Stop Using the term Class Warfare

[Anonymous]

You are being manipulated by a bunch of politicians. Every time you use the term, you legitimize their political objective.

Class warfare is not:

*Snobbery
*Jealousy
*Keeping up with the Joneses
*Disapproving of a clothing or stroller purchase
*Disliking one or another store

Those are not particularly noble sentiments, but they are not class warfare.

The Republicans have branded a relatively modest tax increase (that will hit me personally) as class warfare. Ask yourself, when the Capital Gains and Dividend Tax rates were reduced, was that considered class warfare, because it disproportionately benefitted one group? Even when they argued that "what's good for me is really good for you?" No. No one talked about that as class warfare, even though they were loading up our children with debt.

Go on with various rants, but stop being the tool of a political campaign.

[Anonymous]

I'll stop calling it class warfare when you stop calling the murder of innocent lives "pro choice".

[Anonymous]

BUT it's trendy. And you KNOW how we are trend whores.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'll stop calling it class warfare when you stop calling the murder of innocent lives "pro choice".

When you stop calling Republicans "pro legal immigration."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'll stop calling it class warfare when you stop calling the murder of innocent lives "pro choice".

Did I discuss my belief about abortion?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'll stop calling it class warfare when you stop calling the murder of innocent lives "pro choice".

Sure, but a fetus in the first two trimesters isn't "a life". So it's not "murder", and neither is a fetus in any sense "innocent". So you'll need to stop using the term "pro-life" and use "forced pregnancy advocate".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'll stop calling it class warfare when you stop calling the murder of innocent lives "pro choice".

Sure, but a fetus in the first two trimesters isn't "a life". So it's not "murder", and neither is a fetus in any sense "innocent". So you'll need to stop using the term "pro-life" and use "forced pregnancy advocate".

Forcibly taking money from high income earners to fund failed programs (stimulus) and new boondogles (Obamacare) and then branding the people who don't want to give up their money as evil is class warfare.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'll stop calling it class warfare when you stop calling the murder of innocent lives "pro choice".

Sure, but a fetus in the first two trimesters isn't "a life". So it's not "murder", and neither is a fetus in any sense "innocent". So you'll need to stop using the term "pro-life" and use "forced pregnancy advocate".

Forcibly taking money from high income earners to fund failed programs (stimulus) and new boondogles (Obamacare) and then branding the people who don't want to give up their money as evil is class warfare.

Just two quick thoughts: first, stimulus failed because it was sabotaged by the austerity crowd. Advocates of stimulus recommended a stimulus of $1.2 trillion dollars of spending. The Obama administration pushed an $800 billion dollar stimulus

Since it's pretty clear you've never been exposed to the barest outline of what actually happened over the last 3-4 years, and it's unlikely you'll start anytime soon I'll post to a link to one of the main stimulus advocates deriding the fake "stimulus" in 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/opinion/13krugman.html):

The story of Keynesian economists and the Obama stimulus, as anyone who’s been reading me knows, runs as follows: When information about the planned stimulus began emerging, those of us who took our macro seriously warned, often and strenuously, that it was far short of what was needed — that given what we already knew about the likely depth of the slump, the plan would fill only a fraction of the hole. Worse yet, I in particular argued, the plan would probably be seen as a failure, making another round impossible.

But never mind. What we keep hearing instead is a narrative that runs like this: “Keynesians said that the stimulus would solve the problems, then when it didn’t, instead of admitting they were wrong, they came back and said it wasn’t big enough. Heh heh heh.” That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it, never mind the facts.

And what the facts say is that Keynesian policy didn’t fail, because it wasn’t tried. The only real tests we’ve had of Keynesian economics were the prediction that large budget deficits in a depressed economy wouldn’t drive up interest rates, and the prediction that austerity in depressed economies would deepen their depression. How do you think that turned out?

As far as the boondoggle that is Obamacare--perhaps it was more palatable when it was Romneycare? In any case, it's expected to save money, not cost money, as evaluated by the CBO. Just to enlighten you, generally speaking a "boondoggle" is something that *costs* money, not its opposite.

And finally, who gives a fuck whether you want to pay your taxes or not, you narcissistic twat? That's one of the core responsibilities of living in the United States. Just because the GOP has been able to distract a lot of angry poor people from the fact that they're getting fucked over by pitting elderly white people against "everyone else" ("I want my country back!!") doesn't mean that they'll be successful forever. At some point in the somewhat near future, those old folks are going to be dead, and the 95% of the country that's been getting the shaft is going to be coming after the money--either with pitchforks or with an adjustment to marginal tax rates.

[Anonymous]

All the liberal ranting on this site is nauseating.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:All the liberal ranting on this site is nauseating.

I think you're mistaking "liberal ranting" for "disgust at supposedly educated Americans who can't be bothered to read a newspaper, book, or any other source of information." I'm neither liberal nor conservative; but frankly willful ignorance disgusts me. And between the Teabaggers and the various fringe-nuts on the left and right, we're getting it in spades.

[Anonymous]

Just in case there's anyone out there who still is under the mistaken belief that "the stimulus failed":

Suppose Brooks ever took 10 minutes to read the Obama administration's projections for the stimulus. (It's on the web and can be downloaded for free, so a NYT columnist should have access to it.) The first item in the summary of Romer-Bernstein report would tell Brooks that:

"A package in the range that the President-Elect has discussed would create between 3-4 million jobs by the end of 2010."

Let look at that one again:

"A package in the range that the President-Elect has discussed would create between 3-4 million jobs by the end of 2010."

Okay, 3-4 million jobs from a "package in the range that the President-Elect has discussed."

How many jobs did the economy need? By April of 2009, when the first stimulus payments were going out the door, the economy had already lost more than 6.5 million jobs. If we add in normal job growth that we would have seen in a healthy economy, we were already down by more than 8.0 million jobs.

And the economy was still losing jobs at the rate of more than 400,000 jobs a month. By July, we down by almost 10 million jobs from what would have been expected if the economy had sustained a normal pace of job growth from the start of the recession. This is what Brooks would know if ever bothered to look at the numbers.

Now let's look at that quote one more time:

"A package in the range that the President-Elect has discussed would create between 3-4 million jobs by the end of 2010."

President Obama proposed a stimulus package of about $800 billion. He got a package of around $700 billion. (We have to pull out $80 billion for the Alternative Minimum Tax fix. No one, I mean no one, thinks that this fix, which is done every year, had anything to do with stimulus.)

Furthermore, the package was more heavily tilted toward tax cuts than the package that President Obama proposed. Tax cuts have less impact per dollar than spending. David Brooks could find this fact in the Romer-Bernstein paper as well. The appendix tells us that a tax cut equal to 1 percent of GDP will eventually increase GDP by 0.99 percent. By contrast, government spending equal to 1 percent of GDP will increase GDP by 1.57 percent of GDP.

If President Obama got a package that was smaller than what he requested and more tilted towards tax cuts than what he expected, then the impact on growth and jobs would be less than what he expected. He expected that the package he rquested would create 3-4 million jobs, the package he got would be expected to create something less than 3-4 million jobs. And, we know that the economy needed somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million jobs.

So how is anything about stimulus disproved because a stimulus that could have been expected to create maybe 3 million jobs was not adequate in a downturn where we needed 10 million jobs? There are no tricks here, this is all arithmetic and it is all right there in black and white.

But, Brooks does not want to be bothered by arithmetic. He wants his readers to support his plans for tax reform, for cutting Social Security and Medicare. In other words he wants his readers' support for doing all the the things that David Brooks always wanted to do, but he now says that we absolutely have to do because of an economic crisis caused by the incompetence of the people who always wanted to do these things.

And the people who insist on sticking to arithmetic -- who point out now and said at the time that the stimulus was not large enough -- well to a man in love with his hammer, every problem requires a nail. If arithmetic is nails, Brooks has no hammer.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'll stop calling it class warfare when you stop calling the murder of innocent lives "pro choice".

Deal. But you can't call it a life, you have to call it what it is: embryo, zygote, or fetus. And since murder is a legal term, and abortion is not illegal, let's call the procedure what it is, removal of the fetus (which cannot survive outside of the uterus) from the uterus. If you no longer say tax reform is class warfare, I will call people who support the right to abortion, people who believe women should be allowed to have fetuses removed from their uteruses if they want to.

[Anonymous]

I think the problem is that you can't really have a factual debate with the new breed of American "conservative". They've been subject to authoritarian way of thinking for so long, that the particulars of an actual debate or meaningless. All they're left with is "What did right-wing celebrity X say about this?" Terms become meaningless: Obama's a "socialist". Or an "Islamist". Or a "fascist".

There's actually a rather interesting article on fanaticism, anti-scientific thinking, an the Tea Party that deals with some of these issues:

According to Psychologist Bob Altemeyer this is classic authoritarian behavior. Altemeyer’s book is a fun (albeit rather scary) and eye-opening read, and he has a comment on his website about the tea party. If Altemeyer is correct about authoritarian behavior, then there is no amount of evidence, no matter how solid and convincing that will sway tea partiers from their belief that the planet is not warming and that scientists are manipulating data etc. They will accept claims that agree with their view without any pre-qualifications, and they have no idea how silly they look to others outside their very tight circle

http://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2011/09/08/science-the-tea-party-and-the-dunning-kruger-effect/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All the liberal ranting on this site is nauseating.

I think you're mistaking "liberal ranting" for "disgust at supposedly educated Americans who can't be bothered to read a newspaper, book, or any other source of information." I'm neither liberal nor conservative; but frankly willful ignorance disgusts me. And between the Teabaggers and the various fringe-nuts on the left and right, we're getting it in spades.

Ooooo, you better be careful. You are getting awfully close to implying that you are of "reasonable" mindset, and that will get you called wacky on this forum.

[Anonymous]

Pitting one economic class against the other is class warfare. It is stirring up hatred and divisiveness in this country. Obama uses this rhetoric again and again to further his socialist agenda and our country is more polarized than ever.