Yeah I lost count as well, thus the question. I know there have been a few who tried to subtly tell him he is an idiot by schooling him on something, (RE: Mattis and nuclear weapons if I remember correctly,) but I don’t remember when the moron/idiot stuff came about and who said what.
Rex Tillerson was the one who called him a fucking moron.
This was after the Mattis history lesson meeting though, I think?
Don’t “work the ref”, just install a new ref for your team!
McGahn is out. (Which was expected after the Kavanaugh nom wrapped up.)
I think Kelly should fuck off smartly at the double time, but I thought that years ago.
Scenes from the fight.
A top Trump administration political appointee who just two days ago was on track to lead the Interior Department’s inspector general’s office resigned Friday from the federal government, according to an administration official.
Suzanne Israel Tufts was scheduled to be interviewed Friday morning for another inspector general position elsewhere in the government, according to a person with knowledge of the interview. But she did not show up for the appointment.
Her departure ends a madcap week, as the administration quickly scuttled an arrangement to make Tufts acting Interior watchdog amid media reports and scrutiny from Capitol Hill lawmakers. Tufts did not respond to messages left on her cellphone.
The near brawl — during which Mr. Kelly grabbed Mr. Lewandowski by the collar and tried to have him ejected from the West Wing
Kelly was a marine. He could murder him so easy.
It’s like i can see into the future
https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1054765980004634625
This is the title page of the linked document.
Some choice quotes from the document.
The Nordic and European versions of socialized medicine have been viewed as so desirable by
modern U.S. socialists that they have proposed nationalizing payments for the healthcare
sector (which makes up more than a sixth of the U.S. economy) through the recent “Medicare
for All” proposal. This policy would distribute healthcare for “free” (i.e., without cost sharing)
through a monopoly government health insurer that would centrally set all prices paid to
suppliers such as doctors and hospitals. We find that if this policy were financed out of current
Federal spending without borrowing or tax increases, then more than half the entire existing
Federal budget would need to be cut. Or if it were financed through higher taxes, GDP would
fall by 9 percent, or about $7,000 per person in 2022, due to high tax rates that would reduce
incentives to supply the factors of production. Evidence on the productivity and effectiveness
> of single-payer systems suggests that “Medicare for All” would reduce both short- and long-run
> longevity and health despite increasing somewhat the population with health insurance.
It’s amazing, every word of that bolder section is a lie.
They have better access, and higher longevity. Lower price increases. It completely fails to factor for the fact that our medical sector is over one sixth of the economy precisely because we don’t have such a system. And the 9% decline in productivity is pure scaremongering bullshit. How the hell did they come up with that number?
Don’t answer, we all know. It’s made up without a scrap of evidence.
These are the footnotes from the first page. They’re arguing like your average 20-something online troll.
1 Criterion a is from the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines socialism as public policy based on “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” Criterion b further focuses the discussion to rule out state ownership or regulation for other purposes, such as fighting a war. See also Samuelson and Nordhaus (1989, 833), who describe “democratic socialist governments [that] expanded the welfare state, nationalized industries, and planned the economy.”
2 For classical socialists, “communism” is a purely theoretical concept that has never yet been put into practice, which is why the second “S” in USSR stands for “Socialist.” Communism is, in their view, a social arrangement where there is neither a state nor private property; the abolition of property is not sufficient for communism. As Lenin explained, “The goal of socialism is communism.” The supposed purpose of the “Great Leap Forward” was for China to transition from socialism to communism before the USSR did (Dikӧtter 2010). The classical definition therefore stands in contrast to vernacular usage of communism to refer to historical instances of socialism where the degree of control was the highest, such as the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, or Maoist China. This report therefore avoids the term “communism.”
On the one hand, this is what the dictionary says.
On the other hand, even a single socializing step is a trick towards communism. In other words, death camps.
The burden is on socialists to explain how their latest policy agenda would overcome the
undeniable problems observed when socialism was tried in the past. As the sociology professor
Paul Starr put it, “Much of [modern American socialists’] platform ignores the economic
realities that European socialists long ago accepted.” Marx’s 200th birthday is a good time to
gather and review the overwhelming evidence.
For some reason they’re freaked out that this is the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birthday?
Proponents of socialism acknowledge that the experiences of the USSR and other highly
socialist countries are not worth repeating, but they continue to advocate for increased
taxation and state control in order to help low-income people. Such policies would also have
negative output effects, albeit of a lesser magnitude, as is seen in cross-country studies of the
effect on real GDP of greater economic freedom. A broad body of academic literature quantifies
the extent of economic freedom in several dimensions, including taxation and spending, the
extent of state-owned enterprises, economic regulation, and other factors. This literature finds
a strong association between greater economic freedom and better economic performance,
suggesting that replacing U.S. policies with highly socialist policies such as Venezuela’s would
reduce real GDP more than 40 percent in the long run, or about $24,000 per year for the average
person.
It literally can’t get any better than now seem to be what they’re going for.
It then goes into a couple dozen pages about agricultural reform which, to be fair, was a deliberate disaster in communist countries.
A famine ensued in 1932 and 1933, and about 6 million people died from starvation (Courtois
et al. 1999). The death rates were high in Ukraine, a normally fertile region from which the Soviet planners had been exporting food. Figure 2 shows the time series for Ukrainian deaths by sex, along with births. This time series also appears to show that millions more people were not born because of the famine.
This is bullshit because the Holodomor was a deliberate act by Stalin to punish the “cossack” lands of the Ukraine for supporting the Whites and to snuff out any lingering nationalism.
Furthermore, it has been noted that the true U.S./Nordic output gap is likely even greater
because the U.S. has more nonmarket household production, such as at-home child care or home schooling, than Nordic countries do. Nordic countries tend to do more of their child care
in the marketplace because child care is a government job. As Sherwin Rosen (1997, 82)
described Sweden, “a large fraction of women work in the public sector to take care of the
children of other women who work in the public sector to care for the parents of the women
who are looking after their children. If Swedish women take care of each other’s parents in
exchange for taking care of each other’s children, how much additional real output comes of
it?”
STAY AT HOME LADIES
You’re better off in America, Scandis.
Do you want to get mad?
Nordic Colleges Are Free, but Are They Worth It?
The same OECD study estimates that, while many American students pay tuition, Americans
are somewhat more likely to attain tertiary education on average. In comparison with the
tertiary schooling returns in the Nordic countries, American college graduates get their tuition
back with interest, and also a lot more. To put it another way, the rates of return to a college
education in Nordic countries are low, and propensities to invest are not high, despite the fact
that such an investment requires no tuition payments out of pocket
Taxes and tuition subsidies are among the reasons that the financial value of a college
education varies across countries. Their effects on the results can be removed by looking at
earnings before taxes and by including public tuition subsidies as a cost. Even from this social
(private plus public) perspective, the U.S. financial return is more than double the Nordic
> returns.77 This is consistent with the economic hypothesis advanced in the second section
> above that making a good free reduces its quality.78
It’s better here.
You’re worse off in Norway when you go to college.
Just as an aside this whole document seem to be framed to defend against single payer. Why they’re terrified of single payer (that is what has precipitated this) i’m unclear.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez i think has freaked out conservatives far more than liberals realize. Again, they literally see her as a Che Guevera like figure that leads to their heads on pikes. Or something. That real socialist politicians have been elected seems to have sent shock waves in certain conservative circles.
An open question for socialists is whether they recommend reducing living standards for poor
and middle-income families if it serves the purpose of making the top 1 percent—or the
bourgeoisie, or the kulaks, or the landlords, or the giant corporations—worse off too.
Centralized state controls and high tax rates historically delivered such results. The Nordic
countries abandoned this approach, backing down from high tax rates and finding ways to
enhance consumer choice and market competition. Even Cuba, China, the USSR, and other
highly socialist countries eventually permitted private enterprises both in and outside the
agriculture sector to coexist with the state-owned enterprises. With the exceptions of Cuba,
North Korea, and Venezuela, all the highly socialist countries eventually transitioned to
primarily private economies.
Let’s cut to the chase. This is what they see.
Props on the kulak reference though!