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A new fault line
Simple question: will the question of a “stolen election” by nefarious means – D malfeasance on the local level, top-down fraud efforts, Dominion manipulation, all of the above – divide the conservative side in the year to come? I get the feeling sometimes that if you’re not on board with the idea that Donald Trump actually won, full stop, you’re a cuck-shill Tapper-fluffer (cruise ship icon) RINO eager to buff your cocktail-party credentials.
Published in General
BlueYeti has said that Trump is responsible for his own behavior/demeanor.
We can drop the analogy if you prefer.
There was a soft coup attempt. Five years of non-stop slurs, negativity, and lies. Yet it was Trump’s tone that turned people off.
I’m not saying that Trump was perfect. Of course he’s not perfect. No one is.
Could it be, just maybe, that the perception of Trump by some was driven more by the lies and negativity thrown at him than it was driven by anything that Trump actually did or said or the way he said or did them? That, absent this heretofore unheard of level of propaganda and attack, he might have actually developed a positive perception? That, absent the need to respond to constant attacks, his communications might have been of a different tone? That, his tone was reactionary and that civility in teh face of such propaganda is suicide?
That, and what of people for whom tone is more important than soft coups and dangerous radicalism and anticivility of the Dems? I’ve been in a couple of real fights. If an observer were to look at me during those fights and say: oh what a violent person, I don’t want anything to do with him then you’d likely say that person is silly. Do we need such a person? What are we willing to do to get such a person on our side?We can coach them. We can instruct them, We can lie to them, We can make the other guy appear more toxic than we appear to this silly person. I get it: our fate is in the hands of silly people. Is there something we can do differently? If the answer is to not defend ourselves in a fight because people are too stupid to see that we’re defending ourselves, then I guess there’s not much we can do.
As Reagan said: “There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace — and you can have it in the next second — surrender.”
HW: See Ed G’s response. That’s well put.
Trump brought a gun to the gunfight with the Left. Problem was that most of the bullets Trump fired were fired into his own foot.
You have to gut the political support for the entitlements, first.
There are different approaches to all of them.
1) Social Security –
Seeing as raising taxes apparently doesn’t scare people, raise taxes and cut younger workers off from paying into Social security. Direct them to private savings plans or something else not government supported. As the number of people in the work force not relying on SS for retirement outnumbers the Social Security recipients, flip it to ending social security and lowering taxes.
2) Welfare as UBI (which it is) –
Support for this is everywhere because people with no work or poor wages can’t buy stuff in a service economy. So Welfare is the UBI we use to ensure consumerism fuels GDP. If we were producing more exports, we’d keep up our GDP without flooding the economy with funny money.
Trump was tackling this at the base – remove regulations stimulating business growth, lower corporate taxes to make business here cheaper, tarriffs to bring production back home, get people into jobs, limit immigration to increase labor demand, watch wages rise because labor has high demand and supply is low. Next step should be lowering welfare benefits. But we had a Covid pandemic that interfered so I have no idea if he would have gone there or not.
Just two parts with workable plans. But I don’t see a lot of willingness to tackle them on either front.
Tarriffs are more constitutional than income tax.
Is it just me, or does it seem odd that the hired help argues with and insults the paying customers?
#KyleRittenhouse
One phrase that Trump used over and over, was that those who were getting subsidized for closing businesses and yet keeping staff (if I understood that correctly): They didn’t do this, didn’t deserve it, and if was China’s fault. This always struck me as odd, justifying paying people for doing essentially nothing. I mean, who needs to justify giving free money or free anything away? I think Trump was voicing his own thinking that these payments were unlike entitlement payments, and was NOT a dole system.
I think you’re right, prior to covid, he was trying to employ people to get them off Welfare.
I detect, conspiracy theorizer that I am, a company policy of appeasing Democrats and NTers and is pushing (albeit very gently) moderators to control the dialogue. The mildest of threats to the customers paid off, and so far we have been mostly complaint.
President Trump is “The Great Clarifier”, as I argue in my post here.
It was a rational argument to a government “taking”.
When the states implemented lock down orders they were interfering in the course of business. This has been held as a “taking” in the past, a violation of the 5th and 14th amendment. It shouldn’t be considered odd, that when the government says you may not use your property, that they be required to compensate you.
According to reporting at the time it was structured as a “loan” that turned into a “grant” if you retained your employees.
Decrease labor supply.
I don’t know about odd, but I consider it bad policy.
Resurrected from the Chix Pit
It’s bad policy to develop conditions that prevent your people from working. And I think that we have been doing that for a long time egen before covid.
It is proper to be willing to feed and clothe and house the people you forced out of work through direct policy.
I did not like the use of the federal government for the covid payouts because those suffering were under governments THEY elected. And the federal government did not make those impositions, so it was not responsible for them.