It's not bout winning at this point. It's bout not having our last 20 years go to waste. You can be sure all our allies far from us will 2nd doubt our allegiance when they can be on China side which will dominate the other part of the globe. Russia is only a good front. They are as poor as the next guy. Say what you want bout Trump but he was scaring them. You never knew if Trump would go on a power trip and invade somewhere.

Biden on the other hand, people taking bet worldwide when he'll be removed from office or how many days without a public fuck up...

So much for stealing an election and voting for a corpse. All worth it right? RIGHT?

This post was edited by SunnyvaleTrailerPark on Aug 17 2021 02:51pm

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/28/upshot/infrastructure-breakdown.html

Airports (25 billion), ports/waterways (17 bil), water infrastructure (55 bil), etc. are not liberal pork. The only "liberal" thing there is funding for electric vehicles IMO.

The rest of the infrastructure bill is stuff that we already spend annually. The guy you're quoting isn't particularly smart though and he should probably be primaried so our troops don't die (he is on the armed services committee)

Neocon warmongers and their viewpoints are VASTLY overrepresented in mainstream and elite media. That's why they're blasting Biden right now. But you're of course right that they'll be shilling cheerleaders of the Democratic cause again in a couple of weeks.

For somebody who claims to be smart you'd think you would at least have heard of the sunk cost fallacy.

Yeah, the competence argument doesn't really bode well for the GOP if their public image keeps being dominated by Trump, some more Trump and then a bunch of zany showboats like Matt Gaetz.

One additional thought on the economy: you keep focusing on inflation, but at this rate, I wonder if there might actually be lingering unemployment issues in the fall of 2022. If there actually are renewed covid restrictions this winter, a lot of the small- to midsized businesses which managed to hang so far would fold, which could create significant downward pressure on the entire economy. The plummeting consumer confidence index from recent surveys could well be the canary in the coal mine in this regard. So it's conceivable, imho, that we get a split economy, with high wage growth for the sectors that recovered quickly, but a lot of malaise in others like leisure and hospitality.




Btw, out of curiosity: did you vote for Romney or Obama back in 2012? You strike me like one of these high info swing voters from the suburbs I was talking about, with centrist or perhaps center-right inclinations, but unable to tolerate the incompetence and nonseriousness of big chunks of the current GOP...

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Aug 17 2021 03:52pm

You read NYT so you probably have your head up your rear.

Name one major railroad that Biden WOULD build.

This post was edited by EndlessSky on Aug 17 2021 04:03pm

I think the unemployment rate is low enough where it won't be a substantial factor. If you look at the unemployment rate, most of the unemployed are from hospitality and tourism. I really doubt that we're going to see lockdowns again because I think businesses will simply impose vaccine mandates on their employees and customers in order to stay alive. The ability to stay afloat will trump any sort of principled values that they may have. The only caveat to that is if we get a variant that SEVERELY reduces the effectiveness of the vaccines. If that's the case, we're just fucked and it will probably create some sort of major transformation of our healthcare system.

I never voted for Obama but I think Mitt Romney is the greatest candidate the GOP had since George HW Bush.

I don't think we're getting NEW railroads (nor should we except maybe Los Angeles to Vegas). This is simply maintenance. Anyway, the only reason I even have a sub to the NYT is because Nate Cohn (head of the Upshot) does REALLY good work. The graphic shows just how much the Dems had to give up in order to get this done. There's a reason why McConnell voted yes and it's because the GOP won with this.

Imho, it's for the better that the GOP forced the $1trillion infrastructure bill to focus on "core infracstructure" (e.g. roads and bridges) while leaving out what Democrats misleadingly frame as "human infrastructure" (e.g. health care, racial inequality). If they want to pass a bill to address these issues - or climate change - then they should try to find electoral majorities for these policies based on their own merit. Holding popular and long overdue investment into physical infrastructure hostage to advance liberal priorities would have be bad for the political culture and result in lots of bad policies.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Aug 17 2021 04:45pm