Trump: The First 100 Days

If government jobs are so great why doesn’t Trump just create 25M government jobs.

Promise Met!

I’m sure the future debt slaves not yet born will thank you greatly

As a public-sector employee, I need to have a long talk with my HR Dept. Because if this is true, they’ve been shafting me big time.

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Or it will (as Marx predicted) lead to revolution, which would mean the end of the US as we know it.

People tend to react badly when they see their children starving to death–especially if the food snatched from their children’s mouths was used to pay for billions in tax cuts accruing to those who were already unimaginably wealthy.

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Have things gotten worse or better since the war on poverty act by Lyndon B. Johnson?

By any measure of standard of living, they’ve gotten much better. But before you start in, I’m sure we can all agree it’s impossible to parse the improvement in standard of living into its causal components; ie, how much is due to public policy, vs how much is due to innovation, vs how much is due to cultural changes, etc. Likewise for any negative developments since the onset of the war on poverty; eg, reductions in marriage rates, increases in out-of-wedlock births, etc.

Only an ideologue would argue that the results of the war on poverty have been all good or all bad.

Oh my, it seems someone’s upset over the attacks on the President-elect

“We are witnessing an ongoing acute political struggle in the US, whose task is to undermine the legitimacy of the president-elect,” Putin said, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

Putin mocked the claims contained in the dossier, which he described as “an obvious fake” and “nonsense.”

Russian intelligence services “don’t chase every American billionaire,” Putin said. He added that Trump “has been with the most beautiful women in the world, so why would he need prostitutes in Moscow?”

Or as @therajraj eloquently phrased it “Trump’s getting model pussy” so obviously he couldn’t have done anything wrong…

Typical…oh so typical talking points.

YAWN

Worse by leaps and bounds.

Once again: Psychology 101 an action rewarded is often repeated. All we need to do to build a worse country is continue to pay people to do nothing.

Either that or someone who has a good handle on the facts.

Okay barely skimmed, but will take up Raj’s argument for this thought.

If 1/2 mm govt jobs which are questionable in their effectiveness of providing public services, are exchanged for private sector jobs created - that is a double win for attacking the debt.

And l think many of us here feel that is a consuming black hole, which could be the largest issue in the US very soon.

Some here are too quick to want to see Trump fail. We don’t need that, no matter your dislike of him.

The data are not on your side here. Poverty rate by year:

“There are two things to note here. First, there was a huge fall in the poverty rate throughout the 1960s, and in particular after LBJ announced the War on Poverty in 1964 and followed up with Medicaid, Medicare, greater federal housing spending, and other programs to fight that war. In 1964, the poverty rate was 19 percent. Ten years later, it was 11.2 percent, and it has not gone above 15.2 percent any year since then. Contrary to what you may have heard, the best evidence indicates that the War on Poverty made a real and lasting difference.”

The point, the only point, was that if you are going to say Trump created one million jobs based on Alibaba’s theoretical pie in the sky jobs forecast then you should also count the 550k jobs he is theoretically cutting from the federal workforce.

It had nothing to do with passing a value judgement on whether it is a good idea or not (I agreed multiple times that, generally, I think it is good to cut the gov). Those 550k America’s will be out of work and it’s really anyone’s guess as to whether the end result will be additional private sector jobs.

It’s not “anyone’s guess”, pick any free market economic theory outside of keynesian economics. Scaling back the government sparks private sector activity.

This is a topic that deserves a separate thread, I’m not really interested in continuing it here

As I said earlier - government jobs are used as a tool to mask black unemployment

I note the 1/2 mm workers and agree they should go on the other side of the ‘ledger’.

However, you seem to be upset that these workers will be out of a job. Which by the way, pays a compensation level avg of $123,000 per year. That is a reduction of $68 BB per year. To prove l am not unsympathetic to their plight - l recall several weeks back, you suggested the unemployed move west and take lumber cutting jobs for $12ish an hour.

I am picking on you because every post someone says we need livable wage jobs here and for Americans rather foreigners, you take the other side. Maybe these multi degreed drones are smart enough to fill the openings that are necessitating the importation of multi degreed Asians that ‘experts’ keep telling the gullible we must let immigrate here

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/federal-worker-pay

ED, LOL…you are a die hard lefty for sure. People paid to stay home will continue to stay home

If the government pays people then they now have money. But it is money that the government took from those who are working and gave it to those who are staying home.

Here you go educate yourself:

http://www.lonelyconservative.com/2014/05/lbjs-war-on-poverty-an-expensive-failure-that-never-ends/

Let’s keep doing this until one of us throws up or actually has something important to do.

False. Your economics are as bad as your history.

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“If you measure poverty properly, which is only now being done, you find that the poverty rate has fallen pretty dramatically since the middle of the nineteen-sixties. Indeed, according to an important new study by a group of economists at Columbia University, it has dropped by forty per cent. The main driver of this fall, in fact, has been the very type of anti-poverty programs that L.B.J. championed: food stamps and housing subsidies, Social Security and Medicare, and generous income subsidies, in the form of tax credits, for the low-paid.”

"This chart illustrates what I am talking about. The dotted blue line shows the official poverty measure (O.P.M.) since 1967. It bobs up and down, depending on the state of the economy, but it’s basically flat. Look at the solid red line, though, which is falling. It represents the Columbia researchers’ estimate of historical poverty rates according to a new and more comprehensive measure of need that the Census Bureau created in 2011, known as the supplemental poverty measure (S.P.M.). According to this revised metric, the poverty rate in 1967 was as high as twenty-six per cent. It has since fallen dramatically, to sixteen per cent in 2012; in the period immediately before the Great Recession, it fell below fifteen per cent.

To be sure, this chart isn’t all good news. Even the solid line shows the poverty rate remaining pretty much constant since 2000. But it presents a very different picture of the past fifty years than the one that the Republicans are peddling."

Your turn.

I think this discussion perfectly illustrates how we all wittingly or unwittingly help Trump and his cohorts to frame the debate to their advantage.

Take the “one million Alibaba jobs” soundbite. Let’s assume that Jack Ma didn’t just BS Trump because he’s afraid Trump will slap import tariffs on his e-commerce platform, thus thwarting them in their recent push in the US market.

I think it’s just BS to appease Trump who likes flamboyant statements, but for the sake of argument let’s say he really meant it.

Here’s the full Ma quote:

“Jack plans to share how Alibaba will create 1 million U.S. jobs by enabling 1 million small businesses to sell American goods to China and Asian consumers on the Alibaba platform,”

So if you analyze the quote, it doesn’t say that Alibaba themselves will create jobs.

They’re only dangling a promise that US small business will be able to access Chinese consumers through their platform, and then the Chinese middle and upper-middle classes will supposedly go crazy over products made by US small businesses and start buying stuff like crazy which will result in increased demand and no less that one million additional jobs in the US (and how does he know that exactly? Why not 100k?)

And let’s ignore for the moment what Jack Ma is asking in return - unfettered access to the US market that will destroy jobs in, wait for it, those same US small businesses his platform is allegedly helping.

So even if it was all true, it’s at best a PR speculation based on wildly optimistic and unrealistic assumptions

And look how the debate has changed - although everyone know it’s BS, nobody is actually questioning the “1 million jobs” quote anymore, believing it to be debunked. @therajraj includes it into his spreadsheet and people actually argue over it.

But this fact it’s still in the debate, like Hillary’s e-mails and Bill the rapist claims. People are subtracting losses in the federal workforce from this arbitrary, imaginary number (well, we’re 450k in the plus so that’s ok)

And lo and behold, Trump’s bullshit is legitimized and the soundbite stays in people’s mind. In a few years time, no one will question this fact, while some will actually believe twitter and that “Trump did create a million Alibaba jobs”

And that’s how you legitimize populism, accepting bullshit like this.

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