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Ongoing US GOP Debacle Thread: Seditious Republicans march toward authoritarianism

If you actually think about, food stamps should be expanded to help many more families. It's one of the most humane programs ever developed and is also a huge job creating program. Every dollar given out to recipients help families and directly creates a wide array of jobs.

Here's a small list of them:

farmers
farm workers
vehicle sales for people to get to and from work
gas and oil sales
Seed and feed sales
farm equipment sales
meat and produce storage
meat and produce packaging
delivery truck sales
delivery truck repairs
truck drivers
people who load and unload trucks
all levels of grocery workers
those who produce grocery bags
advertising people

There are lots more.
 
STFU with your demand side economics. That trickle is coming. One day, you'll be rich too, so keep cutting taxes on us rich folks.
 
The suggested move on food stamps would create a significant disincentive to work. At these levels of income, a person can take on a part-time second job or take on more hours at a low-wage job and suddenly lose benefits. I have seen calculations showing that this drop off in benefits because of additional income actually represents the highest effective marginal income tax rate in America. This kind of benefits "cliff" will simply cause people who are right at the line to refuse opportunities to take on extra work, or to keep that extra work under the table and untaxed. It's a monumentally stupid policy, but that's no surprise at this point.
 
 
If that's real, Dershowitz has lost all of his credibility. Charles Johnson is so much of a bigot that the RNC banned him from their national convention.
 
If that's real, Dershowitz has lost all of his credibility. Charles Johnson is so much of a bigot that the RNC banned him from their national convention.

Given the credible accusations leveled against him regarding Epstein and underage girls, I'm not so sure that anything he says should be taken seriously anymore. He's a demented little dude, imo.
 
Given the credible accusations leveled against him regarding Epstein and underage girls, I'm not so sure that anything he says should be taken seriously anymore. He's a demented little dude, imo.

Speaking of

 
Speaking of


I'm sure he is only making this argument for "constitutional" reasons, and not personal ones. Yes, Alan, I'm sure there are plenty of 15 and 16 year olds who would find you sexually irresistible, if only you could lower the legal age of consent. No wonder he is so eager to defend sexual predators and harassers like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. As I said, he's a demented little man.
 

Right now the idiots are happy because with Trump in office, they're #winning. It's gonna be scary once Trump leaves them all poor, he's out of office, and demographics make it apparent they won't be #winning again anytime soon.
 
It will be even scarier if Trump is replaced by a minority that they can incorrectly pin their blame on.
 
A Racist Stuck in the Past: In Trump’s mind, it’s still 1989.

...But Trump doesn’t seem to be aware that times have changed. His vision of “American carnage” is one of a nation whose principal social problem is inner-city violence, perpetrated by nonwhites. That’s a comfortable vision if you’re a racist who considers nonwhites inferior. But it’s completely wrong as a picture of America today.

For one thing, violent crime has fallen drastically since the early 1990s, especially in big cities. Our cities certainly aren’t perfectly safe, and some cities — like Baltimore — haven’t shared in the progress. But the social state of urban America is vastly better than it was.

On the other hand, the social state of rural America — white rural America — is deteriorating. To the extent that there really is such a thing as American carnage — and we are in fact seeing rising age-adjusted mortality and declining life expectancy — it’s concentrated among less-educated whites, especially in rural areas, who are suffering from a surge in “deaths of despair” from opioids, suicide and alcohol that has pushed their mortality rates above those of African-Americans.

And indicators of social collapse, like the percentage of prime-age men not working, have also surged in the small town and rural areas of the “eastern heartland,” with its mostly white population.

What this says to me is that the racists, and even those who claimed that there was some peculiar problem with black culture, were wrong, and the sociologist William Julius Wilson was right.

When social collapse seemed to be basically a problem for inner-city blacks, it was possible to argue that its roots lay in some unique cultural dysfunction, and quite a few commentators hinted — or in some cases declared openly — that there was something about being nonwhite that predisposed people toward antisocial behavior.

What Wilson argued, however, was that social dysfunction was an effect, not a cause. His work, culminating in the justly celebrated book “When Work Disappears,” made the case that declining job opportunities for urban workers, rather than some underlying cultural or racial disposition, explained the decline in prime-age employment, the decline of the traditional family, and more.

How might one test Wilson’s hypothesis? Well, you could destroy job opportunities for a number of white people, and see if they experienced a decline in propensity to work, stopped forming stable families, and so on. And sure enough, that’s exactly what has happened to parts of nonmetropolitan America effectively stranded by a changing economy.

I’m not saying that there’s something wrong or inferior about the inhabitants of, say, eastern Kentucky (and no American politician would dare suggest such a thing). On the contrary: What the changing face of American social problems shows is that people are pretty much the same, whatever the color of their skin. Give them reasonable opportunities for economic and personal advancement, and they will thrive; deprive them of those opportunities, and they won’t.

Which brings us back to Trump and his attack on Representative Elijah Cummings, whom he accused of representing a district that is a “mess” where “no human being would want to live.” Actually, part of the district is quite affluent and well educated, and in any case, Trump is debasing his office by, in effect, asserting that some Americans don’t deserve political representation.

But the real irony is that if you ask which congressional districts really are “messes” in the sense of suffering from severe social problems, many — probably most — strongly supported Trump in 2016. And Trump is, of course, doing nothing to help those districts. All he has to offer is hate.
 
It will be even scarier if Trump is replaced by a minority that they can incorrectly pin their blame on.

We’ve already been through that. It’s not a “moderate” reason to elect a white guy. These people have always branded white guys sympathetic to minorities as “nigger lovers” and dog whistle terms anyway. A white guy candidate will either be attacked for siding with minorities over whites or he will tack so hard to the middle that he will lose support from minorities anyway. Such a white guy better have the stomach to be rejected by the large majority of his peers.
 
Here's a question: How come Trump hasn't attacked Nadler or his district as viciously or as racially as he attacked Cummings considering Nadler is supporting impeachment and runs the committee that can do it?

What's the difference between the two? They are both Dems. They are both old. They are both from big cities. Hmmmm, I wonder what that difference is?
 
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