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POTUS Elect Trump II: Lefties whining and regurgitating fake news

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Re: POTUS Elect Trump II: Lefties whining and regurgitating fake news

dxmnkd316 said:
And this is why Donald Trump is so inherently dangerous
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Although I loathe Trump and agree he is an existential threat to democracy in the United States, this example doesn't frighten or bother me. China and the US, in foreign policy, are equally bad actors. If China's rise means (1) we lose the ability to dictate that half of the globe's economic policy via force, and (2) there is a counterweight to our imperialists and militarists concocting utopian schemes and scams, then... good.
 
Re: POTUS Elect Trump II: Lefties whining and regurgitating fake news

mookie1995 said:
and the stuff syria is using? wasn't that stolen from iraq??? :confused:

:p
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Seems unlikely when there were no WMDs to begin with.

mookie1995 said:
where did all those photos come from then that colin used??? :)
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Don't recall seeing pictures of WMDs. Therefore, the pics wouldn't stand up in court nor an elementary school classroom for that matter. You may support the decision, but its still stunning a POTUS used it to put a couple of a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives on the line.
 
Re: POTUS Elect Trump II: Lefties whining and regurgitating fake news

Kepler said:
You mean this guy? He famously rebuted the fake WMD argument as it was being made, but he was ignored because hurr hurr foreign / these colors don't run / Remember the Maine!!!!

Even at the CIA everybody except the politicals knew it was all bullsh-t. But the politicals make policy, and the GOP has been in the business of voting on facts ever since trickle down.
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There was another guy, Scott or Steve something, who was even more outspoken about there being no weapons there than Blix was, and all he got was harassed and defamed, and I believe, even pedophile allegations made against him.
 
Re: POTUS Elect Trump II: Lefties whining and regurgitating fake news

5mn_Major said:
Seems unlikely when there were no WMDs to begin with.



Don't recall seeing pictures of WMDs. Therefore, the pics wouldn't stand up in court nor an elementary school classroom for that matter. You may support the decision, but its still stunning a POTUS used it to put a couple of a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives on the line.
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you don't recall that presentation?? the pictures shown?? :)
 
Re: POTUS Elect Trump II: Lefties whining and regurgitating fake news

mookie1995 said:
you don't recall that presentation?? the pictures shown?? :)
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You mean the pictures of tractor trailers that we were told were mobile chemical weapons factories? Or the building compounds that we were assured were WMD plants? Those pictures?
 
Re: POTUS Elect Trump II: Lefties whining and regurgitating fake news

FlagDUDE08 said:
Here are proposed income tax brackets under Trump: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-17/how-trumps-tax-changes-will-impact-you

Seems a bit Reagan-esque, sadly not a step towards either FairTax or Herman Cain's 9-9-9...
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It's exactly the Reagan philosophy, which has been demonstrated not to work. Well, it "works." It makes the rich richer.

The only way I would support a flat tax would be a 99% rate with a single $200k single, $300k married exemption.
 
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mookie1995 said:
Just want to be clear here.....

All y'all are incredulous that W believed intelligence he got that started dumb wars.

All y'all are incredulous that tD questions intelligence he has received that could lead to stupid wars.

:D
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Are you drunk...
 
Re: POTUS Elect Trump II: Lefties whining and regurgitating fake news

Great piece on The Triumph of the Hopeless.

Money shot:

 After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.

What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren’t important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell’s Angels, that kind of politics is “nearly impossible to deal with” using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left.
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If you except this analysis, what do you do? Reason and empathy will not work. There's no way to make the lives of an obsolete social and economic class better without them changing and the hallmark of their deficiency is their refusal to change. How do we "let the air out of the ball" and get through this dangerous period of rising fascism sand Caesarism? The course that the GOP set in the 80s and which looks to be being repeated by Trump will only swell the ranks of the white underclass, which is brilliant in a cynical way: the more the GOP hurts uneducated whites, the more angry they get, the more they vote against the liberal elite strawman. Demographically we win out in the end, but that's a generational cavalry we can't afford to wait for.

With the Right now in complete control of government across the board, we should definitely do everything we can to tar them with the brush of The Establishment. This is their sad sh-t show now, and everything they have proposed will only increase suffering, so the Left needs to position themselves to be the sincere anti-establishment movement. God knows there are historical precedents for how to do this: the New Deal was a national revolt against the cartoonish Scrooge McDuck types in the economic elite, and we've gotten right back to that with our descent into Neo-Feudalism in Republican-controlled states. Particular at the grassroots level, we should have no trouble raising a phalanx of middle fingers to the Plutes.

How do we deal with the threat of violence from the far right? That's a lot more scary. The cops and even the army have sympathy for the right's violent rhetoric. The US has never yet had a situation where the army broke ranks from core American political values (there are plenty of examples where the cops do -- it happens every day), and hopefully there is still enough institutional control over the army that we don't have to worry about an actual coup. Will that hold when Plute policies lead us into another inevitable depression?
 
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Re: POTUS Elect Trump II: Lefties whining and regurgitating fake news

Kepler said:
It's exactly the Reagan philosophy, which has been demonstrated not to work. Well, it "works." It makes the rich richer.

The only way I would support a flat tax would be a 99% rate with a single $200k single, $300k married exemption.
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Then that's not a flat tax.
 
Re: POTUS Elect Trump II: Lefties whining and regurgitating fake news

FlagDUDE08 said:
Then that's not a flat tax.
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Semantics. If you favor a flat tax with no exemptions, well (1) good luck with that balancing any budget ever, and (2) you support a system where the real "burden" of taxation -- the cut into needs rather than wants -- falls entirely on the poor and lower middle class. I'm sure that the Kochs' idea of "fair", but it's not mine.

As I've said a hundred times before, there is a simple way around this.

1. Treat all income the same. Your income is the difference in your wealth between 12/31 of this year and last year.
2. Tax only human beings. Leave corporations, etc out of income taxation.
3. Divide the income spectrum into a continuous cumulative frequency table, and tax based on exactly where each dollar value falls in the cumulative total of all income. For example, $1 will be common to all earners, so it represents .0000001 (ish) of all income. This is the tax rate on that dollar. $10, $100, maybe even $1000 is probably still .0000001. At $10,000 you've probably gotten all the way up to .00001. At $100,000, maybe as high as .10. At $1,000,000 maybe .40. At $10,000,000, maybe .75. As so it goes. Each dollar (heck, each penny) is assigned a tax percentage equal to how much of total earnings falls at that dollar and below. By $100,000,000 we're at 99%.
4. No exemptions, no deductions. A simple function lets you plug in your income (say, $87,743) and outputs your income tax liability (say, $20,016).
5. There is no 5. The End.

Your tax filing consists of your form, which has one line: total income. Your W-2 attachments (and your bank statements, and retirement account statements, etc) are exactly one line: income. The End.
 
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Re: POTUS Elect Trump II: Lefties whining and regurgitating fake news

Even with exemptions, the flat tax is massively unfair. It's just like sale taxes and government fees. All are universally recognized as regressive forms of taxation. Unless it's progressive, it's regressive.
 
Re: POTUS Elect Trump II: Lefties whining and regurgitating fake news

dxmnkd316 said:
Even with exemptions, the flat tax is massively unfair. It's just like sale taxes and government fees. All are universally recognized as regressive forms of taxation. Unless it's progressive, it's regressive.
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FICA is the most regressive of all.

As of 2014, Social Security tax is withheld at a rate of 12.4 percent. This includes matching contributions of 6.2 percent from both the employer and employee. Medicare tax is deducted at a rate of 2.9 percent. This includes matching contributions of 1.45 percent for both employer and employee. Only wages up to $117,000 per year are subject to Social Security FICA withholding, while taxpayers who are paid more than $200,000 annually are subject to an additional 0.9 percent Medicare tax, according to the IRS.
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Add that up and that almost reaches Mitt Romney's Federal Income Tax Rate on hundreds of millions of dollars.
 
Re: POTUS Elect Trump II: Lefties whining and regurgitating fake news

I have no idea if it's the most regressive, but it's certainly one of the worst.
 
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