America is just completely broken

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You tend to do less and less for your community if it’s overwhelmed by immigrants. Especially if they look and act different than you.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s where my friends were nearly all first generation and parents were immigrants with accents, different cultures, religions, and more, my best friends are from families from Haiti, India, South American countries, and more. And now I work in a super diverse place. Not my personal experience. This xenophobia is a newer trend to me and seems driven by right wing media Charlie Kirk types, etc. Sorry but your narrative contradicts what I actually lived and experience.

Meanwhile, IGNORING your anecdotal data, where is the $20 BILLION lost in fraud, Minnesota???

Of course you would IGNORE the billions Trump and his cronies and families are siphoning off from taxpayers.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Argentina, and they have universal healthcare.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Israel for this unjustified war, not to mention the BILLIONS the US already gives Israel.

BTW, the leader of the fraud in MN is a white women, American born. But, I realize that pathetic people find it easier to blame those who are weaker than themselves for their lot. I believe the Nazis convinced most of the Germans to do just that.

First, this has ZERO to do with Trump.

These are people who do not respect our culture. Take the case of Ladan Mohamad Ali.

She is given money to bribe a jury but before she even tries to bribe them, she takes an 80,000 cut for herself. LOLOL!

These people are tribal. They care nothing about our country, let alone their state or community. They care about only the race of people they belong to or even their immediate family. It doesn't work here.

I have no sympathy for them. Just get out.

"Ask not what your country can do for you
Ask what you can do for your country." - John F. Kennedy

Oh how ironic that you would quote Kennedy as a MAGA.

Your ancestors were also probably tribal. The Italians sought out Italian neighborhoods, as did the Poles, etc..

People should absolutely go to to prison for committing fraud, but unlike MAGA, I don't blame an entire group of people for the actions of a few. Otherwise, we'd have to assume that MAGA are ALL violent white nationalist insurrectionists judging by the J6ers, Fuentes, et al

No other country in the world would or should put up with the multi culti abuse you think is AOK to visit upon us and it's all for you to feel good about yourself. AGAIN, where is the $20 BILLION?

First, please take a deep breath. I sense your rising blood pressure and don’t want you to have a heart attack.

Second, close your eyes and visualize your 3 favorite foods.

Are they the same foods your great (great, great, etc) grandparents who first immigrated to America?

Mine sure aren’t (Irish, Austrian, Ukrainian (Jewish), English)

I love tacos (Mexico), pizza (Italian), and chicken Tikka Masala (Indian). Oh and chicken mulligatawny soup is a close 4th which is already a mish mash of British and Indian cooking.

Multiculturalism offers us (past, present, and future) amazing things and possibilities. It’s what our country was built on.

If there are suspicions that millions or billion stolen by Somalians in MN they should be investigated. But there are also suspicions that Trump is stealing from our country. Does that mean we should kick everyone with Scottish ancestry out of the country?

Or if you think that example is too inflammatory, what about Senator Scott from FL whose company was convicted of billions of Medicare fraud. According to AI he’s of Scottish and English ancestry. Are all people from those countries fraudsters?

I don't know about the previous poster, but I'm big into Native foods. I make an exception for Mexican food, it is actually pretty close to the native foods. Go read, "Sioux Chef".

He has a pretty good explanation of how foreigners destroyed the Native food supplies. I live with foreigners. They really like their food, but they don't realize Americans really don't do mono-staple food(rice or wheat). They really don't understand how diverse American cuisine is, beans, corn, potatoes, rice, wheat, sweet potato, and more.

American's practically invented food. Immigrants they come here, "Let's have tikka masala". Well, where did those peppers and tomatoes come from? Let's have Thai, where did those peanuts come from...

Let's give America a little credit on food here. Many of these foreign cultures have operated in famine or near famine conditions at near maximum population densities for a long time. This is not auspicious for good cuisine.

Yes, foreigners come here, they bought out whole foods changed the motto sourced locally and globally, raised the prices on bulk and staple items, converted all the supply chains.

Now they want to tell us our food isn't good.

Here come foreigners with their food trucks. Here's your lunch, it's wrapped in a piece of paper, or in a paper bowel.

Remember when we used to go into restaurants and they washed the dishes? You could sit down look at a menu, order, and actually afford the prices.

[Anonymous]

The really sad thing is that whoever cleans up Trump's mess is going to get blamed for inflation and/or increasing the debt. We saw this happen as Biden cleaned up Trump's first mess.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So many things have gotten so much worse. Shrinkflation and skimpflation. Customer service being replaced by AI that sends you in endless loops and never solves the problem. Endless subscriptions and paywalls. Climate change, global instability, and constant supply chain disruptions causing shortages. Younger people increasingly accept that it’s normal to pay the same price and receive less and less, because they don’t remember what things were like before.

Regardless of the fact that our living standards are still better than a 14th century peasant (for now, until the billionaires have their way), we’ve lost something very vital: optimism. People used to look forward to the future. For a moment after WWII, it seemed like things were possible. Rights were expanding, schools were desegregating, opportunities were opening up for more and more people, and the moral arc of the universe was bending (slowly) in the right direction. The middle class was expanding. Flying cars were just around the corner. Families could get by comfortably on one income. A college education unlocked doors. Kids could just be kids without having to grind year round at sports just to make the high school team. Minority groups started to see themselves represented on TV and in the movies. Workers could get together and demand better conditions. Journalists did their job and reported instead of fawning. We weren’t being constantly surveilled by smart technology.

Greedy rich people, religious leaders, and racists all concluded that this was a bad thing, joined forces, and now here we are, being driven off the cliff by people who very much do not have your best interests at heart.

This is an important misunderstanding of history. America’s post WWII economic dominance which afforded us so much was always going to be temporary. America raced out ahead of the world after the war because much of the industrial base of the world was destroyed. We won because nobody else could compete, not because rod the superiority of our model.

As countries rebuilt their economic bases, they slowly eroded our economic dominance. Slowly at first but then all at once. We helped squander that lead, but it was always going to come to an end. A simple and understandable example is the Japanese automakers eventually outcompeting and destroying the model that made labor unions so powerful and important in the USA after WWII.

A lot of tiger things contributed to the decline, from both the Democrats and Republicans, but the post WII American economy was always going to be a temporary thing.

You’re talking about economic superiority which is just one aspect of what PP was talking about. We didn’t need to cut education and infrastructure spending and export jobs like we did. We didn’t need to allow corporate interests to take over our government.

What do you think pays for the education and infrastructure spending? The economy! The two are linked and the inevitable end of American economic dominance was always going to be felt in everything else about American society.

Wealth hoarding is a problem, but it is not *the* problem. In 1970 Social Security and Medicare spending amounted to just under 4% of GDP (or about 20% of the federal budget). Today it is around 9% of GDP (or almost 40% of the federal budget). That is a delta of about $1.5 trillion per year in incremental spending over 1970.

If you make the extremely aggressive assumption that you can achieve 100% tax efficiency and taxed all the wealth of American billionaires, you would collect about $8.5 trillion, or just about 5.5 years of the incremental spend on Social Security and Medicare(again, this is just 20% of the federal budget). See the problem? The math here is just absolutely brutal.

And while it is easy to blame this on billionaires and greed, it is clear the fix won’t be from taxing them. I think there are good policy reasons for these proposed taxes, but it isn’t going to fix what politicians are promising it will fix.

Note: I don’t mean to suggest social security or Medicare are *the* problem or any other specific issue. We have an aggregate spending problem that cannot be solved with additional revenue.

A 100% wealth tax would crash asset values and the collections from such a tax would be a fraction of curren wealth values so the money would be a much smaller amount that would actually only pay for fewer years worth of expenditures.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You tend to do less and less for your community if it’s overwhelmed by immigrants. Especially if they look and act different than you.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s where my friends were nearly all first generation and parents were immigrants with accents, different cultures, religions, and more, my best friends are from families from Haiti, India, South American countries, and more. And now I work in a super diverse place. Not my personal experience. This xenophobia is a newer trend to me and seems driven by right wing media Charlie Kirk types, etc. Sorry but your narrative contradicts what I actually lived and experience.

Meanwhile, IGNORING your anecdotal data, where is the $20 BILLION lost in fraud, Minnesota???

Of course you would IGNORE the billions Trump and his cronies and families are siphoning off from taxpayers.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Argentina, and they have universal healthcare.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Israel for this unjustified war, not to mention the BILLIONS the US already gives Israel.

BTW, the leader of the fraud in MN is a white women, American born. But, I realize that pathetic people find it easier to blame those who are weaker than themselves for their lot. I believe the Nazis convinced most of the Germans to do just that.

First, this has ZERO to do with Trump.

These are people who do not respect our culture. Take the case of Ladan Mohamad Ali.

She is given money to bribe a jury but before she even tries to bribe them, she takes an 80,000 cut for herself. LOLOL!

These people are tribal. They care nothing about our country, let alone their state or community. They care about only the race of people they belong to or even their immediate family. It doesn't work here.

I have no sympathy for them. Just get out.

"Ask not what your country can do for you
Ask what you can do for your country." - John F. Kennedy

Oh how ironic that you would quote Kennedy as a MAGA.

Your ancestors were also probably tribal. The Italians sought out Italian neighborhoods, as did the Poles, etc..

People should absolutely go to to prison for committing fraud, but unlike MAGA, I don't blame an entire group of people for the actions of a few. Otherwise, we'd have to assume that MAGA are ALL violent white nationalist insurrectionists judging by the J6ers, Fuentes, et al

No other country in the world would or should put up with the multi culti abuse you think is AOK to visit upon us and it's all for you to feel good about yourself. AGAIN, where is the $20 BILLION?

First, please take a deep breath. I sense your rising blood pressure and don’t want you to have a heart attack.

Second, close your eyes and visualize your 3 favorite foods.

Are they the same foods your great (great, great, etc) grandparents who first immigrated to America?

Mine sure aren’t (Irish, Austrian, Ukrainian (Jewish), English)

I love tacos (Mexico), pizza (Italian), and chicken Tikka Masala (Indian). Oh and chicken mulligatawny soup is a close 4th which is already a mish mash of British and Indian cooking.

Multiculturalism offers us (past, present, and future) amazing things and possibilities. It’s what our country was built on.

If there are suspicions that millions or billion stolen by Somalians in MN they should be investigated. But there are also suspicions that Trump is stealing from our country. Does that mean we should kick everyone with Scottish ancestry out of the country?

Or if you think that example is too inflammatory, what about Senator Scott from FL whose company was convicted of billions of Medicare fraud. According to AI he’s of Scottish and English ancestry. Are all people from those countries fraudsters?

I don't know about the previous poster, but I'm big into Native foods. I make an exception for Mexican food, it is actually pretty close to the native foods. Go read, "Sioux Chef".

He has a pretty good explanation of how foreigners destroyed the Native food supplies. I live with foreigners. They really like their food, but they don't realize Americans really don't do mono-staple food(rice or wheat). They really don't understand how diverse American cuisine is, beans, corn, potatoes, rice, wheat, sweet potato, and more.

American's practically invented food. Immigrants they come here, "Let's have tikka masala". Well, where did those peppers and tomatoes come from? Let's have Thai, where did those peanuts come from...

Let's give America a little credit on food here. Many of these foreign cultures have operated in famine or near famine conditions at near maximum population densities for a long time. This is not auspicious for good cuisine.

Yes, foreigners come here, they bought out whole foods changed the motto sourced locally and globally, raised the prices on bulk and staple items, converted all the supply chains.

Now they want to tell us our food isn't good.

Here come foreigners with their food trucks. Here's your lunch, it's wrapped in a piece of paper, or in a paper bowel.

Remember when we used to go into restaurants and they washed the dishes? You could sit down look at a menu, order, and actually afford the prices.

Ah yes, good old all-American restaurants like McDonald’s and Burger King, where your lunch comes…wrapped in a piece of paper.

And of course there are no foreign sit-down restaurants, in this fantasy world.

[Anonymous]

Also, we did have to export the jobs once we decided on the international rules based order of organizing the world. The basic trade was:

The western world gets peace and stability.

America gets worldwide dominance of the US dollar and reserve currency status (along with being the world’s weapon’s manufacturer).

Once that trade was accepted, then it was only a matter of time before the jobs would be exported as other countries would use the relative advantage of weaker currencies to take low skill jobs from us. Also related, the reserve currency status of the dollar makes us a destination for unskilled, undocumented labor as those dollars can be shipped back home.

Look, I am an isolationist and a protectionist. I am not defending this and would have preferred something much different. But once the international rules based order of the post WWII era was set in place it was always going to end up like this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So many things have gotten so much worse. Shrinkflation and skimpflation. Customer service being replaced by AI that sends you in endless loops and never solves the problem. Endless subscriptions and paywalls. Climate change, global instability, and constant supply chain disruptions causing shortages. Younger people increasingly accept that it’s normal to pay the same price and receive less and less, because they don’t remember what things were like before.

Regardless of the fact that our living standards are still better than a 14th century peasant (for now, until the billionaires have their way), we’ve lost something very vital: optimism. People used to look forward to the future. For a moment after WWII, it seemed like things were possible. Rights were expanding, schools were desegregating, opportunities were opening up for more and more people, and the moral arc of the universe was bending (slowly) in the right direction. The middle class was expanding. Flying cars were just around the corner. Families could get by comfortably on one income. A college education unlocked doors. Kids could just be kids without having to grind year round at sports just to make the high school team. Minority groups started to see themselves represented on TV and in the movies. Workers could get together and demand better conditions. Journalists did their job and reported instead of fawning. We weren’t being constantly surveilled by smart technology.

Greedy rich people, religious leaders, and racists all concluded that this was a bad thing, joined forces, and now here we are, being driven off the cliff by people who very much do not have your best interests at heart.

This is an important misunderstanding of history. America’s post WWII economic dominance which afforded us so much was always going to be temporary. America raced out ahead of the world after the war because much of the industrial base of the world was destroyed. We won because nobody else could compete, not because rod the superiority of our model.

As countries rebuilt their economic bases, they slowly eroded our economic dominance. Slowly at first but then all at once. We helped squander that lead, but it was always going to come to an end. A simple and understandable example is the Japanese automakers eventually outcompeting and destroying the model that made labor unions so powerful and important in the USA after WWII.

A lot of tiger things contributed to the decline, from both the Democrats and Republicans, but the post WII American economy was always going to be a temporary thing.

You’re talking about economic superiority which is just one aspect of what PP was talking about. We didn’t need to cut education and infrastructure spending and export jobs like we did. We didn’t need to allow corporate interests to take over our government.

What do you think pays for the education and infrastructure spending? The economy! The two are linked and the inevitable end of American economic dominance was always going to be felt in everything else about American society.

Wealth hoarding is a problem, but it is not *the* problem. In 1970 Social Security and Medicare spending amounted to just under 4% of GDP (or about 20% of the federal budget). Today it is around 9% of GDP (or almost 40% of the federal budget). That is a delta of about $1.5 trillion per year in incremental spending over 1970.

If you make the extremely aggressive assumption that you can achieve 100% tax efficiency and taxed all the wealth of American billionaires, you would collect about $8.5 trillion, or just about 5.5 years of the incremental spend on Social Security and Medicare(again, this is just 20% of the federal budget). See the problem? The math here is just absolutely brutal.

And while it is easy to blame this on billionaires and greed, it is clear the fix won’t be from taxing them. I think there are good policy reasons for these proposed taxes, but it isn’t going to fix what politicians are promising it will fix.

Note: I don’t mean to suggest social security or Medicare are *the* problem or any other specific issue. We have an aggregate spending problem that cannot be solved with additional revenue.

A 100% wealth tax would crash asset values and the collections from such a tax would be a fraction of curren wealth values so the money would be a much smaller amount that would actually only pay for fewer years worth of expenditures.

The thing is our government revenue problem was mostly self inflicted. The math here is brutal we spend half of our taxes on interest. These don't go towards services. They go into bond holders bank accounts.

This is just fiscal mismanagement. Frankly those that have the most access to lawmakers are the most responsible for this situation. So even if such wealth taxes are merely punitive. There is some value in punishing those that have so poorly managed the finances.

Though having said that. Taxing wealth directly has some economic upsides. It doesn't punish capitalists for producing goods efficiently in the way of profits. It would ensure that the wealthy keep their assets gainfully employed. If their assets are producing profits then they will evaporate, which I am fine with. You don't get to have a massive company that drives every other out of business then just milk the monopoly cow 1% profit or whatever.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The really sad thing is that whoever cleans up Trump's mess is going to get blamed for inflation and/or increasing the debt. We saw this happen as Biden cleaned up Trump's first mess.

We need to push back on this narrative. Dems need to say over and over and over that they are the party of fiscal conservatism, which includes public assistance and financing stuff like cancer research and climate change policies because it saves us $$$$ in the end.

I'm sure if you look at MAGA/GOP Congress's personal finance they operate very, very differently than how they run the US, which is sign number 1 of a gazillion they're grifters and liars.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You tend to do less and less for your community if it’s overwhelmed by immigrants. Especially if they look and act different than you.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s where my friends were nearly all first generation and parents were immigrants with accents, different cultures, religions, and more, my best friends are from families from Haiti, India, South American countries, and more. And now I work in a super diverse place. Not my personal experience. This xenophobia is a newer trend to me and seems driven by right wing media Charlie Kirk types, etc. Sorry but your narrative contradicts what I actually lived and experience.

Meanwhile, IGNORING your anecdotal data, where is the $20 BILLION lost in fraud, Minnesota???

Of course you would IGNORE the billions Trump and his cronies and families are siphoning off from taxpayers.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Argentina, and they have universal healthcare.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Israel for this unjustified war, not to mention the BILLIONS the US already gives Israel.

BTW, the leader of the fraud in MN is a white women, American born. But, I realize that pathetic people find it easier to blame those who are weaker than themselves for their lot. I believe the Nazis convinced most of the Germans to do just that.

First, this has ZERO to do with Trump.

These are people who do not respect our culture. Take the case of Ladan Mohamad Ali.

She is given money to bribe a jury but before she even tries to bribe them, she takes an 80,000 cut for herself. LOLOL!

These people are tribal. They care nothing about our country, let alone their state or community. They care about only the race of people they belong to or even their immediate family. It doesn't work here.

I have no sympathy for them. Just get out.

"Ask not what your country can do for you
Ask what you can do for your country." - John F. Kennedy

This is what Americans don't understand. It's not within their frame of reference to be able to make sense of a culture that gives not a crap about others.

It's like the Native Americans when the Pilgrims first arrived. They helped the Pilgrims. They showed them how to plant corn, how to harvest food, how to survive in the new world. Then the Pilgrims turned around and killed off the Native Americans. The Native Americans opened up their hearts to the newcomers, and the thanks they got was annihilation. Same thing is happening here. Not outright disease or genocide. Replacement, far more subtle but just as effective.

That's a third-grade version of what happened. The first few contacts wrote home, "avoid north America, poison tipped armor piercing arrows, go to the Caribbean instead", Only after diseases spread did Europeans get a foot hold on North America. At that point the land was very sparsely populated, so the Natives had more land than they knew what to do with, most of the tribes that remained were extremely rural and remote.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Also, we did have to export the jobs once we decided on the international rules based order of organizing the world. The basic trade was:

The western world gets peace and stability.

America gets worldwide dominance of the US dollar and reserve currency status (along with being the world’s weapon’s manufacturer).

Once that trade was accepted, then it was only a matter of time before the jobs would be exported as other countries would use the relative advantage of weaker currencies to take low skill jobs from us. Also related, the reserve currency status of the dollar makes us a destination for unskilled, undocumented labor as those dollars can be shipped back home.

Look, I am an isolationist and a protectionist. I am not defending this and would have preferred something much different. But once the international rules based order of the post WWII era was set in place it was always going to end up like this.

I don't think it was necessarily a matter of time. You're neglecting capitalism in all of this. Walmart is largely responsible for pushing manufacturing to Asia. They told manufacturers that they wouldn't shelve their item unless they lowered it's price. Well, companies were put in a bind >> miss out on Walmart and the risk that entailed or lay off staff to get on Walmart's shelves by retaining management and shifting manufacturing to Asia.

It caused a cannibalism among small towns. The Etch-A-Sketch town laid off it's workforce, so they were forced to shop at Walmart. As a result, they put the Mr. Potato Head town out of business, and repeat over and over.

Now, the Walton family has several multi-billionaires and use up quite a bit of taxpayer $$ by underemploying their staff to shrink benefit outlay.

Greed is how we got here. It's the people (red and blue voters) against the broligarchs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You tend to do less and less for your community if it’s overwhelmed by immigrants. Especially if they look and act different than you.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s where my friends were nearly all first generation and parents were immigrants with accents, different cultures, religions, and more, my best friends are from families from Haiti, India, South American countries, and more. And now I work in a super diverse place. Not my personal experience. This xenophobia is a newer trend to me and seems driven by right wing media Charlie Kirk types, etc. Sorry but your narrative contradicts what I actually lived and experience.

Meanwhile, IGNORING your anecdotal data, where is the $20 BILLION lost in fraud, Minnesota???

Of course you would IGNORE the billions Trump and his cronies and families are siphoning off from taxpayers.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Argentina, and they have universal healthcare.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Israel for this unjustified war, not to mention the BILLIONS the US already gives Israel.

BTW, the leader of the fraud in MN is a white women, American born. But, I realize that pathetic people find it easier to blame those who are weaker than themselves for their lot. I believe the Nazis convinced most of the Germans to do just that.

First, this has ZERO to do with Trump.

These are people who do not respect our culture. Take the case of Ladan Mohamad Ali.

She is given money to bribe a jury but before she even tries to bribe them, she takes an 80,000 cut for herself. LOLOL!

These people are tribal. They care nothing about our country, let alone their state or community. They care about only the race of people they belong to or even their immediate family. It doesn't work here.

I have no sympathy for them. Just get out.

"Ask not what your country can do for you
Ask what you can do for your country." - John F. Kennedy

Oh how ironic that you would quote Kennedy as a MAGA.

Your ancestors were also probably tribal. The Italians sought out Italian neighborhoods, as did the Poles, etc..

People should absolutely go to to prison for committing fraud, but unlike MAGA, I don't blame an entire group of people for the actions of a few. Otherwise, we'd have to assume that MAGA are ALL violent white nationalist insurrectionists judging by the J6ers, Fuentes, et al

No other country in the world would or should put up with the multi culti abuse you think is AOK to visit upon us and it's all for you to feel good about yourself. AGAIN, where is the $20 BILLION?

First, please take a deep breath. I sense your rising blood pressure and don’t want you to have a heart attack.

Second, close your eyes and visualize your 3 favorite foods.

Are they the same foods your great (great, great, etc) grandparents who first immigrated to America?

Mine sure aren’t (Irish, Austrian, Ukrainian (Jewish), English)

I love tacos (Mexico), pizza (Italian), and chicken Tikka Masala (Indian). Oh and chicken mulligatawny soup is a close 4th which is already a mish mash of British and Indian cooking.

Multiculturalism offers us (past, present, and future) amazing things and possibilities. It’s what our country was built on.

If there are suspicions that millions or billion stolen by Somalians in MN they should be investigated. But there are also suspicions that Trump is stealing from our country. Does that mean we should kick everyone with Scottish ancestry out of the country?

Or if you think that example is too inflammatory, what about Senator Scott from FL whose company was convicted of billions of Medicare fraud. According to AI he’s of Scottish and English ancestry. Are all people from those countries fraudsters?

I don't know about the previous poster, but I'm big into Native foods. I make an exception for Mexican food, it is actually pretty close to the native foods. Go read, "Sioux Chef".

He has a pretty good explanation of how foreigners destroyed the Native food supplies. I live with foreigners. They really like their food, but they don't realize Americans really don't do mono-staple food(rice or wheat). They really don't understand how diverse American cuisine is, beans, corn, potatoes, rice, wheat, sweet potato, and more.

American's practically invented food. Immigrants they come here, "Let's have tikka masala". Well, where did those peppers and tomatoes come from? Let's have Thai, where did those peanuts come from...

Let's give America a little credit on food here. Many of these foreign cultures have operated in famine or near famine conditions at near maximum population densities for a long time. This is not auspicious for good cuisine.

Yes, foreigners come here, they bought out whole foods changed the motto sourced locally and globally, raised the prices on bulk and staple items, converted all the supply chains.

Now they want to tell us our food isn't good.

Here come foreigners with their food trucks. Here's your lunch, it's wrapped in a piece of paper, or in a paper bowel.

Remember when we used to go into restaurants and they washed the dishes? You could sit down look at a menu, order, and actually afford the prices.

Ah yes, good old all-American restaurants like McDonald’s and Burger King, where your lunch comes…wrapped in a piece of paper.

And of course there are no foreign sit-down restaurants, in this fantasy world.

Why are food trucks even a thing. As previous posters stated you need to get out of your suburban franchise paradise it does bad things to your logic.

Do you consider a global corporation like McDonald's run by a immigrants, American? This is where liberals don't understand who we're talking about. It's like calling panda express chinese.

The fact that you can't think of any other restaurants is just more fodder for my argument.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So many things have gotten so much worse. Shrinkflation and skimpflation. Customer service being replaced by AI that sends you in endless loops and never solves the problem. Endless subscriptions and paywalls. Climate change, global instability, and constant supply chain disruptions causing shortages. Younger people increasingly accept that it’s normal to pay the same price and receive less and less, because they don’t remember what things were like before.

Regardless of the fact that our living standards are still better than a 14th century peasant (for now, until the billionaires have their way), we’ve lost something very vital: optimism. People used to look forward to the future. For a moment after WWII, it seemed like things were possible. Rights were expanding, schools were desegregating, opportunities were opening up for more and more people, and the moral arc of the universe was bending (slowly) in the right direction. The middle class was expanding. Flying cars were just around the corner. Families could get by comfortably on one income. A college education unlocked doors. Kids could just be kids without having to grind year round at sports just to make the high school team. Minority groups started to see themselves represented on TV and in the movies. Workers could get together and demand better conditions. Journalists did their job and reported instead of fawning. We weren’t being constantly surveilled by smart technology.

Greedy rich people, religious leaders, and racists all concluded that this was a bad thing, joined forces, and now here we are, being driven off the cliff by people who very much do not have your best interests at heart.

This is an important misunderstanding of history. America’s post WWII economic dominance which afforded us so much was always going to be temporary. America raced out ahead of the world after the war because much of the industrial base of the world was destroyed. We won because nobody else could compete, not because rod the superiority of our model.

As countries rebuilt their economic bases, they slowly eroded our economic dominance. Slowly at first but then all at once. We helped squander that lead, but it was always going to come to an end. A simple and understandable example is the Japanese automakers eventually outcompeting and destroying the model that made labor unions so powerful and important in the USA after WWII.

A lot of tiger things contributed to the decline, from both the Democrats and Republicans, but the post WII American economy was always going to be a temporary thing.

You’re talking about economic superiority which is just one aspect of what PP was talking about. We didn’t need to cut education and infrastructure spending and export jobs like we did. We didn’t need to allow corporate interests to take over our government.

What do you think pays for the education and infrastructure spending? The economy! The two are linked and the inevitable end of American economic dominance was always going to be felt in everything else about American society.

Wealth hoarding is a problem, but it is not *the* problem. In 1970 Social Security and Medicare spending amounted to just under 4% of GDP (or about 20% of the federal budget). Today it is around 9% of GDP (or almost 40% of the federal budget). That is a delta of about $1.5 trillion per year in incremental spending over 1970.

If you make the extremely aggressive assumption that you can achieve 100% tax efficiency and taxed all the wealth of American billionaires, you would collect about $8.5 trillion, or just about 5.5 years of the incremental spend on Social Security and Medicare(again, this is just 20% of the federal budget). See the problem? The math here is just absolutely brutal.

And while it is easy to blame this on billionaires and greed, it is clear the fix won’t be from taxing them. I think there are good policy reasons for these proposed taxes, but it isn’t going to fix what politicians are promising it will fix.

Note: I don’t mean to suggest social security or Medicare are *the* problem or any other specific issue. We have an aggregate spending problem that cannot be solved with additional revenue.

A 100% wealth tax would crash asset values and the collections from such a tax would be a fraction of curren wealth values so the money would be a much smaller amount that would actually only pay for fewer years worth of expenditures.

The thing is our government revenue problem was mostly self inflicted. The math here is brutal we spend half of our taxes on interest. These don't go towards services. They go into bond holders bank accounts.

This is just fiscal mismanagement. Frankly those that have the most access to lawmakers are the most responsible for this situation. So even if such wealth taxes are merely punitive. There is some value in punishing those that have so poorly managed the finances.

Though having said that. Taxing wealth directly has some economic upsides. It doesn't punish capitalists for producing goods efficiently in the way of profits. It would ensure that the wealthy keep their assets gainfully employed. If their assets are producing profits then they will evaporate, which I am fine with. You don't get to have a massive company that drives every other out of business then just milk the monopoly cow 1% profit or whatever.

This is partially correct. Revenue since 1970 has hovered around 15-20% of GDP. We are currently at a relative low on the bottom end of that range.

A huge part of the problem has been that when times have been flush we have expended spending rather than cleaning up the balance sheet. This is also observed at the local level where blue states are struggling with spending they expanded during COVID.

Frankly, it is one of the reasons I am anti tax raising. Raising taxes to clean up the mess would be great. But guys like Bernie Sanders are proposing higher taxes and expanded entitlements. Will only make the problem worse in the long run.

I don’t quite understand your last paragraph.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Also, we did have to export the jobs once we decided on the international rules based order of organizing the world. The basic trade was:

The western world gets peace and stability.

America gets worldwide dominance of the US dollar and reserve currency status (along with being the world’s weapon’s manufacturer).

Once that trade was accepted, then it was only a matter of time before the jobs would be exported as other countries would use the relative advantage of weaker currencies to take low skill jobs from us. Also related, the reserve currency status of the dollar makes us a destination for unskilled, undocumented labor as those dollars can be shipped back home.

Look, I am an isolationist and a protectionist. I am not defending this and would have preferred something much different. But once the international rules based order of the post WWII era was set in place it was always going to end up like this.

I don't think it was necessarily a matter of time. You're neglecting capitalism in all of this. Walmart is largely responsible for pushing manufacturing to Asia. They told manufacturers that they wouldn't shelve their item unless they lowered it's price. Well, companies were put in a bind >> miss out on Walmart and the risk that entailed or lay off staff to get on Walmart's shelves by retaining management and shifting manufacturing to Asia.

It caused a cannibalism among small towns. The Etch-A-Sketch town laid off it's workforce, so they were forced to shop at Walmart. As a result, they put the Mr. Potato Head town out of business, and repeat over and over.

Now, the Walton family has several multi-billionaires and use up quite a bit of taxpayer $$ by underemploying their staff to shrink benefit outlay.

Greed is how we got here. It's the people (red and blue voters) against the broligarchs.

Yes, it was inevitable once the dollar was the world’s reserve currency. If not Walmart, it would have been someone else. You cannot have:

(A) Reserve currency status within the international rules based order that America was to lead; and

(B) A protected economy.

You have to choose between the two. Once our leaders chose A, the decline of American working and middle class was only a matter of time.

Stated differently, you could have globalization and all the benefits it entails (international peace, open borders, etc) or you could protect the American economy. You could not have both.

I understand why after the horrors of WWII the choice for (A) was made, but we are paying the price today.

Capitalism only describes people acting in their (perceived) atomized best interest.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You tend to do less and less for your community if it’s overwhelmed by immigrants. Especially if they look and act different than you.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s where my friends were nearly all first generation and parents were immigrants with accents, different cultures, religions, and more, my best friends are from families from Haiti, India, South American countries, and more. And now I work in a super diverse place. Not my personal experience. This xenophobia is a newer trend to me and seems driven by right wing media Charlie Kirk types, etc. Sorry but your narrative contradicts what I actually lived and experience.

Meanwhile, IGNORING your anecdotal data, where is the $20 BILLION lost in fraud, Minnesota???

Of course you would IGNORE the billions Trump and his cronies and families are siphoning off from taxpayers.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Argentina, and they have universal healthcare.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Israel for this unjustified war, not to mention the BILLIONS the US already gives Israel.

BTW, the leader of the fraud in MN is a white women, American born. But, I realize that pathetic people find it easier to blame those who are weaker than themselves for their lot. I believe the Nazis convinced most of the Germans to do just that.

First, this has ZERO to do with Trump.

These are people who do not respect our culture. Take the case of Ladan Mohamad Ali.

She is given money to bribe a jury but before she even tries to bribe them, she takes an 80,000 cut for herself. LOLOL!

These people are tribal. They care nothing about our country, let alone their state or community. They care about only the race of people they belong to or even their immediate family. It doesn't work here.

I have no sympathy for them. Just get out.

"Ask not what your country can do for you
Ask what you can do for your country." - John F. Kennedy

Oh how ironic that you would quote Kennedy as a MAGA.

Your ancestors were also probably tribal. The Italians sought out Italian neighborhoods, as did the Poles, etc..

People should absolutely go to to prison for committing fraud, but unlike MAGA, I don't blame an entire group of people for the actions of a few. Otherwise, we'd have to assume that MAGA are ALL violent white nationalist insurrectionists judging by the J6ers, Fuentes, et al

No other country in the world would or should put up with the multi culti abuse you think is AOK to visit upon us and it's all for you to feel good about yourself. AGAIN, where is the $20 BILLION?

First, please take a deep breath. I sense your rising blood pressure and don’t want you to have a heart attack.

Second, close your eyes and visualize your 3 favorite foods.

Are they the same foods your great (great, great, etc) grandparents who first immigrated to America?

Mine sure aren’t (Irish, Austrian, Ukrainian (Jewish), English)

I love tacos (Mexico), pizza (Italian), and chicken Tikka Masala (Indian). Oh and chicken mulligatawny soup is a close 4th which is already a mish mash of British and Indian cooking.

Multiculturalism offers us (past, present, and future) amazing things and possibilities. It’s what our country was built on.

If there are suspicions that millions or billion stolen by Somalians in MN they should be investigated. But there are also suspicions that Trump is stealing from our country. Does that mean we should kick everyone with Scottish ancestry out of the country?

Or if you think that example is too inflammatory, what about Senator Scott from FL whose company was convicted of billions of Medicare fraud. According to AI he’s of Scottish and English ancestry. Are all people from those countries fraudsters?

I don't know about the previous poster, but I'm big into Native foods. I make an exception for Mexican food, it is actually pretty close to the native foods. Go read, "Sioux Chef".

He has a pretty good explanation of how foreigners destroyed the Native food supplies. I live with foreigners. They really like their food, but they don't realize Americans really don't do mono-staple food(rice or wheat). They really don't understand how diverse American cuisine is, beans, corn, potatoes, rice, wheat, sweet potato, and more.

American's practically invented food. Immigrants they come here, "Let's have tikka masala". Well, where did those peppers and tomatoes come from? Let's have Thai, where did those peanuts come from...

Let's give America a little credit on food here. Many of these foreign cultures have operated in famine or near famine conditions at near maximum population densities for a long time. This is not auspicious for good cuisine.

Yes, foreigners come here, they bought out whole foods changed the motto sourced locally and globally, raised the prices on bulk and staple items, converted all the supply chains.

Now they want to tell us our food isn't good.

Here come foreigners with their food trucks. Here's your lunch, it's wrapped in a piece of paper, or in a paper bowel.

Remember when we used to go into restaurants and they washed the dishes? You could sit down look at a menu, order, and actually afford the prices.

Ah yes, good old all-American restaurants like McDonald’s and Burger King, where your lunch comes…wrapped in a piece of paper.

And of course there are no foreign sit-down restaurants, in this fantasy world.

Why are food trucks even a thing. As previous posters stated you need to get out of your suburban franchise paradise it does bad things to your logic.

Do you consider a global corporation like McDonald's run by a immigrants, American? This is where liberals don't understand who we're talking about. It's like calling panda express chinese.

The fact that you can't think of any other restaurants is just more fodder for my argument.

What argument? You’re bending yourself into pretzels trying to come up with gotchas, and failing spectacularly. It’s hilarious that you’re trying to lecture everyone else on logic when your posts are riddled with fallacies, cognitive errors, bad unsupported assumptions, cherry-picked examples, and outright hallucinations, such as claiming that the CEO who runs McDonald’s, Chris Kempczinski, was not born in America.

No wonder grifters target MAGA. They can get you to believe anything, because facts don’t matter to you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You tend to do less and less for your community if it’s overwhelmed by immigrants. Especially if they look and act different than you.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s where my friends were nearly all first generation and parents were immigrants with accents, different cultures, religions, and more, my best friends are from families from Haiti, India, South American countries, and more. And now I work in a super diverse place. Not my personal experience. This xenophobia is a newer trend to me and seems driven by right wing media Charlie Kirk types, etc. Sorry but your narrative contradicts what I actually lived and experience.

Meanwhile, IGNORING your anecdotal data, where is the $20 BILLION lost in fraud, Minnesota???

Of course you would IGNORE the billions Trump and his cronies and families are siphoning off from taxpayers.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Argentina, and they have universal healthcare.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Israel for this unjustified war, not to mention the BILLIONS the US already gives Israel.

BTW, the leader of the fraud in MN is a white women, American born. But, I realize that pathetic people find it easier to blame those who are weaker than themselves for their lot. I believe the Nazis convinced most of the Germans to do just that.

First, this has ZERO to do with Trump.

These are people who do not respect our culture. Take the case of Ladan Mohamad Ali.

She is given money to bribe a jury but before she even tries to bribe them, she takes an 80,000 cut for herself. LOLOL!

These people are tribal. They care nothing about our country, let alone their state or community. They care about only the race of people they belong to or even their immediate family. It doesn't work here.

I have no sympathy for them. Just get out.

"Ask not what your country can do for you
Ask what you can do for your country." - John F. Kennedy

This is what Americans don't understand. It's not within their frame of reference to be able to make sense of a culture that gives not a crap about others.

It's like the Native Americans when the Pilgrims first arrived. They helped the Pilgrims. They showed them how to plant corn, how to harvest food, how to survive in the new world. Then the Pilgrims turned around and killed off the Native Americans. The Native Americans opened up their hearts to the newcomers, and the thanks they got was annihilation. Same thing is happening here. Not outright disease or genocide. Replacement, far more subtle but just as effective.

That's a third-grade version of what happened. The first few contacts wrote home, "avoid north America, poison tipped armor piercing arrows, go to the Caribbean instead", Only after diseases spread did Europeans get a foot hold on North America. At that point the land was very sparsely populated, so the Natives had more land than they knew what to do with, most of the tribes that remained were extremely rural and remote.

So you are saying the people who were on the land didn't have the right to defend themselves to random newcomers who, as it turned out, wiped them out?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So many things have gotten so much worse. Shrinkflation and skimpflation. Customer service being replaced by AI that sends you in endless loops and never solves the problem. Endless subscriptions and paywalls. Climate change, global instability, and constant supply chain disruptions causing shortages. Younger people increasingly accept that it’s normal to pay the same price and receive less and less, because they don’t remember what things were like before.

Regardless of the fact that our living standards are still better than a 14th century peasant (for now, until the billionaires have their way), we’ve lost something very vital: optimism. People used to look forward to the future. For a moment after WWII, it seemed like things were possible. Rights were expanding, schools were desegregating, opportunities were opening up for more and more people, and the moral arc of the universe was bending (slowly) in the right direction. The middle class was expanding. Flying cars were just around the corner. Families could get by comfortably on one income. A college education unlocked doors. Kids could just be kids without having to grind year round at sports just to make the high school team. Minority groups started to see themselves represented on TV and in the movies. Workers could get together and demand better conditions. Journalists did their job and reported instead of fawning. We weren’t being constantly surveilled by smart technology.

Greedy rich people, religious leaders, and racists all concluded that this was a bad thing, joined forces, and now here we are, being driven off the cliff by people who very much do not have your best interests at heart.

This is an important misunderstanding of history. America’s post WWII economic dominance which afforded us so much was always going to be temporary. America raced out ahead of the world after the war because much of the industrial base of the world was destroyed. We won because nobody else could compete, not because rod the superiority of our model.

As countries rebuilt their economic bases, they slowly eroded our economic dominance. Slowly at first but then all at once. We helped squander that lead, but it was always going to come to an end. A simple and understandable example is the Japanese automakers eventually outcompeting and destroying the model that made labor unions so powerful and important in the USA after WWII.

A lot of tiger things contributed to the decline, from both the Democrats and Republicans, but the post WII American economy was always going to be a temporary thing.

You’re talking about economic superiority which is just one aspect of what PP was talking about. We didn’t need to cut education and infrastructure spending and export jobs like we did. We didn’t need to allow corporate interests to take over our government.

What do you think pays for the education and infrastructure spending? The economy! The two are linked and the inevitable end of American economic dominance was always going to be felt in everything else about American society.

Wealth hoarding is a problem, but it is not *the* problem. In 1970 Social Security and Medicare spending amounted to just under 4% of GDP (or about 20% of the federal budget). Today it is around 9% of GDP (or almost 40% of the federal budget). That is a delta of about $1.5 trillion per year in incremental spending over 1970.

If you make the extremely aggressive assumption that you can achieve 100% tax efficiency and taxed all the wealth of American billionaires, you would collect about $8.5 trillion, or just about 5.5 years of the incremental spend on Social Security and Medicare(again, this is just 20% of the federal budget). See the problem? The math here is just absolutely brutal.

And while it is easy to blame this on billionaires and greed, it is clear the fix won’t be from taxing them. I think there are good policy reasons for these proposed taxes, but it isn’t going to fix what politicians are promising it will fix.

Note: I don’t mean to suggest social security or Medicare are *the* problem or any other specific issue. We have an aggregate spending problem that cannot be solved with additional revenue.

A 100% wealth tax would crash asset values and the collections from such a tax would be a fraction of curren wealth values so the money would be a much smaller amount that would actually only pay for fewer years worth of expenditures.

The thing is our government revenue problem was mostly self inflicted. The math here is brutal we spend half of our taxes on interest. These don't go towards services. They go into bond holders bank accounts.

This is just fiscal mismanagement. Frankly those that have the most access to lawmakers are the most responsible for this situation. So even if such wealth taxes are merely punitive. There is some value in punishing those that have so poorly managed the finances.

Though having said that. Taxing wealth directly has some economic upsides. It doesn't punish capitalists for producing goods efficiently in the way of profits. It would ensure that the wealthy keep their assets gainfully employed. If their assets are producing profits then they will evaporate, which I am fine with. You don't get to have a massive company that drives every other out of business then just milk the monopoly cow 1% profit or whatever.

This is partially correct. Revenue since 1970 has hovered around 15-20% of GDP. We are currently at a relative low on the bottom end of that range.

A huge part of the problem has been that when times have been flush we have expended spending rather than cleaning up the balance sheet. This is also observed at the local level where blue states are struggling with spending they expanded during COVID.

Frankly, it is one of the reasons I am anti tax raising. Raising taxes to clean up the mess would be great. But guys like Bernie Sanders are proposing higher taxes and expanded entitlements. Will only make the problem worse in the long run.

I don’t quite understand your last paragraph.

This has manifested as the GOP crashes the economy (bush, bush Trump) and the democrats clean it up (clinton, Obama, Biden) - if the dems had ever had sustained control of the government, our debt would have been reduced, not just the rate of spending. Bu the American public was suckered into believe the GOP was the party of fiscal restrain...how LOL is that?