Helping the floundering GOP presidential candidates solve the Trump riddle

PhilFish said:

the american public, by and large, is pretty dumb. hence, why we am where we am..

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For years I used to point out the fact that we should be happy the American people didn't get the politicians they deserved. As bad as our politicians were, they were nearly always better than the people who voted for them -- better educated, smarter, harder working, less openly hate-driven, etc. For example, as much as I despised Bush, I recognized that there was public sentiment, right after 9/11, that would have empowered him to do so much worse if he'd wanted -- not just empowered him to do it, but rewarded him for doing it. He could have stoked the anti-Muslim resentment, rather than trying to defuse it. As awful as he was, the people were worse. But now I wonder if maybe we're finally getting the politicians we deserve, at least on the right. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump sound like they'd be right at home as callers for one of those "shock jock" conservative radio shows, which is something you couldn't say about Bush, Romney, or McCain. They really do reflect the Republican base in a way that, mercifully, prior Republican standard bearers never did.

Arkady said:

For years I used to point out the fact that we should be happy the American people didn't get the politicians they deserved. As bad as our politicians were, they were nearly always better than the people who voted for them -- better educated, smarter, harder working, less openly hate-driven, etc. For example, as much as I despised Bush, I recognized that there was public sentiment, right after 9/11, that would have empowered him to do so much worse if he'd wanted -- not just empowered him to do it, but rewarded him for doing it. He could have stoked the anti-Muslim resentment, rather than trying to defuse it. As awful as he was, the people were worse. But now I wonder if maybe we're finally getting the politicians we deserve, at least on the right. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump sound like they'd be right at home as callers for one of those "shock jock" conservative radio shows, which is something you couldn't say about Bush, Romney, or McCain. They really do reflect the Republican base in a way that, mercifully, prior Republican standard bearers never did.

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why qualify...'at least on the right'.. veering headlong into gimme gimme socialism isnt exactly a turn toward nirvana...

PhilFish said:

yep. though one shouldnt infer that Trump is a really smart candidate.....or..??

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I think Trump is a lot like Reagan -- a stupid man with mediocre education, but with immense practical skills in the media universe, honed by decades as a popular entertainer and media figure on the national stage. Reagan knew how to charm his way out of anything. Trump doesn't do it through charm, but he has his own basket of rhetorical tricks that he's become expert at using. I think he'll be hard to nail down. I think Clinton has the skills to pull it off if they're the nominees. Sanders might, too. And probably Cruz would, if he had the luxury of time he'd get in a one-on-one debate with Trump. It's tought to pull off on a crowded stage, though.

PhilFish said:

why qualify...'at least on the right'.. veering headlong into gimme gimme socialism isnt exactly a turn toward nirvana...

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If either candidate on the left veered headlong into gimme gimme socialism, I suppose that would be a fair point, but I don't think that's the case. Clinton is virtually identical, in campaign rhetoric and policies, to her husband (and Gore). Sanders is definitely to their left, but would be entirely mainstream by the standard of advanced nations generally -- he's a standard-issue Social Democrat, who'd be comfortably at home in center-left parties like Germany's SPD, Canada's Liberal Party, etc. Sanders's rhetoric is usually pretty mild, and his preferred policies are mostly analogues to things that have been tried successfully in many other wealthy nations. I understand your desire for symmetry in my comments, but I just don't think the situation is symmetrical, so trying to impose symmetry on it would be a distortion. The liberal base just isn't driven by xenophobia, fear, and hate, the way the conservative base is, and the liberal base isn't pushing for policies that are far outside the realm of behaviors of other leading nations, the way the conservative base is.

Arkady said:

If either candidate on the left veered headlong into gimme gimme socialism, I suppose that would be a fair point, but I don't think that's the case. Clinton is virtually identical, in campaign rhetoric and policies, to her husband (and Gore). Sanders is definitely to their left, but would be entirely mainstream by the standard of advanced nations generally -- he's a standard-issue Social Democrat, who'd be comfortably at home in center-left parties like Germany's SPD, Canada's Liberal Party, etc. Sanders's rhetoric is usually pretty mild, and his preferred policies are mostly analogues to things that have been tried successfully in many other wealthy nations. I understand your desire for symmetry in my comments, but I just don't think the situation is symmetrical, so trying to impose symmetry on it would be a distortion. The liberal base just isn't driven by xenophobia, fear, and hate, the way the conservative base is, and the liberal base isn't pushing for policies that are far outside the realm of behaviors of other leading nations, the way the conservative base is.

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well, it's not a desire for symmetry.. morew, a recognition of what it in reality is..
I like Sanders by and large, and do not disagree with where he lands in the spectrum..but he plays to an audience who is further left than he.. the' gimme gimme'. the right, is not driven by xenophobia, etc (at least not in my assessment) as a whole, but their elected sure are.. it's tough being caught in the middle of that.

Arkady said:

For years I used to point out the fact that we should be happy the American people didn't get the politicians they deserved. As bad as our politicians were, they were nearly always better than the people who voted for them -- better educated, smarter, harder working, less openly hate-driven, etc. For example, as much as I despised Bush, I recognized that there was public sentiment, right after 9/11, that would have empowered him to do so much worse if he'd wanted -- not just empowered him to do it, but rewarded him for doing it. He could have stoked the anti-Muslim resentment, rather than trying to defuse it. As awful as he was, the people were worse. But now I wonder if maybe we're finally getting the politicians we deserve, at least on the right. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump sound like they'd be right at home as callers for one of those "shock jock" conservative radio shows, which is something you couldn't say about Bush, Romney, or McCain. They really do reflect the Republican base in a way that, mercifully, prior Republican standard bearers never did.

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I don't think Trump is a republican at all. He is as much Democrat as he is republican. To say he is a shock jock conservative or he reflects the republican base to me is way off. He definitely has his own view on every topic.

Can a party keep out someone they don't want, like could they have kept Trump out of their party?

PhilFish said:

well, it's not a desire for symmetry.. morew, a recognition of what it in reality is..
I like Sanders by and large, and do not disagree with where he lands in the spectrum..but he plays to an audience who is further left than he.. the' gimme gimme'. the right, is not driven by xenophobia, etc (at least not in my assessment) as a whole, but their elected sure are.. it's tough being caught in the middle of that.

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I don't know. There are certainly some far-left types who, in theory, Sanders could be playing to -- for example, promising slavery reparations, or the redistribution of all second homes to the homeless, or the seizure of certain classes of firearms from their owners, or some such. I've just never heard him play to that audience. Instead, he pushes mainstream Social Democrat policies, like free public college and more socialized medicine. His ideas tend to sound radical in our rarefied far-right political context, but they're hum-drum by the standards of other wealthy nations. For example, Germany has a center-right government and yet recently made all public universities free and is moving aggressively towards solar energy to slow climate change.

There was one debate where Bernie said College should be free, he also said college graduates couldn't find jobs, and capped it off by saying no longer is a high school education enough that you have to have a college education.

Confusing.

SW48 said:

I don't think Trump is a republican at all. He is as much Democrat as he is republican. To say he is a shock jock conservative or he reflects the republican base to me is way off. He definitely has his own view on every topic.

Can a party keep out someone they don't want, like could they have kept Trump out of their party?

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You make a fair point about Trump not fitting in perfectly with the shock-jock conservative audience, since some of his policies are unorthodox from the conservative perspective. I think to some extent, he can't even be said to have real beliefs.... for example, does anyone, including Trump, really know his position on abortion? He knows he can't be openly pro choice if he wants to reach the presidency through the GOP, so he says he's pro life now, but does anyone believe him?

But where I think he's quite at home with the GOP base is in terms of tone. If you listen to the callers to conservative talk radio, they have that same angry, egocentric, xenophobic, ultra-nationalist view, and that same conviction that if the nation were just bolder and less apologetic we could reverse its supposed decline. They, like Trump, tend to speak in terms of a rambling procession of short declarative assertions of absolutes, interspersed with insults of their ideological enemies. By comparison, listen to lefty call-in segments. Listen to, say, the callers to NPR shows. You can practically hear the tweed. The people who call in tend to be egg-heady policy wonks and academics, who get lost in a string of nested caveats and clarificiations. Obviously, that's not Trump's crowd.

SW48 said:

There was one debate where Bernie said College should be free, he also said college graduates couldn't find jobs, and capped it off by saying no longer is a high school education enough that you have to have a college education.

Confusing.

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I don't find that confusing. High school education clearly isn't what it used to be, in terms of employability. The unemployment rates of people with just a high school diploma are much higher (around 5.3%) than those with a college degree (about 2.5%). As the economy gets more and more sophisticated, the education bar is raised. Back when we first started having state-financed high school education, a high school diploma was enough to set you above the majority of people in the job market, giving you an expectation of low unemployment and high pay, relative to the majority. Now that same niche is filled by those with a bachelors degree. So, you could argue that just as we once covered the cost of school through high school, we now should through undergraduate.

But, although that makes a good case for making college education more widely available, it would be a mistake to think that all we've been seeing is "structural unemployment" -- in other words, unemployment isn't just raised because of a mismatch between labor force skills and the economy's demands. Some of what we're seeing is based on the economy still being depressed. 2.5% unemployment among those with Bachelor's degrees sound pretty good, but we've had much better -- as low as 1.4%, back in the Clinton years. That's what "frictional unemployment" looks like -- the level where the only people who don't have jobs are those who are just briefly between jobs. We're not back there yet.

To put it more succinctly, creating more college graduates increases our economic potential, thereby increasing long-term prosperity. Those workers will be able to be more productive and we'll end up better off because of it. But since we're not even operating, at the moment, at our CURRENT economic potential, it's not a way to bring about a short-term improvement. There are college educated people who can't find jobs even today, and dealing with that will take something besides just creating more of them. So, we need a two-tier approach: (1) educate the population better, to enhance our long-term potential, and (2) stimulate the economy, to get us back to full employment, so we're actually reaching our current potential.

Arkady said:

I don't know. There are certainly some far-left types who, in theory, Sanders could be playing to -- for example, promising slavery reparations, or the redistribution of all second homes to the homeless, or the seizure of certain classes of firearms from their owners, or some such. I've just never heard him play to that audience. Instead, he pushes mainstream Social Democrat policies, like free public college and more socialized medicine. His ideas tend to sound radical in our rarefied far-right political context, but they're hum-drum by the standards of other wealthy nations. For example, Germany has a center-right government and yet recently made all public universities free and is moving aggressively towards solar energy to slow climate change.

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I can see supporting free college where the net outcome is a benefit.. but not for those who use it to pass th etime and come out as dumb as they went in..

PhilFish said:

I can see supporting free college where the net outcome is a benefit.. but not for those who use it to pass th etime and come out as dumb as they went in..

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Yes. I think we could come up with a compromise system where college is free based on various standards. Keep a certain GPA (which could be lower or higher depending on the degree you're pursuing and the college) and Uncle Sam will foot the bill. Slack off and that's fine, too, but you'll be paying your own way. That's basically what companies that have tuition reimbursement tend to do for their employees.... reimbursement is contingent on performance.

Arkady said:

Yes. I think we could come up with a compromise system where college is free based on various standards. Keep a certain GPA (which could be lower or higher depending on the degree you're pursuing and the college) and Uncle Sam will foot the bill. Slack off and that's fine, too, but you'll be paying your own way. That's basically what companies that have tuition reimbursement tend to do for their employees.... reimbursement is contingent on performance.

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then comes the rub. european nations...take germany for example.. fund it with substantialy higher tax burdens than here..

Arkady said:

Yes. I think we could come up with a compromise system where college is free based on various standards. Keep a certain GPA (which could be lower or higher depending on the degree you're pursuing and the college) and Uncle Sam will foot the bill. Slack off and that's fine, too, but you'll be paying your own way. That's basically what companies that have tuition reimbursement tend to do for their employees.... reimbursement is contingent on performance.

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With 3 teenagers headed to college I am all for free college, I just don't see how it gets passed by congress and actually implemented.

SW48 said:

With 3 teenagers headed to college I am all for free college, I just don't see how it gets passed by congress and actually implemented.

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it doesnt.

sorry.

PhilFish said:

it doesnt.

sorry.

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Could probably help by making college tax deductible.

SW48 said:

Could probably help by making college tax deductible.

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debt interest .... :-(

PhilFish said:

then comes the rub. european nations...take germany for example.. fund it with substantialy higher tax burdens than here..

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Yes. the United States is currently taxed at absurdly low levels. Total government revenues are about 26% of GDP, compared to 28.2% at the end of the Clinton years, and an average of 34.4% among the developed nations. Germany has taxes that are pretty much normal for a developed nation -- revenues are 36.1% of GDP, which is probably about what the developed-nation average would be without the US pulling it down so hard.

In order to finance first-world-style government services, the US would need to move at least a bit towards a first-world-level tax system, instead of our current system, which looks a lot more like those borderline-first-world nations like Chile and Mexico. But, I don't think we'd need to hike taxes all that much to be able to afford those things, since we have the benefit of an unusually large GDP/capita, as well as economies of scale that no other wealthy nation can come close to. We could get a lot of the way there simply by shuffling our budget a bit.

One of the best ideas is simply finding efficiencies by shifting spending from the states to the federal government. If the US were a business, that's what a smart exec would do -- he'd see how we're spending very inefficiently with small-batch purchases at the state level and all sorts of redundant bureaucracy, and he'd find synergy savings by centralizing functions that can be more efficiently handled in a centralized way.

There's also our military budget. Imagine we decided we wanted to spend "only" a wildly excessive amount on our military, as opposed to an insanely excessive amount. For example, say we wanted to outspend the next closest country by "just" 2-to-1 (a relative advantage that probably no other nation in the history of the world ever maintained). That would mean cutting our military budget to about $260 billion. That would save us $320 billion per year. Average in-state tuition at a public university is $9,139 per year. So, for those savings, alone, we could pay to send 35 million Americans to public universities, every year. There are only something like 19 million people between age 18 and 21, so even if every single one of them wanted to go to college, the savings on the military budget, alone, could cover it.

It's simply a question of priorities. Do we prioritize spending many, many times more on our military than anyone else? Or do we content ourselves with "only" doubling anyone else's spending, and do something productive with the rest? Do we prioritize maintaining a Chile/Mexico-level of taxation. Or do we allow our taxes to rise a bit towards civilized norms, and do something productive with the proceeds? The choice is ours. But it would be dishonest to plead poverty as a reason we can't do it. We can easily afford to do it. We're just choosing other things, right now.

SW48 said:

With 3 teenagers headed to college I am all for free college, I just don't see how it gets passed by congress and actually implemented.

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We need a better Congress. We get the chance to replace the entirety of the House in November. We just need to decide what our priorities are.

The Sage of Main Street said:

The Wedding Crashers

Advice from one's enemies is suspect and unwelcome.

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This advice helps America . They have hurt the country as a whole by purposely enraging their base.