American Politics

[Spidy]

I asked you a question. You can refuse to answer it if you like, but this is sposed to be an opinion board. You shared your opinion, and I asked you a question on it. Why share your opinion if you are not going to support it? ...

... Go back to your neo-lib corner and thinki it over.

Okay, so I have questions now, after contemplating in my "neolib corner".

Well since we live in a neoliberal world (as the argument is often made), do you think we are witnessing the collapse of neoliberalism? Provide support your opinion/argument.

And what does "bothsidesism" have to say about neoliberalism, in America or Worldwide? Provide support your opinion/argument.

Now your turn, to go back to your "bothsidesism" neoliberal corner and think on my questions and report back.

[JustTK]

Ascribing all the credit to the political party in power doesn't make sense. And ascribing credit to increasing tax rates really doesn't make sense, based what little I know about macroeconomics.

I admire your patience and I read your comments with interest. But you're really wasting your time on these two. They are like Born Again Christians. They have drunk the KoolAid long and deep. Another good. Must be "Dem Party did it". Anything bad: "Chump". No other scenario is possible.

[EihTooms]

The data is from Bloomberg. It requires a subscription to access but you can get the info by Googling from other sources if you're willing to spend the time. The St. Louis Fed is often a good source for USA Data.

I have provided links to both of those sources many times. I don't have a subscription to either and am not aware of anyone being blocked from accessing my links for lack of a subscription.

Also, what you assert ought to be easy to find from various sources as well as quoting the pertinent passages. Same as I do. Same as I did recently from, yes, Bloomberg.

[EihTooms]

You realize that drilling on private lands, not owned by the federal government, is what has driven US production growth. Federal leases account for about 24% of oil production and 11% of gas production. Also advances in hydraulic fracturing, as well as horizontal drilling, have been an essential part of the production growth since 2011. Hydraulically fracked wells in the unconventional plays that have become the mainstay of US oil and gas production decline quickly. Production for example may start at 1,000 barrels a day in the first month, and decline to 400 BOPD after 12 months. If you ban hydraulic fracturing, total US production will decline rapidly, as maintaining the rate depends on constantly drilling and fracking new wells.

Well, Bernie Sanders, who came within a c**t hair of becoming president of the United States, would have banned hydraulic fracturing through executive orders the minute he was elected. He would have done this on private lands, as well as federal leases. Elizabeth Warren and some other Democratic candidates for president campaigned on similar platforms in 2020. Sanders wanted to eliminate fossil fuels for transportation and electricity generation by 2030. Biden wants to go to "0" net carbon emissions by 2050. Both basically would eliminate the oil and gas refining and production businesses in the USA, except perhaps for exports. The only question is the timing.

So given those types of threats, does it make sense for a company like Shell or Exxon to invest billions developing an offshore oil field in the Gulf of Mexico that won't go on stream for 10 years? Or does it make sense to put a refinery that was mothballed during COVID back into service?

Back to the leases. You need to understand a bit about petroleum geology to understand what's going on. Basically, conventional oil and gas accumulations, and many unconventional accumulations, occur in traps like anticlines. A company may acquire a large lease block, say 50,000 or 100,000 acres, and then acquire seismic data over the block, to try to identify potential traps. Then it drills wells, both to try to prove up traps and provide additional data that will help ongoing exploration. This is a multi year process. And at the end of it, you may be lucky to have identified traps that occupy 1000 acres out of the initial 50,000 or 100,000 acres. Or you may just drill dry holes and not find anything, so the leases expire without production.

As to the drilling permits, Biden campaigned on doing away with new drilling permits on federal leases, not banning drilling. And he did suspend the issuance of new permits, but backed off in part because of court challenges. So yes, oil and gas companies have stockpiled drilling permits, to have an inventory in case no additional permits are issued. They're hoping, if that happens, that sanity will some day return to the executive branch and they'll be allowed to drill again.

I assume you were referring to the 2016 Democratic Primary election and not some secret or imaginary Presidential election involving Bernie Sanders, right?[/QUOTE]Was The Democratic Primary A Close Call Or A Landslide?https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...r-a-landslide/.

Hillary Clinton will officially become the Democratic nominee for president this week, at which point well finally close the chapter on the 2016 primaries. But when we look back on the 2016 race, how should we think of it, as a close call or as a blowout? Could a few small changes have made Sanders the nominee and could a higher-profile candidate such as Elizabeth Warren have beaten Clinton, when Sanders didnt?

My view is that the race wasnt really all that close and that Sanders never really had that much of a chance at winning. From a purely horse-race standpoint, in fact, the media probably exaggerated the competitiveness of the race. But thats not to diminish Sanderss accomplishments in terms of what they mean for the Democratic Party after 2016. Its significant that Sanders in particular and not Warren or Joe Biden or Martin OMalley finished in second place.

Really, it's fun to make a point and claim for which you can actually provide links to reports, charts, data, etc that substantiate your claim. Then it doesn't look like you're just making up stuff on the fly.

I encourage you to try it sometime.

[Tiny 12]

See, here's the problem.

One one hand you have the anti-everything Moron Brigade claiming that everything about the relocation was above-board. They hear that, of course, from the two idiot governors (Abbot and his partner Costello aka DeSatan) as well as rightwingnut media. They complain about government spending but are completely OK with DeSatan using taxpayer money to do this. They complain about "government overreach" but are completely OK with the government overreaching in this case. They complain about the government lying but are completely OK with the government lying here (but, to be fair, they were completely OK with Donnie the Dumbass lying his ass off for 6 years) so who knows what they stand for.

On the other hand you have the immigrants themselves who say they were lied to and mislead. There are dozens on first-hand reports about this. Here are some: https://www.npr.org/2022/09/15/11231...rthas-vineyard and https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...d/10410896002/ and https://www.reuters.com/world/us/rep...nt-2022-09-15/ and https://www.politico.com/news/2022/0...e-cod-00057247 The Moron Brigade will, predictably, say that this is "fake news" and that the only source of "real news" is Donnie the Dumbass and his merry band of rightwingnut minions.

What I find absolutely comical is that the wingers say that transporting the migrants from MV to Cape Cod means that MV didn't want them when in reality, they were able to get access to more and better services at the AFB in CC. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/0...e-cod-00057247.

But keep on drinking that KoolAid. What flavor is it? Orange? Red? Or just ignorant?

I don't know enough about this issue to argue about it, or even to have an informed opinion, except that those billionaires in Martha's Vineyard are hypocrites. I have some sympathy for the Cubans and Venezuelans who have escaped totalitarian regimes and who were living in destitute poverty. And I love the influx of Cuban strippers who have showed up in my area. I mentioned this earlier, but in the county where I live, Trump won in 2020 by 60 percentage points. This is even though a plurality of the population is Hispanic and the majority are people of color. (You would have had a tough time getting me to vote for Trump short of holding a gun to my head, but that's neither here nor there.) A lot of Hispanics vote for Republicans. A majority of Cuban Americans vote Republican. I suspect the same may end up being true of the Venezuelans. As to the Cubans, whether this is because the Republican Party was more anti-Castro than the Democrats or whether it's because Cubans were fleeing socialism, and the Republicans are more anti-Socialist, I don't know. Anyway I don't see Bernie Sanders getting a lot of Cuban or Venezuelan votes.

[Tiny 12]

BTW, do you have a link for any of the figures you cited in your posts about this? You know, something like the reports, charts and data links I usually provide along with the pertinent entry for it.

The data is from Bloomberg. It requires a subscription to access but you can get the info by Googling from other sources if you're willing to spend the time. The St. Louis Fed is often a good source for USA Data.

[EihTooms]

I'm guessing more fake news to help the DNC I mean Wall St.

Who I am I kidding lets just call it what it is, the Wall Street owned DNC.

You and a few others here used to love to post poll numbers just a few months ago. You know, "How low can he go? Jajaja" and all that.

Don't worry. The Repub Party is stationing all the election-denying QAnon loons they can scrape off the underside of rocks wherever necessary at the state and local level to make sure the election-denying Repub candidates on the ballots "win" no matter what the polls show or what the legitimate vote count is. As they wish they had done in 2020.

[Tiny 12]

Oil, Gas Industry Stockpiled Drilling Leases Before Biden Pause.
January 29, 2021

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/enviro...re-biden-pause

The lengths some Repubs go to slavishly cater to one of the biggest corporate welfare recipients of all time is pathetic.

You realize that drilling on private lands, not owned by the federal government, is what has driven US production growth. Federal leases account for about 24% of oil production and 11% of gas production. Also advances in hydraulic fracturing, as well as horizontal drilling, have been an essential part of the production growth since 2011. Hydraulically fracked wells in the unconventional plays that have become the mainstay of US oil and gas production decline quickly. Production for example may start at 1,000 barrels a day in the first month, and decline to 400 BOPD after 12 months. If you ban hydraulic fracturing, total US production will decline rapidly, as maintaining the rate depends on constantly drilling and fracking new wells.

Well, Bernie Sanders, who came within a c**t hair of becoming president of the United States, would have banned hydraulic fracturing through executive orders the minute he was elected. He would have done this on private lands, as well as federal leases. Elizabeth Warren and some other Democratic candidates for president campaigned on similar platforms in 2020. Sanders wanted to eliminate fossil fuels for transportation and electricity generation by 2030. Biden wants to go to "0" net carbon emissions by 2050. Both basically would eliminate the oil and gas refining and production businesses in the USA, except perhaps for exports. The only question is the timing.

So given those types of threats, does it make sense for a company like Shell or Exxon to invest billions developing an offshore oil field in the Gulf of Mexico that won't go on stream for 10 years? Or does it make sense to put a refinery that was mothballed during COVID back into service?

Back to the leases. You need to understand a bit about petroleum geology to understand what's going on. Basically, conventional oil and gas accumulations, and many unconventional accumulations, occur in traps like anticlines. A company may acquire a large lease block, say 50,000 or 100,000 acres, and then acquire seismic data over the block, to try to identify potential traps. Then it drills wells, both to try to prove up traps and provide additional data that will help ongoing exploration. This is a multi year process. And at the end of it, you may be lucky to have identified traps that occupy 1000 acres out of the initial 50,000 or 100,000 acres. Or you may just drill dry holes and not find anything, so the leases expire without production.

As to the drilling permits, Biden campaigned on doing away with new drilling permits on federal leases, not banning drilling. And he did suspend the issuance of new permits, but backed off in part because of court challenges. So yes, oil and gas companies have stockpiled drilling permits, to have an inventory in case no additional permits are issued. They're hoping, if that happens, that sanity will some day return to the executive branch and they'll be allowed to get more permits and drill again.

[EihTooms]

When a country comes out of a recession the unemployment rate decreases. Ascribing all the credit to the political party in power doesn't make sense. And ascribing credit to increasing tax rates really doesn't make sense, based what little I know about macroeconomics.

I agree. Glad I didn't do that. Who did BTW?

[Tiny 12]

The 1993 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act was effective in August 1993:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-...ouse-bill/2264

When Clinton and the Dems began work on that 1993 legislation the unemployment rate was still above 7%. That was when Repubs were squawking about it being the exact wrong time to raise taxes because, you know, millions of jobs would be wiped out.

Didn't happen. Instead, the exact opposite of what the Repubs were squawking about happened.

When Biden and the Dems began work on their great American Rescue Plan legislation the unemployment rate was still above 6%.

Same squawking from Repubs. Same exact opposite result.

See the BLS Unemployment Rate Table here:

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

When a country comes out of a recession the unemployment rate decreases. Ascribing all the credit to the political party in power doesn't make sense. And ascribing credit to increasing tax rates really doesn't make sense, based what little I know about macroeconomics.

[Tiny 12]

Donnie the Dumbass did cause the COVID recession. He did absolutely nothing right except for Operation Dork Speed and any idiot could have done that. Donnie the Dumbass actually made things worse in many respects. The US would have been better off during COVID if he had just stayed at the Mar-a-Lago Putt-Putt and McDonalds Emporium and played golf or buried his head in the sand.

But, yes, it was a COVID recession and every moron who says that Biden caused it is way off base.

Agreed again. Saying Biden caused the COVID recession is even more bizarre than saying Trump caused it. I also agree that if Trump had just worked on Operation Warp Speed and pushing the vaccines through the FDA, and left the public relations aspects of the pandemic up to people like Fauci and Brix, we would have been better off.

Please explain why USA GDP performance in 2020 was 2.4 to 7 percentage points better than the other top 5 developed countries -- see post #10168.

[PVMonger]

I'd a hell of a lot rather live in Martha's Vineyard than South Texas, where the largest number of Latin American asylum seekers start out. South Texas is perhaps the most impoverished part of the USA. I saw a couple of the immigrants interviewed who were in Martha's Vineyard. They were damn glad to be there. But the locals, who likely are mostly greenies, won't even stand for construction of windmills offshore of Massachusetts. So you know they're going to throw up a stink at this. No windmills or poor Venezuelan asylum seekers in their backyards. Hypocrites.

See, here's the problem.

One one hand you have the anti-everything Moron Brigade claiming that everything about the relocation was above-board. They hear that, of course, from the two idiot governors (Abbot and his partner Costello aka DeSatan) as well as rightwingnut media. They complain about government spending but are completely OK with DeSatan using taxpayer money to do this. They complain about "government overreach" but are completely OK with the government overreaching in this case. They complain about the government lying but are completely OK with the government lying here (but, to be fair, they were completely OK with Donnie the Dumbass lying his ass off for 6 years) so who knows what they stand for.

On the other hand you have the immigrants themselves who say they were lied to and mislead. There are dozens on first-hand reports about this. Here are some: https://www.npr.org/2022/09/15/11231...rthas-vineyard and https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...d/10410896002/ and https://www.reuters.com/world/us/rep...nt-2022-09-15/ and https://www.politico.com/news/2022/0...e-cod-00057247 The Moron Brigade will, predictably, say that this is "fake news" and that the only source of "real news" is Donnie the Dumbass and his merry band of rightwingnut minions.

What I find absolutely comical is that the wingers say that transporting the migrants from MV to Cape Cod means that MV didn't want them when in reality, they were able to get access to more and better services at the AFB in CC. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/0...e-cod-00057247.

But keep on drinking that KoolAid. What flavor is it? Orange? Red? Or just ignorant?

[MarquisdeSade1]

Biden's Approval Rating Surges After Hitting Low Mark In July, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Half Of Americans Say Trump Should Be Prosecuted On Criminal Charges Over His Handling Of Classified Documents

https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3854

Biden Approval Rating Gets Big Bounce From Young Americans

https://www.investors.com/politics/b...ung-americans/

Dems continue to expand their lead over Repubs in the Generic Ballot Poll of Polls:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com...eneric-ballot/

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/ep...vote-7361.html

Even Rasmussen can only squeak out a mere 1 percentage point advantage for their beloved Repubs.

I'm guessing more fake news to help the DNC I mean Wall St.

Who I am I kidding lets just call it what it is, the Wall Street owned DNC.

[EihTooms]

My point about the oil leases was that Obama had more common sense than Biden. If some posters here have brought up the millions of acres of undeveloped oil and gas leases and thousands of unused permits, and used that to back up Biden's false claim that the oil and gas refiners and producers were holding back supply and jacking up prices, then they don't understand the industry. And, much as the 2500 people who trespassed on the grounds of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, they're misinformed and gullible.

The 1990/1991 recession was a pip squeak. GDP was down 1. 4% from peak to trough. And Clinton's tax bill wasn't passed until over 2 years after the end of the recession. Aside: Clinton later said he raised taxes too much in 1993, and he and a Republican House cut the capital gains tax in his second term.

The recession caused by COVID (not Trump, you should stop saying that, you're very intelligent and that's out of character), saw a drop in GDP of 19.2%. And Biden was looking to raise taxes a year after it ended.

That said, given the ridiculous amount of stimulus provided by the American Rescue Plan, almost 10% of GDP dumped into the economy, I imagine the Democrats could have raised taxes a good bit. That would have had a favorable effect on inflation. It would still be a suck ass idea, in my opinion. In yours I imagine not. I'm tired of writing so will stop at that.

Oil, Gas Industry Stockpiled Drilling Leases Before Biden Pause.
January 29, 2021

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/enviro...re-biden-pause

A stockpile of federal oil and gas leases across an Ohio-sized swath of land in the West shows the fossil fuel industry was preparing for a leasing moratorium for years, former Interior Department officials say.

President Joe Biden imposed what he described as a pause on federal oil and gas leasing on Wednesday as part of his climate policywhile allowing millions of acres of existing leases to remain unaffected. Nevertheless, industry representatives and elected officials in the West lambasted the move, saying itll deprive Western states of much-needed income for basic state services.

But the industrys huge inventory of undeveloped existing leases and drilling permits are evidence that the oil and gas industry anticipated a pause in leasing long ago, said John Leshy, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings and former Interior solicitor in the Clinton administration.

That makes the sky is falling rhetoric from the industry and its allies a bit over the top, Leshy said Thursday. Especially since many of the Trump-era lease offerings attracted no bids, or only minimum bids.

Oil and gas production was occurring on less than half of the more than 26 million acres of land already under a federal lease by the end of fiscal 2019, according to the most recent federal Bureau of Land Management data, which doesnt include millions of acres leased in the Trump administrations final year.

Energy companies have the right to drill federal oil and gas leases for 10 years, and many of the leases sold over the last year were auctioned by the land bureau for as little as $2 per acre. The land bureau didnt respond to a request for comment Thursday.

(And more)

The lengths some Repubs go to slavishly cater to one of the biggest corporate welfare recipients of all time is pathetic.

[EihTooms]

We weren't staying indoors where I live. We hadn't been staying indoors since May of 2020. Please provide evidence of countries with MUCH (emphasis on much) higher rates of inflation than the USA. I'll do it for you. This shows YoY CPI inflation at 6/30/2022, for the same list of countries I used before to show April, 2021 CPI inflation. For completeness sake, note that USA data is available through August, 2022. And USA YoY CPI inflation was 9. 1% in June, 8. 5% in July, and 8. 3% in August respectively. I'm using 6/30/2022 because that's the most recent date for which all the countries have reported numbers.

USA 9. 1%.

Australia 6. 1%.

Japan 2. 4%.

Switzerland 3. 4%.

Singapore 6. 7%.

Hong Kong 1. 8%.

UK 9. 4%.

EU 8. 6%.

As to jobs creation, what I'd like to know is why are 5. 5 million Americans seeking work, while the number of job vacancies is 11.2 million? That's an all time high spread I believe. The labor force participation rate is 62.4%, down from 63.4% pre-COVID, and 67% at its peak. So you can't blame it on "not enough people. ".

Glad to see you're at least citing numbers for countries when they were not still in the depths of Trump's Pandemic downturn vs when Biden's roaring economy was in blessed recovery from it. LOL. Yeah, the United Kingdom's inflation rate was 0. 7%. Sure, bad old Biden's legislation put ours higher that.

But then the United Kingdom's inflation rate climbed above 10%. I posted the report of it here and asked if anyone knew how Biden did that to those poor Brits. Nobody knew.

Now they're celebrating a recent dip to merely.

9. 9%.

UK inflation rate unexpectedly dips to 9.9% as fuel prices decline

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/14/uk-i...s-decline.html

The consumer price index rose 9.9% annually, according to estimates published Wednesday by the Office for National Statistics.

Last week, new British Prime Minister Liz Truss announced an emergency fiscal package capping annual household energy bills at 2,500 ($2,881.90) for the next two years.

BTW, do you have a link for any of the figures you cited in your posts about this? You know, something like the reports, charts and data links I usually provide along with the pertinent entry for it.