Quest for the Presidency (2016 Edition)

[AmateurEmale]

I should also make another post right now about Donald Trump, otherwise known as T-Rump at Facebook, or The Donald a few years back. Donald Trump is a completely abrasive and possibly racist man because of what he said about the Black Lives Matter protestor -- "He should have been roughed up!" -- but I am nevertheless surprised by his progressive tax cut plan. He thinks that we should have lower taxes for everyone, but even though he's rich, he believes that rich people would have too much of an advantage if we had a flat income tax as advocated by Steve Forbes (R) and Harry Browne (L) when I was in high school. Trump says that the upper classes should pay 15% of their income in taxes, middle class people 10%, working class people 5%, and poor people only 1%. It's a progressive tax plan, but lower at the same time?!

I think that Donald Trump is someone who wants politics as usual: Republocrat politics.

[sandhunter]

A-E here are some maps of the US pipeline maps

First up is the crude oil pipelines

Secondly we have the natural gas pipelines

Third pic is Mexico`s pipelines

Also there are 4 new pipelines under construction between the US and Mexico , 3 natural gas going to Mexico and 1 crude flowing north to the US .

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by AmateurEmale

I should also make another post right now about Donald Trump, otherwise known as T-Rump at Facebook, or The Donald a few years back. Donald Trump is a completely abrasive and possibly racist man because of what he said about the Black Lives Matter protestor -- "He should have been roughed up!" -- but I am nevertheless surprised by his progressive tax cut plan. He thinks that we should have lower taxes for everyone, but even though he's rich, he believes that rich people would have too much of an advantage if we had a flat income tax as advocated by Steve Forbes (R) and Harry Browne (L) when I was in high school. Trump says that the upper classes should pay 15% of their income in taxes, middle class people 10%, working class people 5%, and poor people only 1%. It's a progressive tax plan, but lower at the same time?!

I think that Donald Trump is someone who wants politics as usual: Republocrat politics.

AmateurEmale: the American sums do not add up now, today, this day. Your country is running a deficit which it cannot sustain indefinitely, today, this day. What you [as a country] should be talking about is how you plan to repair your public finances. Donald Trump and indeed the other Republican candidates are selling you the same crock of shit George HW Bush sold you in 1988.

Read my lips!...No...New...Taxes!!

Anyone remember that one?

The fact is, the only way to repair a national debt which is in excess of six times your Federal Government annual spending is to increase tax revenues and still treat the debt as a mortgage on your country, to be repaid down to a manageable level over decades. Tax cuts now can be financed in one way only: increased borrowing. Any talk of spending cuts and austerity is bollocks, for all sorts of reasons, but most of all because spending public money is the main way politicians acquire and express power. Politicians do not genuinely want to reduce public spending. But even if they did, cuts in in a budget totalling 6 trillion are not much of an answer when the question is what to do about a national debt of over 18 trillion (over 100% of your gross domestic product BTW).

Increased borrowing now is increased taxes later, so that you can party on down now and think what a fine chap your president is now, only for your kids, who never benefiited, to have to pay your party bills afterwards. Financially speaking, the USA is a basket case and ordinary voters should be considering what is the right way forward, for the sake of their kids, who will inherit the consequences if the problem is not addressed. But Mr Trump isn't even talking about the fact that the USA is over-borrowed. It depresses me that people with votes have no concept of their duty to vote wisely, and only want more sweeties. It seems to me that, like George HW Bush in 1988, Donald Trump is aiming for the bottom feeder vote.

[fordprefect739]

This is on John Kasich's YT channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCQhBYEMRQI

Original quote that he's paraphrasing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

Even GOP candidates are comparing Trump to Hitler now.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

AmateurEmale: the American sums do not add up now, today, this day. Your country is running a deficit which it cannot sustain indefinitely, today, this day.

Present financial situation is actually very good. Deficit is estimated at %2.7 of GDP for 2015, and GDP growth is coming in at about %2.5 . . . this is excellent performance. The deficit is financed entirely in US Dollars, and at rates so low I'd never have believed it.

Moreover, the US population is growing, and markedly younger than our competitors in the developed world.

And extraordinarily, we have essentially no net oil imports.

We have our problems, but Chinese in particular are falling over themselves to buy US assets and to get US residency . . .

Given where we were in 2008-9, I'm going to say things look pretty good.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Present financial situation is actually very good. Deficit is estimated at %2.7 of GDP for 2015, and GDP growth is coming in at about %2.5 . . . this is excellent performance. The deficit is financed entirely in US Dollars, and at rates so low I'd never have believed it.

Moreover, the US population is growing, and markedly younger than our competitors in the developed world.

And extraordinarily, we have essentially no net oil imports.

We have our problems, but Chinese in particular are falling over themselves to buy US assets and to get US residency . . .

Given where we were in 2008-9, I'm going to say things look pretty good.

All true: I am not saying you need to wear tin foil hats or stick pencils up your nose and say "wibble". I am however saying that you [as a nation] need to assess your situation realistically, and that talking about tax cuts is totally unrealistic.

You mention the 2.7% deficit, Deeps, exactly as though this were a good thing. The fact is, your economy is growing well [which of course is good]; and this is exactly when you as a nation should be running a budget surplus. Anything less than a healthy surplus and paying down the national debt means you are storing a bad problem for whenever the economy tanks again, as of course history tells it will happen some day. You must have head room to borrow and to run a deficit whenever you next encounter a serious recession. People who say that the laws should be changed to force government to balance its books every single year are full of shit. But over the economic cycle government has to balance its books, or at least keep the deficit under control; and this is why running a 2,7% deficit in the present climate is seriously, seriously undesireable.

The growth in GDP is crtical to your future prospects for managing the deficit. It is the only way to pay down debt in a world where spending cuts are hard to deliver (and likely to do more harm than goood if delivered) and idiots like Mr Trump only want to talk about cutting taxes. The man is a complete and egregious disgrace to his country.

Interesting point which you raise as well concerning low interest rates. The future is harder to predict now than it used to be, because the banking crisis has led to a paradigm shift in interest rate policy and (incidentally) IMHO has proven that decades of previous interest rate policy was wrong. But the Fed and the Bank of England have been yearning for at least two years to start ratcheting up base rates, and the vagueries of current events have repeatedly deterred them when it was plainly apparently that they were psyching themselves up to do it.

Britain was protected from the speculators in 2012 when these fellows attacked Greece, Italy, Spain and Argentina among other places, seeking to make a fast buck by forcing these countries to borrow at unsustainable interest rates. The reason why Britain was protected is that the British government relies heavily on long term debt instruments and was able to refuse to buy when the markets demanded greedy and stupid prices for short term debt instruments. Provided America has structured her debt prudently, she should be able to manage in the coming world of 3% plus base rates. But has she structured her debt prudently?

I have yet to hear from any candidate, including the Democrats, who have anything worthwhile to say about either fiscal or economic policy. I think that's a big fail and that they are letting the voters down by not having this conversation and by not inviting the people to think about these issues.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

All true: I am not saying you need to wear tin foil hats or stick pencils up your nose and say "wibble". I am however saying that you [as a nation] need to assess your situation realistically, and that talking about tax cuts is totally unrealistic.

You mention the 2.7% deficit, Deeps, exactly as though this were a good thing. The fact is, your economy is growing well [which of course is good]; and this is exactly when you as a nation should be running a budget surplus. Anything less than a healthy surplus and paying down the national debt means you are storing a bad problem for whenever the economy tanks again, as of course history tells it will happen some day.

That's less of an issue than is imagined. If you look at the huge deficits of the 1940s, incurred to fight WWII, they were never "paid off" by running surpluses -- though we did have a few surpluses in the 1950s, they didn't substantially "pay down" the debt.

The US moved from a debt to GDP ratio of %160 in 1946 to about %35 in 1975 by growing the economy-- the nominal debt never declined.

Our problem is to find growth. If folks are willing to by US Dollar debt for 30 years at %3, I say "sell it to them".

There are long term fiscal challenges which are being ignored, but its not deficits, its entitlements and pensions. We have vast out year obligations from an aging population and increasing healthcare costs, these will consume the entire budget.

If you look at what the US spends on healthcare (roughly %19 of GDP) and what other advanced industrial nations spend (about %12) -- you find that the US is spending %7 more than any comparable suggests that we need to. That is, if we spend at the same ratio as Germany, Switzerland or Australia, we'd be spending about 840 billion dollars less per annum than we do.

That's much larger than our deficit, and its larger than our defense budget.

When it comes to America's fiscal health, the alpha and the omega is "healthcare costs".

[AmateurEmale]

I personally believe that Scoundrel is wrong about spending cuts being "bollocks".

First, the unsustainable military spending (aka. Military Madness during the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, plus still garrisoning 100+ countries around the world) could be cut to 2000 levels, as pointed out by Libertarian Gary Johnson.

Secondly, the increased domestic spending (Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, etc.) actually happened under Bush Jr., and I believe it could be cut. No Child Left Behind, in particular, assumes a federal Department of Education, which I find unnecessary. The U.S. won the Space Race with no Department of Education in Washington!

Reducing expenditures is the same thing as increasing revenues, if you think about it. The saved money could go to deficit relief, tax cuts, or a mixture of the two.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by AmateurEmale

The U.S. won the Space Race with no Department of Education in Washington!.

You're correct that it wasn't done through the "Department of Education"; it was the Department of "Health, Education and Welfare". Given the size of healthcare in our economy (a little less than %20 of our economy, about $3 Trillion), it doesn't make sense to agglomerate a function as huge as healthcare with the much smaller and very different educational segment, I really can't see any reason to stick "Education" back into HHS; they do very different things.

How did we "win the space race"?

The Eisenhower Administation's response to Sputnik included a massive Government investment in education and science. President Eishenhower respected science and scientists -- his science advisor, George Kistiakovsky, probably was the most influential such advisor ever.

Eisenhower had a solution for the crankiness of the right wing. He slapped the words "National Defense" in front of worthwhile public policies, a pragmatic response to nuttiness.

So we have the "National Defense Education Act (1958)" and the "Defense Highways Act" (1956).

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by AmateurEmale

I personally believe that Scoundrel is wrong about spending cuts being "bollocks".

First, the unsustainable military spending (aka. Military Madness during the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, plus still garrisoning 100+ countries around the world) could be cut to 2000 levels, as pointed out by Libertarian Gary Johnson.

Secondly, the increased domestic spending (Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, etc.) actually happened under Bush Jr., and I believe it could be cut. No Child Left Behind, in particular, assumes a federal Department of Education, which I find unnecessary. The U.S. won the Space Race with no Department of Education in Washington!

Reducing expenditures is the same thing as increasing revenues, if you think about it. The saved money could go to deficit relief, tax cuts, or a mixture of the two.

The reason why I regard talk of spending cuts as bollocks is because no one can deliver them. In sober truth, AE, were it to look even remotely possible that you were going to succeed in delivering defence spending reduction on the scale which you advocate, someone would assassinate you to prevent this from happening. There is no way the likes of Lockheed Martin would ever tolerate such a thing, which would be an existential threat to them. The military-industrial complex is far too influential for any such cuts as these ever to happen. Hence "bollocks".

We do repeatedly see a conspiracy to rob Americans of their pension benefits, into which they have paid for over forty years. George W Bush was very keen on "privatising" the funds involved, because the private sector is just so good at running things, as we see in the fact that as a nation you pay ten bucks each citizen on state* healthcare for every four bucks Britain spends, and we get universal healthcare, free at rthe point of supply, while you go into personal bankruptcy and lose your house if it is anything worse than chillblains. But this is OK because we have Paul Ryan's assurance that state healthcare has failed everywhere it has ever been tried. It has been failing in Britain since 1948, and failing in Norway since 1900. Meanwhile. last electoral cycle, Rick Santorum was the runner up for the Republican nomination on a program in which he advocated abolishing schools. Schools...remember that's where you learned to read, write and count? Meanwhile the desire to hive off pensions to the private sector has not gone away, not at all.

You see, schools, healthcare and pensions are "entitlements" and entitlements are bad. I consider this entire philosophical approach, based as it is on a malevolent attack against the basic human rights of ordinary folk, to be an exhibition of gross criminality for which the persons responsible should be waterboarded and pistol whipped. But once you accept that the pigs are in the trough on defence spending, and if you find that cancelling peoples state pension rights, abolishing schools and refusing people the right to healthcare are going to generate a backlash you cannot ride out, then; what's left?

Talk of spending cuts on anything like the scale to even scratch the surface of the budget deficit (let alone the accumulated debt since 2001) is total cloud-cuckooland bollocks. You heard it here first.

Postscript:
For factual accuracy I should clarify this statement. America spent $8,360 per person ($4,437 is public spending, the rest private) and Britain spent $3,480 per person ($2,888 is public spending, the rest private). These figures were published in June 2012.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/data...-world-country