US Politics Mega-Blog - Page 118

On December 30 2018 05:49 IgnE wrote:
in what sense is it a half-measure? because it is not total revolution?

bernie is also a half-measure in that sense. i better not see you stumping for anyone in a year or so if your position is revolution or nothing.

my whole point is that her reform bill does seem good for us. and by us i mean everyone fed up with Congress, on the left, in the midde, and even on the right.

disclaimer: at least it seems good on its surface, i havent dived into every detail

On December 30 2018 10:58 IgnE wrote:
well, because the future is not determined

On December 30 2018 11:14 IgnE wrote:
i mean look, dude, i don't understand this fatalism. you still argue for bernie's proposals which are arguably even more dead in the water. i'm simply asking for some consistency and applied thought rather than this simple assortment of ideas and people (i.e. anything pelosi touches = bad).

or to put it another way, i want you to stop having it both ways. stop talking about a dead in the water revolution if you've already given up on other, more actionable, good things that look unlikely.

On December 30 2018 12:58 IgnE wrote:
Well we can look at the text of the bill right? Have you looked?

Is she always a dishonest actor? Do her intentions even matter to the substance of the bill?

On December 30 2018 14:29 IgnE wrote:
what's radlib? i just think it's a little passé to be so jaded. either you support things that work towards your goals of improving democracy (i mean we still agree on democracy right?) or you stop talking about US politics altogether. obviously mitch mcconell is a piece of shit with the rest of the republicans in the senate, but if you have a political will to try anything here, this seems like a good start, and who knows.

On December 30 2018 15:54 IgnE wrote:
is communism not democratic?

On December 30 2018 16:19 GreenHorizons wrote:


This still feels Socratic. If that's what you're doing you can say so and I can be less confused and and give better answers.

It is. But I'm sure you're aware that "democracy" as articulated in the US amounts to a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie which stands in antithesis of "democracy" as I would use it, aka a dictatorship of the proletariat via democratic centralism.

On December 30 2018 18:30 iamthedave wrote:


Moving outside US Politics for a second, how do you feel about some of the European models? Not the UK's - we're probably in an even worse state than you lot right now - but maybe Sweden or one of the other successful leftish EU nations. Are their governments more suitable in your mind, or are those lacking critically as well?

I do worry that your absolute fatalism concerning US Politics makes this discussion a difficult one to have. You don't seem willing to countenance much other than total revolution and have given up on the idea of reform coming from anywhere.

On December 30 2018 22:07 Nouar wrote:

I can chip in on that about France's model. I kind of like it. Campaign contributions are strictly controlled, there is a hard cap on spending (if you want to get anything reimbursed by the state), and a hard cap on giving as well. Nothing like superPACs exist, and TV time is strictly enforced between candidates, regardless of money. There have been people trying to go around that, they have been busted mostly, and/or the amounts were pretty low (<1M).

I was pretty hopeful when people elected someone who wanted to change things last year, however it got down the drain pretty fast since French people don't actually want anything to change, as most voters do in the world. Just we are even worse than usual xD.
I have no qualms about the system itself though, I'd like more proportionality for the congress (even if it would mean more far-right senators :-/ )

It's just that overall in a democracy, electors will vote for what's best for them, not what's best for the world. And if any country tries to pull the sheet to itself, why should WE take the damage and lose money and standing among others, to save the planet, if others don't do it ? And they don't even get what they voted for, since despite endless lies, they still trust what politicians say anyway during elections ! Even if it's unrealistic, as not everyone can do the math to see if things are possible or bullshit. (and it's getting worse with "but i've seen it on facebook so it must be true !!!").
I'll stop there, I'm digressing.

In France, corporations try to control congress, it's somewhat successful but not too much. They do control it at the european level, sadly. They do not, however, control elections, candidates and funding.
I'd advise for counting blank votes in the main percentages, and redo the election if needed, so our politicians realize they are out of the loop. It's probably not going to happen though.

About the welfare state economy we have, it's not working too bad, however the difference between the minimum salary (where you get very little benefits) and not working while getting the benefits is only a few hundreds euros, which is not sufficient as an incentive to work for lazy people. French are pretty reluctant to take ANY job, even if their field is bloated. There have been some attempts to give a bit more money to people at minimum wage, it's... okay but still insufficient and only moves the problem slightly up the ladder, angering lower-middle class people, feeling their skills are worth nearly nothing.
Everyone pretty much loves the welfare state, and are feeling bad about their taxes, even though they are needed to sustain the system. However there are more perks in the end.
Nearly everyone is on a state-funded pension, healthcare is customary and single-payer, as it should be to pay efficiently for everyone (leverage for drug costs...). Hospitals are mostly state-owned apart from private clinics. That means the service level is average, food barely OK, but the cost is stable since they are not fighting for clients, ever-increasing the service and costs (costs in the US are really crazy to us).
Even additional health coverage is at a fair price (I pay around 70€ for both my wife and me, monthly).
Guess what ? Our doctors are still top-notch ! Don't need all that fancy stuff to be a good doctor.

On the issues side, since workers are well-protected, companies are thinking twice before recruiting, so we have a very hard time lowering the unemployment rate. It's a systemic problem, but if you try to touch worker security, things go south really fast (heard of French strikes ? sigh...)

Having lived abroad in a variety of places, I leaned to appreciate what we have instead of complaining all day. We can't have everything, otherwise the country will wither and lose its place in the world in a few decades, and if we hit the critical mass we'll lose all we currently have. Please french people, don't be TOO greedy !

On December 30 2018 23:09 GoTuNk! wrote:


That seems a somewhat fair assesment, however you completely ignored the close to 100% government debt. Don't you think the welfare state will require severe adjustments or collapse entirely?

On December 30 2018 18:30 iamthedave wrote:


Moving outside US Politics for a second, how do you feel about some of the European models? Not the UK's - we're probably in an even worse state than you lot right now - but maybe Sweden or one of the other successful leftish EU nations. Are their governments more suitable in your mind, or are those lacking critically as well?

I do worry that your absolute fatalism concerning US Politics makes this discussion a difficult one to have. You don't seem willing to countenance much other than total revolution and have given up on the idea of reform coming from anywhere.

On December 30 2018 22:07 Nouar wrote:


I was pretty hopeful when people elected someone who wanted to change things last year, however it got down the drain pretty fast since French people don't actually want anything to change, as most voters do in the world. Just we are even worse than usual xD.

On December 30 2018 23:58 Nouar wrote:


Actually, our health care/pension system is nearly balanced for the first time in a while. Yes we should reduce the debt, however the overall budget is nearly balanced if you take the debt interest out of the picture (it accounts for 2/3rd of the budget deficit). So in a vacuum, the system is working fine.
In reality, yes we have a huge debt and should be making more efforts to reduce it (go back to french people not wanting to cut anything.... :-( ). The lack of inflation these past few years has damaged the way things were working (use a 3% deficit and hope inflation is around 2% to cover for it). Very few 1st world countries run without a debt though...
Can I remind you that debt exploded due to a crisis in 2009 that was brought by capitalism and banks, not the social welfare system ? It's not the root of the issue, it's the overall corporate/banking greed, and it didn't even start from Europe (granted, it highlighted several issues we had, and we fixed some of them. Trump is undoing all the fixes in the US, unsurprisingly).

however the difference between the minimum salary (where you get very little benefits) and not working while getting the benefits is only a few hundreds euros, which is not sufficient as an incentive to work for lazy people

You cannot over expend at first and later say budget is "balanced" pretending debt doesn't exist.

The banking system is anything but free market capitalism. Banks in bed with government that run above tolerable risk expecting a bail out on the taxpayers dime when things go wrong, is something both socialist and capitalism advocates deeply despise, myself included.

Morever, your argument loses a lot of weight when comparing more socialist governments (France, Norway, Sweden or to the extreme Argentina) to freer economies (Australia, New Zeland, Hong Kong, Singapur) and theri debt to GDP ratio.

Singapore has one of the largest income gaps in the world. Wealth is disproportionately spread among wealthy foreigners while native Singaporeans live in poverty and often have lower-paying jobs. Between 2012 and 2015, the number of families receiving financial assistance in Singapore jumped 43.45 percent.

Poverty in Hong Kong hits record high, with 1 in 5 people considered poor

I find this to be a very big issue on first world country's debt. People who are able to work should be looking for work 24/7, not relying on welfare perpetually.

On December 31 2018 03:12 Nouar wrote:


I am not pretending the debt does not exist, I am saying that the "socialist" part of the economy is currently balanced, and is not the one increasing the debt. The social system and pension system are working well and are funded. Public schools are nearly free, students don't start with a debt (unless they wanted to go to a top private school).
Governments here are always overspending when the economy the good, due to our issues with lowering unemployment (companies cash the check the government give them, rather than recruit, it happens everytime. Last time was 20B€ a few years ago in taxes. They increased profits and shareholder dividends...), and voters going crazy if you lower anything (which Macron is trying to do, and he's having issues as you can imagine). If you have a look here :
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Dettepubliqueetpolitique.JPG
you will see that socialist governments (Mitterrand, Jospin) aren't the ones crazily increasing debt, crises are. The same happened 2012-2017 when Hollande (socialist) slowed down the debt increase.



Banks need to be heavily controlled, as they host the people's money. If those checks aren't there, the people's savings are at risk, and that is why we had to save some of the banks here (not all of them). The issue is that since not ALL countries are controlling their banks, if we do too much here, business will move somewhere else.
We are going back to my issue of having separate countries, so "why should we... if they don't?". Do note even the UE doesn't apply the same rules everywhere (Hello, Ireland).


Australia : top 1% earning holding 23% of the country's riches last year. More than the bottom 50%.
France : top 1% at 11% in 2014, bottom 50% owning 23%.
NZ : top 1% at 28% of the wealth.
I'm not going to compare Singapore and Honk-Kong, due to the very small and unique economy these places have, but here are some bits :



I don't know enough about those economies to go deep into how they deal with education, poverty etc, but while wealth distribution is getting slightly worse here, it's getting a lot worse, much faster, in the countries you listed. Not exactly my target.



And yet, we are in need of finding solutions. Manual labor and low-tech jobs, cashiers, harvesters etc, are slowly getting replaced by machines, so we WILL have an employment crush in a few decades, where lower skilled workers will have very few jobs left. The whole population is not suddenly becoming smarter, rather dumber, while jobs become more technical. So all these people, what do you do with them if you can't offer them a job ? Dump them under a bridge ?

(Not to mention that the money earned will be from companies that employ less and less humans. Do you concentrate that wealth in the hands of these, or do you redistribute since there is less work available ?)