As always you ignore that passing it til Nov boosts Trump’s election odds significantly and if he wins there will be zero additional help ever. Your plan massively increases the likelihood of even more widespread and long term human suffering than is/will be experienced with no help right now.
Dems should demand the HEROES Act through inauguration day as a stipulation to avoid a government shutdown. When accused of taking the government hostage the only response is, “You’re goddamn right we are, because you took tens of millions of Americans hostage and until you let them go, we aren’t doing shit else. We are the party of the people.”
I don’t think rhetoric can substitute for immediate economic relief. Working class people need money yesterday. If Biden can’t beat Trump, that’s his problem.
It’s really simple. The GOP doesn’t want to help people, they want to help Trump get re-elected. Hence why they’ll extend through mid-November and no later. This is the one chance to get relief for now through late January. Democrats need to either get it all, or make sure Trump gets blamed so he loses. Giving him a compromise that maximizes his win% while only providing aid for a couple months would be a tragic error. They’d be screwing everyone for the following couple months anyway, and helping him win.
If the GOP controls the Senate or White House after this election you can forget about meaningful aid for 2+ years.
We can’t just focus 100% on the short term, we have to protect the working class as much as possible overall.
What’s your estimated date for an effective treatment or vaccine for coronavirus? The window for getting any aid at all is closing IMHO. Democrats are certainly not guaranteed to control Congress after November and they certainly aren’t guaranteed to win the presidency, regardless of the effect of “doing the right thing for people who are suffering and dying right now” on Trump’s theoretical win%. Even in the scenario where Biden wins and Democrats control Congress, if the pharmaceutical industry releases an effective covid treatment or vaccine before January 20, there’s still a decent chance the date for coronavirus relief will be N E V E R. Plus, if we end up with a divided Congress, the stalemate just stays in place regardless of the outcome of the presidential election.
Here you go, Cuse, since you seemingly find it fundamentally impossible to understand the problem.
A car dealership has a $40,000 car but with options has stacked it to $50,000 with tons of dealer buyback incentives meaning they can still make money as long as the car sells for $42k. The invoice on the base car is $36,000 and with options is maybe $41,000 (building in some profit for the dealer with other incentives regardless of whether you pay invoice). As a normal person, you can maybe get the car for invoice, a little under, or a little over invoice if you’re a decent negotiator. But the dealership will still make money no matter what the sale ends up at since they will not make the sale if they cannot make any money on the car.
You walk in with $20k cash and say I’ll give you $20k for this $50k car and pay you cash right now. You are Nancy Pelosi in this transaction, while even though she’s more the $50k side of this deal, she has no power in the transaction only what she perceives as a leverage. The dealer (the GOP) laughs at you and says the price is $50k. You then get out your receipts and say ‘you’re adding in all this extra cost I don’t want for options I don’t want, why would I pay $50k for that and also this car’s been on the lot for 6 months and invoice is $42k roughly (the best info you can find)?’
And you think surely they’ll negotiate down to that invoice price at the very worst because they have to sell that car. Instead, because you’ve misinterpreted the interest of the other party, you counter back with, ‘I’ll pay you $30k cash today’. You expect them to say ‘no’ but expect them to counter with something close to $40k as you’re meeting them more in the middle. They say to you, ‘no, it’s $50k’ they don’t budge at all because they think you’re being an a-hole who feels they have all this leverage when they have no power. You then say to them, ‘call me when you’re serious about a number’. They say, ‘you call us when you’re serious about a number’.
You both walk away and neither ever calls the other because neither of you was serious. Pelosi started the negotiation in an impossible position and so did the GOP. Neither was motivated to make a deal because it’s an election year. When you have millions of dollars in the bank and stock market. you don’t care about regular people and you can do this gamesmanship. Actual people can’t. I don’t understand why you have such a difficult time grasping this is not like EV at a poker table or a car deal or something.
Both sides started from bad faith impossible stances and never intended to pass anything, which is exactly what you wanted. I just want you to admit that and we can be done here.
I’ve been binge watching a few hours of Mark Blyth’s lectures and podcasts on youtube.
Blyth is a professor of Political Economy at Brown University. He was raised working class in Scotland. He first popped up as a recommended video on youtube that was tagged “Professor who predicted Trump…”. I assumed that it was some click-bait type header and laughed it off. Then when I finally did watch it, I found him insightful and engaging.
The video below, even if you just watch the first 5 minutes will give a good idea of the type of content and analysis that he provides. This video was recorded within a few days after Trump’s election in 2016. I actually typed out a transcript of the first few minutes of the video, in case anyone would prefer to read what he has to say in order to gauge whether to listen. He’s an engaging speaker, with great delivery and a sense of humor, so I’d recommend listening.
Summary
November 2016:
Mark Blyth: I wasn’t surprised at all[about the election result]. Many of you have been sat here in this room with me where I’ve spoken about global Trumpism and various things like that. The first time that I came out publicly and said that I thought that he would win was at a Watson event in May of last year(2015). I did an interview in Greece that went viral when I predicted both Brexit and Trump. It’s not because I have a clairvoyant crystal ball sitting under my bed, or I made a pact with Satan to see the future in a mirror. It’s simply pretty obvious if you think about it in a more global way. This is not a local event. Everything that Prof. Shillet said is true about this election. Brexit happened and there’s a leftwing version of this that brought us Greece. There’s a shrinkage of center party votes across the OECD. There’s a collapse of leftwing party votes in particular across western Europe. Coming up next, Renzi is going to fail in the referendum in Italy which will cause a constitutional crisis. Shortly after that is the French election.
I would like to remind you of the following statistics. The lowest that George W Bush ever got in his approval rating was 29%. The president of France currently has an approval rating of 4%. The National Front have nearly 40% of the intended vote. So, even with the design of the French constitution which makes it very difficult: you have to have a second round, etc. the most popular political party by a factor of two in France is the National Front. After that we have the German elections coming up. Merkel is vulnerable. How is all of this going to play out and where is it all connected?
Here’s a simple way of thinking about it. From 1945 until 1975 we targeted a particular economic variable called full employment, and there’s a thing called the Lucas Critique, that basically says that if you keep targeting something, people will game it. And they did. Unions gamed it, employers gamed it, and the result was inflation. After a while that inflation became painful. Painful enough that the people who were hurt by it, who were the creditor classes in these countries, banded together to fund a market friendly revolution. They liberated finance, deregulated banks, and integrated the economies of the world. They globalized labor in such a way that labor could no longer demand that it gets its share of productivity, because if they do I’ll just move your job somewhere else.
All those trade agreements that were signed, the globalization that was inevitable and we can’t roll back. You know you can go on the web and type in “WTO text” and you’ll find that it’s a very long 700 page legal agreement that took 5 years to thrash out between corporate interests, lawyers, and lobbyists. With very little input from civil society. The same is true of the EU’s agreements on capital movements, the banking union, take your pick. There was a moment when people started to figure out that for the past 30 years going from 1985 until now, huge amounts of money have been generated in the global economy. This we know from the work of Thomas Picketty and others. Most of it has gone up to a tiny fraction of the population. So, there’s been a huge amount of growth, but hardly anyone has benefited.
You don’t have to go far to see this. Get off the East side, go to the west side of Providence. Go to northwest Providence and walk into neighborhoods that have check cashing agencies, fried chicken joints, pawn shops, broken down fix-your-mobile and networks you’ve never heard of stores. That’s the reality for people. Not just here but in many, many countries. So, they’re a bit fed up with this. They’ve decided that at any possible opportunity, whether it’s Brexit, the Italian Constitutional referendum or anything, to basically give their elites notice–that we’ve had enough of this. That’s what this is.
Now there is a macroeconomic underpinning to this one too. Because after we targeted full employment for 30 years, we decided to target inflation for 30 years. I don’t see how the Lucas Critique doesn’t apply to that as well. We’ve managed to create a world in which you can dump 13 trillion euros into the global money supply through quantitative easing and other programs, and there’s no inflation anywhere. Here’s your problem. When you’ve levered up your banking system and bailed it out, dumped it on the public purse, and say [to the public] you need to cut that terrible debt. When people’s personal balance sheets are still bloated from all the credit that they took on in the 2000s, and they don’t have wage growth, and there is no inflation to ease the burden of the debt. Then the creditors fight harder to get their money back. Whether it’s the case of Germany vs the rest of the Eurozone, or the creditor class vs the debtor class, what we have everywhere are creditor/debtor standoffs.
Those standoffs take different forms: for the left it takes the form of Podemos, for the right it takes the form of the National Front. For Trump, which has a weird coalition which is of course sexist, and of course racist, and of course anti-immigrant and all the rest of it. But one part of it is if you look at the states that really fell hard, the Rust Belt, it’s economic. If you recognize that simple fact you can put Trump in there with Brexit, and Jeremy Corbin and all the rest of it. I’ll leave you with one set of numbers that I found today, which I think is just an absolute clanger for this whole thing. In 2015 Wall Street bonuses(not regular compensation) seven years after they were bailed out with the public purse totaled $28.4B. Total compensation paid to every single person in this country who earns minimum wage, $14B. I’ll stop there.
This is a really complex question. I haven’t followed that thread the last week or so, but assuming no new developments beyond the Abbott Labs rapid test… Effective treatment? Depends how you define effective. Just say it makes most Americans feel safe? Late 2021 is probably a reasonable over/under. 50% or better effective vaccine safely available to all Americans? Over/under is probably mid-2021. It’ll probably be rolled out sooner, but it’ll take time to get everyone vaccinated.
I think rapid testing + mask compliance + distancing could get us to an R0 below 1 under Biden’s leadership, though.
Agreed.
It’s not the right thing. Let’s say we need aid through June 2021, plus retroactive aid (to avoid mass evictions/foreclosures) going back through August. So basically we need 11 months of aid at $600/mo + another stimulus check. We should include the USPS, because safe elections are important to public health as is the delivery of medicine.
The GOP is willing to give 3.5 months, assuming they’ll still do it retroactive to August. I’ll even say they’ll give $600/mo, although I doubt that’s the case. That’s still only covering 31.8% of the time aid is needed.
Once that’s done, there are zero outcomes that provide for mid-Nov through late-January. No matter who wins in November, there will be no help until late January and then only if Democrats control House + Senate + White House.
If Republicans control any of the three, there will be no more aid before 2022.
So what you’re saying is that we have to take 32% of what is needed, because it’s the best we can currently get, even though it guarantees we won’t get the next 20% we need on time and makes it less likely we get the remaining 48%. PredictIt gives a 44% chance of Dems winning the most electoral votes and keeping the House and winning the Senate. Let’s say there’s a 10% chance Trump loses the electoral college and retains power, so 40% chance of a Dem trifecta right now. Giving them the short-term bill probably boosts Trump’s re-election odds by another 5 points AT LEAST, so let’s say that’s a 35% chance of a Dem trifecta.
That means that this plan has an expected value of 32% of what is needed + .35 * .68 = 56% of what is needed.
On the other hand, if we hold the line here there is an increasing likelihood of a Democratic sweep. If it’s 57% that’s what we should do, as a Dem sweep means all the money comes in starting in late January.
No, they want to extend through mid-Nov for a reason. They’ll blame Dems obviously regardless, but there’s a reason they want to extend it past the election. They know Trump is most likely the one who will be blamed.
This is the worst and dumbest analogy I’ve ever read to describe a political situation, and you’re lying about what I wanted to happen.
I also do not have millions of dollars in the bank and stock market, my net worth is nowhere near seven figures, not even close. My poker games have dried up, I’m making decreasing amounts of money, and I can’t get anyone to rent to me because I’m a poker pro. I have enough money to last me a few years, but if I have to go over like 6-8 months with no income, I’ll have to drop down in stakes if/when live poker resumes, which will cost me about 70% of my annual income until I can move back up. I’m not staring down hunger or homelessness (although I may have to move in with my parents if nobody will rent to me), but I’m probably being more impacted by this crisis financially than around half of the country. I’m super lucky this didn’t happen one year sooner. I’d be completely and utterly fucked if not for the money I made the last year or so.
As for what I want out of this? I want to minimize human suffering, that’s it. I don’t want to kick the can 2.5 months down the road and make the EV of suffering worse, just because I’m squeamish about what’s going to happen in those 2.5 months. We’re going to see a lot of human suffering soon and over the next year. I want to do what we can to make that the lowest amount possible, not delay the inevitable for 2.5 months because I can’t bear to watch.
They really don’t want to extend anything though. They could not care less if nothing passes. They know they’re losing but they’re trying to hang this on the Democrats to hit a 1 or 2 outer. They have zero problems Thelma and Louising this country.
lol, why do you always think any reference about anything is describing you? I’m describing literally most of both the House and Senate who are mostly millionaires and have millions in the stock market. Step back and read what you’re responding to. While I’m telling you the analogy, the analogy is not about YOU. I’m telling you how Nancy and the GOP are doing the negotiations. It’s not even remotely a bad analogy and is actually extremely accurate to what they’re doing (meaning their negotiations are the dumbest thing ever).
And again, you are maximizing human suffering by assuming something good is going to happen by doing nothing when the alternative is basically nothing on top of nothing. Would you play a poker hand differently if you knew playing it in a small EV way would result in your literal death?
The biggest thing to understand that we all missed when this discussion started is they absolutely should have passed a skinny bill because of the CR being another negotiating spot. Cause the government to shut down to get what you want there because the people would have been taken care of. This was just an insane error on Nancy’s part and yours too. I’m in the same boat because I didn’t realize it either.
Reality: Democrats are trying to get enough money in aid to help people through January, because they don’t want to do a half meaure.
Your analogy: They’re trying to buy a $50K car for $20K.
Wat?
You keep insisting on analyzing this as if this situation has zero bearing on the outcome of the election, when it has a massive bearing on the outcome of the election… and the outcome of the election has a massive bearing on whether there is more aid.
All you can say about that seems to be various forms of, “Well, it could go either way so it’s a big unknown so we can’t factor it in at all.”
Okay you want an analogy? Here’s an analogy. You’re uninsured, you need a $50K surgery to save your life, and you have to pay half in three days and half on the day of the surgery in a couple months. We live in a dystopian hellhole where they aren’t required to operate on you without payment even if it’s life and death.
You currently have $24,500 to your name, zero other assets, no other job, and no means of making money other than poker. You owe a bookie $1,000 and he’s going to break your kneecaps if you don’t pay. You want to sit down and play three days of 1/2 to try to make the $500 to make the first payment and $1,000 to pay the bookie, then figure the rest out later. I’m telling you that you need to go play in the soft T/25 game across the room to give yourself a chance of making enough to pay the $25K and have a bankroll left over to make the second payment, and that paying the bookie should be your last priority.
You’re saying, “But if I go broke, I’m dead. If I don’t make $500, I’m dead.”
Yeah, and if you make $500 and pay it you’re dead, too. You’ve got a soft T/25 game, go play it, take your chances, and see what happens. Getting knee capped isn’t the end of your life, and getting to $25,001 means you’re still going to die.
You’re in a shit spot, and you’ve gotta make the highest lifeEV play. And by the way, you’re in a shit spot because you have been overfolding for months against these loose aggressive droolers across the table because TPTK might not be good enough. As a result you’ve been making 3bb/hr instead of 8 bb/hr.
We can’t fold anymore, we can’t play 1/2 anymore. It’s time to maximize our EV.
ROFL, what you just described is saying the Dems want it to be a 72 month car deal and the GOP wants it to be 60 knowing the Dems can’t afford to pay a 60 month car payment for the full 60 months right now. The GOP doesn’t know what that person will be able to afford in 60 months and it just assumes the person will default. That’s what you’re doing. You’re creating the outcome of something that is not happening yet. Based on how many people here are reacting to the convention, you’d think Trump is the favorite to win the election. I do not think that at all, and do not AT ALL think he will be buoyed by the Dems getting a better deal or passing a skinny deal. He did nothing. He walked away from the negotiations saying, no too much.
What I’m telling you in this analogy is that one side has the price massively inflated for what they want, and one side has its price massively below what they’re willing to do with the caveat that they actually don’t give a s*** if they make a deal. When you are in a condition like this, a deal can never be made. That’s why Nancy blinked. The GOP was never blinking. In fact, like I said yesterday, the $500 billion they’re trying to pass now proves they were never serious on the $1 trillion. Come on man, you’re better than this.
You keep assuming the GOP wins if there is more aid. I don’t agree with that at all. They are trying to make the aid as little as possible when the debt is gone. There is no win for this for either side now. They are both going to be thought of as losers. You know, and I know you know this, that nearly anything like this always turns into being the Dems’ fault with voters. When the CARES Act passed that was the highest approval Congress has had in a long time. You know who got hurt when the negotiations fell apart? That’s right, the Dems. You are not looking at this objectively and that’s why we never agree on this stuff. You say things based on what you think is going to happen because of your highly negative worldview and how it will be perceived in the future, while I’m telling you what is happening right now is going to cause huge backlash on both sides of the aisle starting in just a few days. Just like nearly every strike, there is no winner once one side decides to return back to the table. I’ve been dramatically affected in my occupation by both writers’ strikes and actors’ strikes. Neither of those strikes resulted in anything close to what the writers or actors wanted but a whole lot of jobs were lost while they fought over things they didn’t know would exist when they signed their contracts.
I’ll tell you what’s bad about this analogy. Many people are faced with this exact situation every day with 0 dollars in their pockets and as far as I know there is no requirement for anyone to operate on you unless you’re in the ER. They choose to die because they don’t want to burden their families. That is wrong and should never ever have to happen in this country just like there is no reason people should have to be homeless or starve because Congress wants to fight over meaningless money that would dramatically help real people right now. In almost every case, I would guess nearly every person in your situation outside of the poker analogy would not get that surgery under those conditions. You have a different brain. You are a poker player and I want you to stop thinking like one.
Dude, I don’t know how many times we have to tell you. You, we, none of us are the average American who pays little to no attention to politics. Their thought process is pretty simple: the president runs the country and things are going good/bad. If things go well, Trump gets credit. If they go poorly, he gets blame. It’s really that simple.
The GOP knows that, so they want to make it look good until 11/4. They want to slap wallpaper over a massive hole in the wall instead of fixing the drywall, they know the average person won’t really check to see if the repair was done well. Then once the election is over and they have no incentive to help people, they don’t give a fuck.
This is bullshit. We want to help people for the minimal amount of time we know they will need help, and bridge the gap until we know we have a shot at giving them more help. That’s not massively inflated.
Then so be it. We cave in this spot every goddamn time, then wonder why they put us in this spot every goddamn time.
The only thing the $500 billion proves is that they’re better at messaging than the Democrats. The average American doesn’t know the difference between $500bn and $4T, they’re both massive numbers, sounds like they would be enough to solve all the problems, who can be bothered to do the math? The GOP is passing a bill that sounds big, but it’s actually dogshit, then when the Dems refuse to pass it, they get to blame the Dems. It’s great politics if you’re going up against abject morons, which lucky for them, they are.
They are doing what I have been screaming for the Dems to do for months. Pass something then blame the other side every day for not passing it. We should have passed HEROES and CARES extensions over and over and over again, for escalating amounts of money, and pounded the TV news circuit and screamed from the mountaintops about how the GOP is sitting on the bills refusing to even vote.
Instead, we’re letting them do it with a dogshit bill.
They want to make it look like they’re on top of this and Trump is for the little guy until 11/4, then they don’t care anymore. That’s because Trump was getting the blame for this and will continue to get the blame if the bottom falls out on 9/1, and they know it. That’s why they want a short-term fix to make it look like they addressed it for the election.
Only because Democrats suck ass at messaging. If we use that as an underlying fact, then none of it matters and WAAF so much harder than we imagine. Which we probably are.
Uhh, what? Trump’s approval cratered, Biden was crushing.
I’m old enough to remember when you lectured me about my highly negative worldview because I thought Nancy and Nadler were going to wuss out on the Russia thing, or that Barr was never getting impeached in a million years. Oh how quickly you forget how wrong you’ve been about everything because you’re not negative enough for the current times.
Yup, sure is.
You want me to stop using analytical abilities and logic as problem solving techniques facing a massive problem, and instead just be short sighted and prevent short term suffering and figure out the rest later.
That’s the type of bullshit that’s gotten us into this situation, facing hostage taking tactics over and over and over. But sure, fuck it, let’s try the same play again and maybe the last 10 times it failed were not at all indicative of what will happen now. Maybe the 11th time’s the charm!
His latest.
