Meanwhile, in Paris: Gilets Jaunes

You’re got limited mental ability to engage with anyone who disagrees with you, which is why you post here and taunt the odd dissenter with all the creativity of a 5 year old.

Hey bud, tell you what, I’ve got a phone book for you to stand on, maybe your daddy will spot you a roll of nickels. ;)

Now this is funny!

Horace, thinking: Hey, this looks like a great forum in which to disagree with people by posting and taunting them with all the creativity of a five-year-old. I think I’ll join in!

I mean, isn’t unintended revelatory projection a bitch?

Strange how you blame me for responding to another poster who insulted me for voicing my political beliefs. It’s almost like you’re a partisan hack who comes here to beat off on liberal propaganda. I come here for ideas on how to craft political messaging. It’s a wonderful site for that.

The evil Gman is everywhere! You guys are incredibly paranoid. Someone is living rent-free in someone’s head.

I don’t think he’s gman, but he does share gman’s obsession with regards to posting. I honestly don’t know why people like him (her?) join forums like this. If you’ve been lurking, you would know exactly what you’re getting yourself into.

Look, the economic impact of mitigating climate change on the poor and vulnerable isn’t a none-issue, and certainly rising energy costs are a concern. (There are many, many papers and studies that address this; but we can also just ignore climate change or pretend it’s a hoax, and then that won’t be an issue at all because those same poor and vulnerable people are gonna be dead.)

But instead your first post on the issue is just to assert the “far left” doesn’t care (because we all know if there’s one thing the far right do care about, it’s the well being of the poor, amirite?)

There is also a cautionary tale to be learned about the French response to a carbon tax. Australia’s Labor party implemented it and that succeeded in ushering in Tony Abbott and a series of Murdoch-backed PMs; Canada is embarking on one now too and so far as I’ve read, it’s not too popular. Washington St voters rejected it in the mid terms. IOW there is political backlash from imposing a carbon tax, which by most accounts is the best way to deal with climate change, but if there is no political will to get it done or the voters can’t be sold on it, then that just pretty much seals the deal that nothing meaningful can or ever will get done.

PS The coal industry in the US is already dead and dying and that has nothing whatsoever to do with a carbon tax.

Well, Horace, unless you can muster some political beliefs at least slightly above liberals are bad (snort), you’re going to have to get used to the insults.

This is certainly true. We’ve dug ourselves into a hole and it won’t be easy or cheap to get out of it. But if we are scared to do anything because someone won’t like it, we’re truly fucked.

Hmmmm.

So we’re a liberal game reserve you visit to do some hunting and throw some bullshit parables over the wall to see what sticks? That’s kinda bullshit, isn’t it?

So he is one of gman’s friends if not himself. How nice. Thanks for the suspension. People like him refuse to debate in good faith and will never admit their side might be the Nazi’s even when Hitler rises from the grave to take the lead of said party.

I mean US coal production, measured in tons, peaked during Obama’s tenure.

But employment has been in decline for decades.

Even if you increased mining production (how? Demand lagged due to cheap natural gas supplanting much of usage), and even if you rolled back pesky regulations on things like ‘not dumping toxic waste in waterways’ and ‘not killing your employees’, the jobs are not coming back.

Let’s look at this chart for productivity per basin for the major sites
image https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2018.03.07/main.png

Notice something? That brown outlier that accounts for a small number of workers but a huge portion of production? That’s your Idaho and Wyoming mines. West Virginia is never getting coal mining jobs back. That’s why. Any increase in production will inevitably be tied to the low labor per unit western basins. So we could double production tomorrow and still not reach employment levels from the 80’s.

Advancements in technology and the opening of the west have made it so that inventing in coal jobs is foolish in the extreme.

… At least this time we cut to the chase quickly. You’re here to cynically use our community as guinea pigs for whatever virus your masters are pushing this week. Please spare us all the fake outrage when we refuse to slather you with love and kisses as you stick the needle in.

If the “far right” can get away with “tax cuts will pay for themselves,” why can’t we get away with “a Green New Deal will pay for itself”?

I can’t believe this. I don’t check Qt3 for like 4 hours, and I miss the chance to insult Horman/Gman. Boooo!

I predict with certainty that this will not have been your last chance.

Reading more about the thread topic, it looks like it’s not just the fuel taxes that have raised the ire of the French, but rather Macron’s “business friendly” policies (he also cut taxes for the wealthy, but I do not know the tax rates and such in France.) They also want an increase to minimum wage. Macron sounds like a neo-liberal, but those policies just aren’t gonna fly in today’s political environment.

@CraigM Thanks for doing the legwork there.
By comparison, Wal-Mart employs 2.1 million people. Edit: Correction, 1.4 million in the US.

If someone on the far left thinks taxes fund anything, they’re certainly not on the far left. It’s Keynesianism 101.
Post-Keynesianisns are not on the far left, they want to tax so that the deficit amounts to zero for magical reasons that the right never follows. That is not the far left, that’s neo-liberalism by other means. Real leftists would tax a negative social behavior while using the power of the state to invest resources to solve social problems regardless of accounting pipe-dreams that have no actual bearing on growth.
Coal jobs go away? Well, the far left would have a New Deal type job guarantee for you on stuff that keeps getting postponed for decades - notice how infrastructure everywhere is crumbling with real costs to everyone, for one example of how “AI” or “China” isn’t going to eliminate jobs.

What you complain about is not the far left, it’s the capital-domesticated progressives who just want the middle and the lower class to pay contribute well above their means. I’m with you on that.

He’s an ex-Goldman goon, so, obviously. He was only elected because people wanted Le Pen and Fillon to lose, not because they expected much.
How the Europhilia ever thought he would reform anything is beyond me.

Anyone want to play?

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