well...I wouldn't voluntarily cut military...I'd would bloat military with reversible planned expenditures and then negotiate with russia and china to set caps. Military is a waste but you have to get them to cut back too so spending more is a valid tactic

Clear implication?

We spend how much more then those to countries combined? We could cut half our military budget and still outspend them. Somehow i dont think China will be up for caps that are unequal anyway. But hey if they are thats still a lot of socialist money we could spread around.

no...im saying if a country has a central bank then high taxes wont cause permanent unemployment as the currency will just weaken and unemployment should balance out with a poorer population. In france case they dont have thier own central bank so GL to them. They have permanent structural unemployment imo

currency devaluation is not caused by debt. see Japan. ITs caused by cash inflows and outflows. Debt can be a factor if its tenous and people run for the hills but for the most part its micro policy attracting or dissuading capital.

agree US can be more progressive without issue...just GND is wacky and Naive

Id negotiate it. a freeze is a big win

No, debt and international trade affect those things, not a progressive tax.

If you can provide evidence show that taxation affects exchange rate and buying power, I would be willing to consider it and change my mind, though.

Trying to get your rivals to cut military spending is a losing battle, especially when those rivals are autocrats. You are just asking for an arms race.

The way to reduce military spending is to force NATO members and Japan to increase their spending. In order to do that it will probably require first doing modest cutbacks in military spending. Trump actually almost got this one right, but then he ****ed it up.

By "in some way" I assumed you meant it affected it enough to actually matter and be a considered, not in the "maybe it could have some very fringe impact" type of way. My bad.

Shouldn't this all be discussed with the debt and deficit in mind? That should be incorporated into any analysis of the state of the economy and its future, no?

It can't just not matter forever...

No. If you need primary sources, type in "equality vs equity" in any search engine, and take your pick from any one of the dozens of progressive and intersectional academic sites that appear and explain the differences between the two. Neither Joe Rogan nor Tim Pool are inventing what other people think; it's well defined by the progressives themselves. The difference is clearly equality of opportunity (equality as normal people would define it) versus equality of outcome (equity).

And you are correct that very few on the left are shouting "equity, not equality", because very few liberals believe in this nonsense. It is only the intersectional progressives; the far left, the ones that are hijacking the Democrat party, along with bandwagon people who didn't really think about what the intersectional progressives are really advocating.

Those intersectional progressives are the ones drafting this legislation, so it is extremely important to nail down what they mean word for word when they propose such laws. Normal people do not really think there is a difference between equality and equity. However, the intersectional progressives have very clear definitions as to what they mean by equity.


I agree with this to some extent. I don't think progressives are totally misguided, but their proposed solutions are certainly worse than the perceived issues that they have with society. Some of the things they see as issues are really a natural consequence of a free and equal society, but they received the short end of the stick and don't like it.

Is there not some middle ground between "primary driver" and "very fringe impact"? You obviously think there is no to little impact. I think it is somewhat more than that.

maybe not. the prevailing trend is that as long as inflation is low you can print money and monetize debt. This is the premise behind the gnd, but it can also be the premise for tax cuts. I have no doubt whatsoever that this will be the norm. wiping debt will be seen as a perk of low inflation.

People with a corporate or personal finance background have trouble with this...but its not the same. a company has to pay debts...but a government can have thier central bank buy it and never pay it back.

there was an argument that this stuff will cause massive inflation....but after QE and QE2 its been proven fairly false. The fed can forgive all the debt and I doubt theres an uptick on inflation tho there might be a slight downtick on exchange rate due to sentiment and uncertainty. (BOJ gives the coupon to the japanese government literally free money).

So for all the debt hawks....it really doesnt matter

we may not have another inflationary period or recession in our lifetime. Central banks dont have enough firepower. they have to wipe debt and let the government run a deficit to fund low taxes. they'll take 5 years to figure it out. the thought of a recession is laughable

That is pretty fascinating. I actually don't think the general idea of what they are saying is dumb, at least from the little bit I read, but their way of saying it is idiotic and their solutions are bad.

What they are saying is that not everybody gets the same advantages, therefore there isn't equity. So we should provide some sort of compensation for that. The first part is trivially true, second is near impossible to implement.

It's a little more than bitterness over being less successful than others. There is a clear correlation between race and income as well as other race based biases (like when in comes to criminal justice). The problem is that you have one side saying "it's their fault if they aren't successful" and the other side trying to make the biases go away overnight with more radical reform that often ignore the fundamental issues that cause the problem.

God this is so 1927 thinking. The entire civilized world thought they'd entered a golden age of mankind and enlightenment, where recessions, stock market crashes, war and strife were done forever, with only prosperity and technological marvels to come.

Soon after that came the Great Depression and almost the annihilation of civilization with World War II, followed by half the world plunged into paranoia, control, misery and poverty for two generations by left wingers.

I wouldn't be too confident that nothing goes wrong again. In fact I'd be supremely confident that it will.

well i only invest 6 months at a time and im not going to predict imminent war and strife...i think i have a handle on it

This is perhaps the most ignorant statement I've read about politics. I highly recommend reading what the left say, they are completely bat**** crazy just like the Maoists and the Bolsheviks were.

The bolded is precisely what they are saying. The thinking goes like this:

1. All races, cultures and genders are equally talented (to say otherwise is racism, white heteronormative patriarcy, and sexism, respectively, which are no-nos and in fact unthinkable)

2. Given (1), if there are disparities in any way in measurable outcomes between races, cultures or genders, this MUST be due to racism, white heteronormative patriarchy, or sexism.

3. These disparities are therefore unfair and should be fought in any way possible.

It is pure unhinged crazy, masquerading as reasonableness, and actually difficult to intellectually argue against if you're stupid, because (2) follows directly and strongly from the false assumptions in (1). And to question (1) means you're a racist, sexist, patriarchalist, etc.

To the extent that the claims are somewhat reasonable (African American lack of success can be partly traced back to historical racism and not entirely to their culture), they are still are static and not creative. Nor they do they take self referential effects into account. Thus they are extremely harmful.

For example, the best thing that can happen to black communities is for the entire community to understand and accept the shame that the biggest cause of black poverty is the fact that black fathers fail to live at the home of their children at a very high rate (>72%). This statistic is not due to racism; in 1950 under Jim Crow in a frequently racist society it was 22%. So it is cultural.

But instead black people are taught that white society is oppressive and racist toward toward them, at some deep hidden super secret level that's somehow bound into the structure of everything, and that this needs to be corrected/overthrown.

This view is obviously highly destructive to the cultural and economic success of black people - for one it masks the true and more importantly changeable reasons for their poverty (desertion of children by fathers). For two it makes people think in racist, collectivist rather than individualist terms (which are the basis of understanding and success). It is also antithetical to the kind of conscientious, internal locus of control viewpoint that all successful oppressed minority communities have adopted (Asian immigrants, for example).
No, they aren't.
Yes but it's not the dominant culture that needs to be changed. That's highly meritocratic and fair, at least in the US. It's the internal culture of the oppressed that needs to change. That's a bitter pill to swallow but it's medicine that needs to be swallowed to get better.

nah, that's dumb

Yeah, there seems to be some confusion over where socialists draw the "filthy rich" demarcation line.

"Anyone whose wealth I greatly envy" would seem to qualify as "filthy rich".

I actually think outrageous wealth is one of the great drivers of economic prosperity and human worth. Most of the arts (when the world was far too poor for arts if wealth was distributed more evenly) came out of very wealthy patrons and benefactors. Even much science did. Da Vinci was supported by the Medicis. Do you think the peasants would pay this guy to do science and art or Mozart to do music when they barely had enough for food and clothing? Nearly all the beautiful art and architecture which has rippled down the ages, most science, was only possible through private wealth not shared with the poor.

Beyond that it's simply good for innovation and economic robustness to have many different levels of private wealth. Private science foundations can be started and develop organically, charities of types not met by the giant government bureaucracy. New large undertakings can be done.

The cutting edge desires of the rich also provide the influx of capital for research and development of currently non-economically-viable ideas, which then trickle down to the masses. The cell phone industry was paid for by filthy rich businessmen in the 90s, whose massive overpaying for calls (because they were rich) paid for a tower buildout and technological refinements and increasing adoption. Mass cheap air transport has its root in the expensive travel habits of the mega rich. Life extension work is being funded by the rich. Tesla (for those who like that company) was only possible because super rich people could afford to lay down hundreds of thousands of dollars for prototype sports cars. Space technologies and the race to get cheaper satellites is being developed by private industry in anticipation of "filthy rich" tourists wanting to take a ride. If was also funded by the filthy rich - SpaceX was only possible because Musk was filthy rich and put his own money in it - the government was happy with their pork barrel suppliers and stodgy old ways.

The filthy rich and the hypercompetent are an incredible force for good with massive positive externalities beyond what they consume. They're the spark plug of society. I think if you genuinely cared about the welfare of the poor, you'd tax them more and give that tax money to the rich.

"Anyone whose wealth I greatly envy" would seem to qualify as "filthy rich".

That's just silly made up dumb. That standard would be different for every person based on the envy quotient, which is known to be very unstable and unreliable. What made you think that's a good definition?

Also, you have the externality thing inverted. The filthy rich, almost without exception, got that way by inheritance or exploiting some massive negative externality.

This is the problem with unleashing and fanning envy. Where does it end?

The Maoists started with wanting to correct to excesses of the "filthy rich".

They ended up killing, imprisoning and torturing millions of people with any capitalist-minded thought whatever, and the families of anyone who thought that way just for good measure..

A billion lives were wasted over two generations in what followed from the idea you're espousing.
40 million people needlessly died of famine because the "filthy rich" were actually the competent people that kept society functioning, who knew how to do things - which is how they got rich.
This seems to me to be objectively false.

Oprah is filthy rich. Did she get that way by "inheritance or exploiting some massive negative externality"? There's a Russian billionaire's yacht - the Quantum Blue - parked in the harbor where I am in Nice, France. He got filthy rich starting a single store and growing it into a nationwide chain that was far better and cheaper than what was currently offered. He became something of a folk hero in Russia.

I assume you think these are rare exceptions, but if you go through the billionaire's list and analyze what each has done, I think you'll find that the majority are a) self made and b) got there by doing an amazing job of creating wealth in the form of creating massive ecosystems that created what people wanted to have better and with fewer resources than anyone else could.

Wealth is corrupt and somewhat unearned in plenty of the rest of the world (the Russian oligarchs for example), but I don't think that's a fair statement in most of the West.

csb

I don't think that's a fair statement

I do and you're wrong. Suck it, nerd!

Why pay the poor at all. The rich should start up new versions of the company store and pay people with bits of food and shelter. The poor would just squander anything else.

Because it's a free market and the desire for and availability of motivated work come to a middle point? The only way you can keep people poor is socialism and government control. Otherwise the market sets the price.

And yes the poor absolutely squander. They smoke and drink far more, cost more in health care (choosing unhealthy life practices and foods), and fail to save and invest for the future despite the ability to do so (they can get far greater returns than the rich). It's essentially the rich that are investing in capital and future production. That's why they're rich to begin with.

Start on an island with equal resources and marshmallow-now eaters and two-marshmallows-later eaters, and the power of compounding will have the delayed eaters controlling most of the resources. Same results for intelligence provided violence is removed from the equation.

Start on two separate islands (removing exploitation) and you'll see one vastly more developed than the other. It's just how the world works.

They know their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.

I have no idea what socialism is the way it’s used itt.