The senseless stupidity of Jan 6 upsets me. People died for what? Congress was going to count the Electoral College ballots and declare the winner of the election no matter what happens on Jan 6. The counting might have been delayed a few days. That didn’t even happen because the Capitol building was secured and Congress met that night.
I kept waiting for the Republicans to speak up in December and affirm that Biden legitimately won and it was a fair election. Republican Leaders should have been on the Sunday news shows reassuring the public that the election results had been investigated by the AG and found to be legitimate. The mob probably wouldn’t have showed up on Jan 6.
Coding was one Clinton era program to help miners who were interested, get new job skills. The fact is that even when coal is still mined, much of the work is automated. There is a group of Americans who refuse to get new job skills, who refuse to take any steps to better their lives and who demand that politicians pander to them by setting up lots of government handouts so that they can pretend that they are coal miners, or whatever. To quote Trump on the subject:
“If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people don’t have the imagination — or whatever — to leave their mine. They don’t have “it.”
Pitchforking strawmen can be entertaining but is rarely a good source of rational arguments.
If you were actually interested in the Biden Administration plan for revitalizing the economy, you could look around for some information in the dark corners of the Internet, like, say:
I’m sure part of rebuilding infrastructure, modernizing transportation, transitioning to cleaner and lower-carbon energy technologies, and addressing water quality and Internet access issues will involve some amount of “coding”, but it is also going to require the entire array of vocations providing the intellectual and physical labor that were involved in originally making the United States the world’s leading economy. Of course, it might also require fixing the immigration <gasp> system so that we can bring in workers who are willing to do some of the physical labor jobs that many middle class Americans have decided is beneath their collective “self-worth and dignity”.
I have yet to see this entire class of the population that is unwilling to accept “a government handout”–certainly, not among the middle class which gets such benefits as educational support for post-secondary education or the horror of ‘socialized medicine’ that is Medicare, and definitely not by the very wealthy investors who actively seek massive tax breaks and who are first at the trough whenever there is an economic recovery act–but I would agree that it is much more sustainable to create actual jobs that contribute to a productive economy rather than just shift money around. To that end, investing in and preparing people to work in industries with potential for future growth and that contribute to greater economic vitality are a far better option than somehow creating makework jobs in highly automated or dying industries such as industrial manufacturing, traditional steel mill production, or mountaintop removal mining to extract coal that nobody wants to burn.
Or, we can get in the Wayback Machine and return to a worker’s fantasy paradise when industrial cities looked like this, because nothing says “Welcome To Your Glorious Future!” like black lung and cleaning soot off your windows every morning:
The stimulus is not a “handout” that means you’ve failed and are in the same class as those that choose not to work, its a “stimulus” going to everyone. The difference is important. And unemployment isn’t a handout because it was your money paying into the insurance.
You do know it’s possible we can give all Americans jobs like back in the 1950s without reinstituting 1950s racism? Just slap enough tariffs on whoever so it’s cheaper to make iPhones in the United States, and watch the reason for the insurrection disappear.
Tariffs are just a tax on American consumers. If full employment is the goal, better for the government to just hire anyone who needs a job and find something to do than institute a dumb tax on all consumers that helps no one at all.
Also, I was actually in the position of “needing it” growing up, and we had to accept things like the government cheese and food. It was utterly humiliating and degrading, I felt like we had failed society, and I desperately prayed that no one at school would ever find out.
Everyone needs to watch every documentary they can about post WW1 Germany through to the start of WW2. Watch Hitler’s speeches, his hand gestures, read the subtitles and how he mesmerized the people, conned them into who the “enemy” was, the “brown shirt” terrorists and their various inhumanities, how he eliminated democracy so successfully.
Not just by any capital police, but by Eugene Goodman, the guy who diverted a mob from an open senate chamber. He deserves some kind of award, not sure what.
It seems there are three kinds of Republicans: those who have at least a bit of honesty and vote to convict: those actually in favor of the insurrection; and those who know perfectly well that Trump is guilty, but are scared of being primaried. The last two will vote to acquit and Trump will go around proclaiming total exoneration.
You continue to demonstrate astute knowledge in the fields of macroeconomics, classical employment theory, and Say’s Law of Market. Truly, you should call of Janet Yellen and school her on economic theory on how “we can give all Americans jobs like back in the 1950s”.
Any Senator stupid enough to actually believe this should be immediately removed from office. Any Senator who thinks the public at large is stupid enough to believe this should also be immediately removed from office, no matter how many members of said public prove they actually are that stupid.
Perhaps the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I mean, the shine has kind of been tarnished with Trump giving it to such democracy-loving luminaries as Rush Limbaugh and Devin Nunes, but I can’t think of a better way to repair that offense than to use it to recognize someone who actually did something to literally protect and preserve the democratic process.
Yeah, and when exactly was it that any coal worker lived a “middle class” lifestyle? I’ve read a few books and watched some movies about growing up in a coal town, and most of those people were not middle class by my estimation. The managers and skilled trades guys, maybe, but even then, a lot of their jobs were precarious, and could disappear at the drop of a hat. Most of them only ever had a house because it was a company town, and even those houses were the cheapest thing the company could build. And if someone died or lost their job, they were out of that house almost immediately.
This was not a lifestyle anyone really aspired to.
Re-read the posts by, e.g., me and Horatius pointing out that “back in the 1950s” was not actually all that much of a job-security paradise for the American working class. There were lots of strikes, there were massive layoffs; even strong unions couldn’t guarantee that good jobs would always be available.
What there was back then was a lot less economic inequality, and a general conviction that workers (well, at least white male workers) ought to share in the prosperity of their employers, rather than just being disposable temporary labor. But that conviction didn’t automatically guarantee workers good jobs, not even the white male ones.
So just to be clear, your proposed solution to “how can we route work to unemployed 60-year-olds” is to attempt to try to destroy the economies of other countries with political trade restrictions (which sounds somewhat like what inspired Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor) and then, after we have successfully cut off the middle class from acquiring virtually any technology or physical goods, point at those 60 year olds and say “All the competition is gone! Now go forth and make IPhones!”
