Even though the effort by the Democrats to call a vote is Quixotic, it puts both parties on record as to where they stand.
Until you get people like me in the mix, anyway. I want a bigger conversation on a lot of stuff that's been reduced to political talking points.
Rumor coming out of DC was my Congressman was going to retire and have his wife run for his seat. He never announced his re-election campaign; he just put his name on the ballot and I've met people who claimed they've heard of me because he mentioned my name while canvassing. From what I'm picking up (fourth-hand information), the DNC has identified me as a threat, and told him to run this year so I'll go away.
Whatever, dude; nobody likes you. I'm going to Congress and I'm going to end poverty. We've got like 160 new Democratic candidates coming to replace Republicans and incumbents; I guess I've already not made any friends in DC, but that's okay: we're bringing new friends.
The 2018 term won't be an important term for me; 2020 term will. If I lose this election, I'll come back more powerful than these people can imagine.
I'm typically of the mind to create the regulatory impetus and then refine it as we learn new things through the fast-moving nature of administration. When the administration does it wrong, we fix it; when it does something right, we can try to define and describe that in a broad sense to create a safety net against backwards administrative action.
We all seem to be looking at the problem in the same way, with the same general approach, and working out the details.
He was an asshole to everyone. I had serious problems with that manager, but he cleaned up well, and these were not those problems. Pretty much every person this dude interacted with knew who had the problem, or at least was tired of being told that program crashes happen because you're too stupid to use his perfect software the right way.
You seem consistently biased against anyone with power.
It's also the same advice I've heard over the past decade and a half, and the same advice told back in the 1920s. It's the statistical correlate with which engineer gets the highest salary. It was also bluntly stated by Andrew Carnegie when he hired the first person in the world to ever earn a million-dollar salary as an employee of any firm.
When we got rid of our unmanageable prodigy, things got a lot better. Coworkers stopped crying after being told repeatedly that it's okay for them to be stupid because not everyone can be a genius. The pace of "updates" stopped, but the quality of code went up.
Also, he got arrested by the FBI a few years later for hacking into a school and publishing the dean's social security number because they weren't taking security issues seriously. He said they were too stupid to understand until somebody showed them, and should thank him.
Fair enough. The added payload often significantly increases the fuel cost, although at this point I don't know how that impacts the launch cost. At least this time it didn't detonate with teachers on board.
I think that just as I was talking about super PACs, they are also talking about super PACs
There's an often-repeated list about limiting the corrupting influence of corporations, billionaires, unions, and special interests. That last category is stuff like NARAL and environmentalist groups, although mainly people mean to indicate the NRA and such.
If we look at how McCain-Feingold did it, it did not prohibit all political advertisements in the sixty days prior to an election, it only prohibited those which clearly identified a candidate
Lobbying is 501(c)(4); political stuff is 527. A 527 organization can talk about candidates, while a 501(c)(4) can talk about issues. If you want to do both, you have to create a separate segregated fund for your 527 activities and get donors to contribute for that fund; if you transfer from your 501(c)(4) bank account to your 527 account, you pay taxes on that money. Also, for the 527 to raise funds, it needs to transfer money from your 527 account to your 501(c)(4) account at the fair market price of list rental of your 501(c)(4) donor list, or else find its own donors without referencing the list.
As you say: these are not PACs. 527 is PAC; 501(c)(4) is lobbyist. As a candidate for office, I've considered organizing a 501(c)(4) with a 527, called a "Leadership PAC", mainly as a fall-back so I can quit my job and become politically-active if I lose. I learned some shit that made me rather unhappy in the process.
By the by: the IRS requires you to file form 8976 to inform them you intend to file form 1024-A to organize as a 501(c)(4). If you file form 1024-A, they'll process it; but that doesn't satisfy the requirement to also file form 8976 informing them of your intent to file form 1024-A. Are we in a sitcom?
this question of what speech is, without providing a specific answer, is what I'm imagining you're talking about.
It's more-complex than that. Arguments over unions center around things like free association as speech. The courts talk a lot about compelling government interests, equal protection, and other such things when discussing election and campaign finance law.
while I don't know every way in which political speech can be expressed, I do know that spending money isn't (or shouldn't be) a part of it
Well, you can spend hours and hours knocking doors and reach a few thousand people in a few months. You could also pay people to do that for you. You can pay radio and TV broadcasters to use their infrastructure (labor) to send a message.
Imagine if you had to campaign across a large Congressional district. It's 40 miles wide. A rich guy can buy gasoline; you can't afford a bus ticket. By spending money on gasoline and car insurance, he's expanded the reach of his speech and can effectively compete against you. This is both why spending money is speech and why we need controls on the spending of money.
The courts have argued that it's not in the government's interest to equalize competitiveness between candidates, and also that the government can't put limits on campaign spending because this would not be equal protection and would need to reflect each candidate's situation to be valid. These are actually conflicting arguments; if the second wasn't used to justify why the government can't make campaign spending limits, but only as a note of why it doesn't achieve the stated goal, then they wouldn't be in conflict.
When you sit down and think about it, the courts have ruled that giving people money is a violation of the first amendment.
To be honest, I think the courts are flat wrong: it's the government's primary interest to represent the people, and elections are the key to that representation. On the other hand, I can work with this. They gave me enough to attack, so I'll rig up circumventions for all of these arguments.
Laws are never as complete as we'd like them to be
This will be even more true when Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies.
Honestly I consider space launches squandered capacity. Put something up there we can use: GPS, moon infrastructure, something that will enrich the nation and the world. A lot of labor went into this thing, and a lot of nothing came out. Generally, I thus assume these people have no sense.
On the other hand, this thing cost $90 million to put up there, whereas the shuttle program cost $196 billion and the last mission cost $450 million, while a single Apollo mission cost $18 billion--1.67% of GDP in 1970, or equivalent to $310 billion today as a portion of our total economic power. This thing cost something like.029% of a single Apollo launch, and it wasn't even taxpayer money (which makes less difference than you'd think, although it matters).
We're reaching a point where a pointless display of space access wastes less economic power than things like mechanical loss of ketchup due to non-coated bottles refusing to release that last drop. Instead of a single Apollo launch, we could achieve universal healthcare. Twice.
Maybe it's time I reassess. Kim-Jong Trump's stupid military parade would land on the same scale as a heavy lift launch today.
The space debris will most probably just float off and crash into something, or drift into the empty void of black space where none shall ever encounter it. How do these people not understand that space is big?
Please call me when somebody gets to artificial neural networks again. There are some interesting conjectures I'd like to make so as to see the response from better-informed than I.
I thought it included people 16-64, with many people retiring around 70.
Still, it was more of a theoretical discussion rather than one of our BLS measures and the implications for our economy. The point is unemployment is a trend number that suggests things about our economy, most strongly in the context of its own history; it doesn't magically describe large and complex economic concepts such as poverty.
People look at employment and treat it as a measure of poverty. When that doesn't satisfy, they look at things like number of employed and the labor force participation rate. The dialogue goes in the direction of "why isn't everyone working?"
A comprehensive economic report would include income distribution, standard of living, number in poverty, number receiving aid, percent of GDP of aid disbursed, number homeless, number hungry, number in college, number retired, and so forth.
With a labor participation rate above 50%, excluding those in college and those in retirement, you've got single-adult households and multi-worker households: men and women are working. Single-adult households suggest labor force participation rate should be higher; whereas multi-worker households suggest wealth (to pay nurses, day cares, and the cost of appliances to do housework, freeing one householder to pursue a career for self-fulfillment) or poverty (to keep the household financially-solvent). Multi-adult, single-worker households tend to suggest wealth as well (non-workers can pursue non-work efforts for self-fulfillment).
This gets even more-complicated when you realize traditional family values don't describe today's world: not everyone wants kids and, while there are roughly an equal number of men and women, not every two-adult household is a male-female pairing. A single-worker lesbian household is still a woman working and a woman not-working; a single-worker gay male household is a man working and a man not-working. Which is more likely? How far does our workforce currently lean toward male workers and female non-workers? For that matter, how many households are now female-breadwinner households where the man doesn't work?
I didn't see much of a scientific rationale behind the article's assertions. Truth be told, the guy talking doesn't display any sort of credential--not a certification or whanot, but at least an explanation of the merits of what he's saying. All he says is airlines are doing a bunch of stuff and they're stupid and his way would be better because it would.
we're not talking about regular PACs, we're talking about super PACs
Does that change the argument at all?
That's a whole lot different. Communications issues.
Super PACs are one of the results of Citizen's United and exist solely to increase the influence of people and corporations with more than $5,000 to donate.
Interestingly, SuperPACs can collect unlimited contributions from a single individual. The discussion becomes a lot more sane when we get away from "only individuals should be allowed to do whatever it is PACs do" to "limiting the contributions allowed from an individual donor to a tax-exempt organization engaged in electioneering".
The common lay discussion--where people cry about PACs in general and demand only small-donors to candidates--is both unstructured and terrifying, because it implies both that nobody should be allowed to speak about anything politics-related except candidates and that the only thing PACs do is donate enormous sums to candidates. It's a normal outcome when people don't know what's going on with something that's complex but obviously broken; the whole elections communication and contributions thing is complex, and I'm not an expert either.
Once we get back on track, things get more-sane; they also get more-difficult. You have to ask: what does a SuperPAC actually do? An individual or corporation (both of which can contribute unlimited to SuperPACs) can't deduct the contribution off their taxes, so there's no tax advantage. It's also not illegal to just spend a ton of money on your own (McCain-Feingold made it illegal for Corporations to do so, but not for individuals). You can pool money without paying taxes as it changes hands, but nobody really incurs a $1,000,000 expense: a lot of independent movement among rich folks would work just as well, while the rest of us really need to pool our resources.
The largest problem with Citizen's United v. FEC is the majority opinion actually makes sense, and the dissenting opinions are a huge pile of everyone understanding there is a problem but nobody knowing precisely how to address it. In other words: changing this is hard because we're not rightly sure to what we should change it.
As to the cry of a Constitutional Amendment, the best you might get is to extend the First Amendment "...except as to restrict the direct pursuit of influencing government actions and the public opinion thereof from those associations of individuals organized for purposes of commerce, wherein Congress shall enable the establishment of well-regulated and effective associations of the People organized for such purposes of the influence over government actions and the public opinion thereof."
This might work, maybe; it's still dangerous. The language attempts to say "if you're organized for commerce (business), we can prevent you from lobbying", while also providing the Supreme Court a weapon to invalidate any Congressional law which restricts the effective organization of individuals as such: if they block Corporations and don't allow PACs with donation limits high enough for small donors to actually have a voice, then only millionaires can have a voice--and the Supreme Court can claim the donation limits are too low and thus declare the law as-written unconstitutional; whereas if the limits are like $2,000, such an argument is weaker.
I'm not sure about putting in a provision to limit expenditure by individual. There are arguments for and against, and that's another step which creates additional risks--what I've suggested already could have unintended consequences, and I've attempted to limit those. At this point, however, you've helped me refactor and reframe this discussion into something I can approach more-directly.
I think we can get rid of the name "SuperPAC", but not the fact of rich people using their money as influence--we can try, but not sure we can succeed in full without damaging ourselves. What's your take, then?
We can also increase the rapidity at which society can recover, and reduce the impact of transitional unemployment. These are generally called "welfare", although there are interesting considerations about what is and isn't welfare depending on who you ask.
The Dividend has other localized impacts. In poorer cities like Baltimore, Flint, or Detroit, the impact is bigger: more consumer spending capacity creates a need for jobs where unemployment is high. Automation and other technical progress (automation ~= wooden shipping pallet) create localized high unemployment (see: coal mining). This actually directly-remediates that: you at least need local service workers and truckers (the people driving in your city to move goods from distribution centers to stores, not the long-haulers who dump it in your town and leave)--or at least truck mechanics, maintenance, and logistics people--so jobs will come when consumer demand comes--even if that demand goes to Chinese goods from Amazon.
In total, people can't be completely-removed from consumption. This puts job-creation and job-retention pressure on the economy, slowing the loss of jobs in progress and restoring them back more-quickly. In other words:
If automation progresses faster than we can handle it then we will pass laws to slow it down
I've suggested laws to speed it up by making it less-risky and more-profitable, through the mechanism of strengthening consumers so their purchasing power (effective demand) can hold the job market up under a bigger assault.
I grew up in the 90s, where technology advanced at an unbelievable pace. I want it back.
Just like in the first 18th century (the 20th is so similar I like to call it the 2nd 18th century), easier jobs do not bring more time
Actually, we get wealthier. In 1900, 40% of the median household's income went to food; it was 33% in 1950; rapid agricultural productivity increases have this at about 12% to day, although that's a lot of food out of home: you can get by on around 3%-5% if you eat like people in the 1950s (i.e. plan meals, cook at home, thrifty shit).
We funnel all that back into buying more with more working-hours. Sometimes we don't notice: a car from 1970 has a lot less stuff in it than an equivalent income-level car from 2018. I was around to see anti-lock brakes, drive-by-wire, and multi-changer radio in what today is a $50,000 car, while the $20,000 car had a tape deck and standard brakes; now all that high-end luxury stuff--even heated seats!--is showing up in cars that poor people on barely more than minimum-wage might buy (you know, with a $150-$200 car payment). A "car" you might buy at a given income still costs about the same percentage of your income, but has a lot more stuff--things that would have taken more labor, but now take less.
We also buy a bunch of stuff, not just clothes and food. Bigger houses, automatic washing machines, Roombas. Whenever I win the argument about middle-class median income buying these things, the other party starts talking minimum-wage--even though they also use the "cost-of-living" argument (minimum wage raises by cost-of-living will keep that bottom worker just-as-poor as ever forever, so it's a dumb argument unless you want to talk about a growth-based wage instead of a COLA wage).
We could instead work less and enjoy a better, but not as much better, standard-of-living, where that standard is measured by material wealth--both produced per-capita (fewer working hours per-capita means less consumer purchasing power, which means fewer jobs) and actually in the hands of the worker (who works less and so can't purchase as much as otherwise).
The working-hours decision isn't up to a person, but rather up to society. In theory, this means everyone deciding to work 32 hours (4 days) would work (laissez-faire); in practice, nobody individually can get traction, so you can only reduce it by law. Union labor agreements seem like another path, but that doesn't work: unions would also likely argue for the same weekly wages (which is rational), which means those products become more-expensive. They could, in theory, take the 20% pay cut for 20% working-hours cut; but do you really think the 400 unionized workers in your shop are going to bargain for smaller paychecks?
Off course this signifies technical progress, but we can only have human progress if the structure of society evolves with it.
Actually, it's the same structure; it's a matter of modal response. We still behave as if it's 1920; it's just a little tweaking of the knobs, but it's necessary to achieve the gains in leisure time.
We're also at a point where we can provide a universal dividend and a growth-based minimum wage without creating high taxes. The Dividend itself actually doesn't increase taxes in the US, mainly due to the poor structuring of Social Security's retirement and disability benefits: restructuring these and our taxes to make retirement and disability permanently-solvent at their CPI-adjusted levels from now until the end of time can actually achieve an additional benefit that in total produces lower taxes even on the rich. Weird, right?
I only really said three things in my post above, and two of those were pretty unimportant.
You repeated a lot of things in different ways and I deconstructed the arguments, yeah.
You see the point, though: the whole political action committee thing is a structure that brings together people with interests. It gets abused, but we don't burn the whole system down and tell people they're all on their own and good luck when the super-rich are also all on their own.
I'm just not willing to do this
I've gone down the rabbit hole a few times. It ends in one of three ways: you start refining points to converge to a clearer understanding; you start bloating up posts bigger and bigger; or you keep repeating the same arguments at each other with no change.
How much of this you can take really depends on staying power, and I fundamentally don't wear down, so the only real reason to stick around is if you think you're going to get the first outcome.
House of Representatives banned the filibuster. They must have met someone like me once.
I think that most people have at least heard of Sheldon Adelson or Tom Steyer, so I would guess that most people know that PACs aren't just a way for corporations to buy political influence - they're also there to increase the influence of rich individuals
That seems unimportant though, the main thing about PACs is that they only increase the influence of the wealthy.
They increase the influence of small donors, but we call those PACs "special interest groups" and pretty much bitch about femenists, wage workers, gay marriage advocates, abortionists, and people who think we treat felons pretty shitty as having too much of a voice in government.
Anyone with less than ~$5,000 to donate has always been able to so by contributing directly to the campaigns, so the difference with PACs is that if you have more money you can now funnel unlimited amounts of it into those.
Actually, a PAC can only donate $5,000 per election to a campaign.
Collecting signatures in order to get on the ballot has been the norm in... every state? Virtually every state?
I paid $100 and got on the ballot. No signatures.
If someone tried the same thing but with funding and got too many candidates, they set their threshold too low.
Gotta keep the rabble out by making sure they have to have a team behind them to get their voice heard. Well-connected rich folks only please, someone who can get 20,000 signatures.
Citizen's United overturned a law which limited speech in the interest of preventing corruption.
That's all it did. It's not legal to donate a shitton of money to a candidate--Citizen's United didn't change that.
The law says it's not legal to run broadcast advertisements to influence an election within 60 days of the election unless you're a direct affiliate of the Candidate, basically. That means if NARAL decides within 2 weeks of Jeff Sessions's primary to run a ton of ads in Alabama talking about his endorsement of personhood-at-conception and felony murder charges for abortion, they can only legally do so because of the Citizen's United decision. Whether that's a power you want anyone to have is up for debate; but that's the scope of Citizen's United v. FEC.
Without Citizen's United v. FEC, NARAL--whose funding comes from both charities and individuals and who represent the will of a large number of regular people with little enough voice that we don't have to care about any of them (especially the poor rabble)--can still run such ads and make powerful indictments against the character of Jeff Sessions (or anyone else) up to 60 days before an election.
This also applies to SuperPACs--PACs not affiliated with candidates and not restricted to spending (this was a thing before Citizen's United v. FEC)--and to individuals. Corporations and individuals actually can m
people who protest Citizen's United are employing the very tactics which they protest against... so what? If they succeed, then those tactics will no longer be legal and they'll go do something else. That's not a contradiction.
Actually, I've spoken to a few of the more level-headed ones, and they're trying to find a balance. A lot of people don't understand what a PAC is and think it means big corporate money buying politicians.
Also, people who want pure public funding with no contributions have never suggested a system which would leave it up to some elite who gets to run.
Actually, a few have suggested we need a way to limit how many people can run, and some have referenced other systems where a party gets funding (not a candidate). The signature plan has been called a disaster by some of the reformists, as well: we've implemented it in some states, and a huge number of people ran at massive expense that nobody predicted.
There are other ways to do it.
Yes there are some big problems with opt-in approaches, but those are the only approaches allowed by the Citizen's United Decision
Citizen's United v FEC isn't about candidates and donations, but about running political ads within 60 days of the election. People don't seem to realize that anyone can pretty much put whatever they want on TV, if operating independently. They talk about SuperPACs but don't talk about the fact that corporations can pretty much just spend money and pay taxes on it (PACs let you avoid taxes). Claiming opt-in approaches are the only approaches allowed by Citizen's United v FEC demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the matter in discussion.
I have technical problems with most campaign reform efforts.
In one corner, you have everyone focused on Citizen's United--most of whom want to pass laws which would make their own campaigns illegal, and seem to fundamentally misunderstand what Citizen's United is. To be clear: the Citizen's United decision allows an entity (PAC) to speak about a candidate or candidates, so long as they don't coordinate with any candidate. These anti-Citizen's-United groups... are endorsing candidates and spending money to speak out, telling people it should be illegal to do... well, that, as well as to do any sort of "lobbying" of any politician, or even to spend any money to influence legislation--which is exactly what they're doing.
tl;dr: that kind of ham-fisted approach will quickly silence all advocacy groups, making sure the little people's voices stay little. There may be a viable approach to Citizen's United, but there's a lot of risk of unintended consequences and less reward than people think.
You also get people who want pure public funding--no contributions. This leaves it up to some elite to decide who gets to run, really. I cannot support that kind of measure.
Many of the less-radical groups push for things like small donations matching with archaic rules about who can get matching. This is a good direction, but they put a lot of emphasis on not taking donations over some dollar amount ($50 or $150, frequently), not using your own money, and not taking contributions from PACs. You're also not eligible for public funding until you raise some money--$10k to $40k is the usual range. These systems are also opt-in, which is a huge flaw: the small-donor candidates typically get 95%+ from individual contributions and matching, while the traditional candidates raise 30%-50% more funds.
So what do we do about it?
From what I can tell, we can't do this without two things: Democracy Vouchers and campaign spending hard limits. The system needs to be mandatory (not opt-in), and we can keep current PAC rules and donation limits. Contribution matching will reduce the impact of large donors, if you scale it up enough: a 3:1 match up to $675 or a 5:1 match up to $450 means big donors hit the ceiling quickly, while small donors have a big impact.
I also want to boost new candidates--e.g. match Congressional candidate loans up to $5,000 (reclaim from any loan payment) and match qualifying initial individual contributions (up to $5,000). With 3:1 matching, a candidate can self-fund up to $40,000, but has to pay $40,000 back to extract $5,000 of those loans back into his own pocket (loans out first: whenever you pay and have public matching loan balance, you have to match your loan repayment to pay the state back).
Let's say a candidate needs $40k to go full public matching in this system. Those candidate loans don't count. What counts is any theoretical public funds and any real contributions: if you get $10,000 in 3:1-matched contributions, the State will give you up to e.g. $15,000 (3:1 on the first $5K) on the way up, and then another $15,000 when you break $10k (at which point the matched funds would be $40k). If you get PAC money, well, okay, but that's not matched: you need $10k from small donors, or $20k from PACs (that initial $5k matching means you're effectively there when you have $20k of any other funding) to start receiving additional matching.
It's key that we have spending limits. $300k and you're DOA, or maybe some more-complex rules about only being able to spend $50k of your cash-on-hand (not from Candidate contributions or loans!) and then can only take small individual contributions. One way or another, breaching a hard limit has to stop you from pumping your own wealthy millionaire money into your campaign.
We might need some rules for PACs as well, such as a PAC that takes only small donor contributions (e.g. $50) can get matching under anal
Common sense is only laziness and ignorance. It's common sense that teachers in school should be armed so they can shoot back at the school shooters. Try it in practice--it won't work: the teachers will be prime targets for shooters because they're a threat and they're carrying ammo drops. They'll also probably miss now and then, causing even more danger to the students around them (as much as that's really possible when someone's trying to kill them).
Slashdot Mirror
Even though the effort by the Democrats to call a vote is Quixotic, it puts both parties on record as to where they stand.
Until you get people like me in the mix, anyway. I want a bigger conversation on a lot of stuff that's been reduced to political talking points.
Rumor coming out of DC was my Congressman was going to retire and have his wife run for his seat. He never announced his re-election campaign; he just put his name on the ballot and I've met people who claimed they've heard of me because he mentioned my name while canvassing. From what I'm picking up (fourth-hand information), the DNC has identified me as a threat, and told him to run this year so I'll go away.
Whatever, dude; nobody likes you. I'm going to Congress and I'm going to end poverty. We've got like 160 new Democratic candidates coming to replace Republicans and incumbents; I guess I've already not made any friends in DC, but that's okay: we're bringing new friends.
The 2018 term won't be an important term for me; 2020 term will. If I lose this election, I'll come back more powerful than these people can imagine.
I'm typically of the mind to create the regulatory impetus and then refine it as we learn new things through the fast-moving nature of administration. When the administration does it wrong, we fix it; when it does something right, we can try to define and describe that in a broad sense to create a safety net against backwards administrative action.
We all seem to be looking at the problem in the same way, with the same general approach, and working out the details.
He was an asshole to everyone. I had serious problems with that manager, but he cleaned up well, and these were not those problems. Pretty much every person this dude interacted with knew who had the problem, or at least was tired of being told that program crashes happen because you're too stupid to use his perfect software the right way.
You seem consistently biased against anyone with power.
It's also the same advice I've heard over the past decade and a half, and the same advice told back in the 1920s. It's the statistical correlate with which engineer gets the highest salary. It was also bluntly stated by Andrew Carnegie when he hired the first person in the world to ever earn a million-dollar salary as an employee of any firm.
When we got rid of our unmanageable prodigy, things got a lot better. Coworkers stopped crying after being told repeatedly that it's okay for them to be stupid because not everyone can be a genius. The pace of "updates" stopped, but the quality of code went up.
Also, he got arrested by the FBI a few years later for hacking into a school and publishing the dean's social security number because they weren't taking security issues seriously. He said they were too stupid to understand until somebody showed them, and should thank him.
The guy was an asshole.
Fair enough. The added payload often significantly increases the fuel cost, although at this point I don't know how that impacts the launch cost. At least this time it didn't detonate with teachers on board.
Astronauts get ketchup. They get salt and pepper in liquid form only.
I think that just as I was talking about super PACs, they are also talking about super PACs
There's an often-repeated list about limiting the corrupting influence of corporations, billionaires, unions, and special interests. That last category is stuff like NARAL and environmentalist groups, although mainly people mean to indicate the NRA and such.
If we look at how McCain-Feingold did it, it did not prohibit all political advertisements in the sixty days prior to an election, it only prohibited those which clearly identified a candidate
Lobbying is 501(c)(4); political stuff is 527. A 527 organization can talk about candidates, while a 501(c)(4) can talk about issues. If you want to do both, you have to create a separate segregated fund for your 527 activities and get donors to contribute for that fund; if you transfer from your 501(c)(4) bank account to your 527 account, you pay taxes on that money. Also, for the 527 to raise funds, it needs to transfer money from your 527 account to your 501(c)(4) account at the fair market price of list rental of your 501(c)(4) donor list, or else find its own donors without referencing the list.
As you say: these are not PACs. 527 is PAC; 501(c)(4) is lobbyist. As a candidate for office, I've considered organizing a 501(c)(4) with a 527, called a "Leadership PAC", mainly as a fall-back so I can quit my job and become politically-active if I lose. I learned some shit that made me rather unhappy in the process.
By the by: the IRS requires you to file form 8976 to inform them you intend to file form 1024-A to organize as a 501(c)(4). If you file form 1024-A, they'll process it; but that doesn't satisfy the requirement to also file form 8976 informing them of your intent to file form 1024-A. Are we in a sitcom?
this question of what speech is, without providing a specific answer, is what I'm imagining you're talking about.
It's more-complex than that. Arguments over unions center around things like free association as speech. The courts talk a lot about compelling government interests, equal protection, and other such things when discussing election and campaign finance law.
while I don't know every way in which political speech can be expressed, I do know that spending money isn't (or shouldn't be) a part of it
Well, you can spend hours and hours knocking doors and reach a few thousand people in a few months. You could also pay people to do that for you. You can pay radio and TV broadcasters to use their infrastructure (labor) to send a message.
Imagine if you had to campaign across a large Congressional district. It's 40 miles wide. A rich guy can buy gasoline; you can't afford a bus ticket. By spending money on gasoline and car insurance, he's expanded the reach of his speech and can effectively compete against you. This is both why spending money is speech and why we need controls on the spending of money.
The courts have argued that it's not in the government's interest to equalize competitiveness between candidates, and also that the government can't put limits on campaign spending because this would not be equal protection and would need to reflect each candidate's situation to be valid. These are actually conflicting arguments; if the second wasn't used to justify why the government can't make campaign spending limits, but only as a note of why it doesn't achieve the stated goal, then they wouldn't be in conflict.
When you sit down and think about it, the courts have ruled that giving people money is a violation of the first amendment.
To be honest, I think the courts are flat wrong: it's the government's primary interest to represent the people, and elections are the key to that representation. On the other hand, I can work with this. They gave me enough to attack, so I'll rig up circumventions for all of these arguments.
Laws are never as complete as we'd like them to be
This will be even more true when Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies.
Honestly I consider space launches squandered capacity. Put something up there we can use: GPS, moon infrastructure, something that will enrich the nation and the world. A lot of labor went into this thing, and a lot of nothing came out. Generally, I thus assume these people have no sense.
On the other hand, this thing cost $90 million to put up there, whereas the shuttle program cost $196 billion and the last mission cost $450 million, while a single Apollo mission cost $18 billion--1.67% of GDP in 1970, or equivalent to $310 billion today as a portion of our total economic power. This thing cost something like .029% of a single Apollo launch, and it wasn't even taxpayer money (which makes less difference than you'd think, although it matters).
We're reaching a point where a pointless display of space access wastes less economic power than things like mechanical loss of ketchup due to non-coated bottles refusing to release that last drop. Instead of a single Apollo launch, we could achieve universal healthcare. Twice.
Maybe it's time I reassess. Kim-Jong Trump's stupid military parade would land on the same scale as a heavy lift launch today.
The space debris will most probably just float off and crash into something, or drift into the empty void of black space where none shall ever encounter it. How do these people not understand that space is big?
Please call me when somebody gets to artificial neural networks again. There are some interesting conjectures I'd like to make so as to see the response from better-informed than I.
I thought it included people 16-64, with many people retiring around 70.
Still, it was more of a theoretical discussion rather than one of our BLS measures and the implications for our economy. The point is unemployment is a trend number that suggests things about our economy, most strongly in the context of its own history; it doesn't magically describe large and complex economic concepts such as poverty.
Why do we even have poverty, anyway?
People look at employment and treat it as a measure of poverty. When that doesn't satisfy, they look at things like number of employed and the labor force participation rate. The dialogue goes in the direction of "why isn't everyone working?"
A comprehensive economic report would include income distribution, standard of living, number in poverty, number receiving aid, percent of GDP of aid disbursed, number homeless, number hungry, number in college, number retired, and so forth.
With a labor participation rate above 50%, excluding those in college and those in retirement, you've got single-adult households and multi-worker households: men and women are working. Single-adult households suggest labor force participation rate should be higher; whereas multi-worker households suggest wealth (to pay nurses, day cares, and the cost of appliances to do housework, freeing one householder to pursue a career for self-fulfillment) or poverty (to keep the household financially-solvent). Multi-adult, single-worker households tend to suggest wealth as well (non-workers can pursue non-work efforts for self-fulfillment).
This gets even more-complicated when you realize traditional family values don't describe today's world: not everyone wants kids and, while there are roughly an equal number of men and women, not every two-adult household is a male-female pairing. A single-worker lesbian household is still a woman working and a woman not-working; a single-worker gay male household is a man working and a man not-working. Which is more likely? How far does our workforce currently lean toward male workers and female non-workers? For that matter, how many households are now female-breadwinner households where the man doesn't work?
Unemployment isn't a flat descriptor of economy.
I didn't see much of a scientific rationale behind the article's assertions. Truth be told, the guy talking doesn't display any sort of credential--not a certification or whanot, but at least an explanation of the merits of what he's saying. All he says is airlines are doing a bunch of stuff and they're stupid and his way would be better because it would.
we're not talking about regular PACs, we're talking about super PACs
Does that change the argument at all?
That's a whole lot different. Communications issues.
Super PACs are one of the results of Citizen's United and exist solely to increase the influence of people and corporations with more than $5,000 to donate.
Interestingly, SuperPACs can collect unlimited contributions from a single individual. The discussion becomes a lot more sane when we get away from "only individuals should be allowed to do whatever it is PACs do" to "limiting the contributions allowed from an individual donor to a tax-exempt organization engaged in electioneering".
The common lay discussion--where people cry about PACs in general and demand only small-donors to candidates--is both unstructured and terrifying, because it implies both that nobody should be allowed to speak about anything politics-related except candidates and that the only thing PACs do is donate enormous sums to candidates. It's a normal outcome when people don't know what's going on with something that's complex but obviously broken; the whole elections communication and contributions thing is complex, and I'm not an expert either.
Once we get back on track, things get more-sane; they also get more-difficult. You have to ask: what does a SuperPAC actually do? An individual or corporation (both of which can contribute unlimited to SuperPACs) can't deduct the contribution off their taxes, so there's no tax advantage. It's also not illegal to just spend a ton of money on your own (McCain-Feingold made it illegal for Corporations to do so, but not for individuals). You can pool money without paying taxes as it changes hands, but nobody really incurs a $1,000,000 expense: a lot of independent movement among rich folks would work just as well, while the rest of us really need to pool our resources.
The largest problem with Citizen's United v. FEC is the majority opinion actually makes sense, and the dissenting opinions are a huge pile of everyone understanding there is a problem but nobody knowing precisely how to address it. In other words: changing this is hard because we're not rightly sure to what we should change it.
As to the cry of a Constitutional Amendment, the best you might get is to extend the First Amendment "...except as to restrict the direct pursuit of influencing government actions and the public opinion thereof from those associations of individuals organized for purposes of commerce, wherein Congress shall enable the establishment of well-regulated and effective associations of the People organized for such purposes of the influence over government actions and the public opinion thereof."
This might work, maybe; it's still dangerous. The language attempts to say "if you're organized for commerce (business), we can prevent you from lobbying", while also providing the Supreme Court a weapon to invalidate any Congressional law which restricts the effective organization of individuals as such: if they block Corporations and don't allow PACs with donation limits high enough for small donors to actually have a voice, then only millionaires can have a voice--and the Supreme Court can claim the donation limits are too low and thus declare the law as-written unconstitutional; whereas if the limits are like $2,000, such an argument is weaker.
I'm not sure about putting in a provision to limit expenditure by individual. There are arguments for and against, and that's another step which creates additional risks--what I've suggested already could have unintended consequences, and I've attempted to limit those. At this point, however, you've helped me refactor and reframe this discussion into something I can approach more-directly.
I think we can get rid of the name "SuperPAC", but not the fact of rich people using their money as influence--we can try, but not sure we can succeed in full without damaging ourselves. What's your take, then?
We can also increase the rapidity at which society can recover, and reduce the impact of transitional unemployment. These are generally called "welfare", although there are interesting considerations about what is and isn't welfare depending on who you ask.
I've been pushing a Universal Dividend as a countermeasure for most of this. Without raising taxes, creating deficits, or cutting services, you can actually restructure the Federal welfare system (notably Social Security's retirement and disability benefits) to pay $7,500 per adult in 2016. That's not enough to live on; it raises a lot of people above the poverty guides (no welfare for you), and many others quite close, which means HUD and SNAP can get more people into apartments and eating real food, thus bridging the poverty gap.
The Dividend has other localized impacts. In poorer cities like Baltimore, Flint, or Detroit, the impact is bigger: more consumer spending capacity creates a need for jobs where unemployment is high. Automation and other technical progress (automation ~= wooden shipping pallet) create localized high unemployment (see: coal mining). This actually directly-remediates that: you at least need local service workers and truckers (the people driving in your city to move goods from distribution centers to stores, not the long-haulers who dump it in your town and leave)--or at least truck mechanics, maintenance, and logistics people--so jobs will come when consumer demand comes--even if that demand goes to Chinese goods from Amazon.
In total, people can't be completely-removed from consumption. This puts job-creation and job-retention pressure on the economy, slowing the loss of jobs in progress and restoring them back more-quickly. In other words:
If automation progresses faster than we can handle it then we will pass laws to slow it down
I've suggested laws to speed it up by making it less-risky and more-profitable, through the mechanism of strengthening consumers so their purchasing power (effective demand) can hold the job market up under a bigger assault.
I grew up in the 90s, where technology advanced at an unbelievable pace. I want it back.
Just like in the first 18th century (the 20th is so similar I like to call it the 2nd 18th century), easier jobs do not bring more time
Actually, we get wealthier. In 1900, 40% of the median household's income went to food; it was 33% in 1950; rapid agricultural productivity increases have this at about 12% to day, although that's a lot of food out of home: you can get by on around 3%-5% if you eat like people in the 1950s (i.e. plan meals, cook at home, thrifty shit).
We funnel all that back into buying more with more working-hours. Sometimes we don't notice: a car from 1970 has a lot less stuff in it than an equivalent income-level car from 2018. I was around to see anti-lock brakes, drive-by-wire, and multi-changer radio in what today is a $50,000 car, while the $20,000 car had a tape deck and standard brakes; now all that high-end luxury stuff--even heated seats!--is showing up in cars that poor people on barely more than minimum-wage might buy (you know, with a $150-$200 car payment). A "car" you might buy at a given income still costs about the same percentage of your income, but has a lot more stuff--things that would have taken more labor, but now take less.
We also buy a bunch of stuff, not just clothes and food. Bigger houses, automatic washing machines, Roombas. Whenever I win the argument about middle-class median income buying these things, the other party starts talking minimum-wage--even though they also use the "cost-of-living" argument (minimum wage raises by cost-of-living will keep that bottom worker just-as-poor as ever forever, so it's a dumb argument unless you want to talk about a growth-based wage instead of a COLA wage).
We could instead work less and enjoy a better, but not as much better, standard-of-living, where that standard is measured by material wealth--both produced per-capita (fewer working hours per-capita means less consumer purchasing power, which means fewer jobs) and actually in the hands of the worker (who works less and so can't purchase as much as otherwise).
The working-hours decision isn't up to a person, but rather up to society. In theory, this means everyone deciding to work 32 hours (4 days) would work (laissez-faire); in practice, nobody individually can get traction, so you can only reduce it by law. Union labor agreements seem like another path, but that doesn't work: unions would also likely argue for the same weekly wages (which is rational), which means those products become more-expensive. They could, in theory, take the 20% pay cut for 20% working-hours cut; but do you really think the 400 unionized workers in your shop are going to bargain for smaller paychecks?
Off course this signifies technical progress, but we can only have human progress if the structure of society evolves with it.
Actually, it's the same structure; it's a matter of modal response. We still behave as if it's 1920; it's just a little tweaking of the knobs, but it's necessary to achieve the gains in leisure time.
We're also at a point where we can provide a universal dividend and a growth-based minimum wage without creating high taxes. The Dividend itself actually doesn't increase taxes in the US, mainly due to the poor structuring of Social Security's retirement and disability benefits: restructuring these and our taxes to make retirement and disability permanently-solvent at their CPI-adjusted levels from now until the end of time can actually achieve an additional benefit that in total produces lower taxes even on the rich. Weird, right?
Sounds like working to create value.
I only really said three things in my post above, and two of those were pretty unimportant.
You repeated a lot of things in different ways and I deconstructed the arguments, yeah.
You see the point, though: the whole political action committee thing is a structure that brings together people with interests. It gets abused, but we don't burn the whole system down and tell people they're all on their own and good luck when the super-rich are also all on their own.
I'm just not willing to do this
I've gone down the rabbit hole a few times. It ends in one of three ways: you start refining points to converge to a clearer understanding; you start bloating up posts bigger and bigger; or you keep repeating the same arguments at each other with no change. How much of this you can take really depends on staying power, and I fundamentally don't wear down, so the only real reason to stick around is if you think you're going to get the first outcome.
House of Representatives banned the filibuster. They must have met someone like me once.
I think that most people have at least heard of Sheldon Adelson or Tom Steyer, so I would guess that most people know that PACs aren't just a way for corporations to buy political influence - they're also there to increase the influence of rich individuals
There's also increases to the voice of folks who think women need equitable access to reproductive healthcare; people with concerns about environmental policy; folks who want to protect social security and medicare (and not just one); people who want our criminal justice system fixed so it actually helps people and reduces crime; various efforts to drug policy; and so forth.
That seems unimportant though, the main thing about PACs is that they only increase the influence of the wealthy.
They increase the influence of small donors, but we call those PACs "special interest groups" and pretty much bitch about femenists, wage workers, gay marriage advocates, abortionists, and people who think we treat felons pretty shitty as having too much of a voice in government.
Anyone with less than ~$5,000 to donate has always been able to so by contributing directly to the campaigns, so the difference with PACs is that if you have more money you can now funnel unlimited amounts of it into those.
Actually, a PAC can only donate $5,000 per election to a campaign.
Collecting signatures in order to get on the ballot has been the norm in... every state? Virtually every state?
I paid $100 and got on the ballot. No signatures.
If someone tried the same thing but with funding and got too many candidates, they set their threshold too low.
Gotta keep the rabble out by making sure they have to have a team behind them to get their voice heard. Well-connected rich folks only please, someone who can get 20,000 signatures.
Citizen's United overturned a law which limited speech in the interest of preventing corruption.
That's all it did. It's not legal to donate a shitton of money to a candidate--Citizen's United didn't change that.
The law says it's not legal to run broadcast advertisements to influence an election within 60 days of the election unless you're a direct affiliate of the Candidate, basically. That means if NARAL decides within 2 weeks of Jeff Sessions's primary to run a ton of ads in Alabama talking about his endorsement of personhood-at-conception and felony murder charges for abortion, they can only legally do so because of the Citizen's United decision. Whether that's a power you want anyone to have is up for debate; but that's the scope of Citizen's United v. FEC.
Without Citizen's United v. FEC, NARAL--whose funding comes from both charities and individuals and who represent the will of a large number of regular people with little enough voice that we don't have to care about any of them (especially the poor rabble)--can still run such ads and make powerful indictments against the character of Jeff Sessions (or anyone else) up to 60 days before an election.
This also applies to SuperPACs--PACs not affiliated with candidates and not restricted to spending (this was a thing before Citizen's United v. FEC)--and to individuals. Corporations and individuals actually can m
people who protest Citizen's United are employing the very tactics which they protest against... so what? If they succeed, then those tactics will no longer be legal and they'll go do something else. That's not a contradiction.
Actually, I've spoken to a few of the more level-headed ones, and they're trying to find a balance. A lot of people don't understand what a PAC is and think it means big corporate money buying politicians.
Also, people who want pure public funding with no contributions have never suggested a system which would leave it up to some elite who gets to run.
Actually, a few have suggested we need a way to limit how many people can run, and some have referenced other systems where a party gets funding (not a candidate). The signature plan has been called a disaster by some of the reformists, as well: we've implemented it in some states, and a huge number of people ran at massive expense that nobody predicted.
There are other ways to do it.
Yes there are some big problems with opt-in approaches, but those are the only approaches allowed by the Citizen's United Decision
Citizen's United v FEC isn't about candidates and donations, but about running political ads within 60 days of the election. People don't seem to realize that anyone can pretty much put whatever they want on TV, if operating independently. They talk about SuperPACs but don't talk about the fact that corporations can pretty much just spend money and pay taxes on it (PACs let you avoid taxes). Claiming opt-in approaches are the only approaches allowed by Citizen's United v FEC demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the matter in discussion.
Pharmacists are important. Don't underestimate them.
That's nutty.
I have technical problems with most campaign reform efforts.
In one corner, you have everyone focused on Citizen's United--most of whom want to pass laws which would make their own campaigns illegal, and seem to fundamentally misunderstand what Citizen's United is. To be clear: the Citizen's United decision allows an entity (PAC) to speak about a candidate or candidates, so long as they don't coordinate with any candidate. These anti-Citizen's-United groups ... are endorsing candidates and spending money to speak out, telling people it should be illegal to do ... well, that, as well as to do any sort of "lobbying" of any politician, or even to spend any money to influence legislation--which is exactly what they're doing.
tl;dr: that kind of ham-fisted approach will quickly silence all advocacy groups, making sure the little people's voices stay little. There may be a viable approach to Citizen's United, but there's a lot of risk of unintended consequences and less reward than people think.
You also get people who want pure public funding--no contributions. This leaves it up to some elite to decide who gets to run, really. I cannot support that kind of measure.
Many of the less-radical groups push for things like small donations matching with archaic rules about who can get matching. This is a good direction, but they put a lot of emphasis on not taking donations over some dollar amount ($50 or $150, frequently), not using your own money, and not taking contributions from PACs. You're also not eligible for public funding until you raise some money--$10k to $40k is the usual range. These systems are also opt-in, which is a huge flaw: the small-donor candidates typically get 95%+ from individual contributions and matching, while the traditional candidates raise 30%-50% more funds.
So what do we do about it?
From what I can tell, we can't do this without two things: Democracy Vouchers and campaign spending hard limits. The system needs to be mandatory (not opt-in), and we can keep current PAC rules and donation limits. Contribution matching will reduce the impact of large donors, if you scale it up enough: a 3:1 match up to $675 or a 5:1 match up to $450 means big donors hit the ceiling quickly, while small donors have a big impact.
I also want to boost new candidates--e.g. match Congressional candidate loans up to $5,000 (reclaim from any loan payment) and match qualifying initial individual contributions (up to $5,000). With 3:1 matching, a candidate can self-fund up to $40,000, but has to pay $40,000 back to extract $5,000 of those loans back into his own pocket (loans out first: whenever you pay and have public matching loan balance, you have to match your loan repayment to pay the state back).
Let's say a candidate needs $40k to go full public matching in this system. Those candidate loans don't count. What counts is any theoretical public funds and any real contributions: if you get $10,000 in 3:1-matched contributions, the State will give you up to e.g. $15,000 (3:1 on the first $5K) on the way up, and then another $15,000 when you break $10k (at which point the matched funds would be $40k). If you get PAC money, well, okay, but that's not matched: you need $10k from small donors, or $20k from PACs (that initial $5k matching means you're effectively there when you have $20k of any other funding) to start receiving additional matching.
It's key that we have spending limits. $300k and you're DOA, or maybe some more-complex rules about only being able to spend $50k of your cash-on-hand (not from Candidate contributions or loans!) and then can only take small individual contributions. One way or another, breaching a hard limit has to stop you from pumping your own wealthy millionaire money into your campaign.
We might need some rules for PACs as well, such as a PAC that takes only small donor contributions (e.g. $50) can get matching under anal
If it's just convenience, we have certifications. If it's dangerous, we have licensing.
Common sense is only laziness and ignorance. It's common sense that teachers in school should be armed so they can shoot back at the school shooters. Try it in practice--it won't work: the teachers will be prime targets for shooters because they're a threat and they're carrying ammo drops. They'll also probably miss now and then, causing even more danger to the students around them (as much as that's really possible when someone's trying to kill them).
It's easy to nerf armed teachers.
Common sense says harsh punishments deter crime. That doesn't work either .
I agree we should have standards of competency before you're allowed to touch certain things. What those things are requires some review.