ORH_wxman

Unfortunately a lot of the "party types" are or close to it. Guys like Weld are a lot more normal/practical vs a guy like Gary Johnson. But Weld was more of a moderate republican who happened to join the 2016 libertarian ticket.

That's the biggest problem with the libertarian party in general. They take it to an extreme to the point where it isn't actually functional in the real world.

Yeah I think the investigation is more politically valuable to the Dems as material for 2020 than impeachment is.

I don't agree. I think impeachment will bring every rural redneck out of the woodwork. Without it, say you keep like an extra 5-10% of them home...that matters in a close election like we had in 2016. The GOP is definitely hoping the Dems go forward with it.

I agree with you his stances are weird and conflicting at times.

Sales taxes are regressive. Unless you make exemptions for clothing/food/other household necessities. Then it's more like a luxury tax which isn't the worst thing. But that would get some fight on how constitutional it is if you start filtering what gets taxed because then some states will start claiming that they disproportionately sell those services versus other states and if they make a good case, then it's unconstitutional.

That would help somewhat but you'd still have a large gap. We're not just talking access to education, we're talking educational achievement where these numbers show up. I actually think a universal pre-K would be a lot more efficient from a cost-benefit analysis. Gaps in achievement start showing up really early between kids who attended pre-K and those who did not. That's not saying universal college is a horrendous idea...so long as there's a reasonable way to pay for it...but we'd get a lot more bang for our buck going the pre-K route first and probably reforming high school education a bit. But we'll never actually close the gap since you can't control how families operate.

You can be capable of something but still be at an advantage or disadvantage. It's not a binary issue. I think he's mostly full of shit on a lot of his posts, but in a hypothetical sense, you can have someone starting from a shittier situation but still be capable of gaining a full education, etc. They just have to overcome more obstacles. The biggest issue with all this crap though is politicians can't solve a lot of it. The largest predictor of education now is whether you grew up in a single parent household.

I agree Mueller thinks he's unfit. Most sane people do. And yeah, congress doesn't need to be bound by the strict legal standards. But I agree with Phin that Mueller leaves doubt about OOJ from a legal standpoint. He didn't have to bother to say he couldn't determine whether he committed a crime or not. He could've left that out and said DOJ guidelines were the reason he isn't recommending indictment.

That's different than indictment in a court of law though. Even if he wasn't a sitting president.

I don't think this is the only reason...but it's part of it. Mueller sounds very conflicted in the report over the underlying crime aspect and the incompetence of it all. You can gather that he doesn't think this would hold up in a court of law. The grounds for impeachment aren't as rigid so impeachment is definitely more plausible.

Congress won't do shit since it's political poison for them. They're afraid of every single rural redneck coming out of the woodwork and running up the score on them in 2020.

The initial parsings of the report are pretty close to what I expected. Whole lot of smoke on OOJ that could spur the house to start the impeachment process (though I still predict they won't actually go through with it)...and a few interesting nuggets on the collusion angle but ultimately not as much there. From a political standpoint, this report is likely more valuable to dems for 2020 than for impeachment. Impeachment would probably backfire whereas they can use the worst parts of the report for ads/messaging against Trump.

Yep. It's not an endorsement of the tax cut either. I think it sucked. (AMT-gutting, Inheritance Tax, top marginal rate, etc) But it shows the power of propaganda. In the NY Times article, it said that 3 quarters of democrats still don't think they got a tax cut. Hell, even 40% of republicans don't think they got one. Probably in addition to the misinformation campaign against the law, the fact they didn't mail out lump sum rebate checks like George W did in 2001 played into the perception. Many people might not notice an extra 80-100$ per month when its chopped into 2 or 4 paychecks. If the Trump admin were smart (which they aren't), they would have done it that way. They really need to make some sort of financial literacy class in high school a requirement to graduate.

These numbers are pretty sobering in terms of financial literacy in this country....not that I'm totally surprised though. We were talking about this a few weeks back too. It reminded me of an article I read yesterday: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/business/economy/income-tax-cut.html