Republicans not the only ones nervous about radical ideas of AOC

AOC will moderate, her radical ideas will gradually erode, she prevailed in campaign with flashy radicalism. I think she hasn't caught up to the fact she's now part of an establishment with strong and lasting interests that caters to cultivated constituencies discretely advancing particularized interests in moderate doses that don't upset other interest groups in their big tent.

 

You haven't given solid reason why policies that work in other countries cannot work in yours though. I would argue that the 20 trillion in debt is not a product of social programs but of tax cuts going back to the Reagan era mixed with huge spending outlays such as war and bailing out corporations after the recession of 2008:


"The U.S. has exceeded $20 trillion in national debt — the nation was a cool $20.7 trillion in the red as of Tuesday — and the issue is being thrust back into the spotlight with the director of national intelligence calling it “unsustainable” and a risk to security.

But if history shows anything, it’s that both parties share responsibility for boosting the debt. Fighting wars, big tax cuts and economic stimulus packages have all added to the burden over the years."

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-how-the-us-got-to-20-trillion-in-debt-2017-03-30

There are solutions to problems such as healthcare. It takes political will to produce legislation that over 70% of Americans say they want. You also need to get big health corporation lobbyists out of the process as well.

Well, let's look at the role of government. Why is it okay to bail out banks and corporations when they run into the ground but not to help create the conditions and funding to increase human capital? And lets look at what happens when government gets out of regulating the economy. Clinton overturned Glass/Steagall allowing banks greater freedom to speculate and undertake high risk loans and investment. Where did that lead? During the gilded era the same lack of government intervention in the economy was evident. Banks and corporations were free to speculate and the stock market was basically allowed to run free far ahead of it's actual value. Where did that lead?

How does democratic socialist policies erode individual freedom? Equality? Even if government was some kind of threat to liberty or equality, you still need some form of government intervention to protect your land and property rights from people who feel they are entitled to the same freedoms, equalities and property rights that you enjoy. And under the current system, government subsidizes industry to the tune of around 100 B a year not including bailouts when bankers and speculators run the economy into the ground.

Why is socialism okay for banks and corporations but not to increase the human capital of citizens? Don't forget that investment in education, healthcare and innovation produces a healthier, better educated and more adaptable workforce that is able to take part as the economy changes.

Also, what people like AOC are proposing is not the socialism Marx's era which was actually meant to be an intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. It has evolved over the years and tried to learn from mistakes of the past unlike unfettered capitalism which takes itself to be the natural state of human affairs and therefor infallible which renders it unable to escape it's own dogma and creates conditions where it is unable to learn from it's mistakes as we are seeing today. Capitalism bounces through it's boom bust cycles every decade or so and when it's contradictions really reveal themselves, it is prone to deep and lasting economic trauma. To say nothing of the fact that it depends on continual unsustainable growth and exploitation and commodification of everything that can be made resources including labour. We can see the destruction of the planet and ecosystems on our little planet everywhere because of an economic system that we are told cannot be regulated.

Why not? Why are we slaves to market fundamentalism of the blinkered Friedman/Greenspan variety. Even Greenspan admits he was in error.

As we have seen in Nordic countries or with Mondragon corporation in Spain, there is no reason that socially democratic policies cannot work with private ownership and capitalist structures to create a better economy and increase the human capital and well-being of a population. This isn't utopian thinking. We can see it working in other developed countries around the world today.

Disagree completely. What led to Trump in the WH was a deep anger and distrust of people who feel that government no longer serves their interests and an economic system that has left them behind. Nowhere is this more evident than in what used to be industrial white America where cities such as Trenton among others have been reduced to ghettos. Trump was able to tie into this dystopia and tell people what they wanted to hear while appearing to poke the powers that be in the eye.

Unfortunately, he is a con-man and all he has done is give those powers everything they ever wanted and more. Once people realize that Trump doesn't give a crap about anyone but himself and his economic policies have to endure another downturn we will see what happens.

Interesting times.

 

Canada has at least 20% minority population and rising so right away your numbers on that appear to be suspect. Even so, are you saying that minorities do not pay taxes so are therefor not entitled to enjoy the same government benefits that whites enjoyed in past decades?

AS for the taxes, there is mandatory and discretionary forms of spending. Consider how much spending was put out to bailouts during the post 2008 era and then put that into perspective with mandatory spending.

Also could you provide a link for marginal rates? I am not getting 49.6%. To me it looks like 37%. Am I calculating this wrong?

 

You are probably correct about moderating her radical ideas. I hope not but that seems to be what happens to politicians once the adapt to life and lobbying for special interests in the beltway.

I know that the powers that be in the Democratic party will do everything in their power to make it so - sadly!

 

I think I may have touched on these earlier, but the reasons why some policies that work in other countries cannot work in ours are numerous, but the most obvious reason is that we're not other countries. However, to name a few specific problems, there are issues such as our enormous national debt ($21.9 trillion and growing with over $122.1 trillion in unfunded liabilities) the unsustainability of existing programs such as Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid which are already headed for insolvency, the incompetence of our federal and state governments and bureaucracies and the fact we've tried or looked into some of those policies and found they do not or cannot work. For example, we do have a government-run healthcare system in this country that is run by the Veterans Administration and it has failed our nation's vets spectacularly. Furthermore, a couple of states (Vermont & Maryland are two I am aware of) have looked into adopting a single-payer HC system and both have found that they were ruinously expensive and the benefits weren't worth the costs, especially when we already have HC programs for the poor and elderly.

Of course, all I've addressed here are matters concerning cost and efficiency. I haven't even addressed how a massive expansion of government power tends to produce a significant erosion of individual rights and freedom. For the tens of millions of Americans in this country who still believe in the principles of individual freedom and limited government that this country was founded on these are profound problems. The quote in my signature by Founding Father Samuel Adams scratches the tip of this iceberg:

The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional.

As you can see, the Founders were well aware of the proto-socialist movements in Europe (Levellers, Diggers, etc.) and thank goodness they rejected their views when they built our country.

By the way, I'm going to condense your quotes for the sake of saving bandwidth - our posts are getting very lengthy.

Social programs and the spending associated with them are most definitely contributing to our debt problem. Our national debt and the amount of money we have spent on our War on Poverty/Great Society programs are roughly equal to each other - over $20 trillion - and as I pointed out earlier we have a staggering $122 trillion in unfunded liabilities lurking down the road.

As for the bailouts, I opposed them, whether they were for the banks or corporations like General Motors, but at least we got our money back on the TARP loans that went to the banks. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for GM - I think taxpayers lost $11 billion on Obama's bailout.

There's definitely room for improvement, but as I pointed out earlier our government has already proven it can't handle running even a relatively small number of Americans' healthcare.

You make some valid points that even a libertarian would support. Our government has no business bailing out banks, corporations and their labor unions ("picking winners and losers") and this is a classic example of the mission creep of a federal government that exceeded its constitutional authority decades ago. If there's one thing that can be said for our Federal Leviathan it's that it's completely out of control.

OI agree that we do need some level of government and regulation to protect people's rights - I don't know if anyone who disputes that. Where people get into conflict is when the government exceeds that role and in our country when it exceeds its limited/enumerated constitutional role.

Well, socialism is not okay for banks and corporations, is it?

Having been a "progressive" myself I understand that not all socialists are Marxists. It's fairly safe to presume that most of the democratic socialists in this country more closely resemble the likes of Clement Attlee than Karl Marx. However, I remember what Britain looked like in the 1970s after Attlee's social and nationalization programs had been in effect for several decades and it wasn't a pretty picture. I have also lived in the laboratories of our own nation's social welfare policies - our cities - and I don't particularly care for what I'm seeing there, either. Obviously, the limited brand of socialism we practice in this country needs reforming, too, but there's little to no political will to undertake such an enormous and painful project, especially when so many politicians and bureaucrats are invested in our welfare state.

That being said, there are still many True Believers in this country who have not learned from the failures of the past and many of the ones who can remember them refuse to even acknowledge those failures. Of course, we have a new generation of young progs who never lived through that era and are completely ignorant to what happened in the socialist and quasi-socialist states of the 20th Century. They have no idea where their utopian fantasies and good intentions can lead - heck, many of them really don't understand what they're embracing and promoting. They've been told that it was good and never thought to question what they were being told.

As for capitalism itself, we all know that it's not perfect, but what we learned from the 20th Century and the grand failure of the socialist projects in the USSR and elsewhere is that for all its shortcomings it's still better than socialism. The freedom and standard of living in the liberal West was far higher than that of the socialist East, and today the tragedy in Venezuela is reminding us of this. It's disturbing that democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and many others once held this country up as some paragon to be emulated, where the American dream was more likely to be realized than here in America itself.

Once again, they were proven wrong. Did they learn from this experience? Did they finally change their tune?

No, they did not.

The dissatisfaction that Trump tapped into was a dissatisfaction with the arrogant political elites in Washington who have sold ordinary Americans out, and clearly that dissatisfaction cut across party lines. The dissatisfaction with the economic system that socialists like Bernie Sanders tapped into does not - in fact, it doesn't even cut all the way across the Democratic party.

As for Trump, if you're looking for him to take care of you you've got a problem that is at the root of the declining state of affairs in this country and that's the rising level of dependence on government we've seen over the course of the past 55 years. We used to be a people who prided themselves on individual freedom, independence and responsibility but now we've been seduced by the lure of government dependency and "free" stuff. It's a terrible situation and it doesn't bode well for the future.

 

I haven't looked into Canada's minority rates recently, so if you're right, and if you're taking in the same low class types of people we've been taking in, your health care system is headed for problems, too. That may not necessarily be the case because a) you don't take in single males, and b) no one can just walk across from a third world country. Interestingly, nearly all the blacks we get from Africa and other countries overseas are higher in average IQ, higher in average income, and higher in average academic achievement than our native blacks, and usually so are their kids. Nearly all the Indians we get are of much higher IQ than most of the Indian population (in India, that is), which is why it seems like they're all doctors. (They're not, but it can seem like it.) The difference is in who pays the taxes and who uses the services. Rich people pay the taxes and pay for their own health care while poor people pay few taxes but use a great quantity of social services at taxpayer expense. This was pointed out to me when I was just a youngster of 21... if you have a family paying $10K a year in property taxes but they have two kids in the school system and the school system is spending $9K a year per child in education expenses, you have a net loss in taxes of $8K for that family. And most poor and minority families have more than two kids. This same principle plays out in income taxes vs. welfare and healthcare, where the amount poor and minority families take far exceeds the amount they pay in. These days, the people being screwed the MOST aren't even whites, it's Asians, who make far more per capita than whites and end up paying the most in taxes per capita while getting the least amount of social services for their money.



Okay, I misremembered the marginal tax rates and I was mixing up the 39.6% and 43.4% of the Obama years and making it 49.6% Mea culpa. 37% is the rate without taking into account the Obamacare surtax of 3.8%, which makes the current total 40.8%. I didn't remember, either, that the lowest rate in the last 80 years didn't even take effect until 1988, almost the end of Reagan's eight years in office.

https://bradfordtaxinstitute.com/Free_Resources/Federal-Income-Tax-Rates.aspx

 

The rich are a minority no different to women or Hispanics or any other. If allowed the poor majority will violate their property rights.

In a representative democracy this is not permitted, just as internment camps are not allowed (unless a Democrat is in office)

 

Failed Ideas? Because the 2nd World had 1 economic downturn with convenient political developments in the USSR? lol

The eastern bloc nations are worse off under capitalism while the socialist governments that survived are still going strong (and don't start on Venezuela, that **** started with the Saudis crashing oil prices and Chavez dying and being replaced by drug cartels) despite decades of capitalist economic attacks. Meanwhile how many 1st world economic downturns have their been since? What is the infant mortality rate in 'free', capitalist America? And then you had the Great 'Recession' (which we all know full well was a depression) puting that myth to rest at last which is why most of the world is socialist or fascist and capitalism is a dirty word outside the American right (the ones who aren't fascist at least).

People like you are the last desperate breath of a failed economic model that has reduced 3 generations to destitution and plunged the world into systematic environmental collapse.

 

She replaced a republican?

 

No, but he was almost as ugly as Mitch.

 

No horse teeth?