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On November 17 2017 23:56 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On November 17 2017 23:48 Stratos_speAr wrote:On November 17 2017 23:32 Danglars wrote:
The long-term political impact is minimal for resignation. Wisconsin governor is a Democrat and simply appoints another Dem to finish his term. Hey. HEY. It's Minnesota. Dick. We're not Wisconsin. It is deeply offensive that he insinuated you folks would elect Scott walker.
I am waiting for the apology from Danglers and for the ethics investigation on if he should be expelled from this forum or not
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Scott Walker is the sun ripened garbage bag of garbage humans.
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On November 17 2017 23:58 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Show nested quote +Senior White House adviser and son-in-law to the president, Jared Kushner, failed to hand over to Senate investigators emails concerning contacts with WikiLeaks and a "Russian backdoor overture," according to a letter sent by two senior lawmakers.
The letter, released Thursday by Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and its ranking Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, says Kushner failed to turn over "September 2016 email communications to Mr. Kushner concerning WikiLeaks" and other emails pertaining to a "Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite."
The lawmakers said they were seeking the documents that were "known to exist" from other witnesses in the investigation.
"We appreciate your voluntary cooperation with the committee's investigation, but the production appears to have been incomplete," the letter, sent to Kushner's attorney, Abbe Lowell, said. "It appears your search may have overlooked several documents."
Those overlooked documents also included unspecified phone records, according to The New York Times.
In a statement on Thursday, Lowell said he and his client had provided the committee "with all relevant documents that had to do with Mr. Kushner's calls, contacts or meetings with Russians during the campaign and transition, which was the request."
"We also informed the committee we will be open to responding to any additional requests and that we will continue to work with White House Counsel for any responsive documents from after the inauguration," Lowell said.
The WikiLeaks emails from September 2016 would coincide with Twitter messages exchanged between the radical transparency organization and Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son. U.S. officials believe that WikiLeaks acted as a conduit for emails from the Democratic National Committee and senior Democratic officials that were hacked by Russia.
The Trump administration has repeatedly denied collusion with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 elections. And less than a month before the election, then-candidate Mike Pence, during an interview on Fox News, specifically denied any contacts between WikiLeaks and the campaign.
The revelation of undisclosed emails comes on the same day that The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, reports that special counsel Robert Mueller issued a subpoena last month "requesting Russia-related documents from more than a dozen top officials." Source
I find it deeply disturbing that Wikileaks would initiate contact with the Trump campaign themselves. That doesn't seem right in the slightest.
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Wikileaks has pretty much proven they are in it for themselves and to do the bidding of whoever will give them money. The whole “free information and transparency” marketing ploy worked for a while, but people have their number now. You won’t see them outing the abuses of Russian oligarchs any time soon.
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After all the nice things Trump said about the WikiLeaks releases... I’d be surprised if they didn’t try to curry favor.
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So has anyone else been seeing this argument pop up for getting rid of SALT
"Big liberal states are being subsidized by smaller states by paying less in federal taxes so I am happy to see it gone"
I don't get it, almost every big state pays more to the fed than it revives (I think NY is right on the cusp) so how does this argument make sense.
Danglers, xDaunt?
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As a home owner in one of those states, I’m super not excited that our property tax will no longer be a deduction.
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Interesting that Mueller issued a subpoena to "a dozen top officials" for Russia related documents. So he was able to convince a grand jury to issue that subpoena. Does mean that he has something more than nothing on them.
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On November 18 2017 00:44 Plansix wrote:
As a home owner in one of those states, I’m super not excited that our property tax will no longer be a deduction.
As someone who just pays taxes in those states, I am not happy either.
One question I have is how are republicans in those states supposed to run now? We raised your taxes, vote for us?
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On November 18 2017 00:40 IyMoon wrote:
So has anyone else been seeing this argument pop up for getting rid of SALT
"Big liberal states are being subsidized by smaller states by paying less in federal taxes so I am happy to see it gone"
I don't get it, almost every big state pays more to the fed than it revives (I think NY is right on the cusp) so how does this argument make sense.
Danglers, xDaunt?
Translation: The Liberal States will need to pay more to support the Welfare States i.e. Mississippi, Louisiana etc.
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Norway28704 Posts
I dunno I get that it feels like rewarding the states that voted republican but as someone who favors progressive taxes as a means of redistribution I can't really be opposed to taxing wealthier states more to give more benefits to the poorer ones. Seems inconsistent.
The problem of course is that so is the tax plan. It might have some aspect of redistribution between states but it doesn't seem to really deal with wealth inequality as a general problem.
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On November 18 2017 00:59 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I dunno I get that it feels like rewarding the states that voted republican but as someone who favors progressive taxes as a means of redistribution I can't really be opposed to taxing wealthier states more to give more benefits to the poorer ones. Seems inconsistent.
The problem of course is that so is the tax plan. It might have some aspect of redistribution between states but it doesn't seem to really deal with wealth inequality as a general problem.
And I would agree with you if those poorer states were trying to get out of poverty instead of shouting 'coal is the future'.
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Any "big liberal states get favoritism at the federal level" nonsense requires that a believing audience know nothing substantive about how successful conservatives have been in terms of keeping federal schemes non-coercive relative to states/localities. The Supreme Court's 2012 ACA Medicaid Expansion decision is one among a long line of 5-4 partisan decisions that significantly impact federal statutory efficacy. This highly arbitrary line-drawing in terms of federal power arguably starts with Edelman v. Jordan/Milliken v. Bradley, though the sentiment certainly stretches back and takes on different forms depending on the era. Back in the Lochner Era, state governments, especially those in the west, were the ones carrying the torch in terms of progressive and robust regulation, especially in the workplace; the conservative Supreme Court conjured up some pretty fucked up proto-Randian freedom of contract bullshit that stifled the majority of these laws until FDR had had enough.
At the end of the day, the point is that conservatives have long been fighting for the rights of state governments that do not want to provide services to their poor, elderly, disabled, or the otherwise misfortunate. Thus, both the federal statutes themselves and the jurisprudence that interprets them have carved out this lopsided situation where the successful, service-giving states end up consuming proportionately less from the feds while the poorly run red states that do everything in their power to reduce budgets and cut services end up relying on federal dollars to a far greater extent. All of the incentives are fucked.
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On November 18 2017 00:59 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I dunno I get that it feels like rewarding the states that voted republican but as someone who favors progressive taxes as a means of redistribution I can't really be opposed to taxing wealthier states more to give more benefits to the poorer ones. Seems inconsistent.
The problem of course is that so is the tax plan. It might have some aspect of redistribution between states but it doesn't seem to really deal with wealth inequality as a general problem.
But larger states already do this. (And some smaller states, looking at you Utah) Every state that pays more than it gets is redistributing some of its wealth to others.
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On November 18 2017 00:59 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I dunno I get that it feels like rewarding the states that voted republican but as someone who favors progressive taxes as a means of redistribution I can't really be opposed to taxing wealthier states more to give more benefits to the poorer ones. Seems inconsistent.
The problem of course is that so is the tax plan. It might have some aspect of redistribution between states but it doesn't seem to really deal with wealth inequality as a general problem.
I have no problem paying more taxes for better services. This is more taxes for less services that expire in like 5-7 years. I liked not having to pay federal taxes on that 7 grand in property taxes. It was cool.
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It also won't change anything on the State level. Mississippi with more federal revenue won't all of a sudden fix their crumbling roads and highways(literally if you have ever driven through the state), or even use funds to diversify their economy.
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On November 17 2017 23:48 Stratos_speAr wrote:Hey. HEY. It's Minnesota. Dick. We're not Wisconsin.
Sorry, Minnesota 
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On November 17 2017 10:24 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On November 17 2017 10:13 Danglars wrote:On November 17 2017 08:35 xDaunt wrote:On November 17 2017 08:30 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 17 2017 08:25 xDaunt wrote:On November 17 2017 08:20 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 17 2017 08:17 xDaunt wrote:On November 17 2017 08:16 TheTenthDoc wrote:On November 17 2017 08:14 xDaunt wrote:On November 17 2017 08:11 TheTenthDoc wrote:
[quote]
No. I just thinking letting the market have such a large role in allocation of healthcare, which is saying we think it's as reasonable for rich people to live longer than poor people as it is for rich people to own better cars, is morally abominable when there are non-market solutions.
(I also pray we never give unlimited healthcare to everyone, because that's a horrible thing to do to humans) And you understand that even under "non-market solutions," care is still rationed -- meaning that lots of people will be denied care that they desire or even need to live -- right? I don't care about rationing as long as it's not based upon money in your bank account. It's not like food rationing is evil when there are limited food supplies. By having a market, you ration based upon wealth. That's what a market is. So are you opposed to having a system where a basic level of coverage is provided to everyone and then individuals have the right to buy additional coverage if they choose? The first public the second private is what some folks have been saying for a long time. But that also means everyone pays according to their ability. Right, I'm one of the people that has long advocated for this kind of solution. I think that the dumbest thing that republicans have done is refuse to create this kind of system on their own terms before democrats get around to doing it. If they do it right, they can create a system that appropriate limits the public baseline coverage thereby creating something that is fundamentally the type of free market system that they purport to want so badly. But like I have pointed out numerous times, republicans and conservatives are completely ass-backwards on healthcare. Still hoping to hear your other ideas on addressing wealth disparities that typical conservatives don't have besides socializing healthcare. Right now it seems like you accused other conservatives of not having something you also don't have. I've known you supported socialized healthcare for a while, I want to know what else you got. Healthcare is my major heresy. I'm also in favor of the estate tax. As for other big policy ideas, that gets a little tougher. What separates me from many conservatives is that I recognize gross wealth disparity as a problem that should be addressed. I haven't really decided what I would do about it yet, though. Heretic I'll take someone that can identify and prosecute all the major problems with Obamacare, as well as appear sympathetic that its real purpose was to destroy the American insurance system, compared to the blind that move from bad to bad. Big tent. I lost the xDaunt quote but this is sort of to both of you anyway. Show nested quote +On November 14 2017 22:57 xDaunt wrote:On November 14 2017 15:54 IgnE wrote:On November 14 2017 15:50 a_flayer wrote:On November 14 2017 14:23 Kyadytim wrote:On November 14 2017 13:41 mozoku wrote:On November 14 2017 11:38 Kyadytim wrote:On November 14 2017 10:42 Falling wrote:On November 14 2017 07:19 Kyadytim wrote:On November 14 2017 05:17 Falling wrote:
[quote]
Right here, right now. It's called job specialization. I work at a particular job, but I can't be bothered to fix my own car, so I pay someone else to do so. I gain because I don't have time to learn to fix my car (not have I invested in all the tools needed), and so I benefit from his labour. I'm salaried, so my potential earnings is limited unless I hustle on the side. But if that mechanic does well and is able to hire a bunch of journeymen mechanics and/or apprentices and double the income that I make, hell if he makes ten times what I make, I still haven't lost anything. I still get my car fixed, freeing up my time to do something else. And he gets my money, plus a bunch of other customer's money. And the journeymen mechanics are gainfully employed and may well strike out on their own if they are sufficiently enterprising. There's no loss to me, if I get what I want for a reasonable price, and they got rich. I got what I wanted, and I can focus my labour elsewhere. It's all very nice looking at the relationship between two laborers, but how about the relationship between you and your employer? If your employer starts giving you 10 more hours of work a week with no compensation, that's fine because value is still being created? I'd call that your employer generating value at your expense. Well, I teach, so it's not so much that I'm given more hours, so much as I take on more hours. But the public will never want to pay sufficient money to compensate my out of class hours, even if I am (as I am currently) coaching two volleyball teams and am the athletic director on top of full time teaching. But teaching is weird in that it relies upon tax money, in full or in part, so it isn't exactly free market (even our private schools have 50% government funding for the students, though nothing for capital expenses). Salaried work is weird in general, as I suppose it is more open to abuse from an employer. On the other hand, if I didn't like working those extra hours without pay, I could find some other job that paid hourly. I certainly wouldn't have double coached (in the same season) any other sport other than volleyball. But I enjoy it, so I do it- no one else was going to. That was more of a generic "you." I believe technically I should have written "one and one's employer," but that just sounds strange. But yeah, my problem with capitalism isn't the relationship between workers, or between workers and government. It's the relationship between workers and capital, the latter of which is largely represented by large corporations these days. With all the overtime exemptions, salaried work is open to abuse from employers. Of course, hourly work can result in stuff like McDonald's budget advice for its employees that made the rounds a while back. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/mcdonalds-sample-budget-sheet-is-laughable-but-its-implications-are-not-cm261920Basically, the reality is that most people can't change jobs easily, and employers leverage this into things such as squeezing more work out of salaried employees or squeezing hourly wages down. When people are working at minimum wage, wealth is generated, and both the employees and employers get some of it, but the employees are getting so little that they can't actually live on it. My original comment is that capitalism is how the employers (the large corporations and the people who benefit the most from their behavior) morally justify the situation where a significant portion of Americans don't have the option of exchanging their labor for what it's really worth, much less the option of gaining some share of the value their labor creates when they're part of a larger organization. The alternative, that human labor is not actually worth enough for a human to live on, has implications that I'm pretty sure this thread has discussed already in the form of discussing UBI. If your labor is actually worth more than you're being paid for, you really shouldn't have much trouble switching employers or roles... managers hate losing hard-to-replace employees as much as employees hate managers treating them poorly--remember, in most workplace scenarios your manager has their manager is who is expecting them to deliver results. Pushing out underpaid employees means you're probably going to have to hire a properly paid one to replace him (i.e. is not in your manager's interest), and the new hire search plus ramp-up process makes it harder for the manager to meet their own goals. The places that consistently "mistreat" employees (rather than merely have poor managers) usually make up for it with higher pay, and that's true all along the salary scale. At the low end, Amazon works its warehouse employees notoriously hard, but they also pay better than the competition for similarly credentialed employees. My wife went to a very competitive business school for her MBA, and the same dynamic is true there too--even though the pay is much higher for employees in that pool. Investment banks and big name consulting firms pay the best, but make you work/travel for 70+ hours/wk. Corporate management positions generally pay less, but give better work/life balance. I'm simplifying things a bit, but the rule is generally true. You should generally know what you're getting yourself into when you're hired. In cases where a manager suddenly changes hours (or other) expectations without an accompanying pay bump, it's more likely to be a symptom of incompetent management (or unfortunate market conditions maybe) trying to save its ass than something fundamentally wrong with capitalism, and it's not like switching to a communist society fixes either of those problems. In China for example, the non-market sectors are often run by production targets set by the government. When the targets aren't being met, what do you think happens? Often, the managers grind their employees to work more hours. It's really not any different than what happens here. Management errors (e.g. unrealistic targets in this case but there's a million ways to be a poor manager) are more often than not going to get pushed down the hierarchy. It's just human nature unfortunately. At least a market system has a mechanism to punish bad managers (i.e. failure) instead subsidizing it until the government reforms or collapses (which takes much longer and is much less desirable for a government than it is for a private company). I guess I wasn't clear enough. I am stating that either all minimum wage employees are paid less per hour than their labor is actually worth, or the value of basic human labor has fallen below the cost of living. As for places that mistreat their employees, there's a sliding scale from how EA used to treat its software developers to how Google treats its software developers. For salaried positions, basically, if it's easier for the employer to replace the worker than it is for the worker to find a new job, the employer can in some fashion abuse the worker. Someone discussed this a while back (probably thousands of pages now), but in the pressure between what the employer wants and what the employee wants, what is at stake for companies over 100 employees is in no way comparable to what is at stake for the employee. Many companies can afford to have an employee quit and not replace them for six months. Most workers can't afford to spend six months out of work without unemployment insurance, which they usually don't get for quitting. This gives the employer a lot of advantages when it comes to failing to give an employee a raise or dumping some extra work on an employee and basically saying "suck it up, you can't afford to quit right now." This isn't even getting into companies like Uber, which are basically doing an end run around all sorts of employee protections by pushing all of the operating costs and risks on the workers. Income inequality is at Gilded Age levels. Last time this happened, workers literally ended up fighting a small scale war against employers to gain the rights that have since been slowly eroded as large corporations have lobbied for things like the overtime exemptions or found ways to avoid having to treat employees properly. Capitalism these days is used as a moral justification for the way in which worker rights have been eroded and worker pay has been ground down. The tl;dr here is that people are using the idea that unfettered capitalism and the results thereof is a good unto itself to provide moral standing for levels of inequality and the naturally following ill treatment of the lower class which people gave their lives fighting against a hundred and forty years ago. Given that capitalism has now led us to this point in our history for the second time in under 150 years, I'm arguing that capitalism as a concept is how the successful selfish convince the rest of society to accept exploitation. There is absolutely no point in talking to people like mozoku. They will always repeat the same nonsense in response to what you're saying. Market this, market that, etc. They refuse to acknowledge the imbalances and the reality that many people live in. I'd probably have a conversation in person with mozoku. It just takes too much effort in a forum context because he's basically uneducated. The biggest problem that I have with traditional stock conservatives and economic libertarians is their inability to articulate a solution for growing income inequality and uneven wealth distribution. When you push them, their answer is typically that these things aren't problems at all. Such a position is patently untenable due to the obvious social and political implications. I guess my question to Danglars where are you on this? @xDaunt I think we're going to need to help move Danglars somewhere along the line of "not a problem" toward embracing an estate tax, supporting socialized medicine, and perhaps some of these other ideas waiting to be fleshed out.
I'm more interested in the living standards of the poor than economic inequality. Inequality assumes if the poor are doing well and have first-world living standards, perhaps even through government assistance programs, but the rich are just increasing their money at crazy rates, inequality goes up and we have to be worried. I say that is poppycock.
I want policies that increase jobs available and temporary economic assistance to families that have lost their jobs with subsidized job training programs/adult education.
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Norway28704 Posts
On November 18 2017 01:03 IyMoon wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2017 00:59 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I dunno I get that it feels like rewarding the states that voted republican but as someone who favors progressive taxes as a means of redistribution I can't really be opposed to taxing wealthier states more to give more benefits to the poorer ones. Seems inconsistent.
The problem of course is that so is the tax plan. It might have some aspect of redistribution between states but it doesn't seem to really deal with wealth inequality as a general problem. But larger states already do this. (And some smaller states, looking at you Utah) Every state that pays more than it gets is redistributing some of its wealth to others.
Yeah, but some redistribution already occurring isn't in my opinion a valid argument against more redistribution. Like don't get me wrong, I am not at all defending the GOP tax plan. It's nothing like the type of policies I myself favor. I also think there's a legitimate chance that Trump is the kind of quid por quo type of jerk who would do this because he wants to reward states that voted for him. But some of the arguments I'm reading have this air of being the democrat version of 'what's the point with spending more money on the inner cities when the recipients are just gonna spend it on drugs' to them. The principle of richer states giving more money to poorer states is what I am defending.
It's kinda like Norwegian leftists being anti-EU because that's best for Norway without acknowledging that one of the great benefits of the EU has been increasing living standards for the newer eastern european member states.
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On November 17 2017 23:59 IyMoon wrote:Show nested quote +On November 17 2017 23:56 Plansix wrote:On November 17 2017 23:48 Stratos_speAr wrote:Hey. HEY. It's Minnesota. Dick. We're not Wisconsin. It is deeply offensive that he insinuated you folks would elect Scott walker. I am waiting for the apology from Danglers and for the ethics investigation on if he should be expelled from this forum or not
Apology from Who? lol
If you meant to say my name, I'm sorry to have accidentally implied that Minnesota had a great governor like Walker.
Really, there's too much Paul Ryan on my mind as I hope he takes measures to combat all this sexual misconduct in his chamber.
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