Ya. My point was they had Bernie right there if they wanted him, but they decided to royally screw him over and go another way. Worked out well for them. And idk, the wealth gap can only continue to widen before something gives. That tax bill was not popular.
I think people will warm up to the tax bill once they realize they have bigger paychecks. People claim they care about a lot of issues, but really, the economic effects they experience are the most important topic of any election.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/business/economy/tax-overhaul-survey.html
These Democrats are in a tough position, because they can’t really promise too many things that have to do with the economy. Trump has hijacked their traditional policies - spending money (on infrastructure), and protectionism with the claim of boosting wages. Entitlement reform will only cut benefits, and people who care about gay rights already vote Democrat.
So as much as people dislike Trump’s personality, I have a hard time thinking that he’s the underdog in 2020. A normal President in this position would have an overwhelming advantage. Also keep in mind that Trump spent less than half of Hillary’s budget in 2016, and most of the GOP had boycotted him. This isn’t going to be the case in the future, now that he’s handed the Republicans the biggest legislative achievements in years.
I generally agree with Ohai on this.
saw earlier that 62% of women are anti trump and 55% of independents also
not sure how he will get the women vote
Lol Trump never had a platform he just said generic things he thought people wanted to hear - then later he would backpedal or just claim he never said it (no Medicare cuts - remember when he claimed everyone else stole it)
Dems do need a platform but if Trump has shown us anything it’s that you DONT NEED A PLATFORM or even to have a clue what tourey talking about. Just lie to people and tell them you’ll get their coal jobs - they are dumb and will believe you.
Dems platform should focus on election reform & making sure Russia can’t hack voter rolls and funnel cash into our elections again. This should include legislation regarding citizens United which opened the flood for this entire mess to begin with. The entire premise of one person one vote is made a mockery with our current electoral college system - we need to get rid of first past the post in general. With ranked choice we will get more moderate politicians instead of this race to the loonies on the left and the right. Anyone fighting against election reform such as that typically had a vested interest in keeping it a mess.
I mean it’s pretty hard to unseat a sitting president you have to be a pretty big mess to lose - it’s a long way til election day and if the economy faulters Trump will take the blame (since he was so eager to take credit for it & right or wrong the Pres always gets the blame even if it’s anormal cyclical downturn)
If Dems run a candidate like Joe Biden who can get the blue collar PA/MI/WI Trumps odds in our current economic climate get much more difficult.
I think it’s a pretty simple “choice”.
America is a corporatocracy, illusion of choice. People voted the “wrong” way, and Trump was put under control. It’s right back to QE4, globalism, postmodernism and all that…with a controlled opposition front office guy. He’s “Obama of the right wing”. So just accept reality, nothing will change, at least not in DC, that’s an S&P500 controlled space. You have no means to capture it, period.
However, he annoys the living fuck out of the fascist-left and their corporate-media/tech oligopoly (even if it’s just an appease-the-revolution show, it can breed further resistance at the grass roots level). The fascist left have to be opposed, and nobody else has stepped forward, so you gotta go Trump. If the left get back in, it’s going to be all-out corporate-Stalinism (which they are going to keep running via corporate-tech/media anyhow).
Corporate-RINO Trump 2020!
What do you mean? Trump had a very well defined platform, which he is pursuing, for better or worse.
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Cut taxes, deregulate energy industry.
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Raise tariffs, protect American domestic industries.
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Build a wall on the Mexico border. Reduce immigration.
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Repeal Obamacare.
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Spend $1 Trillion on infrastructure.
And many other things. Even if this is “generic”, it is tangible and cohesive. Protect American interests. Return to old values. Not everything here is great, but it is a real platform.
You guys STILL seem completely lost. The Dem have a very strong platform, and have done many things.
Immediately after the election of Trump was the key time; will they realize they are in checkmate, abandon everything and start developing from a completely different place, or will they persist? They made their choice, they will persist with their postmodernist movement (180 degrees opposite of liberalism). All their assets are developed in that area; corporate media, corporate tech, university brainwashing camps. They can’t just pick up and move, repurpose all those assets, unbrainwash all those people. They are dug in, till the bitter end.
Dems will continue to run the game of economically corporate-socialism (“free healthcare for all” which turns out to be a profit-maximizing scam, pushing women and immigrants into the workplace to drive down labor costs), and socially postmodernism (white-hate, man-hate, silencing opposition voices via witch-hunts and tech, destruction of statues/history, getting to the kids earlier with grade school brainwashing, etc).
Trump’s platform thus stays the same; to appear to oppose all this.
Yeah not sure how Trump doesn’t have a platform. Mark what Ohai said then add tough posturing on foreign policy. It’s easy to get caught up in the CNN commentary but he’s been relatively consistent at the core, at least no less so than any other politician. His implementation is at turns bizarre, puzzling and rudimentary but he does have a platform.
His run for reelection will feature:
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Cut taxes, deregulate energy industry.
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Raise tariffs, protect American domestic industries.
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Build a wall on the Mexico border. Reduce immigration.
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Repeal Obamacare.
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Spend $1 Trillion on infrastructure.
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Tough on North Korea, China and ISIS
Will talk about tax wins, the markets / economy, deregulation, how NK and SK are now talking, ISIS is defeated, any possible progress on background checks and / or immigration, Section 232 if that comes to fruition, etc.
I really think it is way simpler than all this. People really, really hate Trump. Probably as much as people hate Hillary. That galvanizes people to go out and vote.
Why is it different than 2016? Because nobody thought Trump could win. And, because Hillary isn’t running.
You watch too much TV, that is their alt-reality blue bubble projection.
A fabricated reality, becomes reality with time, as the masses psychologically give up, that is their game plan. Not clear if that will work though. It didn’t work last time. Their doubling down either 1) works, or 2) makes the media-fascism all the more transparent and gives Trump something to oppose. Lying media is an emotional immediate issue, it worked for him last time.
You may be right, my brain tells me you’re right. Although my gut tells me a number of traditional Republicans may also have been drawn back into the flock. Honestly at the end of the day, I’m genuinely just curious how this will turn out and couldn’t be convinced to bet one way or the other.
My feeling up to this point is that his rhetoric has been so abrasive that it’s causing more people to vote that normally might not in the special elections since his inauguration. And everyone knows the death knell for the GOP is more people voting. Their base is and has already been going to the polls, they have nowhere else to go but down. I don’t see a ton of people flipping over, but who knows, I guess we’ll get a decent peek into this later in the year.
(Ah, took too long to think/type)
Meh. There is a huge counter-culture revolution growing (finance people are squares, and not in touch with culture). And it’s NOT on the side of the left. Yes, I agree more will be voting, but that may not go the way you assume. It may come down to the normies vs the revolution.
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5a9990ade4b089ec3539d869/amp?yn=&__twitter_impression=true
What’s the AF consensus on stock buybacks? Good for Main Street?
These buybacks are financially retarded…
Borrow from China + borrow from citizen’s future social security + print > USG subsidized corporate profits (aka “tax breaks”) > buy back shares late bull-market at valuations the corps know are inflated (because they are the ones who inflated them) > the action of the buyback further manipulates valuations > the bubble grows.
It benefits the 10% who own 80% of the shares, for awhile.
Meh, this is dumb. Virtually every SS co has put out analysis showing CAPEX, debt / pension paydown and employee wages as the top uses of corporate tax benefits. How HuffPo goes from $200B of tax repurchases (which you can’t show wouldn’t have occured already under current capital allocation plans) to proving the tax cuts aren’t benefiting employees proportionately is lame. It’s the incrementals that matter. Earnings calls this year have universally supported SS findings. Honestly, the “analysis” floated by liberal mags and shared here has done more to push me into the Republican camp than anything.
True Story :
I was sitting in an AI/ML seminar at my school a few weeks ago and this Silicon Valley BSD PhD type was giving a talk on his company which was primarily involved in developing self-driving cars. The time came to the Q&A after the talk as it usually does with seminars and people were asking legitimate questions on aspects of computer vision and learning. Things like how machines are not able to detect patterns such as subtle differences in waving or how their inner navigation works and blah blah.
This fat lesbian looking chick from an "Unaffiliated department " I later found it was one of those women studies/African American Studies kind of departments got up and asked about how the company is dealing with Racism and bigotry.My initial thought was the fatso was asking about their hiring practices and things of that nature, which was fine but kinda a waste of time given the talk wasn’t related to their anti-discriminatory stuff. Turns out she as trying to ask “if the car has to run over a black dude or a white dude how would it decide which one to run over?” She then cut the guy short in his first sentence and added what if it was between a woman and a man? I mean WTF?
It’s the very own fault of the liberals that they have alienated themselves so far from the common folk they no longer share a common ground with the average Joe Schmo.
^
Ironically she raised a very valid point. Machine Learning, AI whatever you want to call it is pattern recognition on a massive scale. If facial recognition products that could be implemented in the future by police departments are trained on a data set which is skewed Caucasian then their accuracy will be sub-par when implemented on non-Caucasians.
What’s more interesting is that the smear campaign on ‘liberals’ has had so much success than even third world immigrants masquerading as Iranians dismiss their opinions based on their appearances and what they study rather than what they are actually saying