The General US Politics Thread

The problem is they won't. You could give them exactly what they want and they won't vote when it's do or die time.

They're contrarians, not insufficiently won over leftists.

Have they? Maybe more recently, but in the 90s and early 2000’s , most compromises were made towards conservatives and corporate donors, with the Clinton administration taking steps to slash welfare and create harsh anti-crime bills which harmed poor urban African-Americans, all to appeal to what was seen as a largely conservative America. Hell, back when Obama first ran for president, he didn’t support legalizing gay marriage ( he supported civil unions) because he wanted to appeal to moderate conservatives. With this history, you can’t blame some for being skeptical.

edited 8th Nov '17 10:21:35 PM by Ludlow

I'd be willing to vote for Jill Stein if it came down to her vs. Trump somehow.

Oh, I really don't want to see the timeline where that's a scenario that comes to pass.

Anyway, I suppose I think it would be nice to get some specifics. What exactly have the moderates already conceded, what do the radicals still want, and why can these things not be given?

Apologies for making such requests - I just think it's important to lay everything out, and God knows I have little idea as to what's important.

I think that different people have different ideas as to what can be compromised on and what can‘t.

True, but I'm curious what the general opinion of the thread is when it comes to that.

Not really going to speak up on that one since its just something that would start another argument.

Times change — the Democrats needed to offer some red meat or else they would have been trounced worse than before. The insufferable leftists making hay on Twitter about this sort of shit aren't old enough to remember the Clinton era, and the measures required to stay viable against an unrelenting GOP machine. They can kindly fuck off, to be honest. They probably weren't there, and if they were, it's likely they did nothing, not even vote. Politics is about more than martyrdom.

edited 8th Nov '17 11:01:29 PM by CrimsonZephyr

Screw it.... I have decided to post it here since you have asked, I was going to PM it instead but ehhh......

To answer your question about what is still wanted by the left, and why it cant be given... one of the big ones is the 15 dollar minimum wage increase. Which can't really be brought up in the thread due to how much support it has there.

The problem being they see it as a question of "can companies afford to play employees more" to which the answer is a blunt yes, the reality of the fact though is its a question of "will companies tolerate paying employees more" which is a demonstrable no...

Self checkouts are on the rise, even the local McDicks^note One of the worst companies out there, you should hear about what they did to there founder and original employees.... is already replacing its cashiers with machines because it is cheaper... to the point where some of them dont even have cashiers at all any more..... whether we like it or not the rise of automation is here and human employees cant out compete machines in cost...... its a problem that needs to not be exasperated.

In addition Amercians are actually as a whole already paid quite well, more so then we were actualy...

Now that's not to say there isn't a problem here, there is and it is a big one that very much needs to be addressed, even though you make more then we do, you have less spending money, so little that two minimum wage jobs are required in some areas to make due something that should never happen..... but the only solution is not the minimum wage itself but also other areas that should be addressed.

A good place to look would be the American housing market, which is fucking awful......I could have bought a home in Edogawa... which is in down town Tokyo, 10 minutes from where all the maps are centered. Three bedroom, detached, not small, big enough for a whole family for 30,000,000 yen.... roughly 300,000 USD... About 1/3rd of the cost of a single bedroom in the Bronx which is a comparable neighborhood as far as density and proximity to major city features go... and from what I have seen this causes housing and housing related expenditures to be a massive chunk of your expenses compared to what it really should be.

Similarly government benefits should be steeped up big time, because we are standing on the end of the unskilled labor market whether we like it or not.... we are no longer competing against other humans, but against machines and there will be a lot of us that loose out to that.... Extending it to apply to every one below a certain income regardless of unemployment status is another good idea..... because people need more money then they did before, while the existing job opportunities are less.

Its just important to rember when you address it from the business end of things its a question of "will they" not "can they" and they are greedy fucks who will do every thing in there power to maximize short term profits, regardless of the harm it causes them in the long term when the economy crumbles.

edited 8th Nov '17 11:50:48 PM by Imca

Uh, if we can successfully vote in officials who can then successfully get a minimum wage increase passed, then companies will be forced to pay at least that, or be in violation of the law. And while automation is on the rise, that is not an argument against raising the minimum wage. "oh no they're just going to use machines" is not a good excuse to not pursue better wages for people. (And, of course, making sure they give this minimum wage to part time workers, as well.)

Also "paid well on the whole" is just kind of showing off your ignorance of the reasons why people are pursuing higher minimum wage; Wages in America have stagnated for decades and poverty is still a fucking problem in this country. "Paid well on the whole" just seems like you're saying "it could be worse, so this isn't a problem worth pursuing."

Frankly I'm wondering why we're supposed to care what kind of housing you can buy in Japan when you and a lot of the rest of us are living in America, and are interested in improving our chances here, in America.

edited 9th Nov '17 12:07:03 AM by AceofSpades

Because I am drawing the comparison to what I had left to show some of the problems here.

People in Amercia are already paid more then what we were, however there housing expenses are fucking absurd.... that's part of the problem here. Personal finances aren't just how much you make, but also how much you spend, and the costs that are forced to you know, live, are way too high in proportion to discretionary funds.

And no, they wont be forced to play ball, you can say that all you want but the reality is they wont.... Most unskilled jobs can be done by machines now, and companies are very willing to switch to them they are already doing so.

If I was a business operator, and my options are to pay you 32,000 dollars a year, or buy a machine for 10,000 that does the same job, but costs pennies in electricity for upkeep... why would I hire you?

Its better to look at the government for direct assistance instead at this point.

edited 9th Nov '17 12:12:41 AM by Imca

John Oliver on economic development in the USA:

tl:dw; Economic Development as it stands (ie bribing businesses with tax breaks and other incentives) is not a reliable way of boosting economies or increasing jobs. He specifically mentions the ongoing Amazon headquarters bidding competition.

Basically, it's "trickle-down" all over again.

edited 9th Nov '17 12:14:01 AM by M84

I love Oliver, but thats the other end of the problem.

Bribing them doesn't work to make new ones doesn't work.

The concern here isn't making new jobs though, its loosing the ones that already exist.

Immy's argument is basically that Wally World and Mc Donald's will lay off their entire staff than pay a reasonable wage even if it kills their profits in the long term and even if paying that minimum wage will increase their earnings in the long term.

They're that short term focused and ultimately that spiteful. They'll kill themselves before they do it.

A better solution to the problem of the lower classes not having enough money to reinvest in the economy is probably something more like a government granted basic income.

Imca's got a point. You can mandate that businesses pay $15 an hour to human employees all you want, but until you can mandate that businesses have to hire humans at all instead of automating, that's a non-starter. If it gets more expensive to pay human workers, Big Business will just shrug and buy more self-checkout stations.

@Garcon: Not just out of spite - if you can get robots/machines that will do the same job within an acceptable margin of error for much less cost, there's nothing to gain by hiring humans.

edited 9th Nov '17 12:21:17 AM by RedSavant

I think the point is that, if companies are forced to increase the wage to X value, these companies would try to employ fewer people to balance the money they are spending by paying higher wages.

This is especially troubling when you consider that some (many?) businesses live only to keep their investors happy, and many of these investors do not want to wait for years and years until the business itself becomes profitable, etc, either because they don't have the patience to wait and invest in a company to make it successful AND wanted (i.e. high profits, loyal employees, loyal customer base), or because they invest in so many things at once that if any of those does not return profits immediatly is considered a failure.

Finally, with the rise of automatons and all these new technologies, business-people think they have found the key to getting rid of all those pesky things that get in the way of instant profits: humans who need to be paid a living wage, or who get sick and need medicare, or who get become parents and need time off, or who can't work 24/7 because we need silly things like rest and potty breaks, etc.

Of course, the flaw in their plan is that if people haven't got jobs they won't have money, and if they don't have money they won't be able to consume the goods and/or services that these businesses are providing.

Alas, I assume most companies and the like know this but they can't do anything to ensure their long term survival when you've got hundreds if not thousands of people investing in many companies not because they believe in the company but because they expect to get some of the profits instantly.

It is a vicious cicle, really. Companies will not pay more (though they can and should) because that will hurt the pockets of the people giving them money... for now. In the long run, the investors could become richer if only they waited a little more, but why wait when you can just take your money elsewhere and get some return for your investment now now now.

Garcon has nailed the problem in one, it is also a hugely spite thing.

Walmart already works its employees 39.5 hours a week and not a minute less, but will fire you instantly if you work 1 minute more then 40 hours a week.... just so they can avoid having to pay employee healthcare.

Do you reallly think they won't terminate all the employees they can to avoid having to pay them more? Because I don't buy it one bit.

These are not rational people, there are greedy, spiteful, short term profit maximizers.... but unfortunately we currently have to deal with them.

Though, I would add additional housing subsidies to his mention of UBI..... Humans need a house to live, they shouldn't be a slave to there house payments.

edited 9th Nov '17 12:30:53 AM by Imca

Hopefully without any red-lining bullshit this time.

Ugh. *sighs* Well it was nice feeling optimistic while it lasted...

I am totally in favor of a UBI (as well as larger/more widely dispersed housing subsidies), for the reasons named already and also for others I don't feel like getting into.

And yeah, I'm done with Sanders for good now. I mean come on...a Democratic Socialist won in Virginia, but just because they weren't his candidate (in fact none of his won), this means the victories don't count and Dems aren't liked? I was going to suggest maybe he said this before the election returns came in, but based on that timestamp...

Sure there was that poll which said the Democratic Party was only at around 30% in popularity (but the Republicans were doing worse). But aside from the fact this could just be "people hate politics/people think things are becoming too partisan/people are sick of corruption and corporatism across the board", I have a number of questions. Like, who was asked? When were they asked? Where were they from? How big a sampling size? How were the questions phrased? It's likely to me that not only would the answers to those questions reflect more about individual people's biases and priorities than how the Dems are actually doing overall, any real negativity is probably based on one of two things: the flagellating of deceased equines that is the endless Bernie/Hillary pie-fight, and the issues with corruption (real or perceived) at the DNC. The first is something being unnaturally inflated by Sanders and his supporters, and the second while a problem is undercut by Tuesday's election. The party and its organizations may need repairing/replacing/cleansing, but when it comes to actually going out in favor of candidates you support, people have proven they're willing to step around all the crap (both the DNC's and Bernie's) to do what has to be done for the sake of actual progress. As long as that momentum can be kept up, the stuff with the party donors and structure and such can be worried about later or behind the scenes (i.e. not put on public display for ratings at the cost of morale).

So to sum up: fuck Bernie.

Also: that post of TheWanderer's @217543 was a thing of beauty.

edited 9th Nov '17 1:47:02 AM by Ingonyama

See here’s my issue with that argument Imca, why are you assuming that they haven’t done that already?

If they could automate the human jobs they would (and often have) done so already, if they could ship the job overseas they would (and again have) done that already, if they could fire people and just make everyone else do that work for the same pay they would (and again regularly do) do that already.

It doesn’t matter what we do, they are already going to fire everyone they can, automate out every job they can and outsource every service they can, so for the few jobs they can’t get rid of we might as less ensure that they pay decently.

This is all academic by the way, as the contrarian crowd won’t be won over by a minimum wage increase, you could run Bernie/Stein as the ticket and they’d conclude that both Bernie and Stein had sold out and shouldn’t be trusted.

They refuse to vote Dem because they don’t want to be part of things, they want to be the “plucky underdog” and shout from the sidelines that they’d have done it better. They’ll never vote for a winning candidate if they can help it.

Oh and on the falling in line/falling in love thing, it’s not totally true, look at Republican turnout amongst the (not actually) WWC in Virginia, number did fall in love with Trump and didn’t turn out for the Republican nominee for governor. But that’s not because of policy differences, it because of style and bravado.

edited 9th Nov '17 2:34:27 AM by Silasw

They ARE doing it already, it is a slow process that is mostly stalled in existing store locations, because machines represent a large upfront cost, and again these people don't give a shit about the long term.

New McDonalds, those built in the last 2 years, do not have cashiers.

Walmart is installing more and more self checkouts, and agian if you work 1 minute more then 40 hours a week you are called in and your job is terminated.

That is not an exaggeration, you get no warning, no nothing, it is goodbye if you are ONE MINUTE more then 40 hours in a single week... just so they can classify you as part time and pay pennies less per employee.

And they can get away with this easily because they know they have 7 more people lined up to replace you the instant they fire you.

If you make employees more expensive they will do it FASTER, they will gut the existing locations to do it..... And not just do it to the new stores.

It is inevitable, but until the systems are in place to cope with it you don't want to speed it up.

If you were bleeding out your not going to to want make it worse before you can get to the hospital, and that's exactly what is happening with the economy.

edited 9th Nov '17 2:52:01 AM by Imca

And that’s where we disagree, because I don’t think it can be sped up, I don’t buy for a moment that cooperate America isn’t already bleeding the economy dry as fast as they can.

It's not that they cant, it is that they don't currently have the motivation too.

Seriously let's try it out here, name any current type of low skill workplace and I bet you I could come up with a system to manage it with 3 employes or less. (One to make sure customers don't walk off with things, one to engage in fine object manipulation, and a manager, all three can double as cistomer service, and in theroy you could drop the manager and have the front end employe(the security) or the back end employe(the manipulator) double as them as well) and this is all you really need to destroy the econemy.

edited 9th Nov '17 3:36:03 AM by Imca

Unfortunately the policy positions that would mitigate that are not really politically tenable yet, nor is it “politically correct” to tell people that their capacity work is only going to become more and more worthless with time (see Joe Biden’s recent statements on UBI).

Things might be changing now with more people being aware of automation and UBI experiments happening, but probably not quickly enough to really mitigate the damage.

Depends on how much cheaper it still is to keep people around as opposed to automating a task. If it does become more economical to get robots to do it you bet your ass that companies will be walking all over each other to replace their employees.

Whether a 15 dollar minimum wage would actually do that is something else entirely and something we probably won’t know until it happens. But really, we don’t need all jobs to be fully automated before we start seeing a crisis, just enough so that people’s labor bargaining power becomes functionally worthless which in a country with as weak a labor movement as the US’s probably won’t be much.

Wait companies aren’t doing that already? Keep in mind that my expeirance is with the UK bar trade, but the kind of stuff you’re talking about already happens, scrap security at all but peak times, check, have the manager double up as the chef, check, ect...

US low skill workers already have no bargaining power, so worrying about it dropping lower is foolish. The only protections they have are the ones the government gives them, they’ve no power on their own.