That's an awfully legalistic definition of "lying" for POTUS. Lying isn't illegal (although certain lies can be), so I don't see any point in arguing the point. Self-contradiction without explanation is usually considered lying. (So's self-contradiction with reasons, according to certain Trump fans, who blamed Clinton for dishonesty about the TPP).
Last time I read a Libertarian platform, the thing that I had the most problem with was the idea of using the civil courts to resolve things that we currently resolve with regulation. For example, if companies were polluting my air, instead of letting the EPA take care of it, I'd have to file suit against the individual companies. There's no possible way this could work without pouring a tremendous amount of resources into the civil courts, and giving them far too much power.
Those Libertarians were either dinking around at politics without being serious (see also the Grassroots party in town, a one-issue party), or had no clue of what they should do should they succeed. I don't want such people in office.
What does their politics matter? What matters is their fact-checking. Snopes.com, which I'm familiar with, has a long history of digging up solid information on claims and evaluating them according to what they found out (which includes leaving some dubious-looking stuff as "undetermined"). They provide sources for what they say, so they can be checked up on.
However, there's plenty of delusional right-wingers who think that any website they don't like must be horribly biased and therefore false.
I don't remember that claim. If you could provide a cite, that would be nice. As it is, it's a vague statement, and could be a matter of definition.
we can pull out of Iraq and be free of our involvement there,
I believe that was the Bush administration. Obama tried to negotiate a longer presence for US troops, but couldn't get the Iraqis to agree on continued extraterritoritality for US troops. In any event, that was a prediction, not a statement of fact.
we can let Russia come in and take control and that won't have a bad impact on the US or our allies
That's so vague it isn't even wrong.
how if we just build schools, hospitals and give them jobs, everybody who would have become a terrorist will instead live a happy productive life without perpetrating any violence
One of the fundamental ideas behind Bush's approach to Iraq: bring them democracy and they'll be grateful and peaceful. Again, this isn't a statement of fact, but a prediction that turned out to be seriously wrong.
we should release the bad people from Gitmo because they aren't really bad people they're just misunderstood,
You're making up the reason, although there were doubtless people in there who weren't really bad but were just misreported by unfriendly sources. The real reason was that Gitmo was itself wrong. It was presented as a way for the Federal government to get around the Constitution, ignoring the legal theory that it has no powers not granted by the Constitution, and the prisoners were not treated according to treaties the US had signed and ratified.
we don't have a problem with terrorists that requires a military solution, we have a problem that requires a criminal justice solution?
A policy statement, not a statement of fact, and you haven't shown that it was in any way wrong at the time. Treating terrorism as a problem to be solved by the US Armed Forces hasn't worked any better than Hercules chopping off the heads of the Hydra.
Bush's "Mission Accomplished" was, if I remember correctly, a photo op of him on a carrier which had a "Mission Accomplished" banner because that's what the carrier crew had done. I don't remember him explicitly claiming the mission was accomplished. It wasn't actually a lie, but I believe there was an intention to give the wrong impression.
Could the government ever be trusted to provide the raw data? For most of the duration of the US, the government was unable to provide raw data to most people, and so the question was less important. There were researchers who went to the government archives and went through the raw documents, which is not quite what we tend to consider as raw data today.
Houses are much more expensive nowadays, as are colleges and medical care (and blaming the increase in the cost of health care on greed accomplishes nothing). Luxuries are relatively much cheaper, although you don't seem to be accounting for the cost of televisions back then. Cutting back on relatively cheap luxuries isn't going to make houses noticeably more affordable.
Also, whether someone is retired or a student or other classification not expected to be employed depends partly on the ease of finding work. My cousin wound up retired by losing his job and being unable to find another one while being close to retirement age. If a married woman can't find a decent job, she might just give up for a while and be a housewife.
And, of course, no one number will tell people everything they need to know. The unemployment rate is very useful, as is the underemployment rate.
I assume that politicians lie. I prefer the variety that doesn't lie about easily checked facts . For example, the recent insistence that Trump's inauguration ceremony was attended by far more people than the evidence points to: not only was that a completely unnecessary lie, it's easily refuted.
Just because it's hard to calculate a cost doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Coal plants have benefited by not having to consider externalities for a long time, including general pollution and global warming. I like seeing externalities incorporated into the market by regulation or taxation, because that makes the economy more efficient overall. Without doing any research, I'd expect coal externalities to be very high compared to solar and wind.
More like, whatever you think his position shouldn't be, he probably already said it, and if he said something you approve of he'll say something else next week. The White House is rapidly nearing Baghdad Bob levels of credibility. Watch what Trump does, who he appoints, and what executive orders he signs.
There's cheaper ways to heat a place than using electricity off the grid, and that gets important where it gets cold. Most houses around here are heated by burning fossil fuels and skipping this whole "convert to electricity" business.
Obama's birth certificate showed that he is a native-born US citizen, and hence eligible to be President. There's good reasons to believe that Trump's business are likely to have unconstitutional dealings with governments (AFAICT, private dealings aren't covered by either of the emoluments clauses, and neither is signing executive orders favoring companies the President owns lots of stock in), and his tax returns would be significant in finding that out.
I don't know where you are, but there are multiple political offices, and often other issues. The US doesn't have a parliamentary system, where the executive branch is an extension of the legislative branch. We have referenda on important financial decisions. They usually come in the form of "We want to raise X taxes in order to do Y", and around here tax increase proposals do pass quite often.
"Chicken in every pot" is older than I am. "Everyone should be afford to own a home" is at least as old. I hit Social Security full retirement age in three years. You have no sense of history.
During the mortgage bubble, mortgage companies sprang up that would issue a mortgage and immediately sell it to someone. They weren't picky about who they issued mortgages to, because they could sell each and every one. This means that banks were deliberately buying bad loans of their own free will.
I was a contractor for the home mortgage division of General Motors for a couple of years, working on modeling. They weren't interested in cashflow on a loan, but a complicated formula that assumed a lot of defaults. Since housing prices would continue to go up, it would be possible to take foreclosures as they came and on the average sell the house for enough to cover any losses, right?
I don't really care to acquire and read a book when it's pushed on the grounds that what I saw with my own eyes is false.
Children grow up today expecting the things they are used to having
In other words, kids are just like they've been for centuries. What's changed is that most children can't expect to do as well financially as their parents did.
There were no banking regulations enforcing bad loans. There were banking regulations forcing banks to use uniform criteria. There were lots of banks that thought that a mortgage that was certain to be defaulted on was an asset, and apparently no regulations or common sense to say that a loan that will lose money will not in the end make money (it could be profitable in the short run because idiot investment bankers would pay actual money for bad loans).
Employees aren't usually paid according to their contributions, but rather according to their replacement cost. If you're getting $20/hour* net benefit from a minimum-wage employee, you're not going to pay the guy $15/hour if you can always hire another one easily for $10/hour. Raising the minimum wage will remove some jobs, but the increased spending can create enough economic activity to create new higher-paying jobs.
*Yes, I'm doing an easy special case. I know there are additional costs involved. It's just easier to show the basic ideas if we consider spherical employees of uniform density who are in a frictionless vacuum for a workplace.
You seem to think that giving people money is an instant solution to all problems. There will be lots of people who need additional temporary help.
no need for subsidized medical care.
What have you been smoking and how can I get some? No feasible UBI will cover health care the way the US has it set up. College education is the same way here. You're effectively suggesting that UBI recipients can forget about acquiring more valuable skills or, for that matter, staying alive when medical problems show up.
If there's demand for housing that has money behind it, and a UBI will supply the money, there will be housing. There are places that are very restricted in building new housing (San Francisco and Juneau, to name two), but most places can build more as they need it. There can be lots of short-term friction, but in the long run it's a competitive market, and people are not going to leave money on the table by not providing low-end housing for UBI folks.
In the US, the biggest thing keeping people on welfare is medical care. If you've got a kid with health problems, you will do anything you can to get care for that kid, including finding ways to stay on welfare.
Drug use among people receiving government assistance is rather low. Drugs are something of an expensive luxury, after all.
Also, no reasonable UBI can replace Medicaid, as medical expenses can be appallingly high if someone gets unlucky, and the only way to get individual medical insurance that won't kick you out when you really need it and will cover any pre-existing conditions is the ACA, and that's getting trumped.
People do try to get jobs that pay a living wage. Lots fail. People do work multiple jobs, but there's only so far you can go with that, and it can pretty well destroy possibilities of acquiring better skills in what would be your time off work (if you can acquire such skills). You might want to look at what actually happens to people rather than what you think should happen.
Not everyone is offered a reasonable education as a youngster. That depends heavily on where you live, as the quality of public schools varies wildly.
I take it you don't mind stepping over corpses to get to the grocery store, but most people like people to have a living.
moved all of the manufacturing jobs overseas to make more profits
Some were moved overseas. Some were automated out. Either way seems to be cheaper than hiring US workers. Ideally, this would raise the general standard of living and free up workers for more important jobs, but that's either not happening or lagging horribly.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an awfully legalistic definition of "lying" for POTUS. Lying isn't illegal (although certain lies can be), so I don't see any point in arguing the point. Self-contradiction without explanation is usually considered lying. (So's self-contradiction with reasons, according to certain Trump fans, who blamed Clinton for dishonesty about the TPP).
Last time I read a Libertarian platform, the thing that I had the most problem with was the idea of using the civil courts to resolve things that we currently resolve with regulation. For example, if companies were polluting my air, instead of letting the EPA take care of it, I'd have to file suit against the individual companies. There's no possible way this could work without pouring a tremendous amount of resources into the civil courts, and giving them far too much power.
Those Libertarians were either dinking around at politics without being serious (see also the Grassroots party in town, a one-issue party), or had no clue of what they should do should they succeed. I don't want such people in office.
What does their politics matter? What matters is their fact-checking. Snopes.com, which I'm familiar with, has a long history of digging up solid information on claims and evaluating them according to what they found out (which includes leaving some dubious-looking stuff as "undetermined"). They provide sources for what they say, so they can be checked up on.
However, there's plenty of delusional right-wingers who think that any website they don't like must be horribly biased and therefore false.
Let's see how those stack up.
I don't remember that claim. If you could provide a cite, that would be nice. As it is, it's a vague statement, and could be a matter of definition.
I believe that was the Bush administration. Obama tried to negotiate a longer presence for US troops, but couldn't get the Iraqis to agree on continued extraterritoritality for US troops. In any event, that was a prediction, not a statement of fact.
That's so vague it isn't even wrong.
One of the fundamental ideas behind Bush's approach to Iraq: bring them democracy and they'll be grateful and peaceful. Again, this isn't a statement of fact, but a prediction that turned out to be seriously wrong.
You're making up the reason, although there were doubtless people in there who weren't really bad but were just misreported by unfriendly sources. The real reason was that Gitmo was itself wrong. It was presented as a way for the Federal government to get around the Constitution, ignoring the legal theory that it has no powers not granted by the Constitution, and the prisoners were not treated according to treaties the US had signed and ratified.
A policy statement, not a statement of fact, and you haven't shown that it was in any way wrong at the time. Treating terrorism as a problem to be solved by the US Armed Forces hasn't worked any better than Hercules chopping off the heads of the Hydra.
Bush's "Mission Accomplished" was, if I remember correctly, a photo op of him on a carrier which had a "Mission Accomplished" banner because that's what the carrier crew had done. I don't remember him explicitly claiming the mission was accomplished. It wasn't actually a lie, but I believe there was an intention to give the wrong impression.
Could the government ever be trusted to provide the raw data? For most of the duration of the US, the government was unable to provide raw data to most people, and so the question was less important. There were researchers who went to the government archives and went through the raw documents, which is not quite what we tend to consider as raw data today.
Houses are much more expensive nowadays, as are colleges and medical care (and blaming the increase in the cost of health care on greed accomplishes nothing). Luxuries are relatively much cheaper, although you don't seem to be accounting for the cost of televisions back then. Cutting back on relatively cheap luxuries isn't going to make houses noticeably more affordable.
Also, whether someone is retired or a student or other classification not expected to be employed depends partly on the ease of finding work. My cousin wound up retired by losing his job and being unable to find another one while being close to retirement age. If a married woman can't find a decent job, she might just give up for a while and be a housewife.
And, of course, no one number will tell people everything they need to know. The unemployment rate is very useful, as is the underemployment rate.
I assume that politicians lie. I prefer the variety that doesn't lie about easily checked facts . For example, the recent insistence that Trump's inauguration ceremony was attended by far more people than the evidence points to: not only was that a completely unnecessary lie, it's easily refuted.
Just because it's hard to calculate a cost doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Coal plants have benefited by not having to consider externalities for a long time, including general pollution and global warming. I like seeing externalities incorporated into the market by regulation or taxation, because that makes the economy more efficient overall. Without doing any research, I'd expect coal externalities to be very high compared to solar and wind.
More like, whatever you think his position shouldn't be, he probably already said it, and if he said something you approve of he'll say something else next week. The White House is rapidly nearing Baghdad Bob levels of credibility. Watch what Trump does, who he appoints, and what executive orders he signs.
There's cheaper ways to heat a place than using electricity off the grid, and that gets important where it gets cold. Most houses around here are heated by burning fossil fuels and skipping this whole "convert to electricity" business.
Obama's birth certificate showed that he is a native-born US citizen, and hence eligible to be President. There's good reasons to believe that Trump's business are likely to have unconstitutional dealings with governments (AFAICT, private dealings aren't covered by either of the emoluments clauses, and neither is signing executive orders favoring companies the President owns lots of stock in), and his tax returns would be significant in finding that out.
I don't know where you are, but there are multiple political offices, and often other issues. The US doesn't have a parliamentary system, where the executive branch is an extension of the legislative branch. We have referenda on important financial decisions. They usually come in the form of "We want to raise X taxes in order to do Y", and around here tax increase proposals do pass quite often.
"Chicken in every pot" is older than I am. "Everyone should be afford to own a home" is at least as old. I hit Social Security full retirement age in three years. You have no sense of history.
During the mortgage bubble, mortgage companies sprang up that would issue a mortgage and immediately sell it to someone. They weren't picky about who they issued mortgages to, because they could sell each and every one. This means that banks were deliberately buying bad loans of their own free will.
I was a contractor for the home mortgage division of General Motors for a couple of years, working on modeling. They weren't interested in cashflow on a loan, but a complicated formula that assumed a lot of defaults. Since housing prices would continue to go up, it would be possible to take foreclosures as they came and on the average sell the house for enough to cover any losses, right?
I don't really care to acquire and read a book when it's pushed on the grounds that what I saw with my own eyes is false.
In other words, kids are just like they've been for centuries. What's changed is that most children can't expect to do as well financially as their parents did.
There were no banking regulations enforcing bad loans. There were banking regulations forcing banks to use uniform criteria. There were lots of banks that thought that a mortgage that was certain to be defaulted on was an asset, and apparently no regulations or common sense to say that a loan that will lose money will not in the end make money (it could be profitable in the short run because idiot investment bankers would pay actual money for bad loans).
In the US, I can make a much better argument that banning handguns is Constitutional than I can that banning modern automatic weapons is.
Employees aren't usually paid according to their contributions, but rather according to their replacement cost. If you're getting $20/hour* net benefit from a minimum-wage employee, you're not going to pay the guy $15/hour if you can always hire another one easily for $10/hour. Raising the minimum wage will remove some jobs, but the increased spending can create enough economic activity to create new higher-paying jobs.
*Yes, I'm doing an easy special case. I know there are additional costs involved. It's just easier to show the basic ideas if we consider spherical employees of uniform density who are in a frictionless vacuum for a workplace.
You seem to think that giving people money is an instant solution to all problems. There will be lots of people who need additional temporary help.
What have you been smoking and how can I get some? No feasible UBI will cover health care the way the US has it set up. College education is the same way here. You're effectively suggesting that UBI recipients can forget about acquiring more valuable skills or, for that matter, staying alive when medical problems show up.
If there's demand for housing that has money behind it, and a UBI will supply the money, there will be housing. There are places that are very restricted in building new housing (San Francisco and Juneau, to name two), but most places can build more as they need it. There can be lots of short-term friction, but in the long run it's a competitive market, and people are not going to leave money on the table by not providing low-end housing for UBI folks.
In the US, the biggest thing keeping people on welfare is medical care. If you've got a kid with health problems, you will do anything you can to get care for that kid, including finding ways to stay on welfare.
Drug use among people receiving government assistance is rather low. Drugs are something of an expensive luxury, after all.
Also, no reasonable UBI can replace Medicaid, as medical expenses can be appallingly high if someone gets unlucky, and the only way to get individual medical insurance that won't kick you out when you really need it and will cover any pre-existing conditions is the ACA, and that's getting trumped.
Oh great oracle, where are those low-skill 9-5 jobs you can apparently live on?
People do try to get jobs that pay a living wage. Lots fail. People do work multiple jobs, but there's only so far you can go with that, and it can pretty well destroy possibilities of acquiring better skills in what would be your time off work (if you can acquire such skills). You might want to look at what actually happens to people rather than what you think should happen.
Not everyone is offered a reasonable education as a youngster. That depends heavily on where you live, as the quality of public schools varies wildly.
I take it you don't mind stepping over corpses to get to the grocery store, but most people like people to have a living.
Some were moved overseas. Some were automated out. Either way seems to be cheaper than hiring US workers. Ideally, this would raise the general standard of living and free up workers for more important jobs, but that's either not happening or lagging horribly.