2020 US Election (Part One)

[Tristan_C]

I guess saving the American auto industry doesn't count. Or suspending the payroll tax. Or quadrupling wind farms and solar farms. Or his thousands of infrastructure repairs.

Ooh, storytime!

The GM bailout was pretty much the first thing he did as president, and it formally established him in my mind as a quintessential Chicago politician. He granted federal backing for bonds held by UAW workers, his allies. Public investors were left unprotected and sunk.

In Chicago, we had what is called a political machine, where a boss (like Daley or Stroger) directs the city's real estate and sales tax proceeds to his allies, in the form of high-paying public sector jobs, pensions, services, etc. In Chicago it was widely known during the Daley era that you needed to know somebody to get a public sector job, and they paid crazy salaries. In addition to entrenching its political support base in this manner, the machine gets a lot of money back in the process through donations by individuals and unions to the local political party. On the federal level you get "pork" but this system is much more intense than that, and normal politicians cannot get away with it nationally. Immune to criticism because of his race, and getting a Nobel Prize for, um, some reason, Obama in 2009 was not normal. This is how GM was handled, in the tradition of machine politics.

I am not sure what to think of how he screwed the bondholders. On the one hand I do not support bailouts of this kind. They perpetuate bad behavior and socialize the losses. On the other hand the bondholders could be seen as victims of false information, bad knowledge, and ultimately, the bullying power of the UAW itself, which had negotiated the pensions system that sank the company. And the UAW got rewarded for this because they had a friend in the White House.

It was the Good Fairy who brought those 11.6 million jobs.

It was the revisions to the U6 methodology in the BLS that brought them. I would propose that most of the people in the BLS are more personally/politically sympathetic to Obama than they are to Trump, and that this may have affected the bureaucracy's inclination to modify the rubric then in ways they wouldn't do now. However, I wouldn't go so far as to formally accuse them of this. I am just raising the possibility, because there aren't any substantial justifications for why they did what they did.

 

[Zardnaar]

Biden's still in the lead by a large margin.

Youngest of the top 3 is 70.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...dba9fa-d0cc-11e9-87fa-8501a456c003_story.html

 

[Fippy]

Cannot read the article, but where's Biden in front?
Warren leads in winning the dem. nominee.

 

[Zardnaar]

Cannot read the article, but where's Biden in front?
Warren leads in winning the dem. nominee.

WP-ABC poll.

Biden 29%
Sanders 19%
Warren 18%

The rest in single figures.

People think he has the best chance to eat Trump in the article.

Poll
https://www.washingtonpost.com/cont...ws-poll/d4e18b36-79bf-492d-91e3-d1c7a49d37e2/


Primaries haven't started I wouldn't worry to much.

Sanders, Biden name recognition, Warren's the most organised.

Harris 7%
Pete 4%
Beto 3%
Yang 3%
Gabbard 2%

 

[Fippy]

Ah okay, i find that very strange..
Biden has been exposed so often, i think he would lose to Trump.

 

[Zardnaar]

Ah okay, i find that very strange..
Biden has been exposed so often, i think he would lose to Trump.

And look what Trump said pre election.

Gaffes don't seem to matter.

 

[mitsho]

Most people don‘t follow the news. At all. Always keep in mind that. They may hear 10-30 seconds of news on the car radio, but that‘s it. They have too busy a life or just like to talk more about the newest episode of Dancing with the Stars or what Aunt May wore to that wedding last spring. This interest in here is a special case. The old people over on facebook getting carried away by Russian and other trolls are only able to be done so because they are not that much informed and it‘s easy to forward things you generally agree with but have only read the headlines. Just count the nightly viewers of Fox News and look, how big a percentage of the population that truly is. Those polls however poll a segment of the whole population.

 

[Zardnaar]

I wouldn't worry to much about polls. Odds are one of the top 5 or 6 will win.

No one's won from a lower ranking this far out from a primary.

 

[Zkribbler]

... UAW itself, which had negotiated the pensions system that sank the company...

This is a morally bankrupt, totally deranged statement. Suggesting that providing a well earned retirement to a company's lifelong employees somehow "sunk the company" views these people as consumables, to be sucked economically dry and then cast aside into an old age of hopeless and despair.

Fall down on yor knees and pray to God in Heaven that he replace that stone in your heart with a human heart!

 

[Socrates99]

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/democratic_nomination_polls/

I like going here for polls since you can quickly skim a bunch at once. It also shows how bad polling can be. Biden leads by 25 points in one poll, only 2 and 3 points in 2 of the 4 released today. The interesting one is the Iowa caucus where he only leads by 3 points.

 

[El_Machinae]

"Trump helped African Americans"

Whaddya bet that late-cycle black consumer loan defaults are going to be what's blamed as the trigger of the next recession?

 

[Tristan_C]

This is a morally bankrupt, totally deranged statement. Suggesting that providing a well earned retirement to a company's lifelong employees somehow "sunk the company" views these people as consumables, to be sucked economically dry and then cast aside into an old age of hopeless and despair.

Fall down on yor knees and pray to God in Heaven that he replace that stone in your heart with a human heart!

It was a total collapse under the weight of pension plans. It's just what happened, sorry if you don't like it. Sometimes governments run into the same problem with their "social security" obligations, where the bureaucracy can't sweep the problem under the rug any longer. Illinois, Flint, Ireland, Greece, recently.

It was a case of— a long time ago— the unions negotiating for more remuneration than the value that would eventually be generated by the business. That can happen in favorable litigation environments. These negotiations are unexpectedly dangerous to all parties when long term commitments like pensions are made, because they rely on a consistent performance on the company's part in spite of the world changing every minute, and the actuarial data about the pensions themselves always being dead-on. You just cannot expect that sort of thing to always win in the real world. It was just dumb. GM's cars were not creating enough cash flow to pay for everyone's pensions.

Obama siding with the UAW was him prioritizing allies, and it evokes the sort of sentiment you expressed in this post. You don't want to abandon these people. But a business and investors confronted with the UAW/Government alliance see the losing game there, and are just going to look outside the US for making investments and building plants. Offshoring. You tried to put this forward as Obama "saving the industry" but it was actually quite perverse. The bailout was just robbing Peter to pay Paul, and this is all going to happen again because the system wasn't forced into a painful restructuring.

 

[Takhisis]

The bailout was just robbing Peter to pay Paul, and this is all going to happen again because the system wasn't forced into a painful restructuring.

Taken out of context I might agree with this phrase, but I think your reforms would probably erase social security altogether.

 

[Estebonrober]

It was a total collapse under the weight of pension plans. It's just what happened, sorry if you don't like it. Sometimes governments run into the same problem with their "social security" obligations, where the bureaucracy can't sweep the problem under the rug any longer. Illinois, Flint, Ireland, Greece, recently.

It was a case of— a long time ago— the unions negotiating for more remuneration than the value that would eventually be generated by the business. That can happen in favorable litigation environments. These negotiations are unexpectedly dangerous to all parties when long term commitments like pensions are made, because they rely on a consistent performance on the company's part in spite of the world changing every minute, and the actuarial data about the pensions themselves always being dead-on. You just cannot expect that sort of thing to always win in the real world. It was just dumb. GM's cars were not creating enough cash flow to pay for everyone's pensions.

Obama siding with the UAW was him prioritizing allies, and it evokes the sort of sentiment you expressed in this post. You don't want to abandon these people. But a business and investors confronted with the UAW/Government alliance see the losing game there, and are just going to look outside the US for making investments and building plants. Offshoring. You tried to put this forward as Obama "saving the industry" but it was actually quite perverse. The bailout was just robbing Peter to pay Paul, and this is all going to happen again because the system wasn't forced into a painful restructuring.

uh huh bla bla bla uh huh bla bla bla uh huh.

Socialism for the rich, the strap for the poor.

 

[Estebonrober]

https://wtop.com/national/2019/09/maine-to-allow-ranked-votes-in-general-presidential-election/

Maine voters in 2016 approved ranked voting, but the system was limited to federal races and primaries.

Under the system, voters rank three or more candidates on a ballot in order of preference. If no candidate gets more than 50%, the last-place candidate is eliminated.

The second-choice votes of everyone who ranked that candidate first are allocated until someone receives over 50%.

Maine leading the way on this, not that it is not without its detractors. Meh those are mainly Republicans who know it does not bode well for them and I just don;t care considering their behavior these past 15 years on voting stuff.

 

[Zardnaar]

GoP basically needs gerrymandering and lop sized electorates to win.

Independent electoral commissions seem to be a foreign concept.

You guys are making monarchy look good. We have Queen Elizabeth as head of state and she looks great by comparison.

God save the Queen, her son's a pumpkin.

 

[Lexicus]

"Trump helped African Americans"

Whaddya bet that late-cycle black consumer loan defaults are going to be what's blamed as the trigger of the next recession?

Trump tried to help them but they just couldn't get it right!

 

[El_Machinae]

The Republicans will have rebranded themselves as people who accepted 3% growth by running 4% deficits during the peak of the economic cycle. Super low inflation, which should make everyone wonder where those extra dollars landed.

The super irony is that consumer lending is what seems to be extending the cycle over the next year. At the end of the story, both household debt levels and government debt levels will have risen.

 

[Lexicus]

The super irony is that consumer lending is what seems to be extending the cycle over the next year. At the end of the story, both household debt levels and government debt levels will have risen.

Why is that super ironic? The economy has been artificially propped up by consumer lending for decades now.

 

[El_Machinae]

It's ironic because late cycle consumer spending is what's going to protect the economy until after the 2020 results come in, leaving the same people in charge as precipitated the crisis in the first place