If there are riots they will be black riots, and they will move white blue collar workers further to the right. My hope is that Republican efforts like what is happening in Maine convince lower income whites that the Republican Party is their enemy.
Yeah, we were going to look into that, but then Idol came on.
But lowering the minimum wage, yeah that’s bad, we should do something about… OMG!!! Steven just totally dissed Randy! I gotta get on Facebook and see what my friends think!
You got it.
I dont like the Republicans, they sent away our factories and jobs to asia, Republicans eliminated our labor protective tariffs, the Republicans bailed out the rich guys and the banks, the Republicans gave us trillions more debt and 2 (Iraq, Afghanistan) endless unwinnable needless wars. I dont see much to like about Republicans.
Democrats and obama are no different, except that with Libya we now have 3 unwinnable endless needless wars instead of just 2, and another 6 trillion in debt.
As long as we continue to reduce American factory jobs, as long as we spend and borrow trillions each year, as long as we bail out the big banks and make the people at the Federal Reserve richer and richer, as long as we have foolish stupid wars, as long as we continue to overpopulate, things will not get better.
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I would much prefer either Roosevelt to what we have now.
I dont agree that FDR made things better economically, and going into a world war is NOT a “step up” from the Great Depression that would have been endless. People remember that during the Great Depression lots of people(25%) had no money/no job to buy anything, but they forget that during WW2 they STILL!!! had nothing, because there was no gas, no rubber, no meat, no cars, no sporting guns, no sugar, no nylons, not much of anything in the stores to buy. Rationing was not much different than not having money, either way, you still could not buy anything. During FDR’s entire presidency lots of people had nothing, and also had to go to war and get killed. For lots and lots of people, one way or another, things were very bad from 1933 - 1945. It was not until the late 1940’s early 1950’s that prosperity returned to the American worker.
**FDR was the first one to admit himself!!! **that his policies and ideas were not working, he repeatedly said he made, and will continue to make mistakes over and over again (but not the same mistakes). Regardless, FDR’s intentions were unquestionably pro-America, and pro-American worker, and FDR endlessly kept trying more and more new things to make things better, he never gave up even when it became evident that things were still bad.
Moreover, FDR did an absolutely fantastic job running WW2 - that alone overshadowed all of FDR’s shortcomings.
As far as Teddy, his conservation efforts to permanently preserve forever millions of acres of land, forests, and natural wonders for hunters, fishermen, and campers made Teddy one of the greatest presidents we ever had. There also was no question at all “whose side”(big banks or workers) that Teddy was on when it came to economic policies.
What we need today is another FDR or another Teddy who will put America first, put the American “people” first, who will want to get and keep American jobs and American factories, who will stay out of unnecessary wars, who will balance the budget and pay off the national debt, who will protect our borders and make reasonable immigration laws, and who will get rid of “free trade” and replace it with “fair trade”.
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Fat chance of them ever knowing what they want to conserve.
I used to be a Conservative free-trader. ALL of the free-trade arguments I see now I used to make. They were wrong then and they’re still wrong.
Ironically it was during my way up the economic ladder that I saw the truth in the form of so many others who fell to their doom on all sides of me - through no fault of their own. I know I’m where I’m at because of sheer luck, capitalized upon by skill. Without the luck I’d be down there, too. I knew this era was coming and talked about it coming a lot. And it’s going to get worse.
I interpreted his writings as saying that Capitalism is like a boiler whose vents are closed; and that it will explode. Keynesian ideas came and opened the vents; plus it also made Capitalism into not-Capitalism. Now we have trickle-down bullshit in effect and the vents all being closed again. His formulas do not appear to be wrong; at worst only his implied timeline was off.
Overpopulation politics bother me. Here’s why.
Part of what bounced me out of Conservatism was my realization that Capitalism can be, and probably is being, used as a tool of population control. Starve the throngs of poor so the rich can keep everything to themselves. Everything about Capitalism points to the Lord of the Flies-style natural selection.
Why bother with having Hitler come along when you can siphon all the world’s wealth up to the top 1% and leave everyone else falling behind until eventually they start turning on each other for basics like food? This ain’t far fetched; look at the size of America’s homeless population and the burden being put on soup kitchens… at the same time that we’re cutting programs for the poor. The poor are being left to fend for themselves while the rich are being subsidized. It’s a slow genocide by negligence rather than hands-on murder.
Start with population control and you can predict what Conservatives and free traders will do next.
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“Free trade” is not “fair” trade. And “Free trade” has absolutely nothing to do with making the American citizen richer or safer. Today’s “free trade” is a policy to make rich people, and global companies, and big banks, richer.
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Capitalism is fading from America. What we have today is becoming facism and socialism. Government is giving taxpayer dollars to the big banks and the big corporations. We also have 10 million people getting unemployment/welfare checks, and 40 million getting food stamps.
Today’s economy is trending towards what we had in the 1930’s, except that instead of 10 million jobless people hopping frieght trains, we have 10 million jobless people sitting on couches watching tv with their unemployment checks. Instead of 40 million people standing in soup kitchen lines, we have 40 million people getting food stamps.
If you really want to see how bad it is today, then stop the unemployment checks and no more food stamps…except that we dont have an FDR today, i.e. somebody who “wants” to make things better .
Regardless, what we have today is what the American voters has chosen. No foreign army took away our capitalism, it was the voter who voted for what we have now.
Over population is NEVER!!! good. Even Communist china and the countries of Africa realize that too many people is bad, too many people costs a lot of money, too many people use a lot of water and energy and health cafe and schools and food, too many people means lots more people who are jobless, too many people means more and more debt and more and more pollution, and too many people means that the pie is going to have smaller and smaller pieces.
Yeah, of course I would prefer some guaranteed job forever with constant raises every year. Should I continue to get paid even if I’m not making anything useful? Who should keep paying me?
duh, society of course, and you deserve it!
Does paid time off increase each year too?
You’re thinking what I’m thinking, too. Cut the welfare and unemployment and you’ll have an instant-cook rebellion. People are going to rebel before they starve. The GOP is digging its own grave with their newest quests for budget cuts.
I’m not so sure the American voters chose this mess. We voted for politicians who promised to do us right and they turned and screwed us. See: Obama and his declared war on big business, which fizzled; and Clinton’s war on NAFTA, which he turned and signed when he got into office.
We’re in a world now where we TELL politicians to do one thing, we vote for politicians who will do our bidding, and then they outright defraud us. We buy a carton of milk and open it to find it’s full of rat piss. Voters are being told to fuck off - by the rich lobbyists.
Lifetime employment was a reality in Japan. During that time they experienced explosive growth, competitive advantages and prosperity.
I don’t expect much of an answer to that - the historical fact that job stability DID exist and progress was still being made at breathtaking speeds, is a pretty tough historical fact to reconcile with this propaganda that chronic national and even global-scale job instability is the only way we can achieve great progress economically and technologically.
There’s another bad argument that is pushed around here - that it’s bad to ensure that everyone gets a job, because it’ll result in people doing stuff that no one wants.
The alternative is that we have millions of people chronically out of work doing nothing at all.
Apparently it’s better that they be doing nothing at all rather than doing some kind of work for pay. As usual, no one has the knowledge or courage to address this. However at some point America will be forced to address it.
It is being addressed. As a result of the recession fewer people were buying widgets. It seems your solution was to just keep making widgets so people could keep working. Then I supposed we either find something to do with the widgets or just have the government dump them in a whole.
As the economy recovers more people will buy widgets, meaning more jobs, meaning more people can buy widgets.
Do you think that maybe lifetime employment was an EFFECT of explosive growth and competetive advantage, not a CAUSE?
And what happens when they lose those competetive advantages?
So should we continue to invest money and resources to make sure buggy whip makers and phone booth sanitizers remain employed forever?
I must have missed the left-wing calls for widget production. I’ve heard of calls for public spending on repairing roads and bridges (do you need a cite that such investment is desirable?), and others contend that expanded access to health care could add employment to that industry.
Republican policies also can fight unemployment, hiring soldiers (or better yet, expensive private contractors) to export creative destruction to Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. AFAIK, neither party was advocating widgets; do you have a cite? 
Yea do you consider doing a job just standing there watching? If so have you ever worked a day in your life?
The factory worker putting in 12 hour days is like a guy standing there watching slots?
Nope, never worked a day, could you tell me what it’s like?
From what I’ve seen on tv, the guy that works 12 hour days gets paid a salary for his efforts? Is that not correct? I also heard he gets paid whether the venture is profitable or not.
We punish the fools who gave away our competitive advantage. Abandon the concept of trickle-down economics? Scale back the whole scam of globalism a notch or two, like Asia and the BRIC’s have done?
:rolleyes: You’ve accused me of knowing nothing about economics and yet you bring up this blatant non-sequitur?
We have no buggy-whip scenario coming in this industry, at least not in the major sectors of tech and manufacturing. What do you think is replacing computer programming, and the manufacturing of automobiles and computers? The buggy-whip scenario applies to things that are obsolete. People will always want computer software, cars and computers. Unless someone comes up with transmat technology and self-aware, self-programming computers. 
And if you think automation is replacing manufacturing, well I’ve about a few thousand Toyota workers in America earning over $27/hour who would beg to differ with you.
Tell ya what. We can either invest money and resources to make sure that people have jobs, or we can let them sit idle forever and continue to be totally unproductive to society. Or maybe the whole point is to throw these chronically unemployed to the wolves in hopes our population dies down? 
You’re not answering the question here. What do we do with the unemployed who spend years without a job? And there are quite a few of them now (to put it lightly). How many of them do you think have savings or severance packages or are vacationing in Spain? What do we do with them?
I have an idea. How about this. We have roads that are being replaced with asphalt, crumbling bridges, and an alternative energy infrastructure that needs to be built to help wean us off of the need for poisonous coal and the increasingly scarce and hard to acquire oil. We need more rollouts of high speed internet. Let’s start investing in that and put people to work doing that. Using goods made in the USA. None of that is buggy-whip obsolete. None of that will go unused.
Your two sentence topics don’t match.
This isn’t the 1930’s. The things you are describing take specialized skill (and training). It’s not enough to just pay people to dig ditches any more. Very few of the 16million unemployed are ready to go out and repair bridges. Remember what you said about offshoring? Tech industry? Biotech? A guy with a masters in biochemistry is pretty useless on a construction site.