A New Story: Politics for the 21st Century

I just read about the Republican moderates counter offer of a $600 billion "stimulus".  Here is my almost over the character limit response/comment that I left at the WaPo.  No Deal.  600b is simply not enough to offset the loss of demand.  It will result in the kind of uneven and slow recovery we had in 2009-2011, which is precisely what R's want to happen so they can run their campaigns; at the expense of the American people yet again. So much demand has been lost, that 1.9 tril may be too low. The only impediment to 1.9 tril is inflation and Powell said that a bit of inflation would actually be a good thing.  We do NOT need to worry about paying for it - we are the sole creator of our own currency, can never go insolvent.  So paying for it is NOT the question.  The question is: is it a good idea? Child care tax credit cuts child poverty in half.  YES Essentially universal checks guarantee that everyone who has been hurt by this virus g...

 Another response to Catherine Rampell's attacks on universal direct cash payments. Please explain how it has become "clearer" who has suffered?  Some 50% of Americans have lost income, across all income levels but certainly concentrated among the poor.  But as these comments show, 2019 tax returns will not reflect that.  So yes, in general, it has become clearer, but I disagree that there is a magic wand to decipher who is deserving and who is not.  But making it, say under 150K, like the last round of checks, you only leave out about 10% of the population, so only incur about 10% of the cost.  Not only will people like me, in the top 10%, who have not lost income, use it to pay off debt for schooling, invest in my retirement, give to charities, get work done that we have been putting off, and etc. but I am totally fine with a small extra cost to make sure that no children are left hungry b/c of a virus. Agree, we need to tackle the problem of p...

 I have a feeling I will be writing a bunch of these.  In an article criticizing Ben Sasse for crtiticizing Qanon, Jeff Charles ends with this line. "On the right, we must ensure that this asinine fairy tale doesn’t give the left enough ammo to paint us all as conspiracy lunatics. Still, most of us know that this fringe element by no means represents the conservative movement or the Republican Party." The irony here is that so many articles at redstate do exactly this:  they take the actions of one "leftist" and use it to prove that the left is the "thought police" or whatever the latest attack is.  Just today, there were articles using what is known as the fallacy of composition, which Charles says is unfair: Looks Like We Got Another 'Winner': New 'Squad' Member Opens Her Mouth & PROVES IT   GOP Committed CHEMICAL WARFARE by Not Wearing Masks Says Clueless Elected Official   Ever Had a Hard Time Understanding Someone's Accent? ...

I went to high school with Tucker.  He was an aggressive conservative debater even then.  I specifically remember him attacking me for wearing a "Mutants for Nuclear Power" button when I was a lowly freshman and he was an upperclassman.  Since then I have taken classes in logic, and logical fallacies, studied History in college and taught just about every social studies class at the high school level.  He is very smart, and a good rhetorician, but is still using the same tired fallacies to make his arguments.  While the "illicit transference" fallacy (drawing general conclusion from specific cases) is pretty common, and just because an argument is a fallacy doesn't mean it is not sound, in Tucker's case, he uses them as a tool of propaganda.  See the list of propaganda principles here. Let's start with the problematic argument he made against my button in 1985.  He asked what California would do for electricity if it immediately shut down all nuclear ...

 Please show me your magic wand of "targeting."  This is the 4th article you have published, second from the editorial board against Direct Cash Payments.  And the 4th time that your "targeting" has remained vague at best.  Until you explain exactly how you plan to "target" AND get the relief to people as soon as possible, you are wrong.  Direct cash transfers are the most progressive idea out there, in general. Your arguments: 1. People who don't need it will get it.  Mine: people who DO need it won't unless your "targeting" is 100% efficient. 2. Unemployment benefits would be better.  Mine: that misses a large swath of people, including gig workers and stay at home parents (who are staying at homer to educate their children).  AND it is a drag on employment. 3. It's expensive.  Mine: So is giving everyone a free vaccine which I assume we both support.  At what price is a human life not worthy of being saved.  The tax co...

 There are two versions of reality in America.  I, of course, think I live in the "real" one, and that the right wingers live in a fantasy world of alternate facts, lies, and conspiracies.  Since the insurrection at the Capitol, I have been thinking about nothing else.  As an exercise, I wanted to see how many words I would have to change for a comment from RedState to accurately reflect my own beliefs.  I made 11 changes and changed only 5 words.  Please forgive the grammar, it is not mine. Here is the RedState Version of reality: The Democrat party, their news & social media outlets, far left radical supporters, Antifa, BLM and the political collusion with China in their agenda towards transforming America into what they have been indoctrinating the last generations into, a Socialist single party leadership. They have used every Communist tactic China uses to control what the public see's, hears, believes. The Democrat party, many R...