US Politics Mega-Blog - Page 53

On October 24 2018 03:09 xDaunt wrote:


Forcing the restroom issue isn't going to fix the underlying problem of promoting tolerance. It's only going to exacerbate matters and inflame the majority. Attacking and flaunting social norms will always have a price.

On October 24 2018 04:29 Mercy13 wrote:


Can you think of a time when social norms where changed without any attacking or flaunting of them?

On October 24 2018 05:06 xDaunt wrote:

Off the top of my head, no, but I don't think that doing so in this instance is going to be productive for anyone.

On October 24 2018 05:20 Doodsmack wrote:
Looks like Trumps claim that his administration and Congress are working on a new middle class tax cut for just after the elections is a fabrication. In other words hes lying to his supporters about what he will do, in order to induce them to get to the polls. I wonder how his supporters feel about being lied to to their face? Most of the time when someone lies to you to your face and it's an obvious lie, you dont just take it on the chin.

On October 24 2018 06:19 xDaunt wrote:
GH, what do you think of Gillum?

On October 24 2018 08:10 GreenHorizons wrote:


I said it before but basically he jumped the line in the primary by rhetorically embracing more progressive policy than Democratic party wisdom said was viable and finding his voters, but he's already pretty much abandoned the biggest point and ran to the center but most of the Democrats stopped paying attention to what he's actually been saying since he won the primary and took a big polling lead.

It's reminiscent of pre-president Obama vs after he won. That might not make much sense for you if you still think Obama is some wild lefty and not a center-right imperialist.

On October 24 2018 08:27 iamthedave wrote:


So you think Gillum is Obama 2: Right of Centre?

On October 24 2018 05:06 xDaunt wrote:

Off the top of my head, no, but I don't think that doing so in this instance is going to be productive for anyone.

On October 24 2018 09:39 IgnE wrote:


I can think of several. Texting instead of calling. Emails instead of snail mail. Open office plans instead of offices/cubicles. Norms around exercising and eating. Changing norms about sexual activity in college. Expected length of stay at any one job, or the norms around lateral moves (zigzag moves, since lateral moves are usually also moves up, at least on the front nine) within one's career.

On October 24 2018 08:27 iamthedave wrote:


So you think Gillum is Obama 2: Right of Centre?

On October 24 2018 11:46 GreenHorizons wrote:


More or less, it's not like they really even try to hide the plot.

Obama says he'd be seen as moderate Republican in 1980s

On October 24 2018 18:10 Grumbels wrote:

And Chuck Schumer famously said this about the 2016 election:

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Brian Kemp, Georgia Secretary of State and the Republican nominee for Georgia governor, expressed at a ticketed campaign event that his Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams’ voter turnout operation “continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote,” according to audio obtained by Rolling Stone.

Kemp’s recent decision to suspend more than 53,000 voter applications, 70 percent of which were filed by black residents, for violating the state’s “exact match” verification standard has drawn attention to his penchant for restrictive voter laws and purging of voter rolls. American Public Media reported last week that Kemp purged an estimated 107,000 voters last year simply because they didn’t vote in the prior election. He is also being sued for leaving more than 6 million Georgia voting records open to hacking.

One other reason that Kemp’s “right to vote” line is potentially alarming is that he is facing another lawsuit after reports that an abnormal number of absentee ballots — 595, more than a third of the state’s total and 300 of which reportedly belong to black and Asian American voters — have been rejected in the state’s most racially diverse county, Gwinnett. The Georgia Muslim Voter Project and Asian-American Advancing Justice-Atlanta filed suit last Monday to request that three days be provided after the election for rejected voters to resolve the matter so that their ballots count.

All of these reports have led to charges that Kemp is suppressing votes

On October 24 2018 22:14 iamthedave wrote:
That sounds utterly disgusting if true. But the US's democracy has been on very faulty ground for a while now so that's not new. In theory at least, is there a punishment for voter suppression if he's found guilty?

I also wonder how many Democratic governors might have tried the same tactics on Republican consituents.

Indeed, New York’s voting procedures have become a talking point for Republican-led states in defending their own regression on voting rights. In discussing their limitations on voting rights, North Carolina and Ohio have pointed to the New York rules. If other states can have restrictive policies, the argument goes, why can’t they? As John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, said when asked about his state’s decision to cut early voting from six weeks to four, “I do not know why you are picking on Ohio. Why don’t you go pick on New York?”

The New York City Board of Elections illegally purged about 200,000 voters off the city’s rolls in 2014 and 2015, an issue discovered during the 2016 elections. Suspicion around that purge has loomed over every election since, even after the board of elections agreed to clean up its act and institute reforms. And every time there are problems at the polls, this spurs concern and frustration that the city’s voting systems are still not up to par.

The majority of the purged names came from Brooklyn, and was first reported when local public radio station WNYC, which found the borough was mysteriously missing 63,558 Democratic voters — about 7 percent of its overall share of Democrats. No other borough had such a significant drop.

After an investigation, the attorney general’s office detailed separate purges in a complaint against the City Board of Elections; first, the board manually identified and purged the records of over 100,000 voters who had failed to vote or update their forms since 2008, which is illegal under state and federal law.

Second, the board looked addresses in the National Change of Address database, and removed another 100,000 voters from the rolls it suspected to have moved outside of the city. But they did this after giving these voters just 30 days notice, when they were required by state and federal law to keep voters on the rolls for at least two more federal elections after notifying them.

California made major news this month, reclaiming a valuable economic marker and surpassing Britain as the fifth largest economy in the world. Its growth after the recession has accelerated under President Trump and even turned a modest surplus.

However, the Golden State remains one of the most unequal in the nation. It has both billions of dollars in Silicon Valley and rampant homelessness. Its efforts to eliminate poverty instead accentuates it, and its tax system inadvertently aids those who are already wealthy. With the middle class leaving in droves, California society represents a modern day feudal system of robber barons and the poor. It is an unsustainable mixture.

Gross domestic product in California is now above $2.7 trillion, which represents just under 14 percent of the entire United States economy. The topline numbers are a bit misleading, as the state represents a similar 12 percent of the national population. California had the fifth largest economy in the world before the recession, falling seven spots by 2012, while growing at an anemic 0.1 percent. The state has been fortunate to be the center of the booming technology and internet sectors. Moreover, part of the growth was due to a rapidly expanding real estate sector, which heavily assists wealthy residents. With the mega rich and upper class driving its economy, California is unique in its ability to leave the rest of the population behind.

After factoring for costs of living, California is the poorest state in the union. An average of 14 percent of Americans live below the poverty line by census measures. Compare that with the 19 percent of Californians who live below the poverty line and the situation is clear. The census measures factor in housing costs and wellbeing with programs like food stamps and housing assistance. Altogether, the state government has made life for poor and middle class Californians nearly unbearable.

How? California renters pay an average of $1,440 per month, much higher than the national average of $1,010 per month. In 2015, more than 40 percent of Californians spent over 30 percent of their income on housing. Today, 29 percent of them spend over half their earnings on housing. Median home values, at $529,000, are more than double the national median of $239,800. Residents who can afford rent or a mortgage are on the hook for electricity rates burdened by green initiatives and regulation that grew 500 percent faster than the national average from 2011 to 2017.

“Not In My Backyard” development and construction restrictions mean that California cities are much more expensive for the poor, with Los Angeles having the highest proportion of income going towards rent in the nation. The state and its cities use environmental and zoning laws to restrict housing, which often disallows large scale development of apartments. The result? Less access for middle class residents.

From 2011 to 2016, California increased spending on administration at more than double that of teacher pay. Its public employee system disincentivizes government thrift and saddles taxpayers with debt that outstrips the national average. A private sector employee would have to save $2.6 million to receive the same retirement as a California Highway Patrol officer. In addition to its burdensome state income tax, California is home to the highest sales tax in the nation and property tax rates that disproportionately punish the poor.

Traditional left wing prescriptions simply have not worked in the state, which an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times dubbed the “poverty capital” of the country. Housing vouchers increase the cost of living. The number of uninsured in California fell by more than half after the state expanded Medicaid, yet poverty remains near historic highs. California spends the third most per capita on welfare programs, yet its economy fails the poor and middle class.

Despite having just 12 percent of the national population, the state represents nearly a third of the population on welfare. Federal taxpayers shell out more than half of the $6.7 billion in the California Work Opportunities and Responsibility to Kids welfare program. In Texas, 6 percent of families under the poverty line receive welfare. In California, the figure is 66 percent. Can you guess where the poverty rate is lower? Not California.

The combination of government overreach and ineffective programs creates a brutal dichotomy of very rich and very poor. California is the fourth most unequal state in the union with astonishing many homeless who face diseases like typhus and hepatitis. The number of people living on the streets in California increased by nearly 14 percent from 2016 to 2017 to more than 130,000. Mark Zuckerberg is worth $70 billion, while San Franciscans have an app that helps them track human feces on the sidewalk.

In many ways, California has long been an example for the rest of the nation. But the middle class conservatism that propelled national figures like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan is gone. It has been replaced with virtue signaling and policies by the wealthy that hurt struggling families. Both sides of the coin, from technology executives to families unable to pay rent, vote for Democrats that only make the problem worse.

The robber barons and artificially high real estate values in California brought its economy back to the fifth largest in the world. However, for the average person, Sacramento represents systemic political and economic failure.