***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[Belgium]

Trade wars are good and easy to win

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/ec...re-costing-americans-1-4-billion-each-n987336
Trump's tariffs are costing Americans $1.4 billion each month, study shows
The study concluded that “the entire incidence of the tariffs fell on domestic consumers and importers,” with “no impact” on the prices received by foreign exporters.

President Donald Trump’s trade policies and tariffs reduced U.S. income at a rate of $1.4 billion per month by the end of last November, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Princeton University, and Columbia University.

The collaborative study found that businesses and consumers saw “substantial increases” in the price of goods throughout last year, including a “complete passthrough” of U.S.-imposed tariffs onto imported items. The economists — the New York Fed’s Mary Amiti, Princeton professor Stephen Redding, and Columbia professor David Weinstein — also said Americans suffered by a lack of import variety and disruptions to supply chains.

“Economists have long argued that there are real income losses from import protection. Using the evidence to date from the 2018 trade war, we find empirical support for these arguments,” the researchers wrote. “Losses mounted steadily over the year, as each wave of tariffs affected additional countries and products, and increased substantially after the imposition of the wave 6 tariffs on $200 billion dollars of Chinese exports.”

Amiti, Redding, and Weinstein found that while losses were accumulating at a rate of $1.4 billion per month by last November, total losses from January 2018 through November 2018 ballooned to a conservative estimate of $6.9 billion.

That number may be too low, the economists said, because their model assumes that the U.S. government uses tariff tax revenues to offset the welfare burden. If the U.S. government did not offset the cost of the tariffs to the American consumer with the new tax revenues, the full value of the tariff payments would be $12.3 billion.

The White House imposed a variety tariffs on goods imported from economic partners of the U.S. in 2018. The tit-for-tat between the U.S. and China has come as Trump and the U.S. Trade Representative try to protect American intellectual property and curb a steep trade deficit.

Trump has had varying success with the tariff tactic, winning both a revised version of the North American Free Trade Agreement as well as alienating key allies including Canada and the European Union. The White House announced a round of tariffs on $200 billion of products imported from China at a 10 percent rate last year.

The White House also announced last year the introduction of a 20 percent tariff on the first 1.2 million imported residential washing machines from South Korea and a 50 percent tariff on machines above that number. LG Electronics told retailers less than one week after that decision that it would hike prices.

The research team also found that American consumers are also harmed during a trade war in terms of the variety of goods they can purchase. Consumers benefit from open trade and the ability to purchase more unique goods — like French wine and Colombian coffee, for example — that might be foregone if trade barriers are high.

In the three years prior to the imposition of tariffs, all categories of goods experienced increases in the number of varieties offered in the U.S., the researchers said.

“However, the imposition of the tariffs is associated with sharp drops in the number of imported varieties entering the U.S. in all sectors except the wave 1 products (washing machines and solar panels),” they wrote.

“These results suggest that some of the tariffs were prohibitive, reducing imports to zero. This can create a measurement problem that can arise if we try to assess the price impacts of tariffs on goods that are no longer imported.”

The trade war also caused “dramatic” turmoil in supply chains, as about $165 billion of trade ($136 billion of imports and $29 billion of exports) is lost or redirected through company and customer efforts to circumvent tariffs.

“We find that the U.S. tariffs were almost completely passed through into U.S. domestic prices, so that the entire incidence of the tariffs fell on domestic consumers and importers up to now, with no impact so far on the prices received by foreign exporters,” the Fed, Princeton and Columbia economists wrote. “We also find that U.S. producers responded to reduced import competition by raising their prices.”

 

[boris]

Nothing to see here folks

 

[Belgium]

House Republicans released Papadopoulos' testimony.
https://dougcollins.house.gov/sites/dougcollins.house.gov/files/Papadopoulos l10.25.18 Interview Transcript_Redacted.pdf

Papadopoulos' lawyers are also now requesting a pardon from president Trump.

 

[hand2handking]

The Democrats’ Gentrification Problem

The view from above in San Francisco.CreditDavid Paul Morris/Bloomberg

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/opinion/democrats-gentrification-cities-voters.html

The nation’s largest cities and metropolitan areas — home to a majority of Democratic voters — are at the forefront of the party’s most vexing racial, ethnic and class conflicts.

Last week, in an essay for CityLab, Richard Florida, a professor of urban planning at the University of Toronto, described how housing costs are driving the growing division between upwardly and downwardly mobile populations within Democratic ranks:

The rise in housing inequality brings us face to face with a central paradox of today’s increasingly urbanized form of capitalism. The clustering of talent, industry, investment, and other economic assets in small parts of cities and metropolitan areas is at once the main engine of economic growth and the biggest driver of inequality. The ability to buy and own housing, much more than income or any other source of wealth, is a significant factor in the growing divides between the economy’s winners and losers.

Allies on Election Day, the two wings of the Democratic Party are growing further estranged in other aspects of their lives, driven apart by the movement of advantaged and disadvantaged populations within and between cities. These demographic patterns exacerbate intraparty tensions.

Florida, writing with Benjamin Schneider of CityLab, expands on this point:

While the advantaged members of the knowledge, professional, and creative class have enough money left over even after paying the cost of housing in these cities, it’s the less-well-paid members of the service and working classes who get the short end of the stick, with not nearly enough left over to afford the basic necessities of life. They are either pushed to the periphery of these places or pushed out altogether.

The competition for housing between rich and poor has become a critically important and divisive issue in urban America.

“The state of housing affordability in the expensive coastal metros is driving a wedge between two factions of the American left,” Issi Romem, a fellow at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an email to me.

In a paper published earlier this month, Characteristics of Domestic Cross-Metropolitan Migrants,” Romem looked at the income and education levels of families moving in and out of 441 metropolitan areas. He found that

Domestic migration across U.S. metropolitan areas is selective: in-migrants to expensive metros tend to have higher incomes and educational attainment than out-migrants, while the opposite is true in the least expensive metros. This pattern contributes to the process of polarization across U.S. metros.

One of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the country, San Francisco, is also one of the most Democratic sections of the country, (San Francisco County: Clinton 84.5 percent, Trump 9.2 percent). According to Romem, between 2005 and 2016, those moving into the San Francisco area had median household incomes averaging $12,639 a year more than the households of the families moving out, $70,015 to $57,376.

Conversely, in the struggling Syracuse metropolitan area (Clinton 53.9 percent, Trump 40.1 percent), families moving in between 2005 and 2016 had median household incomes of $35,219 — $7,229 less than the median income of the families moving out of the region, $42,448.

Research that focuses on the way city neighborhoods are changing by income, race and ethnicity, while not specifically addressed to political consequences, helps us see the potential for conflict within the Democratic coalition.

Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, published a detailed study in 2015 for the St. Louis Federal Reserve of the economic composition of neighborhoods. Overall, he found, “middle-income neighborhoods are tenuous,” while neighborhoods at the top and bottom of the economic ladder have remained strikingly stable.

For example, as Sampson explained by email,

fully 80 percent of all U.S. neighborhoods in the top income quintile remained in place between 2000 and 2012. In Los Angeles, the persistence rate reached 87 percent among the highest income quintile neighborhoods. In Chicago 82 percent of the affluent neighborhoods in 2000 remained in place over the decade.

Chicago, Sampson wrote, is “experiencing a concentrated affluence shift,” in which

the black population has declined and Hispanics are now second largest after whites in population. The race/ethnic shift is something of a milestone given the history of the city.

Despite this shift, Chicago remains reliably Democratic. In 2016, Clinton beat Trump there 83.7 percent to 12.5 percent.

In firmly Democratic neighborhoods across the country, the economic status of those moving in and out began to shift radically starting at the beginning of this century.

Take, for example, “Accounting for Central Neighborhood Change, 1980-2010,” by Nathaniel Baum-Snow, an economist at the University of Toronto, and Daniel Hartley, an economist at the Federal Reserve in Chicago. They found that the core of the nation’s cities is being taken over by members of the affluent wing of the Democratic Party at the expense of the less affluent, disproportionately minority wing of the party:

Central neighborhoods of most U.S. metropolitan areas experienced population decline 1980-2000 and population growth 2000-2010. 1980-2000 departures of residents without a college degree accounted for most of the decline while the return of college educated whites and the stabilization of neighborhood choices by less educated whites drove most of the post-2000 rebound.

Baum-Snow and Hartley cite what they call “a shifting balance between departures of low SES (socioeconomic status) minorities and inflows of high SES whites” and point out that neighborhoods surrounding cities’ central business districts have experienced a turnaround

driven by the return of college-graduate and high-income whites to these neighborhoods, coupled with a halt in the outflows of other white demographic groups. At the same time, the departures of minorities without college degrees continued unabated.

In Chicago, Baum-Snow and Hartley point out, the largely minority census tracts that gained whites the fastest from 1980 to 2010 were “almost exclusively within 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) of the central business district.”

A similar pattern has emerged in the urban West. “Gentrification in the Bay Area, Portland and Seattle,” Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, told me in an email, “is definitely pushing disadvantaged populations out of old neighborhoods and into far-flung exurbs.”

Within major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Cain continued,

the sorting is also between neighborhoods, with large nonwhite populations surrounded by white/Asian suburbs, and certain Latinos and Asians displacing blacks.

Upscale liberal whites “who consider themselves committed to racial justice” tend to be “NIMBYists when it comes to their neighborhoods,” Cain wrote, “not living up to their affordable housing commitments and resisting apartment density around mass transportation stops.”

“One of the key problems of the information/digital economy,” according to Cain,

is that it thrives under conditions of amassing large concentrations of human and financial capital, which results in these homogeneous bubbles. It doesn’t help that many of the tech workers are not as inclined to be good neighbors.

The trends Cain cites are part of a nationwide shift.

From the 1960s and 1970s to 2000, Florida pointed out by email, the basic pattern was

blacks were moving into and staying in cities, and whites were moving out. But in the period since 2000, and earlier than that for very successful cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, Washington D.C., and Seattle, affluent white highly educated people begin to move in, and less educated whites and particularly less educated and less affluent blacks begin moving out.

As intraparty economic and racial divisions have increased within the Democratic coalition, the political power of the well-to-do has grown at the expense of racial and ethnic minorities.

Right now, a heated conflict has erupted within Democratic ranks in California over pending legislation (SB 827) that would override local zoning laws to allow developers to exceed height and density limits in return for an agreement to include more affordable housing units near transit hubs.

In very liberal Marin County (Clinton 77.3 percent, Trump 15.5 percent, median household income $100,310), elected officials of at least seven local municipalities have voted to oppose the legislation.

Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine on Wednesday, pointed out that the housing issue in California and elsewhere,

is ultimately a question of whether the most prosperous parts of blue America can be opened up to new entrants, or whether they will remain closed off and increasingly unaffordable. It is also a political test for whether progressives will be manipulated by knee-jerk suspicions, or be able to think clearly about using the market to serve human needs.

After overwhelmingly Democratic City Councils along the California coast voted to oppose the legislation, the Democratic State Senate answered Chait’s question and killed the bill.

The maneuvers in California are a reflection of a larger problem for Democrats: their inability to reconcile the conflicts inherent in the party’s economic and racial bifurcation.

Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard, addressed the Democrats’ dilemma in a recent essay for Project Syndicate:

In principle, greater inequality produces a demand for more redistribution. Democratic politicians should respond by imposing higher taxes on the wealthy and spending the proceeds on the less well off.

In practice, Rodrik writes

democracies have moved in the opposite direction. The progressivity of income taxes has decreased, reliance on regressive consumption taxes has increased, and the taxation of capital has followed a global race to the bottom. Instead of boosting infrastructure investment, governments have pursued austerity policies that are particularly harmful to low-skill workers. Big banks and corporations have been bailed out, but households have not. In the United States, the minimum wage has not been adjusted sufficiently, allowing it to erode in real terms.

Why?

Rodrik cites the work of the French economist Thomas Piketty, who argues that political parties on the left have been taken over, here and in Europe, “by the well-educated elite” — what Piketty calls the “Brahmin Left.” The Brahmin Left, writes Rodrik,

is not friendly to redistribution, because it believes in meritocracy — a world in which effort gets rewarded and low incomes are more likely to be the result of insufficient effort than poor luck.

Michael Lind, a professor of public policy at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote in a prescient 2014 essay, “The Coming Realignment: Cities, Class, and Ideology After Social Conservatism,” that “high-density downtowns and suburban villages are coming to have an hourglass-shaped social structure.”

“Wealthy individuals” are at the top, according to Lind, with a “large luxury-service proletariat at the bottom.” Democrats, in this scheme, have become the party of

the downtown and edge city elites and their supporting staff of disproportionately foreign-born, low-wage service workers.

Lind’s point raises a fundamental question for the Democratic Party: Can it find a way to hold its “hourglass-shaped” political coalition together?

Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, predicted the potential political developments of this situation in an article in March 2016:

Over the next decade or so, the Republicans will split between their growing nationalist-populist wing and their business establishment wing, a split that the nationalist-populist wing will eventually win. The Democrats will face a similar split between the increasingly pro-corporate but socially liberal Clinton wing and a more economically progressive Sanders wing, a split that the Clinton wing will eventually win.

The outcome?

The Democrats will become the party of urban cosmopolitan business liberalism, and the Republicans will become the party of suburban and rural nationalist populism.

Clearly, the 2016 election demonstrated the fragility of the Democratic coalition and its vulnerability to challenge from the populist right.

Dani Rodrik picks up this point in his Project Syndicate essay:

Why were democratic political systems not responsive early enough to the grievances that autocratic populists have successfully exploited — inequality and economic anxiety, decline of perceived social status, the chasm between elites and ordinary citizens? Had political parties, particularly of the center left, pursued a bolder agenda, perhaps the rise of right-wing, nativist political movements might have been averted.

The forces behind the conversion of the Democratic Party into “the party of urban cosmopolitan business liberalism,” as described by Drutman, may be inexorable. If so, Rodrik’s call on the center-left to adopt a “bolder agenda” may be beyond reach.

Taking it a step further, a Democratic Party based on urban cosmopolitan business liberalism runs the risk not only of leading to the continued marginalization of the minority poor, but also — as the policies of the Trump administration demonstrate — to the continued neglect of the white working-class electorate that put Trump in the White House.

In other words, Democratic strategists looking to piece together a 21st century political alliance have to consider the unintended consequences of taking the easy route: constructing a coalition explicitly dominated by elites.

I say easy because — compared to the average resident of the United States — the affluent are “vastly more engaged politically,” as Douglas S. Massey and Jacob S. Rugh, sociologists at Princeton and Brigham Young University, write in a forthcoming paper, “Isolation at the Extremes”:

Whereas 99 percent of the wealthy voted in the 2012 presidential election and 60 percent gave money to a political candidate, the corresponding figures were just 78 percent and 18 percent for Americans in general. As a result, the affluent are far more likely to have their political preferences reflected in public policies than other Americans.

The force that had historically pushed policy to the economic left — organized labor — has for the most part been marginalized. African-American and Hispanic voters have shown little willingness to join Democratic reform movements led by upper middle class whites, as shown in their lack of enthusiasm for Bill Bradley running against Al Gore in 2000 or Sanders running against Clinton in 2016.

The hurdle facing those seeking to democratize elite domination of the Democratic Party is finding voters and donors who have a sustained interest in redistributive policies — and the minimum wage is only a small piece of this. Achieving that goal requires an economically coherent center-left political coalition. It also requires the ability to overcome the seemingly insuperable political divisions between the white working class and the African-American and Hispanic working classes — that elusive but essential multiracial — and now multiethnic — majority. Establishing that majority in a coherent political coalition is the only way in which the economic interests of those in the bottom half of the income distribution will be effectively addressed.

 

[boris]

The Democrats’ Gentrification Problem

The view from above in San Francisco.CreditDavid Paul Morris/Bloomberg

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/opinion/democrats-gentrification-cities-voters.html

Living in the Bay Area has become a ****ing joke. I don't know how anyone survives here if they aren't in tech.

 

[elpablo21]

 

[RustyShackleford]

Donald Trump's move on the ACA is very stupid from a political standpoint. Having healthcare be a major issue on the ballot has never worked out good for the GOP in recent years. Especially if Trump's plan is "just trust me, it will be great".

You are just priming white voters to think of there economic well being over their identity. Sure most will choose identity but you risk enough people flipping Dem or just not showing up.

 

[RIP sleazyy]

It's to divert attention from the report. And nothing more.

It is painfully obvious, they just rinse and repeat the same tactics.

 

[gry60]

Why were democratic political systems not responsive early enough to the grievances that autocratic populists have successfully exploited — inequality and economic anxiety, decline of perceived social status, the chasm between elites and ordinary citizens? Had political parties, particularly of the center left, pursued a bolder agenda, perhaps the rise of right-wing, nativist political movements might have been averted.

At what point do they start acknowledging that the right-wing has been lying about wanting to solve those issues?

It's one thing to promise the world and another to say "here's what can/cannot be done."

 

[Methodical Management]

Here, there was a two-year FBI investigation that yielded no indictments that related to collusion with Russia to influence the 2016 election. That was the "wait-and-see." There are no indictments so there is not any "all the facts" to wait on.

If you juxtapose that with Avenatti who was recently indicted, that is very different. In that case, we should wait and see if the prosecutors prove him guilty. The issue is that people are innocent until proven guilty. Not the other way around. You don't wait and see if someone is exonerated. Because they are already innocent.

The issue with the Central park 5 illustrates the problem with the guilty until proven innocent standard. Saying "trump has not been exonerated" is using the same logic of the Central park 5 being guilty until proven innocent. And it is problematic.

How did you know that there would be no further indictments at the time you began crowing about this? https://niketalk.com/threads/official-political-discussion-thread.509493/page-6167#post-31475778

You started your victory lap not on any official word from the Special Counsel, from the official report, or even on Barr's summary of that report.

You declared total victory based on the word of an anonymous source.

So, if we're being honest, you did not wait for "all the facts." You waited for "facts" you liked, and ran with those in a way that you would - and have - criticized others for.


The presumption of innocence is not of greater importance to you than whatever led you to stridently support a man who repeatedly called for the deaths of the Central Park 5, who claimed that Ted Cruz's father played a role in the assassination of JFK, who continues to advocate for the jailing of Hillary Clinton (despite the conclusion of the Justice Department's Investigation), who served as the public face of the racist birther conspiracy, who supports stop and frisk policies, and who has repeatedly praised the extra-judicial killing of suspected drug dealers and terrorists.

Let's just acknowledge the obvious: protecting due process is not your top priority. Encouraging civility is not your top priority.

As such, your constant use of tone policing can only be construed as trolling.



A guilty verdict in the case of the Central Park 5 was not the first word or the final word on the subject. The Jussie Smollet case continues to evolve in ways that have both illustrated the perils of a rush to judgment and emphasized the inadequacy of relying exclusively on the determination of the justice system to decide if and when we are allowed to formulate and share opinions.

There's a balance between the extremes of validating reckless accusations/youtube conspiracies and using disingenuous calls for temperance as a means of stifling discussion until such time as omniscient knowledge may be established.

I trust that all involved will engage in good faith and keep your stated preferences in mind moving forward:

I don't think there is anything wrong with forming an opinion based on available information.

 

[Zainjal26]

Very proud of our President Elect. He truly is a great man and and an ELITE counter puncher. LIBS ARE DONE.

With every one of your posts
I either pray your trolling
Or I lose faith in humanity a bit

 

[harlemtothebronx]

Bruh been in character for like 5 years at this point.

 

[stuntman mike]

With evy one of your posts
I either pray your trolling

 

[Belgium]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/na...ats-out-quitting-trump-administration-n985096
Mike Pence talked Dan Coats out of quitting the Trump administration
Whenever Trump is souring on Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, whom he calls "Mister Rogers," Pence encourages him to stick with Coats.

Excerpts:

Relevant article:
https://www.politico.com/story/2017...ats-senate-intelligence-hearing-russia-239244
Coats and Rogers refuse to say if Trump asked them to sway Russia probe
The two intelligence chiefs say they never felt pressured, but dodged when asked if Trump tried to get them to intervene.

 

[IATT]

Bruh been in character for like 5 years at this point.

 

[whywesteppin]

Party at the Honkerburger for Rusty tonight! We already got a keg of Coors light tapped and lines of coal for later. Big surprise, I hope it goes over well -- we hired a Tomi lookalike adult performer We love you, bro. We know you're a coal man deep down inside.

I'm 33 and I still have a full head of hair.

That's about the only thing going for me.

Don't need hair on account of wearing my MAGA hat 24/7. Chicks dig it.

 

[whywesteppin]

Bruh been in character for like 5 years at this point.

Bruh been woke for 5 years.

Back in 2010 he was talking about the merits of affordable health care and other libbie nonsense but something went off inside him once the Honkerburger closed down. Then he saw the Donald on Apprentice. The rest is history.

 

[gry60]

Bruh been in character for like 5 years at this point.

Maybe it's his final form.

 

[IATT]

@dwalk31

 

[blastercombo]

@dwalk31

Lol she literally has only taken money away from all things public education and IDEA related. If you are a parent of any sort you HAVE to be against trump unless you’re a complete idiot

 

[IATT]

Lol she literally has only taken money away from all things public education and IDEA related. If you are a parent of any sort you HAVE to be against trump unless you’re a complete idiot

We finding out real quick how much of this crew literally ain’t got a damn soul

 

[blastercombo]

We finding out real quick how much of this crew literally ain’t got a damn soul

I mean jokes aside I’m looking down the list of things done for the field of education and not ONE thing is positive. Biggest thing they’ve push for is giving GUNS TO TEACHERS. The pipeline to jail research has been proven correct in all times it’s discussed yet here they are aiding in the continual downgrading of public education.


If ANYONE needs proof trump support is the safe way to say discrimination there it is and it’s NOT debatable

 

[whywesteppin]

@dwalk31

let's never forget that the DeVos family invested $100 million in the fraudulent company Theranos.

 

[aepps20]

@dwalk31

Betsy is BAE

 

[aepps20]

let's never forget that the DeVos family invested $100 million in the fraudulent company Theranos.

The female Steve Jobs conned everyone.