US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6675

On January 29 2017 01:01 Mohdoo wrote:
People of TL: I know that we tend to appreciate memes from our own side more than the other side, even if they are somewhat overly partisan. But I am finding myself in total exception when it comes to Baron Trump. I've seen a couple people making fun of Baron and posting memes comparing him to Shinji from Evangelion. I really just think its straight up distasteful and utterly wrong. Under no circumstances should a 10 year old kid be an internet joke. How in the world do people feel comfortable poking fun at a kid just because his father is Trump? Some people get so absorbed in their own partisan shit that they are losing their sense of decency. Its sad.

Am I the only one who sees kids as off limits? How in the world does someone feel comfortable poking fun at a kid?

On January 29 2017 01:05 Liquid`Jinro wrote:
I dont think I've seen anyone do that in this thread at least?

On January 29 2017 01:08 Gorsameth wrote:

Yeah I'm confused. Why exactly are you making this plea here when no one here has attacked or meme'd any part of Trumps family.

A coalition of activists called #NotOneInch are planning a poignant and unique form of protest today: delivering a number of “back-up spines” to Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s apartment in Brooklyn, New York.

The protestors are organizing in response to Schumer’s vote to approve three of President Donald Trump’s cabinet members: Mike Pompeo, James Mattis and Mike Flynn.

The “spines” will include cardboard signs, cut-outs and plastic skeleton spines ― a tongue-in-cheek dig at what they perceive to be cowardly moves by Schumer.

“When will spineless Democrats get it through their heads that we demand ZERO COLLABORATION with the Trump/extreme GOP agenda? ZERO,” Tim Murphy, co-founder of #NotOneInch and active member of Gays Against Guns (GAG), told The Huffington Post. “It is infuriating that Schumer thinks just because he’s sitting pretty in his Senate seat for six more years, he can afford to vote yes on SOME of these terrifying cabinet picks to preserve some dealmaking leverage with Republicans. NO.”

On January 28 2017 15:14 ZapRoffo wrote:


appreciating the things globalization gives needs to happen times a million. Look at the poverty stats here:
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty/

"During the first half of the last century, the growth of the world population caused the absolute number of poor people in the world to increase, even though the share of people in poverty was going down. After around 1970, the decrease in poverty rates became so steep that the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty started falling as well. This trend of decreasing poverty – both in absolute numbers and as a share of the world population – has been a constant during the last three decades."

Basically you can just scroll through and look at the graphs though. But then there's the section titled "The population in rich countries is largely unaware of the decline of global extreme poverty" which is pretty amazing.

House Republicans, led by Paul Ryan, have been trying to give President Donald Trump an outlet for his protectionist impulses while avoiding any increase in tariffs. They hit on a clever plan -- but on Thursday a series of remarks by Trump spokesman Sean Spicer and reports by journalists showed that it might have been too clever.

The House Republican idea is to cut the corporate-income tax to 20 percent and modify it. Crucially, the new corporate tax would have a feature in common with most of the value-added taxes (VATs) that other countries use: It would apply to imports but not exports. The idea is to tax all domestically consumed goods, whether those goods are produced here or abroad.

This “border adjusted” tax wouldn’t be a tariff, because it wouldn’t discriminate between imports and goods produced in America for Americans. It therefore wouldn’t bias a consumer’s choice between a domestically produced good and a competing import.

Some Republicans think that other countries’ VATs help to reduce their trade deficits and that we could reduce ours by adopting a border-adjusted tax. They are probably wrong about that: Most economists believe that when countries adopt such taxes, their currencies appreciate and their total imports and exports end up roughly unchanged. (How fast this happens is an open question.)

But since we import more than we export, applying taxes to imports but not to exports also raises money for the federal government. The economist Martin Feldstein estimates that border adjustment could raise $120 billion a year. That’s another reason House Republicans like it: They could use the revenue to offset some of the tax cuts they want to enact.

The best argument for border adjustment is that it is a way for free traders to tell Trump that they are going to discourage imports and encourage exports, while at the same time they avoid outright protectionism. That rationale depends on Trump’s not quite grasping what’s going on.

Problem number one with this plan is that Trump’s understanding of it is a little too poor. He recently said that border adjustment was “too complicated” and sounded as if it could be a “bad deal” -- sounding as if he thought it had something to do with international trade negotiations, when it is actually something Congress could simply legislate. But later he said it would be an option.