US Presidential Election XII

[womanfish]

Originally Posted by bono_212

Not to get off the subject but can someone explain to me where this magical 15/hr number came from? Honestly, in Kansas of all states to point out, 15 is far more than a living wage. I'm all for an increase, but this flat 15 seems like more trouble than it's worth, and seems to be impeding the push to fix the problem.

Yep, Hillary's original plan for minimum wage was much better than Bernie's, which was more of a jump on the Fight for 15 bandwagon.

I think a Federal base of 12 nationally, indexed with inflation, giving any city or state the right to raise it higher, is far superior.

I've always said, It costs 1,500 a month on up, for an apartment in NY or Boston, or LA, and it costs 400 a month in Chester, OK. It makes absolutely not sense to have the same minimum wage for every area. It really highlighted Bernie's distaste for nuance and details.

[womanfish]

Originally Posted by Oregoropa

The Reuters poll changed its methodology recently to get rid of the category of 'undecided voters'. Instead they assigned voters to a candidate based on the phone answers they were giving. Pretty arbitrary. Maybe that's why they dropped it.


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Thanks for the info!

[BigMacPhisto]

Originally Posted by Salome

Out of curiosity (I honestly don't know), did they ever figure out where large portion of funds for the Sanders campaign came from?

From individual donors, all of it...or are you just bringing up some Clintonista conspiracy?

There was no Bernie Super PAC aside from a nurse's union airing ads in support of the guy and anybody that accidentally contributed over the maximum amount allowed to Bernie's campaign had their excess money returned. Every single dime Bernie received is a matter of public record. When millions are giving you $27 per donation, it can add up pretty damn fast.

[BigMacPhisto]

You all do know that if the minimum wage had kept up with productivity since the sixties, it would be well over $21 an hour, right? $15 should hardly be considered some windfall and it's totally doable even in places like Kansas...businesses will see a huge uptick when the poor are suddenly earning twice as much money. The cost of living is so low in places like that because wages have been kept down.

BTW, The Nation talked about the minimum income about a month ago and figured $1,000 a month would be the right amount - the same amount I suggested and got grilled on here for...again, nobody is saying it's enough money to live in NYC, for example, and you'd be damn foolish to even try.

[Irvine511]

The Clinton Rules.

As a reporter, I get sucked into playing by the Clinton rules. This is what I've seen in my colleagues, and in myself.

1) Everything, no matter how ludicrous-sounding, is worthy of a full investigation by federal agencies, Congress, the "vast right-wing conspiracy," and mainstream media outlets

One of my former colleagues, a hard-nosed reporter who has put countless political pelts on his wall, once told me that everyone in public life has something to hide. Who goes down in the flames of scandal? The politicians we decide to go after.

That may not be 100 percent true, but it's true enough. The act of choosing, time and again, to go after the same person has the effect of tainting that person, even when an investigation or reporting turns up nothing nefarious — and it's time not spent digging into his or her adversaries. The original source of alleged malfeasance could come from the other party, within a politician's party, or from the reporter's own observations and industrious digging. But two things are crystal clear: If there's no investigation, there's no scandal. And if there's no scandal, there's no scalp.

The Clintons have been under investigation for about 25 years now. There's little doubt they've produced more information for investigators, lawyers, and journalists about their finances, their business and philanthropic dealings, and their decision-making processes in government than any officials in American history. They've watched countless friends frog-marched into congressional hearings and, in some cases, to jail. They know there's a good chance that any expressed thought will become part of the public record and twisted for political gain.

The most absurd allegations against Hillary Clinton have been bookends on her public career so far: that she had something to do with the suicide of Clinton White House aide Vince Foster, and that she bears responsibility for the terrorist attack that killed US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

But in between, there was Travelgate, Filegate, and Whitewater. Some were less legitimate than others. When Clinton surprisingly claimed that she and her husband were "dead broke" when they left the White House, it was because they had spent all of their money to defend themselves against an eight-year barrage of investigations.

It's understandable, then, why the Clintons have a bunker mentality when it comes to transparency. But their paranoia leads them to be secretive, and their secrecy leads Republicans and the press to suspect wrongdoing. That spurs further investigation, which only makes the Clintons more secretive. The paranoia and persistent investigation feed each other in an endless cycle of probe and parry. Along the way, the political class and the public are forced to choose imperfect sides: the power couple that always seems to be hiding something, or a Washington investigation complex that is overly partisan and underwhelming in its ability to prove gross misconduct.

This is, for Republicans, a reasonable strategy. They know that if they keep investigating her, it will do two things: keep the media writing about scandals that might knock her out, and turn off voters who don't want a return to the bloodsport politics of the 1990s. They leak partial stories to reporters hungry for that one great scoop that will give them the biggest political scalp of them all. But they also err in jumping the gun in accusing her of wrongdoing, which allows Clinton to defend herself by pointing at the folly of her adversaries.

2) Every allegation, no matter how ludicrous, is believable until it can be proven completely and utterly false. And even then, it keeps a life of its own in the conservative media world.

In touring the country to promote our book in 2014, my co-author and I were repeatedly lobbied to assert that Clinton is a lesbian. One gentleman pushed the issue during a Q&A at a Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — one of the few places you might expect that kind of thing to get a rest.

The National Enquirer published a story in April alleging that Clinton wiped her personal email server clean because it contained references to her lesbian lovers.

Meanwhile, the conservative media are also convinced Clinton is preparing to wage a war on Christianity if she wins the presidency. But one thing revealed in her State Department emails is that Clinton shared daily religious reflections with her friends.

It's not just the out-of-the-box allegations that keep the media machine spun up. A year before Chelsea Clinton got married, Clinton staffers were kept busy by mainstream journalists who were absolutely sure she had already gone through with secret nuptials.

And, on a more serious note, remember Benghazi flu? Many political opponents and members of the media were unable to accept the idea that Clinton was forced to cancel planned Senate testimony on Benghazi because she'd suffered a concussion. Now, three years later, it seems ridiculous to think that Clinton was making an excuse — she's since testified on both sides of the Hill — or that she suffered, as Karl Rove suggested, brain damage. And if she was making up the concussion to avoid testifying, how did she suffer brain damage from a fake fall?

The conservative media echo chamber, which bounces innuendo from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News and back again, ensures that the most damning story lines — true or not — stay alive. The Benghazi attacks are a perfect example. Terrorists killed four Americans. The conservative echo chamber seems convinced Hillary Clinton is at fault. The reasonable argument to make is that we shouldn't have been in Libya in the first place and the murders were a down-the-chain result of bad policy. But the right wing wants to prove that they happened because of Clinton's actions — or inaction — on security matters.

They've talked about security requests denied for Libya (never mind that the stronger contingent would have been in Tripoli, not Benghazi, and that there's no evidence Clinton herself was aware of the requests), a stand-down order that prevented reinforcements from arriving in Benghazi (never mind that they wouldn't have gotten there until after the fighting was done, and that even a House Republican committee found that there was no such order) and, most of absurd of all, that Clinton knew the attack was coming. This is how Limbaugh put it in May.

The freedom of the conservative media to make wild allegations often acts as a bulldozer forcing reporters to check into the charges and, in doing so, repeat them. By the time they've been debunked, they're part of the American public's collective consciousness. Or, as it's been said, a lie gets around the world before the truth gets out of bed.

3) The media assumes that Clinton is acting in bad faith until there's hard evidence otherwise.

One outgrowth of Clinton's terrible relationship with reporters is that journalists often assume she is acting in bad faith. There's good reason for that. Though she's added some new pros to her press staff for this campaign, her operation's stance toward the media was always a reflection of the way Bill Clinton's White House handled journalists.

Back in the mid-1990s, Bill Clinton relied on a series of Machiavellian spin doctors to keep the press at bay. With the Clinton White House, the modus operandi was to stonewall as long as possible, lie if necessary — or just out of habit — and turn questions around on the questioners. After all, Bill Clinton once wagged his finger at a press conference and told reporters, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman ... Ms. Lewinsky." He'd lied in a deposition, too.

So the press has plenty of precedent for believing that when the Clintons aren't forthcoming — and sometimes, even when they are — they're covering something up. And the Clintons, given the history of some-smoke-no-fire investigations launched against them, have plenty of precedent for being mistrustful of the press. The result is a brutally dysfunctional relationship on both sides. The Clintons believe the press acts in bad faith, and the press believes the Clintons' attitudes toward the press are evidence that the Clintons are hiding something.

That attitude carried over to Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, and to some degree her tenure as Secretary of State. The standard response to a reporter's question is not an answer. It is to ignore the question or to engage in a Socratic debate by asking a question in return. It's clear Clinton doesn't like the media one bit, as Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman reported last year.

At a July Fourth parade this past weekend, Clinton aides used rope to create an impromptu moving barrier for reporters, keeping them away from the candidate and voters. She treated them like cattle, and they responded by putting the video on television for the last three days.

The mistrust among journalists is a problem for Clinton. And as the media is an amplifier for the public, it's also little wonder that so many voters are inclined to believe she's often acting in bad faith. Most Americans say she's not honest and trustworthy.

This view, shared by many reporters and most of the public, makes it much easier to treat Clinton's actions as though they are uniquely sinister. Case in point: She made a ton of money giving paid speeches to people with business before the government. So did Jeb Bush, of course. But until Bush recently released an accounting of some of those speeches, the media had little interest in his dealings. Kudos to Ken Vogel of Politico, who did some digging on that for a story published Thursday.

The imbalance in assumptions about Clinton's motivations is another way in which the Clinton code has a distorting effect on the public perception of her. And it, too, is self-perpetuating: It leads Clinton to assume the press is biased against her, which leads her to treat the press poorly, which leads more reporters to assume she's trying to hide something from them.

4) Everything is newsworthy because the Clintons are the equivalent of America's royal family

When Clinton keynoted an annual fundraiser for David Axelrod's epilepsy charity in June 2013, several major news outlets sent reporters to cover the speech. That was more than three years before the 2016 election. Every word, every gesture, every facial expression is scrutinized.

Video of Clinton ordering a burrito bowl at a Chipotle became the first viral image of her campaign. Reporters gave fodder to late-night comedians earlier this year when they made a mad dash to catch up as her campaign van rolled by.

This coverage of every last detail, of course, isn't a one-way street. It wasn't until a reporter was tipped off to the Chipotle visit that anyone knew about it. She craves the attention even more than she detests it.

But that, too, has a distorting effect. As with the royal family in London, normally private moments become part of a public narrative: her husband's affair, her daughter's wedding, the birth of her granddaughter.

All the attention has the effect of making Clinton seem, to the casual observer, hungrier for press than even the average politician. And there's no doubt that part of the love/hate relationship is an intense desire to attract and manipulate coverage. But Clinton understands that sometimes it's better not to be in the spotlight.

The best example of that was when she declined requests to appear on Sunday political talk shows right after the Benghazi attacks. Susan Rice, then the ambassador to the UN and now Obama's national security adviser, leaped at the chance to stand in for Clinton. Those appearances ended up costing Rice the nomination to succeed Clinton as secretary of state when many senators concluded she had lied about the origin and nature of the attacks.

The press has such fascination with the Clintons that the coverage would be there whether Hillary Clinton wanted it or not.

5) Everything she does is fake and calculated for maximum political benefit

For someone who lost a big lead in the 2008 presidential primary and is ceding ground to Bernie Sanders right now, Clinton is given a lot of credit for her political acumen. Her detractors see in every move, including the birth of her granddaughter, a grandly conceived and executed political calculation.

And Clinton plays into that by using the positives in her life for political gain.

That doesn't make her different from other candidates for the presidency — it makes her just like them. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie talked about his grandmothers, his mom, his wife, and his kids when he launched his bid for the presidency last week. Was that calculated to send messages about Christie to the public? Of course!

The best example, though, was the tear — the one that rolled down Clinton's cheek as she campaigned in New Hampshire after having come in third in the Iowa caucuses in 2008.

The New York Times's Maureen Dowd pilloried her for what Dowd saw as a window into the dark part of Clinton's soul.

How far political journalism has come from castigating Ed Muskie for crying to accusing Clinton of calculating that tears would help her win. She's not that good at politics.

Confessions of a Clinton reporter: The media's 5 unspoken rules for covering Hillary - Vox

[BigMacPhisto]

Originally Posted by Axver

Also, you really do jump between labels sometimes. Are you liberal? Progressive? Left-wing? These are rather different things. I ask in part because I - as a green social democrat - have no interest in achieving the goals of economic liberals, which I would suggest are fairly harmonious with Clinton's platform.

Certainly not an economic liberal, obviously. I identify with some sort of socialist/capitalist hybrid in that I believe the United States should take control of a lot of services as they do in European countries. Telecommunications, electricity, etc. are all necessities and the state can give it to people a lot cheaper without all of the profit motive and CEO compensation that the free market model entails.

My foreign policy beliefs are about as isolationist as can be imagined. I'd trim the military budget by 2/3 if I was President and then consider more cuts after that. I'd get rid of every single international base as well. Not a single drone would be fired or a military boot set on foreign soil. Getting involved in that crap just makes us more open to being retaliated against.

I can generally get behind what the American Greens argue for and it's closer to my beliefs overall and in temperament than these guys selling Socialist Weeklies, but I'd probably be to the left of the Greens by a bit since I'm a bit more for government takeovers than just a heavily reformed Capitalist system.

[Dfit00]

Originally Posted by BigMacPhisto

You all do know that if the minimum wage had kept up with productivity since the sixties, it would be well over $21 an hour, right? $15 should hardly be considered some windfall and it's totally doable even in places like Kansas...businesses will see a huge uptick when the poor are suddenly earning twice as much money. The cost of living is so low in places like that because wages have been kept down.

BTW, The Nation talked about the minimum income about a month ago and figured $1,000 a month would be the right amount - the same amount I suggested and got grilled on here for...again, nobody is saying it's enough money to live in NYC, for example, and you'd be damn foolish to even try.

If the minimum wage goes up, the entire economy and businesses will raise their prices as a response to offset the extra labor cost now imposed by a raised minimum wage. Hence, the cost is passed to consumers and workers themselves, becoming an effect of reduced consumer spending and having a tiny beneficial effect to minimum wage workers, if any.

The debate of raising the minimum wage will always favor more to the businesses who pay it rather than the workers who earn it. Government policies will always protect the best interest of those who have the capital and control the means of production.

[DaveC]

human labour costs, especially for minimum wage jobs, will become negligible within the next 15-20 years anyways. we're arguing over last century's solutions in this thread.

[namkcuR]

Originally Posted by DaveC

human labour costs, especially for minimum wage jobs, will become negligible within the next 15-20 years anyways. we're arguing over last century's solutions in this thread.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

[DaveC]

i mean minimum wage jobs are going to be automated en masse in the coming decades in the west.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

[bono_212]

Originally Posted by BigMacPhisto

You all do know that if the minimum wage had kept up with productivity since the sixties, it would be well over $21 an hour, right? $15 should hardly be considered some windfall and it's totally doable even in places like Kansas...businesses will see a huge uptick when the poor are suddenly earning twice as much money. The cost of living is so low in places like that because wages have been kept down.

BTW, The Nation talked about the minimum income about a month ago and figured $1,000 a month would be the right amount - the same amount I suggested and got grilled on here for...again, nobody is saying it's enough money to live in NYC, for example, and you'd be damn foolish to even try.

Doesn't answer my question of where the number comes from.

Anyways, seems to me it's an easy way to get lower class people to move away from the coasts to places where they'd be practically upper middle class, too, which feels skeezy.

Added to that, you're imaging, in your scenario, that board members take pay cuts to even things out, instead of raising prices, which we already know from cities that have tried out 15 immediately, hasn't happened.

Again, that being said, I'm very glad that LA is moving to 15, it's much needed.

[BigMacPhisto]

Prices raises aren't an issue with minimum wage increases. All you have to do is index the wage to inflation via the consumer price index and you're good to go. The buying power for the minimum wage than stays relatively unchanged from year-to-year.

As for people moving, it already happens. Recent findings are that the poor don't go to where jobs are but to where cost of living is low, and the obvious problem is that the places with low cost of living tend to have no jobs. Technically, where they should be going is a city with a high minimum wage where they can commute to work for (like SF) and still be able to afford rent in the surrounding area. $100 a month for rent sounds good in the middle of the country until you realize you don't have a job to even earn that $100.

And $15 an hour isn't going to make anybody upper middle class, especially if that is the federal minimum wage. That would put anybody on the bottom although, obviously, a full-time couple would earn a lot more than a single person working part-time, etc.

$15 did come about as part of a poverty level equation with the idea that anybody getting paid that amount full-time would be above the poverty line, even with children. That's another huge benefit to lifting the wage floor - if we could get every worker out of poverty, that would greatly diminish the amount we have to spend on our welfare system. Hundreds of billions of dollars suddenly being freed up for local, state and federal governments and the lowest paid workers would now be contributing a sizable amount into the tax system.

[namkcuR]

There are also those that suggest that a minimum wage increase of this kind of magnitude can't happen in a vacuum. That if you raise the minimum wage to $15/hr or whatever, than people in non-minimum-wage jobs who are making the annual salary equivalent of $15/hr for doing harder or more challenging jobs that required more education will want their pay raised as well because why should they do a harder job for the same thing the minimum-wagers are making? And then the people on the next tier up will say the same, and so on. Essentially, it's a theory that raising the minimum wage to a livable wage, and making it so there's no full-time job that you can work and still be below the poverty line, will force wage increases across the board.

It's just a theory though, I'm no economic expert so I can't speak to the validity of it. It makes sense though.

[DaveC]

the only thing mandating a $15 minimum wage is going to do is make the future in the video i posted happen (slightly) faster.

[Diemen]

Originally Posted by DaveC

the only thing mandating a $15 minimum wage is going to do is make the future in the video i posted happen (slightly) faster.

So then the alternative is... do nothing?

[mikal]

Originally Posted by namkcuR

There are also those that suggest that a minimum wage increase of this kind of magnitude can't happen in a vacuum. That if you raise the minimum wage to $15/hr or whatever, than people in non-minimum-wage jobs who are making the annual salary equivalent of $15/hr for doing harder or more challenging jobs that required more education will want their pay raised as well because why should they do a harder job for the same thing the minimum-wagers are making? And then the people on the next tier up will say the same, and so on. Essentially, it's a theory that raising the minimum wage to a livable wage, and making it so there's no full-time job that you can work and still be below the poverty line, will force wage increases across the board.



It's just a theory though, I'm no economic expert so I can't speak to the validity of it. It makes sense though.

This is true. I can't imagine what my program's labor vs revenue would look like. Definitely not as peachy as it does today.


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[DaveC]

Originally Posted by Diemen

So then the alternative is... do nothing?

the alternative is to do something like provide a minimum income so that there is a bit of a cushion for people when it happens. a $15 minimum wage is useless if there are no minimum wage jobs. a $1000 minimum guaranteed income is highly useful for the people who lose those minimum wage jobs as the economy adapts.

[BVS]

Originally Posted by BigMacPhisto

Prices raises aren't an issue with minimum wage increases. All you have to do is index the wage to inflation via the consumer price index and you're good to go. The buying power for the minimum wage than stays relatively unchanged from year-to-year.

Sounds so simple, right? Except very few economists believe this.

Please show me how you've come up with this "good to go" solution?


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[bono_212]

Originally Posted by BigMacPhisto

. Technically, where they should be going is a city with a high minimum wage where they can commute to work for (like SF) and still be able to afford rent in the surrounding area. $100 a month for rent sounds good in the middle of the country until you realize you don't have a job to even earn that $100.

Spoken like someone who's never had a real commute to work.

Originally Posted by BVS

Sounds so simple, right? Except very few economists believe this.

Please show me how you've come up with this "good to go" solution?

Right? Apparently it's just so simple.

[LuckyNumber7]

BMP are you a student?