Politics What did Romney and the GOP do wrong?

You folks have me confused. Is "it" (in this context of they do "it" and they have a problem if we do "it") wrong to yo? Does it become o.k., when your side does "it"? I am reminded of an older cousin I had (she is no longer living), she said don't do illegal drugs, but she did illegal drugs. She said it was the wrong thing to do, the wrong way to live - I agreed and did not do illegal drugs. My perception is that her words were solid and her heart was genuine - I loved her for that. If you folks can clarify what you mean, I would appreciate it.
--- merged: Dec 2, 2012 at 8:32 PM ---

The Costco business model is very different than Wal-mart's. In terms of profits per employee I am pretty sure Costco beats Wal-mart. By this measure and measures like it - one could argue Costco exploits its employees to a greater degree than Wal-mart, if you are using some kinda "fairness" standard.

Again, in the Costco dividend, they did not simply pay the dividend out of cash - they took a loan to pay it. the interest on the loan will be deducted against future earnings lowering future taxes paid. This is money not being used to hire more people, build more stores, etc. If you believe the dividend will have a trickle down affect as I do - you can argue the dividend is a good thing if Costco does not have a better use for the money. but I think I am the only poster her you believes in the "trickle down" theory.

 

You speak like it has to be one or the other. It doesn't. You can create jobs and make a shit load of money at the same time. I always made more money treating employees good then I did when I paid them as little as I could and gave them no benefits. Happy employees work harder for you and are willing to go the extra mile. Today's management style seems to be cut pay to the bone and threaten to ship all the jobs overseas if workers don't submit and claim it's because you can't afford to make a profit if you don't. Thanks to SEC filing and news reports of multi million dollar bonuses and CEO pay unions and workers know it's bull shit. Companies like Hostess will go under but another company will buy there brand and those bakers will be working for another management team soon enough. Little battles like this will be fought until either there is no middle class and everything you buy is imported or management stops this war on middle class workers and starts treating people like they're human beings and not slaves.

 

Ultimately, this is the point I was trying to make.

And no, I don't believe in the trickle down fantasy, or as Bush Sr. called it, Voodoo Economics.

 

I get a big kick out of the way you believe Trump personally owns what he says. He says he dislikes President Obama because Obama is a con artist, liar, and manipulator with nefarious motives (coincidently, the very same qualities Trump possesses) and in your world, it correlates to what Trump actually thinks and believes. No need to look further for other possible motives for his actions. No need to look at what makes this man tick -his history, his past behaviors. Take him at his word. His reasons for disliking Obama are all on Obama and have nothing to do with personal gain despite the fact that everything Trump does appears to be for his own personal gain.

First and foremost, Trump is an attention whore. After that, any motivation he may have had for leaping on the birther bandwagon and taking it nuclear is up for grabs. Including racism. Reason is on the side of the most obvious motivation - He (like so many others) wanted a like minded capitalist pig in the White House. He did what he could to contribute to the smearing campaign of the candidate who was threatening to come between he and some of his money.

Fair enough though I'm still unclear what that trait is.

Possessing a sense of fairness and fair play is not at odds with capitalism. The smart capitalist, the capitalist in it for the long haul, does not burn bridges. The smart capitalist does not shit where he eats. The smart capitalist knows the history of capitalism and understands the fragile nature of economies. The smart capitalist plays the game fairly because it's in his long term interest to do so.

The capitalists you are emulating, Ace are not of the smart capitalist breed. They are posers, look-alikes but not the genuine article. They are the get in, make as much money as possible, as irresponsibly as need be, before the effects of short-sighted greed bring the whole structure crashing down. Smart capitalists don't think much of your ilk.

 

Exactly. This "make all you can at all costs as fast as you can" Gordon Gekko style with no regard as to what that does to the economy or the nation is a pretty insane philosophy. In the military we always used the term "don't shit where you eat." The new capitalists are shitting where they eat and eventually they be eating in their own shit. Least in the US they will be. They've cut wages of workers to grant huge salaries and bonuses to CEO's and management. Look at CEO to average laborer in the 50's and 60's and compare it to today. They've cut the workers pay to point where the only way the workers can afford the products they make is to finance it. And management is happy to supply that financing. When the pay gets cut to the point the workers no longer are willing to play they close the doors and head to court for liquidation. The first request they make to the court is "we'd like to pay our management team a few hundred million in bonuses." You know because they're so broke they can't continue to operate. And the courts have been granting their requests. This can't go on forever.

They keep shitting where they eat and the US will be in nothing but a world of shit sooner or later. It's starting to look like sooner rather then later.

 

Sir Richard Branson, if you don't mind.

 

all this lunacy is enabled by exclusive focus on shareholder returns as if that is the only dimension of capitalism that is of any consequence. it is obviously impossible to fashion coherent policy if your framework eliminates capitalism as a social form a priori.

sometimes i think that the condition of possibility for neo-liberalism was the decisions taken by tv networks in the states to feature dow jones average numbers every night on the news as a kind of astrological feature, something that gives the impression of information about an abstracted economy.

the selling of neo-liberalism across the 80s would be an interestingly cynical little history. the long con, as they woulda said in "the grifters."

 

Ah yes, the shareholders.

 

What is the "right" tax code? I tried once to list the goals that any tax system should have and they were both noncontroversial and hopelessly contradictory. Raise enough money to finance the govt, don't depress growth, don't distort economic decisionmaking, have progressive rates (this isn't a complete list) -- all of this is pretty standard stuff, but the goals don't fit together well, which means there are going to be, as with pretty much all things, trade-offs.

 

Add to the calculation the fact that a substantial percentage of the population doesn't want to pay any taxes at all. It undermines the prospects for consensus when the entire conversation is measured against political fallout.

 

If you want to figure out the tax code or how to make it fair I don't see anyway to do that until you can get a consensus of what "government need" actually means.

 

The problem with the GOP is that they are mainly the ones in positions to use these loopholes, yet bitch about the national debt. Them not paying taxes is what caused the debt to go up, and now we have to pay even more taxes to cover the interest. And unfair or uneven taxes are a big problem too. If you see someone living in a different state paying a lot less, anyone would move there. Yet, if the rate is low because they've cut corners, it is a problem.

The whole reason the Bush tax cuts were first enacted was because the right said that a government surplus wasn't right and that the government should give the money back to the people who overpaid. Then we had two unfunded wars and a few agencies that were created...

 

in the real world, what the right has done since the reagan period is funnel massive amounts of federal expenditures into the military and social control sectors because, at bottom, that is a significant aspect of the conservative political machine.

then they have benefitted from a bizarre-o refocus on stock market behavior as if it was indicative of the overall health of the economy as a whole--the stupidity of this is overwhelming, but they found those conditions. the responsibility for them lay with stupid things like the decision noted above in the early 70s taken by (corporate) network news in the states to provide dow jones index information as an indicator of economic well-being as over against the gdp figure that they previously had relied upon because dow jones averages move more often. the difference should be obvious: gdp figured incorporate production; stock averages incorporate the state of shareholder and/or intermediary senses of what returns would accrue to themselves.

so with capitalism redefined, functionally, as symmetrical with shareholder returns and with the massive patronage system payouts that the right preferred off the table, the right then proceeded to impose all over again the question of "fairness" which is a subset of the broader question of what the function of the state is in the context of a modern capitalist economy.

and since it appears that people do not do any research---god knows why--in order to obtain a sense of how federal outlays were then patterned and take as given the ideologically motivated frame within which the right poses the questions of fairness and so on as given, like rocks or plants, and assuming the complicity of corporate media in this o so free america---the right was able to control the debate, such as it was in american pseudo-democracy, about the role of the state and its patterns of redistribution of wealth.

add to this the assumptions about taxes and/or regulation that we're all too familiar with given the corporate monocropping of infotainment in this very far from free society we live in and the positions of bottom-feeders like ace start to become comprehensible.

add to this the neo-liberal hostility to the notion of the social, its atomization into a collection of isolated individuals--pace margaret thatcher. this is the basis, such as it is, for the narcissistic credo ace outlined that asu quoted above: it's all about me me me, as if capitalism is some abstract hydraulic system that involves only isolated individual actors like you learn in freshman microeconomics and take seriously only if you're too stupid to see the problems with the modelling in itself, that then moves to act as though all that is important is immediate relations of supply and demand even though that's obviously bullshit even from a business viewpoint.

the bottom line is that capitalism is an economic form that operates within social contexts. it is itself a social phenomenon. if you want to profit over the longer run, then it is only rational that you would pay forward to maintain system coherence. system coherence involves abstractions like "fairness"---attending to them is what has kept modern capitalism from collapsing. attending to them is what builds and maintains political consent and social cohesion. to say "i'm a greedy capitalist pig" is to rule yourself out of coherent conversation about the types of policy that are required in order to maintain baseline consent. its to say that you're entirely irresponsible, that you don't even understand the basic facts that shape the world in which you live.

to "own" being an idiot by being proud of being an idiot is meaningless.

 

^^ should surprise no one.

 

Has anyone done the math on what the outcome would have been had all states gone with the proportional +2 bonus method?

It makes a 3rd party even more unlikely, since every state would be in play, and the candidates would just have to get the big cities to turn out.

I worry about the winner of the most votes nationwide not winning though. And not by the Gore-Bush amount, I mean that over a million more people would vote for the candidate that ends up losing.

I wouldn't dismiss this right away. If the keep it to the state-wide population, and maybe award the extra bonus electoral votes based on population size (so you win 10 bonus ones for winning CA or NY), it might be better than what we do now.

 

I like their secession idea better.