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Oh, you like AP more than the Cook Report? Sometimes.
[QUOTE=Tiny12;2963845]The AP, the definitive source for real time election results, shows Trump with 50.0% right now.
What does that mean? Only 1/3rd of Senators were up for election.
Yeah, it's possible that right now Republicans have a structural advantage in the Senate. But that will change. People are leaving tiny blue states like Vermont, Delaware and Rhode Island for red states with greater economic opportunity. At some point before you die you'll look up and see the Democrats with a majority of Senate seats and a minority of the popular vote in the Senate.
Of course you haven't. That's because the media sources you favor aren't reporting it. Republicans are ahead, 50.71% to 47.71%:
[URL]https://www.cookpolitical.com/vote-tracker/2024/house[/URL]
Since World War II, except for 2012 to 2016, Democrats have generally gotten significantly more House seats than they deserved based on the House popular vote. Euphemistically you could say they're better at gerrymandering than the Republicans. Or if you were a Republican who wanted to be disparaging, you could say Democrats are better at cheating than Republicans.
The country's split down the middle. Trump doesn't have a mandate. And despite your protestations neither do Democrats, either now, or when Biden and Obama were president.
GIVE US A BREAK. Do you really believe that?[/QUOTE]The link I provided showing Trump below 50% of the vote a day or so ago if you scroll down and look into the Results section is showing him even further below 50% today and, in fact, referenced their numbers to the Cook Report. Which I see you like when it shows what you want to see.
I get Subscription Required pop ups on the Cook Report site, which is one reason I don't frequent that site for info.
However, now that I know you love to reference the Cook Report, I did manage to get a quick screenshot of their assessment that Trump is below 50% of the vote.
See screenshot below.
I assume you saw that on the Cook Report site too but raced to another site, this time AP, to find something more appealing to your non partisan, neithersider / bothsider heart.
So now you are dismissing the 4 seat swing and 3 seat advantage for Repubs in the Senate as meaning nothing really because "only 1/3 of Senators were up for election"?
Please tell your beloved Trump, Fux News, all other MAGAs and the new Repub leadership in the Senate about that.
On the slight Repub popular vote advantage in overall House races over the years; I submit that if the extreme gerrymandering by Repubs did not exist to make it a lost cause and waste of money for any Dem to run a serious campaign against them in those districts, genuine competition and ad campaigns throughout the country would produce the same remarkably consistent majority or plurality vote advantage for House Dems as it has been for Senators and Presidents.
Do I believe the numbers irrefutably showing a mere swing of less than 130,000 votes from Trump to Harris spread across only three states would have produced a President-elect Harris today instead of a President-elect Trump?
Yep.
Do I believe the Muslim leadership on the ground in those three states that it was their mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Muslim voters to express their anger at what is happening between Israel and Gaza by not voting for Harris is what "gave Trump the win"?
Yep.
Boom and Bust. Smooth Hawley Tariffs.
[QUOTE=SubCmdr;2963931][I]Tariffs were one of the pillars of the American System that allowed the rapid development and industrialization of the United States.
The United States pursued a protectionist policy from the beginning of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century. Between 1861 and 1933, they had one of the highest average tariff rates on manufactured imports in the world.
Tariffs were the greatest (approaching 95% at times) source of federal revenue until the federal income tax began after 1913. For well over a century the federal government was largely financed by tariffs averaging about 20% on foreign imports. At the end of the American Civil War in 1865 about 63% of Federal income was generated by the excise taxes, which exceeded the 25.4% generated by tariffs. In 1915 during World War I, tariffs generated 30.1% of revenues. Since 1935, tariff income has continued to be a declining percentage of Federal tax income.[/I]
Let's get back to high tariffs and low income taxes.[/QUOTE]Have you ever scanned the series of Recessions, Depressions and Panics the USA suffered from those post-Civil War years until the USA stopped relying so much on tariffs and instead relied more on a Federal Income Tax system for revenue?
[B]List of recessions in the United States:[/B]
[URL]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States[/URL]
Those were the severe Boom and Bust years that, mercifully, came to an end after the Federal Reserve was established and after lingering tariff proponents in the Repub Party had their final grand tariff orgy with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930:
[B]The Great Depression Lesson About Trade Wars.
In 1930, raising tariffs across the board hurt the U.S. economy.[/B]
[URL]https://www.history.com/news/trade-war-great-depression-trump-smoot-hawley[/URL]
That was the last Great Repub Depression that America has suffered and the longest stretch without one since 1861 and well before that. Oh, Repubs have certainly tried several times and come very close. But they haven't quite attained their high water mark for the Great Repub Depression of 1929-1933 since that one.
At almost 100 years since the last Great Repub Depression, I suppose memories have faded enough by now to start contemplating another. And Donald Trump is just the person to come up with all the really bad ideas and conditions necessary to bring one on; he's a Repub, a tariff lover and a Federal Reserve hater. The perfect trifecta for creating another Great Repub Depression.
And, BTW, tariffs are contrary to the concept of Free Trade, which I thought was one of those supposed Conservative "principles". Trump wants the most "central" of all Central Government entities, himself, to decide which industries and companies are to be rewarded or punished by applying tariffs to them or not.
Trump claimed his election was an unprecedented Mandate
[QUOTE=Tiny12;2963990]What did I write?
Your screen shot shows Trump with 49.83% of the vote. AP at this moment shows Trump with 50.0%. The difference is 0. 17%. If you had 1000 people, it would take a swing of 2 to get from 49.83% to over 50%. That's meaningless. The 50% "mandate" is meaningless, especially when you have a lot of people like me voting for 3rd Party Candidates and Amy the Wonder Dog (write ins).
The only significance of the 50% number is that Democrats LOVE to cherry pick periods and say how many Republican presidents didn't get 50% of the vote, while ignoring the number of Democrats who didn't get 50%. If you go back to WWII, there were 9 presidential elections Democrats won and 5 won by greater than 50%. And there were 11 with Republican winners and 7 won by greater than 50%. That's assuming Trump ultimately gets less than 50% this year.
[URL]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin[/URL]
Democrats also LOVE to point out that Republicans got more than their fair share of House seats in 2012,2014, and 2016, while failing to point out that they got more than their fair share in 32 of 40 elections since World War II. Sometimes they got A LOT more, like 8. 5% to 10.9% more in 8 of those elections.
[URL]https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/vitalstats_ch2_tbl2.pdf[/URL]
But that's all water under the bridge. Again, the fact is, the country's split down the middle and nobody has a mandate. The best solution is to devolve more power to the states and cities, so where feasible you don't have Republicans imposing unwanted policies on blue cities and states and vice versa.
Are you aligned with Stephen Miller on the issue of Muslims and immigration?[/QUOTE]I don't recall Clinton, Obama or Biden claiming their election wins gave them a "Mandate" to do anything.
At likely a 1. 6 point lead over Harris, meaning less than a single percentage point swap, 0. 8 point, plus 1 more vote and Trump would have lost the popular vote for a third time, Trump's vote count win was narrower than any of those other presidents yet he is claiming he was given an "unprecedented Mandate" by the voters. And his supporters appear to agree with him.
I would welcome a Repub Party that merely cherry-picked details that suit them. It's when they add making shit up to the cherry-picking that makes them so special.
And I find it hard to classify as "cherry-picking" the fact that Repub presidents, their policies and stewardship have produced and presided over every Great Depression, Great Recession and Massive Jobs Destruction of the past 100 years and none of the Historic Economic Recoveries, Expansions and Jobs Creation while Dem policies and stewardship have produced and presided over every Great Economic Recovery, Expansion and Historic Jobs Creation and none of the Depressions, Great Recessions and Jobs Destruction.
Trump was given a less than 130,000 Netanyahu-hating Muslim vote spread over three states "mandate". He can honestly take pride in that and tout it at every public appearance. If they had voted for Harris instead he would have lost the election but still could claim a Plurality of the vote "win" by about 1. 6 point or, again, a swap of less than 1 percentage point would have reversed it.
I am not claiming those Netanyahu-hating Muslims who "gave Trump the presidency" cheated or ought to be deported. As far as I know they put Trump in the White House fair and square despite the fact that they are now realizing it was a pretty dumb thing to do.
You and the other MAGAs can relax in the knowledge that Repubs' remarkable run of getting fewer votes than their Dem opponent went from 1992 until today with 2 extremely narrow exceptions and only when the Repub is running for a second term after having "won" the first with fewer votes than their Dem opponent.
Be proud and loud about it!
The Second Coming of the God of Tariffs Jan 20.2025
[QUOTE=Tiny12;2963996]Excellent topic for discussion. In 2023 the value of U.S. imports were 3.83 trillion. Federal government expenditures were 6.2 trillion. So you're not going to get anywhere close to funding the federal government with a 20% tariff with current spending.
The system you're proposing works for some very prosperous countries, like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. The thing is though that they import a very large % of what they consume.
Back when tariffs funded the USA's federal government, government expenditures were a lot lower. And we didn't have worldwide supply chains and the like.
I'm a big believer in Comparative Advantage so don't like tariffs. We're all more prosperous when countries produce the goods they can produce more efficiently. China is very efficient at producing textiles and consumer electronics and has the supply chains in place to do that. The USA is very good with jet airplanes, software, etc. Why have Americans making garments and the like when they can do higher value work?
High tariffs make it where countries don't fully take advantage of their strengths. They also induce crony capitalism. Industries that have the ear of the politicians or that grease their palms ask for and get tariff and trade barriers. They can become fat and lazy and uncompetitive in world markets. Obviously tariffs raise prices. People pay more for good than they would without tariffs.
Singapore and Hong Kong, which are very prosperous places, don't levy tariffs, and Chile, for long the "miracle economy" of Latin America, levies them at very low rates. I believe that smaller government and rule of law are necessary to have a very prosperous country. That's unless you have advantages like lots of oil (Norway) or you're small and/or a tax haven (Monaco). I think having relatively free trade is important too, although I'm not as sure. Take your adopted country as an example. Thailand imposes huge import duties and excise taxes on autos but largely exempts pickups from high taxes. It gives tax preferences to exporters. As a result it became a major worldwide manufacturing center for pickups. They're trying to do something similar with EV's right now. Does this kind of industrial policy work to the advantage of the working man? I'm not sure.
[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage[/url][/QUOTE][URL]https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2024/11/19/breitbart-business-digest-the-gop-returns-to-its-roots-as-the-party-of-tariffs/[/URL]
"I'm not sure" are you sure?
[URL]https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2024/11/19/breitbart-business-digest-the-gop-returns-to-its-roots-as-the-party-of-tariffs/[/URL]
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Size of the Federal Government, Dems vs Repubs
A couple of popular ways to measure the size of the Federal Government is based on Federal Spending Per Capita and the number of Rules listed in the Federal Register.
For whatever strange reason, some people focus on the number of [I]pages[/I] in the Federal Register. I don't see what that has to do with anything important. It seems to me it is the number of rules added or subtracted that matter and not how many paragraphs it takes to clarify or explain the rules.
And I say that despite the fact that the number of pages grew quite a bit under Trump.
However, when it comes to increases in Federal Spending Per Capita, a few standouts are unavoidable:
Spending remained steady or declined under Dems Clinton and Obama but skyrocketed under Repubs GW Bush and Trump. Otherwise, there is no notable difference in the steady growth of that expenditure from LBJ to Nixon / Ford to Carter to Reagan to Bush1, Dem or Repub, it doesn't matter much, they all grew it, even the supposed Icon of Less Spending and Smaller Government Repub Ronald Reagan:
[B]See graph below[/B]
[URL]https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per-person-is-skyrocketing/[/URL]#text=Adjusted%20 for%20 inflation%2 see%20 federal%20 spending, Louis%20 Federal%20 Reserve.
And for the number of Rules logged in the Federal Register, there is also little difference among the first year and hand-off year of the incoming and outgoing presidents going back to GHW Bush; they all reduced them slightly except for Dem Obama, who increased them very slightly and Repub Trump who increased them dramatically:
[B]See graph below[/B]
[URL]https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynecrews/2023/12/29/bidens-2023-federal-register-page-count-is-the-second-highest-ever/[/URL]
It should also be noted that so-called President-elect Repub Trump has already announced a planned unprecedented expansion of the Executive Branch in the Federal Government by the creation of a new Cabinet Office to be Chaired by two (2), not 1 Secretary, Musk and Ramaswamy. I have heard Trump plans to unabashedly name it The Department of Whatever Elonia and Vivek Can Find to Give Their Business Interests an Unfair Advantage and Impoverish Everyone Else and I will Issue an Executive Order to Make That Happen.
Or something like that. Maybe a clever anagram.
So for expanding the Expenditures and Size of the Federal Government and despite what they say about themselves and what their perennial benefactors in Mainstream Media can convince the sucker American Electorate into believing, Repubs are the Undefeated Champions over the Dems going back to at least the 1960's.
