A billion dollars is a hard sum of money to wrap your head around. There is basically no ethical way to make a billion dollars. If you have a billion dollars it’s because you’ve stiffed a lot of people a lot of the value they created and kept it for yourself.
immutable
joined 2 years ago
The Dems raised billions for the election and lost. What did I receive after donating thousands of dollars to them.
Pleas for more money. Give us just a little bit more money and we will finally do something.
I’m done. We should fight the fascists but the corporate democrats have been completely captured. They only know how to raise money and hand it to consultants that will tell them to parade around Liz fucking Cheney.
I’m not paying them to slide further and further to the right anymore.
You keep being an ass to people and you won’t have to worry about anyone wanting to be your ally.
What a weird way to spell “will” I mean they missed every letter, “could” some editor must be real embarrassed.
This problem has always bugged me writ large as well. It seems nearly impossible to have any conversation that looks at the bigger picture of things in a complete and nuanced way.
Take for example employment rates. It’s just taken as a given that high employment is the goal. But stop and think about that for a second. In any other part of your life is your goal to completely saturate all time with labor? No, obviously not.
But the goals are set and we must achieve them. More money next quarter than last quarter, it doesn’t matter if every conceivable customer already has a subscription, we must grow. Make the product cheaper to make, charge more, do anything but consider that we might have picked stupid goals.
Plenty do. The thought that democrats don’t have guns is a stereotype. Being pro gun control and being a responsible gun owner are compatible.
Excellent point and kudos to you for knowing that widgets are juiced based.
Tariffs suck for the country implementing the tariff. But before I tell you why they suck, let me tell you the way they are supposed to help.
Here’s the way tariffs are supposed to work according to people that like tariffs (spoiler alert, this thing I’m about to describe is a fantasy and I’ll explain why).
Let’s say people in the US can make widgets for $10 and sell them for $12 and have a viable business. But mean old foreign country can make widgets for $5 and sell them for $7 and have a viable business. The foreign country sells the people of the US widgets for $7, which is great if you live in the US and want to buy a widget but sucks if you live in the US and want to make a widget.
Tariffs are supposed to protect local businesses by making foreign goods less competitive. Let’s say we pass a law putting a $10 tariff on foreign widgets. I used to import widgets from foreign country and pay the manufacturer $5 per widget and sell them to Americans for $7. Now when I import the widget from the foreign country I still pay the manufacturer $5 per widget but now I have to pay the US government a tariff of $10 per widget. Each imported widget now costs me $15 and so I have to sell them for $17 to make a profit. This now means that American made widgets are competitive again, the locally made $12 widget is a great deal compared to the $17 imported one. Great if you are a US widget maker and shitty if you are a US widget buyer.
Now you might notice the people in the US buying widgets, even in the best fantasy scenario, end up getting dicked over. The theory goes that widget making jobs are good though and if we do that enough then everyone will have to pay more for goods but we will have lots of jobs making stuff that pay ok.
Now here’s the part that really, really sucks. Let’s say you are a US widget maker and now you know that your foreign competition can’t make a widget for less than $17. You could sell your widgets for $12 and have a viable business or you could sell them for $16.99 and have a super profitable business. I’ll just gesture broadly at the sea of corporate greed we find ourselves floating in and let you decide which is more likely.
Tariffs induce even local manufacturers to raise prices because it hurts competition. It’s basically a massive transfer of wealth from local consumers to local producers by cutting out the foreign producers and the competitive pressure they exert on the market. This is why basically every economist said “do this and kill the economy”
So why do people want tariffs? Well the promise for your average voter is that the tariffs are going to bring back good solid blue collar jobs. You can go work in a factory and pump out widgets and get a nice middle class paycheck. It’s a nice sales pitch and a lot of people would really want that to be true. I suspect though that the manufacturers will automate most of this work and pocket the profits, again, gestures broadly at the late stage capitalism hellscape all around us.
Speech and debate clause.
Someone should read that on the floor
If there’s something in particular in that original analysis you disagree with feel free to point it out.
Progressive voters can’t vote for progressive candidates that don’t exist. My analysis explains why progressive candidates / parties don’t emerge in this system.
When there are progressive candidates progressive voters vote for them, while centrist Dems say they won’t (that’s exactly what Clinton supporters said they would do if sanders won the nomination)
What exactly do you think “you know what, fuck you guys, we’re done” looks like in the absence of progressive candidates? Maybe the presidential candidate getting 20M fewer votes? That literally just happened.
I’d refer you back to my first comment that explains the structural incentives and disincentives that prevent an alternative to the Democratic Party from emerging
Exactly this. The Democratic Party has been completely purchased by the donor class.
Both parties now act in the interest of the wealthy, and arguably have for a while. This is why the largest thing we can point to coming out of the Democratic Party in decades are things like the ACA and the CHIPS act. These only entrench already established powerful interests, the same powerful interests that line the democratic party’s pockets.
They didn’t fix healthcare they just tried to make private insurance companies viable a little bit longer by making it mandatory that everyone join in. This was a massive giveaway to health insurers.