bmdrocks21

plus you didn't have a good reply to why non-gun murders aren't wildly out of whack, as should be the case to some degree, if this is just a bad person problem and not a gun problem. 

which of you ditto head dim wits agrees with trump on this, and why? 

Science has absolutely NOTHING to do with "consensus"

What a ridiculous fad that has been going around the last decade propagated by politicians to create a new meaning for science.

Most actual science is conveniently censored.

 in the gun debate

you denied the consensus of science 

 that you lost. 

I don't think anyone rational is debating this, it's a free country. 

I don't know what you are possibly talking about. Believing women is common decency and the failure of doing so makes you no different than a Middle-ages priest.

Well that's cringe

prove what, that they deserve rights?

Gay and trans people are valid and deserve the same rights as any other american

I know!  Why is Olympic shooting divided into Men's and Women's?

If that something is corruption and that impact is disenfranchisement of US citizens than yes, that is always wrong no matter who the group.

But the GOP paying a private firm to illegally remove tens of thousands of blacks from the voting registrars was not "enforcement of any law,"  The opposite, in fact.

Including federal and state taxes, the tax code likely “worsens” the wealth gap, said Kim Rueben, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. Local taxes tend to be flatter, eating up more money from lower-earning households as a proportion of their income, she noted.

Disparities are less clear when focusing on the federal code, she said. Higher earners pay higher income rates — but they also have access to “special aspects of the tax code.” That includes the rules surrounding capital gains and inheritances, she noted.

“For people starting with less assets, which on average black and Hispanic households are, it is harder to access these benefits in the tax code,” Rueben said.

“There’s nothing in the way the federal income tax is written that’s explicit about race. But because of the demographics and characteristics of different taxpayers, it can have different effects,” she later added.

The first list DBT Online provided to the Division of Elections in April 2000 contained the names of 181,157 persons. Of these, approximately 65,776 were identified as felons.   88% of this list were Black (FL is 11% Black).  That's 159,418 Blacks removed from the rolls.  In May, election official complaints led to the discovery that at least 8,000 people on the list had never been convicted of more than a misdemeanor.  DBT never claimed that more than a third of the removals were due to felony convictions and even that list was shown to be extremely tampered with.  Election day revealed thousands and thousands more on the criminal list who had never been convicted or only had misdemeanors.  Blacks who had been pardoned by the Governor were still on the list. 

That is a crime that by itself won the Republicans the presidency in spite of garnering half a million fewer votes than Democrats.

Hispanics are the swing vote in FL.  You can piss off the Blacks because they were never going to vote GOP anyway but if a FL Republican pisses off Hispanics, particularly Miami Cubans who vote in blocks (the 1997 Mayoral election being a great example), Republicans lose Florida, period.

Let's ask ourselves honestly, if a third of all counties in GA or AZ had objected to a voting procedure as illegally disenfranchising thousands of white males, would Trump voters even care what the facts were?  No.  Fat Nazis would be scaling the walls of the Capitol with swastika flags and nooses in hand even as we.....oh, wait.

• I am not alleging conspiracy, I am reporting the Republican conspiracy as documented by a fair number of Federal, State, and Journalistic investigations over the years.
  
• The short version is that FL contracted out the voter purge files to a private data crunching firm.
  
• In 1998, they hired the lowest bidding contractor, Professional Services Inc and paid them $5,700 for a fairly typical voter purge list
  
• In 2000, they hired DBT Online (then run by a flashy well known former cocaine smuggler) in a no-bid contract and paid them $4 million for a gigantic purge list. (which appears to be why DBT's services were 70 times more valuable to the Republican Government)
  
• According to the Palm Beach Post (among other issues), though blacks accounted for 88% of those removed from the rolls, they made up only about 11% of Florida's voters.  Even before election day, country officials were finding chunks of thousands of perfectly legit black voters who were on the purge lists.
  
• The lists were so obviously fraudulent that 20 counties simply refused to use the list and conducted their own purges.
  
• The State used the same firm to try to purge lists in 2004 and were interdicted by Federal Courts.
  
• The ACLU sued Florida and Florida settled by agreeing to stop using contractors and use the ACLU standards going forward (thereby admitting the fault of the 2000 purge)
  
• The bipartisan US Commision on Civil Rights found "that the problems Florida had during the 2000 presidential election were serious and not isolated. In many cases, they were foreseeable and should have been prevented. The failure to do so resulted in an extraordinarily high and inexcusable level of disenfranchisement, with a significantly disproportionate impact on African American voters." and referred the violations to the US Attorney General's office for determination of liability (needless to say AG John Ashcroft never looked into his boss's brother's conduct)
  
• Investigations by the Miami Herald, LA Times, BBC, Vanity Fair, etc. documented thousands of legally registered black voters in FL who were incorrectly purged and denied access to voting booths on election day- in an election where Bush's margin of victory depended on 538 votes when counting was stopped by the Supreme Court.  There really is no question that Gov Jeb Bush's administration deliberately intervened to illegally block the votes of thousands of black people and that intervention alone caused reversed the majority of voter's choice of a Democratic president.
  
• Republicans had two good reasons not purge Hispanics:
  
• The Cuban (one third of Miami Dade) vote was reliably Republican and absolutely necessary to a Republican win in FL.  The purge had no way of distinguishing Cuban voters from other Hispanic voters but also
  
• More Hispanic voters supported Bush than any other Republican presidential candidate before or since (40%).  The GOP had good reason not to tamper with Hispanic voters.  The fact that Hispanic voters were barely purged at all reveals the deliberation used by the GOP in purging.
  

Cause it’s hard for Democrats to understand that minorities commit the most amount of violent crime in urban areas and therefore are gonna be stricken from the voting list

• African American voters were placed on purge lists more often and more erroneously than Hispanic or white voters. For instance, in the state’s largest county, Miami-Dade, more than 65 percent of the names on the purge list were African Americans, who represented only 20.4 percent of the population. Hispanics were 57.4 percent of the population, but only 16.6 percent of the purge list; whites were 77.6 percent of the population but 17.6 percent of those purged.
  

I understand attacking them as people, but calling them cowards was clown stuff

I have no problem with a welfare state. You really have to control immigration if you have one though

Well you can't scam out reparations if you don't invent an evil class of people based on an immutable birth defect

Blacks are not the race we should be hating. Neither are Hispanics, asians, africans middle easterners or any variety of indian. 

Or if tax dollars were being used to indoctrinate children to hate a group of people for the color of their skin.

actively outlawing the freedom of some groups to speak on unpopular topics.

Simple. Much as you would like, you do not live in my head.

1. Restore liberty.  End all lockdowns.

2. Imprison anyone who supported lockdowns, from Fauci and his grant fraud to the politicians that implemented them.

I’m comfortable with a higher short-term deficit and higher taxes on the rich. Interest rates right now are extremely low, and they have been relatively low for over a decade now. My guess is that part of it is the slowdown in productivity and part of it is a savings glut. I expect that some of this spending will pay for itself in the long run too (see the programs in Hendren and Sprung-Keyser 2020 with infinite marginal value of public funds). 

"In many cases, the policies are Pareto dominated, MV P F < 0, under one set of assumptions and represent a Pareto improvement, MV P F = ∞, under another set of assumptions.86 Despite substantial expenditures on the evaluation of these reforms, the designs of these reforms in each state make it difficult to know whether this massive shift in the provision welfare benefits to low-income families led to an increase or decrease in welfare."

I think there are three good reasons to think the fiscal burden of more immigration would be smaller than it initially seems. First, the U.S.’s population is aging a lot, and it needs more workers to pay for entitlements through taxes. Roughly two-thirds of American social spending is on very young children and seniors (who don’t pay taxes) – immigrants, in general, are neither. In fact, as the population of domestic U.S. taxpayers decreases, it needs enough young people to take on the load in the future. Second, even if low-skilled workers are a net drain on these programs, over the long run, their children are often no longer net drains and end up being net surpluses for social programs. Third, a lot of U.S. government programs are fixed costs for investments in nonrival public goods – for example, U.S. military spending. In this case, an additional immigrant doesn’t contribute to the cost of programs (you still have to spend on defense), but pays taxes for them, hence spreading out the cost more and offsetting their effect on social programs not aimed at public goods. 

Blau and Mackie 2017, for the National Academy of Sciences, estimate the net present value of additional immigrants to the U.S., using data from the CBO Long-Term Budget Outlook. Some of their findings include:

• If additional immigrants have a similar composition to current U.S. immigrants (i.e. if the number increased while the screening methods remained the same), then the net present value (over the long term, including their children and other descendants) to the U.S. government of one more immigrant is $259,000.
  
• Some low-skilled immigrants are net positive, while others are net negative. Low-skilled immigrants who finished high school but didn’t go to college add a net present value (per immigrant) of $49,000 per immigrant. For those who didn’t finish high school, it’s more negative (-$117,000 per immigrant). However, I’m not advocating open borders or entirely randomizing who is let in either – if you take a weighted average of the net present values of people who are let in if you double or even triple immigration, my guess is it would come out positive. This is particularly the case for younger immigrants – even immigrants who didn’t finish high school under the age of 25 have a positive net present value. 
  

I’m not actually clear why this is true. Furman and Summers 2020 explain why it is plausible that low interest rates are a “new normal,” and hence the cost of additional borrowing has substantially reduced (Furman is an economist at Harvard who was Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, Summers was Secretary of the Treasury and Director of the National Economic Council). The optimal tax literature is pretty divided, but economists are generally in favor of higher taxes – consider this poll among economists in the IGM Experts Panel.

  Based on Russian rhetoric, the point of Russia invading seems to be to do another cleanse.  

 Russia covets Ukraine, and always will and Putin thinks delivering Ukraine again would make him the most popular Russian monarch since Peter I.

Russia could quickly double the size of its economy

The oft-repeated lesson of Russian history is that you can't invade Russia and once Russia takes Ukraine, Russia is very hard to stop.  The Ghosts of Churchill and Napoleon and Gustav IV and Wilhelm II are looking us in the eye today and saying, "best nip that particularly thorny flower in the bud."

Still waiting for the part where you explain why any of this matters. 

The fact that Hunter was battling a crack addiction - irrelevant

The fact that he doesn’t speak Ukrainian - irrelevant

My tax dollars were not paying Hunter’s salary, and Hunter had no authority within the US government. The absurd amount of money he was being paid came from a private company who has every right to pay their employees whatever they want.

If you want to argue that the US has a vested interest in this you need to link this to US affairs. Baseless speculation is not a link.

Moreover, it’s breathtakingly hypocritical for you to argue that this warrants a federal investigation while apparently not giving a rats ass about Ivanka, an actual federal employee, who dad is the sitting president, receiving patents from multiple foreign governments, many of which were approved right after Ivanka met with their prime ministers. It seems quite obvious what this is really about.

This was supposed to be about Joe Biden. Show me what evidence Trump had on Joe Biden at the time of the phone call to Ukraine.

Nixon could have easily made the same argument; “duh I was spying on them to see if they are corrupt because if they are the US needs to know!”

To argue that Biden would have benefited from “being cleared” is equally absurd. Investigations require a valid predicate. Because of this fact, we have all developed a strong skepticism towards someone’s innocence when we learn they are under investigation. The mere announcement of that investigation would have hurt Biden’s credibility and therefor weakened him politically. That’s common sense. Trump did not have that predicate, so what he was really trying to do was to steal that credibility from real investigative bodies in order to smear his opponent.

I’m not convinced of that. I don’t buy for a second that you would see it the same way if this were Biden, Clinton, or Obama. I don’t buy for a second that you really don’t see an issue with a US president going around the justice department to investigate his own political rival, and use US foreign aid to do it. Some things are just so obvious they shouldn’t need explaining.

Ok Shaman terrorist.

It's NOT OK to cosplay in the Capitol.

You can dish it, but can't take it. Nice.

Oh? The smaller the country, the less need there ids of sovereignty?

Are you one of those neomarxists that wants to spread autocracy to the Middle East? I'm not trying to project things on you, just really getting those vibes......

Is this a strawman or does this accurately reflect your opposition to the minimum wage being increased?

If any of you have made this argument was it an intellectually honest one or were you just looking for your beliefs to appeal to a liberal mindset?

What is wrong with russia owning the Ukraine?

Of course, all of history disagrees with you.

That does bring the question to mind though, at what point do we draw the line? Should we only help those countries that offer us some clear benefit? Or is it incumbent upon America to help safeguard those friendly sovereign nations who are subject to international bullying by other nations stronger than themselves?

Was there any US interest in Austria larger than the cost of potential war with Germany? no

Was there any  US interest in Czechoslovakia larger than the the cost of a potential war with Germany?  no

Was there any US interest in Poland larger than the cost of a potential war with Germany? no

Was there any US interest in Nanking larger than the cost of potential war with Japan? no

Was there any  US interest in French Indochina larger than the the cost of a potential war with Japan?  no

Was there any US interest in Hong Kong larger than the cost of a potential war with Japan? no

If Russia expressed clear intent to fully annex the Ukraine, should America guarantee Ukrainian independence?

Then no investigations.

It speaks to the level of desperation required to defend the indefensible when you have to portray, as your argument, the idea that the free press of this country is beholden to Twitter.

point?

Crazy how you continue to make shit up about my argument just so you can accuse me of doing the misrepresenting. I never used the word “just”, you did.

Using leverage to get things done for the country is fine,  that’s what people in power are supposed to do. Using that leverage for your own personal gain is not, that’s the literal definition of corruption. Do you not understand the difference?

I can actually believe that he brought all those  guns up in multiple trips, but it’s weird.

 attempts to dig up a motive. The whole thing was memoryholed almost immediately despite it being one of the most deadly events in recent history (and committed by a white male to boot.

Seems obvious that it was some kind of arms deal gone wrong and that the feds were somehow involved which explains the weird lack of interest from all parties involved 

You think he made it to South America? 

The conspiracy that Merkel is secretly Hitlers daughter 

-The official narrative behind the Las Vegas shooting is BS, but I don't know what actually happened

-Joe McCarthy was right about almost everything

-The 1960 election was stolen