(February 7, 2019 at 1:44 pm)Yonadav Wrote: And this is typical of my experience with you. I give you a very well reasoned article that is solidly rooted in facts, and you disparage it as 'just an opinion piece'. Uh, OK. What was the opinion? Oh, yeah. The opinion was that the Republicans handled the defeat of Goldwater correctly, while the Democrats handled the defeat of McGovern very badly. OK. I didn't necessarily intend for you to agree with that opinion. That wasn't the point of giving you that article. I gave you that article so that you could look over the many facts that the opinion was based upon. And among those facts were facts about the Democratic neoliberals pushing policies that favored the wealthy. But you reason that since the facts are presented as a part of an opinion piece, then the facts are opinions. That's a pretty silly thing to do, isn't it?
Look at Kennedy and Johnson. I don't think McGovern was in the mainstream of Democratic thinking. I think Goldwater was an outlier as well, and only became more acceptable when the Republicans moved further right. I think Democrats need to move further left and that Republicans need to move back toward the center. The first will be ineffective without the second, and given the Trump disaster it might happen.
I'm a gradualist, as I mentioned elsewhere.
(February 7, 2019 at 1:44 pm)Yonadav Wrote: Let me ask you something, Jay. Don't you think that it is a little weird that we live in a society that gives us tax incentives for rent seeking, while taxing real productive income more heavily? I mean sure, the lower income producers who have children get the Earned Income Tax Credit, but those who don't have children or are higher earning producers pay more tax than non-producing rent seeking billionaires. You don't see an aristocracy forming? The Second Estate? You know, a culture where the producers pay the taxes and the second estate lives handsomely on their cut of those taxes. I know that you are a big fan of Robert Reich, so I am certain that you have seen him explain how the working class pays taxes to the rich. You do realize that is exactly how the British aristocracy and the French second estate earned their incomes with no tax burden, right?
I never said we don't have big problems with money in the U.S. I just don't understand why current Democratic policies, as listed in the party platform, couldn't effectively deal with them if in fact they were enacted over Republican opposition. Please let me know what you would change in the platform, that you think favors billionaires.
