891–900 of 931 posts
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I’ve ran the numbers in a bunch of ways and I don’t think they’re much if any more regressive than current income tax, given the rich avoid income past a point and spend a lot more on goods in the middle band, even percentage based. If you want a better progressive tax you’d need to focus on capital or spending on luxury goods and services.
Congratulations, you have rediscovered VAT
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Murphy isn't well known.
He's getting more well known pretty fast, over all this. His explainer videos of what's going on and why it's so dangerous are often kinda boring and basic if you're a politics nerd–but that's great, because we don't need to be told, it's the folks who aren't politics nerds who need to be educated on this stuff.
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The point is to replace income taxes with tariffs. Domestic production is "desired" but this is not how to rebuild domestic production capability.
> Domestic production is "desired" but this is not how to rebuild domestic production capability No need to be handwavy. It can be part of a strategy. A painful and ultimately less effective way than another, sure. There will be a lot of factors at play beyond these controls. This administration lacks the ability to focus for very long in any competent sense. I'm not sure there is a strategy that will work, at this t…
Bad ideas:
* Tax cuts for the rich will make it happen.[1]
* More tax cuts.[2]
* High tariffs with no plan.[3]
Semi-reasonable ideas:
* Clairmont study.[4]
* McKinsey study (2017).[5] Hasn't held up well.
Manufacturing is low-margin and requires stable markets. How to promote that? There are a lot of dull and boring businesses someone has to do.
Maybe tax policy should be set up to favor dividends over growth. That favors steadily profitable companies over growth companies.
[1] https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2025/01/24/the-golden-age-of-...
[2] https://nam.org/timmons-nam-members-meet-with-bessent-congre...
[3] https://x.com/cspan/status/1909639514861322433
[4] https://dc.claremont.org/restoring-american-manufacturing-a-...
[5] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/americas/making-i...
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When you are engaged in a conversation is it a good idea to crater the conversation by myopically focusing on one minor detail, to the detriment of everyone else?
When your point is defeated and you were wrong, maybe make a new point instead of being hung up on how anyone who points out your blatant lies is nitpicking and focusing on minor details.
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The president has all the power that the congress and the senate gives him. Previous presidents were not given this much power. The bad guys are in the congress and the senate for not upholding the constitution.
I think the current state of affair has exposed a fundamental bug in the consitution. Sure, the US has three branches of government that are supposed to be checks and balances on each other. Which has, mostly, worked really great. But turns out there is no way to enforce this. If we get a president that doesn't care about any of this and is happy to ignore everyone else, there isn't actually any way to enforce the se…
Democracy cannot survive a political party that spends 50 years electing worse and worse criminals, and sacrificing everything to the alter of "More power for our party"
Voters did not punish republicans for Nixon. Voters did not punish republicans for Iran-Contra. Voters did not punish republicans for several market and economic failures. Voters did not punish republicans for multiple outright illegal wars waged on false pretenses that cost us tens of trillions of dollars, spent explicitly from debt.
So this is what you get. The bar will keep getting lower until republican voters finally decide they won't support literally any criminal with an R next to them.
So we are fucked basically.
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>And the bleach argument was the supporting argument for the statement regarding intelligence. It was but one example of a list much longer than the post you responded to, which anyone who was fair would recognize. >Yes really. No, not really. >No. The poster used that bleach argument as the reason here - which is a completely dishonest argument. It's not a minor detail. The bleach argument was one example and you're…
> It was but one example of a list much longer than the post you responded to, which anyone who was fair would recognize. "Anyone who is fair would see it exactly how I see it!" > No, not really. Yes, really. Wonderful way to have a conversation, isn't it. Everything else in your response is nitpicking and hanging up over minor details! > The bleach argument was one example and you're being nitpicky about it anyway.…
That's not what I was saying. I was saying anyone would reflect there is a long list of questionable behavior. Whether or not you think that is disqualifying is your opinion. Scam university, scam banks, scam businesses. These are facts of Donald Trump's past, not opinions.
>Wonderful way to have a conversation, isn't it. Everything else in your response is nitpicking and hanging up over minor details!
It's not everyone else. It's you. And it's because that's what you did to the other poster and I was rightful in calling it out. You could just stop instead of digging in.
>The other example was groping. So I refuted half the points the user made, pretty major to me. It's not being nitpicky, it's major difference. If I said Kamala wanted to establish soviet like price controls, people would rightfully correct that and that wouldn't be nitpicky or hanging up over minor details.
You didn't say that the other example was groping. You only talked about "injecting bleach" and even then not reasonably engaging in it, just pulling the kind of "technically right but clearly not getting the point" kind of argument that I accused you of. If you want to engage with the other poster fairly, you can. You didn't. It's not the end of the world but no need to keep belaboring the point by bringing up things you never expressed which would have totally changed the situation.
>No, you are just nitpicking.
How is that nitpicking? I never said conversations should go like that, so there is no reason to ask me why I would prefer it go that way. Do you not know what a strawman argument is?
>I did, by engaging in the DIRECT argument that the user provided for him being unintelligent. User said "Trump did X. He is unintelligent". I'm supposed to say "ohh no but he is intelligent" completely ignoring the reasoning for his conclusion? In an actual conversation, you engage the reasons provided - otherwise it just turns into unproductive "no/yes/no/yes" conversation.
That wasn't the entire argument. Are we now going back to grade-school reading comprehension? I quoted his point. You ignored that in your response to me where you continue to pull this obnoxious shtick. ENOUGH!
> I'm supposed to say "ohh no but he is intelligent" completely ignoring the reasoning for his conclusion?
You did completely ignore the reason for his conclusion. He said there are many reasons why Trump has questionable character, you zero'd in on a minor detail of one of those arguments and did not address anything else, let alone Trump's actual character and why it would or would not be good based on evidence. Then you accused him of doing it on purpose! You're really rude and a really bad poster that is doing exactly what you complained about and now your ego is too big to walk away. Sad!
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That’s the same thing as being pro-business. Big business out-competes small businesses again and again. The idea of smol business being viable (see: this whole thread) is just the marketing front.
Small business is viable. There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses successfully running throughout the country. Maybe I'm missing your point but this seems like a dumb thing to say.
Megacorps are destructive to market forces in general.
Small businesses died because we fed all the IGAs to Walmart, through Reagan's absolutely braindead "what if we just don't prevent monopolies?" policy.
It turns out, destroying the economy of local communities so that Walmart shareholders can be even wealthier while average Americans only get a few cents cheaper on some products.... at least until the monopoly has consolidated control and can just keep raising prices for the rest of history while selectively dropping prices anywhere someone tries to compete only serves the goddamned shareholders, not Americans.
Most rural places had small grocers. Now people who live in those places have to drive an hour to Walmart, and the local economy no longer has anyone working at the local grocer. The building that used to house the local grocer now has a fourth generation of whatever sketch dollar store company bought it this year, which employs exactly one human being from the local community, and the products are terribly priced, meaning not only did we lose the money staying local with whatever kind of more expensive IGA we replaced, we didn't even get better prices for it!
Monopolies are a huge percentage of the problem. America's rural communities are dying partially because all the local businesses have been replaced by national behemoths so literally every single day to day purchase you make ships more money out of the local economy. Nobody can have a job in a rural community because every dollar that finds its way to that community gets shipped out to Walmart HQ instead of flowing around and paying tradespeople and buying local products and services.
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The whole thing strikes me as a bunch of nepobaby/fake academic/banker bro advisors who have no idea how the physical world works. As much as I think Musk is a bad actor at this point, talking to him about supply chains would have highlighted how insane this whole plan was from day 1. My dad is a retired EE who dealt with the 90s offshoring wave and described the process of spinning up offshore production with a new…
It’s pure stupidity and most people don’t even realize it. Last night I met a couple at a country club where I was a guest - one of those $100k/yr places - and they asked me if my trade partners are charging me more with the tariffs. I told them the U.S. government is charging me more with the tariffs and my trade partners are charging me more because the value of the dollar is down. This was the first time anyone to…
The dirty secret that nobody talks about is that the vast majority of our rich people are literally in filter bubbles of their own making and are disconnected entirely from reality. Like really bad ones too, not anything interesting, just generic Fox News based ones.
I listened the book "Lucky Loser" (Craig/Buettner) a few months back. It's a well-researched timeline of how the Trump fortune was made, and to be really kind, how monumentally terrible DJT is at business on a fundamental level. The shady deals and repulsive ethics are not exceptions but the status quo. The only reason he's in the situation he's in is because the guy who created Survivor saw an opportunity. Now the w…
From what I am hearing, he seems to have appealed on culture war issues. On economic issues, it was assumed that Biden had been doing something bad and Trump would end it, but they didn't much care past that. There is still a halo of "Democrats are bad at the economy" dating from the 1970s and rooted in the New Deal.
Because nobody likes admitting the why: The democrats are hated because of the Civil Rights Act, and how the feds enforced it in the south.
It is not a coincidence that states that tried to ignore the Civil Rights Act have been strong Republican voters ever since.
Democrat hatred is based in tyranny. The "tyranny" of being forced to treat black people as equals.
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> It was but one example of a list much longer than the post you responded to, which anyone who was fair would recognize. "Anyone who is fair would see it exactly how I see it!" > No, not really. Yes, really. Wonderful way to have a conversation, isn't it. Everything else in your response is nitpicking and hanging up over minor details! > The bleach argument was one example and you're being nitpicky about it anyway.…
>"Anyone who is fair would see it exactly how I see it!" That's not what I was saying. I was saying anyone would reflect there is a long list of questionable behavior. Whether or not you think that is disqualifying is your opinion. Scam university, scam banks, scam businesses. These are facts of Donald Trump's past, not opinions. >Wonderful way to have a conversation, isn't it. Everything else in your response is nit…
If I address any of those points, would I be nitpicking and picking on minor details?
> You didn't say that the other example was groping. You only talked about "injecting bleach"
The user brought up groping and injecting bleach. I refuted the bleach argument, leaving the groping argument alone. It's also not technically right, it's completely incorrect and absolutely disingenous framing.
> You did completely ignore the reason for his conclusion. He said there are many reasons why Trump has questionable character, you zero'd in on a minor detail of one of those arguments and did not address anything else
I addressed ONE of the TWO reasons the user provided. What other reason am I supposed to have addressed? Should I start making some up?
Rest of your post isn't worth addressing it's just the same junk.