_heimdall

Informed consent is informed consent. My point was that informed consent in general is becoming more rare, especially when its government agencies we are expecting to do the informing (the SEC in this case).

I point to the pandemic response as a recent example of where the government completely failed to inform the public of what was going on, what was known, and what was unknown.

Informed consent is extremely important. Its also exceedingly rare today, and the pandemic response didn't help.

There's no legal limitation on how many parties we have, we simply haven't moved past two main parties since Hamilton and Jefferson were after each other.

U popular opinion for sure, and I'm not even saying it as my view today, but there is argument to be made that we don't own anyone a vote and if both parties are terrible options we can walk away and engage elsewhere. If I really believed both parties were bad options, I'd focus on working with my local community as much as possible. If the federal government can't represent me in anyway then I'd be walking out of that system as much as possible.

I'll ignore Iran here for a moment because I still don't understand how Trump managed to start a war and rack up a huge cost without congress. That's its own beast and a sign of both a broken system and a completely useless Congress.

On the two former wars, there were Republicans in the White House but, until Iran, they have never been the ones to declare war. Congress declares war, and multiple Congressional groups are briefed on the same confidential details the President should be using to recommend a declaration of war.

I don't say that to excuse those presidents and vice presidents, only to point out that all of Congress was involved and both wars were strongly supported by congressional votes.

We had a 90% bracket in the US if I'm not mistaken. Also a fun fact, income tax was sold as a temporary measure at a 1% rate.

Its a really tricky problem to solve. One simple solution would be to tax any loan secured by owned assets as regular income, though there may be situations that hits more average people, say if you take out a HELOC on your home.

It is pretty absurd that one can borrow against a mountain of owned stocks and live of the loan without it being considered income.

I'd be very curious where I could find debates over balancing federal budgets. I know only one or two members of Congress that even talk about balancing a budget beyond getting a cheap sound byte.

Congress hasn't meaningfully acted on the war in Iran. They are the only ones with the power to declare war and emergency powers are clear. They also own the budget and decided to pay for the war after the fact. Yes the Republicans control both houses right now do that doesn't help, but unless I'm wildly mistaken that spending vote was jot a party line vote.

I'm not sure of your point here or what you may have thought I was arguing for.

Where exactly we can find causes of our massive debt is an interesting question, and almost certainly wouldn't fall solely on tax cuts from two presidents.

Whether you agree with the current president or the insane things he sometimes says (I don't) is entirely separate.

> It seems like the economy is kind of doing this on its own?

This is what I was replying to. At least to me, saying the economy did something on its own takes the agency and responsibility off of us. My point was that the economy is just backward looking analysis of how money changes hands, it does nothing by itself and when things change its the result of us making decisions.

It'd a bit of a vicious circle. Voters don't tend to pay much attention or understand, they hear sound bites that land well for them and their cheer for "their team."

I don't think many people even know what liberalism means today. It gets treated like a synonym for progressivism, which itself is poorly defined and used as a synonym for a DNC voter.

Both parties absolutely want experts in charge and for the public to generally fall in line and not ask questions.

Did you not see how the entire pandemic response played out? There are still YouTube videos of a huge swath of politicians and media outlets telling people not to do their own research and to just listen to those in charge of the relevant federal agencies.

Claiming that both parties have more in common than they're given credit for is very different from throwing ones hands in the air and giving up on voting.

I personally see our two parties today and fighting for the same principles while landing on different specific policies. That doesn't mean I don't vote.

I can't speak to his intent, I just know that he specifically said the state legislation should redraw California lines to favor his party.

I can't include every detail in such a format, but its worth noting that I did clearly call out the Republicans doing it first. Its not like I was saying "democrat gerrymander" out of context there.

You didn't post them because you were arguing with a point I didn't make. I didn't say both parties spend just as much, I said both parties overspend and run deficits. The average person shouldn't need to fact check such an obvious statement.

Your attempts here to deflect all spending from the president in office to the party you disagree with is also a bit too obvious. You had no counter argument to my actual point and were instead fishing for me to provide exactly those numbers so you could do exactly this deflection.

Given that you wanted so badly for me to look up numbers, I'd love to hear you justify that running deficits is not a problem of only one party.

You're still deflecting off my actual argument, latching onto only the first sentence, and demanding stats where none are needed.

I said its not a one party problem and then went on to very clearly explain that both parties overspend our income and run deficits. Are you refuting that? No exact stats are needed there because its common knowledge that we haven't run a balanced budget since Clinton was in office.

You seem to be arguing with a point that I never said. I didn't claim which party had spent more, for that I would have to double check the numbers and adjust for inflation.

Social security is a legal ponzi scheme. I don't say that to be outlandish, its a good description of how SS is funded - take money from people paying in today and give it to this who laid in previously.

It isn't fully funded though and people have been raising the alarm for decades now that it will run out of money.

The problem isn't simply that governments are stealing from the social security pot, the program isn't designed in a sustainable way and there are no direct links between money taken in and benefits paid out. The assumption at the time was that growth would always keep up, that fails eventually.

Newsome proposed a ballot measure to allow the government to draw a more Democrats friendly map. hHochul treated redistricting in New York and supported efforts to do so.

The difference in many case was that legal challenges in blue stated tended to stop the gerrymandering where courts in red states tended not to. The end result is different, the political intent was not.

Your argument is absurd. You seem to take issue with my arguments and the examples I gave and demand I owe you numbers and statistics. But you're making your own arguments ad though they are correct without providing your own data.

I think we even agree that one party will outspend the other. You're ignoring my entire point that running a deficit is the problem and both parties are guilty of doing it and both parties continue to push for even more spending on policies they happen to agree with.

The two parties, including the most recent presidents, have disagreed on specific policy but not on direction. Both partied want more federal powers and authority. Both want to spend more than they make. Both believe in authoritarian type rule with "experts" at the top deciding what is best for all of us.

The economy is a measure of past financial behavior. I'm not sure how the economy could do this on its own, we're doing this to ourselves. I say "we" collectively there, these are all results of human choices not an amorphous concept of an economy.

I wouldn't say democracy I'd illusory. I'd say it has to be fought for repeatedly to keep it, and we've done a poor job of fighting for it at least in my lifetime.

Is your argument that one party overspends worse than the other? That certainly is true, though how many externalities are included would be up for debate. Regardless though, my problem is with the over spending, not with which is party over spends less.

To be fair, Clinton pulled off a surplus through clever accounting though it would have been comparatively close either way.

I'm not sure how you could possibly narrow the issue down to two presidents' tax cuts alone. What about all the war spending? Or money printing? Or a partially implemented half step towards socialized health care?

Both parties are responsible for the debt we hold today, they have just argued about what to spend it on along the way.

This isn't a "one party is the problem" situation. Both parties have spent over 20 years fighting pointless wars. Both parties spend without balancing a budget. Both now gerrymander and both at least threaten to stack the court. Both pander to voters with short term solutions that actively do harm long term. Both were responsible for the shit show of the pandemic response.

The list goes on and on. They argue over where new debt should be spent, who to bomb, or what new powers the government should claim. What we don't see is a debate over government overreach, balanced budgets, or even whether we should even be in a war with Iran.

It doesn't directly. Financial repression does though, its a "solution" to high federal debt and leaves the average person having to eat the cost.

Its a bit like austerity, but instead of taking a share of everyone's wealth they just make all of our stored wealth worse less. They do that by inflating asset prices much faster than wages can keep up, meaning those large corporations at the top get rich while the average person falls further and further behind.

This shouldn't be a surprise. The US came out of WWII with similarly high debt to GDP. They only corrected that through financial repression, and that's likely to be their only chance of lowering that debt ratio today.

If we don't spend the next few decades skating by while the currency is debased under our noses, I assume its because there's a much more severe and tragic response.

You're swapping in the words fact and truth which are different. If a court years a case and makes a ruling following proper procedure, that is legal fact. That doesn't make it true.

If court decisions were always determinations of truth then wrongful convictions would be impossible.

Edit as I meant to answer your last question. The FCC almost certainly defines how they measure radio frequencies and is defining what measured frequencies are allowed and disallowed for transmission. I will say this question seems a bit like a straw man though, the realm of fact is much much larger. If a government must determine truth it often would not be based on things that can be isolated and tested.

Truth wouldn't apply to mathematical proofs either, no. Truth is effectively undiscoverable and that's kind of the whole point, see the scientific method and consensus vs truth.

The problem with making the government decide what is true is that they have to codify the definition and how to identify it. If they can go with gut feel or what seems likely that will eventually be abused by those in charge.

> I would rather have someone emigrate and work in America where they can provide additional labor to the mainland economy

This is what I responded to. Whether the initial intent or not, it makes the case that we would be better off with the native population emigrating to the mainland and providing the economy with economic value.

They decide what is allowed, not what is true fact.