Uncle Joe

[jhawks99]

This is mich, right?

[Sparko]

On the other hand...
Similar to the Trump tax cuts, I wonder how much of this is driven by Government doing things that raise the deficit, which seems like a bad idea when unemployment is so low.

Without the tax cuts of W and Trump, we are in the black by a good margin. The ecomomy exists to serve us all. You are an illness away from bankruptcy.

[Sparko]

Yes the economy is doing so well now that
Powell will have to raise interest rates some more to try and choke the economy down.(sarcasm)

That we are prosperous and have a record low unemployment rate is the goal of every president. Biden has done an amazing job in a world of MAGA stupidity and spite.

[Mjl]

On the other hand...
Similar to the Trump tax cuts, I wonder how much of this is driven by Government doing things that raise the deficit, which seems like a bad idea when unemployment is so low.

Without the tax cuts of W and Trump, we are in the black by a good margin. The ecomomy exists to serve us all. You are an illness away from bankruptcy.

This is just not accurate.

[DCHawk1]

On the other hand...
Similar to the Trump tax cuts, I wonder how much of this is driven by Government doing things that raise the deficit, which seems like a bad idea when unemployment is so low.

Without the tax cuts of W and Trump, we are in the black by a good margin. The ecomomy exists to serve us all. You are an illness away from bankruptcy.

This is just not accurate.

I wonder sometimes what color the sky in Sparko's world is.

[Sparko]

It is accurate. The trillions of dollars of lost revenue and accrued interest are tough to understand when you are conservative and spring-loaded for snarky memes. What makes this head in the sand conservative/libertarian spin even more impressive is that we were about to pay off the debt (revenue was in the black for a few years until Bush) as Clinton left office and Greenspan began to spin tales of how dangerous no debt was. Then DC Cheney said deficits didn't matter. And Poof. Blame Biden.

[Sparko]

On the other hand...
Similar to the Trump tax cuts, I wonder how much of this is driven by Government doing things that raise the deficit, which seems like a bad idea when unemployment is so low.

Without the tax cuts of W and Trump, we are in the black by a good margin. The ecomomy exists to serve us all. You are an illness away from bankruptcy.

This is just not accurate.

I guess you are the exception. Okay, the economy does not exist for your benefit.

[Sparko]

I should note cutting taxes while engaged in generational wars was not bright and unprecedented. The issue of the national debt is not driven by helping Americans live better, but rather is a rigged game benefiting the wealthy and corporations. We are here with a lot of debt thanks largely to conservative values. Trickle down economics was repudiated but never eradicated. We are all prisoners of Laffer curves, mergers, off-shoring and tax write-offs. We need to spend more time on consensus programs and live more to the aspirational values of the Preamble to the Constitution. I lived most of my life as a Republican and am as much to blame as anyone else. It is really about fixing systemic values and stupidity.

[jfish26]

Opinion | Biden has a theory of MAGA that just might be working

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... cans-2024/

Now that Congress has passed the debt limit deal, explanations for President Biden’s success in negotiating the outcome are abounding. Among them: Biden drew on his long experience in Washington to achieve bipartisan compromise; he avoided claiming a win so Republicans could support it; he didn’t get distracted by the media’s second-guessing.

Here’s another way to understand this unexpected outcome: Biden is operating from a largely unappreciated theory of MAGA, and in some ways, it’s working.

[...]

Biden ran in 2020 on the idea that the country faced an existential threat from the far right, highlighting white supremacy, political violence and President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attacks on democracy. This year’s reelection launch highlighted the assault on the Capitol and cast “MAGA extremists” as a threat to American “freedom.”

However, in promising to restore “the soul of the nation” in the face of this threat, Biden has continually distinguished between MAGA Republicans and more conventional ones. This approach has been criticized by those of us who see much of the GOP as extreme and dangerous — after all, many elected Republicans helped whitewash Trump’s insurrection — and think Biden’s characterization of non-MAGA Republicans plays down that broader threat.

But Biden’s reading served him well in the debt limit standoff. Contrary to much criticism, Bidenworld believes that refusing to negotiate at the outset was key: It forced Republicans to offer their own budget, which created an opening to attack the savage spending cuts in it.

Notably, Biden and other Democrats relentlessly characterized those cuts as destructive and dangerous in the MAGA vein. Bidenworld did believe that some MAGA Republicans were willing to default and force global economic cataclysm to harm the president’s reelection, a senior Biden adviser tells me, but also that many non-MAGA Republicans ultimately could be induced not to go that far.

That seems to be what happened. As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein points out, the outcome falsified the prediction that the GOP as a party would use that leverage to inflict maximum chaos. Meanwhile, the cuts themselves won’t be nearly as damaging to the economy as the ones in the 2011 standoff, as the New York Times’s Paul Krugman explains.

This illuminates Bidenworld’s broader theory of the MAGA GOP: The way to defeat the MAGA threat to the country is to marginalize it within the GOP coalition — that is, to contain it.

[...]

There is a tension in Biden’s approach to the GOP. His initial rationale for running was that the GOP is largely hostage to an extremism that foundationally threatens the American experiment. His reelection case is that he has begun to defuse that threat and another term will complete that task.

Yet Biden also plainly believes that conducting the nation’s business on a bipartisan basis is inherently stabilizing. That sometimes requires treating the opposition — or a large swath of it — as a mostly conventional political party, which risks mitigating perceptions of the threat it poses.

In the debt limit outcome, that tension proved far more navigable than many, including me, expected. How this tension will play out in 2024 is hard to predict, but for now, the Biden theory of MAGA has mostly been vindicated.

[MICHHAWK]

you're a little late firing up the propaganda machine today. did you sleep in.

[KUTradition]

looks like mich needs to go back to school to study his riting (and proper use of punctuation)

[jhawks99]

you're a little late firing up the propaganda machine today. did you sleep in.

Looks like the guy in the big boy chair did good.

[DCHawk1]

[japhy]

Even the hair screams "boogeyman", Fox News will love this.

Can he replace Kamala?

[ousdahl]

Bring our troops home and invest those trillions of war dollars into American communities. Support veterans, stop all foreign military aid, close the bases, disband NATO, and ban nuclear weapons globally.

holy shit, what office is Cornel West running for, the president of Russia?

[zsn]

Here you go, all the Third Party people! You are getting your wish. How much are you going to send him for his campaign?

[Mjl]

Here you go, all the Third Party people! You are getting your wish. How much are you going to send him for his campaign?

Most of the pro third party people here want a centrist. So, not applicable at all.

[zsn]

Most of the pro third party people here want a centrist. So, not applicable at all.

You just made the point I was trying to make all along. Almost all of the third party candidates so far have been either unqualified, insane, extreme or a combination thereof.

[DCHawk1]

Most of the pro third party people here want a centrist. So, not applicable at all.

You just made the point I was trying to make all along. Almost all of the third party candidates so far have been either unqualified, insane, extreme or a combination thereof.

None of which apply to Professor West. If anything, he is too qualified, too sane, and too pragmatic to be an effective political candidate.

[Mjl]

Most of the pro third party people here want a centrist. So, not applicable at all.

You just made the point I was trying to make all along. Almost all of the third party candidates so far have been either unqualified, insane, extreme or a combination thereof.

Which is why us complaining about not having a centrist third party candidate are still complaining.