Some notes from the last Republican debate on February 25:
- Essentially, Trump is a cognitive elitist on immigration.I am not sure if even that is all that great of an idea, but it’s still leagues ahead of open borders. Cruz lamely triup to outtrump the Trump but it’s far too late for that by now.
* On economics Trump is essentially advocating a return to the 19th century American System of internally free but externally protected markets (in this sense I think Scholar’s Stage got it precisely 180 degrees backwards with the comparison to Jackson).
This might be a good idea if the US wishes to retain what still remains of its manufacturing base. By the time it dropped trade barriers after WW2, the US was by far the most economically dominant country on Earth, accounting for close to 50% of its manufacturing capacity. But a generation later, more effective competitors such as Germany, Japan, and later Korea would converge and substantially hollow out its industrial base; despite the recent spate of “reshoring” thanks to automation, the process might go into deep and terminal reverse as China is now on the cusp of maturing across multiple hi-tech manufacturing sectors. The Listian recommendation is to only have free trade when you are the manufacturing hegemon and the US hasn’t been that since the 1980s. Considering that a subtantial proportion of Trump’s base are blue-collar workers such a turn would carry electoral logic too.
- It was cute how obsessed they were with catering to Hispanics. Although they now make up 17% of the US population, their relative youth means that fewer of them are eligible to vote, and their electoral participation rates are half that of Whites and Blacks, so they actual electoral weight isn’t all that great.
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Conservative values, blah blah… None of those empty suits even said outright they would reverse gay marriage. So who would care any longer apart from the cucks at NRO? A big thing in the 2000s but that train has now left the station as people have now realized it was an elite scam all along.
“Nationalism is the new thing, man,” said Jordan Voor, 30, a Trump supporter who works nearby and wore a longhorn belt buckle the size of a miniature football.
“I just kind of want to watch the establishment burn,” Mr. Voor added. “What’s the point of being conservative anymore? It’s a failing ideology.”
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The single biggest problem with the US healthcare system is that its costs are wildly inflated relative to results. I suppose knocking down state barriers will improve competition and lower costs, but I’m not sure it will have that much of an effect – California, after all, has a population approaching that of a mid-sized European countries like Spain, which should allow for lots of competition even within just California, but its healthcare costs are absurdly inflated nonetheless. Still, at least Trump reassured us that under him people’s won’t be dying on the sidewalk (unless he shoots them).
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Trump is factually wrong when he says that US taxes are very high. They are, in fact, the lowest of almost any First World country. That said, Republican exchanges of 30 second soundbites are not where you come for logical economic debates. The others were more inane. (Actually I don’t even remember what their points were but I assume they were inane or otherwise I’d probably recall something). Some blithering claptrap about innovation and more deregulation.
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The mandatory self-abasement before Israel ceremony.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/703059445006278656
Trump is a pretty good goy himself – “Obama treats Israel horribly,” – but he has nothing on Cruz, who would stand with Israel for ISIS against Christians. And Carson apparently believes Israel is America’s baby (“We can always be fair to other people, but, you know, it’s like when you have a child, you know, you want to be fair to all the children around but you have a special attention for your own child.”). Incidentally, I’m not sure the sentiment is reciprocated… evangelicals might like Jews, but the Jews don’t much like evangelicals.
- Carson whines because the moderator doesn’t ask him any questions and nobody cares about his opinions.
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Based Trump boldly says it was better with Gaddafi and Saddam in charge and the audience is even cool with it. This would have been unimaginable not that long ago.
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Moving past the debate, Trump provided us with yet another of his trademark high energy quotes:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/703900742961270784
Let’s make Amtrak great again!
2013 photograph from my rail journey across the US.
* PredictWise now has Trump on 80% odds to win the Republican nomination. The neocons are scurrying from the sinking ship and have now openly declared their allegiance to Hillary Clinton, who has helped launch infinitely more wars than bellicose irrational warmonger Trump. Though I don’t particularly expect for people to start seeing past their subterfuge anytime soon, this will be a highly positive development for at least three reasons:
(1) Trump won’t have to purge the Republican Party himself.
(2) The neocon affiliation with conservatism will be revealed to have been just as much of a fraud as their prior espousal of Trotskyism.
(3) We will no longer have to politely pretend there is any substantive difference between neoconism and R2P/humanitarian intervention.
- In the meantime, Hillary has pretty much cinched the Democrat nomination (97% on PredictWise now). Why? Because whereas Sanders supports gibs for all, blacks as well as whites, Hillary only wants mo money for dem programs.
Who knows, maybe this will make not a few Bernie Bros go full /pol/-tard. LRx here we come!
https://twitter.com/Gravantus/status/703898173471723520
- And for her Goldman Sachs friends, of course:
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/703733273504018432
Trump was in favor of taking out Gaddafi in 2011, but only as long as the U.S. got to keep the oil:
http://www.wsj.com/video/trump-we-should-take-libya-oil/7E12BC15-38AE-465F-949A-CDB65ED6DC75.html
I assume this was his 2002 position towards Iraq, as well.
BTW, Trump hates Snowden. The feeling is mutual. Snowden is a Berniebro by default, since Bernie is the only Presidential candidate who doesn’t hate him.
What are the brackets supposed to represent?
We usually use round brackets for ((pure coincidences)) and Trump is not jewish, so I don’t get it.
What are the square brackets supposed to represent?
B A S E D
A
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A new meme I’m trying to push through.
was it in this debate where Rubio tried a HBD-like argument about small hands?
Agree that Trump’s economic policy proposals are closer to Clay’s American System than Jackson’s stand on tariffs.
But it was neither Jackson’s stand on tariffs or Trump’s take on free trade that catapulted them to national prominence. No way to prove it, of course, but I’d wager if Trump declared tomorrow he is for the TPP then he would be forgiven.
The other way to look at this is to say that in the 1830s the Scots Irish, cavalier, and European working class immigrant demographics stood to benefit from low tariffs, while the high flying urbanite Yankees stood to suffer. The reverse is true today. Global trade’s benefits just as uneven now as they were in the antebellum era, but the boons all go the Yankee urbanites this time around. Trump, like Jackson, is for the material betterment of his people.
[Carson apparently believes Israel is America’s baby]
He’s right!
Sure, most parents would rather have a more loyal and respectful, less totally egotistical child, but what can you do?
Free trade did not gut American industry.
For starters, it isn’t gutted. Chinese industry may be growing faster than ours (if you can believe Chinese statistics, anyway); but American industry has never ceased its robust upward climb.
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/chinausa1.jpg
At any rate, concerns about trade deficits and possibly lost potential industrial output are also not addressable to free trade, because: 1) half of American imports are manufacturing components — American industry is actually more efficient because of free trade. And 2) under free trade conditions, countries with sustained budget deficits see declining currencies — as the relative value of goods that can be bought with currency from the country declines. For example, the AUD has lost half its value over the last 5 years.
That is, unless the currency in question is used to buy mass quantities of goods abroad. The USD is used to buy oil from every OPEC country, which means every country needs dollars to buy oil. So the US can buy imports with unconverted dollars, something that no other country has the privilege of doing. Imports are cheaper here than they have any right to be, and the absence of tariffs and quotas has nothing to do with it.
In reality, the only way free trade can “destroy” domestic industries is if domestic manufacturing is so shoddy that unrefined domestic goods have more value than domestic industry (and in most cases, such as happened in Britain in the 80s, the net result will actually be domestic industry gets bought out, rather than completely dismantled), in which case this destruction is actually positive.
Blacks are to the Democratic Party what Christians are to the Republican Party: a captive constituency. Since the other party hates them, their ‘own’ party doesn’t have to deliver them anything much in order to get their vote. It’s enough just to scare them with the enemy party.
That’s the theory. Unfortunately, there is this empirically observed phenomenon that free trade somehow does destroy industry, and that successfully industrializing countries without exception incubated their industries by huge tariffs and/or government subsidies and/or other methods (like the devalued yuan policy of China which they had until very recently).
“The neocon affiliation with conservatism will be revealed to have been just as much of a fraud as their prior espousal of Trotskyism.”
If even their espousal of Trotskyism was a fraud, what exactly does motivate them?
You would appear to be an ignorant libertarian (but I repeat myself). There has been no “robust upward climb” in recent years.
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO
The aspens turn in clusters, because their roots connect them.
“The neocons are scurrying from the sinking ship and have now openly declared their allegiance to Hillary Clinton, who has helped launch infinitely more wars than bellicose irrational warmonger Trump. Though I don’t particularly expect for people to start seeing past their subterfuge anytime soon, this will be a highly positive development for at least three reasons:
(1) Trump won’t have to purge the Republican Party himself.”
As I noted on another thread, this will prove that “self-deportation” does work and that Mitt Romney was right, after all.
I always wondered why Reagan decided to give the desperate neocons a home in the Republican Party in 1980. (I believe Boyd Cathey has stated that they really didn’t know what they were getting.) There was nothing “conservative” about the neocons apart from their name, and they shared none of the conservative values of the Republican Party. They were predominantly Jewish, a group that comprises about 2% of the American population and votes overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party. So, unlike the Southern blue dog Democrats, they did not bring a lot of votes to the Republican Party. Nevertheless, they were able to hijack the Republican Party’s foreign policy that has proven disastrous for the Republican Party, the country and the world. Good riddance, I say. Preferably by self-deportation, but, if that doesn’t work, giving them a well-deserved boot back to the Democrats. (That should prove amusing to watch.)
Republicans have a choice between two casino magnates, Donald Trump and Sheldon Adelson. Shelly has been holding back his shekels at the moment, but look for them to spew forth when most opportune. (Perhaps for HRC.)
The US population has been cucked by the Supreme Court since before many of the candidates were born. That’s why “the train has left the station”.
The fight to retain the vestigial remnants of martial-law sanity was never an “élite scam”, but a genuine grass-roots movement, as were the pro-life and anti-ERA causes. (All were overwhelmingly female, as well.)
We need ISIS for a Thirty Years war , whereby Israel might transfer the West Bank Palestinians to the Palestinian state (Jordan). The Jewish Diaspora would say Israel has the right to maintain itself as a Jewish state, and shut up about the West resisting replacement immigration.
Tikkun olam baby. That and the dark side of human nature that seems to love smashing other people’s things.
I think the neocons really are crypto-Trotskyites or at least the direct heirs of crypto-Trotskyites. Keeping in mind that Trotskyism is in many ways just tikkun olam on amphetamines and with access to machine guns.
Yeah, Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs and the general resurrection of American manufacturing capacity is probably the best thing about his campaign.
And in broader terms, the Democrats & Republicans can probably avoid unnecessarily antagonizing Latinos or, em, rural whites, by a two-pronged approach along the following lines: (1) Latino immigrants, legal or illegal, are to be assimilated by aggressively re-instituting English as the ONLY language for conducting any sort of formal business in the US; and (2) resurrecting American industrial capacity and raising wages in the process, under the argument that ALL of American society would benefit from such a development. (Unz has been a strong advocate of both proposals.)
The worst thing about Trump is probably his fascistic tendency. I mean, I can think of one other guy who made the trains run on time. The comparison is not idle.
But what is the corresponding audio effect?
Where does this “empirically observed phenomenon” come from? Estonia industrialized under free trade, so did the Czech Republic. American industry is doing quite well without tariffs, and if you don’t believe me I invite you to visit the Japanese and German car manufacturing plants in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina. Or the Alienware computer factory in Nebraska. You’ll come away impressed, I assure you.
You see those grey bands on the map? They are called “recessions”. You may notice that all manufacturing declines correspond to them, and the trend is otherwise up.
What’s more — manufacturing is so strong in this country that it has PROPPED UP an otherwise fundamentally lackluster economy. In the midst of a mediocre non-recovery that’s left us with stagnant wages and unemployment so high it dwarfs the Great Depression, American industry keeps on truckin’ along.
http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/infographics/2014/06/IB-NAFTA-2014-chart-2_HIGHRES.jpg
Even manufacturing employment has grown, albeit lackadaisically (but then we’ve been trading low-value for high-value manufacturing work for decades).
http://res.cloudinary.com/engineering-com/image/upload/w_640,h_640,c_limit/manufacturing-jobs-BLS-report_ol1pwx.jpg
Ok, so you’re going to go with anecdote over data. Dipshit.
The trend is flat and then down over the last 16 years, when you account for the change in population. Surely even a libertarian can understand this.
The problem with protectionism is one of basic math.
If tariffs make foreign products twice as expensive to buy, then domestic industries have to add more than twice as much value to compensate. With diminished competition, they probably won’t — they’ll just produce useless, expensive shit no one wants to buy.
Like Ladas.
Who in their right mind would buy a Lada over a Ford, if they had the choice? I don’t give a fuck if it protects domestic jobs or not, the point of economic development is being more prosperous by being more easily able to buy better stuff.
The wage data is not flat.
And how manufacturing reflects population growth matters little, because the overall trend of manufacturing is automation and depopulation.
There is a reason why the US economy is declining, but it’s not jobs being exported. It’s this:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/SSaXWv3_pDe12HMrhwqp76vykI7kb6h0tNdwq9tV5HGIWf79LbvjLbbeFQCzQTvTHSU2E2ypQKezCaYxChaTnKYIAjhQ__kx23x5fE0niyr_D4VYqzZh5uJjUi1gh5Cs51Zw6os
That index is not of wages, but of the value of production deflated by price. It indicates that the economic contribution of industry per person is declining, not relatively but absolutely. But let’s look at wages:
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/AHETPI
They are lower, deflated by the CPI, than they were in 1970. But what do you care? You have your halfwit slogans and you cannot perceive or even conceive anything beyond them.
For the record, I misclicked. Was aiming for the “Disagree” button here. Horribly embarrassed that there’s no way to undo it.
Free trade in the US is just welfare for China.
I will concede to you that wages are close to what they were in 1970 (not lower though), but with two important caveats:
1) wages have largely merged between manufacturing and other sectors occupations.
2) the variety and quality of goods that can be bought with said wages has substantially increased, and that’s largely because of free trade. This is something that the CPI does not adequately account for — a modern household buys approximately $10,000 of goods and services that simply DID NOT EXIST in 1970.
Money is just paper. Production volumes are just statistics. None are worth anything if they produce no goods that people actually desire and value.
Correction: the petrodollar is welfare for America’s banking system.
If the OPEC didn’t sell oil in dollars, there’d be no need to even consider this question, because the trade gap would be closed by the dollar’s collapse.
No, as Justin Raimondo has pointed out Trump opposed Iraq, Libya and Syria.
That Amtrak photo makes it look like you were traveling with Crocodile Dundee and the Pope.
Are there any good sources on that?
You mistake technological progress for free trade. Smartphones are the products of the former, not the latter.
Ladas are (were) products of a command economy. Of course ten years ago I knew many guys in Hungary who preferred twenty year old Ladas over Fords of the same age, but you must know that the biggest difference between the US and the USSR wasn’t free trade vs. protectionism, the USSR was a command economy.
Protectionist capitalist industries were producing Toyotas and Hyundais, which were lower quality but with lower prices for the domestic markets with income levels it wasn’t too bad, and later on as quality improved (and the home market started to feel small) they became export powerhouses.
Czechia has been an industrial powerhouse for several centuries. In the 18th century the Habsburgs raised the tariffs on Hungarian industrial products towards other Habsburg countries, while they lowered the tariff on Hungarian agricultural produce. They did the opposite to industrial and agricultural exports from the Czech Kingdom. Their idea was to develop each province/country according to its natural advantages. Hungarian nationalists in the early 19th century freaked out against it, but there was a government policy to develop Hungarian agriculture and Czech industry until the mid-19th century.
They were anti-Communist, tired of high tax rates they were paying, fed up with black– and white student– misbehavior, and mostly right about sex. (Read the back-and-forth between the Podhoretzes and Gore Vidal about sodomy.) And the first geneation at least was quite brainy and therefore useful.
There were also many goy neocons: William Bennett, Charles Murray, the Touchstone and First Things crowd. Foreign policy, except for the USSR, wasn’t emphasized. It was a different time.
[None are worth anything if they produce no goods that people actually desire and value.]
Circular reasoning. Is there any logical fallacy which cannot be illustrated from any five sentences of a libertarian?
In talking about US tax rates, one has to keep in mind that Americans pay federal taxes, but also almost always substantial state and local taxes, including real estate tax and sales taxes as well. Most Americans who earn above average incomes live in states and municipalities with above average taxes as well, although by sheer luck or conniving one can live, work and shop in lower tax areas and legally “beat the system” in some cases.
In the best case scenario, you could live in a state with no real estate tax and shop across the line where sales tax is low or nonexistent. Worst scenario, you live in New Jersey and work in Manhattan. In that case your tax load could approach that of France or Germany, but you still pay out of pocket if you want your kids to not go to snakepit public schools and for higher education, and of course you need a car in Jersey, along with car insurance at insanely high rates.
Communism produced a lot of goods, ironically. But they could never produce what people wanted when they wanted it, and had no particular incentive to.
That isn’t to say what they made was all garbage. They made camera lenses that were very good, although the mechanicals were a little crude. Their vacuum tubes (yes, certain applications for vacuum tubes still exist) were superb, and things like aircraft instruments, basic electrical test equipment, etc were pretty good.
Efforts to do business with ex-Soviet manufacturing to actually get new things manufactured for Western markets were generally unsuccessful. Alcoholism was one problem, the language barrier another, but beyond that one got the sense that the Russians, and the Ukrainians, etc, just didn’t have a lot of motivation to do much. Eventually, most would-be importers just gave up, except for people having access to old warehouses full of existing stock.
“The single biggest problem with the US healthcare system is that its costs are wildly inflated relative to results.”
Agree 100%. The culprit is group health insurance, a sort of poorly checked and destructive excise tax on labor, and which has no reason for its existence other than to block national health care. We have some folks “underwater”—they earn in wages less than the cost of their enrollment in group health insurance. You can thank the American Medical Association for talking Big Business into adopting this scheme.
I’d expect a President Trump to take a very hard look at America’s health care system.
The British were world class manufacturers until WWII and their capital goods were quite good through the fifties and most of the sixties. Vicious unions and “rationalisation” destroyed the car business in particular, and it became obvious the banks were no longer interested in financing British manufacture. Today’s chavs are te descendants of once highly skilled manufacturing workers.
Another reason for the decline of British manufacturing was, ironically, that workers were too skilled. Each worker had a trade he had come up through via an apprenticeship and the introduction of modern tooling was rejected, whereas the American and later the Japanese approach was to build the skill into the tooling. British manufacturers therefore lagged behind in the NC revolution.
The blacks still get a fair share of rewards for voting Democrats, the Christians what exactly do they they get in return ?
I have a question for Karlin, why does RT keep attacking America with their usual leftist media style ? They are attacking Trump like the others, but this really makes zero sense, Trump has signaled that he is not the anti Russian politician like the others, do they fail to comprehend that Hillary is openly belligerent and Trump wants to improve relations.
I think you meant marital, not martial, law.
If trump hates snowden, that worries me about trump.
Another scared shabbos goy says:
“The worst thing about Trump is probably his fascistic tendency. I mean, I can think of one other guy who made the trains run on time. The comparison is not idle.”
There’s Hitler with the impossible ‘6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’ and there’s Hitler without the impossible’ ‘6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’.
The ‘6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’ are scientifically impossible frauds.
see the ‘holocaust’ scam debunked here:
http://www.codoh.com
No name calling, level playing field debate here:
http://forum.codoh.com
Also note that there is not a single verifiable excavated mass grave that can actually be SHOWN, not just claimed, (recall the claim of 900,000 buried at Treblinka) even though Jews claim to know exactly where these allegedly enormous mass graves are.
“[[[Trump]]] Will Make Amtrak Run on Time”
Hopefully Trump will eliminate Amtrak.
Those are foreign owned! As in the profits go to foreigners while colonized Americans slave away. When we had no Japanese automobile manufacturing plants on US soil those profits went to Americans. To GM, Ford and Chrysler stockholders.
Here I thought libertarians are capitalists who kept an eye on the who and whom of profits. Actually 95% of libertarians are theoreticians same as ye old USSR had Marxism-Leninism theoreticians.
As I’ve participated in the hollowing out of American factories, I will tell you that moving light and medium manufacturing equipment is relatively easy, technically speaking. Most of this equipment just sits on the concrete floor. All that is needed is to cut the wires powering the equipment, load the stuff onto pallets and truck beds without breaking too much stuff, and be able to put it back together at the new location. Depending on the company structure, different things may happen financially, but it’s the bean counters making the decision according to the margins and their projections – nothing to do with “shoddy-ness”. I mean, “made in China” is an epithet, not a compliment, no?
I’m reminded of the introduction to Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson”:
This is the argument in favor of free and unrestricted trade, and against mercantilism, from a pure economics standpoint – but Hazlitt (a mere economics journalist) recognized that even beneficial policies cause pain to individuals, and the “rightness” of our policy does not mean that their pain does not exist, that they are “non-persons”.
I’ll illustrate the problem for those who care: imagine that tomorrow, all manufacturing jobs were perfectly replaced by robots, with no change in output, but the costs are lower. The money saved by using the robots goes to the factory owners and the robot makers. However, we have a problem of unemployed workers. What do we do with them? A small fraction are employed making the robots and maintaining them – but what do the rest do? The theory is that they learn new trades based on the new demand from the factory owners and robot makers. The problem is that the trickle down effect may take a long time [years].
Ok, we ameliorate the problem by stretching the robot-worker replacement out over a long period of time, thus allowing the workers to slightly depress other wages as they are absorbed into other commerce (burger flipping, lawn mowing, retail sales, shelf stocking). This is a question of “at what rate can we replace workers with robots without causing too many of them to be unemployed and falling into the poverty trap?”
The thing about these examples is that the money at least stayed within the US. Let’s say that instead of robots, we replace manufacturing workers with temporary H1-B workers who retain their ties to their home countries – just working and saving money to send home, where their families and homes are. This money does not come back to the US, except by convoluted arguments of economists, which I would assume would take even longer to possibly trickle down to the unemployed workers.
Now imagine that the entire factory is located in another country – with the same results as using robots. However, the money earned from the export of the product back to the US is now spent on the things that the people of that country want. It will certainly take years, perhaps decades for the trickle down effect to come back to the US. What do we do with the unemployed workers?
We had 17-18 million manufacturing “jobs” through the 80s and 90s (and even that from about 1965, from the huge jumps post-WW2), but since 2000, it has collapsed down to 12 million. Where did these 5 million jobs go? The answer to me, is a combination of the digitalisation of manufacturing allowing more to be done by fewer people. But does our country’s policy of pro-offshoring also show up in 2000? I don’t have the historical memory to know this.
But this is why the blue-collar guys are unhappy. They remember that there used to be 17 million jobs 15 years ago, and now there are only two thirds that number. Their economy has not recovered.
In all of this, I am a proponent of free trade and capitalism. The more of it there is, the better off the world is. Certainly, by having the factory in the foreign country, the foreign workers are much better off! Except that I am more in favor of nationalism now, and the betterment of my own nation. If pro-nationalism is treated as a positive thing, a good thing, and pro-globalism is treated as a good thing as well, then you can strike a balanced position.
But treating the “hollowing out” of the manufacturing sector as an un-alloyed “good thing” ignores the scale of what has been happening. My view is that the sector has been crushed by the hammers of digitalisation and globalisation, and that our current “Free-Trade” (meaning, trade treaties that now put American businesses at a disadvantage, whatever the effects were when the treaties were put in place) stance puts the American middle class at risk. It’s tough enough already without pro-offshoring policies in place, isn’t it?
Well, whether we agree or disagree, it’s more important that the tariff stance is seen as something that can change according to the environment of global trade and its effects on the American people. We don’t have a world government yet, after all, and I think we’d prefer our government to look after the interests of its citizens, as no other government is going to do that!
This video of James Goldsmith arguing against free trade between nations at different levels of development (leading to outsourcing for lower labor costs) eventually leads to an interesting discussion on high tech manufacturing vs low tech.
I can’t search through it for the exact time, but I think it is a useful rebuttal to your post. He says that even if the US and another country were tied for the value of their exchanges, the US is a net loser if its high tech products are made with far fewer people than the lower tech products it is importing. Looking just at the value of the exchange is misleading, because there are social costs and issues of dependence and the unspoken issue of the division of added value between capital and labor. You are exporting jobs and importing unemployment.
The same thing, really.
A Beauty Contest:Maria Zahkorva versus the filthy Irish Skank Samantha Powers?
Is the Sky Blue fucking SU-35 ISIS exterminating Conservative Orthodox Christian Russian Pure?
Another Beauty Contest: Melania versus Michelle?….THE SALVES WIN AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!
Should read:THE SLAVES WIN AGAIN!!!
Hillary won the malodorous repellant hairy fat ankled psychopathically violent bulldyke beauty contest in Hell several times apparently according to the Daily News celebrity news section today!!!!
I’m not American, and I don’t quite understand the American healthcare system, and from my limited knowledge it appears that it’s not in a very good shape. But… I think the most important single issue in all historically white/European countries is whether they can stay (or become once again!) predominantly white/European or their populations get replaced by someone else.
Based on that, I wouldn’t spend any political capital on anything that doesn’t improve the demographic situation. But it’s just me.
{…imagine that tomorrow, all manufacturing jobs were perfectly replaced by robots,}
Maybe there is some hope for human manufacturing workers after all:
[Mercedes Boots Robots From the Production Line]
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-25/why-mercedes-is-halting-robots-reign-on-the-production-line
Maybe Putin thinks it’s in Russia’s interest to destroy the US once and for all. Another few decades of leftism might weaken the US enough for Putin’s purposes.
But a more likely explanation is simply that old habits die hard, and it’s simply momentum driving forward RT coverage of… basically anything.
“If even their espousal of Trotskyism was a fraud, what exactly does motivate them?” – What’s good for Jews is good.
While I appreciate your need to jump into every thread here to defend Hitler and to pimp your forum like a three-dollar whore, I think your current interlocutor was thinking of Mussolini.
Clyde, I agree with much of your comment.
I’d just note that millions of Americans directly benefit from the profitability of foreign car companies because we own shares of their stock.
what does “based” mean?
what does this mean —
B A S E D
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it’s getting so one needs a glossary to understand all the made-up (or bastardized) vocabulary of the twittering generation. in three years it all will be as relevant as the hoola hoop.
I’m no fan of the U.S. Government or its warmongering ways these past many decades. But without a very militarily and economically powerful US, Russia will find that it is increasingly at the mercy of China.
Nobody ever notices stories like that one, though, while they swallow the robots-replace-man kind more eagerly than any trout.
that snowden tweet. fuck. I knew I was right wen I chose sanders and trump.
If they are not grounded in Trotskyism, does this mean that Trotsky can be cleared of responsibility for everything that ails Western Civ?
No, it is Anatoly Karlin who is “factually” wrong about US taxes. For corporations, US taxes are among the highest in the First, Second or Third World.
First World
US Federal Corporate Tax: 39% (plus state taxes)
UK Corporate Tax: 20% (no state or provincial tax)
Canada Federal Corporate Tax: 15% (plus provincial taxes)
Second World
Russia Corporate Tax: 20% (includes share to Regions)
Third World
China Corporate Tax Rate: 25% (But only 15% for high-tech and electronics sectors)
The “Free Trade” that is bad is when US industry takes its monetary and intellectual capital and builds a factory overseas where the labor is cheaper, and then brings back the product for sale in the US. This is not what Ricardo’s theorem assumes and hence is not guaranteed to be best for both countries. But people who object to this practice are told they are stupid because they do not understand Rucardo’s theorem because they have not studied economics. Trump has the right idea.
We got it, clown. Only corporations are people. A normal person might think that the total US tax take being comparatively low in proportion to national product would be quite enough to make AK’s statement factual, but not you.
I wonder about that, too. But RT is clueless on a number of issues, particularly racial tensions in the US. In the RT view, cops go around in cars and pick off unarmed black infants playing in their yards. I’m really dumbfounded by this because they can be pretty incisive on other issues.
And their latest gig, “celeb” news, is enough to make one vomit. It’s what you find at the grocery checkout counter or on an msn or yahoo homepase. Nauseating.
Since you begin by calling me a “clown,” we can infer the non-existent “factual” basis of your assertion about US taxes.
As I stated, the US has the highest, or among the highest, corporate tax rates in the world, and much higher than its fiercest competitors. That’s a major incentive for US corporations to invest and earn off-shore, thereby destroying US jobs, and the US manufacturing skills base.
If you want to compare overall tax burden to GDP, the US still looks heavily taxed (27%) compared with Mexico (19.5%) and China (22%), the countries with which the US has the largest trade deficits (figures from Wikipedia). But total US tax burden is over 40% of GDP if off budget items are included.
So, 5371, put away the childish diatribes and talk facts if you know any.
.
As the late John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard University economics professor, US Ambassador to India, Head of FDR’s Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply during WWII, etc., etc., stated many years ago, the whole point of economics is to give credibility to the lies that serve the moneyed interest.
Hence the near universal misrepresentation of Ricardo’s theory of Comparative Cost, better known today as the Theory of Comparative Advantage, which as you indicate, states that free trade with input factor (capital, labor and technology) mobility is detrimental to the countries that supply the capital and technology or receive the labour.
In accordance with the phony economics as propagated by the NY Times, the American Enterprise Institute and most Nobel Prize winning economists who write popular books about economics, the US has probably suffered more than any other country from public policy based on a denial of Ricardo’s idea.
You, being a racist hasbarist Zionist means we really cannot expect much real thinking from you.
Hitler, Schmitler.
There’s Hitler with the impossible ’6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’ and there’s Hitler without the impossible’ ’6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’.
And boy, the CODOH Forum has certainly taken you to the woodshed. It’s not even fair.
I tried to explain how Putin’s thinking might go. I didn’t say it’s correct.
Not to some commenters, who assume Trotsky too must have been a Jewish chauvinist.
Calling me the same wrong thing over and over again won’t turn me into it.
Here’s a point of comparison. Let’s see if you can keep up.
You call me a “racist hasbarist Zionist,” but there’s absolutely nothing in any of my posts to indicate that I hold any of those positions. My most recent post on the topic of Israel directly states that Israel has committed ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. How that’s “hasbara” I have no idea.
I call you a Nazi. But, unlike me, you post hateful things about anyone not white — especially Jews — and you routinely defend Hitler and the Nazis. What would any reasonable person conclude?
What I truly don’t understand about you is that, given your anonymity, you don’t just openly state what your views about Jews and National Socialism are. You’ve got nothing to lose.
Which implies that, as long as he didn’t commit genocide, Hitler was someone you admire and would like to live under. Hardly surprising.
If the best you get out of life is moderating a forum where you can take your enemies “to the woodshed,” then maybe I should feel sorry for you.
If nothing else, your refusal to debate substantive points anywhere but CODOH says volumes about your lack of bravery.
you seem to know about this stuff, so I have a question. how much do they actually pay? in comparison to the tax rate? how much of the 39% do they actually pay out of their profits :)))
“Trump is factually wrong when he says that US taxes are very high.”
It depends on what taxes he means. U.S. corporate tax rates are comparatively high. One advantage offered U.S. companies by offshoring operations is that the earnings of the offshore branch or subsidiary, as long as they are not brought back to the United States, are not taxable here.
There have been numerous “inversions” by which the headquarters of an American corporation is moved offshore through a merger between it and a foreign corporation. See for example:
http://www.bidnessetc.com/56917-why-valeant-pharmaceuticals-intl-inc-could-be-acquired-by-pfizer-inc/
“Pfizer has been looking for a way to escape US tax rates. It wants an acquisition deal to help it move its legal address to a tax-friendly country. At the moment it is in merger talks with Allergan Plc. Pfizer’s tax rate is as much as 25%, which would come down significantly it were to actually buy Allergan. Allergan’s effective tax rate for last year was 15%.
“Valeant, however, presents an even more attractive tax rate. Because it is HQ’d in Canada, its tax rate checked in at 10%. Valeant could double Pfizer’s tax savings and allow access to its overseas cash, rather than repatriation.”
My guess is that Trump is quite familiar with such tax arbitrage, given the scale at which he does business and the people he knows in connection with it.
Federal personal income tax rates may appear low in comparison to those of other countries, but the comparison needs to take into account American state and in some cases city income taxes, which have no equivalents in most of the rest of the world. These, together with the separate Federal payroll tax, increase the total burden of personal income taxation in the U.S. considerably above the Federal rate alone.
Canada, which operates under a similar federal system, for 2015 has a top marginal personal income tax bracket of 33%, applicable on income over Canadian $200,000. The U.S. personal income tax 33% bracket begins at U.S. $189,301 for single filers and $230,451 for married couples filing jointly. However, a 35% bracket is applicable to both on income over $411,501, and a 39.6% bracket begins at $413,201 for single filers and at $464,851 for those filing jointly. So, compared to our northern neighbor, our taxes, at least on the upper income ranges, are indeed relatively high.
Too similar to ((echo)) imo tbh fam, every time i see it i get badthink vibes, the sematic magic spells are getting crossed.
Asterisks might work better, it has ~Star Power~.
One of the problems with arguing economics with classical economist is Asia is not playing by classical economic rules. Two of the most prominent writers about this are Clyde Prestowitz and Eamonn Fingleton. The Japanese are using a combination of Americas “American System” with a series of trade barriers and German economics. The other Asians are copying them. Some of it is based on Monopolist Technology Capture. They forge monopolies in strategic industries and throw money at them. The volume they produce combined with the large amounts of capital needed drives down prices making it difficult to even get in the market much less make a profit. The idea that you could one day decide to open up a semiconductor factory and compete is foolish. It takes enormous amounts of capital and insider technology to do so. If we loose our manufacturing base it may be forever.
The people arguing that free trade production can just move back and forth at a whim are not only not getting it right. They’re not even in the ball park of understanding what’s going on.
The Asian countries have a huge structure devoted to this system. Manufacturers, legislature and banks combined. They’re not going to stop eroding American manufacturing. It’s working for them.
If you read some of the articles of the two guys I mentioned you will see there is no such thing as “free” trade and if we don’t get on the ball all of our lots will hewers of wood for the rest who own all the robots.
As for taxes for corporations. Why shouldn’t they be taxed the same as people? If they give up their rights as “people” then they can get tax breaks I but see no need to give corporations super human powers higher than the rest of us.
Mar 3, 2016 Constitutional View: The Founders on Executive Power
Under the Constitution, the president was delegated the authority to execute laws passed by Congress, not create them with the stroke of a pen.
https://youtu.be/iJ24C233K_4
Russia is dealing with the US government’s human rights propaganda. Russians are hammered with the US government championing and funding Russian homosexuals, Russian individualists, Russian transsexuals, Russian feminists and the like. RT is fighting back by pointing out US government hypocrisy. Do the Russians really give a sh!t about American blacks? No. But when you are fending off an enemy attack you use whatever stick is within your grasp.
Um, well actually, perhaps not that much, but one can be sure that large corporations work very hard to take profits where taxes are lowest. After all, a difference in tax rate of between 39% in the US and 15% in China (for high-tech industry, e.g., drug development) means a 40% higher net profit in China than the US, all other things being equal. That’s a huge incentive to operate in a low tax jurisdictions, and especially in low tax jurisdictions such as China where labor is cheap, and where regulation of work place safety and protection of the environment is minimal.
GE, incidentally, is said to have something like 600 accountants working on tax avoidance issues.
Profits accumulated offshore will often, presumably, be kept offshore to avoid higher American taxation, which means that those profits will be invested offshore, not in America. Hence Trump’s claim that lower corporate tax rates will bring several trillion dollars home to be invested at home may be correct.
The sensible thing, it seems to me, is to eliminate the corporate tax altogether and tax corporate profits at the normal rate of income tax at the time they are received in the hands of investors as dividends. A benefit of this approach is that no one would have to waste their time on tax avoidance schemes, and everyone would pay the same rate whether their income was earned at home or abroad.
You nailed it re RT.
True, but only because our trade with many counties, especially with China, is not remotely “free trade”. Mercantillist trade has gutted American industry.
I don’t understand what you or others might mean by Jewish chauvinist.
Are you a Trotskyist or a Stalinist?
Free trade only really makes sense for small countries where manufacturing a wide range of goods is impractical due to economies of scale issues. Hence its not surprising that the biggest supporters of free trade are small nations like Chile, Sweden, Singapore and New Zealand, while many larger economies, such as Japan, China and Russia aren’t so keen.
America can produce a lot of cheap goods in mega factories without the need for cheap Asian labour.
[the US still looks heavily taxed (27%) compared with Mexico (19.5%) and China]
In other words, it is lightly taxed compared with other rich countries, which was the original claim you objected to, but you are trying by a pathetic evasion to avoid admitting it.
[But total US tax burden is over 40% of GDP if off budget items are included]
And if “off budget items” were included for other rich countries, their tax burden would still be just as much larger than that of the US as it actually is.
Run along now, idiot.
Me a National Socialist? That’s a hilarious and desperate claim coming racist Zionist Mathis.
There are the ‘Nazis’ with the mythological ‘6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’ and there are the ‘Nazis’ without the mythological ’6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’.
Andrew Mathis is a stalking hasbara Jew, he has threatened physical violence against Revisionists, posts pictures, addresses, phone nos. of those he wants attacked. He has left threatening voicemail messages, on & on. All this illegal activity is documented by many, it’s ironclad.
Such are the usual enemies of free speech.
Read on and witness the beat down of Handy Andy Mathis:
He also posts as ‘Thames Darwin’. Check it out and have a laugh.
‘Himmler’s note infers Hitler knew of liquidation?’
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2143
‘Is 1% too much to ask?’
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10206
‘Alleged “mass graves” according to T. Darwin / Andrew Mathis’
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9414
‘Andrew Mathis on Dachau, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka’
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9228
Anecdotal evidence & “holocaust survivors”
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9238
‘Why no gas chamber experiment?’
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10207
holocaust’ denial article by Andrew Mathis debunked here’
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=2816
‘Prof. Mc Nally dissects HHP’s Andrew Mathis’ bogus article’
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=2841
‘Holo. Hist. Proj.’s Andrew Mathis on Zyklon scent removal’
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=2499
‘Green, Mathis refuted / cyanide: lice, humans, & more’
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=267
‘Believer org. spokesman, Andrew Mathis, demolished in debate’
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=254
‘Holo. Hist. Proj.’s Andrew Mathis attempts damage control’
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=2498
‘Email from Andrew Mathis (The Holocaust History Project)’
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=1526
‘holocaust’ History Project to unveil section on Treblinka’
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=280
This is too easy.
so I was right in thinking they pay jack shit in actual tax. GG.
Really? What’s hilarious about it? You defend Hitler and the Nazis and you clearly hate Jews. Where am I going wrong on this one?
So you love the Nazis. Exactly as I thought.
All completely untrue, and you cannot prove otherwise.
I heard that Jonnie Hargis raped and killed a girl in 1976. Prove that he didn’t.
I’m not an enemy of free speech. I’m an enemy of lazy library assistants shirking their responsibilities to spread anti-Semitic propaganda on the taxpayers’ dime.
Read the links below about how “BobbyBeGood” rigs the debates at CODOH:
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2015/07/playing-whack-mole-with-jonnie-hargis.html
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2015/04/atrocity-by-soviet-partisans-in-finnish.html
https://rodoh.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=101
https://rodoh.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1979&hilit=berg+hargis
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/251521_Largest_Holocaust_denial_forum
The funny thing about those round echo brackets is they look like the ones used in the programming language Scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_%28programming_language%29 Kind of apt.
Tell me something: when you were a kid, and you got into a fight on the playground, did your mom come and tie the hands of the other kid and let you beat the kid up?
Because that would make a lot of sense if that happened.
Your analysis is obfuscating political gibberish. 30,000,000 jobs have been exported since 1990. Consumers and workers have not benefitted. An item once manufactured in the US is the same price now that it is produced overseas, and American workers’ wages are stuck at 1960s levels. The efficiency you mention benefits management and shareholders in the long term, but no one else.
Amtrak’s on-time stats are at about 57%.
Would you mind explaining the meme?
Also, does Trump’s red lightsaber reflect the ‘red pill’, the similarity of Sith teachings to ‘might makes right’ alt-right philosophy (I actually did use the Sith code while weightlifting), or a desire to affiliate with the ‘dark side’ and feel rebellious on your part? 😉
That said, if you add health care as 17.5% of GDP to the US tax base of 27% of GDP you get French and Norwegian rates of taxation. That’s required to get an apples to apples comparison because health care is paid for by government taxation in most 1st world countries.
Agree 100%. Regrettably, most folks enrolled in employer-paid group health insurance have been allowed to believe that the “health care excise tax” paid for them is compensation for work.
Even people who are popularly believed to pay no taxes or very little in taxes–retirees, unemployment comp beneficiaries, minimum wage earners, and so on– do pay excise taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, personal and real property taxes, etc., that can easily take 15%-20% and more of their earnings.
It’s a /pol/ meme.
Yeah, I caught that too. Disappointing, but I don’t expect any candidate to be everything I want. Trump is still the best candidate to destroy the elitist traitors and turn the country around.
Maybe Karlin shouldn’t use memes that only people with monikers like “racerealist88” understand. I find all those references to weirdo reddit communities irritating.
Trot.
A Jewish chauvinist puts the interests of the Jews above those of humanity – like the neo-cons (who are really ex-Shactmanites, not Trots).
It’s not about being Trump not being everything desirable. It’s a matter of some positions being broadly prognostic. Snowden is a hero. Anyone who wants to prosecute him – for treason, yet – is pure reprobate.
Not to some commenters, who assume Trotsky too must have been a Jewish chauvinist.
A Jewish chauvinist puts the interests of the Jews above those of humanity – like the neo-cons
This doesn’t make sense to me. Trotsky and most of the other early Jewish Marxists were very “universal” in their outlook. The wanted the universal brotherhood of workers to overcome ethnic and religious divisions.
I think what is really meant by “Jewish chauvinist” is that no matter what the person does or writes you are assuming that it is fake and they are just hiding their “true” Jewish interests.
A chauvinist is very open and loud about their preference.
It’s difficult to know what Jewish communists wanted regarding the Jewish people, for reasons of both self-deception and crypsis. Obviously they didn’t mind the fact that the new elite had a lot of people with at least some Jewish ancestry. Some Jewish communists later (some of them even before Stalin started to turn against the Jews in the USSR) became ethnically self-identified Jews (or possibly retained such ethnic self-identification all along), for example both Molotov’s and Voroshilov’s wives started to talk like ethnically conscious Jews after 1945. Polina Zhemchuzhina’s emotional meeting with Golda Meyerson in 1948 was probably among the reasons why Stalin finally turned against both Molotov and the Jews. It’s difficult to know if Polina Molotova really was both a Jewish nationalist and a hardline Stalinist at the same time, but interestingly, after her husband was forced into retirement by Khrushchev, she spent her (very long) remaining life in reclusion with Molotov as unrepentant Stalinists. I don’t think she repented her emotions when talking to Golda Meyerson either. I have no information about Voroshilov’s wife, but I’d think she was similar.
Let me add that for most of human history it was highly inadvisable for Jews to openly express supremacist thoughts in the presence of gentiles. It was especially inadvisable in Stalin’s paranoid dictatorship to openly express loyalty to another country’s government. It was understood by all people (Jewish or otherwise) that in Stalin’s eyes the government most worthy of respect and loyalty (and by a wide margin) was Stalin’s own, and that no non-communist government was worth of any respect or loyalty at all. The fact that at least one high-ranking (central committee member) Stalinist publicly expressed loyalty to Israel is astonishing in and of itself.
So we cannot know if or whether Jewish communists really had a universalist outlook, or if they thought that in the universal brotherhood of mankind their co-ethnics should be more equal than other ethnic groups. But we have reasons to suspect that at least some of them did harbor such thoughts.
I don’t buy into the MacDonald or associated BS.
Yeah, at least my ‘You must be new here’ works on the superficial level whenever someone says something lefty.
(It’s an old Slashdot reference.)