[Poll] How Long Will DJ Trump Stay in Office?

I give him 2 years. He’ll be hounded out of Washington hated by every single person he comes into contact with. What sort of dickhead calls the CIA Nazis then makes them his first port of call on his first day in office and then wastes the whole visit blaming the media for reporting his tweet in the first place? Eventually everyone will just wake up and say, you know what? this guy’s a complete cock.

A similar sort of reasoning was behind all the predictions that his candidacy would never go anywhere.

When reality stubbornly refuses to reassert itself, you may be believing in the wrong reality.

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See Obamacare: enrollment claims.

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He’s kind of made a habit out of that…in case you haven’t noticed.

[quote=“Brianjones, post:17, topic:157785, full:true”]
Except it’s not a stagnant economy it has been showing steady growth and employment uptick has been very strong for years. There are patches of the US that have been doing badly for decades but most of it has been doing better ober the last few years. [/quote]
Obama is the first president who never saw one year of 3% growth. Maybe it was steady, but it wasn’t robust, and it wasn’t healthy, it wasn’t American. Maybe it’s good for other countries, certainly not this one.

Unemployment? at 95 million, we never had so many people out of work. Back in the 70s under Carter, unemployment numbers were reported more honestly. Today, they use the U3 figure instead of U6 or labor participation rate, which leaves out the people who have stopped looking for work out of desperation – but the’re still technically unemployed, just like they were in the 70s. But this figure shows that we’re much close to Depression-era unemployment than 70s. But you might be right, it may have improved…it could hardly get worse!

Furthermore, Obamacare caused businesses to cut fulltime workers and hire more parttimers, which hardly helps anyone’s situation except those businesses trying to avoid onerous taxes, and government elites who can say they “created jobs.”

[quote]@Jotham - bare face lies most of it. Is this the way you ‘debate’ politics in the US now.

Post-truth?

Reagan spent spent spent, a lot of it on the military remember Star Wars and nuclear weapons and ships and outspending your enemy now best buds the Russians?..
…Reagan cut taxes and waffled on about cutting the government. But it was the other side Wah Wah. Is that the quality of your debate?[/quote]
Yes, everyone knows that Republicans beef up defense to project strength, while cutting other government pork, this is nothing new, and Reagan certainly needed to beef us up after Carter left us weak and vulnerable to Soviet artifice. In fact, Reagan refused to talk to the Soviets until we had 4 years to build up our economy and military so he could negotiate from a position of strength. So we had Reagan’s defense spending plus Democrat pork, which he was unable to rein in.

Are you not familiar with how American government works? Are you British? The parliamentary system is different from the presidential system, and would make your arguments valid. But in the US, the Congress holds the purse string by design our Forefathers. Our President has the power to veto their spending, but Congress can overcome that by a 2/3 vote. Look it up, Reagan vetoed their lavish spending and almost every time, they overrode him because they had enough numbers. It’s balance of powers. It really happened. The President doesn’t do it all, he’s not a dictator.

Well, no it’s not free money, it’s letting people spend money they earned instead of government, which is much more efficient. Because millions of individuals are making millions of decisions based on quality and best price, which helps develop the market according to competition, instead of a few elites in government (who think they can spend your money better than you), which encourages cronyism.

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Ah the magical law of the free market and the rich will spend it when they have it with trickle down economics, how many global financial crises do you need to see through that crock of shit.

You realize the vast majority of your posts end up contradicting each other?

What does global financial crises have to do with the free market? crises occur when governments try to manipulate markets and make them do what they can’t do. They we have to suffer the consequences. Yes, you’re right it is a law. And if we follow the law, we can avoid crises. Just like if we respect the law of gravity, we can prevent ourselves splattering on sidewalks because we think we can fly.

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jotham: you surely realise that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by markets getting a little bit too “free”, specifically the market for credit and credit derivatives. I don’t like arbitrary taxes and protectionist trade policies that are imposed purely for political reasons, but a completely unregulated market is equally undesirable. For example, we have laws about trading human lives, and I’m sure you’ll agree there’s a good reason for that sort of law.

It’s just my opinion, but I suspect crises derive from a fundamental limitation of human nature. Government intervention tends to make them worse, but I don’t think they can ever be prevented.

Naw, its not limitations of human nature at all, it’s opposite. It’s government acting like a king, a know-it-all, and questioning and mistrusting the good sense and discretion of common people to spend or accumulate according to their needs. In short, manipulating the economy is manipulating people, we are the economy. It’s authoritarianism by a few elites in government.

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I’ll just write a quick reply before reading the good ol:“But what about an evil monopoly!11!!!one” argument. It’s bound to show up, eventually.

I was talking about debt and its derivatives. Are you suggesting that lending money to people with neither the wit nor the will to repay it is likely to end in anything other than catastrophe? There is nothing inherently wrong with trading repackaged debt, but if you’re being sold a pig in a poke, the chances are the seller is trying to put one over on you.

The government can only control the interest rate on government debt issued to banks. The reality is that this doesn’t give them much leverage on the economy as a whole. It’s the private banks who decide both interest rates and money supply; they are the agents of credit creation, and the government doesn’t have much choice except to follow their lead. If it didn’t do so, there would be an instant liquidity crisis.

There’s a nice concise explanation here: Who Determines Interest Rates? – Pragmatic Capitalism

One of the great failures of economics (and the ‘Age of Reason’ generally) has been the attempt to replace thorny moral questions with nice cut-and-dried logical ones, of the sort Mr Spock would approve of. Life just isn’t like that. Moral decisions have enormous economic impacts. Go to any third-world country to see the truth of that statement: the overt characteristic of any failed state is moral failure, which yields economic failure. There is no other possible outcome. You said yourself that The South was backward because of slavery.

This can’t be true. Recessions occurred before Big Government was able to fiddle around with the economy, or even before “The Economy” was even a thing people talked about.

What I meant was this: there can’t be any such thing as The Market. It isn’t possible for a human mind (or even a superhuman mind) to grasp much more than a tiny slice of what goes on in the world. There’s just too much information involved. Decisions that individuals make are really little more than guesses based on their prejudices and fears. We all know how it goes: we swing from complacency to panic; we over-react. Any dynamic system that over-compensates for disturbances will oscillate. If the oscillations “hit the limit stops”, something breaks. You wouldn’t want to try to describe that mathematically, but if you’re talking about laws, that’s a well-established one.

Another way to look at it: economies cannot grow exponentially even if we wanted them to (which we do - that’s the “human nature” bit). Exponential growth quickly gets out of hand. Something has to give, and that means catastrophic collapse to some prior level. Then things can grow again, and the cycle repeats.

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You think the bubble is exponential growth. You’re very very wrong. The bubble is when people are spending recklessly and malinvestment, instead of accumulating capital, which is where real wealth comes from. It’s opposite, the bubble prevents wealth creation. I don’t know if I would go so far as to say it makes a country poor, but certainly makes it less rich then it would be without bubbles.

I would say that we have experienced exponential growth DESPITE all these government-induced crises, which are bumps in the road. Certainly in the last 200 years.

Back to topic. I think Donald the President will be around until a handsome portion of his supporters will realize that they picked the wrong candidate. Granted, that could take a while, it will dawn on them slowly but surely. It could end ugly, really ugly. In the end he will be forced out of office or find some lame excuse to step down.

My un-educated guess is that Trump doesn’t really know yet how he wants to keep all the promises to his supporters. It was all about winning for him, not about actually doing the job after winning. I thought he would drop out of the race at some point before the election to avoid actually having to do the job as president. Now that he’s sworn in, it will even be more difficult to find an excuse to leave and let Pence or someone else run the show. I guess he’s overwhelmed with the task ahead, but drawn further in to it because being the President comes with a lot of prestige and the stuff he seems to care so much about. I cannot picture this man working long hours going over hundreds of proposals and digging deep into the details of economy, foreign affairs, etc. instead of watching TV and playing with his twitter machine.

Adam Smith was only against government monopolies, in other words the companies that governments prop up to the exclusion of other competitors. But I’m not against economic monopolies, such as Microsoft was in the last 90s. Their huge share of clientele compared to other companies is because they were serving customers the best. Monopolies are evil by virtue of the welfare of customers, not of competing companies.

So much fantasy thinking from Jotham.

What he doesn’t get is that you will ALWAYS have a government. It’s the natural state of things.
Each family has a leader, each tribe a chief or ruling family, each land a ruler.

To anybody who thinks technology will change that look at how dominant controlling companies have taken over the free space of the internet in just a few decades. These companies govern over the Internet and over you the internet user.

You will always have the rulers and the ruled, the only thing that really changes is who is doing what.

‘The free market’ doesn’t even have one definition and certainly doesn’t have any real scientific basis compared to something like the laws of motion.

There is no free market no matter if you could say that you kept the rules fair for all participants humans being smart will find a way a game it to somebody’s advantage.

Not only that, ‘the free market’ or ‘free trading’ cannot cure all ills and does not exist in and of itself. Just like the US and U.K. are experiencing now , if you create enough disenfranchised and disillusioned people , they will bite back at the rest of society in some form, as is their right. In stable democratic countries we can have electoral change, in more undemocratic countries we can see violent rebellions and civil wars.

The world and everything on it so much bigger and beautiful and important than a stupidly simple concept of a free market which can’t deal with resource constraints. climate change, species extinction, death and destruction or empathy and love for our fellow human beings and living things.

The republicans will obviously try and keep him around for a full term unless he starts becoming a massive liability for elections to congress. They can their Supreme Court picks in and change a lot of legislation and get a lot of local pork passed. As you said I doubt he will do any real work or review of policies.he has confessed himself that he has never read any books and doesn’t even use email! He will delegate everything substantial, he doesn’t have intellectual brainpower or focus to do any of that himself (Obviously just bangs out tweets regularly).
So I give it 4 years just because it suits a lot of people. Trump could well torpedo that midway with his antics or if some dirt gets out on him.

Yup, I agree, but every single time I explain the benefits of free market there is always a person arguing that free market will inevitably lead to a huge evil corporation with a monopoly over the necessary product X and charging 27 gazzillion dollars for it.

The top Republicans who are using him and manipulating him with his own narcissism will keep him around long enough to implement as much of their agenda as possible. If and when the low information Hoi Polloi wake up and realize they are being fleeced, the Republicans will happily let Trump take the fall. (It will be easy enough to blame him since he’ll already be taking all the “credit,” anyway.) If he’s impeached, they get Mike Pence, which most of the would prefer anyway, so win-win for them. Either way, it’s likely four-years-and-out for them unless the DNC continues to shoot itself in the foot.

With the social justice wing and identity politics in full control, that seems like a given. Or, like Madonna says, why shoot yourself in the foot when you can blow up the White House?

You’re kidding, right? If the primary results showed us anything, it’s that the right-of center neoliberal wing maintains a firm grasp on the party. I think they can only continue to shut out the progressives (which is who I assume you are referring to as “the social justice wing”) for so long, though, because the establishment is aging and dying.

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