TRUMP 2016

[Lewkowski]

O’Reilly: African-Americans Should Wear “Don’t Get Pregnant At 14” On Their T-Shirts.

Context matters. The remark is about what is impacting black communities and the silence from folks like Obama on those types of issues. Absent fathers and teenage pregnancies are massive negative impacts. Instead of wearing a BLM t-shirt and addressing a symptom as opposed to addressing the root of the problem is what he was talking about would be more effective.

[Aimless]

Go on Lewk, ask some more questions

[Steely Glint]

Context matters. The remark is about what is impacting black communities and the silence from folks like Obama on those types of issues. Absent fathers and teenage pregnancies are massive negative impacts. Instead of wearing a BLM t-shirt and addressing a symptom as opposed to addressing the root of the problem is what he was talking about would be more effective.

Suddenly, Mr. Why is Ok For Black People to Use Racial Slurs About Themselves But Not Me is concerned context.

[Enoch the Red]

Suddenly, Mr. Why is Ok For Black People to Use Racial Slurs About Themselves But Not Me is concerned context.

I can't recall Lewk making this argument. It's possible I missed it. Do you have a link for this?

[Ominous Gamer]

"Rule for thee but not for me."

And it's in a discussion about context, so the context here is right on the nose.

[Enoch the Red]

And it's in a discussion about context, so the context here is right on the nose.

That's a petty and uncharitable claim considering his next paragraph. Lewk pretty clearly is not saying he wants to use that word, he seems to be saying he thinks it is dumb for anyone to use that word. Further, there should not be protected subgroups who may or may not be able to use it acceptably depending on how the prevailing winds of social justice are blowing. That strikes me as a topic worthy of debate, even if I don't necessarily agree with it, and not an indication that Lewk is somehow chomping at the bit to use offensive language and being prevented by doing so by liberal outrage.

[Loki]

Context matters. The remark is about what is impacting black communities and the silence from folks like Obama on those types of issues. Absent fathers and teenage pregnancies are massive negative impacts. Instead of wearing a BLM t-shirt and addressing a symptom as opposed to addressing the root of the problem is what he was talking about would be more effective.

Waiting for a similar take on poor white Trump voters. Oh that's right, we have to "understand" their grievances. Just like drug use suddenly became a disease and not an indication of criminality once whites started succumbing to addiction in large numbers.

[Lewkowski]

Waiting for a similar take on poor white Trump voters. Oh that's right, we have to "understand" their grievances. Just like drug use suddenly became a disease and not an indication of criminality once whites started succumbing to addiction in large numbers.

I've had a libertarian stance on drugs for over a decade and oppose it being illegal. I do think people who drive under the influence should have the book thrown at them but that's about it.

I think it is important that people are empowered and that the reality that much of your circumstances in life are based on your own actions. People should take credit for their successes and acknowledge their failures. The problem with the left is that they desire nothing more than to KILL the idea of personal responsibility. You aren't successful because of your [insert color, gender, orientation, religion, etc]. So when sometimes says "you know these communities kinda did it to themselves..." they bleat about oh look racism! How dare you blame someone for their lack of personal responsibility!

People shouldn't take race into consideration but it is obvious the left is pushing for that to happen and be codified into law. They eagerly and actively support racism as part of their platform and INSIST on people being treated differently solely on the basis of race. This is utterly absurd.

[Lewkowski]

Suddenly, Mr. Why is Ok For Black People to Use Racial Slurs About Themselves But Not Me is concerned context.

Context almost always matters but the end goal is to live in a color blind society. Suggesting that people of one skin hue can do certain things while others cannot is 20th century thinking.

[Steely Glint]

Context almost always matters

He said, then going on to ignore context one sentence later.

[Loki]

Which themselves sourced it from Murdoch's latest dreadful rag Heat Street by former British MP Louise Mensch back in November. https://heatst.com/world/exclusive-f...ies-to-russia/

Speaking of Mensch.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/menschs-list

[Aimless]

Pretty sure she's a Russian spy.

[Aimless]

Latest updates:

- NATO was obsolete because Trump didn't know what it did, but now that he does, it isn't.

- NK was a piece of cake until he learned from China that it really isn't.

- NK is governed by a wily "gentleman" who is in fact three gentlemen.

- China is no longer the worst currency manipulators in the world.

- The presidency is much more demanding than previously thought...

[Lewkowski]

Sounds like he's learned something? :0

Though to be fair I think his bluster about NATO was about countries not paying their fair share. And honestly there is a point to be made there. Frankly other countries should just be directly paying America if they don't want to build their own military.

[Aimless]

He made it very clear that he believed NATO was useless because he thought it didn't fight terrorism until he told it to.

[Lewkowski]

He made it very clear that he believed NATO was useless because he thought it didn't fight terrorism until he told it to.

"We pay a disproportionate share of the cost of N.A.T.O. Why? It is time to renegotiate, and the time is now!"

You don't 'renegotiate' if you want to completely leave something behind.

In any event are you actually opposed to other countries pulling their own weight?

[Loki]

He said NATO was obsolete. Why would you stay in an organization that you don't think should exist anymore?

Do you think there's some central NATO budget to which all members contribute? Because that's what Trump seems to think.

[Lewkowski]

He said NATO was obsolete. Why would you stay in an organization that you don't think should exist anymore?

Do you think there's some central NATO budget to which all members contribute? Because that's what Trump seems to think.

The current state is obsolete, not the idea.

There is an actual budget for it but its small potatoes compared to the 2% in defense spending. I'll ask you - do you think countries who are part of NATO should get a free ride off the backs of America? Or should they do what was agreed?

[Loki]

So it was obsolete in Afghanistan and Libya?

The 2% is a recent agreement that said countries should strive towards that target. It didn't call for instant implementation. Just like we promised to get rid of nukes as part of NPT. When did you become a stickler for international law?

[Aimless]

Speaking of which, are there any good estimates of the impact of the Iraq war on military expenditure as a percentage of GDP? How do they deal with spending borrowed money, or the interest payments?

[RandBlade]

I know of no nation that counts interest payments towards defence spending. The UK changed its definition of what it includes as defence spending to include military pensions - had it not done so then the UK would have fallen for the first time under 2% but by counting pensions as defence spending that kept the level above 2%

There's suggestions that in order to keep British spending above 2% following future austerity we may redefine intelligence within defence spending.

It is a bit of an odd target where we keep redefining more and more as defence in order to meet the target.

[wiggin]

I know of no nation that counts interest payments towards defence spending. The UK changed its definition of what it includes as defence spending to include military pensions - had it not done so then the UK would have fallen for the first time under 2% but by counting pensions as defence spending that kept the level above 2%

There's suggestions that in order to keep British spending above 2% following future austerity we may redefine intelligence within defence spending.

It is a bit of an odd target where we keep redefining more and more as defence in order to meet the target.

What's fascinating here is that there are incentives on both sides. Some want to include a bunch of stuff in defense spending to look at the headline number and say, "Look at the ridiculous amount of money we're spending on defense, we should spend less." While others want to argue that it's not enough because headline numbers include a lot of incidentals (e.g. the difference between US and Chinese defense spending isn't as big as we think because of US personnel costs etc.).

To an extent this is just a bookkeeping exercise; just like with GDP revisions in recent years, they don't really change anything about underlying spending, just categorize it differently. If everyone had a harmonized set of rules about what constitutes 'defense' spending (or if NATO did, at least), it would help a lot in understanding the underlying comparisons.

That being said, I think it's generally appropriate to include intelligence and military pensions as part of defense spending; in fact I believe most estimates of US spending do include most of this (e.g. the VA, Tricare, at least some intelligence gathering, etc.). It's a harder sell to include interest payments unless it's just the interest payments as a portion of the total federal budget; otherwise you run the risk of assuming that all defense spending is 'optional' and the first to go in a budget cutting exercise, which is obviously silly.

It's very challenging, though, to split out a specific set of military expenditures and isolate them. We all know that the shorthand used in US budgets for Iraq and Afghanistan (so-called OCO funding) was a grab bag of funding that (a) failed to appropriately capture all of wartime expenditures while simultaneously (b) included a bunch of stuff that was by no means war spending. Then there's the questions about long term costs to e.g. military readiness, paying for long term care of wounded vets, wear and tear on equipment, etc. Understanding the counterfactual is also challenging - what would force posture/readiness/equipment/etc. have looked like otherwise? It gets very complicated very quickly.

[Loki]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/26/politi...fta/index.html

Any free trade Republican who voted for Trump, I hope you're satisfied.

[Loki]

That being said, I think it's generally appropriate to include intelligence and military pensions as part of defense spending; in fact I believe most estimates of US spending do include most of this (e.g. the VA, Tricare, at least some intelligence gathering, etc.). It's a harder sell to include interest payments unless it's just the interest payments as a portion of the total federal budget; otherwise you run the risk of assuming that all defense spending is 'optional' and the first to go in a budget cutting exercise, which is obviously silly.

VA is a separate budget item. Otherwise, our military budget would be $800 billion.

[RandBlade]

That being said, I think it's generally appropriate to include intelligence and military pensions as part of defense spending; in fact I believe most estimates of US spending do include most of this (e.g. the VA, Tricare, at least some intelligence gathering, etc.).

Indeed I don't disagree with either military pensions or intelligence being classed as defence, they both sound reasonable. What I find bizarre is fiddling with the definitions in order to meet a target.

[wiggin]

VA is a separate budget item. Otherwise, our military budget would be $800 billion.

You're right. Dod spending figures are a bit under $600 billion (2015 data) and include nearly all intelligence, pensions, and medical care for servicemembers (and oco funding). However they did not include ~30 billion in ogsi (a budgetary wheeze to deal with spending caps), ~20 billion for DOE defense spending, 6ish billion in State FMF, DHS (at least the USCG probably falls under most definitions of military, and that's about 8 billion), and 65 billion for the VA. All told in 2015 you could have a low estimate of 600 billion and a high estimate of 800 billion. That is either 3.3% or 4.4% of GDP at the time.

[Loki]

Think about what military healthcare and pensions mean. It means you spent a lot on the military in the past. It says nothing about your current military capabilities.

[wiggin]

Think about what military healthcare and pensions mean. It means you spent a lot on the military in the past. It says nothing about your current military capabilities.

It all depends on why you're trying to measure defense spending. If you want to understand its effect on federal budgets, economic growth, etc. you'll probably want a broad measure. If you want an understanding of current capabilities, you'll probably want to see a history of spending on a narrower measure in the past 10 or 20 years, combined with other data on equipment and readiness. That narrower measure probably wouldn't include retiree healthcare or pensions, but it probably also shouldn't include things like current payroll (a couple hundred billion a year IIRC) and parts of OCO-type funding - fuel and munition expenditures for operations do not contribute to readiness or capability. The narrower measure would probably just need to cover equipment, logistics capacity, training, etc.

That's part of why the 2% number is so ill-defined and open to gaming (and also why it's so ridiculous that countries can't meet it). A country can have very inefficient defense spending - say, spending a lot on poorly trained troops, or bespoke weapons systems purchased in small quantities, or whatever. Most of NATO members are guilty of this; they should pool resources for shared high end capabilities and focus on scale and interoperability over each country having its own complete (and tiny) force structure. The big players (US, Germany, France, UK, maybe a couple others) can aspire to this ambition but most of the rest shouldn't waste their time.

[Lewkowski]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/26/politi...fta/index.html

Any free trade Republican who voted for Trump, I hope you're satisfied.

Didn't vote for Trump but if I did... Gorsuch.

NAFTA is good, getting rid of it would be bad. But even so, still better than giving Clinton a SC pick.

[Loki]

Didn't vote for Trump but if I did... Gorsuch.

NAFTA is good, getting rid of it would be bad. But even so, still better than giving Clinton a SC pick.

You're willing to destroy our economy and foreign policy for one SC judge?