Kitchen pantry. 
What additional pro-secessionist movements can there be? At this point I assume that any pro-secessionist movement is and will be bankrolled by Putin because the vast majority of them have been, and I assume a lot of other people will be assuming this as well so I do not think it will be as useful a tactic as it has been in the past couple of years, but other than perhaps Quebec, I can’t think of a region ripe for secession that hasn’t been tried already. There is Puerto Rico but the numbers that want true secession are tiny and have already had their voice so I don’t think that has a lot of potential.
Good thinking.
California?
Pretty cool. On the one hand he probably didn’t want to talk “business”, but on the other he was probably glad you weren’t a flaming right-winger.
Already done a couple years ago, and bankrolled by Russia.
Huh? They used their once-a-year budget reconciliation free pass on the tax cuts. That’s nothing new; it’s been kosher for decades.
Except that reconciliation can only be used on measures that decrease the deficit, which they conveniently ignored for the tax cuts.
The accounting for Social Security is complicated, but Medicare takes hundreds of billions of dollars each year out of the general fund. The problem with Medicare is that you (and your cohort) haven’t paid enough into it. You earned the money in your retirement accounts; Medicare is like putting a down payment on a house and then claiming that that makes you entitled to the house in full. If you’re trying to defend it on the grounds of the advantages of a “increased productivity of a healthy and secure work force” (I’m not sure if that was related or a separate topic in your post), it’s hard to tie that in to Medicare, which is mostly (but not exclusively) for the elderly.
I read it the first time. I got the part about Republicans accusing them of tax and spend from this part -
Emphasis added.
Then when you suggested trying to change the terms by re-labeling the admitted fact that Democrats do want to raise taxes and increase spending, the Rep then made what you termed an “interesting pivot” and started talking about Russia.
And I agreed. It was indeed interesting, although probably not for the same reasons as you.
From my POV, he knows as well as he might that Dems really do want to “tax and spend”, and didn’t think your suggestion on how to rephrase that would make it more palatable to the electorate, so he trotted out another response that he might want to make. It worked with you, but you are a Democrat. But even with an already convinced audience, the Rep did not seem interested in going further into the issue of how “tax and spend” is a good idea, even if you call it something else.
Regards,
Shodan
Hey, call it what you will, but “tax and spend” is better than the Republican policy of “borrow and waste”.
The above is a narrative retelling of a conversation I had 6 days ago, not a word-for-word recounting of the entire conversation. If you read the above aloud, it may take 5 minutes to run through… trust me, Shodan, he didn’t pivot from an uncomfortable point of view, no matter how much you wish to see it that way. But thanks for trying you may collect your parting gift at the door.
Shodan’s posts brought to mind the bolded part of this quote:
That’s irrelevant. No matter what they do in that once-a-year exception to needing 60 votes for cloture, the filibuster is still there the rest of the time as long as the ‘once-a-year’ part still holds.
Is this -
an accurate representation of the conversation?
As mentioned, we both found his eagerness to discuss Russia and Trump rather than re-labeling his desire to tax and spend as “invest and build” to be interesting, but for probably different reasons.
This is either one of the most insightful things I have read recently, or it isn’t.
Please tell me you aren’t going to go off on Abraham Lincoln again.
Regards,
Shodan
John, be prepared for hard confirmation questions about what a drunk President Castro must be. No one uses Uber to get home unless they have a serious problem with alcohol… :dubious:
Are you serious with this? I (and many others, I’m quite sure) use Uber and Lyft like taxis… when we don’t want to worry about parking, when we want to have 2 or 3 drinks, or when we don’t want to wait for public transportation. I don’t think these services would survive if they were only used by drunks.
No. Just sounds like a question some clueless Senator might ask.
Democrats have been trying to call it “investments” since the Clinton years. It worked once: when Clinton did it. Since then, voters hear “spending”, because the government is a terrible investor. Almost all actual federal spending is pure consumption. Very little of it is investment and every little of it is good investment.
I would say that a lot of that (like when talking about Social Security and Medicare) can be called consumption, but it is an investment to avoid social decay.
IMHO it is also to avoid the growth in the number of desperate people deciding to take torches and pitchforks. It was common to see many well to do that were aware of what their taxes and what they were being invested for. But many Republicans nowadays think that there is no need to invest in the security of our society.
Or, since they are deciding that progress is not needed, then a lot of investments that are good will be on the chopping block, after all very little of it is good, no? :rolleyes:
So does literally everyone involved in politics except for the hardest-core of libertarians. If you don’t tax and spend, you don’t have government.
I teach this to third graders, and would be happy to pass along the third grade lessons to you if they’d be helpful, explaining how governments function via requiring taxes and then spending the funds raised on government functions.