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Mother Jones: "Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters"
- Thread starter Shake Appeal
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notsureifserious
Yet it's getting harder and harder for lower class people to attain that success, because YOU GUESSED IT, income inequality. Most of the money in the economy is getting funneled to the top earners, leaving scraps for the lower and middle classes. I highly advise you read up on income inequality, because pretty much any societal ill, like a bad educational system, can be laid at its feet. The less money that the lower classes make, the less chance their children have of escaping the cycle of low wages and poverty.
Yeah I bet Obama is going to fail so hard in the debates. I mean its something that's completely new to him. He's never done it before.
Oh wait.
Haha, Its always fun when hes gets a catch.
lol
Baconsammy
Banned
He's debating a guy that refuses to say what he'll do when/if he's elected. He has a plan, but it's a secret plan. Obama is going to destroy this idiot.
He thinks about what he says and he has a mild stutter
He is going to do 12 million jobs. He is going to do them hard.
Deified Data
Banned
Performing well in the debates is Mitt's last (fleeting) chance. If his campaign knows what's good for him they'll buy him some pomade. As his recent press conference showed, having just one misplaced hair on his head transforms him from clean-cut yuppie to mental patient.
Dude Abides
Banned
Mitt and Obama are evenly matched in the debates. Both are good debaters, neither are great. Mitt will be well prepared and do fine. Everyone writing him off and lowering expectations will help.
Devolution
Member
How does oblivion keep trollin' people successfully. Has no one caught on to his schtick.
Baconsammy
Banned
Mitt wont do well until he actually decides to speak in detail about his plans. He's already lost the election, though. Might as well drop that idiotic "we're not going to go into the details of our plan until we're in office" approach.
That's not trolling. That's a republican.
That's not trolling. That's a republican.
ryutaro's mama
Member
Oblivion already trolled the thread.
Devolution
Member
No, he's just about trolled every political thread I've been in and people still fall for it.
To be fair to Obama, he's got a lot of things on his mind, so he can't really keep up with campaign issues.
On the other hand Mittens doesn't really have an argument for his stances.
PhoenixDark
Banned
People expecting a debate blowout on either side will be disappointed; both are good debaters. The problem for Romney is that he is clearly behind, so he'll likely have to come out the gate aggressive. Given his problem with low favorability he won't be doing himself any favors by constantly attacking Obama. Meanwhile Obama will basically be repeating his 2008 performance against the desperate McCain: agreeing with his opponent sometimes while slowly twisting the knife here or there.
Dude Abides
Banned
Yes yes anyone who doesn't acknowledge Obamadagod is trolling. Hillary stomped Obama several times and Mitt's a better debater than old man McCain.
It doesn't matter whether he has a good argument for his stances. Presidential debates are not the Oxford Union.
I didn't say a good argument. I said an argument. He's proven time and time again that he's unprepared for even his own press conferences.
He's been pull in Palinesque responses even during events without cameras when it comes to answering questions.
Dude Abides
Banned
He's not going to be unprepared for the debates. If arguments were important, GWB wouldn't have ever been president. Romney is too stiff and self-conscious to have a great debate performance, but he will hold his own.
ryutaro's mama
Member
Yes, of course he is.
McCain gave Bush that work in 2000.
Obamadagod...LOL.
Dude
Abides
They must be sitting on a mountain of valid policy if you think they'll be preprared for the debates.
Which begs the questions, why are they not divulging it? The countries lively hood depends on it. I'd consider it close to treasonous if they are withholding it from the american public.
That dont plague your mind?
Zeus Molecules
illegal immigrants are stealing our air
lol Wait what?
This is not a vacuum. Give me the first world countries you're talking about, and I'll bet most of them have either healthcare for all citizens, lower income inequality, better mobility between social classes, or more likely all of the above. All of these things factor into education because they provide factor into the environment that our children are being brought up in. If I'm born poor, everyone I know is poor, no one has moved significantly from their social position unless through illegal means, my parents don't care about my schooling because they're poor and everyone they know is poor and that's just how life is, of course that's going to effect how well students living in poverty do in school (and that's a large percentage of students, 22%). Schools with predominantly low-income students do not get the same funding, making for worse teachers and environment, and an incentive for increased apathy towards schooling itself. Private schools, which would invariably rate higher than the national average for standardized tests, are not required to take them, skewing your figure.
BUT, provided that we completely change how our country works, then yeah, we wouldn't need to spend extra on education (except for post high school education).
http://www.americanprogressaction.o...the-minimum-wage-when-unemployment-is-high-2/
There are "people with a lot of money" even when income inequality is not so large. The difference is there's much more plausible avenues for achieving significantly greater wealth, so that argument makes no sense. If someone makes it harder to "work your way up", they are also removing part of the incentive to do that work. That's a pretty simple concept. Income inequality necessarily makes it harder to work your way up.
The idea of the American Dream, i.e. social mobility, was popularized back when it was an actual force that gave people incentive to be better, look at it now, at a near all-time low:
Most other rich countries are beating us on this.
It should probably be renamed to the European Dream.
Open Source said:
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Most other rich countries are beating us on this.
It should probably be renamed to the European Dream.
The gini coefficient has no connection whatsoever with social mobility. While I generally agree with the idea that mobility is low at the moment, I hate the argument about income inequality, since I fail to realise how is that a bad thing.
Social mobility and poverty level are valid points. Income inequality is not.
Devolution
Member
That didn't really come out right, did it?
Hero_of_the_Day
Member
This may have been posted already since it went up at like 6 last night, but Romney's camp said they're going to be attacking Obama for that 1998 recording over the next few days:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politic...-for-redistribution-remark-in-1998-recording/
Start that deflecting, baby.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politic...-for-redistribution-remark-in-1998-recording/
Start that deflecting, baby.
Devolution
Member
There's nothing more hilarious than people going for the you're intolerant of intolerance defense. It's just projection distilled down to its purest form.
As long as mobility is encouraged (e.g. with free high quality education and no help from government to big companies) and poverty is controlled (free healthcare, strong social security), i have no problems with mega-billionaires. Especially since a decent portion of the current richest people in the world are people that have the most respect for (Gates and Buffet, for example).
To answer your question of how: with an effective democracy. Something that we lack at the moment, and which Democrats are not interested in creating.
Devolution
Member
That part was prefaced by "especially". It is not a necessary condition. They can be evil people as well, as long as they abide the law and their power is contained by an effective democracy.
speculawyer
Member
What the fuck? So Obama was talking about how the Chicago Public Housing authority and Chicago public schools should allocate their resources . . . . and . . . . what? I guess the fact that he used the word 'redistribution'? Did that suddenly turn him into Karl Marx or something? What am I not understanding?
Black Mamba
Member
The GOP has no strategy other than to twist words around to make it seem like something horrible.
BTW, it's not just Mitt Romney who is out of touch, it's the entire GOP brass. They have lost all perspective of those that aren't far right conservatives. If you asked them to describe what an independent voter was, they'd describe to you a conservative (opposed to hard right).
If wealth is useful for amplifying wealth... the greater the wealth disparity, the less influence (wealth) the lower and middle classes have to change their circumstances, the more influence the upper classes have to maintain and amplify their power base.
Additionally, if wealth is been concentrated at the top, it also typically comes at cost to social policies that provide freedom of opportunity to those in the lower socio-economic classes.
Crappier pay and crappier access to service rears its head in a few critical ways - crappier education, more time spent working to make ends meet - both parents needing to work, reducing time spent rearing children...
Of course you understand that's a problem with poverty.
You're technically right - as long as those issues are taken care of for the bottom end, then it doesn't matter how large a wealth disparity there is at the top end. This is especially evident if we lived in a post-scarcity society, where the only purpose of wealth was to serve as an indication of status.
But of course we don't - and that large gini coefficient is in real terms strongly correlated with social mobility, access to services, taxation rates, etc.
When does income inequality not affect poverty? I see a couple possibilities where income inequality grows:
1) More people from middle class become poor, money they were earning went to the rich.
2) The poor become even more poor, money they were earning before went to the rich.
3) The economy grows but the growth only benefits the rich. Lower classes remain stagnant. This still effects the perceptions of the people living in poverty without having an absolute effect on income. It effects their relative cut of the pie.
4) A combination of 3 and either 1 or 2, or 3 with both 1 and 2.
In all cases but #3, either poverty is effected absolutely by rising income inequality. These division are rather crude, and i don't want to go on for paragraphs about how each of these would work in a periods of growth/stagnation/decline etc, but please correct me if my basic understanding is crude. I'm not an economics guy.
Here's what Wikipedia says:
Income inequality effects poverty effects social mobility. It's like, all interconnected and shit, man.
travisbickle
Member
Income inequality isn't just rich vs. poor. It's about having the established means to move up and down the income ladder. When you have high income inequality you can't just say "work harder and you'll be as rich as that guy" inequality means that the wealth is not available to all no matter what they do, just the few.
If you were to take an extreme example, a slum in India next to wealthy apartments, I don't know how you could tell the family living in the slum "is that not enough motivation to work hard, look at what you could have", and pretend that is anything but meaningless drivel.
Foxy Fox 39
Banned
"I know the answer but I'm not going to say it!"
I'm sure these people are just terrible at picking up on patterns.
... or they haven't seen/remembered his previous posts.
Not to be a killjoy... honestly curious. Isn't habitually trolling threads supposed to get you banned or was that never actually the case?
Are you saying 107% of all the people don't pay taxes??? Small government FTW!
Devolution
Member
I dunno. I think if it's kind of harmless it's not. If you're shitposting everywhere I can see how it would be though.
I agree with this. I don't deny that a correlation exists, and I already said that the problem exists. But why do people focus on the wrong part of the problem? When they do, to me they come off as just being jealous...
IMO, the historical trend is that the creation of wealth (which is strongly related to technology advancements) benefits everybody in a democratic and non corrupt country. My argument is that the developed world is losing the democratic part of the equation, and that is making the poverty levels rise. That, and not inequality, is a huge problem.
Let me put it this way: would you rather be a middle class american today or a european king in medieval times? Would you rather be a poor american today or part of the european middle class in medieval times?
They will hardly have need for debate skills during the debate. It is not like they will actually be debating stuff.
Moderator: "Candidate 1, [ Some semi-tough specific question about a position ]"
Candidate 1: "[ Sidesteps specific question and tells general prepared quote partly blaming Candidate 2 while totally not answering the question ]"
Moderator: "Candidate 2, your rebuttal"
Candidate: "[ Sidesteps points made by Candidate 1 and tells general prepared quote partly blaming Candidate 2 while totally not answering ]"
I don't see your point. Yes, poor people (or people of any class) have it better now than they did in the past due to technology. That's a given.
You're saying that income inequality doesn't effect poverty. Resources and goods and assets are to some degree finite at any given snapshot in time. If the rich are taking more of that pie or more of the relative growth of that pie (income inequality), how does that not make poverty levels rise???
Of course it's income inequality is not a direct variable that correlates 1:1 with poverty, the real world is much too complex for that to be the case, but it seems like you're saying one has no effect on the other, which seems impossible to my mind. Can you explain this position better?
Dude Abides
Banned
Just trying to leaven the Obama shits gold mentality with a little perspective. This seems to really upset people for some reason.
Again, you seem to think the debates are a policy round table when they aren't. It's not as if the Obama campaign is offering lots of policy detail of their own. Perhaps Obama should be tried for treason?
Why is Candidate 2 blaming himself?
After my original post, I really have no place pointing out minor errors.
I feel like Dude Abides is at least somewhat right. Obama isn't an amazing debater. He's good enough to not embarrass himself, but I can't think of any times he's really done something incredible in that format.
On the other hand, I don't think Mitt Romney was even the best debater in that weak Republican primary field, and he's done some odd things in those debates, like when he berated John King for having the gall to make him actually give an answer to a question, or when he tried to make a $10,000 bet with Rick Perry. He's absolutely capable of doing decently in a debate, but I don't think he'll look good if he has to get aggressive.
Like you said, "it's like, all interconnected and shit, man".
Just as you can't dissociate income inequality from poverty, you also can't dissociate inequality from wealth creation. This isn't some "job creator idolizing" bullshit that is so common among republicans in the US. It's basic human nature: people respond to incentives. Stress causes action. Positive and negative reinforcements work.
I recommend you read this great essay by Paul Graham. The most relevant part:
pg said:
The whole thing is brilliant, and you should read it. I hope this parts I copied at least explain a little bit better the previous point I was trying to make.
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