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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Speaking of, I'm still waiting for an answer to this:
You don't actually post on any other thread but this one and you've never edited the wiki. Mud-slinging at Clinton is literally the only thing you do on this site. Are you a Sanders propagandist? Or, alternately, for one of the Republicans?
edited 16th Mar '16 1:57:22 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Hillary shouldn't be President for an entirely practical matter, in that she has an incredibly high chance of losing against anyone who's not Trump in 2020, which is also an incredibly important Census year that could finally kill the gerrymandering obstruction the Republicans are currently using to keep themselves relevant.
She's basically the picture that goes along with Establishment Politician in the dictionary, which means she can't get anywhere near the same voting momentum needed to really deal with Congress like Sanders could.
Also, Julian Castro is the big name for VP and next President.
Well, the delegates certainly don't agree. She keeps winning state after state, suggesting her voting momentum is already stronger than his.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.The incumbent has very strong momentum in any election. For Hillary to lose in 2020 would require some sort of serious crisis: a losing war, a major recession, etc. Also, that crisis would have to have its effects felt or still be felt in roughly April of that year or later.
Because despite all the rhetoric and hullabaloo and hand-wringing over issues, the single biggest predictor of a Presidential election is the performance of the economy in the six months prior to the polls opening. If it's good, the incumbent party wins. If it's bad, the opposition party wins.
Republicans in Congress will have to engineer a pretty big crisis in the next six months to get Trump, of all people, elected. And those worrying that Cruz could take Clinton, or that the RNC could pull a coup and nominate Paul Ryan, or something else like that, are betting on a very low probability. For one thing, if Trump doesn't get the nod, all his poor white trash supporters will probably stay home.
edited 16th Mar '16 2:05:43 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"To have a shot at winning in 2020/24, the GOP needs to at least deal with its race issue. Otherwise demographics will kill them in presidential and Senate races.
Or Trump throws a fit, starts a brawl at the convention, and runs as a 3rd party ticket. Maybe he'll form his own party and run guys in downticket races as well. Unlikely, but I can dream.
edited 16th Mar '16 2:06:56 PM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.![]()
Yep. And Clinton is going to carry the minority vote, overwhelmingly. Sanders, for all his enthusiasm, hasn't managed that trick, and it's why he hasn't won in the South.
False. Dodd-Frank remains a powerful tool against them, one they still haven't forgiven the Obama administration for. Anyway, Wall Street isn't going to destroy the nation. They have to live here; they will make enough Bread and Circuses concessions to keep the trains running, something we cannot say about Trump.
Anyway, for things to get that bad implies another event akin to the Great Depression, and that's simply not likely to happen in the next six months.
edited 16th Mar '16 2:09:44 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Dodd-Frank is too weak. It can't prevent another crisis or bailout. If they're actually pissed about it that's good, but that's like getting pissed because someone slightly nudged you. I'm happy that they're mad, but they're still in no danger.
Bill Clinton repealled Glass-Steagall, a.k.a. an act with some actual teeth to it, and I doubt the other Clinton will have any interest in introducing something like that again. As for "won't destroy the nation"... maybe not, but if they had any foresight(or care, considering they were the only ones to get away with it) to the consequences of their actions - 2008 crisis would not have happened to begin with.
edited 16th Mar '16 2:15:20 PM by Luminosity
Glass Steagal is overrated; the shadow banking that triggered 2008 wouldn't have been prevented by it, or at least not significantly. This has been studied. Sanders' hammering on it indicates that he's either naive or using canned talking points for an undiscerning public. Similarly, "too big to fail" is no longer relevant thanks to provisions of Dodd-Frank, and there is some evidence that it was never relevant; Geithner and Bernanke kind of made it up in order to avoid having to take responsibility for unwinding AIG.
The real, concrete economics don't back up Bernie's arguments.
edited 16th Mar '16 2:20:33 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I've been looking for them. It's hard to search back through blog posts if I can't easily access the contents.
Here is a summary of the issue: http://rooseveltinstitute.org/sanders-clinton-approach-shadow-banking/
There are two problems with this approach. The first is that it’s often difficult to structurally reform banks along these lines. Glass-Steagall, even before its repeal, didn’t prevent banks from lending to mortgage-backed securities and getting involved in the crisis, which is a normal banking function. Either you draw the lines vaguely enough that banks can maneuver around them, or you draw them so tough that it’s difficult for normal banks to do anything that banks do.
The argument is that reinstating a modern version of Glass-Steagall either (a) would not stop shadow banking, as it would simply move out of the regulatory umbrella, or (b) would be so stringent as to prevent banks from functioning at all.
He also would not have have the authority to forcibly dissolve banks: that would require the Fed to act, and Yellen is not going to back such a plan; however, the Dodd-Frank capitalization requirements are already putting a big squeeze on the major banks, with more to come.
In other words, while Sanders' ideas may resonate well with a populace that's fed up with "Washington BS", they fail the credibility test when applied to the real world.
edited 16th Mar '16 2:30:25 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The main thing I know about Dodd-Frank as a non-financial person is that it created a huge burden of information gathering and reporting on financial institutions such that a lot of new jobs were created as a result of having to implement and maintain it. Ironically this hurts smaller banks more than large ones since the large ones can more easily stretch their resources to cover it.
All of the states most favorable to Clinton have already voted, including the entire deep south, and the states most favorable to Sanders are still on the calendar. If anyone should be worried about their chances at the nomination waning over time, it’s Hillary Clinton.
Furthermore, it’s most important to note that going into these favorable states, Bernie Sanders only needs 58% of the remaining pledged delegates. And considering he picked up 67.7% of the vote in Kansas, 64.3% in Maine, and a thundering 86.1% in his home state of Vermont — shutting out Clinton entirely from the 15% delegate threshold — this is not as impossible as the doomsayers predict.
He also squeaked above the 58% figure with 59% of the vote in Colorado and 61.6% in Minnesota, and he scored a respectable 57.1% in Nebraska. He received 60% back in New Hampshire and has come in virtual ties in many other states outside of the South thus far, meaning he’s beaten the target a total of six times.
Well, what would actually work 'in the Real World'? And how does the proposed act "stop banks from functioning at all"?
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.Here's the argument that Dodd-Frank just doesn't do enough.
There’s no question that the flawed incentives in Wall Street pay packages played a major role in creating the financial crisis. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the official body charged with investigating the causes behind the financial and housing market crashes, found that pay systems too often encouraged “big bets” and rewarded short-term gains without proper consideration of long-term consequences. The practice of awarding large bonuses and other forms of immediate compensation creates incentives to ignore long-term risks and "take the money and run."
Former Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Schapiro described the situation to the commission in this way: “Many major financial institutions created asymmetric compensation packages that paid employees enormous sums for short-term success, even if these same decisions result in significant long-term losses or failure for investors and taxpayers.” To take just one example, top executives of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers – the two big investment banks whose failure triggered the crisis – got paid $2.5 billion in the years leading up to the financial collapse. Despite their firms’ disastrous collapse, they got to keep every dime of it.
Risk-taking of this sort wasn’t always how things worked on Wall Street. In the decades after World War II, many of the big investment banks were private partnerships, meaning that senior managers' funds were constantly at risk and they could only collect their full payouts upon retiring, as opposed to in annual bonuses or stock options. During the decades after the war, in fact, pay inside the financial industry was roughly equal to pay outside of the industry. However, when investment banks went public in the 1980s and 1990s, bets were increasingly made with the money of shareholders, and firm pay structures began to reward the risk-taking that would lead to short-term paydays for companies, at the price of longer-term stability.
The Dodd-Frank financial reform law includes a specific provision to address precisely this problem, but it hasn’t been implemented yet. Section 956(b) of the law requires that financial regulators ban any type of incentive pay arrangements at banks that act to encourage inappropriate risk-taking. The statute tells regulators to write rules to implement the ban within nine months of the signing of the law. Yet today, almost four years after the law was passed, regulators still have not put these required restrictions on Wall Street pay in place.
What’s more, not only do the rules remain unfinished, but the initial proposal by the regulators was much too weak to get the job done. The regulators initial proposal to implement Section 956(b) includes general language telling bank boards of directors to design pay packages that don’t encourage excessive risk. But the major specific requirement in the proposal is that large banks set aside at least half of bonus payments to be paid out over three years. To comply with this requirement, a bank could pay their executives half of their bonus at the time it was earned, and then another third of the remaining half the next year, another third the year after that, and a final third three years after the bonus was earned. So as little as one-sixth of the total bonus could be deferred for the full three year period. This new requirement is weak compared to old partnership incentives that held executives’ wealth genuinely at risk based on the long-term consequences of their actions.
Furthermore, the rule doesn’t even ban the practice of "hedging" future compensation – so, for instance, an executive due a future deferred bonus who wanted to receive most of their money immediately could just sell the right to the deferred portion of the bonus in exchange for an up-front payment.
Finally, the specific pay requirements in the proposal cover only "executive officers," which includes only the CEO and major division heads of the bank, not the traders or other high-level employees below them. This is much too narrow. Individuals who are not covered could include many key decision-makers with the power to incur dangerous risks for the banks.
Since the release of this inadequate proposal, there has been no further action on implementing this crucial piece of financial reform. Why has the rule been so delayed and (so far) so weak? One answer is heavy lobbying. As Public Citizen noted in a 2011 report on the pay rule, companies that would be impacted by the new rules have spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying against its implementation, along with submitting comments in support of substantially weakening the rule. Another factor is the need for six different regulatory agencies to sign off on the rule, a process built for delay.
Today, the types of pay structures and incentives that contributed to the financial collapse are still in place. The six agencies responsible owe it to the public and the health of the financial system to take action to change them.
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Nationalization is a four letter word in the US still and while I in general agree that there should be laws around certain "don't screw people over" boundaries, I disapprove in principle of the idea that the government can take whatever they want and think they can run it better.
edited 16th Mar '16 2:43:27 PM by Elle
@Lumi - If you don't want to be strawmanned, you would do best not to do the same, as you have with me and others.
On Clinton and Russia, I don't recall her being around when Obama started sanctioning Moscow to high heaven. That was a policy under her successor and Obama together. Nothing I have ever said in this forum has ever been me saying "attack Russia", "sanction Russia", or that all war is good. There is a reason I found Rubio's policy dangerous, because thats what his would have been.
On Syria, I only say we can't half-ass policy. Demanding Assad goes and then doing nothing about it yet still causing problems for everyone else mostly because you don't want to intervene is worse than to ignore it or to go all in. At least in those two scenarios, you know where they stand. On Russia, I always advocate the US minding its own business. I do not, however, say ignore the world as it burns or to take over the world in Imperialistic machismo. So yeah, you're strawmanning.
As for Jeb, on Iraq, he's been all over the place because he both wanted to use and get away from his brother. Using Iraq alone as a standard is pointless with Jeb because of complications that have nothing to do with the war itself.

Oh. Me. Do me. Meee next! What am I like!
edited 16th Mar '16 1:57:42 PM by Aszur
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes