Somewhere I read that the idea proposed that the more money flows from the government to voters, the more mud slinging happens.

For example, after the Civil War in the U.S., politics got extremely bad due to the large numbers of voters who were veterans and were receiving money from the government. Things got less nasty after those people died.

The idea is that nowadays in the U.S., there are several ways large numbers of voters get money from the government: welfare, government employment, and government contractor employment. Speaking generally, the Democrats tend to have more voters on welfare and directly employed by the government, while the Republicans tend to have more voters in government contractor jobs. So, each party has policies that give more money to their constituents, which results in bitter political fighting.

I know I'm being hand-wavy but that's the general idea. Here are some links that support this idea:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/12/the-politics...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/upshot/how-we-became-bitt...

This would imply there's some correlation between countries with large state sectors and political vitriol and dissonance, which absolutely does not appear to be the case.

(Also, politics after the civil war was brutal because Reconstruction was necessarily the destruction and re-building of a culture at gunpoint, that of the slave owners. Their resentment is still a poisonous factor in current US politics, Charlottesville passim)

You forgot corporate welfare.

> America wasn't like this 20 years ago.

20 years ago was 1998, the year Clinton was impeached - the politics were just as slimy 20 years ago, the reality of it was just not as readily at our fingertips as it is today.

All right, lets go back just a bit further - to Watergate. The House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon. One member called his wife, said that they had voted to impeach, and then started crying. This was one of the Representatives who voted in favor of impeachment, crying (I believe) because it was a tragedy for the country as a whole that it had come to this.

I can't imagine that, if the Democrats win the election next month, if they vote to impeach Trump, that any of them will cry about it, ever. I can't imagine that the Republicans shed any tears over voting to impeach Clinton, either.

No one in Washington would cry about Trump being impeached because Trump has done literally nothing with the Presidency that would earn respect from anyone. Even his own party sees him as little but a seat-filler who's only useful because he picks appointees along party lines.

He got rid of the requirement for government agencies to report their Y2K preparedness measures. Faint praise but it's something.

That's not really the point, though.

Literally nothing that would earn respect?

If something that Trump did that was good was considered revenue, and something he did that was bad was considered costs, you're saying that it has all been costs? Or do you mean that in your view his profits = revenue - costs has been negative? I'm sure you can go around the country and DC and find plenty of people who think Trump has earned revenue, so to speak, even if they think he's a net negative.

Anyway, the points are all subjective, so no-one can balance the books but each individual voter.

To continue your analogy, the revenue that Trump has made to date has been by selling the furniture. It's like a new Google CEO came in and sold the datacenters and said "look at the revenue!"

Hell, a bit over 20 years before that Nixon was resigning over the scandal that brought us [x]-gate. Politics has always been a dumpster fire

It was slimy as fuck, but it wasn't this bad. Someone like Trump could never have been taken seriously 20 years ago; a lot had to change to get us to this point. There's ample and varied evidence that American partisanship has skyrocketed in the last quarter-century (for example: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/05/takeaways-on...).

20 years ago, Clinton tells a lie about his personal life and gets impeached; today, Trump lies about things which have actual life-or-death consequences for US citizens, and that's just ordinary political background noise and you're crazy if you get upset by such a minor thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well... the lie about his personal life was under oath, and about sexual behavior in the office during a lawsuit about sexual harassment. I think Clinton was a pretty good president, mostly, but this seems like impeachable behavior to me.