What's with all the GOP anger??

[Londoner]

Where were you when budgetary restraint was called for before our debt reached 19 trillion?

I blame an entrenched establishment.

This is fair, but let me make some humble suggestions.

Reagan tripled Carter's debt, and Bush 43 doubled Clinton's. Your party only calls for budgetary restraint when the Democrats are in charge. However, when Bush 43 was in charge, he didn't veto one piece of Republican Pork. He didn't stop one bridge to nowhere. And Republican voters were largely silent about his unprecedented spending until he became a lame duck and it was safe to criticize him. We didn't hear a peep from your side when he and his Republican controlled house/senate raised the debt ceiling 4 times. This is why its hard for us to take your budgetary concerns seriously.

Here is the problem.

Ronald Reagan promised to shrink government and control spending. He gave birth to the current hysteria over deficit spending and debt (which hysteria your side seems to use as a weapon against the democrats rather than a genuine governing model).

Point is: for every dollar Reagan shaved from school lunch programs, he added $100 to defense, including weapons-contract give-aways like Star Wars. He tripled the national debt in his efforts to become the military defender of a global economy that required bases on all continents and, eventually, nation building in the Middle East.

If you truly want a cheaper, less powerful Washington, you have to stop the shell game, one that I don't think you are aware of. It goes like this:

You tell us that Washington doesn't have the competence to run a laundromat while at the same time you give it the money and power to rebuild whole foreign nations. (Obviously the Democrats will go along with nation building because they believe that Washington can save the world)

My point is this. At the same time that Reagan was preaching about small government, he was using the Cold War to build a Washington that was not only in charge of the 50 states, but the entire globe, that is, he was building a defense apparatus that could and did intervene in the economies and politics of over 30 nations across several continents. Do you understand the real expense of this, or how effectively it was hidden and spread across different agency budgets so that it would be impossible to unearth in total? This is not to mention the "Golden Triangle", compromised of special interests and bureaucrats who formed around the taxpayer's teat, as big government pumped out an endless sequence of inflated no-bid contracts.

We can debate whether or not it makes sense for Washington to become so large and powerful that it can create/influence/stabilize markets across the globe, and we can debate whether or not it has the competence to do these things without making the globe worse and bankrupting us, and we can debate whether or not Vietnam and Iraq are proof of Washington's inability to save the world, and we can debate whether or not the surveillance state created by the war on terrorism places too much faith in the hands of flawed human bureaucrats, but there is one thing that isn't really debatable: when you consume over 25% of the world's resource but you have under 5% of its population, there is a huge military cost. You get this right? Once the oil runs out in Texas, your Middle-East-Military-Cost goes way up? Our lifestyle is expensive. This is why I'm begging you not to repeat tired cliches about spending until you consider all the drivers of national debt.

 

[ptbw forever]

When Trump loses, far right, that's it. It's over. Don't huff and puff or the cops will give you the cuff and stuff.

The cops will kind of be on our side.

You idiots blew it with them.

 

[ptbw forever]

The anger stems from being left behind by a global economy that doesn't need their skills, and a changing world that doesn't reflect their values. [A similar thing happens to children when the whimsical vagaries of youth are confronted with the realities of adulthood. This is when a well-adjusted person grows-up and chooses a more enlightened self, one that finds a genuine place in the world rather than devolving into a dysfunctional stasis of inchoate anger and terminal whining ]

Put more simply. Tea Party anger stems from the confusion and fear of watching their white nation evolve into a more diverse set of demographics, one that doesn't hold their beliefs in the center of the cultural & moral solar system. (Please recall the social convulsions of the Copernican Revolution when science dislodged the earth from the center of the universe. The people who depended psychologically on Biblical Cosmology lost their minds and became maladjusted anachronisms)

But it gets worse.

Unlike a child who must accept change and grow (see maturation), the Tea Party is being cajoled by a cynical political class into a sad form of arrested development. Indeed, the Tea Party is being told that they don't have to grow-up and evolve with a changing world. They are being told that their nation is perpetually under siege by a "demonic other" (gays, blacks, baby killers, socialists, liberals, Mexicans, Muslims, elitists, bra burners, atheists, cultural relativists, terrorists, etc., etc.). Rather than growing up and measuring their beliefs against the actual world they are shadow-boxing against non-existent demons trying to steal their guns and turn their children gay.

The wealthy corporate elite (WCE) use demonology to scare the Republican Base into voting against their economic interests. The WCE are using demons and patriotism and messianic nationalism to chase these well-meaning Americans into the voting booth (where they will unknowingly pull the lever for policies that transfer wealth/power into the very plutocracy which has stolen their nation).

But here is the kicker. There is no way to demonstrate these facts to them because the Republican voter has been conditioned to fear every information source save the ones controlled by their party.

This means that any attempt by outsiders to communicate with them will be felt as an attempt to deceive.

[The well-meaning Republican Brain is protected from argument by an inflexible code of Common Sense, which consists of unexamined, incontrovertible, self evident facts - facts reinforced every day by an admittedly charismatic pundit class. FYI: the whole point of education and personal growth is to get the individual to take a critical stance toward his default settings (his common sense).

This was beautifully demonstrated during 17th Century European Enlightenment where people where urged to cast off the feudal bondage of superstition, fear and religion. Problem is: when that feudal bondage serves the very system which controls 100% of your information, the game truly is over and Trump truly is Lord]

Your own country left YOU behind.

Keep your ignorance and fear to yourself.

 

[ptbw forever]

Maybe bill718 the poster is actually 18 and like any freaking teenager he speaks in cliches and has little or no historic or political perspective. If lefties view the mild rhetoric of Trump's acceptance speech as "angry" what the hell do they think of president Hussein inviting the BLM radicals to the White House when they are responsible either directly or indirectly with their propaganda for the assassination of eight Police Officers?

Cognitive Dissonance is an essential element for keeping the circus that is the Democrat party of today together.

 

[Londoner]

Perfectly said! They're mad because their pundits told them to be mad. That, and they're the losers who failed to educate themselves and can't find a decent paying job because Republicans killed the unions and offshored their jobs.

The Republicans offshored their jobs? Care to elaborate?

Reaganomics adopted the position that lowering the cost of production would incentivize capitalists to take risks and innovate. They told us that the high taxes, high regulations and expensive, union driven labor costs of the liberal postwar era stifled investment/productivity.

You get their point, right Ray?

Nike makes higher profits when their sneaks are made for pennies in Taiwan, as opposed to being made for first world labor rates (where the populations don't live in slums and eat dog food).

Moreover, the theory goes, if we can give Nike or Apple investors the ability to make the higher returns that 3rd world labor makes possible, than they will be more likely to risk their money and create the products we want.

This is why Reagan liberalized trade and opened the legal doors that allowed capitalists to shift production to China, etc.

Clinton capitulated with Reaganomics. Clinton was called a New Democrat because he sided with capital over labor (see Nafta).

But here is the real problem Ray. I know you mean well. And I know you are angry. But you are entering a debate with zero knowledge of the Reagan Revolution, specifically the libertarian components crafted by Milton Friedman, his economic advisor.

Read Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" to understand why YOUR party believed in the 80s that it was crucial to allow capital to shop the globe for the cheapest production costs.

The logic of capital accumulation holds that a capitalist requires correct incentives - that is, investors are less likely to risk their money unless they are guaranteed the highest possible returns, which is secured by the cheapest possible labor rates (which is why capital partners with Asian sweatshops).

But we civilians are guilty too Ray. As a consumer I put loads of pressure on companies to lower their prices. I'm always looking to buy from the place offering the best deal. Do you know how those deals are created? Partly by lowering production costs.

It gets even worse Ray. What happens when the capitalist desire for profit puts downward pressure on wages? Answer: weak demand. You get this right?

Wages are what we use to buy the very things the capitalist produces, so how can we buy things if the jobs and wages we need to make those purchases are weakened or gone? Answer: debt.

This is called a contradiction, and it explains the crisis tendency of capitalism, which expands debt levels to enable its low-paid workforces to by the stuff it produces. This is the opposite of "Fordism", which was enacted by one of our greatest capitalists, who paid workers high enough salaries to buy what they produced. (The technical definition of Fordism goes well beyond this, but it's interesting to see how Reaganomics, by over-cooking the supply side, lorded over the transition from wage-based consumption to debt-based consumption. And yes, Clinton was no better; he sold the Left's principals for high wages downriver).

Ray, I would love it if you took some of your anger and channeled it into learning the core principals of your party's economic philosophy. Start by studying neoliberalism, and look into what Friedman and Pinochet did in Chile. A major goal of neoliberalism, of which Reagan and Thatcher were major players, is to open all markets to foreign investment (often by bloody force), and to basically allow the global production system to go wherever it needs to go to get the cheapest production costs/highest profits. Only by doing this - only by sending American jobs to Taiwanese sweatshops (if they offer the lowest labor rate) - will you create the high returns that drive investment and create the great things we consumers want.

This philosophy has created terrible problems and tons of blowback (e.g., some radical groups didn't like that we installed the brutal Shaw in Iran so that we could have easier access to their oil). However, there were and are many benefits to the global production system. It would be nice if you knew the whole story and all the arguments.

Please turn off Fox and Rush and Levin. Please go to a library or find a way to research these issues.

 

[Ray From Cleveland]

Perfectly said! They're mad because their pundits told them to be mad. That, and they're the losers who failed to educate themselves and can't find a decent paying job because Republicans killed the unions and offshored their jobs.

The Republicans offshored their jobs? Care to elaborate?

Reaganomics adopted the position that lowering the cost of production would incentivize capitalists to take risks and innovate. They told us that the high taxes, high regulations and expensive, union driven labor costs of the liberal postwar era stifled investment/productivity.

You get their point, right Ray?

Nike makes higher profits when their sneaks are made for pennies in Taiwan, as opposed to being made for first world labor rates (where the populations don't live in slums and eat dog food).

Moreover, the theory goes, if we can give Nike or Apple investors the ability to make the higher returns that 3rd world labor makes possible, than they will be more likely to risk their money and create the products we want.

This is why Reagan liberalized trade and opened the legal doors that allowed capitalists to shift production to China, etc.

Clinton capitulated with Reaganomics. Clinton was called a New Democrat because he sided with capital over labor (see Nafta).

But here is the real problem Ray. I know you mean well. And I know you are angry. But you are entering a debate with zero knowledge of the Reagan Revolution, specifically the libertarian components crafted by Milton Friedman, his economic advisor.

Read Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" to understand why YOUR party believed in the 80s that it was crucial to allow capital to shop the globe for the cheapest production costs.

The logic of capital accumulation holds that a capitalist requires correct incentives - that is, investors are less likely to risk their money unless they are guaranteed the highest possible returns, which is secured by the cheapest possible labor rates (which is why capital partners with Asian sweatshops).

But we civilians are guilty too Ray. As a consumer I put loads of pressure on companies to lower their prices. I'm always looking to buy from the place offering the best deal. Do you know how those deals are created? Partly by lowering production costs.

It gets even worse Ray. What happens when the capitalist desire for profit puts downward pressure on wages? Answer: weak demand. You get this right?

Wages are what we use to buy the very things the capitalist produces, so how can we buy things if the jobs and wages we need to make those purchases are weakened or gone? Answer: debt.

This is called a contradiction, and it explains the crisis tendency of capitalism, which expands debt levels to enable its low-paid workforces to by the stuff it produces. This is the opposite of "Fordism", which was enacted by one of our greatest capitalists, who paid workers high enough salaries to buy what they produced. (The technical definition of Fordism goes well beyond this, but it's interesting to see how Reaganomics, by over-cooking the supply side, lorded over the transition from wage-based consumption to debt-based consumption. And yes, Clinton was no better; he sold the Left's principals for high wages downriver).

Ray, I would love it if you took some of your anger and channeled it into learning the core principals of your party's economic philosophy. Start by studying neoliberalism, and look into what Friedman and Pinochet did in Chile. A major goal of neoliberalism, of which Reagan and Thatcher were major players, is to open all markets to foreign investment (often by bloody force), and to basically allow the global production system to go wherever it needs to go to get the cheapest production costs/highest profits. Only by doing this - only by sending American jobs to Taiwanese sweatshops (if they offer the lowest labor rate) - will you create the high returns that drive investment and create the great things we consumers want.

This philosophy has created terrible problems and tons of blowback (e.g., some radical groups didn't like that we installed the brutal Shaw in Iran so that we could have easier access to their oil). However, there were and are many benefits to the global production system. It would be nice if you knew the whole story and all the arguments.

Please turn off Fox and Rush and Levin. Please go to a library or find a way to research these issues.

Gee, a know-it-all liberal. How rare!

Nobody could ever stop companies from leaving the US. That's not how it works in a free country. USSR, Cuba? Perhaps, but not a free country.

Consumer demand is the major motivator behind cheap products. It's why Walmart has been our number one store and employer for many years now. There is no solidarity with union people and their purchases, nor solidarity with Americans and their fellow American workers. Give it to me cheap and I don't care how you do it. I don't care about slave labor, child labor, or pollution in places I don't live. I don't care about quality either. Just give me products at the cheapest price possible.

It's much less politics (and certainly Republicanism) than it is the consumer, and there is no solution in sight. Government can't stop globalization, and even if they could, more and more manufacturers would turn to technology which is the real culprit in job reduction. More and more American consumers would turn to the internet--the biggest threat to our brick and mortar stores.

Jobs were leaving before Reagan and jobs left long after he left office nearly 30 years ago. It has nothing to do with the Republicans.

 

[Iceweasel]

The anger stems from being left behind by a global economy that doesn't need their skills, and a changing world that doesn't reflect their values. [A similar thing happens to children when the whimsical vagaries of youth are confronted with the realities of adulthood. This is when a well-adjusted person grows-up and chooses a more enlightened self,

Hey, Shithook. Who is doing all the marching, protesting, crashing opponent's rallies, blocking streets, chanting, flag burning, etc. etc.

You are insane. And not the smart kind.

 

[Ray From Cleveland]

Wouldn't that be nice, if elections actually altered the course of anything at all; the the characters of the two bickering factions of aristocracy, once elected serve the same masters, and it ain't "the people".

But at the end of the day, if the masses can be kept sneering at each other, the sham continues unabated.

The problem is that people don't take control when it comes to politics. Now the tides are changing as we see Trump emerge and Sander's a close second. I think there are more and more people getting sick of our politics as usual, and they are now more than willing to take risks to change it.

We shall see, but this election will be historical and probably the most important one in all of our lifetime. Will it break the status quo? Only time will tell because my crystal ball is no better than yours. But at the very least, it's waking up a lot of people at the top.

 

[Iceweasel]

This is why Reagan liberalized trade and opened the legal doors that allowed capitalists to shift production to China, etc.

Clinton capitulated with Reaganomics. Clinton was called a New Democrat because he sided with capital over labor (see Nafta).

So Reagan was responsible for NAFTA? And Bill? Why haven't the dems shut it down then? Could it be because the establishment on both sides do well under the current system? You are a political hack and have no use for full disclosure.

 

[JakeStarkey]

 

[bodecea]

It's all the Republicans fault. Democrats walk on water.

No one is saying that...besides you.

 

[Dot Com]

It's all the Republicans fault. Democrats walk on water.

it would help if you people "passed stuff" after winning elections instead of sitting on your hands a la kindergarten.

 

[bodecea]

It's all the Republicans fault. Democrats walk on water.

Well when the GOP is in charge of the House Of Reps it is hard to logically blame anyone else.

I get that BHO is a god among men and that he is to blame for everything on God's Green Earth therefore.

But that is a GOP myth as well.

As much as they would like to blame BHO for everything, the man is only a man, at best a saint, but only a man.

Except neither the house nor the senate can do anything on their own. Obama has the power to veto and the Republicans do not have numbers sufficient enough to override that veto unless they wish to do what Reid did and invoke the nuclear option. Correct?

How many bills did President Obama veto?

 

[Dot Com]

It's all the Republicans fault. Democrats walk on water.

Well when the GOP is in charge of the House Of Reps it is hard to logically blame anyone else.

I get that BHO is a god among men and that he is to blame for everything on God's Green Earth therefore.

But that is a GOP myth as well.

As much as they would like to blame BHO for everything, the man is only a man, at best a saint, but only a man.

Except neither the house nor the senate can do anything on their own. Obama has the power to veto and the Republicans do not have numbers sufficient enough to override that veto unless they wish to do what Reid did and invoke the nuclear option. Correct?

How many bills did President Obama veto?

yeah WillerTwee, we're all ears

 

[Ray From Cleveland]

it would help if you people "passed stuff" after winning elections instead of sitting on your hands a la kindergarten.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/us/politics/congress-zika-funding.html?_r=0

Top 10 Bipartisan Jobs Bills Blocked by Senate Democrats

http://bearingarms.com/bob-o/2016/0...ock-background-check-terror-watch-list-bills/

Democrats block Senate energy bill over Flint aid

http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/286960-senate-democrats-block-defense-spending-bill

Senate Democrats block VA funding bill

Senate Democrats block bill to restrict Syrian refugees from entering U.S.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/6/democrats-vote-defend-sanctuary-cities/

 

[Yousaidwhat]

Where were you when budgetary restraint was called for before our debt reached 19 trillion?

I blame an entrenched establishment.

This is fair, but let me make some humble suggestions.

Reagan tripled Carter's debt, and Bush 43 doubled Clinton's. Your party only calls for budgetary restraint when the Democrats are in charge. However, when Bush 43 was in charge, he didn't veto one piece of Republican Pork. He didn't stop one bridge to nowhere. And Republican voters were largely silent about his unprecedented spending until he became a lame duck and it was safe to criticize him. We didn't hear a peep from your side when he and his Republican controlled house/senate raised the debt ceiling 4 times. This is why its hard for us to take your budgetary concerns seriously.

Here is the problem.

Ronald Reagan promised to shrink government and control spending. He gave birth to the current hysteria over deficit spending and debt (which hysteria your side seems to use as a weapon against the democrats rather than a genuine governing model).

Point is: for every dollar Reagan shaved from school lunch programs, he added $100 to defense, including weapons-contract give-aways like Star Wars. He tripled the national debt in his efforts to become the military defender of a global economy that required bases on all continents and, eventually, nation building in the Middle East.

If you truly want a cheaper, less powerful Washington, you have to stop the shell game, one that I don't think you are aware of. It goes like this:

You tell us that Washington doesn't have the competence to run a laundromat while at the same time you give it the money and power to rebuild whole foreign nations. (Obviously the Democrats will go along with nation building because they believe that Washington can save the world)

My point is this. At the same time that Reagan was preaching about small government, he was using the Cold War to build a Washington that was not only in charge of the 50 states, but the entire globe, that is, he was building a defense apparatus that could and did intervene in the economies and politics of over 30 nations across several continents. Do you understand the real expense of this, or how effectively it was hidden and spread across different agency budgets so that it would be impossible to unearth in total? This is not to mention the "Golden Triangle", compromised of special interests and bureaucrats who formed around the taxpayer's teat, as big government pumped out an endless sequence of inflated no-bid contracts.

We can debate whether or not it makes sense for Washington to become so large and powerful that it can create/influence/stabilize markets across the globe, and we can debate whether or not it has the competence to do these things without making the globe worse and bankrupting us, and we can debate whether or not Vietnam and Iraq are proof of Washington's inability to save the world, and we can debate whether or not the surveillance state created by the war on terrorism places too much faith in the hands of flawed human bureaucrats, but there is one thing that isn't really debatable: when you consume over 25% of the world's resource but you have under 5% of its population, there is a huge military cost. You get this right? Once the oil runs out in Texas, your Middle-East-Military-Cost goes way up? Our lifestyle is expensive. This is why I'm begging you not to repeat tired cliches about spending until you consider all the drivers of national debt.

To be accurate. I am a Democrat in Maryland.

It's not my party. None of us were ever invited to the party that we are all paying for.

There is waste, fraud and abuse. Both parties. Throughout history. I am fully aware of the drivers of the national debt.

Hence, massive debt. No accountability.

I want responsibility and accountability.

Obviously I will side with a strong military. It is our obligation. Yes, there is waste in the military industrial complex. I don't condone it.

I appreciate your response. You just have me mistaken for someone else.