US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2836

On November 16 2020 12:55 Nevuk wrote:

Presidents always get outsized credit for good and bad things happening with the economy. It's a role that has very little actual influence on the economy other than as a messaging platform.

The one actual economic act of Trump's presidency, the tax cuts, were pretty awful for everyone making <500k a year.

This is because they literally wrote into the law that these cuts were going to expire after a couple of years for those middle class and below, then redefined how they calculated yearly increases to some standards to make the cuts worthless even sooner than that expiration date.

In fact, I think the only thing they passed that economists liked was the least popular part of the law - repealing SALT deductions, which meant it was actually a tax raise on many residents of blue states.

Even that act can't really be credited to Trump and should instead be laid at the door of congress. A generic republican president would have done the same, aside from maybe the SALT part (as it hurt republicans in those states too).

Economies are slow to move - we're certainly still feeling effects from decisions made under GWB's second term and Obama's first, for instance. They move on a time scale that the average voter has a very hard time understanding, for the positive signals, at the least.

Some of Trump's changes that have had an economic impact are also going to be temporary by nature - he can't repeal regulations, for instance, he can only choose to selectively not enforce them, so the next president (GOP or democrat) with a different vision would change them. Legal immigration being down is probably bad for the economy in the long run.

The reason Trump isn't getting credit for the economy is that it's (mostly) been too soon for any positive or negative effects of his policies to be felt. The exceptions here are going to be his tariffs which absolutely ruined many farmers. Are tariffs a good idea in the longrun, though? History suggest no, but it's probably too soon to KNOW.


edit: Also, the other economic act of his presidency, the covid stimulus, we can KNOW would have been better under any other politician. There was significant delay in sending the paper check portion of it out so that his signature could be added.

A recount in Georgia’s presidential race found more than 2,600 ballots in Floyd County that hadn’t originally been tallied, likely helping President Donald Trump reduce his 14,000-vote deficit to Joe Biden.


Trump could gain about 800 net votes from the newly discovered ballots, said Luke Martin, chairman of the Floyd County Republican Party.

The previously uncounted votes were cast during in-person early voting at the Floyd County Administration Building, which includes the county’s elections office, Martin said. Over half of 5,000 printed-out ballots cast on an optical scanning machine weren’t initially recorded.

“It’s very concerning,” Martin said. “But this doesn’t appear to be a widespread issue. I’m glad the audit revealed it, and it’s important that all votes are counted.”

Elections officials in Floyd County in northwest Georgia didn’t immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

The Rome News-Tribune reported that the county’s elections board chairman tentatively confirmed that more than 2,500 votes were recorded during the recount than on election night.

Martin said these ballots could rectify a discrepancy between the number of people who checked in to vote early and ballots that were counted in Floyd County.

The issue appeared to occur on an optical scanner that stopped working after a couple of weeks of early voting, Martin said. County election officials were supposed to rescan all paper ballots cast on that machine, but roughly half of them weren’t recorded.


It’s unclear whether the problem was caused by poll workers or an issue with voting equipment, Martin said. Similar issues haven’t been discovered in other counties, which led Martin to believe the problem was caused by the county’s elections administration practices.

In Other News

On November 18 2020 11:49 Nevuk wrote:
So, Republicans on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers in Michigan appear to have tried to stage a coup? Not exactly sure what the precise, proper phrase is. Mass disenfranchisement? They reversed course rapidly after it became apparent no one was going to back them.

So, the play tried was to refuse to certify the county containing Detroit, which would definitely give Michigan to Trump. And yes, the state is permitted to just throw out all of Detroit's votes (Michigan is weird), but they'd have to do so publicly, and there appears to be no appetite to do that when Trump lost Michigan by 3 points.

Essentially, Michigan requires certification of the vote by a bipartisan commission - by a per county board basis, then if that deadlocks, it must be certified by a state-wide board.
The issue is that if THAT gets deadlocked 2-2, then the vote must be certified by Michigan's GOP legislature instead. There they could have disenfranchised Wayne county on a strictly party line vote.

It is important to note that this is flatly impossible in any of the other swing states, before people go praising them for backing down, so even this would have done nothing for Trump: I, for one, am sure it would have gone through if Michigan were the only state in question.


The reason this is so crazy : it was 68-31 Biden-Trump in that county. There's not exactly any doubt about who won.

MI SoS on the matter (she points out any errors they've cited are routinely seen state wide and that she's willing to audit them)

https://twitter.com/JocelynBenson/status/1328849110619840513

Final certification as of https://twitter.com/adam_brew/status/1328882544348180483.

On November 18 2020 12:00 Mohdoo wrote:


Thanks for explaining all this. So it deadlocked, then now it is going to the next phase. What are the chances of that deadlocking too?

I can't possibly imagine the chaos if they actually just throw out Detroit's votes. The rioting would be completely off the charts.

On November 17 2020 21:13 m4ini wrote:
So..

For the constitutionalists here, the guys who think the founding fathers had it all figured out a few hundred years back.. How does one protect themselves from a spiteful "man"baby trying to sabotage the presidency of the following president?

Isn't it a bit of an oversight to give the guy who lost an election months to fuck shit up properly, scorched earth style? To be clear, not only did trump ponder whether or not to bomb iran, he's also pondering to pull out all troops out of afghanistan leaving yet another power vacuum ready for the taking.

Makes you kinda wonder, does it not? Sure, one would assume that people aren't so retarded as to elect a moronic manchild into office who has to be pulled out the white house by his legs while he's torching it, but, i mean.. Am i the only one who thinks it's weird that in the few coming weeks/months he can fuck shit up so badly that Biden has nothing else to do but to chase down those issues, while in four years republicans gonna argue that he got nothing done?

This is really one of the smallest issues within the US government processes. Bottomline is, the US government simply does not work towards bettering their country, or god forbid, the lives of people who live in it but rather towards its own 'metagame' goals. I mean, at this point they accept that unless the ruling party has a senate majority, they will never actually pass any bills through the senate. AND THEY ARE FINE WITH IT LOL