US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7514

To justify his executive orders nullifying policies protecting people from climate change, hazardous working conditions and persecution because of their religion or citizenship status, President Donald Trump during a Feb. 16 press conference said: "To be honest, I inherited a mess. It's a mess. Jobs are pouring out of the country." He later told the Conservative Political Action Conference that regulations are "crushing our economy."

That's a claim worth exploring. Look at California, which is one-eighth of the U.S. population with 39 million people and one-seventh of the nation's gross domestic product of $2.3 trillion. Far from being a mess, California's economy is bigger than ever, rivaling the U.K. as No. 5 in the world, when figures for 2016 are officially tabulated.

California is the chief reason America is the only developed economy to achieve record GDP growth since the financial crisis of 2008 and ensuing global recession, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Much of the U.S. growth can be traced to California laws promoting clean energy, government accountability and protections for undocumented people. Governor Jerry Brown, now in his fourth term, considers immigrants a major reason for the state's success: "39 percent of us are Latino and the majority are from Mexico," he said in a March 2 interview in his Sacramento office.

In the stock and bond markets, where investors show no allegiance to political parties, California has outperformed the rest of the U.S. the past five years, especially since the Nov. 9 election, when Trump became the fifth person to win the Electoral College and lose the popular vote. California's creditworthiness keeps getting better, measured by the declining premium global investors must pay to ensure against depreciation of the state's debt obligations. That premium has diminished more than for any other state since 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. California, whose voters favored Hillary Clinton two to one, outperformed Treasury bonds since the November election. Texas, which is the second-largest state in population and which supported Trump, became cheaper compared to Treasuries and California in the market for state and local debt since the November election. Investors see security in the state with more protections for immigrants and more regulations.

California's borrowing cost is 0.15 percentage points lower than the average for states and municipalities and has declined to just 0.24 percentage points more than the U.S. pays on its debt, down from 1.97 percentage points in 2013.

At the same time, bonds sold by California's municipalities produced a total return of 2.3 percent since November, outperforming the benchmark for the U.S., according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The growing popularity of bonds sold by California issuers is a consequence of the state's more rigorous regulation of the market, specifically legislation signed by Brown last year, creating greater transparency and accountability for issuers of California debt.

No state or country has created as many laws discouraging fossil fuels and carbon while promoting clean energy. That convergence of policy and voter preference is paying off in the stock market.

California is home to 20 of the 130 companies in North America and South America that meet the standard classification of clean energy. These 20 companies produced a total return of 45 percent during the past 12 months, beating the clean energy benchmark's 13 percent, the S&P 500's 19 percent and the S&P 500 Energy Index's 6 percent.

California clean energy companies reported annual revenue growth of 26 percent, almost three times the benchmark, and they turned more revenue into profit with an average gross margin of 46 percent, compared to 41 percent for the benchmark. California companies also spent 13 percent of their revenue on research and development compared to 8 percent for the benchmark. Jobs at clean energy companies in California increased 14 percent last year, double the average rate for the industry. Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg say these 20 stocks will gain only 1 percent during the next 12 months, because they achieved their target valuations much sooner than predicted. Tesla Inc., the Palo Alto-based manufacturer of electric vehicles, appreciated 60 percent since Trump's election and is now worth more than $50 billion, greater than Ford Motor Co.'s $45 billion market capitalization and almost as much as General Motors Co.

"We have a goal of a million and a half electric vehicles by 2025 and that's quite a steep curve to get there," Brown said in the interview in March. "No matter what Trump says, China, the world, the academies of science and all the major countries have all recognized climate change. Certainly, businesses acknowledge they have to make these investments. California is well on its way."

Technology driving the clean energy boom is the reason California companies lead most of their peers in U.S. The 467 California-based firms in the Russell 3000 Index produced a total return of 185 percent since 2012, easily surpassing the 94 percent for the index, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Analysts also are more bullish on companies in California than the rest of the U.S., predicting a 12-month average total return 12 percent (income plus appreciation) versus 9 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Behind such a favorable outlook is the diversity of the California economy, which grew $42.3 billion during the first three quarters last year. That's almost as much as the next two fastest-growing states, New York and Florida, combined.

California's revenue from agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting totaled $39 billion in 2015, plus $279 billion from manufacturing. The trailing 12-month revenue from California technology companies is $720 billion, or 54 percent of the U.S. industry, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The capitalist juggernaut that is California helps explain why the state's per capita income increased 9.5 percent since 2015, the most of any state and the most since 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Far from losing jobs overseas, California keeps creating them with an unemployment rate declining to 4.9 percent from 5.7 percent in 2016, faster than the national average.

On May 13 2017 00:18 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Hence they either don't know or they do know and don't wish to be subpoenaed.

https://twitter.com/davidjoachim/status/863048438317019136

On May 12 2017 23:49 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Is there a legitimate cause for impeachment proceedings to begin yet? Or are we waiting for something bigger than what has surfaced thus far?

On May 13 2017 00:27 Mohdoo wrote:


I think we've seen this a lot in this thread, most notably from Danglars and xDaunt. Both of them had this slow, bizarre adoption of Trump. If you look at their posts before Trump was dominant, its like some kinda split personality disorder. People who are already susceptible to this kind of thinking by a life of participation in religious institutions are particularly vulnerable, since appeals to authority and faith play a big role in unconditional support of your leader or the person fighting against "the bad guys".

Its sometimes easy to forget just what kind of mental gymnastics is required to think stuff in the bible is actually true. I think those of us who don't participate in organized religion have already worked through "yeah, its weird, believe just kind of actually think that's true" when we were younger, but it is worth looking at. When someone says they think the bible has a shred of credibility or what have you, there are some interesting mental processes taking place.

Cognitive Dissonance: The Engine of Self-justification

It's fascinating, and sometimes funny, to read doomsday predictions, but it's even more fascinating to watch what happens to the reasoning of true believers when the prediction flops and the world keeps muddling along. Notice that hardly anyone ever says, "I blew it! I can't believe how stupid I was to believe that nonsense"? On the contrary, most of the time they become even more deeply convinced of their powers of prediction. The people who believe that the Bible's book of Revelation or the writings of the sixteenth-century self-proclaimed prophet Nostradamus have predicted every disaster from the bubonic plague to 9/11 cling to their convictions, unfazed by the small problem that their vague and murky predictions were intelligible only after the event occurred.

Half a century ago, a young social psychologist named Leon Festinger and two associates infiltrated a group of people who believed the world would end on December 21. They wanted to know what would happen to the group when (they hoped!) the prophecy failed. The group's leader, whom the researchers called Marian Keech, promised that the faithful would be picked up by a flying saucer and elevated to safety at midnight on December 20. Many of her followers quit their jobs, gave away their homes, and dispersed their savings, waiting for the end. Who needs money in outer space? Others waited in fear or resignation in their homes. (Mrs. Keech's own husband, a nonbeliever, went to bed early and slept soundly through the night as his wife and her followers prayed in the living room.) Festinger made his own prediction: The believers who had not made a strong commitment to the prophecy—who awaited the end of the world by themselves at home, hoping they weren't going to die at midnight—would quietly lose their faith in Mrs. Keech. But those who had given away their possessions and were waiting with the others for the spaceship would increase their belief in her mystical abilities. In fact, they would now do everything they could to get others to join them.

At midnight, with no sign of a spaceship in the yard, the group felt a little nervous. By 2 a.m., they were getting seriously worried. At 4:45 a.m., Mrs. Keech had a new vision: The world had been spared, she said, because of the impressive faith of her little band. "And mighty is the word of God," she told her followers, "and by his word have ye been saved—for from the mouth of death have ye been delivered and at no time has there been such a force loosed upon the Earth. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room."

The group's mood shifted from despair to exhilaration. Many of the group's members, who had not felt the need to proselytize before December 21, began calling the press to report the miracle, and soon they were out on the streets, buttonholing passersby, trying to convert them. Mrs. Keech's prediction had failed, but not Leon Festinger's.

***

The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions — especially the wrong ones — is an unpleasant feeling that Festinger called "cognitive dissonance." Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as "Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me" and "I smoke two packs a day." Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don't rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. In this example, the most direct way for a smoker to reduce dissonance is by quitting. But if she has tried to quit and failed, now she must reduce dissonance by convincing herself that smoking isn't really so harmful, or that smoking is worth the risk because it helps her relax or prevents her from gaining weight (and after all, obesity is a health risk, too), and so on. Most smokers manage to reduce dissonance in many such ingenious, if self-deluding, ways.

Dissonance is disquieting because to hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity and, as Albert Camus observed, we humans are creatures who spend our lives trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd. At the heart of it, Festinger's theory is about how people strive to make sense out of contradictory ideas and lead lives that are, at least in their own minds, consistent and meaningful. The theory inspired more than 3,000 experiments that, taken together, have transformed psychologists' understanding of how the human mind works. Cognitive dissonance has even escaped academia and entered popular culture. The term is everywhere. The two of us have heard it in TV newscasts, political columns, magazine articles, bumper stickers, even on a soap opera. Alex Trebek used it on Jeopardy, Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, and President Bartlet on The West Wing. Although the expression has been thrown around a lot, few people fully understand its meaning or appreciate its enormous motivational power.

In 1956, one of us (Elliot) arrived at Stanford University as a graduate student in psychology. Festinger had arrived that same year as a young professor, and they immediately began working together, designing experiments to test and expand dissonance theory. Their thinking challenged many notions that were gospel in psychology and among the general public, such as the behaviorist's view that people do things primarily for the rewards they bring, the economist's view that human beings generally make rational decisions, and the psychoanalyst's view that acting aggressively gets rid of aggressive impulses.

Consider how dissonance theory challenged behaviorism. At the time, most scientific psychologists were convinced that people's actions are governed by reward and punishment. It is certainly true that if you feed a rat at the end of a maze, he will learn the maze faster than if you don't feed him; if you give your dog a biscuit when she gives you her paw, she will learn that trick faster than if you sit around hoping she will do it on her own. Conversely, if you punish your pup when you catch her peeing on the carpet, she will soon stop doing it. Behaviorists further argued that anything that was merely associated with reward would become more attractive — your puppy will like you because you give her biscuits — and anything associated with pain would become noxious and undesirable.

Behavioral laws do apply to human beings, too, of course; no one would stay in a boring job without pay, and if you give your toddler a cookie to stop him from having a tantrum, you have taught him to have another tantrum when he wants a cookie. But, for better or worse, the human mind is more complex than the brain of a rat or a puppy. A dog may appear contrite for having been caught peeing on the carpet, but she will not try to think up justifications for her misbehavior. Humans think; and because we think, dissonance theory demonstrated that our behavior transcends the effects of rewards and punishments and often contradicts them.

For example, Elliot predicted that if people go through a great deal of pain, discomfort, effort, or embarrassment to get something, they will be happier with that "something" than if it came to them easily. For behaviorists, this was a preposterous prediction. Why would people like anything associated with pain? But for Elliot, the answer was obvious: self-justification. The cognition that I am a sensible, competent person is dissonant with the cognition that I went through a painful procedure to achieve something — say, joining a group that turned out to be boring and worthless. Therefore, I would distort my perceptions of the group in a positive direction, trying to find good things about them and ignoring the downside.

On May 13 2017 00:27 Danglars wrote:

The standard is treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice. We don't have any evidence of obstruction of justice. Treason is very narrowly defined in the constitution. I don't know of any other high crimes and misdemeanors people allege with cause. It's mostly accusations of unethical or improper behavior without criminality.

On May 13 2017 00:33 Trainrunnef wrote:


Its probably more about confirmation bias, loyalty, and pride than any of the brainwashing or other stuff that you mentioned. No one likes to admit they are wrong or picked the wrong person and no one wants to look like a fair-weather fan.

EDIT: its the same thing for democrats and republicans alike, so i dont think the distinction is fair.

On May 13 2017 00:49 Uldridge wrote:
So a lot in politics (shaping society) has to do with the self fulfilling prophecy, interesting.
Also, is there any possible way of discerning if the current American economy is better or not? And if so, is it actually better?

On May 13 2017 00:49 Uldridge wrote:
So a lot in politics (shaping society) has to do with the self fulfilling prophecy, interesting.
Also, is there any possible way of discerning if the current American economy is better or not? And if so, is it actually better?

On May 13 2017 00:36 Doodsmack wrote:


I can see the beginnings of an argument for obstruction of justice, because Trump is linking Comey's televised testimony regarding the Russia investigation to his decision to fire him. Sarah Sanders then goes to the podium and says that removing Comey is part of bringing the Russia investigation to a close "with integrity". And Trump discusses the investigation in his letter firing Comey. They are treading a fine line here.

On May 12 2017 21:57 Yurie wrote:
Been listening to the History of Rome podcast and it is striking how often the best sources they have is statues and inscriptions on buildings. They have something akin to 0 accurate documents about some emperors but statues and inscriptions allows piecing together their actions.

That is something worth learning from. Permanency of history for the future isn't something to ignore, they can't learn from history if it is gone.

On May 13 2017 01:08 KwarK wrote:

That's an absurd comparison and you should feel bad for making it. You don't need to put a statue on a pedestal to record information in the present day, we're not an illiterate society and there aren't barbarians sacking our cities.

A lot of our records from Ptolemaic Egypt come from a rubbish heap in Oxyrhynchus yet you wouldn't argue that it's important that we start dumping books in a hole in the ground in Oxyrhynchus to ensure that our descendants know the tragedy of Bella and Edward.

On May 13 2017 01:00 Danglars wrote:

You may question his decision for firing him or his motives, but there's absolutely nothing obstructed. Comey is not the investigation into Russia's influence on the election, Comey serves at the pleasure of the President of the United States. There's no fine line on the criminality; nothing serious has been alleged. No amount of twisting what Sanders said will change it.