Trump wins bigly, world to end tomorrow...

[BootmanLA]

7 hours ago, ktopper said:

A 10% inflation rate means 10% of your income or other assets have just been stolen.

Funny how nobody thinks that when they get a raise, but a raise is, in essence, just inflation of wages.

7 hours ago, ktopper said:

I'm not talking about racial conflicts here, it will be more of a mass uprising against a system that is oppressing us all, that is one reason the so called deep state keeps pushing identity politics, they want to keep us divided. Think it can't happen or is unlikely to happen? I hope you are right. But I wouldn't bet on it. Perhaps Trump is the safety valve we needed, a way to release some of the pressure.

Trump is part and parcel of the system that oppresses people. His father scammed the US government for millions of dollars building an apartment rental empire that gifted hundreds of millions of dollars to Donald and his siblings over the decades, money that Trump in turn squandered in attempt after attempt to become a major player in the real estate world. Any one who thinks he's going to do anything to relieve the pressure on the poor and working class is a fool; to him, they are marks, easily conned people who have spent millions and millions of dollars directly into his pockets for red hats, fake gold sneakers, NFTs, and all sorts of other worthless crap. That's it.

7 hours ago, ktopper said:

It is not so much that people won't do those jobs as it is they won't do them for shit wages that they can't exist on. I myself have done those jobs as a young man, both sides of my family grew up doing them. Saying Americans won't do those jobs is bullshit so quit lying about it.

Alabama farmers were, at one point, so desperate they were offering $20/hour for manual labor harvesting crops. That is not "shit wages" for an unskilled job that requires no education or training whatsoever. Yes, it's hard, backbreaking, demeaning work. But unless you want to pay $20 for a head of lettuce or a basic hamburger at McDonald's, those jobs aren't going to pay the kind of wages you can support a family on in the United States. They just aren't.

[ktopper]

If we substitute "World to Change tomorrow" for "World to End tomorrow" in the opening premise of this thread; I think that is more descriptive of our future.

I must confess that I was doing a bit of trolling with that. I think most got the joke, a few didn't. Personally I don't think things are going to change all that much, Trump might try but the established power structure is just too entrenched.

 

History has often seen a sudden population decline.  And perhaps it will be that which alters our course.

Indeed there have been periods of sudden decline, sometimes drastic declines.  

Important to recall that while the President has substantial power, so also do Governors.  We have deeply rooted into our governmental systems that whole, oft forgotten, states rights thing.  🙂  So much like health, there are layers of checks and balances, not just the one.  Further, the R party wants more controls given to individual states and out of federal control.  Further, states have counties, counties have municipalities.  It isn't all done in one place here in the US.

Yes. We have already fought one war over states rights (among other things), hopefully we can avoid another. The checks and balances bit has worked pretty well for over a century.   

Overall as a society?  Can we as a society experience a national "aw shit" moment and change our course? 

Many, perhaps most, seem to think we just did. For most of my lifetime America has been a great place to live, good economy, social mobility, progress toward racial equality, acceptance of LGBT issues, etc. I would like to see those trends continue.

 

[ktopper]

Please note that the verb tenses here don't match!

Hey what do ya expect from us peasants? Many of us can't even read.

[NEDenver]

4 hours ago, BootmanLA said:

Again, getting inflation under control is not the same thing as lowering prices. I don't know why that's so hard for people to grasp, but here we are.

I'm not arguing that (some) people are not feeling an economic pinch (though blame for that pinch is, as usual, woefully mis-targeted. I'm pointing out the fact (not arguing) that the problem is not the one people are naming. We could reduce inflation to ZERO and yet beef would be the same price it is today.

To help a bit because it’s not immediate, when we had that spike in gas prices under W, all of the other things we buy that required transportation also went up.  After the price of gas went back down, the prices of meat, eggs, milk, and cereal did not go back down.  
 

Once the “market”* perceives that people will pay a higher price for something and profits go up, then that becomes the new more correct price.  People don’t really understand capitalism.  Adam Smith was warning that the only entity that could restrain the worst impulses of capitalism was the state.  Dickens did a lifetime of work explaining to people that the misery around them everyday was the result of those excesses.  And a bunch of working class people in the US just voted for a more Dickensian union.

For the pseudo intellectuals and anti intellectuals out there, that’s you, too.  Your prices will never go down.  There’s too much transfer of wealth from our hands to a small number of billionaires’ hands, and Trump was selected to ensure this continues.  Harris had a couple ideas to try to force the “market” prices back down, but y’all chose the higher prices.  
 

*The “market” doesn’t “set” prices.  People do.  Someone at McDonald’s decides how much a Quarter Pounder costs.  Someone at Kellogg’s decides how much Frosted Flakes will cost.  The prices don’t need to go up, even with input changes.  That’s all a decision to be made by people, not some invisible nonexistent hand.  Like, insulin prices haven’t needed to skyrocket, same for EpiPens.  Those prices went up because some shitty people decided they could make more profit.  Finally under Biden, some of those drug prices were brought down, because, again, Adam Smith told us only the State could restrain capitalism, but that’s also going away.  Leopards are going to feast on a bunch of Republican diabetics’ faces.  And also innocent people, some of them children with type 1 diabetes will die.  Hope the Trumpers are happy because y’all are going to have done that, too.  I’ll only grieve one group.

[ktopper]

BootmanLA said:

Alabama farmers were, at one point, so desperate they were offering $20/hour for manual labor harvesting crops. That is not "shit wages" for an unskilled job that requires no education or training whatsoever. Yes, it's hard, backbreaking, demeaning work. But unless you want to pay $20 for a head of lettuce or a basic hamburger at McDonald's, those jobs aren't going to pay the kind of wages you can support a family on in the United States. They just aren't.

And you know those farmers were offering that wage exactly how? Were you there? Or did you get your facts by way of CNN? Those jobs are not all unskilled labor "requiring no education or training whatsoever." I don't know how many farming operations you have been around lately but they no longer use Grandpa's old "Popping Johnny," they are using equipment that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. You don't turn unskilled, untrained labor loose on those machines. For one thing they use a lot of computers in them. Twenty bucks an hour is not at all out of line. Yes, some of the jobs are low skilled grunt labor. Most of the local population who used to do those jobs have moved to cities in search of a higher paying job. There are a lot of factors at work in the job market. Just opening the borders to ever increasing numbers of economic migrants is not a good long term solution.

And calling manual labor "demeaning" says more about you than it does them. A few generations back most people's ancestors made their living doing manual labor.

   

those jobs aren't going to pay the kind of wages you can support a family on in the United States. They just aren't.

That is the problem. I would call your attention to the fact that those jobs paid a living wage within my lifetime. And a cheeseburger at McDonalds was 29 cents.

 

[nanana]

1 hour ago, NEDenver said:

*The “market” doesn’t “set” prices.  People do.  Someone at McDonald’s decides how much a Quarter Pounder costs.  Someone at Kellogg’s decides how much Frosted Flakes will cost.  The prices don’t need to go up, even with input changes.

While this may technically be true, it is laughably free of upstream and downstream consequences. Upstream, what obligation does anyone in the market have to produce ANYTHING, even if they are overpaid by the consumer. It’s comical to think that a value-producer is a slave to someone downstream. It’s laughable to think that a value chain is ATTRACTIVE to anyone who cannot make some kind of living. It’s downright Minnie Pearl RIDICULOUS to think that anyone has an obligation to take an UNSUSTAINABLE LOSS by continuing to participate upstream from non-payers in the value chain. Agreed that for disruptions to the value chain, suppliers may decide that it’s in their legitimate interests to take a loss to keep the value chain on LIFE SUPPORT. Tell me, what’s in it for producers to continue enslaving themselves to people downstream who can’t afford to make the value chain SUSTAINABLE?  Is that really so hard for socialists to understand? What do the CONSUMERS do in an economy that disincentivizes the PRODUCERS?   Please help me see what I’m missing. 

Edited Monday at 11:45 PM by nanana
Manually correcting a Minnie Pearl ridiculous auto-correct

[nanana]

1 hour ago, NEDenver said:

Your prices will never go down.

An assertion not borne out by the data. Certainly people will have noticed that gas prices fluctuate. The price of a TV, a microwave, a transistor, and other goods that benefit from innovation and productivity-of-learning-and-repetition gains fall in price. Houses rise and fall in price. The Fed invents imaginary money for its friends and thus makes the dollar worth less. Limitations in supply or changed in demand also affect the rise or fall of prices. Disincentivizing producers is a GUARANTEED method of creating scarcity and driving up prices. Lower-than-market-rate interest rates is another time-tested guarantee that people will be fooled into overpaying for things. Ultimately money is a mechanism for ensuring that producers wish to continue to produce.  Anyone who thinks producers should be forced to produce without reaching an agreement with a consumer is  an advocate of slavery. 

[nanana]

PS - I include both business owners AND laborers in the category of producers. 
 

And - we don’t have capitalism in this country, we have fascist corporatism, where the government provides some guarantees for certain businesses, e.g., military industrial complex, regulated industries, big pharma, etc. 

[ktopper]

10 hours ago, BootmanLA said:

Funny how nobody thinks that when they get a raise, but a raise is, in essence, just inflation of wages.

 

No! Increases in wages follow inflation. They are an adjustment in response to inflation.

But then I suspect you already knew that. 😉

[NEDenver]

9 hours ago, nanana said:

An assertion not borne out by the data. Certainly people will have noticed that gas prices fluctuate. The price of a TV, a microwave, a transistor, and other goods that benefit from innovation and productivity-of-learning-and-repetition gains fall in price. Houses rise and fall in price. The Fed invents imaginary money for its friends and thus makes the dollar worth less. Limitations in supply or changed in demand also affect the rise or fall of prices. Disincentivizing producers is a GUARANTEED method of creating scarcity and driving up prices. Lower-than-market-rate interest rates is another time-tested guarantee that people will be fooled into overpaying for things. Ultimately money is a mechanism for ensuring that producers wish to continue to produce.  Anyone who thinks producers should be forced to produce without reaching an agreement with a consumer is  an advocate of slavery. 

Thanks for the tedium.  My statement is still true when considering item to item. A Big Mac is only going down if the person at McDonald’s with final price approval decides they’ll make more profit by lowering it.

How propaganda works.  

[NEDenver]

5 hours ago, ktopper said:

No! Increases in wages follow inflation. They are an adjustment in response to inflation.

But then I suspect you already knew that. 😉

Not necessarily, but there needs to be government intervention.  

C-suite wages rise all the time faster than inflation.

[NEDenver]

9 hours ago, nanana said:

PS - I include both business owners AND laborers in the category of producers. 
 

And - we don’t have capitalism in this country, we have fascist corporatism, where the government provides some guarantees for certain businesses, e.g., military industrial complex, regulated industries, big pharma, etc. 

Well, congratulations.  You’re strengthening the fascist corporatism.  You’re getting exactly what you and millions of others want.  If you don’t want that, your literal only hope are Democrats.

[pozlvr27]

What ever happened to George Clooney ? That political genius suddenly has nothing to say. 

[ktopper]

9 hours ago, NEDenver said:

Well, congratulations.  You’re strengthening the fascist corporatism.  You’re getting exactly what you and millions of others want.  If you don’t want that, your literal only hope are Democrats.

What Democrats did for Kamala's campaign budget they would have done for America.

[NEDenver]

20 minutes ago, ktopper said:

What Democrats did for Kamala's campaign budget they would have done for America.

That makes no sense.  You’re arguing for fascist corporatism and all of the harm.  And all you have is black lady bad?