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The Democratic Field is Unacceptable, Or, Why It All Matters
From a friend, who nails it:
Published in GeneralMost of the legitimate extreme objections to Trump are “personal” — to his rhetoric, his personality, his style. Sure, people of good faith can object to this policy or action or that — but that’s true of any President. Trump has not fundamentally changed or transformed the country, and 90%-plus of his policies and actions fall within the window of what could easily have been done by one or more of his predecessors. My objections to most of the Democratic candidates are not personal (except maybe in Schoolmarm Liz’s case) — they are rooted in policy. Policies rooted in collectivism and “social justice theory” (the bastard child of Frankfurt School Marxism and postwar French deconstructionism), that no credible candidate seems ready to disavow, are (a) repugnant to me, and (b) well outside this country’s historical norms. Four more years of Trump will not fundamentally change the country. Four years of a semi-moderate Democrat with a Republican Senate probably won’t either. But four years of Liz or Bernie or (probably) Joe, without a GOP Senate, probably would. I do not want my children to have to grow up in a bigger, worse version of 1970s Britain.
Regarding the Barr speech, there are two schools of thought. You can have a moral, productive Society just based on observing what works or you need a religious basis for it. I say it’s clearly the latter. Dennis Prager makes this case and I think he’s right.
Having all of this centralized government power fueled by Keynesianism is not moral or productive. It just gets more and more dysfunctional and then the people vote for more of it.
Trump, whether you like him or not, has had to spend 3 years attempting to reverse many disastrous, culture changing policies of the last administration. He’s been successful at some, other are so embedded it will take years, and may not be reversible. Add to the constant beating down in the media, the terrible lies and scandals that were created within and by our country’s leadership, including the justice dept. to try to remove or cripple Trump’s presidency, it’s amazing that he’s been able to get anything done.
People see through the scams. They just want to live their lives, unburdened by government and provide for their families and stay well. The Democrats had their turn as president, and they’ll get their turn again – but they have to earn it through the people’s vote.
i.e.
Just to focus on the first of these points, I don’t think Trump is shallow. He is an intuitive pattern-recognizing thinker, as opposed to a top-down deductive thinker who is restricted to a particular methodology and set of axioms he has learned.
As an example: Trump saw the connections between non-growing American wages, unbalanced trade with China, and social dysfunction such as the opioid epidemic. Few others saw these connections.
On the topic of Bernie, why is he already back on the train? Didn’t he (almost) die? Nothing says “2019 Democratic Party” more than a walking corpse who refuses to fade into the night in the name of proletariat.
Is Bernie’s plan to “cancel” all student debt
It’s outrageous. Excellent analysis.
There is no way in hell higher education nets out for society like it did decades ago. So much theft and destruction. Waste. Graft.
Here’s another example. We have too much government, so we vote for more:
Hi @peterrobinson, we don’t see enough of you here these days.
I spent a year of study abroad in London in the mid seventies. The pound was over $2.00. Museum admission was free. You could purchase a pint of bitter for 17P. A bus ride from S. Kensington to University College London cost 5P. The tube was 10P. What more could a college student ask for?
excellent analysis
Funny how Bernie suggests we cancel student debt created in large part by the gov’t. The logical choice here is to cancel the government’s involvement in student loans and higher education. Sallie Mae wiki:
SLM Corporation (commonly known as Sallie Mae; originally the Student Loan Marketing Association) is a publicly traded U.S. corporation that provides consumer banking. Its nature has changed dramatically since it was set up in 1973. At first, it was a government entity that serviced federal education loans. It then became private and started offering private student loans, although at one point it had a contract to service federal loans.
The company’s primary business is originating, servicing, and collecting private education loans. The company also provides college savings tools such as its Upromise Rewards business and online planning for college tools and resources. Sallie Mae previously originated federally guaranteed student loans originated under the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP).[2] and worked as a servicer and collector of federal student loans on behalf of the Department of Education. The company now offers private education loans and manages more than $12.97 billion in assets. Sallie Mae employs 1,400 individuals at offices across the U.S.[3][4]
On April 30, 2014, Sallie Mae spun off its loan servicing operation and most of its loan portfolio into a separate, publicly traded entity called Navient Corporation. Navient is the largest servicer of federal student loans and acts as a collector on behalf of the Department of Education.
If you cancel student debt, what else can you “cancel”?
Mortgage debt?
Credit card debt?
Auto load debt?
And by “cancelling”, what you really mean is “causing companies to go bankrupt”, since those loans are assets on their books, in one form or another. If it’s cancelled, will it be paid?
If I cancel Congress, and they don’t get paid, will they go home and shut up and leave us alone? Maybe we could get them all gigs at Sallie Mae, calling former students with late loan payments to ask them when they’re going to make their next payment. Maybe we could do that, and stop treating 535 people like they are tiny gods we need to worship and pay attention to.
We don’t. They’re self-aggrandizing chowderheads.
I am almost through with Richard Epstein’s podcast where he takes down Elizabeth Warren. Just devastating.
It’s also really good at taking down single-payer. Very original and simple. God help us if we go down that path.
You’re reading bird entrails looking for signs of the approaching enemy’s attack plan. It’s fine if that’s what you see, but not everyone is buying it.
Well, obviously not everyone is buying it; that’s why we have political discussion & debate.
With what aspect of these connections do you disagree?
What’s going on is, all Western governments and all of their central banks are doing every single thing wrong in the face of wage deflation and job destruction from globalized trade and automation. People are losing agency, which is depressing as hell. Society has atomized so many people don’t have friends and family.
Tucker Carlson had on a psychiatrist from Canada that made that observation and he said that was part of the opioid epidemic.
I have taken them once and believe you me, they make you feel better psychologically. You don’t need anything else. Very dangerous stuff.
Keep in mind that same line of thinking might apply to you, too. The casual dismissal is telling.
Also, most of your line of adjectives above applies to nearly everyone in politics. So what? It’s not been made screamingly clear that our incentives for politicians are upside down, in that we see the results of who it attracts?
I’ll nitpick a bit. They easily could have, but they certainly would not have. That’s why we have Trump. The GOPe had identified issues to run on and be elected on. They then, for years, explained why those issues were not addressed. The same tired excuses: 1) We had only the Senate, 2) We didn’t have the White House, 3) We didn’t have 60 votes to stop a filibuster. Oh, BTW, we need more money.
They never had any intention of addressing those issues as long as the Republican voters fell for their promises. The voters wised up and put Trump in just to shake things up. Enjoy the show.
Example:
How could the GOP not be ready after eight years and several months of voting to repeal the ACA? How could they not be ready for their moment? Why didn’t they just wait one year if they didn’t really have a plan? What a bunch of liars. Trump gives them what they want and need—control of everything—and then poof!
It’s so irresponsible and then they whine about Trump being irresponsible.
They had no intention of repealing it. Remember all those votes just for show when Obama would have vetoed it? Early on when asked about repealing ACA, The Turtle said, “That’d be really hard to do.” I rest my case.
I really wish I could quiz all of those guys while stretching them on one of those medieval rack things or something like that.
The ACA is forcing single-payer and the GOP is blowing it. I see John Kasich is for impeachment. World record for getting people on Medicaid. There are Republicans that want him to run.
Listen to the podcast of Richard Epstein about Elizabeth Warren. He has a very excellent takedown of single-payer. Melissa Francis explain the numbers on Tucker Carlson. It’s absolutely absurd to think it will work. Service is going to slow down and people are going to die. The GOP is being so irresponsible.
“Chris Wallace today said a “well connected” Republican says there is a 20% chance that the GOP senate will vote to remove Donald Trump in impeachment.” (quote from TGP story)
If they do, that’s the end of the Republican party. I hope so, anyway. It will have proved itself not just lying and feckless, but despicable as well.
I think about this all of the time. I think the best solution is offering a public option that is 10% worse then the worst employer plan in your statistical area. I would make them use straight indemnity Insurance and direct primary care. It would solve so many problems so fast.
The problem is the Democrat party would eventually hijack it and force single-payer.
Obama is a liar and so is the GOP.
One other thing about this is they have to wipeout something called “cross subsidization”. It’s basically just camouflaged theft and regressive taxation. Nobody gets any subsidy unless it comes straight out of the US treasury.
Honestly? Ever single word. You give him credit for seeing these connected webs but there doesn’t seem to be any history of that kind of thinking. And when I said he was shallow I was speaking more about gold-plated toilets and caring about appearances to a degree that is unhealthy. I wasn’t referring to his thinking, although I suppose it’s a fitting description of that as well.
It wasn’t necessarily meant as a casual dismissal so much as a version of “I’m not buying the timeshare that everyone keeps trying to sell me”. Nobody can make the intellectual case for Trump in regards to a number of issues and I’m utterly bored by the attempts at it. The transactional angle is much more fruitful and persuasive. I’ll grudgingly buy the idea that he’s better than whomever the Democrats are going to run. I’m absolutely not buying the idea that he has the first clue what he’s doing all the time. I appreciate that people care enough to attempt to bend reality to fit their narrative (after all what is politics if not that very thing?) but I cannot pretend that it’s persuasive in any meaningful way.
Because it’s really really hard to reconfigure the entire health insurance market under the best of conditions. But after Obamacare it became unworkable. Rather than tell the truth—“we can’t actually do what we promised”—they just kept hoping nobody would notice that the party was incapable of doing it. Because, friend, they’re mostly overconfident cowards. They thought they could do something and when they realized they couldn’t they didn’t want to take their medicine.