US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9647

On January 09 2018 20:26 Uldridge wrote:
If Trump would say: time to press the button, do you guys think it would actually go through?
I feel like it's completely unfathomable to have a global wipeout option at the disposal of a singular person, being able to decide for everyone on a whim.

On January 09 2018 20:39 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
All this talk about Oprah is asinine, also bet it is driving Clinton nuts.

With three strong hurricanes, wildfires, hail, flooding, tornadoes and drought, the United States tallied a record high bill last year for weather disasters: $306bn, according to a new government report released on Monday.

The US had 16 disasters last year with damage exceeding a billion dollars, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said. That ties 2011 for the number of billion-dollar disasters, but the total cost blew past the previous record of $215bn in 2005.

Costs are adjusted for inflation and Noaa keeps track of billion-dollar weather disasters going back to 1980.

Three of the five most expensive hurricanes in US history hit last year.
Hurricane Harvey cost $125bn, second only to 2005’s Katrina, while Maria cost $90bn, ranking third, Noaa said. Irma was $50bn, for the fifth most expensive hurricane. Western wildfires fanned by heat racked up $18bn in damage, triple the previous US wildfire record, according to Noaa.

“While we have to be careful about kneejerk cause-effect discussions, the National Academy of Science and recent peer-reviewed literature continue to show that some of today’s extremes have climate change fingerprints on them,” said University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd, a past president of the American Meteorological Society.

At least 362 people died in 2017 due to these natural disasters, the agency reported, including 64 killed in Puerto Rico. Outlets such as the New York Times and BuzzFeed have questioned the official death toll from the island, and estimated that Hurricane Maria has caused the deaths of about 1,000 people.

Noaa announced its figures at the society’s annual conference in Austin, Texas.
The weather agency also said that 2017 was the third hottest year in US records for the lower 48 states with an annual temperature of 54.6F (12.6C), 2.6 degrees warmer than the 20th-century average. Only 2012 and 2016 were warmer. The five warmest years for the lower 48 states have all happened since 2006.

This was the third straight year that all 50 states had above-average temperatures for the year.

Five states Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and New Mexico had their warmest year ever. Temperature records go back to 1895.

On January 09 2018 20:26 Uldridge wrote:
If Trump would say: time to press the button, do you guys think it would actually go through?
I feel like it's completely unfathomable to have a global wipeout option at the disposal of a singular person, being able to decide for everyone on a whim.

On January 09 2018 20:55 levelping wrote:


Maybe it shows that America is really very much burdened by a savoir complex.

IF ONLY X PERSON could come and SAVE us from Z PERSON!

Which is a bit weird because the founding fathers created institutions to limit the amount influence that one person can hold.

On January 09 2018 20:26 Uldridge wrote:
If Trump would say: time to press the button, do you guys think it would actually go through?
I feel like it's completely unfathomable to have a global wipeout option at the disposal of a singular person, being able to decide for everyone on a whim.

On January 09 2018 22:32 Biff The Understudy wrote:

I really hope this realtv show stops at one point. Running the country is serious business. Entertainers with 0 experience getting elected or even considered to that office is a really terrifying slope.

Until now Trump is a groteque anomaly and a weird monstrous child of anti elitism and anti intellectualism in the US. Let’s hope it’s not becoming the new norm.

In Indiana, Missouri and Pennsylvania, President Trump used the same promise to sell the tax bill: It would bring jobs streaming back to struggling cities and towns.

“Factories will be pouring into this country,” Mr. Trump told a crowd in St. Charles, Mo., in November. “The tax cut will mean more companies moving to America, staying in America and hiring American workers right here.”

The bill that Mr. Trump signed, however, could actually make it attractive for companies to put more assembly lines on foreign soil.

Under the new law, income made by American companies’ overseas subsidiaries will face United States taxes that are half the rate applied to their domestic income, 10.5 percent compared with the new top corporate rate of 21 percent.

“It’s sort of an America-last tax policy,” said Kimberly Clausing, an economist at Reed College in Portland, Ore., who studies tax policy. “We are basically saying that if you earn in the U.S., you pay X, and if you earn abroad, you pay X divided by two.”

What could be more dangerous for American workers, economists said, is that the bill ends up creating a tax break for manufacturers with foreign operations. Under the new rules, beyond the lower rate, companies will not have to pay United States taxes on the money they earn from plants or equipment located abroad, if those earnings amount to 10 percent or less of the total investment.

The Republican vision for the tax plan was to make the United States a more competitive place to do business. Supporters contend that the new rules do not encourage companies to locate overseas. Rather, they say, slashing the corporate rate will make it more attractive to set up shop at home, since many other advanced economies now have higher taxes.

And manufacturers do not simply follow their accountants’ advice. They consider taxes, but they also look at an array of other factors, including the local talent pool and transportation network, when deciding where to build a new plant.

Before the tax overhaul, companies had to pay the standard corporate tax on the money they earned abroad, with a top rate of 35 percent, but only when they brought that income back into the United States.

Many corporations responded by keeping their profits abroad indefinitely. A record $2.6 trillion was in offshore accounts as of 2015, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, a congressional panel. Republicans argued that the system deprived the American economy of investments that could have financed new ventures and hiring at home.

It also meant that many multinationals effectively paid no American tax on their overseas earnings. The new bill, supporters point out, will prevent that from happening on such a large scale in the future.

“It’s a vast improvement from what was on the books,” said Ray Beeman, a tax lawyer at Ernst & Young who worked on a tax reform proposal that was a precursor to the current law when he was counsel to the House Ways and Means Committee, under Republican leadership, from 2011 to 2014.

To prevent an exodus of businesses from the United States, the law establishes a minimum tax rate of 10.5 percent every year.

Companies will get credit for up to 80 percent of the taxes they pay to foreign governments. But if the total still comes to less than 10.5 percent of the income they earn abroad, they have to make up the difference with a check to the American government.

So while companies will now have to pay some tax in most cases, wherever they operate, they will pay much less on what they make abroad than at home.

“Having such a low rate on foreign income is outrageous,” said Stephen E. Shay, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and a Treasury Department official during the Reagan and Obama administrations. “It creates terrible incentives.”

Mr. Shay said the new rule could make a big difference for small and medium-size companies, which make up a vast majority of American businesses. When those companies used to ask him whether to open offices abroad, he advised against it if they needed to bring their cash home.

Such companies, Mr. Shay said, now have no reason to resist the temptation to shift some of their operations abroad, since they would end up paying half the rate they would pay in the United States.

Some companies may not want to leave the comforts of home for a cut in their tax bill. Plants are expensive — they can cost more than $1 billion to buy and to outfit with the necessary industrial machinery. Manufacturers also gravitate toward stable, affordable locales where they can reach their customers easily and hire skilled workers.

“You may prefer to stay in the U.S., with the protections of our legal system, our infrastructure and our labor force,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, an expert at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

On the other hand, for the biggest makers of cars and machines — the kinds of companies that Mr. Trump promised to lure back to the United States — a few percentage points in tax savings can be valuable.

“There are lots of great retail markets out there,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “The new rules might yet encourage jobs and factories to be shipped offshore.”

On January 09 2018 15:54 mozoku wrote:

This + Show Spoiler + whole line of reasoning is idiotic and can be applied pretty much by anyone to anyone they disagree with.

Not to mention, the statement at hand is not nearly as implausible as its made out to be. African Americans tend to be relatively poor. Poor people tend to abuse drugs at higher rates. Unemployment likely plays a role there. Some races (not necessarily blacks) appear to be more predisposed to alcohol addiction. Black culture's own role in explaining some of the African American community's struggles is, at the very least, debatable to the point where one shouldn't be necessarily ostracized for speaking of it.

The guy definitely isn't a paragon of intellectual virtue, but the statement isn't much more blatantly false than the median statement made by a politician either. Of course, it's taboo to associate race with any negative characteristics in this day and age, even if you acknowledge that the causal factors have little to nothing to do with skin color itself, so this one gets special attention.

President Donald Trump—who boasted over the weekend that his success in life was a result of “being, like, really smart”—communicates at the lowest grade level of the last 15 presidents, according to a new analysis of the speech patterns of presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.

The analysis assessed the first 30,000 words each president spoke in office, and ranked them on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale and more than two dozen other common tests analyzing English-language difficulty levels. Trump clocked in around mid-fourth grade, the worst since Harry Truman, who spoke at nearly a sixth-grade level.

At the top of the list were Hoover and Jimmy Carter, who were basically at an 11th-grade level, and President Barack Obama, in third place with a high ninth-grade level of communicating with the American people.

The Flesch-Kincaid scale was developed in 1975 for the U.S. Navy to assess the relative difficulty of training manuals biased on word length and sentence length. A database of Trump’s words, compiled by the incomparable factba.se, ran the comparative analysis yesterday, in response to the president’s claim that he is “a genius.”

On January 09 2018 19:08 levelping wrote:


Isn't the much bigger problem the narcissism and childlike petulance (with access to a nuclear button)? Why do you try to draw an equivalence between the behavior of the guy in charge, and how his opponents respond to him?

On January 10 2018 00:54 Danglars wrote:

Uhh ... you aren’t getting rid of Trump for the next three years and quick look at Trump from the 1080s to today shows he’s unlikely to change. Focus on problems you can fix? Calling him mentally unfit and subject to removal hurts the legitimate opposition.

On January 10 2018 00:59 brian wrote:

this’ll age well i’m certain. my money is on a resignation, personally.