If she wins, one of two things will happen: chocolate imports will double, or america will declare war every month.
~Election 2016~
- Thread starter Infinite Citadel
- Start date
japan77
High Prince of Growth
Sanders is trying to import Scandinavia onto the US, and you know what, I totally agree with that.
Also, for anyone claiming the US is a good location by median pay doesn't know anything about how the pay scale works, a better analysis the is overall wage gap, in which the US comes in 4th to last(Please look up the Gini Index), and crime rate has a correlation with the wage gap(I know, correlation doesn't mean causation, but its still worth noting). It is generally thought that a Gini index score of under 40 is good, 30 is Ideal. Nordic countries sit in the high 20s, low 30s. France is upper 30s, and the US gets a score in the upper 70s, and it keeps climbing
Also, for anyone claiming the US is a good location by median pay doesn't know anything about how the pay scale works, a better analysis the is overall wage gap, in which the US comes in 4th to last(Please look up the Gini Index), and crime rate has a correlation with the wage gap(I know, correlation doesn't mean causation, but its still worth noting). It is generally thought that a Gini index score of under 40 is good, 30 is Ideal. Nordic countries sit in the high 20s, low 30s. France is upper 30s, and the US gets a score in the upper 70s, and it keeps climbing
Because simple regulations won't solve problems of this scale, Canada's banks haven't suffered a major economic collapse in decades because of they don't give theirs the same kind of freedom ours has, the freedom we give them comes at a very high price to average American person. I'd wall street has become a force of evil it acts in a way of utter greed with disregard for just about anything with providing little real value to people to me that is certainly worthy of being considered evil (not everything or everyone in wall street is evil as of course there are exceptions).
Foreign factory jobs are not an improvement with the way we use them at all, case and point the fashion industry for over 2 decades there have been a cycle of child labor, unsafe work conditions, harsh work conditions, and loss of life in the name of greed for the companies to make money for cheap profits, the corporations have shown themselves incapable of solving these issues or unwilling to take the time and effort to solve it because it costs them money, so yea until we shape about it not having the factories there would be a good thing because it's allowing child labor to exist and costed tens of thousands people's lives.
Does that look balanced to you?
Congress is horribly inefficient these days so asking the government to handle those things is ridiculous especially when Congress is lobbied by the corporations to act against the average work for the sake of the corporations because the average worker can't lobby by themselves which brings me back to why we need unions because asking a single person to stand up to corporations is just unfair because the corporations will always hold all the card in that circumstance.
Do you just not care about people or their well being at all honest question? Because it sounds like you don't by how you're willing to trivialize and side track the conversation something as important as paid maternity leave is. (Paid vacations are something far less important)
We've dropped rather low on educations standards despite obsessively testing our children while also putting them under enormous burdens to go to college taking on larger amounts of debt than is fair to ask anyone to take, we import much more than we export, our government runs massive deficit because we refuse to actually raise taxes or lower our war costs and then refuse to properly support the veterans of those wars, our infrastructure is largely poorly maintained because again we refuse to get to money to properly support anything, we still lack proper federal anti-discrimination laws, the NSA is one of most big-brother like Government Surveillance and runs with a lot less oversight than it should and is being used on American people, we're suffering from one of the large guns violence levels in the world and refuse to do anything about it, we've allowed 62 people to own more wealth than half the population in the world while having record poverty levels, we have one of the worst examples of gerrymandering and money influence politics to extreme negatives in the history of the world, we have a failure of a mental health system, we have about 1% of population jailed (often for very poor reasons) more than most nations, we then privatize those prisons which have been called "a cesspool of maggots allowing disgusting amount of unconstitutional humans rights violations" and then offer them poor methods for re-entry into society and more....
But how do you define when a nation has become a failure?
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Woot
Well-known member
The value of the goods themselves arriving and leaving can be unbalanced, but the payments are always balanced. Currency held abroad can only be used to buy our goods or invest in our economy. Even if there was a way to send out empty ships and have them come back full for free, that could only be to our advantage. Now you can debate fiddling with these balances in the short term, but that's a different argument. Sanders and Trump think free trade is a bad thing, period, they want to cancel the agreements and put up permanent tariffs to stop it.
That is simply bad policy. The consensus among economists that free trade is a net positive is nearly unanimous. When polled >90% support taking down existing barriers and oppose putting up new ones. It's the economic version of the climate change 'debate'.
There's two parts to that video: whether employers should be required to allow time off for maternity, and the employee should be paid during it. The first thing is good, we already have that. The second thing - well, it depends on how it's implemented, but in the simplest form there's no reason it would lead to the average woman earning anything more in total, in effect it would just be a way of paying them on a different schedule. (For non-minimum workers, in the long run). I'm not against it, I just don't care that much because anyone who can budget their own money already has it.
There's not a nation in the world you can't type up a paragraph of problems with. Just have some perspective - take a walk outside and you're not going to see a bunch of mentally ill homless veterans who got unfairly fired from their jobs get shot and then get arrested for being shot and then sent to a private prison but die on the way there from a bridge collapse. You'll see a bunch of people working and consuming, you'll see the ordinary economic activity that is 99% of life. At the start of this you asked if I really think the economy is really the most important issue facing politics - well, generally, yes, I do.
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japan77
High Prince of Growth
What we're arguing to clarify woot, is that the current state of the US gov't and economic structure as well as social structure are most likely inferior to the Nordic socialism design provided by Sanders.
Third, the US has the economic power to where if wages are more fairly distributed, we can provide just about every social service that is considered reasonable, the US should not have people in poverty, the economic value of all US goods and persons is high enough to avoid poverty for everyone. Basically we have the capital to afford to cover a almost every social structure issue, but no one seems to want to move to fix this now outside of Sanders. Clinton seems to be attempting to practice a form of gradualism, which I view to be insufficient.
Second, it isn't free trade that is heavily agreed to be good according to all economists, Keynesian economists argue that trade is good, not free trade, a proper tariff needs to be instituted to protect infant industries, and avoid exporting all labor out of the country, as you weaken the economy by doing that. Second, that 90% statistic is most likely invalid, I know for a fact that pure Keynesian economists don't support that statement.
Third, the US has the economic power to where if wages are more fairly distributed, we can provide just about every social service that is considered reasonable, the US should not have people in poverty, the economic value of all US goods and persons is high enough to avoid poverty for everyone. Basically we have the capital to afford to cover a almost every social structure issue, but no one seems to want to move to fix this now outside of Sanders. Clinton seems to be attempting to practice a form of gradualism, which I view to be insufficient.
RoboMonkey
Active member
My opinion on America:
day-to-day our citizens have it very good. A lot of people have disposable incomes and that's why you see stuff like Black Friday happen. Pretty much a lot of Americans are making way more than they need.
On the other hand, the people who are living in poverty, are homeless, etc. are growing in number every year (no source here but it seemed obvious). The problem of poverty is multifaceted and has no single cause. But it is likely due to the fact America has no set policy that allows people stuck in the cycle of poverty to get out of it. With no government help and limited private sector jobs, you're going to see more poverty.
The solution seems painfully obvious to me. Just help the poor out and tax the wealthy. Perhaps give tax breaks to the billionaires that can prove a percentage of their unnecessarily high incomes go to charity.
day-to-day our citizens have it very good. A lot of people have disposable incomes and that's why you see stuff like Black Friday happen. Pretty much a lot of Americans are making way more than they need.
On the other hand, the people who are living in poverty, are homeless, etc. are growing in number every year (no source here but it seemed obvious). The problem of poverty is multifaceted and has no single cause. But it is likely due to the fact America has no set policy that allows people stuck in the cycle of poverty to get out of it. With no government help and limited private sector jobs, you're going to see more poverty.
The solution seems painfully obvious to me. Just help the poor out and tax the wealthy. Perhaps give tax breaks to the billionaires that can prove a percentage of their unnecessarily high incomes go to charity.
Woot
Well-known member
We do have a lot of people at the very bottom, even though the median and average are better it's not the best country to be dirt poor in. It might make me more popular in this thread to say that raising tax rates for the top and lowering them for the bottom is efficient economic policy if you want to redistribute money, and the right is usually guilty of bullshit when that issue comes up.
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I'd rather tariff and admit publicly that's what you want to do than the current backroom hidden dealings that resulted in things like the TPP or TTIP where the public is generally kept on the very down low of their details until the very end while corporations are allowed to influence it pushing things like ISDS into it to allow them to attempt to bully countries doing anything 'bad for business' regardless of the country's motive for something. We don't have 'free trade' we have corporation controlled trade that's bias against certain nations, so of course they'd oppose change that could threaten their dominance.
We have also have some of the shortest maternity leave policies and some of the most strict policies to qualify for it which is the other issue.
That's overly idealistic and ignores reality because like pregnancies aren't always planned or that despite budgeting there is no way some people can realistically afford to save enough to take time off because of their cost of living.
Maybe where you live, but I live in a large metro sub-urban area and I've seen far more than I care to count.
Just because things appear ok doesn't make them actually ok. Like the infrastructure problem is definitely not ok, but it take time to have a large impact but if we keep neglecting it and many other issues like the current of politics does it will come at a high cost to us. You're simply being naive if you think you can ignore majors problems because things appear fine.
For bernie winning the New Hampshire primary or?....
For trump winning the other Primary there...?
Woot
Well-known member
It's a shame the Trump ads were banned. They were causing such a shitstorm back when he was low in the polls and the odds against him were 15 to 1. I can't even imagine what it would be like now that his nomination is almost certain.
Of all the things he could possibly make fun of Trump for, John Oliver goes with a slight variation of his name from 400 years ago? Drumpf doesn't even sound much sillier than Trump already does.
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Augustus Caesar
Current HPoT and Retired HPoW
Im just glad Trump didnt win Texas, but im not happy Cruz did......America is doomed.....