News Us politics - read first post before comment

[Deleted member 41765]

He's cutting things because it's popular with the rest of the party or because it fits with his personal values. No need to confuse things by gathering facts.

Again, I am with you @scout86.

 

[hodge]

‘What to the Sla...

https://www.thenation.com/article/what-slave-fourth-july-frederick-douglass/
Amazing speech. I read it some years ago and included portions in a book I wrote. Thank you for posting this.

 

[hodge]

A lot of those programs are pretty important to people our here in rural areas. I know people who have...

You and me both, Scout. We have Al and Amy, and in my part of the state, Colin Peterson, who's a Dem in name only sometimes, but a Dem nonetheless, lol.

 

[hodge]

This seems to be a fitting commentary at the moment. And, as any Lincoln lover will attest, there's never not a good time to invoke the wise and kind man's words:

Abraham Lincoln: Second Inaugural Address. U.S. Inaugural Addresses. 1989

Lincoln, in his second inaugural address above, is of course speaking during the Civil War and things now are not as they were then, though we are almost surely as divided as a nation now as we were then. Race is still part of it, though Trump's egomaniacalness sort of seems to overshadow any emphasis on any particular issue apart from what threatens his own sense of super importance, which is, really, I think, the only thing that matters to him.

ETA: By the by, does it strike anyone else how incredibly eloquent, articulate and precise Lincoln's language was? Especially for someone who was never formally educated??? When you set presidential words like these aside Trump's tweets, it's like someone making some sick joke. Maybe Darwin was wrong, because this certainly looks like devolution to me.

 

[anthony]

Until then, I feel your *poor people are just lazy* analogy is significantly off.

You have misread what I wrote, jumbled it up, then regurgitated this... again, your words, not mine. Please don't try and twist what I wrote into your misinterpreted version, and spit it out as though that is what I said. Please reread what I wrote, and try again.

 

[Deleted member 541]

@anthony I do know that some people take advantage of programs that we have. I think that's true anywhere in any country. I personally know 2 people that get Social Security, one of them could work as there is basically nothing wrong with them, and the second does work a full time job, but gets paid under the table. So, yes there are abuses. I also know of people in their 90's, he's legally blind, his wife has moderate Alzheimer's, they receive Meals on wheels. A program which will be cut by Trump. Abuses, yes. Need yes. There has to be more oversite, IMO!!!

The minimum wage here sucks. I honestly don't know how people survive on it. Companies won't hire full time, because then they would have to provide health insurance and god forbid, there is no way they want to do that. So it's either buy it yourself, or go on federally run program. Which they are now trying to get rid of. The cost of getting your own health insurance runs anywhere from $600 a month and upwards. How do people pay that, when they get $7-$8 an hour?????

Housing cost???? Where I live, a 1 bedroom apartment (basically 3 small rooms total) can run anywhere from $600-$1200) a month and that's usually without any utilities.

Heating cost. Oil heat, right now runs about $2.00 a gallon to heat your home. It has been as high as $4:00 a gallon through....All oil companies demand that you get 100 minimum. Most oil tanks are 250 gallon capacity. In the winter in the Northeast, you can go through a tank of oil in 3 weeks. We have temps sometimes that run -20 degrees with wind chills up to -40 below zero. Sometimes for days on end. It gets cold here. Natural gas is a bit cheaper, but still a burden if you don't have gainful employment.

Then there is the cost of feeding a family. Holy shit, I don't know how they do it, or what they eat, because food here is expensive.

So, many are trying to survive on $7-8 an hour with the cost of living which is way beyond what they can afford. So yes, cutting these programs, fuel assistance, meals on wheels, and health insurance, will litterly kill people if they are taken away......

 

[Anarchy]

I try to avoid the term "capitalism" as it means very different things to different people. Liberalism is almost as confusing a label, and what Americans commonly understand by the label "liberal" is almost a polar opposite of what it means in every other part of the world, and what it meant in America up until probably the 1890s.

Add in Ted Neale's "vulgar liberalism" : the mistake of seeing what the united state has now as a free market

And vulgar libertarianism (mistakingly assuming that the current problems would be even more exacerbated if we had a free market)

And there's a lot of room for mix understandings.

 

[Anarchy]

Big cuts in states have been made in fairly recent times
A good example would be the New Zealand reform government of 1984. The link is to a talk given by Maurice P McTigue, back in 2004, McTigue was a minister in that government
Rolling Back Government: Lessons from New Zealand

It may be that some of our Kiwi members could comment on how closely what McTigue wrote, agrees or disagrees with their memories of that time.

We've also seen big cuts I the past, notably in the nineteenth century in Britain. The state never went away, and there was a constant struggle between state coercion on the one side and consensual community activity on the other

But, in general, the state coercive side receded from the end of the Napoleonic wars, up until around 1850.

One of the big reforms, was eliminating the restrictive system of parish level support for the poor.

It sounds harsh, but it wasn't. Because parishes were supposed to support their own poor, there were big restrictions on people moving between parishes in order to take up jobs - incase they became poor and had to be supported!

Does that sound familiar?
It should, it's the basis for the present day "keep those Mexicans/East Europeans/foreigners out, they're only coming here for "our" benefits/health care"...

The parish level support also acted as a sort of income suppliment
The whole community, including farmers were taxed for poor support
People on poor support, would work for a small wage for farmers.
The farmers liked this, because although they were paying the tax and the small wage, the rest of the community were paying as well, and that subsidised the farmers.

With the parish level support abolished, the farmers then had to pay a sufficient wage to attract workers, as the restrictions on moving out of the area to seek better wages was gone, the poor were no longer trapped in the parish of their birth, they could go anywhere, and they did!

I'd better quality the reduction in state

Thatcher was not a reduction in state. By any metric you choose to measure it by, Thatcher grew the British state
Number of Employees
Percentage tax take
Proportion of GDP

I'm not certain, but I suspect that the same was true for Reagan

Feckin Google autocorrect!
It know what I want two right better than I duo!

 

[Justmehere]

By the by, does it strike anyone else how incredibly eloquent, articulate and precise Lincoln's language was?

Yes! So precise and seeking to build bridges.

And ironically, he was the first Republican president... and here we are now, with Trump. The polar opposite.

I hope the pendulum swings back.

 

[Anarchy]

Quietly differing on the assessment of Lincoln.
The revisionist historians draw on a lot of lines of evidence that are airbrushed over by the court historians.
________________________________

Regarding national insurance, state pensions and state sector health care insurance

Check out the structure of a Ponzi scheme.

Carlo Ponzi didn't invent the scheme that bears his name (Bismarck had the Prussian state one long before Ponzi thought of his) and he never coerced anyone to join his scheme. He went to prison for it though.

Bernie Madoff, never coerced anyone to join his scheme, he was arrested and he killed himself in his cell rather than stand trial.

The state sector schemes are coercive, they have no underlying investment (government bonds are promises to tax the population even harder in the future)...

And like every other Ponzi scheme, they must collapse. The only question is when?

Is it "leadership" to keep quiet about a Ponzi scheme, and just hope that it doesn't collapse and reveal itself as a scam on your watch?

What would the answer to that question say about "political leadership" for the past how many decades?

 

[Deleted member 541]

and here we are now, with Trump. The polar opposite.

I hope the pendulum swings back.

. I just hope it doesn't take 8 years for that to happen. Too many people will die from his lack of care, concern and program cuts by then.

 

[scout86]

I'm not certain, but I suspect that the same was true for Reagan

It was. It was kind of hard to find a clear, unbiased reference to cite, but here's one source.
http://www.factcheck.org/2013/03/teds-twisted-history/

Here's the thing about government's role in healthcare and a lot of other things. If regular working people earned enough money, we wouldn't need any help or any subsidies. As it happens, incomes have not kept pace with expenses. It's not as simple as raising the minimum wage. The money isn't being sequestered by small business owners, it's being collected and stored by the people at the very top of the food chain. Some of the Republicans like to call these folks "job creators". I'm not sure that's accurate. I think most of them don't create anything that exists in the physical world. They 'create' things like 'investment products'. I'm not such a socialist that I think everyone should get paid the same. I have no serious problem with people being wealthier than i am. (I don't actually aspire to be wealthy, never have, fortunately for me.) But, the simple fact is, in this country, right now, you can't afford to get sick because you usually can't afford to pay the cost of getting treatment. You also can't afford decent insurance to use to pay that cost. There either has to be a way to pay the price on the "open market" (I'm not sold on the idea that it actually IS an open market) or, you resign yourself to the idea that people will die just because they're poor.

Now, if I die because I'm poor, it's not going to be a huge lose. But there are kids out there who have the potential to make the world a better place, if they live long enough and get the opportunity to learn the stuff they need to do it. What about them? I can't accept the idea that the world will be a better place if all the financially disadvantaged just died and got out of the way. Too much of your economic status depends on random factors beyond individual control. We are all better off if everyone has the chance to make the best contribution they can.

Yeah, I know, some people are basically lazy and don't want to contribute anyway. Although I believe that's true, I don't believe it necessarily has to be that way. That's a slightly different topic.