The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(01-03-2021, 12:22 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(01-02-2021, 01:59 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Progress? If your idea of progress is having a trade war with China that the Chinese outsmarted. The Chinese slapped import bans on certain American farm commodities  that America's farmers typically supply for exports. To win back the farm vote that about everyone thought that he was going to lose during that trade war he opened the spigot on commodities that ended up with no market so that he could buy their votes back. Many of those commodities ended up either as livestock food (so meat is underpriced), and by flooding rural America with farm subsidies the USA must sell an increase in the national debt to whatever buyer there is. As in China. 

It has long been a conservative tenet that political decisions that buy elections by bleeding the treasury is a shameful deed to be avoided at all costs -- even recessions with high unemployment. Just when we liberals have come to all but completely despise that practice, Donald Trump does that. Donald Trump does not make that right. He may have prevented a landslide loss in the Electoral College instead of the narrower loss that he got... but he did so at a grave price to the treasury.        



 

Dammit! I want people to see the humanity behind a grave marker, and I want people to see the wrong in sending someone's body or ashes to a place with such a marker before that person's time. Of all the crimes that I associate with the Trump Administration the worst is negligent homicide. Damn him! Damn him! Damn him!  

     

I heard Trump was subsidizing the farmers with the tariffs on Chinese goods. Trump is actually pretty smart when it comes to business. You'd think a regime with a billion mouths to feed would be smart enough to leave food off the table when their messing with the worlds largest food producer. I mean, an American right wing country could bring China to its knees by cutting off a portion of  food supply and tripling tariffs and messing with them militarily while its moving back into manufacturing and positioning themselves to replace them. As we say, where there's a will, there is a way. I know that's garbled French which you's don't grasp but we do and that's all that matters.

Tariffs are taxes... and they are very bad taxes. They are basically sales taxes on imports alone. Sales taxes might have some validity as a source of revenue, but those are regressive. A 9% tax on food heavily falls upon poor people whose biggest expenditures are on food. (Just because you make $100K a year does not mean that you are paying five times as much for food, and if you are dining in expensive restaurants then you are paying for something other than food. You are not buying five times as many ramen noodles or five times as much hamburger.   

There are Third-World countries in which most people buying imported stuff are expats from the First World buying luxuries from the First World. Imports, whether wines or woolens, are easier to tax at the port than is domestic production that often goes through informal markets. Tax laws are so designed in most states so that it is difficult to get a rebate or exemption from sales taxes so that some church treasurer doesn't use a church account to buy pool chemicals or his personal book or music collection. 

...China found other countries willing to sell food to itself, like Brazil, while maintaining low or no tariffs on Chinese manufactures. 

Remember well: it has long been an accusation by the Right that liberal and social-democratic politicians buy the votes of poor people with welfare and easily-accessible public services. That is a valid concern, but I can recognize that a welfare state is a consequence of Judeo-Christian and Islamic ethics that recognize the validity of the ethical mandate to alleviate and mitigate poverty. (I would suggest that you re-read the Sermon on the Mount, arguably one of the greatest political speeches ever made. It may be less concise than the Gettysburg Address, the Finest Hour, and Four Freedoms, but those involve making meaning of nasty wars.  "Blessed are..." say the Beatitudes, and none of those glorify exploitation, indulgence, flamboyance, insensitivity, or arrogance. (A parody of those Beatitudes does exist in the Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey, who is far closer to Donald Trump's ideology and way of life than are the gospels. 

Classic X'er, you do not own the Bible, and you have no authority to interpret it to fit your agenda. As far as I am concerned, people who demand that people suffer in This World for delights in the Next World, deferring their most basic needs and all dignity on behalf of rapacious elites so that those elites can live in opulent splendor and sybaritic indulgence are egregious heretics.   I have some question about the desirability of having people liquidate successful, customer-serving and job-creating business to give the proceeds to the poor, but that question comes after some economic analysis. Stuff must be produced, and markets keep an economy rational. All religious texts must meet logical tests including those of time. This said, I have little use for amoral leaders and outright gangsters who exploit others badly and punish them with torture and murder if they complain about their lot.    

Quote:I'm going to assume that you know where COVID19 came from and understand that they failed to contain and failed to inform while our people were doing business over there and then used their influence with top UN  (a third worlder with college degree) to cover it up and understand that they are solely responsible for the deaths of over three hundred thousand American citizens and I hope the old man with dementia that you elected doesn't forget it and he doesn't have to be reminded/lectured like you.

Quote:Wow! Talk about a run-on, incoherent sentence complete with flawed references in pronouns, let alone faulty logic including the infamous non sequitur. First of all, certain meat is invariably suspect, especially if butchered in unsanitary conditions or supplied with severe faults of preparation, packaging, and chain of custody. I would be leery of foods that require refrigeration if I have some question of whether the refrigeration has failed at any stage. China is practically a free-market economy but it is far newer at free markets than is the United States. Fre markets require some regulation to ensure safety, and the USA is far better at that than is China. I would trust technology-distrusting Old Order Amish as butchers of meat more than I would trust open markets in Chinese backwater cities. (At that I would trust the food supply more in a more thoroughly-modern city like Shanghai or Tianjin than those isolated small cities). 

Second, the Third World turns out some very good people. Your smear of the Third World is racist.  If anything, Third World conditions are beginning to appear in some of the "whitest" parts of America, like eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, and southeastern Ohio. Remember well that the nastiest slums have some very good people, and people who come from those slums or still live there and maintain some goodness are far more tested in their righteousness than people who endure few economic challenges.  

Third, I put much of the blame on Donald Trump, who has set a horrid example for dealing with COVID-19. It is bad enough that he closed the pandemic-control officer that his predecessor established out of spite for a President whose father was from the Third World. You know, the President that Rush Limbaugh called "Halfrican". Trump failed to wear a mask in public and held "mask-free" political rallies that themselves became super-spreader events. Over 350,000 people (and that is still more than the population of Anaheim, California (the 55th-largest city in the United States)... you know, home of Disneyland. In case you are curious, the grim statistical tour has its next stop in Aurora, Colorado, which as I understand has little worthy of mention. 

You excuse extreme incompetence and cruelty by a leader. You have fallen for something completely un-American: the cult of personality of a current President. FDR had the decency to keep the focus on Abraham Lincoln as a model of how to lead a country through the Crisis of 1940, as shown in a photo showing an image of the Great Emancipator of the 1860's with the two Great Emancipators of the 1940's (he and Churchill). Trump offered "herd immunity" that would have killed far more people -- quite possibly me due to age and some slight auto-immune problem (psoriasis, which suggests the hazard of a cytokine stream) -- and even some quack medicine. He faulted people for failing to believe in him.  Herman Cain might be alive had he not believed Trump.          

Quote:He'll probably be the most coddled and protected and absent or unavailable President that the country has ever seen. I can already see it now. Where is Sleepy Joe? What you probably did is succeed in turning the Democratic Presidency into a complete mockery? I know that wasn't your intent but that's what you probably did  Maybe that was the reason why a portion of the Republican party supported Biden and more or less crossed over to the Democratic side. Who knows, they could be positioning themselves to take over when the Democratic party implodes.

TO BE DETERMINED.

"Sleepy Joe" has been cautious about in-person appearances because of the danger of COVID-19. If he spares us incendiary tweets -- such is all the better. Obama seems to have never released any communication unless it went through some committee of trusted people to examine it for facts, ambiguities, and grammatical errors. All really-good writing goes through some editor, and I have done copy-editing. You would be surprised at what I can do to cut the volume of writing. For example, I am veritable death to the passive voice which all but ensures choppy sentence structure.  As others might notice I use the passive voice  rarely. Some creature or thing does something. 

Coddled? He is President and he will need to get away with some things -- far fewer than Trump even if he should be a two-term President. 

If you are thinking of all the Republicans for Biden -- I thank them for having the best arguments against Donald Trump!  We still have political traditions that keep us from going into the realm of tyranny. Trump made efforts to short-circuit those traditions. Nothing could be more genuinely conservative than a respect for tradition, something to be disposed of only with solid cause. 

The failure of Donald Trump practically ensures that when conservatism re-appears it will be more a repudiation of Donald Trump than of Barack Obama. Just think of Barack Obama who as President stood for

1. TRADITION -- old decencies are preferable to new horrors. Obama stood squarely with legal precedents and formalities. He was a stickler for the rule of law, a theme normal for conservatives who eschew demagoguery. He did not play games with language; he kept his expressions as simple and clear as possible instead of creating the sort of Newspeak that one associates with Trump. Words have meanings, especially in law. Words have rigid meanings in determining law, but not in puffing real estate or other commodities. The law even has Black's Law Dictionary as the arbiter of the legal meaning of words in legal context. In eight years, Obama shook far less up than did Trump. Even with Obergfell v. Hodges, Obama let the legal process decide the law and did nothing to hasten the process. Once decided, Obama went fully with it... just as Eisenhower went fully with the Supreme Court decisions involving racially-separated schools. 

2. HIERARCHY -- even if Obama wasn't for oppression and exploitation as perquisites of hierarchy, Obama at least recognized the validity of competence. Such may well serve Model Minorities well... in case you resent them for their successes, tough. Obama recognizes the hierarchy of learning, skill, and talent in deciding who succeeds and who fails. 

3. REALISM -- accepting that deeds have consequences and that one is wise to choose such means as achieve desired consequences. 

Conservatism isn't to be confused with fascism, an ideology that perverts national traditions into a pretext for new terror, oppression, and tyranny. 

Conservatism in 2040 is more likely to resemble the Obama of the 2010's than Donald Trump. .