You were supposed to say, “No way, bro! Farm subsidies aren’t socialism, because Republicans!!!” That way @loppar could gotcha.
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Farm subsidies are much more than red-state handouts. They are strategic imperatives. Food production is, after all, quite important. That is a different beast altogether than tax breaks for Amazon, a hedge-fund bailout or an old-fashioned Cheney-esque no-bid contract for Haliburton.
It is the same reason I buy a DFARS-compliant bolt for $10 that I could get at the hardware store for $1. It is a strategic imperative to build critical military systems with materials from NATO countries. Few conservatives will argue against this idea, even if problems with its implementation can be pointed out.
The thing about having standards and a guiding philosophy about the role of government is that people who don’t have such standards or guiding philosophy can point and say “Look! That person with standards is bending them in this situation and throwing them out in another!”
When your idea of government is sufficiently nebulous or simply rooted in fantasy, there are no standards to which you can be held. None that matter, anyway. It helps if you only take scripted softball questions from activists in the propaganda industry posing as reporters for PBS, ABC and NBC.
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I was looking at it from an income tax standpoint only. To some socialism started when the country began or something.
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I agree. I feel the same way about roads, healthcare, education, etc. I’m not against farm subsidies on face value but people often don’t view these as “handouts” but will if we pay for something for poor people.
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I don’t think you understand what he’s saying. I don’t agree with subsidies of any sort, ideally; I’d rather see deregulation. But I understand what @twojarslave is saying.
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I understand exactly what he’s saying
Okay. Then, you obviously understand why people view such subsidies differently than they do “if we pay for something for poor people.”
Yes. Somehow it’s supposed to be better to have no principles or standards at all than compromise principles or standards even 1%.
Yeah. One is an outrageous waste of tax dollars or something but money going to a wealthy agribusiness shouldn’t be questioned. Because we need food. Poor people aren’t nearly as strategically important.
I’m not against either depending on what exactly we are doing with the money. The details matter. I’m speaking in a general sense at the outrage over something like a “food stamp” vs “farm relief.”
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I agree. I wish my governor did too, but we’ve got electric vehicle fleets to purchase that will somehow manage to traverse our decrepit, pock-marked roads as they go about improving the lives of taxpayers at a much higher cost than a regular diesel engine will. But hey, if you can’t fix the local roads, why not shift gears to saving the planet instead?
Not a very good comparison given the scale of farm subsidies vs the scale of tax money spent on healthcare. I think a good argument can be made for subsidizing preventative medicine, but you shouldn’t be on the hook for every hip replacement and suite of diabetes medication given out in the country.
A decent argument can be made for the strategic importance of education, but paying off the loans of liberal arts majors is not a strategic imperative. An equally decent argument can be made that the government is not particularly good at educating people. Any honest comparison of charter schools vs public schools in poor neighborhoods shines a very bright light on this. We’re spending billions and still ending up with outcomes like the recent Baltimore example, where a 0.17 GPA puts you in the top half of your class.
There’s an awful lot of etcetera these days, and the devil always lies in the details. Like I said, if your notions of the role of government are sufficiently vague, you can make any kind of argument because there’s no guiding principle. Trillions of dollars of etcetera, often in the form of deeply immoral multi-generational promises.
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Yes. If you lose food production, then you’re in trouble. If you lose poor people or get to let another country pay for them, not so much.
Agreed. Do you think that’s even remotely something to worry about in this country right now or anytime in the recent past? We throw out gigantic masses of food on a daily basis.
Indeed. I believe is it Luke that said cast they poor people aside as they have no strategic importance. I get the gospels mixed up.
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Food production is strategically important. So is a healthy population.
The first part would be a start. The second would be fine with me. But I also realize it’s important that we maximize profit in healthcare. If we do that we might create more strategically unimportant poor people! Two birds one stone!
Well I didn’t feel like thinking and making a list of all the things that may or may not be beneficial for tax dollars to go to. Whether we like it or not government at all levels spend on a variety of different things. It changes even by location. Your government does (and should) have different priorities than mine. You have different situations.
On the other hand if you’re Republican you can just say you’re principled and shift those principles around all the time. And no I don’t think Dems don’t do this as well.
I think I’m principled, but I’m flexible at the same time. Situations change, technology changes, etc. I’d be against certain things today that I would be for if the situation called for it.
Agreed. I’m sure you’ll get examples of “successful” subsidies, which is debatable. But let’s argue the moral.
I know you weren’t asking me, but the importance seems rather self-evident to me.
For an example of something we could produce, but don’t, look at Rare Earth materials. It’s basically a messy NIMBY problem where, you’ll never guess, China stepped in to fill that void because they will do the dirty work of rare earth extraction and refining.
Now, imagine that same scenario, but instead of getting our flat screens and smartphones from factories in China that require suicide prevention measures, we get most of our food from those same places because our agricultural base failed to compete.
Can you see the difference? Farm subsidies are certainly unfair and inefficient because they’re administered by the government, but lining a few pockets with a few billion is a small price to pay to ensure the viability of the entire agricultural production base in the USA.
That’s fine, neither did I.
What do you mean by this? Can you provide an example?
Of course policy changes and even fundamental ideas can too, but Republican ideas of today would be easily understood by Republicans 100 years ago. Some disagreement might arise, but there’s always been broad agreement on the principle of limited government. That’s why there’s lots of conservative criticism of Lincoln. He bended a LOT of conservative principles, but still ended up with a massive shrine and is broadly considered one of the greatest Americans ever.
The majority of the DNC platform today would be written off as extremist nonsense rooted in fantasy if 2020 Joe Biden threw his hat in to the ring with 1992 Bill Clinton. You can’t say that about the Republican platform at any point in history.
Maximizing isn’t entirely necessary, but the lucrative nature of the work does a good job of attracting our best and brightest to the jobs that require our best and brightest.
An important question to ask is… Compared to what?
I’m not sure what the medical outcome equivalent of the Baltimore public school system is, but I hope we never find out.
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Agreed. And again also how I feel about roads, education, healthcare, and yes the dreaded etc.
I would say we had 8 years of Republicans screaming about Obamacare and government control of healthcare. Then they ran a guy who said everyone would get healthcare coverage. 8 years of spending that was going to be saddled on the backs of our children. Then ran a guy who said the debt doesn’t matter. That guy ended up having massive popularity in the Republican Party. And once he lost the election we’re back to “we can’t afford all this debt” and other hits.
I don’t view these people as principled. You don’t either. Republicans after moaning for years about Obama and talking about conservative principles had 16 people to choose from and ran easily the least conservative.
Well last I checked the Republican platform didn’t even exist. The party of limited government became “whatever the king wants is right and just.” But I agree with your point about Dems.
Here you go.
https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/docs/Resolution_Platform_2020.pdf
for comparisons sake…
https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/building-a-stronger-fairer-economy/
How can details matter for a platform with no details? Boils down to we like Trump don’t like Obama. I’m not sure how you can say the devil is in the details often and then say look Republicans are showing where their principles are in 2020. You can hate the Democratic platform but at least it’s a platform. Just like what Republicans did in 2016. Before they became too scared to go against the President.
Like I said Dems have screwed up by making plans and being deliberate in the types of things they say they will do. Trump showed this is unnecessary and people will criticize plans. They won’t criticize if you say more jobs, more stimulus, less tax, more healthcare, cheaper healthcare, more military, more infrastructure.
The modern party should base itself off platitudes that everyone agrees with. America is good! Jobs are good! Higher pay is good! Freedom is good!
That’s not an accurate representation of what I linked. Not one bit.
One of the things I found helpful when realizing I was no longer a Democrat was reflecting on the times I found myself repeating false narratives, skewed statistics and other dishonest rhetoric routinely employed by the Democrats. My aha moment for not just realizing, but understanding the nature of the deception was gun control.
Consider how many times you cited “Fine people on both sides” as evidence of Trumpian Racism in the last year, despite Trump explicitly denouncing all racial extremists in the next breath? Hell, I even fell for that without realizing he clarified that in the same speech. It was a bad thing to say if you pretend that it wasn’t in context with a perfectly reasonable clarification that the media deliberately left out to fool people like me and you.
You seem to believe the talking point that the Republican platform doesn’t exist, even though it is explained in plain English on the first page. The fact that it hasn’t changed since 2016 supports my position that it doesn’t change all that much, at least compared to Dems.
I’m not sure if you’ve argued this point or not, but look at all of the recent uproar about “new Jim Crow” in GA. The racists won’t let you give water out to voters, we’re told. There’s a reason the law isn’t explained in full, same as why we got fed out-of-context Trump quotes and second-hand hearsay that wasn’t ever borne out by facts. Because doing so ruins the narrative. The law applies only to campaign operatives and amounts to making vote bribes of all kind illegal, and not a single Georgia resident will have any thirst-related complications as a result of this law. It will prevent no person, black or otherwise, from showing up to vote in perfect comfort and with zero risk of dehydration, a severely parched throat or complete desiccation.
If you’re concerned about the thirst levels of voters or even their access to snacks, you can still donate water for the poll workers to distribute.
Here’s former Vice President Biden, winner of the cleanest election ever and most-voted-for American politician of all-time, lying by omission to the American public.
Biden Criticizes New Georgia Voting Law: ‘It’s An Atrocity’ | MSNBC - YouTube
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