***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[AEA18]

People voted for the orange clown because they read posts they did not like/agree with on online forums.

The people who have been calling out the crazy orange clown from the jump are to blame for other people supporting/voting for him

This guy has lost it.

 

[RustyShackleford]

You are no better yourself look at the posts you've made today with your condescending "I told you so" tone. Get out of here with that

Because the NT Revisionists tried to invent new narratives to help absolve them of the hand they played in Trump getting elected. And one of the biggest culprits is Rusty.

How about the part you played by defending him constantly for months.

I'm not making up a new narrative, I'm just not agreeing with your bull **** one.

 

[rico x hood]

You're the dude that said he needed to antagonize me constantly, so that random people don't get persuaded by my liberalism

You're the dude, that after we called a truce multiple times would break it my randomly insulting me in a thread

You’re the dude that used to bring up my family needing handouts, and that is why I’m a liberal. And how I got priced out of MD.

You’re the dude that was spewing some xenophobia about my immigration status, about me loving the country or leaving it.

And you’re the man that doesn’t deny this, just laugh it off as just debating politics.

Whenever I press into you, you wanna play victim. Because you think I have to tolerate you and forget all the trolling, and antagonistic nonsense you have done.

You stay wanna ride around on a high horse. And you hate when I drag you off of it.

Trump proving all the liberals in this thread right, in your mind the perfect time to be on some "you guys were wrong about the election".

I never said anything about your immigration status. I'm the son of a immigrant. I just said if you couldn't name something you loved about America, then you should leave. Had nothing to do with you being an immigrant. It was about your clear lack of patriotism. But you eventually came around and stated what you love about America and the issue became moot.

You love bringing up old **** but always want to act like there's no blood of your hands. You've said the worst things imaginable to me. But being the bigger man, I take the high road. Funny you have the same thin skin that you criticize Trump for having.

 

[frenchbreadbuilds]

People getting mad that their intolerance isn't being tolerated by "liberals". I've been seeing it a lot lately with trump coming to power. People stating their ignorant/highly uninformed/ racist views and when they get called out on it they play victim and say that liberals are intolerant of other opinions. Most annoying thing ever.

There's a reason many people consider you a bully. You just can't stand people that have a differing opinion than you.

 

[rico x hood]

How about the part you played by defending him constantly for months.

I'm not making up a new narrative, I'm just not agreeing with your bull **** one.

It's called objectivity. You should learn it. You and your ilk dragged this this thread so far left and got led to slaughter. Colombia and apparently Rolaholic were the only ones that didn't fall for your okey doke.

 

[RustyShackleford]

You're the dude that said he needed to antagonize me constantly, so that random people don't get persuaded by my liberalism

You're the dude, that after we called a truce multiple times would break it my randomly insulting me in a thread

You’re the dude that used to bring up my family needing handouts, and that is why I’m a liberal. And how I got priced out of MD.

You’re the dude that was spewing some xenophobia about my immigration status, about me loving the country or leaving it.

And you’re the man that doesn’t deny this, just laugh it off as just debating politics.

Whenever I press into you, you wanna play victim. Because you think I have to tolerate you and forget all the trolling, and antagonistic nonsense you have done.

You stay wanna ride around on a high horse. And you hate when I drag you off of it.

Trump proving all the liberals in this thread right, in your mind the perfect time to be on some "you guys were wrong about the election".

I never said anything about your immigration status. I'm the son of a immigrant. I just said if you couldn't name something you loved about America, then you should leave. Had nothing to do with you being an immigrant. It was about your clear lack of patriotism. But you eventually came around and stated what you love about America and the issue became moot.

You love bringing up old **** but always want to act like there's no blood of your hands. You've said the worst things imaginable to me. But being the bigger man, I take the high road. Funny you have the same thin skin that you criticize Trump for having.

I called you a broke boy, and lives in constant fear of making his rent on his one bedroom in NOVA, in response to your pricing out comments. I never crossed them line like you have, at was usually to snap back at you.

And you're sugar coating your xenophobic comments. You always think that no one should take umbrage by your nonsense

 

[d nice]

[h1]A real agenda for working peopleWhat Trump would do if he were serious about creating jobs, raising wages, and fixing our rigged economy[/h1]

Despite his campaign rhetoric about siding with working Americans against economic elites, President-elect Trump’s actual agenda includes policies that would do nothing to reverse near-stagnant wage growth and rising inequality. Tax cuts for the rich and corporations, deregulation of finance and worker protections, and assaults on unions would all clearly undercut working Americans’ economic clout, not increase it. Together these tried and failed policies would just increase the growing share of income that goes to those at the top. Trump’s failure to speak out against the denial of overtime protections to roughly 5 million middle-wage workers is a leading indicator of what to expect.

We are also alarmed by the Trump campaign’s unmistakable stain of bigotry. We cannot participate in an ordinary debate over policy direction without highlighting our opposition to demonizing people on the basis of their religion, race, or country of origin.

Commentators are wrong to characterize Trump’s win as a simple call for an economy that is fairer for low-and middle-income families. A real agenda for a fair economy recognizes that the factory worker and the nursing aide are both losing hope and dignity in an economy that increasingly works great for those at the top but produces growing economic insecurity for the rest.

The blame for the working American’s plight should be placed squarely where it is due: not on workers of another race or ethnicity or gender, but on the corporate owners, top managers, and Wall Street financiers—and the policymakers in their sway. These are the economic elites who for decades have used government policy to shift economic leverage and bargaining power away from low- and middle-wage workers. They have eviscerated labor laws and the value of the minimum wage and used trade agreements to further hold down wages already suppressed by globalization. They unleashed the financial sector to do what was profitable in the short run rather than what was safe and efficient in the long run, and the result was an upward flow of income and a financial crisis.

In the months ahead, EPI will provide a clear-eyed and rigorous assessment of the Trump economic agenda, using as our yardstick the following five-point agenda to boost American wages and quality of life. Rather than a path back into the failed past, this agenda provides a path forward that strengthens workers’ rights and raises the wages of all workers.

 

[RustyShackleford]

How about the part you played by defending him constantly for months.

I'm not making up a new narrative, I'm just not agreeing with your bull **** one.

It's called objectivity. You should learn it. You and your ilk dragged this this thread so far left and got led to slaughter. Colombia and apparently Rolaholic were the only ones that didn't fall for your okey doke.

Child please, you weren't being objective. No one believes that nonsense. Not Colombia and not Rolaholic

Stop with "da independent" act

 

[d nice]

[h3]Restore full employment as a primary policy target[/h3][h4]Creating an economy in which employers compete for workers would raise wages[/h4]
In an economy genuinely at full employment, unemployment is low enough to make employers constantly compete for workers. Because employers must offer wages that rise in line with economy-wide productivity, wages of most workers rise year after year. American workers have not had this kind of leverage for at least 15 years, and have had it only sporadically since 1979. As a result, even as productivity has increased, workers’ wages have essentially stagnated. Meanwhile the benefits of income growth have gone disproportionately to those at the top.

The unemployment rate has fallen from a peak of 10 percent at the height of the Great Recession to just under 5 percent today. Evidence shows that unemployment could dip to 4 percent or less without wage pressures triggering inflation. The stakes in aggressively pushing unemployment lower are huge, and the benefits progressive. Workers of color and workers without four-year college degrees—who have substantially higher unemployment—gain the most when the economy approaches genuine full employment. To make employers genuinely value their low- and middle-wage workers—no matter where they live or what credentials they hold—we must drive the unemployment rate down until we achieve healthy inflation-adjusted compensation growth that matches productivity growth.

We’re short of full employment today because the economy is still short of demand (spending by households, businesses, and governments). To boost demand and lower unemployment, policymakers should:

• Launch a long-term trillion-dollar public investment program that provides an immediate increase in jobs but also ensures long-term productivity gains.  After years of a public investment drought, America needs bold investments in infrastructure, clean energy, scientific and medical research, early child care, education, and health care delivery. If done right, such investments would create jobs right away and yield higher productivity in the future. EPI specifically proposes a 10-year, $1.2 trillion dollar public investment program. To provide an immediate economic stimulus, the first two years of the program would be paid for with borrowing. To minimize the long-run impact on the public debt, the final eight years would be financed through progressive tax increases. A straightforward, taxpayer-funded effort would ensure that the benefits of investment flow through to the Americans and the communities that need them. A plan that relies on giving tax credits to unaccountable private partners, as has been proposed by the Trump transition team, could bypass underserved communities unable to provide profitable revenue streams while transferring too much ownership of public goods to private firms.

• Reverse damaging spending cuts pushed through Congress in 2011. The reversal of across-the-board federal budget cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011 would give a fiscal boost to growth over and above the public investment program.

• Nominate and retain Federal Reserve Board governors who will pursue full employment and wage growth.  Some of the most consequential decisions affecting job and wage growth in the next few years will be the monetary policies made by America’s central bank (the Federal Reserve, or, the Fed).  It is important that the Fed not prematurely shut down the recovery with interest rate hikes while there’s still room to grow before reaching full employment. Specifically the Fed must not raise interest rates until the expansion starts generating sustained wage growth that matches productivity growth. Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen’s call for a “high-pressure economy” is in keeping with this goal, but candidate Trump criticized the Yellen-led Fed’s policy of using historically low rates to spur growth.  Too often in the past the Fed has prioritized keeping inflation, rather than unemployment, very low. This is not an accident: regional Fed bank presidents are chosen by boards in which finance and corporate sectors have an outsized share of board seats, and these sectors hate unexpected inflation and like having workers who do not feel secure enough to demand large wage increases. Fed governance rules must be changed to ensure that decision-makers represent all interests in the economy, not just business and finance.
• Create public employment programs specifically for areas with unemployment rates that are substantially higher than the national average and with large concentrations of low-wage workers.  We cannot declare victory in reaching full employment until historically disadvantaged communities are also thriving. Preventing interest-rate hikes that would cut off the march to full employment before it reached these still-struggling communities is a critical but only first step. We also need targeted public employment programs that provide the jobs that too often have been scarce for communities of color and in rural areas.

 

[Mark Antony]

Defending one side is objectivity?

 

[d nice]

[h3]Strengthen—not gut—rules that support good jobs[/h3][h4]Preserving and expanding the rules that support good jobs (high pay, benefits, decent work-family balance, and freedom from discrimination and wage theft) would create economically secure families and a fairer economy[/h4]
Donald Trump the campaigner pledged to “get rid of the regulations that are destroying us.” But many regulations help ensure that the economy creates good jobs in which American workers, who are increasing their productivity, get their fair share of economic growth. Other rules enable work-family balance by carving out protections for American workers from excessive or unscheduled corporate demands on their time. Policymakers should not be undercutting American families by destroying the regulations that support them. Instead, local, state, and federal lawmakers need to strengthen the regulatory safeguards that support good wages, help workers balance work and family needs, raise living standards, and ensure greater equity. And they need to fix an immigration system in which employers who exploit and underpay immigrant workers bring down wages for all workers.

To support rising wages and work policymakers should:

• Raise the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 and index it to wage growth.  For some employers, economists, and even policymakers, $15 sounds high. But had the federal minimum wage risen alongside productivity since 1968 (the way it had for the first 30 years of its existence) it would be well over $15 today. Instead the value of the minimum wage has been routinely beaten down by inflation between increases. Today it languishes at $7.25. A $15 minimum wage, combined with the Earned Income Tax Credit and other social supports, would ensure that even the lowest-paid workers could attain a decent standard of living if they work full time. A $15 minimum wage would lift the earnings of the bottom third of the workforce, generate robust wage growth overall, and fuel economic growth. Indexing the minimum wage to growth in the median wage would provide economic certainty to both employers and workers and tie the minimum wage to economic fundamentals rather than the whims of politicians.

• End forced arbitration in employment contracts and consumer financial services agreements. An increasing number of companies are requiring consumers or employees to waive their right to sue, to participate in a class action lawsuit, or to appeal arbitration rulings as a condition of employment or when buying a product or service. Instead, the employee or consumer must submit any dispute that may arise to binding arbitration. In disputes between parties that have substantially equal bargaining power, voluntary agreements to arbitrate are a practical and well-established way of resolving issues without litigation. However, binding arbitration is bad for consumers and employees. Arbitrators friendly to corporate interests conduct secretive, and often inferior, forums in which companies are more likely to prevail. Even if employees or consumers do prevail, they are less likely to recover their due, and once a dispute is decided by an arbitrator, there is no effective right of appeal. Forced arbitration makes it much harder to fight gender and racial discrimination, wage theft (when employers don’t pay workers for all their hours), employee misclassification (when employees are called “contractors” so that they don’t get the benefits and protections), and other wage and hour violations.

• Build a universal child care system. A nationwide child care system could provide economic security to families, improve educational outcomes, and narrow achievement gaps between white and minority students and high- and low-income students. Federal legislation should expand public funding for home visits by nurses trained to help parents make healthy choices before and after childbirth; give all families access to high-quality child care provided by professional staff trained to provide early childhood education; and boost the wages and benefits, and training and advancement opportunities offered to early childhood caregivers and teachers. In the meantime, Congress should boost the generosity and reach of the child tax credit (CTC) and the child and dependent care credit (CDCC).

• Enact paid sick leave. Allowing workers to earn paid sick leave would lead to stronger, healthier, and more economically secure families. Access to this workplace benefit is vastly unequal. Working parents, particularly lower-wage ones, are often forced to choose between staying home with a sick child and earning a paycheck. When parents cannot take off work, children are sometimes sent to school ill, diminishing their learning experience and exposing other students, teachers, and staff to infection. When employees go to work sick, they endanger their own health and the health of their colleagues while jeopardizing the safety and quality of their work. At the same time, staying home and putting one’s own health first can result in unpaid bills and insufficient food.
• Enact paid family leave. Although the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 guarantees 12 weeks of job-protected family leave, half of workers are not qualified to receive it (because it only applies to large employers and workers with a minimum job tenure), and the act does not require the leave to be paid. Because there is currently no national standard regarding paid family leave, each worker is left to the whims of individual company policies, which often means no paid family leave at all. Therefore, workers have to make difficult choices between their careers and their caregiving responsibilities precisely when they need their paychecks the most, such as following the birth of a child or when they or a loved one falls ill. The lack of paid family leave particularly affects women, as they currently take on the lion’s share of unpaid care work. They often leave the paid labor force to care for loved ones when the need arises, forcing these women to forgo opportunities for career advancement and to end up with lower lifetime earnings (and therefore lower retirement income) than their male peers. Poorly constructed measures for paid leave that provide tax credits that do not help lower-income households and restrict leave for pregnant mothers are not acceptable substitutes for intelligent, progressive leave policies.
• Promote sensible and fair work scheduling. Irregular and unpredictable work schedules are bad for workers. Often, these schedules so disrupt employees’ work-family balance that children suffer from lower educational achievement. Responsible policy should protect the most vulnerable workers against excessively unreasonable demands for total flexibility from their employers. Workers deserve to have a life away from work, and to be able to schedule when doctor visits and teacher meetings and other personal commitments happen. Legislation to insure predictability in scheduling should be passed at state and federal levels.

• Increase by 50 percent the Department of Labor’s budget authority for labor standards enforcement, including employee misclassification, wage theft, and prevailing wage violations.  Strengthening the capacity of the Wage and Hour Division at the Labor Department could put hundreds of millions of dollars into workers’ wallets and into the economy. Wage theft, whereby companies fail to pay wages that workers are legally entitled to, costs workers tens of billions of dollars a year. By essentially transferring income from low-wage employees to business owners, wage theft worsens income inequality and hurts workers and their families. The misclassification of employees as independent contractors also exacts a huge economic toll. Misclassified workers often are denied access to critical benefits and protections such as the minimum wage, overtime compensation, family and medical leave, unemployment insurance, and safe workplaces. And because companies don’t pay taxes on their misclassified employees, state and federal budgets, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation funds suffer, hurting taxpayers and the economy.

• Use all the tools at our disposal to eliminate discrimination in hiring, promotion, and pay. Public policymakers, employers, and the educational system should work together to attack the factors that harm labor market opportunities of women and workers of color. These factors include not just overt discrimination but differences in how our culture and education system steers men and women into different careers. Unequal divisions of labor at home and unnecessary employer demands for excessive and irregular hours are particular impediments to women. The solutions are as far-reaching as paid family leave policies, which can reduce the gender wage gap—particularly when men share in leave-taking responsibilities. And solutions are as basic as requiring employers to demonstrate that differences in hiring, pay, and promotion are based on factors other than sex or race, strengthening penalties for equal pay violations, and eliminating the separate and lower minimum wage for tipped workers. Because women and people of color make up a disproportionate share of restaurant servers and others who rely on tips for a living, the subminimum wage for tipped workers widens gender and racial wage gaps and results in worse economic outcomes.

• Reform immigration laws to provide legalization and a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants. Legalizing and providing work authorization to the current unauthorized immigrant workforce (approximately 5 percent of all workers) would raise wages. Because unauthorized immigrant workers fear employer retaliation based on their immigration status—which can often mean deportation—they are practically unable to complain about workplace violations and wage theft. This leaves them vulnerable to exploitation and willing to accept lower wages than similarly situated U.S. workers, and this, in turn, puts downward pressure on the wages of all workers in the major occupations in which unauthorized workers are employed. Legalizing unauthorized immigrant workers would eliminate this source of downward wage pressure.

• Reform—rather than expand—guestworker programs so that temporary migrant workers are not underpaid and have access to labor standards and workplace protections. At present, thanks to inadequate regulation and enforcement, U.S. employers are exploiting guestworker programs to keep wages low in major guestworker occupations (such as landscaping and information technology), to undercut labor standards for U.S. workers, and sometimes even to replace U.S. workers with indentured and much lower-paid temporary migrant workers. Guestworkers—who make up approximately 1 percent of the U.S. workforce—arrive indebted to labor recruiters who connect them to U.S. employers, and may only work for the employer who sponsored their visa. As with unauthorized immigrant workers, this means that they are practically unable to complain about workplace violations and wage theft, because complaining about wages or working conditions can mean getting fired, which means losing their visa status and becoming deportable. As a result, some categories of these “legal” guestworkers earn wages similar to wage levels of unauthorized immigrant workers. For guestworker programs to be fair to both U.S. workers and temporary migrant workers, laws should be reformed to allow U.S. workers to have the first opportunity to apply and be hired for job openings in the United States, and guestworkers should never be paid less than the local average wage in their occupation.

 

[rico x hood]

Child please, you weren't being objective. No one believes that nonsense. Not Colombia and not Rolaholic

Stop with "da independent" act

More objective than you. Someone even said earlier you chastised them for not immediately jumping on the Hillary bandwagon.

Like who the hell are you? It is truly despicable behavior you show to others.

 

[d nice]

[h3]Protect the basic human right of worker organization[/h3][h4]Protecting workers’ right to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions would help restore broad-based wage growth[/h4]
In the debate about wage stagnation, the decline in union power has not received nearly as much attention as globalization and technological change. But unions, especially in industries and regions where they are strong, help boost the wages of all workers by establishing pay and benefit standards that many nonunion firms adopt. Rebuilding the collective bargaining system is essential to restoring broad-based wage growth. Independent, democratically run worker organizations provide workers with leverage to bargain for better wages and a voice to counterbalance the influence of corporate interests in politics.

To enhance worker rights, policymakers should enact the WAGE Act. The Workplace Action for a Growing Economy Act would amend the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to strengthen protections for working people who organize and promote change through collective action. Specifically, the law would increase workers’ rights and protections by:

• Tripling the back pay that employers must pay to workers who are fired or retaliated against because they engaged in collective action, regardless of immigration status.
• Providing workers whose rights are violated with a private right of action to bring suit to recover monetary damages and attorneys’ fees in federal district court, just as they can under civil rights laws.
• Providing for federal court injunctions to immediately return fired workers to their jobs.
• Ensuring that the employers that actually control wages and working conditions will be jointly responsible for violations affecting workers supplied by another employer.

The WAGE Act would put an end to the financial incentives for employers to interfere with workers’ rights by allowing the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to impose financial penalties—including on officers and directors, and to force companies to the bargaining table when their violations prevent a fair union election.

Yall can read the rest here while you go back and forth with Rico. http://www.epi.org/workers-agenda/

 

[rico x hood]

Nah I'm done bro. Thank you for bringing policy back to thread after the usual suspect detailed it.

 

[Mark Antony]

Supports Trump, blames others for getting him into office. Derails thread, blames others for derailing. Makes sense. Great stuff d nice

 

[seandon23]

Supports Trump, blames others for getting him into office. Derails thread, blames others for derailing. Makes sense. Great stuff d nice

Usual troll job so you already know what to expect

 

[RustyShackleford]

Child please, you weren't being objective. No one believes that nonsense. Not Colombia and not Rolaholic

Stop with "da independent" act

More objective than you. Someone even said earlier you chastised them for not immediately jumping on the Hillary bandwagon.

Like who the hell are you? It is truly despicable behavior you show to others.

I supported Bernie, voted for him, and gave him plenty of donations. I was open and clear about this and clear.

Some dudes had a problem that I didn't indulge in a Bernie slurpfest. His platform and messaging was lacking and I will not cosign some of Bernie's voodoo economics. If they had a problem with my position, I'm no special, they could have taken issue with it.

So please, miss me with this act that you have going on. The only thing despicable is your dismissal of any issue that doesn't involve putting a few more penny's in your pocket.

 

[RustyShackleford]

Nah I'm done bro. Thank you for bringing policy back to thread after the usual suspect detailed it.

I'm looking forward to the day you come in and school me on economics. You have been promising for a minute now

 

[IATT]

This really where we're at

 

[everysingletime]

It is truly despicable behavior you show to others.

Didn't you post once that you were waiting for other blacks to die out so you can prosper

 

[IATT]

 

[rico x hood]

Didn't you post once that you were waiting for other blacks to die out so you can prosper

The hell? I have never stated anything remotely close to that.

 

[RustyShackleford]

That entire policy list is like the antithesis of want Trump is going to do.

He is claims to be for the working man, but his policies are very pro big business as opposed to pro labor.

Like the is no way I see him appointing two members to the Fed that will target reaching full employment. Even though given the havoc his is about to cause on the fiscal side, that may be wise.

 

[northoaklandfc]

 

Didn't you post once that you were waiting for other blacks to die out so you can prosper

The hell? I have never stated anything remotely close to that.

No ya nasty *** said something along those exact lines a few months ago. I remember it clearly. 

There's a reason people spit on you. 

 

[gry60]

People voted for the orange clown because they read posts they did not like/agree with on online forums.

The people who have been calling out the crazy orange clown from the jump are to blame for other people supporting/voting for him

This guy has lost it.

That's what entitlement does to you. It absolves you from anything wrong and allows you to blame others for your shortcomings.