How did your vote change from 2016 to 2020?

Contrary to popular sentiment(in the media), I like Trump more now than when I voted for him in 2016.

 

I can take Trump and his tweets and platitudes, I can't take a collapsed economy and the downfall of the country under progressive socialist policies.

 

So you want to keep our collapsed economy and regressive Robber Baron policies.

 

Our economy is not collapsed and we had one of the best in our history before the COVID global pandemic. Put in Biden progressive/socialist policies and it will be a repeat of 2007-2015. Why would you want that?

 

Because I am tired of clowns destroying the country.

 

There will be very little difference in economic handling under Trump or Biden. Continued tariffs. Continued massive deficits. No change in patent policy which gives drug companies monopoly status for drugs for decades. No change in copywrite laws that last 70 years after the death of the author. More endless spending on military, medicare, medicaid, and social security. More subsidies. More bail outs. More borrowing. More stimulus. More years of rock bottom interest rates to prop up the stock market.

I can live with the status quo of poor fiscal policy. I cannot abide a tyrant.

 

No idea as of yet. I find them all wretched. I may not even vote. We will see.

 

There will be a WORLD of difference between Conservative policies and Progressive/Socialist policies. And it is Trump who is trying to deal with prescription drug prices and has done so so far and no we DO NOT want to change patent policies and stymie new drug development. If you think they make too much money then I suggest you invest everything you have into them. You oppose bailouts then I suggest you NOT vote for Biden he led the bailout of GM and the auto unions that cost we the taxpayers BILLIONS. And then vote for more fiscal conservative Republicans for Congress as we had in the late 1990's and who not only balanced the budgets but produced surpluses and the Republican Congress and Republican President which brought the deficit down to a paltry $161B for FY2007 and the the Republicans who forced sequester and austerity in the mid 2010's that cut the Obama/Biden $1,400B and three years of $1,000B+ deficits in half. Isn't that what you are looking for?

 

The vote fiscal and constitutional conservatives back into office.

 

Republicans are never fiscal conservatives unless we have a Dem president.

And the thing with the constitution is way more complicated than a lot seem to think.

"Judge Posner is one of the smartest guys on the bench. He is also a conservative (the real kind) and a Republican.

He used to write in the Posner/Becker blog. I started going there to read Becker, but wound up reading some of Posner's work. I often disagreed with him, but he could blow you away with his analysis of some issues.

"The decisive objection to the quest for original meaning, even when the quest is conducted in good faith, is that judicial historiography rarely dispels ambiguity. Judges are not competent historians. Even real historiography is frequently indeterminate, as real historians acknowledge. To put to a judge a question that he cannot answer is to evoke “motivated thinking,” the form of cognitive delusion that consists of credulously accepting the evidence that supports a preconception and of peremptorily rejecting the evidence that contradicts it.

“Words don’t have intrinsic meanings; the significance of an expression depends on how the interpretive community alive at the time of the text’s adoption under-stood those words. The older the text, the more distant that interpretive community from our own. At some point the difference becomes so great that the meaning is no longer recoverable reliably.” Judge Easterbrook

Easterbrook goes on: “When the original meaning is lost in the passage of time…the justification for judges’ having the last word evaporates.” This is a version of the doctrine of judicial self-restraint, which Scalia and Garner endorse by saying that a statute’s unconstitutionality must be “clearly shown”—which it was not in Heller."

https://newrepublic.com/article/106441/scalia-garner-reading-the-law-textual-originalism

 

I voted for Ted Cruz in the primary.. what kind of Texan would chose a NY city real estate/ reality show host over a fellow Texan? Will say I enthusiastically supported Trump when he won the nomination.. he was bringing to the fore issues I cared about.. and just punching the lying ***** outta the dems!

 

They were no matter who was President the problem now is there are too many RINOS who need to be replaced by more fiscal conservative. You are certainly not going to find them in the Democrat Party. Look at the current negotiations for the stimulus and who is demanding the higher spending. Which side do you support and if it is the Democrats then spare me any blaming the resulting deficits on Trump. Judge Posner was a celebrated judge I read his Watergate book when he published it but he was not an economist please focus this is a about the budget and economic policy.

 

Window dressing. Conservatives campaigned for years on Repeal & Replace Obamacare. What happened when they had the house, senate, and POTUS? Couldn't do it. Democrats won't be able to get much of what they want done either, for the same reasons. There is always someone who's up for reelection, or in a swing state.

Patents are unnecessary for innovation. In a world where free markets exist, drugs will continue to be developed because there is, you know, demand. Like perhaps a new highly contagious disease which creates a sudden demand for a vaccine. Moreover, there NO argument for evergreening and patent thicketing even in a world with patents. There was a bipartisan bill attempting to address evergreening introduced last year, but it never went anywhere because of course something like that will never be passed.

Trump's recent executive order on drug prices - some nice gestures I suppose, but relies on price controls for problems ultimately stemming from government sanctioned monopolies. Notify me when he decides to take up a minimum of the evergreening issue given there is a minuscule support for it in the senate.

Unfortunately no such person is running on the D or R ticket for POTUS this year. Trump is for bailouts. Biden too. On the subject of budgets, see the Obama vs Trump budgets:

2010 (Obama) - 3.4T vs 2.1T rev
2011 (Obama) - 3.6T vs 2.3T rev
2012 (Obama) - 3.5T vs 2.4T rev
2013 (Obama) - 3.8T vs 2.9T rev
2014 (Obama) - 3.5T vs 3.0T rev
2015 (Obama) - 3.6T vs 3.3T rev
2016 (Obama) - 3.8T vs 3.2T rev
2017 (Obama) - 3.9T vs 3.3T rev
2018 (Trump) - 4.1T vs 3.3T rev
2019 (Trump) - 4.4T vs 3.5T rev

Note that the 2018 budget was the only one submitted with the 115th congress. Under perfect conditions of house/senate/POTUS under R control, a Trump budget was MORE expensive than a D budget and had a HIGHER deficit than one passed just a year prior with R control of house / senate but a D pres. So, sorry, but I don't see Trump as any kind of fiscal conservative. I could maybe get behind your argument for an R house and a D president. But you have to be very lucky to live in a district to vote for a congressman where your vote actually counts instead of being all gerrymandered to hell.

Now, despite my extremely negative comments here, know that I view Trump's policy record as mixed. He has done some things I liked. Peace deals in the middle east. Simplification of the tax code (though really just scratching the surface in my opinion). Attempt to tone down the war rhetoric and try to make peace with some of our enemies. Helping to focus the national conversation on China as being our true greatest threat (though their crackdown on Hong Kong after almost a year of protests probably helped a lot more). But really, based on what is actual meaningful policy change to me, this is is just bits of icing without a cake.

And moreover, as I've stated each time I've posted in this thread, this election is not about policy for me - as neither candidate offers much of anything I'm looking for. Trying to make arguments to me on those grounds is just a waste of both our times. The election, for me, is about a march down the road to serfdom, or a sprint.

 

Yours is a procedural complaint not policy.

Without the patentability there would be no capital formation to pay for a new drug or any new product.

It is what he can do as President. The Democrats created this mess of Obamacare where is THEIR solution?

Not like the GM/Chrysler/UAW bailout which cost the taxpayers hundreds of billions and GM still went bankrupt and foreign companies got Chrysler and bargain basement prices. It don't know what you are trying to say with your numbers but Presidents don't control budgets Congress does, the Presidents suggested budget is routinely ignored by Congress and if you are going to list by President then start Obama with the FY2009. Or better yet go back to FY2008 when it was a Democrat budget too. How much was that deficit? How much were the spending increases of the previous last Republican which had a paltry $161B deficit?

And then Obama didn't even make budget submissions for several of the years and the ones he did even the Democrats said DOA.

Trump's budget didn't get passed, he called for spending cuts the Congress did not pass.

Why would you take Democrat economic and fiscal policy over Republican especially fiscal conservative Republican policies?

Then vote Republican because it is the Democrats who want to lead you down that road, and the more fiscal conservative Republican the better.

 

After reading several of your comments on this thread I feel compelled to ask if you believe that President Trump is honest?

 

There are no fiscally conservative politicians.

Posner is pretty good at economics.

"Richard Allen Posner (/ˈpoʊznər/; born January 11, 1939) is an American jurist and economist who was a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago from 1981 until 2017,[1] and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He is a leading figure in the field of law and economics, and was identified by The Journal of Legal Studies as the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century.[2] He is widely considered to be one of the most influential legal scholars in the United States.[3][4]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner

 

My vote, which is non existent, hasn't changed since I figured out that voting doesn't address let alone fix anything I want fixed in the early 1980's. I just adapt to what you folks do. All I ask is that you maintain the congressional gridlock to protect us from partisan laws.

 

I'll shock you by replying that, in my opinion, Trump is only "honest" some of the time, about some things....

With politicians, it's always "shades of gray", Eretria. Who is "less bad" for the country; who is "better"...? Those are our choices.

Thus, again in my opinion, Trump is "less bad" for the country -- and -- Joe Biden is simply GUT-BUCKET AWFUL.... Does that answer it?

 

Before 2016, I occasionally voted republican down ballot. If I saw that the republican was better qualified/experienced, was of more solid character, and was not too ideologically bound, I'd vote that candidate over a flawed Democrat. I have voted for republican governors, senators, state legislators, secretary of states, treasurers, Attorney General candidates because they simply were better candidates, more able, and had proven themselves in prior office as truly independent or talented.

I would never vote for a republican now. Its the party of Trump now, and I cannot afford to give such people a chance because way too few, republicans were capable and willing to stand up to a figure like him. Republican voters cannot be rewarded with any hint of political power anymore. I don't trust them, even if there is an upstanding and outstanding republican sitting in front of me.

We have to remember that the seeds of Trumpism were planted throughout the electorate, in their primaries by those same voters, long before he showed up. They rewarded a lot of behavior that made Donald Trump seem viable in their own party in national elections.

 

Yes, and I greatly appreciate your candor. What I'm coming to understand is that it is about interpretation or what we open ourselves up to interpreting. Similar to "in the eye of the beholder" and many times that cannot be transferred.

 

It is hard to maintain objectivity when there are a considerable number of things about both candidates that a person disapproves of.

I try to use the Constitution as my bedrock 'benchmark' for measuring the propriety of many things, but it's been so abused and trod-over for so many years, in so many ways, that it's hard to simply stake-out one viewpoint to the exclusion of all others.

What's even worse are those situations (VERY important ones) where you see that neither candidate really has any good ideas -- like, for instance, THE ECONOMY.

Trump's idea seems to be that the Federal Reserve central bank should keep on crushing interest rates to zero (or below, if possible), and shovel out virtually interest-free loans to everybody, using imaginary money! He began pushing this ploy strongly as far back as January 2019 -- long before the 'virus' thing took over center-stage. People get screwed to death on the interest that their savings accounts SHOULD be earning ('cash is king'), but what Trump seems to want is for everyone to take every penny they have and stuff it into the almighty-god, grotesquely overvalued STOCK MARKET....

Biden's idea seems to be that all of us who have anything should be taxed to death to give a whole smorgasbord of welfare programs for the 50% of Americans who have gotten quite comfortable and satisfied with the idea of government providing some or all of everything they want or need! His 'Obama 2.0' administration would create a permanent 'parasite' class of Americans, while throwing open our borders to tens of thousands MORE of penniless peasants from Mexico and Central America!

Neither viewpoint makes any real sense at all, but those are our two choices.... And meanwhile, the Constitution doesn't say a word about manipulating money supplies, or interest rates... and it doesn't say anything about providing a 'welfare smorgasbord' for a growing population of indolent bums, either. What a HELL of a mess....

 

I have no problem voting for Trump again, as I did in 2016. Trump didn't derail the Republican party, the Republican party derailed itself, well before Trump ever arrived on the scene. Trump simply exposed it for what it was, and that's how he got elected. Those who understood this eventually came on board, those who still don't understand it, are now called "never-trumpers."

 

that happened under Trump... you do realize that right, Trump was the one throwing gas on the situation

 

I, too, voted for Trump in 2016, and I'll vote for him again.

"Nobody is perfect", certainly applies to Trump -- still, compared to a decayed, corrupt, senile machine-politician like Biden, I'll choose Trump every single time!

 

Ditto.