TomatoPie wrote:
You're arguing with your invented straw man - and not in any way addressing the point of the essay

A straw man is a common type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on the misrepresentation of an opponent's argument.

e.g.

All along, while the welfare state was growing constantly, liberals were insisting constantly it wasn’t big enough or growing fast enough.

While it's a delightful fantasy to think that big government has been the true object of liberals' desire and compassion a mere red herring to distract the benighted public from this insidious end, even if true you'll have to kick over quite a few rocks to find a liberal actually "insisting" on this view.

If it helps, I find the "corporate asset" thing as reductionist as what's his face's bloviating.

TomatoPie wrote:

excerpt wrote: Given that liberals are people who: 1) have built a welfare state that is now the biggest thing government does in America

Stopped reading the excerpt here, didn't bother with the article. We all know what "welfare state" is right-winger code for.

TomatoPie wrote:Take 10 minutes for this - "The Case Against Liberal Compassion"

http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/current

Terrible article

The author runs through the growth of government assistance spending during the years 1977-2009, during which we had a Republican president for 20 years and a Democratic president for 12, and blames all of the increase on liberals.

He pats himself on the back for his insight that liberals aren't intentionally evil, it's just a byproduct of their misguided nature.

He thinks that waste and inefficiency is a choice.

He's adds a new wrinkle to the conservative persecution complex. He thinks the reason why conservatives don't succeed politically (?) is because they've never come up with a good slogan to counter "compassion." If only Republicans could think up slogans like "small government" or "freedom" maybe they'd win their share of elections.

He thinks the reason that Obamacare didn't have a smooth roll-out was because liberals didn't want it to succeed.

I'm sure his final point, that liberals are more interested in getting credit for their compassion than in actually helping people, applies to some Sean Penn types, but overall the article is the kind of mean-spirited rant that isn't designed to change anyone's mind.

I was gonna go with "liberals (people who don't agree with me) are pretty much all identical people with identical goals, which are wrong and mostly evil, so let me tell you my conspiracy theory about them", but let's face it, that's pretty reductionist.

I haven't read up much on this Harold Hamm guy's divorce thing, but I like what I hear of his legal strategy: plead dumb luck. Apparently the vagaries of Oklahoma's judicial system treat such a plea as strengthening your entitlement not to share whatever lucre has accrued to your name. I'm a fan of the bromide "better lucky than good"; Oklahoma has incorporated it in its jurisprudence.

That may be the way to become the US's 24th richest person. It's certainly the most likely way. You don't want it to be your governmental institutions' organizing principle.

swishnicholson wrote:
If it helps, I find the "corporate asset" thing as reductionist as what's his face's bloviating.

This guy Leonhardt may know something about economics but he does not have much of a handle on how politics tends to work:

David Leonhardt in NYTimes wrote:The Great Wage Slowdown Looming Over Politics

The Democratic Party fashions itself as the defender of working families, and low- and middle-income voters are indeed more favorably disposed to Democrats than to Republicans. Those voters have helped the party win the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. But if Democrats can’t deliver rising living standards, many voters aren’t going to remain loyal. They’ll skip voting or give a chance to Republicans who offer an alternative, even a vague alternative.

Or all that disgruntlement will be addressed and converted to votes by one or more of the party's candidates, whether or not they wind up delivering. That is, the delivery doesn't usually, or often, come before the promise (campaign claims of job craterers like 2-time failed CT gubernatorial candidate Tom Foley notwithstanding)

Democracy Day - coming to a nation near you:


"Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed a bill to designate "Democracy Day" as a national election holiday to make it easier for Americans to vote.

Nationwide, preliminary indications are that the total turnout for the 2014 elections was only 36.6 percent, according to the United States Elections Project at the University of Florida.

In America, we should be celebrating our democracy and doing everything possible to make it easier for people to participate in the political process. Election Day should be a national holiday so that everyone has the time and opportunity to vote. While this would not be a cure-all, it would indicate a national commitment to create a more vibrant democracy.

We should not be satisfied with a "democracy" in which more than 60 percent of our people don't vote and some 80 percent of young people and low-income Americans fail to vote. We can and must do better than that. While we must also focus on campaign finance reform and public funding of elections, establishing an Election Day holiday would be an important step forward."

I respect what he is trying to do but who really believes that voter turnout is going to improve substantially just because of a Democracy Day? I understand voting in most suburbs is very different from voting in high population areas. After all, I have probably spent less total time waiting on line to vote in my 28 years of voting than some people spent last Tuesday alone. But I believe, and I think surveys have shown, that people do not eschew voting because it is inconvenient, they skip voting because they do not believe it makes a difference. And, frankly, it is tough to argue with them when elections are bought over and over again in this country.

As we discussed previously, elections are rarely about the "best candidate" but the "best funded candidate". Sometimes those are the same people but I think it is more the exception rather than the rule. As cynical as it is, I do not think voter turnout will ever improve substantially so long as millionaires and billionaires are able to buy seats with their personal wealth and the wealth of their corporate handlers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ ... story.html

As a war planner, I don't like gambling, and I really don't like gambling with other country's forces.

Dave, I hear what you're saying and I don't disagree. But I also think it might be the case that anything that shines a light on the process, as "Democracy Day" would, might also illuminate some of the uglier aspects of that process and hopefully spur a push toward needed reforms, or at least greater awareness and energy.

Sanders is a pretty smart guy and, for someone considered "out there" in his views, surprisingly hard-headed and practical. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if his thinking is that by proposing something that seems anodyne and harmless, he could set in motion a series of events that leads to positive systems change.

Of course, the Republicans know this too, and since greater participation, more/broader civic engagement and less general cynicism are the last things they want, they'll block it.

I don't think making election day a holiday would increase turnout. Indeed, I think it might have the opposite effect. A lot of people would turn the whole thing into a four day weekend by taking Monday off, they'd perhaps party on Monday evening, or take a trip, or go shopping.

I do think more early voting would make a difference. We have early voting in AR, and that includes Saturday. Most counties do require that you go to the county courthouse to vote early though, so that could be a problem regarding transportation. And for small jurisdictions, opening multiple polling places actually can get expensive. But still, I think keeping polling places throughout the county open on the Saturday and Monday before election day would do more to increase turnout than making election day a holiday.

Oh, Megyn Kelly. I imagine Roger Ailes probably has this on repeat while doing things to himself that are beyond horrible to contemplate.

Glenn Beck declaring his condition has longstanding medical roots is [fill in the blank. pro tip: anything fits]

Luzinski's Gut wrote:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-pentagons-nine-brigade-gamble-on-iraq/2014/11/10/0587d99e-68f7-11e4-a31c-77759fc1eacc_story.html

As a war planner, I don't like gambling, and I really don't like gambling with other country's forces.

General, I don't know about the military strateregy,but aren't we, like, doing all this in other countries', y'know, countries?

dajafi wrote:Oh, Megyn Kelly. I imagine Roger Ailes probably has this on repeat while doing things to himself that are beyond horrible to contemplate.

Freudian slip?

Somewhat. But when they fail, and they will fail yet again, we're going to be holding a bit ol bag of dookie.

drsmooth wrote:

Luzinski's Gut wrote:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-pentagons-nine-brigade-gamble-on-iraq/2014/11/10/0587d99e-68f7-11e4-a31c-77759fc1eacc_story.html

As a war planner, I don't like gambling, and I really don't like gambling with other country's forces.

General, I don't know about the military strateregy,but aren't we, like, doing all this in other countries', y'know, countries?

dajafi wrote:2014 job creation faster in states that raised the MW (CEPR)

At the beginning of 2014, 13 states increased their minimum wage. Of these 13 states, four passed legislation raising their minimum wage (Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island). In the other nine, their minimum wage automatically increased in line with inflation at the beginning of the year (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington state).

As CEPR noted in March and April posts, economists at Goldman Sachs conducted a simple evaluation of the impact of these state minimum-wage increases. GS compared the employment change between December and January in the 13 states where the minimum wage increased with the changes in the remainder of the states. The GS analysis found that the states where the minimum wage went up had faster employment growth than the states where the minimum wage remained at its 2013 level.

When we updated the GS analysis using additional employment data from the BLS, we saw the same pattern: employment growth was higher in states where the minimum wage went up. While this kind of simple exercise can't establish causality, it does provide evidence against theoretical negative employment effects of minimum-wage increases.
…
Of the 13 states that increased their minimum wage in early 2014, all but one (New Jersey) are seeing employment gains. Furthermore, nine of the remaining 12 states are above the median for this period. The average change in employment for the 13 states that increased their minimum wage is +0.99% while the remaining states have an average employment change of +0.68%.

It's kind of a weird metric to use the average employment level of the first five months of the year vs. the average employment level of the five months. It's also really strange to treat states that have raised their minimum wage by inflation the same as those who have raised their minimum wage by significant amounts. Both of these twists seem to buy CEPR a more favorable narrative to minimum wage hikes than they'd otherwise get.

I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website and grabbed the numbers for myself. Through August jobs in the 50 states plus DC went from 137,580,300 to 139,112,700 when you sum the state employment figures. That gives us a job growth percentage of 1.11% for 2014. The four states which significantly raised their minimum wages were Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. So far this year they have grown their employment numbers by 0.77%, 0.42%, 0.83%, and 0.57% respectively. The states which raised the minimum wage by inflation ranged from Vermont at -0.84% to Florida at 1.74%. Four of the nine states are above the national average, Missouri is just about at it, and four are below. None of the states which dramatically increased their minimum wage are above the national average.

Obviously there's nothing causal about any of these numbers, but it seems like the states that increased the minimum wage are adding jobs slower than the country as a whole. They're also all high tax states that are growing slower than the national average population wise, so teasing out any impact from the minimum wage hike is probably impossible, at least at the macro level like this.

I don't think small increases in the minimum wage have too large of an impact one way or another, but none of the increases at the state level are up to the $10.10 level the president wants enacted federally, which I do think could cause some problems. It makes more sense to address it state by state (have the federal level pegged to a level that's OK for the states with lower costs of living) because the point at which the minimum wage becomes seriously problematic for unskilled labor in Connecticut is going to be a lot higher than Mississippi. Raise the federal minimum wage to whatever it would be now if it had been indexed to inflation back when it was raised a few years ago, tie it to inflation, and let individual cities or states experiment with levels significantly above that if they want. It's a losing issue for the party, and it doesn't seem like its practical economic importance - good or bad - is anything close to its cache as an issue in campaigns.

I don't think I disagree with any of that, jh.

Then again, I'm increasingly sympathetic to the "let the states figure it out" default of policymaking, where the externalities are limited (which rules out e.g. environmental stuff) and basic rights aren't imperiled (e.g. voting stuff).

Admittedly, the two conditionals leave a hell of a lot of gray area: infrastructure, safety net, education, et al. But devolution where feasible is both practical and probably truer to basic concepts of representative government than top-down policymaking, which can't account for local circumstances and is more prone to alienate people who don't want to be ruled from afar. I want my gay-coddling, gun-limiting, high-tax, high-service local setup to remain in place even if, Xenu forbid, another Texan takes the White House.

Now that I mention it, I'm curious how many of my fellow liberals here agree with this.

I think we are one nation and should generally act as such, while obviously letting a few things go. I don't think civil rights, worker rights, environment, etc are those things.

I just wonder if it would be as big of a deal if we had a different funding system for our politics.

Watergate was a hell of a thing, huh? If that's -62, that'd mean the Dems held an 80-18 advantage in legislative chambers.

Last week's elections puts the GOP quite a bit above their previous postwar high water mark from back when Eisenhower was first elected. Thanks Obama.

drsmooth wrote:Glenn Beck declaring his condition has longstanding medical roots is [fill in the blank. pro tip: anything fits]

adrenal fatigue?!?!



Oh man, he's a jackass and just plain stupid.

Maybe he should buy some McMunn's Elixir of Opium or maybe some Dr Guertin's Nerve Syrup. Or maybe he should have his feet detoxified. Poor guy.