Trump v Clinton: who do you support?

[Kurplop]

All interesting comments on inheritance. Just a few random thoughts now.

1) Government sale: 22 seized mansions, most with 20+ bedrooms, generous ballrooms, all priceless works of art included. Great for growing families. Discount priced for quick sale.

2) Agreed. Many (not all) non-profits are tax evasion scams. The only way to police it, with regards to inheritance, might require excessive privacy infringements on everybody. Do we really want that?

3) Ending tax deductions on charitable contributions would be fine but this would give further control to the government in handling acts of benevolence and deciding who's worthy. Many people, myself included, don't really trust the government and think that the individual should be able to have a choice in where their contributions go. My fear is that the more detached the giver is from the recipient, the more an entitlement attitude is fostered in the recipient and the less sense of responsibility that individuals have for helping others ("I already pay enough in taxes"). One of humanity's greatest joys is found in freely helping those in need; don't make it mandatory.

4) I can imagine ways of hiding assets in the form of cash, off-shore accounts, transference of wealth while living, etc. that would thwart excessive inheritance confiscation without, again, excessive privacy infringements. Also, it's the wealthy who are the most skilled at hiding/protecting their assets.

5) There seems to be a limit to the amount people are willing to voluntarily forfeit to the government before they refuse to comply.

6) I know it is a tired statement but there is some truth to it. It is the well off and ambitious that create most of the jobs. Their skills and innovations, driven by an incentive to succeed, drive our economy.

7) As long as people run the government, it is necessarily a flawed system. While we the people have some power to shape and oversee it, it can be as abusive as any private entity.

8) A more egregious issue may be the lack of taxation on investment income.

9) There is a problem with the radically disproportionate wealth distribution. If the richest people were also the best people and not merely the best at accumulating wealth this may not be a problem. As it is, a measured adjustment may be appropriate. One that addresses the issues but doesn't ignore or dismantle what is already working.

10) Not all capitalists are the stereotypical greedy (pick your expletive) we imagine. If you get a chance, investigate the life of George Westinghouse; a man who appears to have been motivated by people and industrial progress as much as fortune. Sometimes the free market does bring out the best in us.

[fohat]

8) A more egregious issue may be the lack of taxation on investment income.

9) There is a problem with the radically disproportionate wealth distribution.

http://streamhistory.com/die-rich-die-d ... of-wealth/

[fohat]

And here is a sobering article by a Nobel Prize-winning economist:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/09/opini ... .html?_r=0


TL;DR version:

"I understand debt better than probably anybody. I know how to deal with debt very well. I love debt -- but you know, debt is tricky and it's dangerous, and you have to be careful and you have to know what you're doing," Trump said.

Truly, Donald Trump knows nothing. He is more ignorant about policy than you can possibly imagine, even when you take into account the fact that he is more ignorant than you can possibly imagine. But his ignorance isn’t as unique as it may seem: In many ways, he’s just doing a clumsy job of channeling nonsense widely popular in his party, and to some extent in the chattering classes more generally.

None of this should be taken as an excuse for Mr. Trump. He really is frighteningly uninformed; worse, he doesn’t appear to know what he doesn’t know. The point, instead, is that his blithe lack of knowledge largely follows from the know-nothing attitudes of the party he now leads.

[Muirium]

As much as I often agree with Krugman, his Nobel prize is forever stuck in the same bucket of ridicule as the one they awarded Obama as soon as he got the gig. The Nobels have become horribly partisan over the years. I'd be appalled if they'd gone right wing. But I'm none too pleased they've come left, either. An imbalance serves none of us, as they become devalued.

As for unimaginable: how I despise that word. Imagine with me for a moment here a man so ignorant he literally can't find the arse end of a pair of trousers. Not so hard, is it? I've had to deal with a few just like him and then some! As have we all. There is no astounding innate quality about Donald. Nothing special or rare at all. The only thing that separates him from the butthead on the street corner is the fact he was born rich, in the very epicenter of small screen fame, and the zeitgeist tuned in to him, in desire of ever worse idiots. As much as he'd love you to think him one in billion, yewnique!, he is passive, a reflection of wider events around him, and sought out for his bluntness and pigheadedness by cynics looking for a laugh. Story of his life.

You don't need a set to make the Truman Show. America will do.

[ohaimark]

Sounds like Carnegie and I would get along decently.

[jacobolus]

Krugman the pundit is partisan, sure, but not remotely “left”. He’s a mainstream centrist, institutionalist, establishmentarian economist, in the pro-market, pro-trade, policy wonk center of the Democratic party. You can find his like in every economics department in the US (the actual leftists are mostly confined to a few second-tier institutions on the fringes).

His Nobel Prize is for making technical/mathematical economic models of international trade, and doesn’t have much to do with his political punditry one way or another, except insofar as he occasionally makes wonky posts on his blog, which tend to be loosely related (if at all) to his typical punditry.

A lot of the appearance of partisanship has to do with the extreme economic ignorance (or for that matter, ignorance of basic arithmetic) demonstrated by various GOP proposals. If you found an economist who was a registered Republican and asked him to weigh in on the same proposals, he’d either dodge the question or be forced to agree about their absurdity, though perhaps without quite as much taunting.

[fohat]

his Nobel prize is forever stuck in the same bucket of ridicule as the one they awarded Obama

An imbalance serves none of us, as they become devalued.

Since I sometimes get pushback from contrarians based on the sources of my editorial links rather than the value of the content, I figured that a Nobel Prize winner writing in the New York Times is about as unassailable a source as could be found.

[webwit]

Macro-economy is a shit, soft science, full of voodoo. I find it a bit ironic that this guy champions dept like he's an expert. A Nobel prize doesn't mean anything to me. This little test does: did this guy predict the huge financial bank dept crisis or was he a clueless idiot like the rest of us?

[jacobolus]

He did, sort of, multiple times (as did many other people). How long before the crisis, and how much specific detail do you require, for a prediction to meet your standards? Here’s a piece about the housing bubble from 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/opini ... bbles.html

More generally though, the job of academic economists is not to make perfect future predictions (which is impossible) but to make mathematical models which explain some bit of economic behavior, and help make limited, conditional, probabilistic types of predictions, for example about the effects of various concrete policy changes.

In a similar way, geologists can’t perfectly predict the next earthquake, biologists are sometimes caught off guard by species extinctions, few political theorists would have predicted Trump to win the GOP primary, etc.

[fohat]

This little test does: A Nobel prize doesn't mean anything to me.

Yep - contrarian!

[webwit]

He did, sort of, not.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2 ... yre-lying/
The ones who did and are credited for it are well documented, but apparently that didn't serve your argument.

P.S. If you don't want to have a discussion with me, you shouldn't get into a discussion with me and then dictate I shouldn't answer. Then you should just shut up. I find it rather childish you start a personal attack when what I posted was an opinion about an economist. EDIT: you removed it.

[fohat]

Just to move this along with something a little different:

(Disclosure: I, too, was born and raised in Tennessee)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEJTI5f-4v4

[webwit]

It's a good observation. There are voters for Trump with Hulk Hogan as vice-president, because Fuck You to the ruling class of assholes.

[Muirium]

Yup. And what is the freeze frame at the end of the movie of life but a finger to The Man?

This is all a dumb movie, surely…

[cookie]

[seebart]

d6d.jpg (22.03 KiB) Viewed 5127 times

[emdude]

Spoiler:

[seebart]

This seems like a new type of moderate trumpPR now:

DONALD TRUMP INTERVIEW WITH MEGYN KELLY (5/17/2016)- TUESDAY, MAY 17, 2016 PART 2:

[vivalarevolución]

This seems like a new type of moderate trumpPR now:

DONALD TRUMP INTERVIEW WITH MEGYN KELLY (5/17/2016)- TUESDAY, MAY 17, 2016 PART 2:

Two actors just playing their part. Same tactics as always, just diverting and serving the ego, with less shock value. My favorite quote of the interview: "I view myself as a person, like everyone else, is fighting for survival."

Mr Trump has no fucking clue what it is like to fight for survival. Not a fucking clue.

[jacobolus]

WSJ: Women in Elite Jobs Face Stubborn Pay Gap

Cornell’s Prof. Blau, who began researching gender pay disparities in the 1970s, has analyzed wage data isolating the role of education, experience, occupation concentrations and other variables. She and Prof. Kahn estimate that about half the gap stems from women being more heavily clustered in lower-paying jobs and industries—not that they are paid less for identical work. Around one-sixth comes from men being on the job longer.

Just over one-third of the gap, she says, is from factors that can’t easily be pinned down, including potential discrimination. She says the true impact of discrimination could be lower, because her calculation lumps in other intangible variables, or higher because it doesn’t account for how discrimination may keep women from entering lucrative male-dominated fields.

[...]

Among personal financial advisers, who had the fifth-highest gap of any major profession, men outnumber women more than two to one. That imbalance prompted CFP Board, a national nonprofit group that certifies financial planners, to probe what it dubbed the profession’s “feminine famine.”

Its 2014 report found women were more likely to take guaranteed income instead of the greater payouts and risks that came with heavily commission-based jobs or owning their own firms. They had less experience than men in the field and were younger.

After the research controlled for experience, practice size and practice ownership, the women earned about $32,000 a year less on average, according to the study of more than 500 financial advisers. An advisory panel concluded gender discrimination and bias were among factors dissuading women.

[...]

The Journal’s analysis found physicians had the 11th-highest gender wage gap of major professions. Researchers say some of that comes from women’s greater concentration in lower-paying specialties such as pediatrics, while men are more prevalent in lucrative areas such as orthopedics.

Anthony LoSasso, a University of Illinois at Chicago health-policy professor, tracked starting salaries of physicians leaving New York state residency programs over a decade. Their choice of specialty, number of hours worked and structure of their employment didn’t account for the men’s earning $16,819 a year more than the women in 2008.

Nor did his theory pan out, in later research, that women were trading pay for jobs with more flexibility and fewer nights and weekends. Prof. LoSasso has yet to find a reason for the gap.

“I continue to be befuddled,” he says.

[...]

Wage transparency hasn’t closed a particularly wide gap for the very people who set salaries in the workplace. Female compensation and benefits managers earn about $71,000 a year on average, or 68% of men’s about $104,000 annual average, despite outnumbering men more than three to one in the field, the Journal’s analysis found.

“We’re talking about the subset of the working world that has exponentially more access to salary data,” says Kerry Chou, a senior practice leader at WorldatWork, a human-resources association in Scottsdale, Ariz. “And still,” he says, “we have this gap.”

[seebart]

Now that Mr. Trump is much further down the road in this political race more and more about his past comes up:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... ime-213910

[fohat]

Now that Mr. Trump is much further down the road in this political race more and more about his past comes up:

Fortunately for him, his minions don't care about his past. They don't even care that he won't show his tax returns.

This documentary is well worth a watch, although it can be a moving target when you try to find it online:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/ ... ndros.html

[Muirium]

The Trump voter mindset: Where can I vote for FUCK YOU!? Because man I'm chock full of that.

Bernie Bros overlap with this more than a little, too. It's all about what you're against. The more imaginary and batshit insane, the better.

[fohat]

It's all about what you're against. The more imaginary and batshit insane, the better.

But that's the difference. Bernie's supporters understand what the real problems are, and want them resolved.

[Muirium]

That's why I said it was some of them. Many a decent human being has voted for Bernie in the primaries. Every single Trump voter, meanwhile, well it'd be illiberal of me to say quite how I think of them! Let the fuckhead's own words about those he detests say it for me.

[fohat]

Now here is a solid reason to vote Trump:

[webwit]

Trump is leading the polls.

[seebart]

Looks like another "normal" Trump rally in Albuquerque NM:

BREAKING: SHOTS FIRED AT TRUMP RALLY IN ALBUQUERQUE

[photekq]

Note how the violence is not being created by Trump supporters.

[seebart]

Note how the violence is not being created by Trump supporters.

Note how indirectly it is very much so. See this at any other rally of any other candidate? Ever?