Red Mosquito

Amy Klobuchar was really great on Bill Maher.

I'll have to give that a watch. I know very little about her.

Strat wrote:Amy Klobuchar was really great on Bill Maher.

she brought her receipts..

tragabigzanda wrote:

JuanHamm wrote:David Brooks out of touch? Color me surprised.

yeah he's a dink

Specifically what was he wrong about wrt Sanders?

Bi_3 wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:

JuanHamm wrote:David Brooks out of touch? Color me surprised.

yeah he's a dink

Specifically what was he wrong about wrt Sanders?

Specifically what was he right about? Let’s start there.

McParadigm wrote:

Bi_3 wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:

JuanHamm wrote:David Brooks out of touch? Color me surprised.

yeah he's a dink

Specifically what was he wrong about wrt Sanders?

Specifically what was he right about? Let’s start there.

There is Donald Trump’s culture-war Theyism: The coastal cultural elites hate genuine Americans, undermining our values and opening our borders. And there is Bernie Sanders’s class-war Theyism: The billionaires have rigged the economy to benefit themselves and impoverish everyone else.

Each of these stories takes a genuine tension in society and blows it up into an all-explaining cartoon in which one part of America is trying to destroy the other part.

Sanders starts with a truth: Workers need more bargaining power as they negotiate wages with their employers. But then he blows this up into an all-explaining ideology: Capitalism is a system of exploitation in which capitalist power completely dominates worker power. This ideology crashes against the facts.

As Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute puts it, capitalism is doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s rewarding productivity with pay, and some people and companies are more productive. If you improve worker bargaining power, that may help a bit, but over the long run people can’t earn what they don’t produce.

Third, and most important, most of the increase in earnings inequality has happened between companies, not within them. As John Van Reenen of M.I.T. has found, all over the world superstar businesses are racing ahead of their competitors. As those companies grow more productive, they earn more profit per employee and pay their workers more. Companies that can’t match that productivity don’t, and their workers lag behind.

A recent Brookings Institution/Chumir Foundation report also notes that there is a growing productivity gap between superstar companies and everybody else. Whether it is in tech, retail, manufacturing, utilities or services, productivity growth at the leading companies in each industry has remained very strong. Those productive businesses are capturing larger and larger market shares. But productivity is not growing fast among the lagging companies. Workers in those businesses suffer.

Thus, the core problem is not capitalists exploiting their workers; it’s the rise of productivity inequality. It’s the companies and individuals who don’t have the skills to take advantage of new technologies.

The real solution, therefore, is not class war to hammer successful businesses. It’s to boost and expand productivity for everybody else. That’s done the old-fashioned way — by having better schools and better vocational training, by having more open competitive markets, by creating incentives to expand investment, by making sure superstar businesses don’t use lobbyists to lock in their advantages.

And most importantly:

I understand if you want to stick to an us-versus-them political ideology. It’s emotionally satisfying to base your political ideology on blaming people you dislike

Bi_3 wrote:

McParadigm wrote:

Bi_3 wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:

JuanHamm wrote:David Brooks out of touch? Color me surprised.

yeah he's a dink

Specifically what was he wrong about wrt Sanders?

Specifically what was he right about? Let’s start there.

There is Donald Trump’s culture-war Theyism: The coastal cultural elites hate genuine Americans, undermining our values and opening our borders. And there is Bernie Sanders’s class-war Theyism: The billionaires have rigged the economy to benefit themselves and impoverish everyone else.

Each of these stories takes a genuine tension in society and blows it up into an all-explaining cartoon in which one part of America is trying to destroy the other part.

Davos Brooks argues that dissatisfaction with expanding economic inequities amounts to a culture war. False equivalency. He also uses wage growth among low earners to “prove” that a politician pushing for government intervention is wrongheaded.

Economics research, though: “Our analysis of data shows that wage growth in states that increased minimum wages account for the majority of growth among lowest tier earners. Over the past two years, paychecks for those in the bottom 25 percent of the workforce in minimum wage growth states grew almost 1.8 times as fast as those as in states where the minimum wage did not budge, meaning this growth has been geographically based and geographically limited.”

As Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute puts it, capitalism is doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s rewarding productivity with pay, and some people and companies are more productive. If you improve worker bargaining power, that may help a bit, but over the long run people can’t earn what they don’t produce.

You’re never going to save capitalism’s reputation by telling a generation who are getting systemically choked off from the wealth their parents and grandparents inherited, who are working long hours and driving for Uber at night so they can fantasize about someday spending a million dollars on a two bedroom, that this is how it’s supposed to work and all is well.

If you want to rehabilitate capitalism’s reputation, you’d be much better off in arguing that the core of it is good and that we just need social programs to soften the edges then you will be arguing that sorry kid, a CEO is just 1 billion times more productive than you are is all.

Strat wrote:Amy Klobuchar was really great on Bill Maher.

Jesus Christ you can’t be serious

i guess bloomy still needs 1 more poll in order to debate tomorrow.

wonder if there are any due out in time

What do we think the odds are, if Bernie gets the nom, that centrists of both parties work together to run a third candidate? Who would they coalesce behind?

You’re never going to save capitalism’s reputation by telling a generation who are getting systemically choked off from the wealth their parents and grandparents inherited, who are working long hours and driving for Uber at night so they can fantasize about someday spending a million dollars on a two bedroom, that this is how it’s supposed to work and all is well.

If you want to rehabilitate capitalism’s reputation, you’d be much better off in arguing that the core of it is good and that we just need social programs to soften the edges then you will be arguing that sorry kid, a CEO is just 1 billion times more productive than you are is all.

This. B_I refuses to understand the actual economic reality of the average American.

You’re never going to save capitalism’s reputation by telling a generation who are getting systemically choked off from the wealth their parents and grandparents inherited, who are working long hours and driving for Uber at night so they can fantasize about someday spending a million dollars on a two bedroom, that this is how it’s supposed to work and all is well.

If you want to rehabilitate capitalism’s reputation, you’d be much better off in arguing that the core of it is good and that we just need social programs to soften the edges then you will be arguing that sorry kid, a CEO is just 1 billion times more productive than you are is all.

Yeah but you called yourself an Indian, sorry.

Ultimately, either you believe that Trump is a unique and immediate threat that must be stopped at literally all costs, or you think that there are far larger institutional problems that can't be ignored any longer, and that Trump is merely a reaction to/symptom of these larger problems.

So McP and I are diametrically opposed and BI_3 seems to think all is well once Trump is replaced with a neocon conservative.

Personally, I think the Trump movement dies with him, and whats left will be co-opted by the dominant order, which will achieve levels of tyranny Trump could only dream of.

McParadigm wrote:What do we think the odds are, if Bernie gets the nom, that centrists of both parties work together to run a third candidate? Who would they coalesce behind?

Bernie is not going to get the nom

this is the election where it becomes very clear the DNC is full if shit

the superdelegates shouldnt exist

instead the feudal lords will select their king

tragabigzanda wrote:

BurtReynolds wrote:Ultimately, either you believe that Trump is a unique and immediate threat that must be stopped at literally all costs, or you think that there are far larger institutional problems that can't be ignored any longer, and that Trump is merely a reaction to/symptom of these larger problems.

What if I think both?

Nearly everyone thinks both (me included) which is what makes that post so confusing.


Edit: all costs being voting for someone you don’t like in the normal democratic process