4280


4281

Word from noted liberal hack…
(checks notes)
…Bruce Bartlett.

4282

I’m kind of done with that game and I hope Democrats are as well. I’ve watched multiple cycles of them handcuffing themselves to the norms the other party ignores which leaves them ineffectual while the GOP then runs roughshod over the country once they’re back in power (never with a popular majority, I might add).

It’s time to fix the country and get shit done. Can’t afford healthcare because of deficits? Too bad, ram it through and let the GOP try to address it by taking away people’s Medicare instead of taxes.

I understand that’s no way to run a country long term by neither is the status quo. It’s time to get shit done.

4283

This.

The real message of the anonymous senior official’s odd Trump-bashing op-ed in the New York Times is that the Republican rehabilitation cycle that resuscitated the party from the presidency of George W. Bush has already begun.

The author senses that Donald Trump is going down and is laying the groundwork to prevent conservatism from going down with him.

The author makes the same argument as Republicans did post-Bush: Bush betrayed conservatism; conservatism didn’t betray the public. Now, Trump’s bizarre behavior and temperament are betraying America. The public is being denied the true conservative agenda.

[W]hatever you think of immigration policy, it’s clear that neither Bush-style comprehensive reform nor Trump-style nativism is going to provide affordable health care, college education, or child care. It’s not going to prevent climate change, help us adapt to rising temperatures and sea levels, or prevent a return of the financial panic that wrecked the economy during Bush’s final years in office.

These problems simply aren’t addressable within the four corners of conservative ideology, so conservative governance inevitably fails. But instead, conservatives claim that it hasn’t been tried.

And yet even as . . . cultural conflicts define the main axes of political conflict, an enormous share of actual policymaking inevitably involves tangible questions like “who pays taxes?” and “how do we meet the material needs of young families and people too old to work?”

In a healthy country, the things Republicans keep saying they are trying to do to serve majoritarian economic interests — whether that’s Bush’s ownership society, Paul Ryan’s war on crony capitalism, or Trump’s economic nationalism — would be actual things that they actually try to do. Then if one of them failed, they could switch and try something different.

But what they’re actually doing is thinly rebranding the exact same policies, waging a series of vicious internecine battles that have almost no content while pretending to believe that the fate of the American middle class hangs on whether we impose a modest tax on imported washing machines. Republicans’ unanimous support of the Trump tax bill and of a Supreme Court nominee who wants to completely gut the regulatory state shows, however, that even at this late date, there is no actual rethinking of almost anything.

4284

“If he fails”.

I mean, holy shit dude. The guy is presiding over a super economy, and yet still has one of the worst approval ratings in history. He is a total laughing stock. He fucks shit up literally every day.

4285

4286

It’s called bloodletting. It’s how all the best doctors cure what ails you.

4287

That’s the problem with the Affordable Care Act. It got everyone’s humors out of balance.

4288

I can hardly stand the irony of the idea that a “socialist experiment with Medicare” is something to avoid. The whole thing is a socialist experiment! That’s the point and why Democrats like it!

4289

Well I thought Democrats liked it because the idea of old people dying in the streets, their homes or on the steps of various capital buildings of preventable illness, disease and end of life issues was just not something society wanted.

4290
4291

Ouch. I’m sure his pal Trump will waive it somehow, which I’m guessing was the whole point of his supporting Trump to begin with.

4292

At first I was like, what’s $7 million at that level? Then I noticed the extra zeroes…

4293

Time to go download that 1040ez, Mr. Mercer.

4294

Don’t you remember? All we need now is a single note card; that’s not even a form.

4295

He’ll show the IRS by delivering the payment in all pennies!

(In case you’re curious, the US Mint produces 13 billion pennies a year, so if he needed 700 billion pennies that would be, uh, 56 years of production? Yikes!)

4296

Why? Don’t we have enough of them? If we’re short, I’ve got plenty of them here I’ll probably never use. I mean, seriously, isn’t the penny just a token to commemorate being bad at math? A tax for still using cash? A thing you leave in a glass of Coke to see if it dissolves?

-Tom

4297

That’s part of it. Pennies are used in almost every cash transaction and most of them disappear out of the economy because they’re not worth carrying around and counting out.

So you make a bunch of pennies.
People get them as change.
They throw them in a cup someplace because who wants a pocket full of pennies?
Repeat every day for hundreds of millions of people and transactions.

And of course some become worn or whatever, so they replace them, etc, etc.

I’m actually amazed it’s as low as 13 billion, that’s not very many given how many every place of business has to keep on hand.

4298

I think proposals have been floated to abolish pennies but I’m too lazy to Google it.

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