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FondrenRoad

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Posts posted by FondrenRoad

  1. 6 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

    While the statement isn’t accurate, it does illustrate how good Trump/McConnell were at creating the perception they never folded.  

    Trump’s most infamous fold was when he couldn’t get border wall money out of Congress and shut down the government for months only to fold and then declared a national emergency to steal money from the military to build a border wall. 

    Actually, the Obamacare fold might have been more infamous. 

    But both of those folds were actually to Mitch. So I guess I was inaccurate about Trump never folding. It was really just Mitch. 

  2. 4 minutes ago, Chuckie Finster said:


    Goodness. There’s been some wildly politically ignorant sentences typed on this website over the years, but this is up there.

    When did they ever fold?  Mitch passed everything he wanted to and killed everything he didn't. He killed an impeachment twice.  Once he even voted no on removal and then immediately made a statement implicating Trump for the exact thing he voted no against. 

    Mitch even still has his Senate team in lockstep.

  3. 2 minutes ago, Js1 said:

    Overruling the parliamentarian didn’t have 50 votes

    The amendment didn’t have 50 votes

    the bill with the non-passable amendment wouldn’t get 50 votes 

    ThE sEnAtE sHoUlD jUsT pAsS iT

    I'm not disagreeing on the current state of affairs. What I am saying is that it is absolutely the fault of the Senate if this or any other covid relief bill doesn't pass. And you have already given the Senate a free pass on it. 

  4. Just now, David Dennison said:

    Pretty sure Chuck Schumer and the White House were told in no uncertain terms that this bill would not pass if it included the minimum wage.

    Probably, but the "no uncertain terms" are a bluff designed to make Chuck and the WH fold. And they did fold just like they always do.  Now imagine instead that the Senate was told this is the only bill they are going to get. "Not only does Manchin not want you West Virginians to have a fair wage, he also doesn't care about how you've been suffering economically during the pandemic." 

    You know how often Mitch and Trump folded?  0 times. 

    • Like 1
  5. 3 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

    Joe Biden getting the minimum wage raised to $15 would be an enormous legislative victory and the Republicans will obstruct it on that basis alone.  

    Moreover, b/c the White House decided not to overrule the parliamentarian, it neutralizes the House’s ability to play hardball with the minimum wage issue. It would take an unattainable 60 senate votes to overrule the parliamentarian on the minimum wage issue.

    The House is going to pass this watered down Senate bill in the name of expediency. 

    Of course they are.  Dems always fold.  Its why the GOP always doubles down even with a shit hand. 

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  6. 1 minute ago, David Dennison said:

    And when the bill fails in the Senate, then what? Start over on a $1.9 trillion bill? 

    OK.

    Perhaps. Or perhaps the Senate's bluff finally gets called. 

    The attitude you have here is the problem.  You are blaming the House for the Senate not doing something. The Senate is a failed institution, and the only way to even start to fix it is to hold it accountable. And popular bills like this are the best way to do that. 

    The Senate will pass this bill if they know there is no alternative and if they actually take heat for it. 

    • Hook 'Em 1
  7. Just now, Js1 said:

    So they should play hardball with COVID relief and let benefits lapse and be destroyed by everyone for failing to pass a relief bill with 70%+ approval?

    Take up the fucking minimum wage later and get this bill on Biden’s desk 

    Interesting that you believe the House would be playing hardball when it is the Senate who is actually doing that right now. Maybe there is a post from you somewhere here complaining about Senate hardball tactics. Not gonna go back and look. But if one team plays hardball, the other team has to as well. 

    If a minimum wage increase is ever going to happen, it has to be part of a bill like this, and pressure needs to be placed on the Senate to pass it. And blame needs to also be placed squarely on the Senate if it doesn't pass. The house already passed this bill. The Senate could have already done so as well. It could be already signed, but for Senate hardball. 

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  8. 2 minutes ago, Js1 said:

    They aren’t modifying the house bill. They are passing their own bill. Then the 2 have to meet to hammer out the differences. It’s the legislative process. 

    Is it getting a full house vote?

  9. 3 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

    It’s because Joe Biden didn’t want to fight for a $15 minimum wage and if you can’t see that I don’t know what to tell you. The House got it done and Biden let the Senate kill it.  It is not complicated. 

    The Senate should not be able to modify bills passed by the House at all. Vote yes or no. If no, send it back to the House. The Senate has too much power as it is. They dont need to steal additional power. 

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  10. Just now, TwiceHorn said:

    RIght.  I may not have said it particularly well upthread, but there are market structures and forces at play that make immense growth of assets possible and are deleterious to labor, the environment, and other things.

    Hell, I'm not anywhere close to any of this level of wealth, but I am approaching retirement age and since the financial crisis, my "nest egg" has exploded.  Consider if your nest egg is 20x mine.  It's astonishing.  Contrary to popular belief, I'm not some evil robber baron.  I have mostly common or garden mutual funds and am just trying to be able to have a comfortable retirement like my parents did.

    My grandma has a pension from AT&T and lives comfortably off it. She was an operator. Nothing fancy.  In today's job market, she'd be making minimum wage as a phone customer service rep, and would not be considered an employee so would have no benefits.  Now she votes all Republican and wonders why kids don't save. But a couple of the solutions are right there. Bring back pensions.  Add profit sharing for all employees. Ban long term contracting for low wage work. 

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  11. 1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

    Concentration of wealth is difficult to achieve without income.  The increase you speak of was impossible without income (income here including growth/capital gains).

    I'm not sure there's a "hoarding" issue.  That money is at work somewhere in the economy in most cases, hence the growth and income.

    The longer I look at it, the more unjustifiable a wealth tax seems in comparison to raising income tax rates and collections (meaning reduction/elimination of deductions, credits, exemptions, etc.).

    The best justification for a wealth tax seems to be as a correction for previous undertaxation.  Again, that indicates a problem with income taxation rather than accumulation of wealth.  And that would seem to indicate that you should fix the income taxation problem and a wealth tax should only be temporary until the undertaxation problem is "fixed."

    The real issue behind a wealth tax I think is political sleight of hand.  Even poors unaffected by tax hikes and cuts tend to get lathered up about them because they pay income taxes to one degree or another.  This idea is pretty much all "eat the rich" and even the poors can figure out that this doesn't affect them.

    Rather than a wealth tax, which is difficult to implement, regulations to slow or prevent wealth consolidation should be implemented. The real issue is that wages have largely stagnated while revenues and profits have risen.  For public companies, you could mandate a pay scale that doesn't allow C suite employees to makes 100s of times the amount of low wage employees, and 10s of times the amount of key production employees. It is more difficult for privately held companies, but something can be figured out there as well. Owning things is not a "job" nor is it particularly productive and the "reward" of income needs to be better distributed.  Once we made a national goal of using money to make money without regard to what happens in between or what truly gets produced, it is easy to see how we ended up where we are with closed factories and poor job prospects for many. Those with existing capital just want to make more capital.  The industry is irrelevant. Employees are expenses. 

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  12. 1 minute ago, wildcat09 said:

    I'm sympathetic to the argument that if 16 year olds can work and pay income taxes then they should be able to vote, but I don't see many of them ever actually voting. 

    Everything should be either 18 or 21. Hardship work if you need it before that. 

    If you think someone is not competent enough to drink responsibly, then they certainly aren't competent enough to sign up for the military. 

  13. All this is dodging the real issue. There needs to be a maximum voting age. Adding incompetent left leaning voters in early life to balance incompetent right leaning voters in later life is a bad idea.  It is true that not every 70+ year old is incompetent, but neither is every 16 or 17 year old.  We have been happy with a bright line for one so why not for the other?  But its also true that the 16 and 17 year olds have to live in this world that fearful old people try to burn down on their way out the door.  When a coach is about to get fired, you don't let him burn the team to the ground. You keep him corralled until his time is up. 

    • Like 2
  14. On 2/24/2021 at 6:53 PM, WhatTheBuck said:

    I know it’s possible, I don’t know if it’s probable. Sometimes evil seems to have life-sustaining properties. 

    Stress is a big killer too. Since he doesn't give a fuck about anything, he is never really all that stressed.  He will make 90 unless he has an accident or something. Melania may not even be his last wife. 

  15. On 11/5/2020 at 9:19 AM, Tuco said:

    A couple of theories:

    1. "Black Lives Matter" is less palatable to many people than I hoped.  I don't really believe in "shy" Trump voters, but I would buy that given a yes/no question on whether someone supports BLM, there are a fair amount of people who would give verbal support to it, or support to the idea that there are police reforms that are necessary, but aren't really solid behind either.  That makes it susceptible to bullshit like saying it was Communist and anti-Christian.  It made it susceptible to bullshit that mischaracterized defunding police.  Once you give some of those supporters an excuse to vote against candidates who support BLM, they will.  Since the Dems never really embraced the movement, they didn't work to define what it meant, so the Republicans did. 

    2. Many people are more afraid of the shutdowns than COVID.  While they might dislike Trump's rhetoric on COVID, and think the government should be doing "more," they may be more immediately concerned with losing jobs and businesses if we go into a shutdown mode.  I don't think the Dems did a good job of tying economic stability to controlling the pandemic.  

    3. Accurate polling may be impossible during an election cycle.  I get dozens of calls from unknown numbers a day.  I don't answer them.  The people who do answer their phone may not represent a good cross-section of the voting public. 

    Those are just some theories.  I don't how you get evidence to validate or refute them.  And, on #1 and #2, they are important enough that you can't just back off them.  Maybe it's a question of how you market them.  

    1. Black Lives Matter was a branding error that made it easy to attack. It should have been called Black Lives Matter Too.  Instead, opponents of BLM managed to convince enough low info white voters that it meant Only Black Lives Matter which led to bullshit like All Lives Matter.  Not everyone on the cusp of white victimhood sided with the police initially, but eventually they were swayed that way by negative messaging. For the same reason, we see police reform falling apart because of Defund the Police branding. 

    2. Dems also fucked up pandemic messaging.  A pandemic is the perfect time to rely on socialism. It is not the time for bootstraps and kill or be killed. Nobody in America should have had to risk their lives to survive the last year.  Since socialism is a dead end word here, it needs to be rebranded too.  But they also needed to attack the fuck out of Republicans the whole time and they didn't. "We want to keep you safe. Republicans want you to die for their stock value."

    And both of these things point to the larger issue. Republicans never have a plan. Their entire purpose is to attack the Dems plan. Dems can still be idealist. They just need to make the branding airtight. The vast majority of people support Dem plans. They also support police reform and want police to stop killing innocent black people. The left shouldn't care what things are called if they get the job done, so use terms that are palatable to the middle instead. 

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  16. 22 hours ago, The Hot Dog Buffet said:

    I don't think the NY minimum wage would be enough for you to afford to park your van.

    Parts of industrial Brooklyn and Queens look like RV parks these days. Parking is free in most places. One of the reasons that traffic sucks. 

  17. 7 minutes ago, Beantown Express 2.0 said:

    I agree that Biden shouldn’t withhold vaccines from TX even though the actions of the politicians here make us kind of deserve it.  I wonder if Biden can use the federal government to help with the allocation of vaccines in certain areas within TX.  Like don’t let TX send them out to rural areas where they rot.  Don’t send anymore to Amarillo or Lubbock but start sending a ton to Dallas/Austin/Houston/San Antonio/El Paso.  Get them to the places where you have 100s of thousands of people waiting for them right now.

    I agree, somewhat. But it has become problematic that red states get to eat from the federal trough in both GOP and Dem administrations. While blue states are told to get fucked when there is a GOP administration. The just solution would be for future GOP admins to treat all states equally, but since that isn't going to happen, some "turnabout is fair play" needs to occur. You are going to keep electing the same types of people and we need to stop turning the other cheek. Texas will be taking in a massive amount of federal money in 2021 while electing people that don't offer aid to cities and states in distress in blue states.  Texas wanted to be separate. Be separate. Pay for your own shit including the vaccine. 

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  18. 37 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    That’s not at all what happened when the euro rolled lit. When the euro came into existence, legacy currencies were frozen relative to each other (mark vs. lira vs. franc). Goods were priced in euro and you handed over legacy cash that no longer floated relative to anything else. Marks were no longer a thing you could trade on currency markets. 

    Not to mention, the euro was a mandated in-place replacement for legacy currency.  It was not a currency exchange. They were pegged so that they would be functionally the same, and the conversion sent the legacy currency to the shredder, both the physical and the virtual shredder.  At no point was anyone in danger of total loss. Even if a country decided to opt out late, every single person in that country would have had their euros converted back at the pegged rate. 

    This is simply not what occurs with bitcoin. One doesn't just convert to bitcoin and the dollars magically disappear. The dollars go to the other side of the transaction.  And there is no guarantee or mandate that you will be able to convert back because there is no entity guaranteeing that bitcoin will be spendable within its borders.  

     

    • Like 1
  19. 16 minutes ago, gsoda3 said:

    but you can.  you can use it to pay bills.  you can use it to buy goods.  you can use it to satisfy debts.  is it widely adopted across all goods?  no.  but if you're looking for a comparison, neither was the euro for the first act of its life.  

    Okay, start entering into installment contracts where the prices are denominated in bitcoin.  Find a vendor that is selling a subscription you want at a monthly rate.  Offer to price that in bitcoin instead based on today's exchange rate.  And by price in bitcoin, I don't mean the floating exchange rate each month when your bill is due.  I mean your bill is for X btc per month and that is what you pay.

    You can find plenty of vendors willing to accept that deal, but you won't do it.  Approximately 0 people are willing to enter a contract with future payment dates denominated in bitcoin.  And that's because you are valuing bitcoin as it relates to the dollar and not as a currency in itself.  Most bitcoin holders won't even pay a dollar denominated bill today in bitcoin even though they can, much less enter a bitcoin denominated contract.

    And what are you talking about with the euro again?  The euro was absolutely accepted in the eurozone.  It is fiat money backed by government and enforced as legal tender.  There is no comparison.

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