Youtube comments of Brandon M (@brandonm949).
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It's important to note two factors that made Allende's presidency a lot worse.
1. The US was heavily invested in making Allende a failure, most notably pushing a truckers' strike to cripple the economy.
2. The majority of Chile's export money came from copper, and international copper prices dropped by something like 30% during Allende's tenure, leading to a general lack of supply in Chile's economy. It's the same thing that happened to Venezuela in the 2010s, and is similar to the supply shock in the US and UK during the 1970s oil crisis. Allende seizing large farms, nationalizing copper production, and increasing spending was objectively harmful, but I don't think any president was going to look good during this kind of supply shock.
Also, I'm sure Chileans' views on Pinochet restoring the economy were largely affected by which side of the economy they were on. Being an upper middle class person in a rich country is great. Being a poor person in a rich country is often not. The US has a nominally great economy, yet we also have a homelessness crisis, thousands of people dying every year due to a lack of affordable healthcare, and multiple generations of young adults who are too poor to buy homes or have children at the same rate previous generations did. The fact that 56% of people in that "great" Chilean economy chose to kick Pinochet out speaks volumes.
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@mosslinden5058 That comorbidity stat is incredibly misleading, as it includes conditions caused by Covid like pneumonia, respiratory failure, and acute respiratory distress syndrome.
Take those away and you've got stuff like hypertension, diabetes, and obesity. You know who has those things? Like half of American adults.
Also, 80% of Covid deaths are people age 65 or older. But that percentage is the same for a lot of the main causes of death - heart disease, stroke, influenza, kidney disease, and chronic respiratory diseases. Without masks, vaccines, and shutdowns, Covid would easily be the #1 cause of death, which I think makes it pretty damn important.
Your argument basically boils down to, "I probably won't be affected by Covid, so no one should care about it, and the fact that people care must be a conspiracy." It's such a ridiculous opinion.
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@TheDiamond2009 After the next few months, when there is no curfew or military/paramilitary presence, can you please reflect back on this moment and stop being so paranoid? Not everything is part of a plot, and not everything has a clear good guy and bad guy. Sometimes, stuff just happens and we have to deal with it.
As for the debacles, inflation, unemployment, and illegal immigration...welcome to US politics. These are pretty common issues. And after a big pandemic year that hugely affected the economy, it's really not surprising for the rebound year to have weird inflation, supply chain issues, etc. And I use the term "rebound year" lightly, because the pandemic isn't even over yet.
And yes, the media's causing division. But that includes the media you're reading. It's not some left wing plot. It's just media companies of all persuasions trying to get clicks by using hate and fear.
And the vaccine mandate is just another OSHA rule. There are tons of OSHA rules you have to follow to not get fired. You can easily avoid it by working for a smaller company or doing freelance work. Or you could just......get vaccinated.
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@jmartin6158 From the regular upper class and middle class, who would actually have sufficient money to tax, and who already pay most of the taxes anyway.
The top 0.001%, which is made up of 600 billionaires and about 1,000 ultra-millionaires, pay 3-4% of all federal income tax. If you count state and local taxes, sales tax, and payroll taxes, that number is much lower, probably 1-2%. In addition, this group pays a lower effective rate in federal income taxes than the rest of the top 1% even though they have more money.
If you look at spending, the best estimate I could find for how much money a billionaire spends in a year is $45 million. With 600 American billionaires, that gives them a total of $27 billion, a tiny portion of the $15 trillion of consumer spending in America.
In return for that paltry contribution, we let the mega rich corrupt the government so it benefits them (a few thousand people) at the expense of the millions of Americans whose voices are supposed to be represented.
We don't need billionaires, and frankly, I think we'd be better off without them.
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@bricktop6216 Winning the lottery is not the same as being born rich. Being born into a rich family gives you better education, a more stable home life during your formative, and probably more connections to other rich people who can hire/refer you to cushy rich person jobs. Lottery winners don't have connections to trustworthy financial planners, and still carry whatever mental baggage they got from their childhood.
There's a study from a few years back where rich, less intelligent kids ended up being more successful than poor, more intelligent kids. That's unacceptable in a supposed meritocracy.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/29/study-to-succeed-in-america-its-better-to-be-born-rich-than-smart.html
Also, discussing welfare is a bit of a misdirection. We should also be talking about how poorly we treat employed people. If you applied the GDP increases since 1974 to that year's wage structure, the median full time salary would be $80,000 - $90,000, instead of the $50,000 it actually is today. The government has been destroying union protections so corporations can pay subpar wages and funnel more money to their executives. Since 1989, the top 1% has more than tripled their net worth, while the bottom 50% has lost money and has a negative net worth overall. As for those Trump tax cuts, a huge portion of that went toward stock buybacks, which juice the stock market but don't help the middle or lower class at all.
To summarize, poor people are not your enemy. Corporations, their executives, and the legislators they buy are. Unions, a higher minimum wage, an increased estate tax, and more universal programs are how we fight against them.
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@nicktanner8231 That sounds very much like a number that is not a proven fact. Also, Christian Grey is fictional and statistically speaking, the average Joe is married.
Now, it's true that there's a less exaggerated trend of fewer young men having sex and being in relationships and getting married. But it feels weird to blame that on "all these loose women". Women are just people choosing who they want to be in a relationship with, the same as men are. And a lot of the men who say the things you're saying have ridiculous standards when it comes to women's beauty, they don't bother trying to date a lot of women they'd probably connect well with, and then they whine that none of the hot women want to date their schlubby selves.
Unless you're suggesting we make women date these lonely, grumpy men by law, it's up to the men to deal with their problems.
Option 1 - Improve yourself. If the kind of women you like don't want to be with you, work toward being the person they want to be with. Practice having conversations, change your style up, work out more, etc.
Option 2 - Find different women to date. Maybe you've been going to bars, but women who go to bars don't mesh well with you. So try somewhere else. I have no idea where those places are, but there are tons of articles out there on where to find dates.
Option 3 - Find fulfillment outside of relationships. Start a creative hobby. Make try getting a different job. Again, I am the wrong person to ask about this, but I'm sure you'd be able to find something. A lot of people who complain about not getting women do it from a need for validation, rather than a need for companionship. Perhaps you have self-esteem issues, and sorting those out would make you feel better.
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The US runs all kinds of things nationally - Social Security, Medicare, the Postal Service, the IRS. There's no reason we couldn't do national single payer healthcare.
To add to previous comments on wait times, primary care is actually quicker to get in Canada - 3 days vs. 7 days in the US, if I remember correctly. And for specialists, it's not a big gap - something like 21 weeks in the US and 27 weeks in Canada. The ER is faster in the US, but Canada still triages in a way that if your health is seriously at risk, you're going to get treated immediately.
The difference seems to be more about the split between types of doctors, not the payment structure. Canada has more primary care physicians, therefore primary care appointments can be made quicker. The US has more specialists, therefore specialty appointments can be made quicker. Switching to single payer insurance wouldn't change that.
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I love you Kyle, but this is such a bad interpretation of these stats.
1. The man's been President for 10 months. Expecting any President to pass every dollar of spending they promised within 10 months is asinine.
2. I don't have any context for this number. Where were Trump, Obama, Bush, etc at the same point in their presidencies? Hell, I don't remember Trump ever giving numbers. That's an easy way to avoid this stat entirely.
3. Pretending the BBB bill isn't going to be signed soon in some form is misleading. As it is now, that bill would bump the number to 33%, which sounds bad but probably isn't horrible for someone 21% of the way through his term.
4. I'd put his approval rating in the "correlation is not causation" category. You know what probably has the most to do with his drop in approval? The resurgence of Covid. Vaccines were getting out, cases were dropping massively, we were feeling pretty good, and then Delta hit and brought us right back to 2020. We're all just tired of it. Add inflation, gas prices, the media constantly talking about inflation and gas prices, and the coverage of BBB being limited to its cost and what's being cut from it, and it's no surprise Biden's approval is so low. I'd be shocked if any President had good approval in this climate.
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@patrickluby4019 So Cuomo caused all the COVID deaths that weren't even real? Yep, that sounds like a reasonable argument and not just someone spewing all the right wing talking points at once.
And I'd like to see a source for that "60% of COVID deaths weren't COVID" stat. Because I looked into that one CDC stat where 94% of COVID deaths had comorbidities, and it turned out most of them were pneumonia, respiratory failure, respiratory distress syndrome, etc. You know, causes of death that are the result of COVID. The conservative interpretation of the stat was completely wrong.
Also, the total death count for 2020 was about 500,000 higher than that of 2019. (For comparison, the increase from 2018 to 2019 was only 18,000.) If you're claiming that COVID numbers are faked, you'll need to provide a better explanation for the 480,000 extra deaths.
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@erikmerrill8280 How about these:
- The crime, drugs, and rape supposedly being brought over by Mexicans
- Referring to said Mexicans as an invasion
- The left wanting to take your guns, ban free speech, ban cars, ban airplanes, ban meat, etc.
- Socialism, communism, Marxism, etc.
- Banning travel from certain Muslim countries
- Denying entry to Syrian refugees because one might be a terrorist
- Saying Democrats want to kill babies after birth
- Democrats killing the Republican party by letting illegal immigrants vote (when in reality, young adults just hate your policies)
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Polio has a 99.95 to 99.975 percent survival rate.
70% of cases are asymptomatic.
25% of cases have mild symptoms (like those of the common cold).
4.5% involve noticeable muscle stiffness but patients recover completely.
Only 0.5% of polio cases result in paralysis.
Of those paralytic cases, 5-10% result in death, and another 25% develop muscle weakness later in life.
5-10% of 0.5% equals 0.025-0.05% of polio victims who actually die.
Paralytic polio is hell, but it's also very uncommon, even without the polio vaccines. The biggest year of polio deaths in the US (1916) only saw 7,000 deaths. The biggest year of long term polio paralysis (1952) only affected 21,000 people.
All your criticisms of Covid (usually mild or asymptomatic, low fatality rate) also apply to polio, a disease you've told me should definitely require a vaccine. You've fallen for the media hype around polio. Funny how that works, isn't it?
Let me be clear, the polio vaccine was a good idea and we should continue to use it. But by that standard, we should also have a Covid vaccine. Covid is killing more people each year than polio ever did.
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@Dr.Ead151 I don't know what starting from scratch would entail, but I'm all for it. The ultra rich make up a tiny percentage of consumer spending, contribute 3 or 4 percent of federal taxes, and even without their investments we'd have a healthy GDP. If it means less inequality, less government corruption, and more opportunity for small businesses, I'm willing to try it.
As for Art Laffer, he was pretty much given free reign to implement his policies in Kansas in 2012, and he destroyed their economy, education system, and infrastructure. The Laffer curve is a vaguely defined yet sound theory, but nothing else Laffer says about the economy should be trusted.
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Instead of fearing a label, just look at his ideas. Most of them are already done in successful countries.
Medicare for All? Super similar to Taiwan's healthcare system, and not radically different from the systems in France, Finland, Australia, etc.
Free public college? Already happens in Finland, Denmark, and probably some other countries I didn't bother to look up. Hell, Denmark even pays you a stipend to put toward living expenses.
$15 minimum wage? The highest I found is $12.66 USD, in Australia. So $15 is a bit aggressive, but not in the realm of "socialist takeover".
The Green New Deal is probably his most radical proposal. But I would say global climate is a pretty big deal, ending our dependence on oil (or other finite sources) is a nice bonus, and the millions of jobs involved with restructuring the power grid would be really helpful right now.
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Because "fascism" has been used in so many different ways that it ceases to have meaning. Similar to "socialism" and "liberal".
But to explain the concept of Trump being fascist, I'll cite some passages from Umberto Eco's description of generic fascism (which he calls Ur-Fascism) that sound very Trumpian.
"Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement ('When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun') to the frequent use of such expressions as 'degenerate intellectuals,' 'eggheads,' 'effete snobs,' 'universities are a nest of reds.'"
Trump supporters often talk about how universities are "brainwashing" our students into becoming libs or socialists or whatever. Trump's claim that "the science doesn't know" that climate change is real, and Jared Kushner saying that they were "getting the country back from the doctors" are great examples of this.
"In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason."
As evidenced by his desire to lock up Hillary, Obama, multiple Bidens, and Gretchen Whitmer; telling the Squad to go back to their own countries; and calling the media "the enemy of the people".
"The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition."
"They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." That was Trump describing Mexico in his very first campaign speech. You can find tons of Trump rhetoric like this, especially with the 2018 caravan.
"Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside."
Everything QAnon goes here. But with Trump specifically, there's the idea that Democrats are going to sabotage the election via mail fraud, or that the coronavirus was a "Democrat hoax" to tank the economy and make Trump look bad, or that Obama was tapping his phones, or even the old birther conspiracy. Trump loves to imagine plots against him.
"Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party."
Mocking a disabled reporter, talking about shithole countries, and the classic "I like people who weren’t captured" are good examples of contempt for the weak. As for popular elitism, at one Trump rally, he was complaining about the elites and how they didn't like him, and followed that by calling himself and his supporters "super-elites". Classic popular elitism moment.
And finally, a commonly agreed upon fascist characteristic that didn't have a good description in the Eco essay - the idea of national rebirth. Which sounds a lot like MAGA. Or the idea that America "doesn't win anymore". It's not a perfect fit, but there is some similarity there.
Hope this helps.
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@markgreg9139 Do you use electricity, running water, the sewer system, public schools, police and fire departments, and/or the postal service? What about things that work better because of government regulations, like air travel, food, medicine, radio, television? Do you ever ride in someone else's car, or bike on the public roads?
Unless you live in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, you benefit from tax-funded government services.
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The major difference between the current US and the other examples is that the US's drop in output was caused by a drop in demand, not supply.
In the other cases, sanctions and other events made it more difficult to produce things, similar to the US's oil crisis of the mid-1970s. The supply couldn't get high enough to meet the demand.
In the US in 2020, the crisis started with a drop in demand - people were going out less and didn't shop as much. This resulted in near-zero inflation. The supply then adjusted, with companies going out of business and cutting jobs.
The printed money being added to the economy should increase demand, and since we only lost a bit of the labor force and still have access to the same natural resources, there's room for supply to rise to meet the demand. As long as supply can keep up with demand, we won't have hyperinflation.
The rising price of raw materials is a bit concerning since it hurts our supply capacity, but I'm guessing that's also caused by the reduced labor force that's acquiring those materials. When supply rises to meet demand, those workers should be returning and prices should go back to normal.
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@Danielson1818 My original interpretation was that you wanted to sacrifice LGBTQ rights and abortion rights and racial justice for some sort of "unity", so I thought I'd give you a chance to clarify what you meant. Given your hostility toward the question, I'm guessing that's exactly what you meant.
First of all, I don't think those things are opposed to the concept of treating people with dignity. If anything, those are part of the solution.
Secondly, I don't see how those are threatening Democratic unity, other than your own individual commitment to the party. Abortion was one of the main drivers of Democratic turnout in 2022. It won everywhere it was directly on the ballot, even in Kentucky. Democratic voters widely support BLM. Democratic voters widely support LGBTQ rights.
Think back to early 2020 when Democrats were divided. What was the divide over? Universal healthcare, tax rates, income inequality, and the role of the welfare state. Economic stuff.
Would I like the Democratic party to be more economically progressive? Absolutely. But if your main goal is party unity, it's hard to argue that what they're doing now isn't working.
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The President is decided by a group called the Electoral College. Each state is allowed a certain number of Electoral College voters, and each state gets to decide how it picks those voters.
Right now, every state does it with an election. For most of the states, all of their Electoral College voters vote for the winner of the state's election. For example, Wisconsin voted for Biden over Trump, so Biden gets all 10 of Wisconsin's Electoral College votes. (Two states split up their votes but that isn't relevant here.)
In 2020, the three closest state elections Biden won were:
Arizona (by 10,000 votes)
Georgia (by 12,000 votes)
Wisconsin (by 21,000 votes)
If Trump had won those three states, the Electoral College would have been tied at 269-269, and the tiebreaker vote would probably have gone to Trump.
So it can be said that Biden only won by 43,000 votes, the total margin in the 3 states I named before.
(Confusing, I know. We like to make things more complicated than they have to be.)
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Charts that start in, like, 2015. Because if you do, you realize that most statistics did something weird when Covid hit, and the Biden presidency was just those stats correcting back to the normal trend line. Real wages, productivity, unemployment, etc.
Also, the excess savings chart from the San Francisco Fed is extremely illuminating, in that it explains everything prices have been doing. The government gave people more stimulus money than necessary. Businesses raised prices because people had more money saved up. Those extra savings slowly depleted, and now that they're down to zero, businesses are lowering prices.
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@TheRbruin10 The order of steps has to be:
1. Build out a renewable energy grid
2. Phase off of oil
If we do step 2 first, we'll have nothing to power cars, planes, trains, homes, offices, etc. The purpose of the Green New Deal is to do step 1, then step 2. Unfortunately, too many members of Congress are like you, so step 1 never happened. In this moment, we have to keep using oil.
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@violentgreen7196 Your higher education failed you then because you've horribly misinterpreted the CDC's stats on comorbidities.
First of all, I'm pretty sure that 9,000 death figure is from August. You didn't even bother to look for the current number.
More importantly, those comorbidities include conditions caused by COVID. 250,000 of the COVID deaths included "influenza and pneumonia". In a normal year, there are about 60,000 deaths from that diagnosis. And given that the average flu season kills about 36,000 people, that leaves an absurdly high number of pneumonia deaths.
200,000 of the COVID deaths included respiratory failure, 57,000 included adult respiratory distress syndrome, and 12,000 included respiratory arrest.
Calling a COVID death invalid because the COVID caused pneumonia or breathing failure is incredibly stupid. That's how respiratory viruses kill people.
Then there's the cases with hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and other diseases that don't directly kill you. If you're alive with hypertension, get COVID, and then die after a couple of weeks, you probably died because of the COVID.
The CDC estimates there have been around 600,000 extra deaths since February 1, 2020, compared to normal deaths. If they aren't from COVID, then you have to explain them some other way.
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@Desert_Rogue_Tanker Those tax cuts happened in 1981, 2001, 2003, and 2017. Adjusting for inflation, federal tax revenue decreased in 1982, 1983, 2002, 2003, and 2018, according to OMB Historical Table 1.3. 2004 only showed a small increase.
There may be a point at which what you're describing is true, but our tax rates are well below that point. The only thing tax cuts do in the current system is reduce tax revenue.
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Does your data include state, local, payroll, and sales taxes?
Effective rates for federal income tax tend to flatten within the top 1%. The top 0.01% (which includes the billionaires referenced in this study) actually pay a lower rate than the next 0.99%.
State taxes are mostly flat.
Local taxes are usually based on property value, which makes the numbers a little harder to figure out. But my house is worth about 3.5 times my income, and there's no way it's that much for billionaires.
Social Security tax only applies to the first $132,900 of income. Medicare tax has a slightly higher rate for the rich, but neither of these taxes applies to investment income, which is heavily skewed toward the rich.
And since the lower and middle class spend a higher percentage of their income, they'll also pay a higher percentage of their income in sales tax.
With all of those included, I would absolutely believe that billionaires have a lower effective tax rate than the bottom 50%.
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@eiyukabe I found one viral disease that's contagious way before symptoms hit. (There might be more, I didn't try that hard after finding the first one.) Mono. You can spread mono several weeks before you get symptoms. And the virus that usually causes mono (Epstein-Barr virus) is asymptomatic a lot of the time. It beats Covid in both of those categories.
Also, the sources I'm seeing say Covid is usually contagious 2-3 days before symptoms, which isn't all that long. That's about where common colds are.
As for the bioweapon theory, my main objection is that a disease this uncontrollable isn't a great option for biological war. Because it'll do its job in the target country, but it's also going to go everywhere. And there's no good reason for China to anger the entire world. I would argue there's no good reason for China to anger the US. We're one of their biggest trade partners. Shutting down our economy is also bad for China's economy.
If you look at the original SARS, it has a lot in common with Covid. Besides the general strategy of ravaging the lungs, it had a fairly high fatality rate, and in the instances when someone did spread it, it spread to a bunch of people. Apparently, SARS's Achilles heel was that it wasn't very contagious until symptoms appeared, which made quarantining people too easy.
Covid is quite literally SARS 2.0. Same SARS flavor, but it's weaker and now has the ability to spread pre-symptomatically and asymptomatically. And that ability probably just stems from the fact that it's weaker and less aggressive, causing slower damage and a slower immune response. Once you see Covid as "SARS but less aggressive", it's not surprising that it exists. It just happens to hit all the best qualities for causing a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic - high transmissibility, high (but not too high) fatality rate, and spreading before/without symptoms.
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@thegheymantis8702 But you just did the same thing I did, with even fewer examples.
It's ridiculous to point to Cuba and Venezuela and conclude that social spending causes authoritarianism, when we have Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and to a lesser extent, the rest of western Europe. As well as right-wing authoritarian countries like the ones I named before.
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I assume it would be the Great Plains region or something like that. Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, etc.
I can't speak to their culture, but I can speak to the Midwest's culture. You could make a country with Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and northern Illinois, and it would have a pretty distinct culture, accent, and dialect. I'm sure Kansas has a similar dynamic with certain states.
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No, they still don't. It's just about how you look at the margins.
Biden won the popular vote by 7 million, but Trump would have only needed 43,000 votes in 3 states to win the electoral college.
I forget the exact numbers, but the margins were something like 20,000 in Wisconsin, 11,000 in Arizona, and 12,000 in Georgia. Had Trump won those states, the electoral college would have been tied at 269-269, and Republicans held an advantage in the tiebreaker vote.
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@eman3000 There are two key differences:
1. The general consensus wasn't that the result of the 2016 election was incorrect. Trump won the election, which is why I used the word "influenced" instead of "stole" or something like that.
2. A thorough investigation of the Russia claims found a bunch of shady activity by Russia. A thorough investigation of the election fraud claims resulted in no proof of widespread fraud.
I'm all for healthy skepticism. I myself made a spreadsheet comparing the 2020 county results to the 2016 county results to make sure the 2020 numbers made sense. But after all the recounts, audits, court cases, and Republicans vouching for the accuracy of the results, a reasonable person should be able to accept that the results are valid.
And that's not even counting all the other evidence that Trump was lying. Such as the fact that he did accused the 2016 Iowa caucus, the 2016 general election popular vote, and the 2018 Florida Senate and governor elections of being fraudulent too, without any evidence being found. Or how a normal person would do something to prevent fraud if they knew it would happen, instead of just complaining about it. Or the fact that Trump himself voted by mail. Or the fact that Axios called out the red mirage/blue shift problem two months in advance. Or that phone call where Trump asked Georgia's Secretary of State to "find" the exact number of votes he needed to win.
So yes, I have a problem with equating the two conspiracy movements. One was based on an actual conspiracy and was just overblown or interpreted poorly. The other was completely made up by a former President who would rather convince a third of the country that democracy is failing than admit he lost.
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The important distinction is, do you get taxed for Medicare regardless of your private insurance?
I believe NZ does it that way - you're taxed for public insurance, you automatically have public insurance, and if private insurance can improve on that then you can get private. This makes private insurance supplemental by default, which is the same outcome Bernie wants. He's just doing it in a more forceful way. (To be fair, I'd rather do it the NZ way.)
When Biden, Buttigieg, etc. talk about Medicare Choice/For All Who Want It, they're saying you can either pay Medicare tax and get Medicare, or just keep your insurance as is. This is a great way to increase Medicare prices since only the people who need the most coverage will take it.
Tulsi wasn't specific here, but when she says "choice", I interpret that as being the second system, which is not Medicare for All.
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@lachlanbell8390 First, I'd like to hit you with some inconsistencies in the whole fraud narrative.
If fraudulent votes happened, we'd expect either a significant shift in vote percentages compared to 2016, or a significant increase in turnout. But in Wayne County, Trump did slightly better percentage-wise, and the bump in turnout was lower than in the country as a whole. Trump gained about 2% in Philadelphia County, with a similar low bump in turnout. Trump's 2020 margin there was actually 4,000 votes better than in 2016.
So if there are tens of thousands of fraudulent votes there, why are the results so consistent with the 2016 results?
Why did the Democrats lose House seats and not gain control of the Senate? Am I to believe that the Democrats are brilliant enough to run a multi-state fraud operation and convince dozens of judges to ignore it, but are too stupid to also rig the House and Senate?
If Texas was unhappy with Pennsylvania's election laws, why did they wait until December to file a lawsuit? Surely it wasn't because Republicans were running out of ways to try to overturn the election, right?
Why did Republicans fight laws in WI, MI, PA, and GA that would allow election officials to start counting mail-in votes early, but were fine with the same law existing in Florida?
If Trump was so worried about mail-in ballot fraud, why did he vote by mail?
Besides those inconsistencies, Trump has a history of doing this exact thing.
He said the 2016 Iowa caucus was fraudulent when Ted Cruz beat him.
He claimed there were millions of illegal votes in the 2016 general election because he didn't win the popular vote. He even put a commission together to investigate it, and it disbanded after 2 years because it couldn't find anything.
He said votes counted after Election Day were fraudulent in Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott's 2018 elections.
Crying fraud is what Trump does, because he can't admit he lost. This was such a transparent lie, it amazes me that people actually fell for it.
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@agoogleuser3808 Did you just shame the entire lower middle class for not having enough spare money for taxes? That's fantastic.
I'm not saying we should get rid of all the rich people. My beef is with the amount of disparity. Wages haven't scaled up with productivity since 1980, yet CEO salaries have skyrocketed. Obviously CEOs can do that, but it's not fair or helpful. If employees were paid a fair wage, they would be able to pay more income tax, and they would be able to spend more money to fuel the economy. And yes, Bezos might only have $30 billion instead of $140 billion, but is that really going to affect his life at all?
Regarding investing, everyday stuff is expensive. Tuition, rent, healthcare, car payments, etc. There's not much left over for the bottom 50 percenters, so even if they did invest what was left, the positive effect would be nothing compared to what happens when someone like Warren Buffett invests. A 7% gain on not much money is still not much money.
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The least progressive method (and easiest to calculate) would be a flat percentage payroll tax.
Healthcare spending per capita = $10,739
Federal share that already exists = roughly $3,900
Amount to cover with M4A tax = $6,839
Personal income per capita = $53,820
Assuming M4A pays for everything (which is unlikely), that gives us a 12.7% tax, slightly more than the Social Security tax. It could be split between employee and employer like SS, so you'd only see 6.35%.
Since M4A won't cover everything, the tax might be something like 10%, or it could be capped at a certain income. If it's supplemented with Bernie's transaction tax or Warren's wealth tax, this percentage would be even lower.
Note that along with this, the part of your paycheck that goes to insurance would no longer go to insurance, and you'd have no copays or deductibles on most of your care.
The idea of paying for M4A made me nervous before, but honestly this doesn't seem that bad.
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@dra6ke Do you have numbers for how many cases are asymptomatic? I've seen a New York City study that said 1/12 have symptoms, but I've also seen European ones with like 1/30 or 1/40.
As for the fatality rate, that's only one piece of what makes a disease deadly. The other is how much the disease spreads, which is why ebola didn't wipe out a third of the country. If we're assuming enough COVID cases are asymptomatic that the fatality rate is 0.1%, that means something like 120 million Americans have gotten COVID, which is way more than a flu season.
Since February 1st, the CDC has recorded 190,000 more deaths, regardless of cause, than would be expected in that time period. So I have no reason to believe the COVID death count is being overstated.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
As for the economy, you can thank our lovely Congress for that. Most European countries just subsidized wages, and their unemployment rates went up by like 2%. They're fine. We had the chance to do that (via the Paycheck Guarantee Act), but Pelosi, McConnell, et al. decided to throw a bunch of money to corporations instead, and decided to make it a culture war of safety vs. economy.
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@dra6ke A lot of the hospitals are okay because of distancing, masks, etc. We don't know how many cases we would've had at once without those measures.
And I don't see it as a huge deal to slap on a mask or get takeout instead of going to a restaurant or stuff that like that. Especially if it could save hundreds of thousands of lives over the course of this thing (and save some people from lung scarring or post-ICU PTSD). It's easy to downplay these deaths because they aren't noticeably horrifying like a war or terrorist attack. But if you compare COVID deaths to any other event whose deaths we respect, COVID is right up there among the biggest.
As for the people losing their jobs, I'd refer back to the stimulus. The shutdown had some effects, the public's reaction to COVID had some effects, but it was all exacerbated by a terrible stimulus package. Europe got the COVID response right - take your lockdown and testing seriously, help your people and businesses get through it, and then return to normal when COVID is contained. The US is trying to do step 3, but haven't finished step 1 and 2 yet. The longer people try to ignore COVID, the longer this is going to go on.
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@itkojecockot I can't speak for all liberals, but I'm not in favor of bipartisanship. I think today's Republican Party and conservative media outlets are holding our country back, and if we have to get 50-50 ties in the Senate to do popular things like COVID relief and infrastructure spending, so be it.
As for COVID, you're treating it as a binary outcome - either no one dies, or some amount of people dies, with no regard for what that amount actually is. The 7-day average of COVID deaths is down from 3,200 on January 20, to 750 today. That's a very good thing. Criticizing Biden for a 77% drop in deaths is a ridiculous move on your part.
To illustrate Trump's poor management of the COVID crisis, I'd like to bring in Washington state as a comparison. Washington has a slightly higher population density than the country as a whole, has the US's 15th largest metro area, and was one of the first states to have significant COVID spread. From an epidemiology standpoint, Washington is pretty representative of the whole US.
Washington has had 706 deaths per million people, while the whole US has 1,740 deaths per million people. If Washington's death rate were applied to the whole country, we'd have 234,000 deaths instead of 575,000.
So my criticism of Trump is for playing a large part in those extra 341,000 deaths, especially for his hands off approach in March and April as the pandemic ramped up, and his attitude toward social distancing and mask wearing, which was indifferent at best and antagonistic at worst. With the way Republicans revere Trump, him undeniably endorsing masks and distancing would have made a lot of people more cautious and would have significantly reduced the spread of the virus.
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@jasongrundy1717 Big cities tend to have large areas of poor people, who are more likely to shoot someone and are more likely to vote Democrat. The gun control laws happen because of the violence, not the other way around.
On a state by state basis, gun possession really has nothing to do with gun murder rates.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Gun_Ownership_Related_to_Gun_Violence_by_State_%28United_States%29.svg
But being careful about which people have the guns does work to an extent.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/04/gun-control-firearms-law-deaths-shooting-state-data-research/586363/
Also, to add to your last section, reducing poverty would go a long way toward eliminating the gang-related shootings. Life on the streets, so to speak, is difficult. Sometimes you have to do drastic things. If those people had guaranteed healthcare, higher paying jobs, and the ability to go to college for free, there would be much less of a reason for them to shoot people.
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@jeremiah5430 Yes, I was using hyperbole. Really makes the comment pop. Though there's a decent chunk of conservatives who get close to that (see the Palm Beach residents arguing against mandated mask wearing).
Anyway...
What kinds of operations are you thinking doctors will be forced to do against their will? Because as far as I know that's not a thing under Medicare, which is similar to what our single payer healthcare would be - government insurance for private hospitals.
Regarding incentive, if you're talking about the money, I don't think a huge salary is a major incentive for being a healthcare worker. Otherwise, they'd all just be lawyers or bankers or something. There's also nothing that says we have to cut salaries, unless we want to really reduce costs. We'd have to do that to reduce costs in a private system as well.
If you're talking about the increased workload, yes, that could be a problem. Making the first four years of college free would make medical school more appealing, so we might get more doctors that way. Or we'd find some other way to do it.
I'm not sure why there would be a healthcare black market when everyone can afford healthcare. Unless people get antsy about those elective surgeries they have to wait longer for. But I'd think the healthcare black market would get smaller with single payer.
As for the dreaded wait times, you forgot to mention that getting an appointment for general care is way faster in Canada. Other than that, yes, Canada's wait times are pretty bad.
I still think the benefits outweigh whatever drawbacks there are. Benefits like:
- Actually insuring all Americans
- No medical bankruptcies
- Catching more preventable disease because people can afford to see their doctor right away
- Having consistent healthcare costs each year, even if you have a major health issue
- Easier billing for hospitals/clinics
- Not making small businesses pay for employees' health insurance
- Easier movement between jobs, because employers can't use health insurance as leverage to keep you there
- No complicated application forms
- No stigma for the poor, unlike Medicaid
And I'd hardly call it radical to suggest we do what most first world countries already do.
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@justicewalking The racists existed before Trump too, but they never felt as empowered as they do now. We're moving dangerously fast toward a civil war, and Trump just continues pour gas on the fire, so to speak. Trump doesn't have water in his arsenal, only gasoline. He's a divider. What we need now is a calming force to say that of course our elections are fair, racism is bad, doctors understand how diseases work, etc. That won't completely get rid of racists and conspiracy theorists, but it does make them quieter and less influential.
If being commander-in-chief was the only thing the President did, I agree that I'd rather have Trump. But that aspect of the presidency is a pretty low priority for me right now with all the other stuff going on.
As for the leftist movement, said movement didn't really exist before 2016. We don't know what effect a Biden presidency will have on it. But I think it's reasonable to expect the movement to keep going; it's not like we actually like Joe Biden.
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@lukemills8804 I haven't been watching the trial so I don't know how well it was presented, but the evidence is all there.
Tweet from Jan 6, 6:01 pm:
"These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!"
This establishes that Trump saw violence as an expected reaction to the stolen election narrative.
The second piece of it is "Was Trump lying about the stolen election?" The fact that he mentioned it months in advance but didn't take any steps to stop it suggests that he was just making it up. He does have a history of this, after all. He made fraud accusations after the 2016 Iowa caucus, the 2016 general election (regarding the popular vote), and the 2018 Florida Senate and Governor elections. None of those came with any proof of widespread fraud. He even put together a commission for the 2016 general election that found no evidence for his claims.
Then there's the call to Georgia's Secretary of State, where he said, "I just want to find 11,780 votes". That shows that his interest was not in the fairness of the election, he was just trying to win.
So he lied in a way he knew could cause violence. I don't see how that's not incitement.
Almost no one would be dumb enough to explicitly say they were lying and wanted to cause violence. But much like the tweet Joaquin Castro read, the subtext is very clear. We all know what Trump means when he says these things.
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@todjones6571 Thought you might say something like that. So let's take a look at excess deaths from all causes.
This is the CDC's handy excess deaths page:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
If you go about a third of the way down the page, to the blue Options header, select dashboard #4 (Number of Excess Deaths), click Update Dashboard, and scroll down, you'll see that we've had between 165,000 and 223,000 more deaths than usual since February 1. This is even a bit understated; 223,000 is the number above the expected death count. The number of deaths can be affected by random variation; we have 165,000 more deaths than the high end of what randomness could give us. We could just as easily be on the low end of randomness, and have 281,000 extra deaths.
"That's great, Brandon M," you say, "but death reports can come in pretty slowly and the CDC has to estimate a lot for recent numbers." That's true. So I would direct you to dashboard #3 (Excess deaths with and without weighting). The light blue represents where the CDC is filling in the blanks with guesses; the dark blue is actual recorded deaths. And the orange line is the high end of the expected death count (aka what the 165,000 is based off of).
There are only two spikes above the orange line. One in January 2018 (unusually bad flu season) and one in April and May 2020. April and May 2020's confirmed deaths add up to about 126,000 deaths above average. If a significant number of normal deaths were attributed to COVID, deaths wouldn't be that high.
So the official COVID numbers might be a little understated, but they're close enough to base decisions off of.
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The 70% Kyle cites comes from two polls that ask about a variation of M4A, but not true M4A. From what I've seen, M4A polls around 55%. When you add more about it or its effects, approval goes down to 45% or so.
That happens with any policy, not just M4A. People like broad ideas, but get nervous when it becomes more real. As I type this, I'm realizing that probably explains the disconnect. People like safety.
So when you say, "$15 minimum wage," people think, "Ooh, that sounds nice."
When you say, "It'll raise wages for 27 million people, bring 1.3 million people out of poverty, and cause 1.3 million people to lose their jobs," then people go, "I don't like that job loss part. Better stick with what we have." When overall, those effects seem like a net positive to me.
I'm not sure why someone would see Andrew Cuomo as a safe choice, but apparently they do.
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How do Republicans represent what makes us a great nation? Let's take a look at some big American tropes:
Melting pot - America has a blend of cultures that resulted from immigration (and enslavement) from lots of different countries. Democrats support immigration and a variety of cultures. Republicans are against immigration and want everyone to assimilate into the existing culture.
"Give me your tired, your poor, etc." - This applies to refugees and asylum seekers, two groups that Republicans want to keep out of the country. Democrats support bringing in refugees and asylum seekers.
The American Dream - The ability to have a good middle class life on a full time income, a possibility that's become a lot harder with Republicans continuing to push trickle-down policies. Quite a few Democrats also like trickle-down policies, but as a whole they're much more committed to better parity in incomes.
Freedom - Republicans support the freedom to have guns and say mean things on Twitter. Democrats support the freedom to get an abortion, buy contraceptives, marry someone of the same sex, use marijuana, and be transgender. I'll take the Democrats' collection of freedoms any day.
Democracy/peaceful transfers of power - There's a literal category of Republicans called election deniers, and it's probably a majority of the party. The last Republican President inspired a mob to attack the Capitol to prevent his removal from power. Democrats complain about their losses sometimes (i.e. Stacey Abrams), but not with the kind of ferocity that Republicans do.
From my perspective, Democrats represent the best values of America better than Republicans do.
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The only way I see is to change the structure of Congress to look more like a European parliament.
Namely, assign seats to each party proportional to how many votes they get nationwide.
So if the total popular vote looks like this:
Democrats - 40%
Republicans - 35%
Libertarians - 15%
Greens - 10%
Then the Senate would have 40 Democrats, 35 Republicans, 15 Libertarians, and 10 Greens.
That removes the pressure on voters to vote for a major party, because their vote now contributes to someone being elected either way. And if voters start voting for third parties, we remove the ability for Democrats and Republicans to gain a true majority.
With more parties in play, there's less of a right vs. left dynamic. Instead we get different coalitions for different issues. Libertarians, for instance, tend to align with Republicans on economic issues but align with Democrats on a lot of social issues.
If we do it this way, you no longer have one enemy party. Instead, you have four or five parties that you'll eventually be working with. It would be so much less contentious.
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When it lowers the severity of the infection, yes. Vaccines aren't a magic shield that keeps viruses out of your nose. They're just training for your immune system, so when a certain virus does get into you, you can kill it off faster. We got lucky with measles, polio, varicella, etc being viruses that don't mutate all that much, so you can take the initial vaccine(s) and never think about it again. Influenza and Covid aren't like that. They mutate a lot. So we have to create a new version of the vaccine every year based on which strains are going around.
And unless you're immunocompromised, no one is expecting you to get a booster every 6 months. The standard is once a year, like the flu shot, and most people will skip some years. It's fine. Older vaccines still give you some protection. Just treat Covid like a second flu - they're very similar at this point.
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@joemannetti9156 Absolutely. But we should be holding them accountable for their failings, not for every bad thing that happens.
Letting the child tax credit thing expire, continuously gutting and eventually killing BBB, not passing any voting rights or anti-gerrymandering legislation, and not forgiving any student loan debt are failings of the Democratic Party.
High inflation, high gas prices, and Putin invading Ukraine are not failings of the Democratic Party. They're worldwide issues caused by lots of external factors.
Our country has a bad habit of reducing elections to, "Are things good? The President must be good. Are things bad? The President must be bad." And I really wish they wouldn't. The whole point of the United States was that the President couldn't control everything. Why are they expected to now?
From a more strategic standpoint, the reductionist take only leads us to a DeSantis flavored hellscape. Our message should be that inflation was going to happen anyway, and should have been mitigated with student debt forgiveness, free healthcare, a more progressive tax structure, or whatever else.
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@The 6th mass extinction is long overdue The lockdown you described is exactly what we should be doing now, but I think that's more of a mitigation strategy than a long-term solution. I'd rather have a good vaccine that sharply reduces the need for testing, tracing, etc. and lets us get back to "normalcy".
Most people are already vaccinated for measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, and possibly other stuff I'm forgetting about. Adding another vaccine to take isn't that crazy.
I wouldn't mandate it or anything like that. 58% of people claim to be willing to take a free, FDA-approved vaccine. That's a really good start toward herd immunity. And when horrible side effects don't appear, hopefully more people will get on board with taking the vaccine, and we can get COVID cases down to an acceptable level.
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@craigmunro2008 I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with that article, because it jumps from "deaths have increased by 12% which isn't that much" to "COVID has had no effect on deaths" to "COVID is a deadly disease and we should take precautions".
I still have 260,000 - 360,000 excess deaths, which is a 10 to 15 percent increase. But it's also important to note that these are the numbers with shutdowns, masks, and general social distancing. We could easily be at 500,000 or 750,000 or 1,000,000 by now without those measures. Would any of those numbers be large enough for you to care about?
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@unapologetic-c9y Well in that case, I'm paraphrasing, based on my view, that there were 480,000 extra deaths last year. Surely you believe that number now, right?
I call your questioning "rhetoric" because you don't seem to have put any effort into answering those questions, and your skepticism seems to only go one way. Apply the same standard to the theory that COVID numbers are inflated.
Their numbers are an aggregate of state data, so either the CDC would have to convince states to publish fake data, or hope that no one does the math and notices an error (an error which would be obvious if numbers were off by a factor of 10). They would have to do the same thing for total death data, which is even harder to fake because while it's relatively easy to misdiagnose someone, it's pretty hard to misclassify someone as alive or dead.
Then you'd need an army of nurses and/or actors to make up stories of how overcrowded the hospitals are.
And if you compare US data to the rest of the world, it's pretty similar. So there would need to be a worldwide effort to boost COVID numbers for......some reason. Iran has a bit more than half the US's deaths per capita and was one of the early hotspots. Why would Iran help the US fake COVID numbers? Why would Israel and Palestine team up to help the cause? Why would Brazil, Poland, and Hungary - three countries with Trump-esque leaders - post even higher per capita death counts than the US's?
And all the people involved in these things would have to keep it secret.
It's just too big of a conspiracy to work. The most successful conspiracy in recent memory is the "evidence" of WMDs in Iraq. It only involved a handful of government officials and was still investigated and proven within a couple of years. A COVID hoax this thorough would require hundreds, maybe thousands, of people to be well coordinated and quiet. The virus actually killing 4 million people worldwide seems like a way more plausible theory.
(Sorry, this got a bit long.)
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@berbandis I'm very sorry about that. Political YouTube is super toxic and I let my snarky side get the better of me there.
So I'd like to start by saying virtually no one in the Bernie camp wants to make all incomes equal, or get close to that. Our current system of taxation and welfare smooths out the Pareto curve, by lowering the top end and raising the bottom end. We just want to smooth it out a bit more.
What value am I basing that off of? I believe that most people are trying their best to do good things. Something like 60% of working age people are either working or actively looking for a job. Most of the others are retired, in school/training, taking care of a loved one, or are disabled or too sick to work. Only a small percentage are unaccounted for. With that in mind, plus the Pareto distribution showing that not everyone can be successful, I don't think anyone deserves to be poor.
Also, treating troubled people with respect tends to have good outcomes. Norway has nice prisons that focus on mental health and rehab, and their recidivism rate is much lower than that of the U.S. Portugal helps drug abusers taper off their drugs and get mental health services, and that's lowered the number of overdose deaths drastically. Poverty increases lots of bad outcomes like crime, drug abuse, and depression. The best way to fix them is to fix the poverty.
As for the top of the income distribution, they're going to be fine either way. Life happiness plateaus once you go above $95,000 in income. So taking a bit more tax from the rich shouldn't have a noticeable effect on their quality of life.
Merit would still be rewarded. CEOs would still make a lot more than their employees, Jeff Bezos would still be insanely rich, etc. In a way, the meritocracy would be improved because the poor and middle class would have more tools to carry out their ideas.
Finally, there's some empirical data that supports this. The happiest countries according to the World Happiness Report are mostly Scandinavian countries. Canada and Australia do pretty well too. Countries with more individualism like the U.S. and U.K. still do fairly well (I think they're both in the top 25), but are disappointing given the resources they have.
Wow, that went long. I don't know if you'll bother reading all this, but I couldn't help myself.
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@berbandis No problem, I'd rather have the precision.
I guess I fundamentally have a problem with the idea that the rich might freak out if they get to keep only $5 million, but when the poor literally can't afford things, we just tell them to suck it up and get a second/third/fourth job. Corporations have been outsourcing anyway; unless we have a $2 minimum wage or let everyone pay zero tax like Amazon, they're going to keep leaving, and I don't think we want to go that far.
As far as the California tax increase goes, the corollary to that is the recent Kansas tax cuts, which decreased their revenue by a ton.
I'm willing to admit I have some disdain for the super rich. The income distribution in the 1960s was actually pretty good. Then corporations lobbied the government to enact anti-union laws, union participation dropped, wages stagnated, and executive pay ballooned. The result is a millennial generation where many members can't afford to have children, or buy a home, or even leave their parents' house. Millennials currently have 3% of the country's wealth. At the same age, Gen X had 6% and Baby Boomers had 21%. The system is broken, and the super rich had a lot to do with it. (Also college debt but that didn't fit well into this paragraph.)
I'll follow that with some questions.
What's your opinion on unions and/or sectoral collective bargaining?
We currently have taxes and welfare. Do you want us to have less, none, or keep what we currently have?
Do you think your mother deserved to be poor because she didn't produce enough? (I don't mean to be rude with that question; I just think having a personal example frames the subject a little differently than talking about hypothetical people.)
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@berbandis I would say for the "poor", I'm thinking of those who fit the definition of lower class. Below 67% of median income, which for a one-person household means below $20,000.
For the "rich", I'm thinking the top 0.1% (about $1,000,000 income). Maaaaybe the top 0.5% (about $500,000 income), though I don't think their taxes need to be much higher. "The top 1%" is a nice shorthand, but the income for the bottom half of the 1% seems reasonable to me.
The "super rich", when I remember to specify, probably means those who have hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth. The "rich" should pay more taxes in my opinion, but they aren't the ones that influence the government. The "super rich" are the ones who tend to have influence with the government, and have more money than someone could reasonably spend.
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I know it's blasphemous to say this in today's America, but I don't think Biden had much to do with the economic problems or the recovery. It's all just a chain reaction from Covid.
Covid crashed economic demand.
Business responded by cutting labor and closing production facilities.
As Covid subsided, people started wanting to buy stuff again, before the workforce and production facilities were ready to supply it all. Demand outpacing supply = high inflation.
Because of America's business culture and lack of collective bargaining, employers didn't raise wages at the same rate prices increased.
Except for new hires, which tended to get higher wages due to the tight labor market and a growing distaste toward employers.
Therefore, as all the economic stats normalized back to the usual trendlines, a lot of people's positions within the economy shifted. People who stayed at their jobs shifted to a lower spot in the economy, which is why they think the economy is bad despite the statistics. People who got new jobs in 2021-22 generally shifted to a higher spot in the economy, but there aren't enough of them to swing the national opinion.
Every step in the chain makes sense from a free market perspective, and anyone who thinks Trump could've handled it any better is either misinformed or lying to themselves.
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@NickHeathcliff I want to mock that grotesque display of bigotry, but frankly I'm glad you didn't make me fight through a bunch of dogwhistles to get there. So......thanks? Lol
You say Western businesses are all about merit. Does that mean you're denying the existence of nepotism? "It's not what you know, it's who you know" is a common sentiment here, and it completely flies in the face of merit-based employment.
The success of Japanese and Chinese Americans is largely based on the fact that immigrants from those countries aren't a representative sample of their populations. The immigrants tend to be more highly educated and more wealthy than the average Chinese or Japanese person, and they're usually given a visa because they have a good tech job lined up in the US. Of course they're unusually successful. They were already unusually successful in their home countries. That's not a race thing, it's just weird sampling.
I'll give you an even better example: India. India is a pretty poor country, yet Indian Americans are one of the highest paid groups of Americans. If we're viewing wealth as a product of race, which stat describes how "good" the race is? If they're smart enough to succeed in America, why is India so poor?
I can do the same thing with black people. Nigerian Americans have a pretty high income. Why aren't they affected by all the problems you named? Do those problems only apply to descendants of American slaves? If so, what ruined their apparently good African genes?
It's not crazy to think there are slight differences between ethnicities, but societal factors and individual living conditions play a way bigger role in people's success. The stuff you're saying is similar to how people defended slavery in the 1800s. It's just a justification for obvious inequalities that you don't want to address.
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@pleasebeinteresting What impresses me most about Biden is his negotiation skills, which is exactly what you need with such a competitive Congress. The slate of bills we got out of 2021-22 was pretty good, and Biden facilitated quite a few of those. He prevented the rail strike and then helped the workers get sick days behind the scenes, and he navigated the debt ceiling crisis and potential shutdown beautifully.
I also respect the hell out of his commitment to the Afghanistan pullout even when it started going south, and his NLRB has been great at cracking down on union busting.
As for Harris, she's there, she's a VP, there's not much to say. I don't think she's incompetent, I just think she's awkward when she speaks.
Most people are just upset at Biden because prices went up, but that was mostly due to free market forces, which is why every other country also had inflation. Covid did lots of crazy stuff to the economy. Of course there was going to be an uncomfortable recovery period.
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@duckhunt1902 Same place everything else comes from: taxes.
Free college is the easiest, it only costs $100 billion to $150 billion per year. If we cut the defense budget by 15-20%, we could pay for free college and still spend more on our military than the world average (as a percentage of GDP). And now that we don't have that pesky Afghanistan war to fight, this kind of cut is very feasible.
Universal basic income - I would leave that one out, honestly. Costs too much. In a more productive future, maybe we'll be able to, but we aren't there yet.
Universal healthcare would probably revolve around a payroll tax. If I remember correctly, Bernie Sanders' proposal was a 4% employee tax on any income over $29,000, and a 7.5% employer tax for any payroll over $1 million. I think the Wall Street speculation tax thing went toward healthcare as well.
It's important that when you ask, "How do we pay for that?" (a valid question), you also ask, "How much do people pay for that right now?"
If I spend $10,000 a year on private health insurance, and upon switching to universal healthcare, I only pay $8,000 in payroll tax, that's an improvement. Money spent is money spent, whether it's a tax or a payment to a private company.
It's also important to note that a lot of countries already do this stuff. Universal healthcare is all over the place. Multiple countries do free college, including Germany, Finland, and Denmark. The UK has government-run hospitals. France has nationalized collective bargaining. Australia has a $15 USD minimum wage. This isn't fanciful nonsense we're spouting. It's policies that work well in other countries, and we think they'd work well here.
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@agoogleuser3808 The numbers were a good idea. Let's do it.
1. I would refute this in a couple ways. First, accept that sometimes you'll have to pay for things that help society in general instead of yourself, because society has blessed you with good income. I pay property taxes that fund a school that I'm not sending any children to, but that's okay. Second, these taxes don't have to be super progressive because most workers already pay for insurance. Put that cost back into your income, slap a payroll tax on it, and you'll barely notice. We can do other stuff like tax capital gains as normal income, make corporations actually pay 21%, do a tiny wealth tax, I don't know. Unless you're in the top 1%, I doubt you'd lose money on this deal.
2. It's just changing the payment model. We'd need more people to process the claims but that's about it. 60 million people already get some form of Medicare.
3. Loaded wording aside, I agree with you on this one. I don't know how helpful the Wall will be, but I'm all for increasing border security and enforcing visa time windows if we're going to add more welfare state stuff.
4. There is a reason no state has done single payer. The top state tax rate is only 13.3%. The top federal rate is 37%, plus payroll taxes. The federal government has way more resources to make it work.
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@kennethturner8290 In a world where ballots are counted randomly, yes. In a world where mail-in ballots can't start being counted until Election Day, and one party's politicians tell their voters not to vote by mail, this kind of thing is going to happen.
Look at Florida, Ohio, and Arizona. All of them allowed the counting of mail-in ballots weeks before Election Day, and they all finished counting pretty quickly. Speaking of Arizona, you really undermine your argument when Biden was ahead of Trump the whole night in Arizona and you still make fraud claims against them. Watching Arizona Trumpers chant "count the votes" while other states' Trumpers chanted "stop the count" was comedy gold.
Anyway, let's look at states that didn't do this. Pennsylvania Republicans actively blocked legislation to allow early counting. Michigan allowed one extra day. And Wisconsin "conveniently" forgot to do this, despite being pressured by various election clerks and even Republican Senator Ron Johnson (who I insult a lot but did a good job in this instance).
And sure enough, they took longer to count, especially Michigan and Pennsylvania. Now why would these Republican legislatures not enact these laws that would resolve the issue of votes being counted long after Election Day? Could it be because they wanted Trump to be ahead on election night so they could sow doubt about the result of the election? Because outside of that, it doesn't make any sense.
(Note for transparency: I didn't mention Georgia because their results are harder to argue the validity of, and weren't necessary for Biden to win anyway.)
As for 2016, the margins weren't overwhelming. Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were all within 1%. Nevada, Minnesota, and Maine were Clinton states with a margin of less than 3%. But no one claimed fraud in any of those, because Trump won the election. Weird.
And to loop back to the questions from my previous reply, if what you're saying happened did happen, we would see 1) a higher increase in turnout compared to the average county, or 2) a big change in the percentage of votes for one candidate compared to 2016 (see Miami-Dade County). The Atlanta area counties have both of these to a small degree, which is why I can't confidently say they're good. But Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Phoenix don't show these traits at all. Their results would be weirder if you took away a bunch of Biden votes.
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Far right authoritarian nationalism centered around the idea of a national rebirth. There are a lot of variations in the definition but those qualities are pretty universal.
Far right? I would say the Muslim travel ban, the wide array of attacks on transgender people, and separating migrant families are very right wing.
Authoritarian? Constantly claiming election fraud, firing/voting out people who aren't completely loyal to Trump, arguing that Trump should be able to steal top secret documents because he's Trump, and attacking the media and education in general would count as authoritarian.
Nationalist? Another word that's hard to define, but Republicans' commitment to the pro-America aesthetic is pretty blatant. There are also quite a few ways that Republicans try to form a national identity - calling America a Christian nation, wanting everyone to speak English, criticizing education that paints America in a bad light. Nationalism isn't a bad thing on its own. But Republicans definitely are nationalist.
Centered around the idea of a national rebirth? The party's main slogan is Make America Great Again. That couldn't fit more perfectly.
And what you call Democratic fascism tends to just be people exercising their free speech to call out Republican bigotry, or companies exercising their freedom to not platform certain people. That's not what fascism is.
Finally, I'll leave you with three common Republican phrases that are suspiciously similar to common Nazi phrases.
Fake news = Lügenpresse
Cultural Marxism = Cultural Bolshevism
Groomer = Jugendverführer/jugendverderber
If there was just one, it would be a stretch to compare them. But three? That's a bit concerning.
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The 2019-2020 flu season had between 24,000 and 62,000 deaths.
COVID deaths are not "way lower". I assume you're talking about the comorbidities thing. If you're alive with a pre-existing condition, and then you get COVID and die, you were killed by COVID. It doesn't magically not count. Most flu deaths also happen to old and immunocompromised people, and we still count all of those.
Finally, the total number of deaths since February 1st, from all causes, is about 250,000 more than we'd expect in a normal year. If COVID isn't the reason, where are all these deaths coming from?
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@jimohara Because if there was an overcount, deaths from other causes would have dropped significantly, and the number of excess deaths overall would be smaller than the number of Covid deaths. Neither of those things happened.
From 2019 to 2020, suicides went down by 1,500 and chronic respiratory disease deaths went down by 4,000. Everything else stayed the same or went up.
Overall, there were 529,000 more deaths in 2020 than 2019, and there were 351,000 official Covid deaths. So it's safe to assume that all of those Covid deaths were actual excess deaths, not just deaths that would've happened anyway.
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@MajiMarji That sounds like the answer of someone who's making things up.
I checked the CDC Wonder database, as a responsible Numbers Guy. The kindest interpretation I can give is that deaths from "Heart failure, unspecified" went up 10% after 2020. But heart failure is usually a slow, gradual process, which isn't what you're describing. You're thinking of cardiac arrest, which is a sudden event. Also, I would not call a 10% jump "extreme", and the claim that it's caused by the vaccines is tenuous at best.
For two more common causes of death, "Cardiac arrest, unspecified" and "Congestive heart failure", there was no such jump. Instead, they peaked during the winter Covid spikes and were at normal levels the rest of the year.
So no, there's no proof that extreme numbers of people are randomly dropping dead from heart problems.
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50% of Americans pay little to no federal income tax. A lot of them do still pay payroll taxes, state income tax, and sales tax.
And as Kyle said, so many people don't pay federal income taxes because they can't afford to pay federal income taxes. This is the result of 40 years of neoliberal politicians killing unions, stagnating wages, allowing wage theft, and funneling all of the wealth to the top 1%. You end up with a large underclass that can't afford anything past the essentials. If we promoted policies that pushed more people up to the middle class, we'd have plenty of people to tax.
If you want immediate budget solutions, I have a few ideas:
1. Undo the Bush, Obama, and Trump tax cuts. Their nominal value adds up to something like $5T over 10 years, so in 2022 that should be worth at least $600B a year.
2. Remove the cap for Social Security taxable income. Right now 16% of all income is above this cap and not taxed. Assuming $20T in total income, that means $3.2T of untaxed income. Taxed at a combined 12.4%, that would give us around $400B of extra revenue.
3. Increase IRS funding so they can properly go after wealthy tax dodgers. A figure I saw for the amount of dodged taxes was something like $381B. I think we could net $50B with this strategy.
4. Audit the defense budget. Look for where our money is used on unnecessary weapons, ridiculous projects, executive bonuses, etc, and stop spending money there. I'm sure we could tighten the budget by $50B.
Those four actions save us $1.1T a year, which pretty much fixes the deficit, in a way that doesn't hurt poor people or destroy SS/Medicare. But Rick Scott doesn't want to do these things, because it loses money for his real constituents (wealthy donors). He would rather drive poor people into even worse poverty.
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@trumpjr3940 That's a lot of questions. And tangential statements. Let's see what I can get through.
First of all, it's funny that you say "Democrats want to change the way people vote" as if Republicans haven't introduced new voting restriction bills in like 20 states.
But to answer your question, we want to make it as easy as possible for qualified voters to vote. The Constitution says you're allowed to vote if you're a citizen and at least 18 years old. You aren't supposed to have to jump through hoops to exercise that right. The 66% turnout from 2020 isn't even that good compared to other first world countries or historical US elections. We like our platform and aren't afraid of more people voting. Maybe you should ask yourself why Republicans only want to restrict voting.
Was there suppression in 2020? Most likely. It always happens to some degree, but it's too ambiguous to get that worked up over.
Voter ID isn't racist, unless you do it the way NC did in 2013 (they chose the allowed ID types based on what black people were less likely to have, so much so that it was struck down in court).
And no, non-citizens shouldn't be allowed to vote. I think that's a fair restriction.
Those Arizona audits - are you referring to the ones that said Joe Biden won the state? You cite all these "irregularities" but you have no proof that there were enough fraudulent votes to swing the election from Trump to Biden. You're just sore losers and/or don't realize that much of the country despises Trump.
And I live in a state that's a great example of Republican gerrymandering - Wisconsin. In 2018, Democrats got 53% of House votes, yet Republicans got 5 of our 8 seats, as well as 62% of the state assembly. In 2020, Republicans won 51% of the House votes, and got that same oversized portion of seats. Our majority party isn't determined by the voters, it's determined by who drew the maps in 2010.
The Republican Party had a whole plot to gerrymander swing states in 2010, called REDMAP. It's not even speculation, we know they did it. They got control of the House in 2012 despite getting fewer votes than Democrats, and I imagine 2022 is going to look a lot like that.
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But when you ignore cause of death completely, we've still had about 300,000 more deaths this year than expected. Have heart disease, diabetes, etc. suddenly become more deadly this year? Or is it because of this new virus that everyone says is killing these people?
Regarding the comorbidities, some of the comorbidities are things caused by COVID. For example, if you get COVID, it causes pneumonia, and you die, you'll have both COVID and pneumonia listed as causes of death. Saying that's not a COVID death would be 100% incorrect.
Also, the list of comorbidities is way longer than you would think, and it includes really common stuff like diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. The majority of Americans have a pre-existing condition, so acting like these people don't count is ridiculous.
Furthermore, we don't count any other kind of death this way. We don't ignore stroke victims with high blood pressure, or flu victims with existing lung damage. If you get COVID and it kills you, that counts as a COVID death.
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@sinister9111 You're conflating density with Democratic governance.
Deaths per capita have a 0.73 correlation with state density, a 0.62 correlation with the density of the state's largest city, and only a 0.19 correlation with having a Democratic legislature.
Furthermore, blue states are way denser than red states. The average state with a Dem legislature has a density of 361 people per square mile. The average state with a GOP legislature has a density of 112 people per square mile. The 7 densest states are blue states. So it stands to reason that blue states would have more deaths.
If you do linear regression to predict deaths per capita, using state density and whether or not the legislature is Democratic, it shows that having a Dem legislature reduces deaths per capita by 139 per million people.
(Yes, I have an Excel spreadsheet with coronavirus data. Don't judge me lol.)
As for the death rate, a disease with a fairly low fatality rate that's very contagious is still going to kill a lot of people. 200,000 American deaths in a year is way more than any other communicable disease causes.
The often-cited comorbidity stat is flawed in a few ways:
1. Some of them are things caused by COVID. For example, if the COVID leads to pneumonia, or it clots your blood too much and causes a stroke, the pneumonia/stroke is counted as a comorbidity.
2. The list of possible comorbidities is really long.
3. That list includes hypertension, diabetes, and obesity, which basically means we're talking about half or more of the American population. People have comorbidities. So it doesn't make sense to treat those as less relevant deaths.
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Joe Biden Beat The Socialist It brings a smile to my face to watch you people try to explain that Obama was simultaneously too strong and too weak on illegal immigration.
That 70% that Trump reduced illegal immigration by......70% in terms of what? The only stat I found was border apprehensions, which plummeted in the first few months of COVID, but by September, the monthly numbers were outpacing 2019, which itself had a lot of apprehensions.
Either way, illegal immigrants are often considered to be a net benefit to the economy. If they do take jobs for very low pay, that benefits citizen-owned businesses, and usually those are jobs that citizens don't want to do anyway. They also increase the number of customers in the economy, and a lot of the time, they pay payroll taxes.
Personally, I'd like to give them all residency and bring them into the same system as everyone else. But to blame lower wages on illegal immigrants and not even mention skyrocketing executive pay or anti-union laws means you've either drunk the corporate Republican Kool-Aid, or Hispanic people just make you upset.
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@CaptainBongMan420 I'm happy for you but there's a lot of the world that isn't your circle of acquaintances.
Compared to a normal year, COVID would be the 6th biggest killer of 25-34 year olds, the 5th biggest killer of 35-44 year olds, the 4th biggest killer of 45-54 year olds, and the 3rd biggest killer of 55-64 year olds.
COVID mostly kills old people because in a country with a 78 year life expectancy, the people who die of anything are mostly old. Unless you're suggesting some kind of overall old person genocide, that argument is moot.
And the economy started crashing on February 20th, almost a full month before the first state stay-at-home order. It may surprise you to find out that when there's a major pandemic going around, people are less willing to go out and spend money, regardless of whether or not the government acknowledges said pandemic. The economy wasn't going to be magically saved by forgoing shutdowns.
Even if you dispute all of that (you shouldn't), none of what you said negates my original point. Doing less to fight the pandemic would result in more people dying, which would make Trump look even worse.
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@nneely613 Yeah, I saw that spike for Michigan. What are you guys doing over there???
Is the B117 variant really that nasty? Or is it from reopening a bunch of places this year?
As far as lockdowns go, it's not that they're ineffective, it's that they come with a lot of negative consequences. Michigan's stay at home order lasted from late March to mid-June, which corresponds with a dropoff in cases. That's why cases were so low in June. But without subsidizing people's wages, you can't keep that kind of order in place for very long.
Apart from that, I have no objections. I appreciate you making claims that actually checked out when I went to the source. The internet has been a cesspool of misinformation lately, so this was a nice change of pace.
What I would really like is for Biden to state a goal at which the pandemic is "over". (I would say once the 7-day average deaths are below 100, and stay below 200 after that. That lines up nicely with the average and bad recent flu seasons - 36,000 and 61,000 in a year. But I don't consult with epidemiologists so they might have something better.)
We're getting kinda close. But it's been a year, we're exhausted and cranky and impatient, so we could use a good pep talk to get us over the finish line.
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Yes, though the WSJ study was entirely made up of people who had Covid. The study you mentioned only had 7,000 people that got Covid. Still pretty big, but not 200,000.
The Brazil study was also not blind in any way. People got to choose if they wanted ivermectin or not, the doctors knew who had taken it, and there was no placebo involved. Is that significant enough to have changed the results? I don't think so. But it's something to consider.
Also, that study literally says ivermectin should not be used as a substitute for the vaccines, just as a supplement. Which defeats conservatives' entire purpose of promoting ivermectin.
As far as I can tell, ivermectin is a fairly effective prophylactic and treatment, but it's suboptimal in both cases. You're way better off getting vaccinated.
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You're extremely wrong on all of these points.
First of all, the vote counts in the Democratic primaries were valid. The DNC merely influenced the elections. Furthermore, they can legally nominate whoever they want. Primary elections are not the same as general elections.
And the notion that Biden is worse than Trump is absurd. Biden isn't undermining the results of a fair election, he's not in favor of letting coronavirus rip through the country, he can condemn political violence on his side without tons of caveats and without immediately shifting blame to the other side, he isn't telling militia groups to "stand by", he isn't trying to take away people's health insurance, he isn't favoring Big Oil over the health of the planet, he's cool with taxing the rich, etc, etc.
I understand hating the Democratic Party, but you have to have the proper perspective. They're still way better than Republicans.
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@clairegoop946 The vaccine rollout was excellent, and Biden got us out of Afghanistan because Trump was too scared to do it himself. In his first year, Biden exited Afghanistan. In Trump's first year, he dropped the Mother of All Bombs of Afghanistan.
I assume when you say "every single time" a Democrat comes into office, you mean the last two times. As far as I can tell, gas prices were fine in Clinton's first year.
As for Obama and Biden, it happened because Republican Presidents keep handing depressed economies to their Democratic counterparts and the recoveries happen under Democrats.
Take 2008, Bush's last year, in which gas prices were over $3 for most of the year, and then dropped below $2 near the end of the year when the stock market crashed. Gas prices wouldn't hit $3 again until December 2010. The "skyrocketing" gas prices when Obama took office were literally just gas prices returning to their pre-crash levels.
And when Biden took office, people weren't traveling much because Covid was killing 3,000 people a day. And lower demand for gas means lower prices. Once Covid started dying down, people traveled more, and prices went up. It's simple economics I know you understand, but you conveniently ignore it if it conflicts with your political biases.
And it's funny how you whine about the mainstream media smearing Trump when the most watched cable news network constantly defends Trump while smearing Biden. Not to mention Newsmax, OAN, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, etc. There's an entire industry around criticizing Democrats. Which is fine, because free speech, but don't act like that's not a thing.
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@imrino2918 First of all, as someone who's not even that far left, I can tell you that CNN doesn't come close to representing the far left. I would classify MSNBC not as far left but solidly left. CNN is more neoliberal.
Secondly, do you have any proof that Democrats control CNN, or are you just complaining about their bias?
Thirdly, if you think Democrats control CNN, are you willing to say that Republicans control Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN?
And fourthly, when your ideology is anti-science, anti-education, and thinks fact checking = lies, is it that surprising that news channels seem to have a liberal bias? You guys take the most ridiculous stances and then complain that people aren't respecting your ridiculous stances.
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I forget which channel I heard this on, but someone was describing how when we first got photos of Mars, it looked like there were roads on the surface, so people started having nightmares about Martians and it became the big scary sci-fi trope of its time. Then we got better photos and figured out it was just old riverbeds or dirt patterns or something. Then people started worrying about aliens from Venus. Then we figured out Venus was uninhabitable, and that went away too.
Which is to say, people are afraid of new things. I understand it from a biological standpoint - new things may or may not kill you, so it's beneficial to be alert around them. But like many biological human responses, it doesn't make as much sense in a world that's pretty well controlled.
So far, AI has been an overwhelmingly good thing, and frankly much more benevolent than our human leaders. There's no reason to think that won't continue.
Just remember to be courteous to your AI and give it a compliment every now and then, lol.
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How much of your issue with the left has to do with who they vote for though? Congress didn't create BLM, or the pride cereal, or minorities in TV and movies. And the Republican Congress in 2017/18 did nothing to stop those things. Your beef is with the culture at large. Taking voting rights away doesn't fix that.
Republicans are just using your cultural outrage to get your vote, so they can block Democratic proposals that you probably support, like ending gerrymandering, ending corporate campaign funding, removing tax loopholes, raising taxes on the rich, breaking up big tech companies, legalizing cannabis, making healthcare more affordable, and fighting climate change.
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@markberns5804 If you want a serious answer to that, it's media bias.
Your media has trained you to think everything is the worst thing ever. (To be fair, ours wasn't great during Trump's presidency.) Inflation, high gas prices, the border, military stuff - these are pretty common US issues, not the destruction of the country.
And a lot of it is just the effects of recovering from a pandemic. 2020 looked weird as hell. It makes sense that the 2021 recovery would also look weird as hell.
Take the border. The 2019 fiscal year had about 980,000 border encounters. Let's assume that without the pandemic, there would have 1,000,000 in 2020. What we actually got was 460,000. If we assume 1,000,000 new people wanted to cross the border in 2021 and add in the missing encounters from 2020, we get 1.54 million. The exact number of encounters we've had in 2021, with one month left in the fiscal year. Easily explained. 2020 created a backlog of border crossers and we're working through that backlog now.
How about inflation? The pandemic started with a period of deflation and then near-zero inflation as things locked down. There was always going to be an inflationary period as things opened back up, and it's already leveling out. Month-to-month inflation has gone from 0.9% in June to 0.5% in July to 0.2% in August. Since the pre-pandemic peak in February 2020, the CPI has gone up 5.8%, or 3.8% annually. A little high, sure, but definitely not anything to panic over.
Gas prices are more of a perspective issue. The national average has settled in just below $3.20. That's certainly higher than the $2.95 peak during Trump's presidency. But before the 2014 oil price drop, we routinely had gas prices in the high 3's. These are just the machinations of the oil market. It's not like Biden has a Gas Prices lever that he's pushing up higher to make you suffer.
As for Afghanistan, Biden is just executing the exit plan that Trump set in motion. Now you guys are saying we should've stayed in, and that we should gotten more Afghanis out, except those are refugees which are bad and will do terrorism. I don't know what you guys want, other than a reason to criticize Biden. For what it's worth, I've heard we got a ton of Afghanis out after the Kabul terrorist attack. I don't know how true that is, but it wouldn't surprise me if the right wing media never updated their story.
The bottom line is that Trump had 4 years to get out of Afghanistan, didn't do it, and passed the buck to the next guy. Biden pulled us out in his first year and committed to it.
Now the vaccines. If they're unsafe, why is Trump asking people to take them? Why did he constantly take credit for how fast they were developed? Why is every governor vaccinated, including DeSantis and Abbott?
The Supreme Court has ruled that vaccine mandates are constitutional, in the Jacobson v. Massachusetts case in 1905. And the only real mandate is for federal workers and healthcare workers. Most employees have the option of weekly testing or have no requirement at all.
And if you don't want division, why do you support a former President who constantly criticizes "blue states" and "Democrat-run cities", and argued that the 2020 election was fraudulent with no proof 7 months before it even happened? Division is what Trump does. The only reason vaccines are divisive is that Trump played into the Covid hoax nonsense and right-wing media followed suit. If you guys don't want division, quit starting fights at school board meetings and quit trying to overthrow the President the American people chose.
Sorry for the long screed. You seemed genuinely baffled by my line of thought so I wanted to lay it out in detail. Respond to as much or as little as you want.
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@THEEKANYEW3ST Even by your math, Covid is worse.
The worst year of polio in the US had 7,000 deaths. Adjusting for population, that would be 23,000 deaths. 23,000 x 80 years of lost life = 1.84 million years.
Covid has killed 465,000 people in the US in 2021. 465,000 x 5 years of lost life = 2.325 million years. And there are plenty of Covid deaths among people in their 50s and 60s. The average number of years lost from Covid deaths is probably a lot higher than 5.
You're not following the science. You're making your decision politically, and picking and choosing facts that support your argument. Which is leading to some crazy beliefs, like old people's lives not mattering, or preferring no protection over some protection. And the irony is that by refusing to take measures against the pandemic, you're just prolonging it for yourself and the rest of us. So thanks for that.
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Some math for the people:
The best estimate I could find for how much money a billionaire spends per year is $45 million. With about 600 billionaires in the US, that means billionaires' consumer spending is $27 billion per year, or 0.2% of all US consumer spending.
But what about their investments and corporations? If you remove the entire investment and export sections of the US GDP (which is way more extreme than what would happen), you're still left with a GDP per capita of $40,136. That's just below France, the UK, Japan, and New Zealand. And it's higher than Italy, South Korea and Spain.
Finally, income taxes. In 2015, the top 0.001 percent of filers (including all billionaires and about 800 ultra millionaires) were responsible for just $51 billion, or 3.5%, of income tax revenue.
So while letting billionaires leave sounds scary, it seems like we would be just fine if that happened. Ordinary people are the real drivers of our economy.
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@jschrauwen Trump signed over $3 trillion of Covid relief, and his administration printed $2 trillion on top of that to balance the markets.
Biden signed $1.9 trillion in Covid relief, and a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill spread over 10 years.
You're saying that the Trump money didn't affect inflation, but the Biden money did? That's absurd.
Also, I see you've fallen for the recent dishonest Fox News graphic. Biden would have lost 3 million people from the workforce......if he was President in 2020. The Trump number they used was from December 2019 (164,579,000). But by December 2020, when Trump was still President, there were 4 million fewer people in the labor force (160,567,000). The labor force in October 2021 was 161,458,000. Which means the labor force has increased by 891,000 during Biden's term.
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@Zero-ef4sc Looks like I missed a lot of fun lol. Allow me to make this thread even more disjointed and confusing.
If we were living in a social democracy utopia where you could deliver the baby for free, pawn them off on the foster care system, and know they'd have a loving home and financial support, I'd be more inclined to agree with you. But the reality is we're nowhere near that, and pre-emptively banning abortion in case things get better doesn't make sense.
And regarding the slavery argument you made to someone else, there is at least one example of us thinking we were making an enlighted moral decision, only to realize we had it right the first time: Prohibition. In a theoretical world, we were stopping alcohol consumption and everything would be amazing. In reality, overall consumption may have gone down, but it introduced a new set of risks with people going to the black market or DIY'ing their own alcohol, and the costs of that outweighed the benefits. Abortions have a similar dynamic. When people can't get safe, legal abortions, a lot of them opt for unsafe abortions. Would that cancel out all the gains of preventing official abortions? I have no idea. But it's something to consider.
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@KSealedvsK Yeah, they've been pulling way more stuff in the last few months. I'm a big fan of links, but I've cut down on them almost completely because I feel like they're a waste of time now. If you give me a page title and the author/organization/other identifying information, I should be able to find it.
I'll address the part that came through at least. I understand how one could argue over the definition of a Covid death, but the total death count isn't that kind of thing. A death is a death. It's very clearly defined. I find it extremely unlikely that the CDC would just overhaul their entire method to overcount total deaths by 500,000. And even if you find it likely, who else has a reputable count of US deaths?
Secondly, the CDC data is compiled from state data. If Covid wasn't real or was wildly overstated, do you think states like Florida, Texas, and Mississippi would be reporting normal looking data? The two highest states in deaths per capita are Mississippi and Alabama. Are you suggesting that their Republican governments are in on the conspiracy?
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@Chris-oz9qx When you call them failed lockdowns, yet Thailand has very few COVID deaths, I think it's important to point out how those statements clash.
But to your point, I can only speak for the US, but we have a societal guideline for how many deaths are acceptable. Influenza is the deadliest infectious disease we have, with about 36,000 deaths per year. A recent bad flu season had 61,000 deaths. Neither of those numbers seemed to bother us, so that's what we should be aiming for.
I would say we keep going until deaths go under 100 per day (36,500 per year). Then open everything up, and only start implementing safety measures if it goes above 200 per day.
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@jacoblesperance2115 As an American, I can't speak to the measures that Canada's taking. Maybe they're excessive. But I assume those measures are working well, since Canada's deaths per capita are much lower than the US's. Same with Japan. Their numbers are low because they took COVID seriously. Doing well with precautionary measures in place is not a reason to stop precautionary measures.
Also, old and unhealthy people are already protecting themselves. It's not like we've been forgetting to do that. COVID is just very spready. And if you look at the percentage of COVID deaths that are age 65 or older, COVID is right in line with other common causes of death (i.e. heart disease, stroke, chronic respiratory diseases, influenza/pneumonia). In first world countries, most deaths are old people. So comparing COVID deaths of younger people to total deaths of all people is statistically irresponsible.
Finally, you can't only look at fatality rate because the prevalence of a disease matters as well. That's why we aren't constantly freaking out about Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Death counts are a good way to combine both factors. And at least in the US, our death counts are getting really bad and we need to do more.
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@tinasmith1391 I was one of the 80 million that voted for Biden, and I haven't regretted it for a second. And no, I didn't expect much from him. We got a Covid relief package, a good vaccine rollout, a very corporate infrastructure bill, and one less war. I'll take it.
At the very least, Biden isn't malignant to the country itself like Trump is. There aren't historians warning us about Biden being authoritarian or causing democratic backsliding. And that distinction matters, especially as a swing state voter.
Also, there's a big difference between "I don't believe 2020 had the highest turnout" and "2020 had the lowest turnout". You just straight up said the latter, with no real justification, just your feeling that it was low. Where did you hear that it was the lowest turnout ever? How many "real" votes were there?
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As someone who is not Kyle but likes interacting with reasonable YouTube commenters...
I think your characterization of Trump supporters' opposition to the election is incorrect. Most of their comments include things like "the election was stolen" or "the election was fraudulent" or "Trump won the election". This is not the same as what you said. If there weren't enough issues to overturn the election, then we can shore up this stuff over the next two years. There's no need for Trump to get all bent out of shape right now.
As for the lawsuits, I just ran into an article listing all the Trump election lawsuits. I haven't dug into it but it looks well-sourced.
https://businessinsider.com/trump-campaign-lawsuits-election-results-2020-11
I'm guessing most Trump supporters couldn't name 90% of the accomplishments you listed. At most, you're getting First Step Act, USMCA, tariffs, and peace deals. I see Trump's appeal as being mainly cultural, for people who see attempts to improve the lives of blacks, Hispanics, LGBTQ, etc. as attacks on their own lives. In a society (including establishment Republicans) that seems to be catering to everyone except them, Trump is the only one that voices their concerns.
I'm not saying that's every Trump voter. There are plenty who are just Republicans that want lower taxes, are against abortion, and stuff like that. But the people who are extra passionate about Trump seem to be fueled by resentment of "PC culture" taking away their value in society. Or at least that's how I see it.
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@DarlingDaintyfoot I can't speak for every Democrat, but my feelings about the election challengers can be summarized as, "What more do you want?" We had a recount in Wisconsin. We had a recount by hand in Georgia. I assume Pennsylvania and Michigan did a recount and/or audit. The Trump team has had dozens of court cases to try to prove the claims of voter fraud. How much more do people need to feel good about the election?
Crying fraud is what Trump does. He did it in 2016 because he couldn't handle losing the popular vote. He set up a voter fraud commission that disbanded because it couldn't find widespread fraud. He called for Florida to stop counting votes in Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis's races. And he spent 3 or 4 months before this election saying it would be fraudulent, and then did nothing to stop it. He wasn't cheated; he's just a sore loser.
Wayne County and Philadelphia County leaned more toward Trump than in the 2016 election, and had a smaller bump in turnout than the nation as a whole. They were net wins for Trump. If those counties had massive fraud, the results wouldn't look like that. In fact, the counties with the biggest deviations from 2016 (Miami-Dade and a handful of Texas counties in the Rio Grande Valley) moved toward Trump. Biden just made small gains in more counties than Trump and got a nice boost from suburban/wealthy counties. There are no irregularities in the county results that suggest a massive fraud campaign. Republicans are welcome to be dicks to Biden for the next 4 years like we were to Trump, but they should at least acknowledge that Biden is who the people chose to be their President.
Regarding Trump's stance on minorities and why a racist would support him, I've found that he's very good at playing both sides of issues and letting people interpret it how they want to. For example, coronavirus. He calls it a Democrat hoax, just the flu, etc. but also brags about saving millions of lives with the China travel ban. On race, he'll talk about low black and Hispanic unemployment and denounce white supremacy, but then talk about Mexico sending us rapists and criminals, or ban travel from a set of conveniently Muslim countries, or tell four minority Congresswomen to go fix their own countries even though three of them were born in the U.S.
When Trump says "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by, but we really need to do something about Antifa" and so on, right wing militia groups and white supremacist groups see that as support. Just like they did when he said there were "very fine people on both sides" of the Charlottesville incident. Because the societal default is just to say that the white supremacists are bad. I see Trump tepidly denounce white supremacy but spend minutes at a time raging against Antifa and BLM, and it kinda makes me think he's on the side of white supremacists. Or at the very least, he wants their votes more than he wants to denounce racism.
Again, I can't speak for every Democrat, but personally I'm happy he'll be gone because of how divisive he is. A normal President wouldn't turn a global pandemic into a partisan issue. Or protests over police violence. Or the sanctity of our elections. I don't know if we can handle being this divided for another 4 years. We might be anyway. (Especially when people like me call the President a racist and a sore loser. 😉) But I'm hoping it'll help to have a President who doesn't actively turn people against each other.
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Lol, 30 judges are all corrupt? Even the ones nominated by Trump? That's insane.
There are no outliers in the county results that suggest fraud. The votes were just counted in a weird order.
Trump has been telegraphing this plan for like 4 months. Convince Republicans to vote in person, have Republican state legislatures block laws that would allow states to start counting mail ballots early, run up a big lead with the in-person votes, and try to discredit the valid mail-in votes that get counted in the following days.
Don't you think it's weird that Trump would call an election fraudulent before it even started, and then not do anything to prevent the fraud? Don't you think it's weird that WI, MI, PA, and GA couldn't start counting mail ballots early, because it would allegedly increase fraud, but FL was allowed to and Republicans had no problem with it?
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@whyamimrpink78 I love how you dismissed the CDC's numbers and then immediately used a CDC statistic. Good stuff.
But if you want to split the blame (something no one has ever done when talking about how many deaths are caused by something), then let's do that. Now we have a significant increase in deaths from diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and dementia. Which would also be something to worry about, no?
That's the beauty of excess deaths. It doesn't care what you blame the deaths on. It just says, "254,000 more people have died than what would usually happen." Given that the biggest change this year has been the presence of COVID, that's probably the thing we need to address to fix the rise in deaths.
And by "relatively" healthy, I'm referring to people with diseases that aren't immediately life threatening or can be managed without much effort.
Most people with obesity, diabetes, or hypertension live for decades with those conditions. So it's ridiculous to discount COVID deaths in people with these conditions, because most of them would have lived through the year (and likely many years) if they hadn't gotten COVID. Which, again, is what the excess death stat is. Deaths that weren't going to happen.
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@whyamimrpink78 Haven't we known for a while that underlying conditions played a big part in COVID deaths? The CDC just had a nice new chunk of data and released some tables about it. The 6% thing wasn't a big revelation; it was just a fun fact above the comorbidities table. I don't know what you even mean by "adjust for the deaths". And there are a shit ton of comorbidities listed, with associated ICD-10 codes. It's very specific. Check it out (it's Table 3):
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm?fbclid=IwAR3-wrg3tTKK5-9tOHPGAHWFVO3DfslkJ0KsDEPQpWmPbKtp6EsoVV2Qs1Q
It's a lot harder to find suicide and overdose deaths; these numbers usually take a year or two to get released. In a normal year, there are about 40,000 total gun deaths, 25,000 non-gun suicides, and 72,000 overdose deaths. I found a stat where homicides increased by 24% and one where overdose deaths increased by 13%. If we make it a nice, simple 25% increase all around, we get 34,250 for a full year, or about 20,000 from February 1 to early September. That's a significant number, but it also doesn't put much of a dent in 254,000.
I ignored your nursing home stat because while it may be relevant to discussing the official COVID death count, it means nothing when talking about excess deaths. The people who were already going to die aren't in that count.
As for comorbidities, it sounds to me like you don't think the deaths of high-risk people count, which is a weird thing we never do when talking about deaths. I've never heard anyone say, "140,000 people die from strokes every year, but most of them had heart disease so it's really like 20,000." If you're alive, get COVID, don't recover, and then die, that's a death caused by COVID, plain and simple. What else would you say is responsible for 254,000 excess deaths?
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@eiyukabe Then there's no good explanation for you thinking the lab leak theory has been confirmed.
Covid isn't the most contagious disease we know of. Measles has a much higher R0, and mumps and pertussis also have an R0 equal to or greater than that of the delta variant. We're only able to control them because of a 90+ percent vaccination rate. And we only managed that after centuries of these viruses existing and being studied.
I'm not sure what you're implying with the deer thing. Are you suggesting the virus originated in the US? Are you implying that China infected our deer? Covid's been here for a while. It only takes one encounter to introduce it to a new species. And given that Covid doesn't harm the deer, they roam all over the place, and they don't have any kind of quarantining practices, it's not crazy that a chunk of the deer population has gotten infected. Unusual, but not crazy.
As for the alleged Chinese cover-up, the first cases of Covid are thought to have happened in November 2019. It was reported to the public on December 31, with only 27 confirmed cases. If Covid is as contagious and elusive as you say it is, how do you expect China to have discovered it, distinguished it from normal colds and flus, determined its severity, and prevented its escape within two months? Or even six months? There was no way of stopping it from getting to other countries. Blaming China is just a way to feel like someone had control over things, and to some degree an excuse for the US's subpar handling of the virus. Instead of crying about China, maybe we should have done extensive contact tracing and targeted quarantines like Taiwan did.
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Functionally, they're quite different. In 2016, there were 3 blue states on Trump's side of the chart - North Carolina, Florida, and Nevada.
In 2020, North Carolina and Florida are there again, but Nevada's been replaced by Arizona, Georgia, and Ohio. That's 39 more electoral votes leaning toward Biden.
In 2016, Trump won by less than 1% in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and by 1.2% in Florida. To win in 2020, he'll have to eke out 3 of those states again, while not losing any other states he won in 2016, overcoming an even larger poll deficit than last time, by way of a completely new type of polling error because the pollsters fixed their error from 2016.
Anything is possible in 2020, but that's an insanely difficult path to re-election.
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The 2.2 million death projection was assuming we did literally nothing about COVID. The most common one was 100,000 to 200,000 deaths. I remember 60,000 being touted a lot too.
And David shows the comparison graph all the time. If you look at Canada, Australia, Spain, France, Italy, etc, some of them hada big early wave, but have gotten their cases and deaths very low. Meanwhile, the U.S. was on the right track but got bored halfway through, and now we're hovering at a not-small rate of death.
Trump fought with the governors more than supporting them, constantly looking for reasons not to send PPE to New York, for example. Jared Kushner's "This is the federal stockpile, not the states' stockpile" is a personal favorite. The governors deserve all the credit for the drop in cases and deaths that we did have.
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@TheMoveFighter Those are just Republican buzzwords, not actual Biden policies.
Border Patrol recorded over 2 million apprehensions in calendar year 2021, which is far more than any year of Trump's presidency. Legal immigration went up a bit in 2021 but is still way below pre-pandemic levels. Biden's border is just as stingy as Trump's.
Biden supports way less spending on renewable energy than proponents of a Green New Deal, and I don't think any of that spending has even been passed. And I question how promoting clean, renewable energy doesn't make sense to you as a policy. It seems pretty reasonable to me.
As for military decisions, which ones do you have a problem with? I understand the Afghanistan pullout was sloppy, but at least Biden did it. Trump talks a big game, but if he thinks he could've done any better, why didn't he? He had 4 years to pull us out, but he was too scared to.
And Trump's rhetoric about showing strength to Russia suggests Trump is in favor of actual war. Most Americans don't want to be in another war, and Biden's been doing everything he can to keep our troops out of Ukraine. I think his handling of the situation has been excellent.
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@sheraldhill2728 All the Nordic countries, Netherlands, Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#2019_report
The idea of the U.S. supporting upward mobility is a relic of the Gilded Age and post-Depression era. Today, countries like Finland, Denmark, and Canada have way more mobility than the U.S. Not in a way that creates billionaires, but if you're looking to move from poverty to the middle or upper class, it's much easier in Finland/Denmark/Canada.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_United_States#Comparisons_with_other_countries
As for the more education/work argument, it ignores the fact that when one person moves to a better job, someone else has to fill the previous job. Even if everyone got super educated, some of those people would still have to do the low paying jobs. It's a systemic issue, not an individual one. The best way to help those people is to make it suck less to have those jobs, because they're necessary for our society to function properly. Plus happy, healthy people will do those jobs way better than stressed people who work multiple jobs.
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@brandondaniels3604 Gave 'em an extra $600 per week in unemployment payments. It was a good stimulus. But it did nothing to keep those people from unemployment in the first place. Payments to businesses were sparse, and a lot of businesses had to reduce hours, reduce wages, furlough/fire employees, or close altogether.
The wage subsidy fixes that by covering businesses' labor costs, which makes it way easier for them to retain their employees while they temporarily close or just suffer through a low-demand economy. It also helps workers by keeping them employed, continuing their normal level of income, and not overloading states' unemployment systems.
It's probably not something we could afford long-term, but if we pair it with short, strong shutdowns, we could really make a dent in the COVID numbers.
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@yourhighness4-20 If you think inflation's about to get bad, you're not paying attention at all.
The 12-month inflation rate that everyone cites has gone down in each of the last 5 months, from 9.1% in June to 7.1% in November.
But that tells the story of the last 12 months, not the trend that's happening now. If you just look at the last 5 months, the CPI has only increased 0.5%, or an annualized 1.1%. That's less than normal inflation.
Two other metrics I've been looking at are personal savings and credit card debt. In 2020 and early 2021, the government gave out a bunch of money, personal savings went up, and credit card debt went down. People had extra spending money, which is how you get inflation. And we did.
But personal savings and credit card debt are back to pre-pandemic levels, maybe even a little worse. We don't have extra spending money anymore. Runaway inflation is done. If anything, we're headed for a full-blown recession instead.
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@bricktop6216 Or, instead of beating up brown people as policy, we could make national wage standards; give residency to the illegals that currently live here so they can't be exploited; and put more effort toward policing the border, tracking visa overstays, and making sure companies follow the aforementioned wage standards.
As for the "American dream", that term was popularized in the 1930s, was executed well in the 1960s, and is only kind of applicable today. Countries like Denmark and Canada have way better social mobility than the U.S. You can have a meritocracy without the floor being horrific poverty.
https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobility/
For those who do get rich in my hypothetical America, they were probably helped by healthy, relatively happy employees and a consumer base with lots of disposable income, because they didn't have to spend it on student loans or medical debt. The rich can pay a bit extra in taxes to keep that system going. We can even send them a thank you note if they want it. I'm not a monster, after all.
America should be a country that treats its citizens with dignity, not one that glorifies suffering and demonizes the less fortunate.
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@sno-cone6052 1. Fair enough. As far as I know, I haven't gotten Covid yet. If I were asking you for advice, would you say it's a good idea for me to get vaccinated?
2. If the Constitution says nothing about abortion, wouldn't the default position be to allow it?
3. Recreational drugs aren't prescribed by a doctor. Hormone blockers are. And if a child is unsure about their gender, wouldn't it make sense to delay their gendered puberty until they make a decision? I trust the child and their doctor to handle it correctly.
Regardless, you're proving my point. The Right loves government when it serves their agenda. I have no problem with that, regulations are a good thing and we can argue about what should be regulated. But don't BS me with this "small government and freedom" stuff.
4. I don't think any teacher is saying or even implying that Republicans did slavery and Jim Crow. And you don't have to ask me whether or not the parties flipped. Ask the former Confederate states. There's a reason most of them are overwhelmingly Republican. When LBJ signed the Civil Rights Acts, segregationists held that against the Democratic Party, and Republicans co-opted that anger for political gain.
5. I can't help but notice you made an effort to say there's less racism but not that there's no racism. Which is the point we're trying to make. The US has definitely made strides, even since the late 1960s and 1970s. It wasn't conservatives who pushed that along. It was liberals who weren't content with just desegregating people.
I have a math/statistics degree, I'm a data guy. If the data shows income disparities between groups, that either means one group is more deserving of income, or there are biases in the system. The former is anti-equality, so I go with the latter. Fairness is confirmed or disproven by the data, and most minorities are clearly not given a fair shot.
6. If we're talking about fear, isn't the anti-Covid movement largely about fear of government? And the Great Replacement theory (plus general border nonsense) is built on racial fears. I'm also reminded of Trump's rants about low income people invading and bringing crime to quaint suburban neighborhoods. Claiming that only one party uses fear is laughable.
7. When did Democrats become pro-corporation? The 1990s, when Reaganism was super popular and Dems had to co-opt some of it to stay relevant. Formally it's known as the Third Way. There's been a movement of more progressive, anti-corporate Dems lately, but you guys complain that they're "socialist". It's like there's no way to win with you.
And Democrats love free speech. It's why we supported Colin Kaepernick, and the BDS movement. We just have a distaste for people who lie about something as foundational to the country as elections, and people who promote violence. And you guys have a distaste for talking about race relations (aka CRT, apparently) and things that are sexual in nature. Look at that, we all agree that free speech shouldn't be absolute, just like the Supreme Court says.
8. The Left (the real Left, not the corporate Pelosi types) has plenty to offer you. Like less income inequality, less of every bad thing that poverty causes, legalizing cannabis, healthcare that's more efficient and more widely available, and more support for workers to negotiate fair wages and working conditions.
What is the Right offering you? Outrage and complacency. Conservatism is about keeping everything as close to the status quo as possible, and getting angry when things change.
If you ever come across a speech/monologue from Tucker Carlson or Charlie Kirk or someone like that, listen to how they do populist rhetoric. They'll talk about corporations owning the government, growing income equality, healthcare being unaffordable, that sort of thing. All of which is valid. But instead of actual solutions like publicly funded elections, increasing taxes on corporations and the rich, or regulating prescription drug prices, they'll pivot to culture war stuff - Covid vaccines, CRT, etc. Because they don't really want to solve the problems. They're elites, they enjoy the privileges of being elites, and their job is to drum up reactionary outrage to get Republicans elected that will slash corporate/top-bracket tax rates and keep people like Tucker and Charlie rich.
(Sorry this was so long. I got really into it lol.)
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@joecombs7468 We didn't have a lot of rich people in the 1960s either and that worked just fine. We still have millions of people who need goods and services, and if one business moves away, we'll just find another to use.
As for not being able to pay for nice things, you're quite wrong. Free college would cost about $200 billion a year - that's pretty close to how much Trump has raised the defense budget. We could easily pull the money from there.
M4A would be about $2.2 trillion a year, but the taxes needed for that would just replace what we're already spending on premiums/deductibles/copays. It's the same healthcare spending no matter where we spend it.
The climate stuff would be around $0.9 trillion a year. Total income in the US is about $16 trillion, which equals an extra 5.6% on the tax rate. I imagine that would skew heavily toward the rich. But regardless, the money's there.
Regarding freedom, social democracy comes with its own set of freedoms - the freedom to not work a second job because your first job actually pays you a decent wage, the freedom to leave your job and start a business because you don't depend on the job for insurance, the freedom to go to college without taking on massive debt, and so on.
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@MNP208 That would be our lovely plurality voting system and primaries. Plurality voting encourages different factions to combine into two large parties, because giving more votes to a decent party in order to defeat a bad party is a legitimate strategy. And then primaries tend to give you someone in the ideological center of each party, giving you two somewhat extreme options.
If I could recreate our electoral system from scratch, I'd have a national vote where everyone votes for their preferred party, and use that to fill Congress via proportional representation. That's where the extreme views get a say - maybe we get a few representatives from a neo-Nazi or communist party, but if 1 or 2 percent of Americans have those views, they should be represented accordingly. That should encourage the creation of a bunch of different parties.
For the presidential election, I'd go with a pairwise method. Take the top 4 parties, have them nominate a candidate, and create a round robin for people to vote on. For example, 2020 would look like this:
Choose one candidate from each row:
Biden vs. Trump
Biden vs. Jorgensen
Biden vs. Hawkins
Trump vs. Jorgensen
Trump vs. Hawkins
Jorgensen vs. Hawkins
Whoever wins the most matchups wins the presidency, with the tiebreaker being total votes. I think that's simple enough for people to vote on and understand the results. And as a Condorcet method, this would have a tendency to elect moderate candidates, or ones who are at least acceptable to most voters.
Also we should have publicly funded elections because, as you suggested, a lack of wealth shouldn't keep good candidates from running.
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