Negatory

On another note, it’s infuriating to see liberal leaders entirely contradict themselves. All politicians are hypocrites. I really believe this is a great time to push for overarching governmental reform. Everyone is seeing the system at its absolute worst.

Maybe you could solve this problem by giving everyone money, but subtracting out the amount of benefits you are already receiving. E.g. if you get 20k in welfare and housing, you don’t get 20 more. I think there are nuanced, not one size fits all, solutions that could address these issues.

Yes, this is entirely it, it’s horridly inefficient just so people can sneer and say “the poor wouldn’t know what to do with money anyways.” What? The vast majority would spend their money on food and shelter, I’ll tell you that. $3.1T so far, with the vast majority of benefits helping big business or pump the stock market. Could have given every single person almost $10k for that amount of money. Do you feel like the average American has received $10k worth of government assistance?

I think this is a poor representation of the problem, because I’m certain if that “homeboy” doesn’t have money, he’s trying to find a way to get some. Every human in American society has to spend money on food and shelter or else they become destitute. It’s not a “choice” to engage in the American economy for all but the most privileged of people.

This is an interesting discussion, and, just as a reminder, it’s all a hypothetical policy. I think a lot of your points are more a problem of tradition than anything else. I think there were many ways to think outside of the box. And this is coming from someone who believed in lockdowns and still trusts the science. I just don’t know if the current plan (threats of lockdown) is tenable in American culture. Lockdowns, when followed, work fine. But lockdowns in reality don’t work due to a multitude of sociological factors. For example, if we had implemented a strong national health jobs/retraining system (perhaps bolstered by a trillion dollars), maybe we could have rapidly trained a surplus of low risk, unemployed people to be “respiratory techs.” That could reduce load on docs and nurses. Oh and since it’s an unprecedented emergency, let’s not arbitrarily require that training to be 1-2 years. Desperate times call for appropriate risk acceptance IMO, so let’s make it a ~6 week, intensive certification. I am absolutely sure there is something we could have done as a nation to respond to this from a job perspective to reduce the strain on the Manning side of the healthcare system. And I agree that this solution wouldn’t 100% solve the problem, but 100% is too lofty of a goal. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. With policy like this, you could probably hit the 69% solution and at least benefit a bigger portion of society while preserving liberty and life for those that aren’t as affected. And to your point about the high risk person that would lose their job under this hypothetically policy, I don’t think it makes much sense (as it would be worse under current policy). Let’s look at their lives under the current present day policy. They have two choices: 1) quit for no pay so that they don’t get COVID, business probably goes under, they go on unemployment, doesn’t work great. 2) they work and take a risk of dying, but, if they make it, they get their job! I don’t see how this is better. Under the hypothetical plan, their choices are better: 1) they quit, use the $20k a year to not get sick and risk reduce. It’s the same as #1 except now they aren’t begging for food stamps. Rent is paid. Society around them still works. 2) they choose to work still. Maybe they get to keep the $20k, maybe they don’t, I’m not sure. That part of policy needs to be fleshed out. But, on the whole, the hope is enough people, given the resources, would choose #1 to greatly reduce their chances of death and/or severe illness Im not saying that you force people to not work. In this scenario it would just give them money that allows them the choice. Because right now, the choices aren’t good at all. Maybe it would fall off based on income, I don’t know. Bottom line, if that dude still wants to work, so be it. But he accepts the risk to himself and has a reasonable alternative other than food stamps and poverty if he realizes it’s dangerous. If someone dies when they have no option but to work, it’s a tragedy. But if someone who was high risk died when the gov was bankrolling them $1500-2000 a month to stay safe and they disregarded, well now it’s more of their own fault. And for folks in a household, that’s not the govs problem to solve. If the gov gives a 69 year old high risk man who lives with his low risk family 20k a year to reduce his risk (arbitrary figure), he and his family should use that money to not live there. That’s the point. High risk parents with kids should use that money to reduce their risk by having their kids attend virtual school. Low risk people in low risk families wouldn’t receive anything, as it’s not needed for the overwhelming majority. This is all pretty rambly, as it’s hypotheticals, but the point is I think there is a better compromise between liberty and life - for both high and low risk folks - if you incentivize it appropriately. One final data point highlighting absurdity: none of us on active duty - especially officers and SNCOs - should have received $1800 in stimulus this year. But a loooooot of us did. The fact that we did highlights the inefficiencies and poor incentive structure when it comes to the current gov Covid spending.

I can’t disagree with this based on our current government’s ineptitude. They are damning poor people and small businesses. Even landlords. A more middle grounded solution would have been to provide funds to high risk folks to actually quarantine while allowing everyone that’s not high risk to take whatever precautions they want. Would still result in over hospitalization, so target that problem. To put it in perspective, we could have given the 100M “high risk” Americans 20k this year (enough for food and shelter, don’t come outside) and still had $1T for medical system fortifications (this is an actually insane amount of money) for the same cost as the $3.1T in stimulus bills we’ve wasted. It’s insane. I’m not saying that’s the right answer, but it sure as hell would have done more for America than whatever the hell we did. And it would have actually involved personal responsibility and liberty, at least to an extent.

Fair enough, my point wasn’t well connected. It’s just blatantly ironic that the “small government” side believes that the power of government should be diminished, while at the same time also typically believing that we should have either the same size or bigger military. And thats with the military accounting for over 50% of the discretionary spending of the government. And yes, I do believe the power of government is generally about directly proportional to the amount of money it expends. What should the government power be? No income tax, like the 1700s/1800s? Or is WWI your opus magnus? Maybe Reagan years? It’s a spectrum.

Lol at some people saying the free market is anti conservative now. The hypocrisy is reaching critical levels.

Get rid of 90% of our military then, because the strong, overreaching federal government and its ability to impose broad sweeping taxes is the only way we as a group were able to procure 20 B-2s.

True that. It’s not going to do jack. Moderate dems still have to vote with full up communists. Just like moderate reps will still have to vote with full up Nazis. Ranked choice voting and a transition towards a parliamentary system is the solution. But that would require the nation to admit that the two party system (which is great for those currently in power) isn’t working.

I assume if martial law is attempted to be declared in 2 weeks, 100% of you will totally set aside all partisanship and defend the constitution. Reaction to the events of today - no, nothing to see here. It's just business as usual. It's always been like this. But when it actually matters, we'll care, promise.

What's tragic is that military officers on this forum can't see that.

I literally remember this conversation. When you personally liked the post below back in July, it was probably a misclick, right?

Many of your guys' primary response to this f&#ed up day is to glaze your eyeballs over and just say "well, dems did bad things too, soooooooo." What was that Ghandi quote? An eye for an eye or something? Who cares, he was probably a lib.

No one's arguing that those BLM rioters are pieces of shit. No one. That's not the point. A key difference between the two is that the president of the United States was not the figurehead, orator, and leader sparking any of those riots.

I understand the Russia impeachment as grasping. But how on earth is this not impeachable?

On another note, doesn't look like your guys' guesses about billionaire philanthropy were based very much in reality. https://observer.com/2021/01/billionaires-philanthropy-record-low-2020-bezos-elon-musk/ BUT JEFF BEZOS MAX A TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION OF $10B TO THE... Bezos Fund.

Terrorism or insurrection charges?

Now they are reportedly shooting into the chambers. I seem to recall half of this forum claiming that only antifa/BLM protests were violent. Delusional.

I’ll put $10 down on RIFs in the next 2 years.

Can’t say I expected it to happen, but the R party has really imploded these last 2 months. Many of you expected Trump to throw a wrench in traditional politics and he did - he fractured voting confidence and the base for Rs as he tried to burn down the establishment. At the same time, he’s galvanized some more fringe voters to vote dem. It’s funny, because in Nov it was relatively understood that Rs were going to be able to keep the senate if they could just hold themselves together. You can’t argue that you didn’t get what you voted for. Incoming: senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The mayor’s lost control.

It's a pretty nuanced point. It was never dangerous for Typhoid Mary to make food for herself. But it was dangerous for her to go out and make food for the 53 people she infected.

You're in the wrong thread, but fine. Advocating for a revision of tax structures that have been bad for a majority of Americans, as evidenced by multiple sources that I cited, is not communism. In fact, it was addressed in the framework of capitalist America, and even had precedence in American policy, again, as referenced by my sources. Calling everything you disagree with communism isn't productive for intellectual discourse, but it sure makes you feel morally superior. This is what people look like when they call everything that they don't agree with "communism," even when the policies literally have nothing aligned with that form of government: Also, this isn't relevant to this thread or conversation, so I will not address this again here.

Do you have anything of actual value to add to the conversation? Or do you always just resort to baseless name-calling whenever you can't make a valid rebuttal?