BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Tell me you know literally nothing about how the American government works without telling me.

You're spot on here. Plenty of people count maxing out their 401k and IRA as "living paycheck to paycheck", because their budgets would go upside if they missed a paycheck and did literally nothing to cover it.

Combine that with the general bias all people have to view themselves as generally normal and you get a pretty meaningless metric.

The SCOTUS has its fair share of shits on it, but they are not a simple "do what Republicans want" machine (aside from Alito and Thomas).

Literally just today, they announced a ruling allowing Washington state to ban gay conversion "therapy". They've already riled against Trump multiple times in other cases.

This is a nice signal that Gorsuch and Barrett do have some level of sincerity in their beliefs about powers reserved to states.

This isn't to say that they're good, but they operate on a very different level than Alito and Thomas, whose primary ideology seems to be whatever owns the libs the most.

You're the one who brought up layoffs, mate.

Why did you bring up a metric that you yourself are calling shit?

If, by "Zionist Jew", you mean that he is a Jew that thinks that Israel has some right to exist in some fashion - which is what Zionist actually means - you are describing the vast majority of all Jews, and by extension arguing that no Jew should be allowed to be involved in this discussion.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I have a strange idea that you wouldn't similarly support barring any Muslim from being involved in the talks.

Unemployment is essentially the same as it was before the pandemic, and is actually a bit lower than it was in the beginning of 2018.

Inflation is of course a problem. The point is that deflation is a much bigger problem. It's not as big an issue if you have plenty of savings to fall back on, which is to say, if you don't have savings to fall back on, you're fucked.

I completely agree that it's not going to win votes. I think the takeaway is that the average consumer is not a particularly rational actor (much to the chagrin of economists), and your messaging needs to address the actual source of their frustrations, which may very well be the mere fact that the numbers got higher even though their purchasing power hasn't actually decreased.

I'd emphasize how you said that the average Americas is clearly not feeling the benefit, because I think that holds a really key part of this. Consumer sentiment does not necessarily track actual data, whether they're high level metrics like GDP or more individual ones like inflation-adjusted wages.

It should be pointed out that the incentive for saving as opposed to spending also applies to businesses and labor, which means they'll slash jobs.

After all, why continue to pay you when the company can just wait half a year and then hire someone new for significantly less?

Deflation tends to trigger massive layoffs since revenue drops and investment becomes a worse option than saving.

Everyone always hopes that economic downturns will affect everyone but them specifically, but it really doesn't work that way.

But with rent that’s more than doubled...

We really need politicians to start paying more attention to the housing crisis. Housing costs have been such a massive squeeze on literally everyone, and it's an incredibly stupidly self-inflicted wound because for the last 50 years we collectively decided that housing should be a primary investment asset for all Americans instead of a place to live, and fundamentally, you cannot have housing both be a good investment and have it be cheap.

Literally just build more housing. Public housing, subsidized housing, private market rate, yuppie condos, literally anything.

https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced-home-construction-for-20-years/

In the last 20 years, we build around a million single-family homes. In that same time period, the population increased by 3 million. There is no universe in which this happens and housing doesn't become significantly more expensive.

Wealth taxes have often been ineffective in other countries where they've been tried, since they're very hard and expensive to administer. Something like a land value tax is much much simpler to collect and produces significantly better economic incentives. Wealth taxes incentivize you to offshore as many assets as possible, while land value takes incentivize you to use land as productively as possible since you can't exactly hide a chunk of real estate in Switzerland.

That aside though, any kind of asset-based tax is constitutionally questionable and would absolutely be litigated to the Supreme Court, where I wouldn't exactly want to place any bets on that outcome right now.

That comes out to an average of $330 per person, if you assume an even distribution of taxes paid, which is completely false, so the real figure is substantially lower for the median person.

An element to this is that there are a lot of different statistics that can tell a lot of different stories depending on what bits of data you pick.

For instance, most people would probably say that the average person had less purchasing power in October of this year compared to October of 2022. They would actually be wrong, as inflation-adjusted hourly wages have actually increased slightly in that time period (by ten cents, admittedly, but the fact remains that wage growth has been outpacing inflation).

This does not mean that every person has seen a growth in purchasing power, and my loose understanding is that most of the growth has been occurring at the bottom of the labor market (which is arguably a good thing from an equity standpoint).

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/realer.pdf

Ukraine funding costs the average tax payer $330 a year, and given the top 1% pay 42% of all federal income tax, it probably cost you a fair bit less than that.

It was an incredibly stupid showing, but to speak to their perspective, the question they thought they were answering was "Does a call to genocide violate First Amendment protections of free speech, to which universities are somewhat bound in order to receive federal funding?", and the answer to that question, strictly legally, is indeed no. The government cannot punish someone for calls to genocide. The threshold for criminalizing speech is incredibly high, and anything short of "Go kill these specific Jews!" is generally going to be protected speech. In the context of trying to minimize any possible legal exposure, this was essentially the correct answer.

That said, it's unconscionably stupid that the presidents did not realize that they were in a Congressional hearing, not a courtroom, and that in that context, they were not speaking to a judge but rather to a glorified hostile PR agent. It would not have been hard to give an unambiguous "yes" response, and then only if pressed wade into some of the nuance of what necessarily counts as a call to genocide, since that it legitimately a complex question.

Just for anyone who might happen to care about facts, Israel is not a "white nation", and most of its citizens actually originate from the Middle East from Jewish communities in Arab countries that were expelled in the 50s and 60s. Ashkenazi Jews from Europe are a significant group, but they're not a majority. Most Arab countries had Jewish communities for well over 2000 years before being forcibly expelled due to Arab anger after the formation of Israel.

The synagogue of Baghdad, for instance, was built 2500 years ago. A synagogue on the outskirts of Damascus was build 2700 years ago. The synagogue of Aleppo dates nearly 3000 years ago, where it housed a set of Hebrew Bible scrolls from around the year 1000 until they were removed following anti-Jewish riots in 1947. Libya has a synagogue from c. 1060. Cairo has 12 synagogues, but less than 10 Egyptian Jews. In Yemen, evidence of Jewish community dates back 2500 years. In 1949 and 1950, 50,000 Yemeni Jews were evacuated to Israel in the face of growing persecution and backlash to the creation of Israel. By 2009, there were about 350 Jews left in Yemen, and following the Civil War in Yemen and strong persecution from the Houthis, there are less than 10 Jews remaining in Yemen, essentially ending over 2500 years of Jewish history in Yemen.

To describe Israel as nothing but a bunch of white Europeans is simply inaccurate and erases the millennia-long history of Jewish communities throughout the entire Middle East.

Given that Jews are not likely to voluntarily leave Israel, this is de facto a call to violently expel or kill all Jews in the area, which is nearly half of the world's Jews.

While yes, going from "Kill all Jews" to just "Kill half of all Jews" is an improvement, it's still not "let's all hold hands and find a way to get along!". This isn't to say that the Israeli far right is all that much better really, though they're better at knowing what parts to say out loud.

When exactly was there a pro-choice majority in Congress? It wasn't all that long ago that abortion wasn't as polarizing in its partisanship, and so there were quite a lot of anti-abortion Democrats from the south, just as there were a handful of pro-choice Republicans.

If you're referring to the time when Obamacare was passed, several of those Democrat Senators were anti-abortion.

I mean, that's obviously a sarcastic exaggerated joke.