Donald Trump

[Phi for All]

Civil Rights and Women's rights (Suffrage) are Republican ideas.

 

OK, I'm glad you think that.

 

Could you answer my question, though? The one I really asked in that post, about the general prosperity we enjoyed in the 50s and 60s, and how that type of tax structure helped the whole country achieve a better level of economy, social structure, and infrastructure?

 

Because when you dodge questions like that, it makes it seem like you won't answer because it would be a point in my favor, and it seems like that might make you puke.

[waitforufo]

Look folks you can try and lay all the guilt trips on me you want about not wanting to help the poor. I give 10% of my gross income to charity. In fact I have given five grand to the food bank in my area every year for the last ten years. How much do you give? I also give that much to homeless shelters and shelters for derelict families which are mostly battered women and their children. My conscience is clear. I don't need the government to help other people or be compassionate. Neither do you. Also, the money I give can't be diverted by politicians to things I don't want to pay for. You can't say that about your tax dollars?

 

You'll never understand (for some weird reason) that if you don't think these social programs work, it's because people like you choose to elect those who make them weak. Like W Bush coming up with No Child blah blah, and then severely under-funding it. Step on the poor people's necks, then loudly berate them for not getting up. This image doesn't penetrate your mindset.

22 trillion dollars and poverty rate stays the same. People in poverty need jobs. Think of the jobs that would have been created if that money would have been left in the hands of the people pursuing happiness as they saw fit. You know the most common human failing is the belief that if you do something and fail, you weren't trying hard enough. This is what creates political and religious extremism. Wake up. The great society and war on poverty programs are not working. Trying harder by increasing government spending will only put us further down the rat hole.

 

 

Unless you think Trump is lying about his plan, I don't see how you can say we have no idea what he's going to do.

No, I think Trump won't get his plan through congress. So, if elected, he will have to come up with a different plan. Again, Trump is not my preferred candidate.

 

 

... one problem with bullies and narcissists...

Obviously you haven't been paying attention to Obama. Every speech is full of Me and I and executive orders.

 

Could you answer my question, though? The one I really asked in that post, about the general prosperity we enjoyed in the 50s and 60s, and how that type of tax structure helped the whole country achieve a better level of economy, social structure, and infrastructure?

I have answered that question from you many times. You see there was this big war. We won. After that we had the largest industrial base in the world. We also had time to build brand loyalty behind our products. Well the world has caught up. We have lost our brand loyalty. Also there are new big players like China and India. You don't like that answer so you reject it.

 

I continue to read how you folks blame everything on Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and the Bush's and it makes me laugh. It's not those men. It's the government. The government will never produce the utopia you are looking for. Government always leads to oppression. Read history, because its the same story over and over. Our founders knew that and created a government that was intended to be limited with the intention of keeping the oppression on a short leash. That is why we have three branches of government. That is why they wrote. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Well the governed don't feel like they have given consent That is why Trump is winning.

Edited March 15, 2016 by waitforufo

[MigL]

I did notice Phi, that in post #248 you praised B. Obama for having reduced deficit spending, which is now trending in the right direction.

And you imply that this has been a factor in improving the economy/employment.

 

Why is it that whenever a fiscal conservative mentions deficit reduction so as not to saddle our kids with debt, you ( and several others ) always claim that hurts the economy/employment ?

[Phi for All]

I did notice Phi, that in post #248 you praised B. Obama for having reduced deficit spending, which is now trending in the right direction.

And you imply that this has been a factor in improving the economy/employment.

 

Why is it that whenever a fiscal conservative mentions deficit reduction so as not to saddle our kids with debt, you ( and several others ) always claim that hurts the economy/employment ?

 

My reply was in direct response to a specific comment I quoted from waitforufo. He asked why none of us liberals every complain about President Obama's deficit spending. I cited evidence saying he spent less than any president since Eisenhower. The article I quoted may have gone on to imply the rest of what you say I implied. I read back and couldn't find where I did.

 

As for your question, I don't believe I've ever claimed what you say. Please remember, I'm a Sanders voter. He's the ONLY candidate with a tax plan that makes money rather than burden us with more debt. And I don't see anything in Sanders plans that would hurt the economy, and especially not employment. For goodness sake, the man wants everyone to get the best education they can so they can compete at higher levels in the job markets. Trump will keep us dumb and gambling on how little money we'll accept for an American to produce full-time for his employer.

 

I guess you forgot that making the corporations and the uber-wealthy ACTUALLY contribute to necessary government revenue has the benefit of paying for the brilliance we have in reality AND in potential, as well as having some leftover to pay down our debts.

[MigL]

Just clearing things up.

 

Soooo...

Is fiscal prudence a good thing ?

[EdEarl]

Here is a link to Facebook that has on Open Letter to Donald Trump from Brendon Stanton, "the photographer behind the wildly popular Humans of New York Facebook page." I haven't seen Humans of New York and hadn't heard of Brandon Stanton (BS lol), before. The letter is scalding.

[iNow]

Is fiscal prudence a good thing ?

Smart accounting is. Austerity is not. Global economics is different than household budgets. During times of recession, "fiscal prudence" is one of the single dumbest and self-inflicted wound generating approach one can take. It's during times of boom and shared growth that the aforementioned prudence becomes important. We're not currently there, nor have we been in some time.

[John Cuthber]

The government has a never ending list of people they insist are entitled to the earnings of people who work.

Really?

Who?

If I'm employed by the government to do things they were voted in to do- like maintain the water pressure- am I not "entitled" to be paid for that?

OR do you somehow think that you are "entitled" to get that service without paying for it?

[Phi for All]

Soooo...

Is fiscal prudence a good thing ?

 

No. It's a catchall term that's too vague to arm a politician with. It's exactly what they want, terms with enough wiggle and shimmy room to do their song and dance. And it gives them too big a blanket to cover things up with, in addition to allowing them to target the wrong things for austerity.

 

That's exactly how so many delightful babies DIE when you throw them out with the bathwater.

[waitforufo]

Really?

Who?

If I'm employed by the government to do things they were voted in to do- like maintain the water pressure- am I not "entitled" to be paid for that?

OR do you somehow think that you are "entitled" to get that service without paying for it?

I was talking about entitlement programs.

[dimreepr]

I was talking about entitlement programs.

 

 

Think about it, if everyone is a citizen then the unemployed are just government employees on a retainer.

 

Being unemployed isn’t what a school leaver wants, they have plans, they have ambition and they even have dreams; what if you knew, deep down, that those plans and dreams are impossible: You have choices, of course, crime or apathy/cynicism/hatred, of course a few can defy the odds but that just blinds people (hard work and dedication and you can be him/her) and hardens them to the underlying problem/suffering.

I read an interesting article yesterday. Forget about Godwining your discussions by equating Trump with Hitler. The better analogy is George Wallace. Which suddenly spotlights how history is rhyming, not repeating itself, and the 2016 election is rhyming with the 1968 election.

 

Trump is George Wallace, with all his hateful racist rhetoric, and ability to grab free press coverage based solely on sensationalism rather than merit. Clinton is Hubert Humphrey, burdened with the Johnson/Vietnam legacy and party lines he wanted to deviate from, but didn't want to enough to fight the party. Bernie Sanders (white-haired liberal anti-war candidate beloved by college students) is Eugene McCarthy (ditto on the description).

 

Now we just need a deceitful, subtly caustic, dirty-tricks lawyer, not well liked by many in his party, who claims to be trying to unify that party, to be Nixon's counterpart. Oh, look right there! It's Ted Cruz!

 

Nixon focused on the votes going to Wallace. He stole enough of them with his strategy, and Wallace then left the Dems to run an independent effort. I can totally see Trump doing that if Cruz manages to be the "binding voice" of "the silent majority", a term Nixon successfully co-opted from the Wallace campaign.

 

With the Dem vote split, and many of the Wallace fanatics realizing Nixon sounded more reasonable, and had experience as Eisenhower's VP. They jumped ship and Nixon won not only the nomination, he won the election. And six years later he left the White House in disgrace, and is one of the most reviled US presidents in history.

 

History is rhyming, with horrible timing. Don't buy the ruse, and never vote for Cruz.

 

 

That would almost make a great topic, does history repeat or rhyme?

Edited March 16, 2016 by dimreepr

[Arete]

One thing I'm a little baffled by is Trump's slogan: "Make America Great Again" and many of his supporters state a strong belief in American values, while at the same time many of his actions and policies seem to take direct aim at constitutionally protected freedoms.

 

For e.g. Advocating the mistreatment and assualt of protesters at his rallies, and actually legally defending those arrested for said assaults, along with advocating the discrimination of migrants based on their religious views , would seem to show abject contempt for the freedom of speech and freedom of religion protected under the first amendment.

 

I'm a non-resident in the US, so it may be a misunderstanding, but I'm confused as to how a political figure who is seemingly taking a massive, steaming figurative dump on constitutional rights could be considered in any way supportive of the values of the nation. As is the case in a number of other predominately white, western, Christian nations I've lived it seems that "traditional *insert country* values" is coded language for "the values of white, xenophobic, Christian, cis, citizens of *insert country* and the suppression of everyone else's rights". In other words, it seems that Trump and his supporters don't care about "American values" in the sense of constitutional freedoms, fair governance and judicial systems at all.

 

Also, does anyone else find the incitement of violence towards detractors by a presidential candidate utterly terrifying? What will he do once he is president to those who don't support his policies? Can you imagine a Trump administration response to for e.g. past anti-war protests?

[overtone]

 

 

I read an interesting article yesterday. Forget about Godwining your discussions by equating Trump with Hitler. The better analogy is George Wallace. Which suddenly spotlights how history is rhyming, not repeating itself, and the 2016 election is rhyming with the 1968 election.

Mussolini. Please.

 

Trump represents Wallace's faction of the American public, of course, but at the time that base was kept aside by the Democratic Party it claimed - it was a minority aspect of its Party. Now, conjoined with the fundies, it is the major and dominant faction of a national Party.

 

Trump is closer - in his voter support, in his basic policies - to Nixon himself. And that is the aspect of history this is rhyming.

[Phi for All]

I'm a non-resident in the US, so it may be a misunderstanding, but I'm confused as to how a political figure who is seemingly taking a massive, steaming figurative dump on constitutional rights could be considered in any way supportive of the values of the nation.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-2-billion-free-media_us_56e83410e4b065e2e3d75935?w2tn8kt9

Donald Trump received nearly $2 billion in free media exposure this past year, dwarfing his Republican rivals and more than doubling the attention paid to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, according to tracking firm mediaQuant.

 

 

I think Trump's rhetoric is purposely so vague as to be effective as a troll for votes. I think lots of his supporters probably don't agree with everything he says, but they've agreed enough in a strictly emotional, reason-free, yelling-at-the-TV way that they believe he represents them better than the hated Hillary or the commie Jew Sanders. And forget about the candidates with foreign-sounding names.

 

The original definition of trolling, putting a whole bunch of hooks in the water and driving your boat around A LOT, not hoping to entice with bait, but to snag and drag all the fish you can get. And Trump not only gets so much more airtime to troll, he actually has bait for on the lines for some of his supporters, who happen to be the most vicious and rabid of the lot. He's giving them an outlet for hatred that is getting more and more physically violent.

[MigL]

Trump's followers ( and a lot of others ) don't care about rights being taken away.

As long as they're someone else's rights.

They don't realize what's next.

 

And on the contrary, I've always considered Nixon a good president.

He did good internationally, but his domestic agenda ran into difficulties compounded by the OPEC shortage of 73.

His problem was getting cought at the same things Kennedy, Johnson and even Clinton all did.

Jimmy carter was probably the only honest president, unfortunately he was out of his depth.

[Willie71]

This seems to touch on a bell curve or, maybe, a Venn diagram in the description of rhyme or repeat, maybe this is more a poetic question?

 

 

Edit/ If more than one empire failed due to a water shortage then that detail IS exactly the same, so repeat; scale that down to why water was a problem then rhythm prevails.

 

Civilizations in Central America, Africa, and the Middle East have all been tied to population growth, then a change in climate such as drought, or rerouting of rivers left a population that could not feed itself. A parallel to current California was shown in a documentary I watched on this a couple years ago.

Trump's followers ( and a lot of others ) don't care about rights being taken away.

As long as they're someone else's rights.

They don't realize what's next.

 

And on the contrary, I've always considered Nixon a good president.

He did good internationally, but his domestic agenda ran into difficulties compounded by the OPEC shortage of 73.

His problem was getting cought at the same things Kennedy, Johnson and even Clinton all did.

Jimmy carter was probably the only honest president, unfortunately he was out of his depth.

Nixonland was a great read. He was an outsider, never accepted by the stablishment. He used a lot of Reagan's strategy from his California run, to beat the establishment. It ushered in the era that now brings us trump. Policy wise, I don't know much about Nixon, so I can't comment on his actual presidency.

[John Cuthber]

I was talking about entitlement programs.

Well, what you said was " The government has a never ending list of people they insist are entitled to the earnings of people who work. "

And I asked who those people were.

And you didn't answer.

So, here's another chance

Who are these people that the government generates who they say are "entitled"?

 

More importantly, perhaps, if the government was voted in, and the people's representatives decided that these people were entitled and you live in some sort of democracy then how do you escape from the idea that, in fact, they are entitled?

Who else would make that decision?

 

Oh! I see now- it's you. How could I have missed that?

You, and you alone, have the God-like ability to say who is entitled to what.

Well, why don't you stand for election?

 

[zapatos]

 

Oh! I see now- it's you. How could I have missed that?

You, and you alone, have the God-like ability to say who is entitled to what.

 

 

I really don't think he was saying that.

[overtone]

And on the contrary, I've always considered Nixon a good president.

He wrecked the country. He put together the coalition that gave us Reagan - in spite of getting his ass in a sling, which should have blown his coalition apart, and would have if it had been an open one instead of a conspiracy.

 

He did good internationally, but his domestic agenda ran into difficulties compounded by the OPEC shortage of 73.

The enabler of Kissinger, (http://en.mediamass.net/people/henry-kissinger/highest-paid.html) a man who for the rest of his life would have to avoid landing in certain European airports due to threat of arrest and trial for war crimes, did not do good internationally.

He gave the world Pol Pot, a wrecked Vietnam, the consolidation of the North Korean totalitarian regime, and the beginning of the Chinese assault on the US economy (greased by his de facto discard of all human rights considerations in trade agreements). And that was just SE Asia. Do we need to go into South and Central America? Allende, for chrissake? The Middle East and Nixon's rejection of the 1967 Israel borders - what turned out to have been the last best chance to settle them? https://history.state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/arab-israeli-war-1973

 

His problem was getting cought at the same things Kennedy, Johnson and even Clinton all did.

Oh baloney. And that's not because anyone thinks Kennedy and Johnson and Clinton were angels.

The man was dirty. Mobbed up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Rebozo), bought up, Kissinger conned, and fundamentally as cynical and unprincipled a manipulator as the Oval Office had seen. And the problem with that kind of moral and ethical rot is that it weakened the country (as well as the man - he didn't start out paranoid and glory-seeking). The US has never fully recovered from Nixon's Presidency - there's a straight line from his Southern Strategy to Donald Trump, for example. The only reason we mark the decline of the US from Reagan in '80 instead of Nixon in '68 is because his disgrace temporarily paused the influence of his practices.

 

So, here's another chance

Who are these people that the government generates who they say are "entitled"?

You're English, right? He means black people, and brown illegal immigrants.

Edited March 16, 2016 by overtone

[John Cuthber]

 

I really don't think he was saying that.

Well, feel free to answer on his behalf about who makes the decisions?

As I said "Who else would make that decision?"

Because, if it's not the people, then it's not democracy.

And we know that the Republican party (and other Right wing parties) sometimes do what big business wants, rather than what the people want.

So...

[DimaMazin]

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-2-billion-free-media_us_56e83410e4b065e2e3d75935?w2tn8kt9

 

 

The original definition of trolling, putting a whole bunch of hooks in the water and driving your boat around A LOT, not hoping to entice with bait, but to snag and drag all the fish you can get. And Trump not only gets so much more airtime to troll, he actually has bait for on the lines for some of his supporters, who happen to be the most vicious and rabid of the lot. He's giving them an outlet for hatred that is getting more and more physically violent.

Internal pressure of idiots in USA is still weaker than external pressure of idiots. Borders against pressure of idiots are bad therefore you will have another nature but the same quantity of pressure units of idiocy like backward countries.

[MigL]

That is pretty funny, Overtone, because I remember another thread where you were arguing with me as to whether or not it was Nixon who opened up trade relations with China.

In that thread you were arguing against, while in this one you blame Nixon for the "Chinese assault on the US economy".

 

Never pass up an argument of opportunity, even if flawed, eh ?

[overtone]

 

 

That is pretty funny, Overtone, because I remember another thread where you were arguing with me as to whether or not it was Nixon who opened up trade relations with China.

In that thread you were arguing against, while in this one you blame Nixon for the "Chinese assault on the US economy".

That would be the beginning of that assault.

And I am correct twice. What's your point?

Nixon began and abetted the discarding of American trade standards involving human rights abuses and economic warfare, in an apparently desperate (or merely ambitious, in Kissinger's view) attempt at gaining glory and enriching his corporate backers. This constrained Ford and especially Carter, who found themselves negotiating with a China already in possession of various guarantees and promises of access to the American market, and well informed as to American weaknesses and desires, one one side; a corporate America already in possession of various guarantees and promises of access to the Chinese market, and otherwise largely unprepared for what they faced in China, on the other.

So he screwed up the opening of China, without actually accomplishing it. And such was his legacy throughout his tenure in office.

[Phi for All]

Let's also not forget Nixon's maneuvers with Ehrlichman and Edgar Kaiser of Kaiser Permanente, the beginning of our healthcare insurance/"managed" account nightmare.

 

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Transcript_of_taped_conversation_between_President_Richard_Nixon_and_John_D._Ehrlichman_(1971)_that_led_to_the_HMO_act_of_1973:

Ehrlichman: “Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. And the reason that he can … the reason he can do it … I had Edgar Kaiser come in … talk to me about this and I went into it in some depth. All the incentives are toward less medical care, because …”

President Nixon: [unclear.]

Ehrlichman: “… the less care they give them, the more money they make.”

President Nixon: “Fine.” [unclear.]

Ehrlichman: [unclear] “… and the incentives run the right way.”

President Nixon: “Not bad.”

 

 

This was sold to the public as a non-profit solution. Nixon, liar, Trump, liar. The profits came from reduced care. Criminal in my mind, treasonous if I was prosecuting.

[MigL]

No, in one of the instances you are wrong Overtone.

Either he is responsible for opening trade relations with China, or he isn't.

You've argued both, and claim you were right both times.

 

According to Phi, that makes you a liar, comparable to Trump and Nixon.

And a prosecutable criminal !

( just kidding )

 

And something else. If you consider trade relations with China a bad thing, where would the US have gotten the trillions which you guys owe China, and which pay for most of the US government's social spending.

(not that we're any better. Ontario has twice the debt of California with half the population )

Edited March 17, 2016 by MigL