Why do you like Donald Trump as President?

The BBQ Pit
181

I’ll agree that it is a negotiating tactic by NK. Less sanctions, have a meeting, and then IMHO, NK will continue on their path as they have done before. Taught to hate America of course. Love SK? I don’t think so much. Though as information continues to leak north (and south from China) some are clearly changing their attitudes. That’s inevitable as the world shrinks.

Reunification is going to be very, very difficult. I think the only way it could really happen is if SK would take their technology north. Slowly.

182

So, its Col. Mustard, in the library, with the candlestick. But maybe it was an accident?

183

You’re hardly blameless on this score, yourself. In the same breath of calling people fags, you claim others should be more careful with the use of harassing, bullying, and lying.

Lower taxes would be great, if there weren’t other consequences that came along with lower taxes. Every projection I’ve seen is that tax revenue will go down and the deficit will go up. Someone will have to pay those bills eventually. You’re a new poster here so we don’t have a record of your thoughts on the deficit before Trump took office. Certainly a great many Republicans thought large deficits were a bad thing during Obama’s presidency, but they’ve been strangely silent since this last tax cut was passed. How do you feel about large federal deficits; big problem, no problem, or something else?

I think the other items you listed are similarly not as simple as you’d like them to be. More jobs? Great. More jobs because of something Trump did? That hasn’t been demonstrated to my satisfaction.

184

I think I asked the same questions. I was just very succinct the second time. Thank you for answering.

This may be a place where we just have different economic values and agree to disagree. I believe that countries with healthcare for all have demonstrated better outcomes in health, and lower expenses.

I think we could spend quite a while discussing costs and benefits. It is interesting to note that this is a position that conservatives have flipped on. In 2007, George Bush pushed for a guest worker program, because he believed that illegal immigrants did jobs that US citizens were unwilling to do.

We need to define terms. When you say “identity fraud”, I am guessing that you are specifically referring to the use of fake id in order to get a job, or get a child into school, or get a driver’s license. Correct me if I am wrong. Generally speaking, identity fraud applies to identity theft more broadly, so your statement can be misinterpreted.

I admit to snark. Generally when Trump supporters start talking about Deep State, they are using his definition.

Yes, as long as you are willing to turn that lens on Trump.

185

Thank you for the clarification. Would you care to answer the questions posed in posts #176 and 177 above?

186

Sales taxes are an example of taxes that are collected within the community and do not require any identity, generally.

I would like to see some examples of this.

187

Rubbish. They’ve been closer before. That was during the “Sunshine” phase.

Where did you pull this rubbish from? The North did not send armed personnel to the South to kill South Korean civilians because they love their Southern brothers and sisters. North Korea does not want unification on any terms other than its own. It certainly doesn’t want unification any time soon when it has had to rely on its enemies, including South Korea, for such incidentals as food for its population.

What are you on about? What neighbors do they have that have reunified? Let’s check a couple of contenders for regions in the neighborhood who had, to use a Chinese expression, separatist issues.
[ul][li]China and Taiwan? Nope, no success there. And it’s looking to get uglier before it gets any better.[/li][li]Japan? The only division I can think of was when Okinawa was administered by the United States. That administration ended decades ago. On top of that, Okinawans still complain about how the national government treats them.[/li][li]Pakistan? Nope. There was a bloody civil war that changed East Pakistan from a province to the independent count)ry of Bangladesh.[/li][li]China and Tibet? Yeah, right. Not a lot of success there. They’re unified but it’s certainly not by Tibet’s choice.[/li][li]Malaysia and Singapore. Singapore was cut loose, disregarding the idea that all of Malaysia was perpetually one. From any standard, Singapore has been a success compared to Malaysia.[/li][li]Indonesia? Again, a bloody occupation of one area, which finally became independent.[/ul][/li]
Care to try again?

188

Maybe he is referring to all the corrupt people he had to fire or advised them to quit.

Of course they were appointed by him, but he did expose them, eventually …

:slight_smile:

189

He sets them up and he knocks them down?

190

Maybe he’s referring to North and South Viet Nam (for certain definitions of ‘neighbor’). Of course, there were a few minor hiccups on the way.

191

Welcome to the Straight Dope, Ruined!

I am just some internet rando with a job, a mortgage, a gf, a cat. I have not inherited a large wad of money or property &etc, but I am from somewhere and have my gifts. I care about the future and the USA, maybe more than ‘elites’ because I am not exactly insulated from events.

I’d like to encourage you to continue to explain and defend your ideas. Glad to see it, really. If the Trump administration can actually de-nuclearise N Korea, I will give them unqualified credit for the success for the whole world, including N Korea.

But I DON’T like lower taxes, not like this. Deficits are through the roof, for no good reason, and the benefits do not seem to be flowing where they are the most needed, namely the bottom 10%. Your cheerleading for “lower taxes” //fullstop seems short-sighted at best.

192

Why should he believe them? Why should anyone believe them?

See, this is something about Trump you should probably get used to. He lies. A lot. Like, not just “he lies like a politician”, more like “political scientists, newscasters, neuroscientists, and other people who follow politics closely are freaked out by how much he lies”. So when he says “we’re going to have a great health care plan”, then doesn’t do anything to elucidate the details of said plan, or even really to show that he’s given it much thought at all, the immediate reaction should be doubt. Why did you believe him? Why did you believe the republicans who spent 6 years campaigning on “repeal and replace” and yet never in that time presented a coherent plan to repeal and replace that they could get behind would have a coherent plan when they had power?

I mean, maybe it’s just a partisan broken clock being right twice a day, but I coulda told you that. Most people on the left could have told you that the republicans really didn’t have a plan. And many on the left could have told you why - because Obamacare, fundamentally, is about as far to the right as you can get on public health care without it no longer being public health care.

Why? This honestly puzzles me.

I live in Germany right now. We have socialized healthcare. And that’s part of why I really can’t imagine moving back to my home country. It’s something I personally value immensely. I pay a bit more on my taxes every month, but in return, I get world-class health care. And more importantly, I get to live with the knowledge that if I get in a car accident, or catch some disease that requires time in the ICU, or get a back injury that needs physical therapy, I won’t end up bankrupt or unable to pay for my medical care. I spent the last 5 months on antidepressants - looking at what Lexapro costs in the US, I would have been unable to afford my meds, and those few hundred bucks per month probably saved my life - I was borderline suicidal for a while in January.

(Moving away from anecdotes and personal experience, attempts to quantify the quality and cost of care in various health care systems generally end up with the USA ranking pretty low in both cost and quality. I mean, 37th isn’t the bottom half, but it’s still not great - and socialized systems like those in the UK, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and my current country of residence, Germany all rank higher.)

Do you have any examples of a free market medical system working well in the last 20 years? I can’t think of any off the top of my head, and I can think of a whole lot of reasons why a free market system is actually really bad for medicine - things like inelastic demand and really terrible incentives.

I seriously take issue with this. We have to draw conclusions based on facts all the time. But not all conclusions are made equally.

For example, you can see people talking about “climate change” and “global warming” and conclude “it’s a hoax, they changed the definition”. This would be a conclusion based on facts - as you put it, an “opinion”. And yet, it turns out that scientists have been talking about “climate change” since at least 1955. Oh, and what they call it has exactly zero bearing on the scientific data that we have - I could bring out a paper tomorrow titled: “Anthropogenic temperature variance” detailing how the earth’s temperature has changed over time due to human effects, and the fact that I’m calling it something different does nothing to change whether or not the science contained therein is valid.

So your conclusion is probably invalid - it’s based on incomplete facts and bad logic. And you can’t just excuse that by saying “we have different conclusions” - someone’s wrong. It might be me! But if we can’t reach the same conclusions given the same facts, the conversation is going to break down.

193

(Also, Ruined, welcome to the 'Dope! In case it wasn’t clear from the above post, I respect the amount of thought you’ve clearly put into your positions, even if I disagree with you, and I think you do an excellent job really getting into the nitty-gritty of answering the OP, beyond either strawmanning the conservative position or being an actual straw man. I think you’ll find that the BBQ pit is among the worst places to have this kind of conversation on this board.)

194

Can you provide any proof of these assertions beyond Trumpian claims?

No, they’re just playing Trump with the same games. Throw out a “breakthrough”, offer talks, demand concessions and money behind the scenes, then cancel everything at the last minute. Trump bit hard on the same damned hook.

Sure, let me know when that happens.

Proof? My proof is to ask you to google the NYC skyline from the 70’s and compare it to today’s. To consider how much less lead and mercury there is in our environment today and how much less is being added to it due to environmental laws. Your assertion is crap and ignorance based.

His own and his party’s.
Just keep making assertions that aren’t supported by facts and you are not capable of adequately defending. This is part of the definition of “Troll”.

195

Geez, next you’ll throw out the Roseanne claims that he’s been secretly busting up gangs of pedophiles but no one knows about it and the media won’t report it. :rolleyes:

196

I love the irony.

197

Yeah, Ruins claim that the EPA is a joke was pretty much the topper for me. Well amongst a whole bunch of other bullshit.

1970’s Denver. I remember the brown cloud well. Remember is the key word here. Doesn’t happen anymore.

198

[Moderating]
It would be a really good idea to care what I think about your use of the word, because if you do it again, you’re going to be banned from this board.

Understood?
[/Moderating]

199

He won’t be back. He won’t be back because to come back means he has to do one of two things.

  1. He brings facts to support all the “facts” he pulled out of his ass. Not really possible.
  2. He comes back and continues to pull “facts” out of his ass and ignore requests for cites, until finally it’s obvious to everyone that he’s trolling.
    And a final possibility;
  3. He again pisses off the mellowest of all moderators by being a bigoted prick.
200

Wait, I thought we were talking about illegal immigrants, now you are talking about immigrants in general. So your problem with them wasn’t that they came her illegally its that they aren’t “like us”.

Also your statement that 27% of crimes are committed by first or second generation immigrants seems shocking until you realize that 25.8% of Americans are first or second generation Immigrants. So really its about what you would expect.

Didn’t they teach you in elementary school that we are a nation of immigrants?