campaigning or ffs in congressional testimony, I find myself thinking that she is a remarkably smart and knowledgeable person who in spite of her downsides would be a superb and highly-capable choice for president. By far the best qualified and most competent out of all the candidates, Dem and Repub.
I agree that she is remarkably smart and capable. Your analysis is pretty accurate too. Frankly if she just admitted all the crap she's done to get where she is (not by line item for political crucifiction) and genuinely wanted to move past the type of politics from which she was forged into (in any other election other than her two runs at president) the single best political machine since her husband I'd vote for her, and I bet Sanders would to.
He's only running because he has the inclination she isn't going to do that and that the American people are ready for it. Her most recent lines of attacks are indicative that he is right about that. I happen to agree with him.
I think if we all took a step back from our ideologies we could admit the whole damn circus (specifically the rhetoric and political games) on all sides of the aisle and the media has us all distracted from the very basic shit we can, should, and need to change.
So have you been possibly moved from the "if Hillary wins I'm voting for Trump" camp?
Can you specify exactly what it is that Hillary has done to get where she is that bothers you?
Also re: point about Iraq war: yes, she voted for it. So did ~3/4 of the senate and a majority of Democrats there. I don't think it's necessarily a huge black mark against her, she was misled by the Bush administration on the situation like a lot of others. Hillary definitely has a more hawkish foreign policy which would play into her decision to empower the administration to invade (or intervene to use the political word) in Iraq, but I don't think she was super gung ho about invading a nation for no reason.
In my opinion, Hillary has done a pretty lousy job putting her record out there. She kicked ass at the Benghazi hearings, but frankly I don't know why she doesn't mention child immunizations, foster care protections, women's rights, etc. more often.
people dislike hillary for her politically calculated stances. for example, were the iraq war at the time unpopular, she would not have voted for it.
but you can spin this feature of hers as being responsive to democracy. she is pretty good at getting the right people in charge and takes advice. also i see her having more fight in the political arena than obama.
On February 03 2016 13:33 ticklishmusic wrote: But she's not a lying bitch. The entire cold, awkward, calculating thing is like Jeb's low energy tag-- completely made up. I've heard story after story about how Hillary has been a pretty solid retail politician and has connected well with small (50-100) groups of voters. She doesn't look great in the huge rally/speech situations which are the ones that get really covered.
And my impression is that a lot of Bernie supporters haven't taken a good look at her record or her platform. Krugman actually had a great piece about some of them buying into the entire rightwing smear campaign against her, hilariously a couple of the top links in r/politics and r/bernieforpresident are from The Blaze right now.
Hillary has three problems with voters on the progressive side in my estimation.
One is that she is a centrist who has a record of supporting things progressives despise, particularly with matters regarding the power of the state such as the Iraq War resolution and a tacit acceptance of the Patriot act and domestic spying.
Two is that, though she has proposed reasonable measures intended rein in Wall Street and bank excesses, her close ties to it both personally and financially through donations from that industry call into question her willingness to vigorously pursue real change there. In fact her proposals, almost none of which have passed or even gotten co-sponsors, seem almost as though they are smokescreens that provide the appearance of attempts to reform, but with no real chance and no true effort/political capital expended. To the skeptical person you can imagine her telling the Goldman-Sachs directors that she defuse political crisis Y by proposing banking regulation X in congress, but never to worry as it will never pass.
Third, about a quarter to a third of the population has been convinced by the right-wing media that she is guilty of all kinds of shit that has never actually been proven and for which she has been investigated and exonerated multiple times by her political opponents. My best friend from middle-school and his entire family literally believe she murdered or had murdered around 12 or so people. I suspect my Mother-in-law believes this too. Oh, and BENGHAZI!!! Hillary famously talked of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" and it was true. Media forces on the right have been consistent for 25 some years now in skewing their coverage of the Clintons so as to tarnish them in any way possible, to always cast aspersions and call into doubt, to use innuendo or outright misrepresentation. It has been effective. Which then leads to the practical consideration of whether you want to support a candidate who in the general election is going to be running against a machine well-oiled and prepared to hammer away at her with innuendo and insinuations that have been developed and honed over 25 years and for which there is a huge base of suggestible voters who have been prepared to receive this message.
ALL THAT SAID, every time I hear her speak on a subject, whether it is through campaigning or ffs in congressional testimony, I find myself thinking that she is a remarkably smart and knowledgeable person who in spite of her downsides would be a superb and highly-capable choice for president. By far the best qualified and most competent out of all the candidates, Dem and Repub.
I agree that she is remarkably smart and capable. Your analysis is pretty accurate too. Frankly if she just admitted all the crap she's done to get where she is (not by line item for political crucifiction) and genuinely wanted to move past the type of politics from which she was forged into (in any other election other than her two runs at president) the single best political machine since her husband I'd vote for her, and I bet Sanders would to.
He's only running because he has the inclination she isn't going to do that and that the American people are ready for it. Her most recent lines of attacks are indicative that he is right about that. I happen to agree with him.
I think if we all took a step back from our ideologies we could admit the whole damn circus (specifically the rhetoric and political games) on all sides of the aisle and the media has us all distracted from the very basic shit we can, should, and need to change.
So have you been possibly moved from the "if Hillary wins I'm voting for Trump" camp?
Can you specify exactly what it is that Hillary has done to get where she is that bothers you?
Also re: point about Iraq war: yes, she voted for it. So did ~3/4 of the senate and a majority of Democrats there. I don't think it's necessarily a huge black mark against her, she was misled by the Bush administration on the situation like a lot of others. Hillary definitely has a more hawkish foreign policy which would play into her decision to empower the administration to invade (or intervene to use the political word) in Iraq, but I don't think she was super gung ho about invading a nation for no reason.
We can just start with the obvious, (totally unrelated to Republicans) and very recent, manipulation of the debate process.
On February 04 2016 01:00 oneofthem wrote: people dislike hillary for her politically calculated stances. for example, were the iraq war at the time unpopular, she would not have voted for it.
but you can spin this feature of hers as being responsive to democracy. she is pretty good at getting the right people in charge and takes advice. also i see her having more fight in the political arena than obama.
Yeah, the criticisms of Clinton are more so criticisms of American politics. She's good at what she does and I would feel like I am in capable hands. People blaming Benghazi and ISIS on Clinton just makes me roll my eyes.
This video came out 5 days ago but I'm a little slow.
"Stop resisting". They were unaware that they were being recorded and all claimed that he had resisted arrest and that that was the cause of his injuries. One of the officers was an exemplary and award winning officer.
I get it, it's a fucking drug dealer poisoning our kids. maybe even real scum who killed people not just by selling drugs. maybe even a terrible human being. and that still does not warrant such a treatment.
looks like straight out of the shield or something.
"Stop resisting". They were unaware that they were being recorded and all claimed that he had resisted arrest and that that was the cause of his injuries. One of the officers was an exemplary and award winning officer.
[T]he TPP will increase annual real incomes in the United States by $131 billion, or 0.5 percent of GDP, and annual exports by $357 billion, or 9.1 percent of exports, over baseline projections by 2030, when the agreement is nearly fully implemented. Incomes after 2030 will remain above baseline results by a similar margin. Both labor and capital will benefit, but labor will get a somewhat more than proportionate share of the gains in total.
looking at the innards, seems like this model takes information from effects of past trade liberalization deals and basically extrapolate based on affected areas and rate of effective tariff reduction and technical barriers. main area of barrier reduction seems to be expanding the number of countries qualifying under the rule of origin to benefit from 0 tariffs. this also seems to make it in china's interest to eventually join the TPP and hopefully enforce higher labor and ip standards.
On February 03 2016 19:44 DickMcFanny wrote: You'll always have people who make less and people who make more, it's the scale of inequality that's so perverse. When 62 people have the same as the lower 3,5 Billion, something is terribly wrong. Meaning on average, one of the richest people has the same amount of money than 56 Million of the poorest. Whoever makes apologies for that must have had American education inflicted upon them.
Statistics like that are so dumb and just for headlines. Someone who gradated from Havard and has student debt + a mortgage has a lot of negative equity. That person would be considered one of the poorest in the world. edit: Basically anyone who has more than 1$ is richer than X million people in the world.
not it's not just dumb. your example is. capitalism 101 teaches us that it's not a zero sum game. money was transferred in exchange for a value. that value is education, and not just any, but harvard education.
and I would even argue that 300k in debt is fine, strictly economically speaking (yes that's kind of perverted on many other levels), as long as you are a graduate from harvard and not a complete muck up that does nothing with the opportunities this education gives you.
so no, in your example those people are NOT poorer. quite the opposite.
Yes that was kind of my point. According to that particular statistic the Harvard educated guy with student debt and a mortgate would be poorer than a random guy in Africa who has 1$ in savings. Which is obviously not true and thus it's a useless statistic. If you want to argue that there is too much inequality there are other numbers which are better to use. The one where x amount of people own more than the lower x billion is just for headlines.
The billions of people living in poverty and working for a dollar a day do not have vast intangible wealth which is skewing the numbers. I don't see how it's relevant. The point is that there are people with $70,000,000,000 when there are billions of people without $70. Those billions of people do not have less than $70 because they took out loans to get through law school, they have it because they're living in abject poverty.
Sure, you can bring up that many people in the West have negative net worth. It's not untrue. However it's also not even slightly relevant. When we talk about the population living in poverty there is no overlap with the population who own a $300k house but due to putting zero down and variations in the housing market now owe $320k on it.
Something worth thinking about in this discussion. How does it affect the person having less than $70 (because of poverty) if somebody else has $70B?
It's an interesting thought experiment. If suddenly a single person has $100T cash in an underground cave and nobody knows about it, does it actually matter? How much distortion can a single person make by spending that money haphazardly? Does that distortion necessarily make anybody noticeably worse off? What if there is a second person with $100,000T? If there is noticeable distortion from the first, does the 2nd create just as much distortion or have any affect on the distortion of the first?
On February 04 2016 02:33 farvacola wrote: The "living in a cave" aspect of your hypo is too far divorced from the reality of fiat currency to be of much if any use.
It's not living in a cave. I meant that they suddenly had that much money just sitting around, and they didn't need to pay anybody to store it etc. It's as if they can conjure up a large, yet finite, amount of cash and it's essentially tied to a region.
They could go there and extract that pure cash and put it straight into a bank if they wanted from there, and you measure the effects of that, and so on.
On February 03 2016 19:44 DickMcFanny wrote: You'll always have people who make less and people who make more, it's the scale of inequality that's so perverse. When 62 people have the same as the lower 3,5 Billion, something is terribly wrong. Meaning on average, one of the richest people has the same amount of money than 56 Million of the poorest. Whoever makes apologies for that must have had American education inflicted upon them.
Statistics like that are so dumb and just for headlines. Someone who gradated from Havard and has student debt + a mortgage has a lot of negative equity. That person would be considered one of the poorest in the world. edit: Basically anyone who has more than 1$ is richer than X million people in the world.
not it's not just dumb. your example is. capitalism 101 teaches us that it's not a zero sum game. money was transferred in exchange for a value. that value is education, and not just any, but harvard education.
and I would even argue that 300k in debt is fine, strictly economically speaking (yes that's kind of perverted on many other levels), as long as you are a graduate from harvard and not a complete muck up that does nothing with the opportunities this education gives you.
so no, in your example those people are NOT poorer. quite the opposite.
Yes that was kind of my point. According to that particular statistic the Harvard educated guy with student debt and a mortgate would be poorer than a random guy in Africa who has 1$ in savings. Which is obviously not true and thus it's a useless statistic. If you want to argue that there is too much inequality there are other numbers which are better to use. The one where x amount of people own more than the lower x billion is just for headlines.
The billions of people living in poverty and working for a dollar a day do not have vast intangible wealth which is skewing the numbers. I don't see how it's relevant. The point is that there are people with $70,000,000,000 when there are billions of people without $70. Those billions of people do not have less than $70 because they took out loans to get through law school, they have it because they're living in abject poverty.
Sure, you can bring up that many people in the West have negative net worth. It's not untrue. However it's also not even slightly relevant. When we talk about the population living in poverty there is no overlap with the population who own a $300k house but due to putting zero down and variations in the housing market now owe $320k on it.
Something worth thinking about in this discussion. How does it affect the person having less than $70 (because of poverty) if somebody else has $70B?
It's an interesting thought experiment. If suddenly a single person has $100T cash in an underground cave and nobody knows about it, does it actually matter? How much distortion can a single person make by spending that money haphazardly? Does that distortion necessarily make anybody noticeably worse off? What if there is a second person with $100,000T? If there is noticeable distortion from the first, does the 2nd create just as much distortion or have any affect on the distortion of the first?
Printing 100,000T (or having it suddenly appear) would do nothing that stealing from everyone else didn't. That money would simply decrease the value of everyone else's money. If he doesn't spend it then it wouldn't change anything, if it appeared and he spent it then it would lower the purchasing power of everyone else's money. 100,000T would make everyone worse off and destroy the USD.
In terms of actually earning billions by providing services though, profit occurs when there is a difference between the cost of providing something and the value it provides to purchaser. Capitalism teaches us that profit needs to exist to motivate innovation, justify investment and reward enterprise and I don't disagree with any part of that. However I do believe disproportionate profit can exist. Microsoft would have still happened if Bill Gates was only incentivised with 10b, not 70b. The reason it is so profitable is because of the large disconnect between their cost of providing a service and the market value of the service they create.
I don't disagree that their services are valuable, nor that the market will bear the current price. However where I do disagree is whether the price that the market will bear is the optimal price for a service. Between the cost of production and the price the market will bear there is a number that would still yield sufficient profit to encourage investors to invest, innovators to innovate and workers to work. The difference in excess of that number does not serve to do anything other than disproportionately reward the provider of the service by redirecting surplus money from the users to them. Bill Gate's fortune exists because the billions of users of Microsoft products worldwide paid more than they needed to.
Consider if you struck oil in your back yard and somehow owned the mineral rights to it. Your discovery costs and investments were nothing, you weren't drilling for oil, you just struck it. If the cost of extracting the oil was negligible, what price should you sell it at? The market would pay $25/barrel and you could die an incredibly rich man by taking people's money for your oil. But you'd still sell the oil at $1/barrel because fuck it, it's money pouring out of the ground. Once you pass the value needed to justify providing the service at all it's a zero sum game, you're not creating additional value, you're simply redistributing the wealth of other people to you in exchange for providing the same value you would have provided at half the price.
The superrich do not exist in a vacuum. It makes sense for the guy who struck oil by accident to sell the oil for any positive number. By selling it for the maximum possible number he is not providing additional oil, he is simply increasing the household expenses of everyone else and keeping the difference.
On February 03 2016 18:32 IgnE wrote: How are the rich necessary?
The same way the poor are necessary. Equality is some utopian pipe dream.
Edit: What velr said
Basically humans are selfish shitheads at heart is what your trying to say. The fact that it is a pipe dream means there is a deficiency in our species.
tfw human made social and economic conditions get naturalized.
On February 03 2016 19:44 DickMcFanny wrote: You'll always have people who make less and people who make more, it's the scale of inequality that's so perverse. When 62 people have the same as the lower 3,5 Billion, something is terribly wrong. Meaning on average, one of the richest people has the same amount of money than 56 Million of the poorest. Whoever makes apologies for that must have had American education inflicted upon them.
Statistics like that are so dumb and just for headlines. Someone who gradated from Havard and has student debt + a mortgage has a lot of negative equity. That person would be considered one of the poorest in the world. edit: Basically anyone who has more than 1$ is richer than X million people in the world.
not it's not just dumb. your example is. capitalism 101 teaches us that it's not a zero sum game. money was transferred in exchange for a value. that value is education, and not just any, but harvard education.
and I would even argue that 300k in debt is fine, strictly economically speaking (yes that's kind of perverted on many other levels), as long as you are a graduate from harvard and not a complete muck up that does nothing with the opportunities this education gives you.
so no, in your example those people are NOT poorer. quite the opposite.
Yes that was kind of my point. According to that particular statistic the Harvard educated guy with student debt and a mortgate would be poorer than a random guy in Africa who has 1$ in savings. Which is obviously not true and thus it's a useless statistic. If you want to argue that there is too much inequality there are other numbers which are better to use. The one where x amount of people own more than the lower x billion is just for headlines.
The billions of people living in poverty and working for a dollar a day do not have vast intangible wealth which is skewing the numbers. I don't see how it's relevant. The point is that there are people with $70,000,000,000 when there are billions of people without $70. Those billions of people do not have less than $70 because they took out loans to get through law school, they have it because they're living in abject poverty.
Sure, you can bring up that many people in the West have negative net worth. It's not untrue. However it's also not even slightly relevant. When we talk about the population living in poverty there is no overlap with the population who own a $300k house but due to putting zero down and variations in the housing market now owe $320k on it.
My issue is specifically with using net wealth as an indicator for inequality. The numbers aren;t just skewed they totally misrepresent the actual amount of inequality there is. When more than 20% of the poorest people in the world apparently live in Europe and NA you know there's something wrong.
If you want to argue that it's unfair that there are people with 70bln and people with less than 70$ that's fine but then use a more accurate indicator to support your point.
don't we kind of have some economic measures like buying power and earning power that are pretty good (they have downsides ofc) at measuring whatever the hell it is we're trying to measure
On February 03 2016 13:33 ticklishmusic wrote: But she's not a lying bitch. The entire cold, awkward, calculating thing is like Jeb's low energy tag-- completely made up. I've heard story after story about how Hillary has been a pretty solid retail politician and has connected well with small (50-100) groups of voters. She doesn't look great in the huge rally/speech situations which are the ones that get really covered.
And my impression is that a lot of Bernie supporters haven't taken a good look at her record or her platform. Krugman actually had a great piece about some of them buying into the entire rightwing smear campaign against her, hilariously a couple of the top links in r/politics and r/bernieforpresident are from The Blaze right now.
Hillary has three problems with voters on the progressive side in my estimation.
One is that she is a centrist who has a record of supporting things progressives despise, particularly with matters regarding the power of the state such as the Iraq War resolution and a tacit acceptance of the Patriot act and domestic spying.
Two is that, though she has proposed reasonable measures intended rein in Wall Street and bank excesses, her close ties to it both personally and financially through donations from that industry call into question her willingness to vigorously pursue real change there. In fact her proposals, almost none of which have passed or even gotten co-sponsors, seem almost as though they are smokescreens that provide the appearance of attempts to reform, but with no real chance and no true effort/political capital expended. To the skeptical person you can imagine her telling the Goldman-Sachs directors that she defuse political crisis Y by proposing banking regulation X in congress, but never to worry as it will never pass.
Third, about a quarter to a third of the population has been convinced by the right-wing media that she is guilty of all kinds of shit that has never actually been proven and for which she has been investigated and exonerated multiple times by her political opponents. My best friend from middle-school and his entire family literally believe she murdered or had murdered around 12 or so people. I suspect my Mother-in-law believes this too. Oh, and BENGHAZI!!! Hillary famously talked of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" and it was true. Media forces on the right have been consistent for 25 some years now in skewing their coverage of the Clintons so as to tarnish them in any way possible, to always cast aspersions and call into doubt, to use innuendo or outright misrepresentation. It has been effective. Which then leads to the practical consideration of whether you want to support a candidate who in the general election is going to be running against a machine well-oiled and prepared to hammer away at her with innuendo and insinuations that have been developed and honed over 25 years and for which there is a huge base of suggestible voters who have been prepared to receive this message.
ALL THAT SAID, every time I hear her speak on a subject, whether it is through campaigning or ffs in congressional testimony, I find myself thinking that she is a remarkably smart and knowledgeable person who in spite of her downsides would be a superb and highly-capable choice for president. By far the best qualified and most competent out of all the candidates, Dem and Repub.
I agree that she is remarkably smart and capable. Your analysis is pretty accurate too. Frankly if she just admitted all the crap she's done to get where she is (not by line item for political crucifiction) and genuinely wanted to move past the type of politics from which she was forged into (in any other election other than her two runs at president) the single best political machine since her husband I'd vote for her, and I bet Sanders would to.
He's only running because he has the inclination she isn't going to do that and that the American people are ready for it. Her most recent lines of attacks are indicative that he is right about that. I happen to agree with him.
I think if we all took a step back from our ideologies we could admit the whole damn circus (specifically the rhetoric and political games) on all sides of the aisle and the media has us all distracted from the very basic shit we can, should, and need to change.
So have you been possibly moved from the "if Hillary wins I'm voting for Trump" camp?
Can you specify exactly what it is that Hillary has done to get where she is that bothers you?
Also re: point about Iraq war: yes, she voted for it. So did ~3/4 of the senate and a majority of Democrats there. I don't think it's necessarily a huge black mark against her, she was misled by the Bush administration on the situation like a lot of others. Hillary definitely has a more hawkish foreign policy which would play into her decision to empower the administration to invade (or intervene to use the political word) in Iraq, but I don't think she was super gung ho about invading a nation for no reason.
We can just start with the obvious, (totally unrelated to Republicans) and very recent, manipulation of the debate process.
I really don't see the problem. Clinton is a frontrunner, she doesn't want to give her opponents chances to differentiate or stand out. You can blame the DNC, but for Clinton to not vigorously protest the exclusivity rule is more common sense than any real sleaziness. Now they're negotiating for additional debates ,which means there's back and forth-- she wants one here, Sanders wants one there as well, they'll either compromise and we get additional debates or they don't and it's whatever. That's real life.
There's a yuuuuuge difference between "she'll do anything to get elected" and making the rational choice for what's best for her campaign.
EPT
