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Someone Has To Do It: US Elections 2020

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    It's almost impossible to "ram something through 51-49" in the Senate. You can only do that on reconciliation of budget bills.

    What McConnell has been doing has been stopping bills, which is much, much easier. The Republican project is to try and make government so dysfunctional that people give up on it. Perpetually stopping it doing anything is a great way of going there.

    Even if the Democrats could institute a nuclear option, they'd still need their right-wing Senators to vote for stuff - the likes of Joe Manchin and Diane Feinstein and Krysten Sinema. Those senators are almost as opposed to universal healthcare as Rand Paul is, although usually because the health insurance industry butters their bread rather than because they are Randian maniacs.

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      And there's only one caucus remaining: Wyoming.

      I think caucuses are terrible, because they remove the possibility of a private vote and allow peer pressure, and because they're much harder to participate in thus reducing turnout and franchise. The one good thing about them is the transferable vote aspect, but the Democratic party has instituted that for a handful of primaries this year, showing that the caucus is totally redundant.

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        I'm curious, did Ron Paul name his son after Ayn Rand?

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          Somewhat surprisingly, no

          Though I think that has more than a bit to do with his preferred version of his Christian name Randall (he was the much more common Randy as a kid).

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            To be fair to him, Randy Paul does sound a 70s gay porn star or a 70s reliever for the Royals.

            No one pounded you with a backdoor slider like Randy Paul! Yes, I did that on purpose.

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              That is very true and extremely artfully done, but it is equally true that Randall Paul is a perfectly good name for a respected optometrist or a respected elder in a mainstream evangelical church.

              He went with Rand for a reason (though to my generation (and that of his father), it would have always evoked the Vietnam Era think tank and Sperry Rand

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                Originally posted by Flynnie View Post
                To be fair to him, Randy Paul does sound a 70s gay porn star or a 70s reliever for the Royals.

                No one pounded you with a backdoor slider like Randy Paul! Yes, I did that on purpose.
                Randy Paul would be no match for Randy Johnson though.

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                  Originally posted by Flynnie View Post
                  I guarantee every Boomer at 34 know 30 people who had bought a house, and several who had bought them in cities where home ownership is utterly unaffordable these days. At my age, my parents had bought a home in San Francisco, and that's without having graduated from college and with a fair amount of bumming around following the Dead.
                  Wha...?

                  Sorry that's bollocks. I knew maybe four people (including myself and my wife) who owned a house at 34 years old. By forty, sure there were more, but by no means thirty. We were only able to buy a house then because my MiL gave us $5,000 as a wedding present. Mortgage rates round here in early 80s were over 20%. It was a struggle, especially when a family came along. Rapidly rising equity saved our asses, that's what made the difference. Sure it's tougher today, much tougher work wise. But it wasn't as easy as you describe for most of us. Our 20s OTOH...!

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                    Originally posted by anton pulisov View Post
                    I'm curious of any evidence to the contrary: any period when the young were relatively more right-wing than the old.
                    It would be interesting to look at times when younger people have been more right wing than older people, sure. That's not the opposite of "people get more right wing as they get older", though. The opposite of that would be "people get more left wing as they get older". And you'd need some decent longitudinal evidence for that proposition as well.

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                      Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post

                      Wha...?

                      Sorry that's bollocks. I knew maybe four people (including myself and my wife) who owned a house at 34 years old. By forty, sure there were more, but by no means thirty. We were only able to buy a house then because my MiL gave us $5,000 as a wedding present. Mortgage rates round here in early 80s were over 20%. It was a struggle, especially when a family came along. Rapidly rising equity saved our asses, that's what made the difference. Sure it's tougher today, much tougher work wise. But it wasn't as easy as you describe for most of us. Our 20s OTOH...!
                      Interest rates are prob the missing piece in the generational conversation. My folks bought their gaff for £29,000 in 1984, and I'm guessing they could have paid it off quicker than the 20 odd years it took, but in that time period interest rates spent a long while sky high (and oil price crashes/worldwide recessions also meant periods of irregular/poorly paid employment for me da).

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                        Was just going to make the same point.

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                          It's really hard to generalise about aging individuals' beliefs, on anything never mind politics. Fear, caused by perplexity, confusion and vulnerability are certainly factors. There's less future than there used to be, and the present isn't as reliable as it once was. Anger is a concomitant to fear, and populism — from right or left — feeds of it providing easy solutions and a certain sense of solidarity. Others retreat, into their families, groups of friends, or themselves. I suspect that's the direction I lean to. More time on the beach, in the darkroom, in a book. Away, just... away. I'm only needed by a diminishing few and, rightly, live in parentheses and on the margins of contemporary discourse. Am I more right wing at seventy than I was at twenty? possibly, when judged by others, but I don't feel that I am, and in any case those terms don't mean exactly the same as they did fifty years ago.

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                            Interestingly for the US interest rate and credit outlook - home mortgages are at all-time low rates while auto-finance is about 3% higher than it was the last time rates were this low.

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                              Originally posted by TonTon View Post

                              It would be interesting to look at times when younger people have been more right wing than older people, sure. That's not the opposite of "people get more right wing as they get older", though. The opposite of that would be "people get more left wing as they get older". And you'd need some decent longitudinal evidence for that proposition as well.
                              Well, if young people at any point in modern history turn out to be always relatively more left then their older counterparts, then you could actually infer that it is a function of age.

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                                Lots of people die before they get to be old. Do you have any good reason to think that that is evenly distributed across voting choices? It seems very unlikely to me.

                                I'd prefer to have some good longitudinal data, really.

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                                  Originally posted by E10 Rifle View Post
                                  There was an extraordinary statistic about the number of voters in the youngest age bracket who voted Tory in 1983. Absolutely loads of them did, more than a lot of the older groups. People are products of their time, not just the age they happen to be at that time. And Toryism in the 80s was youthful and geezerish and full of possibility from those perspectives (which I don't and never did share). Toryism now is about a lot of those people (now in their 50s and above) defending those gains - if you've still got them - and a nostalgia for that time, and before. The Left could do worse now, I think, than to ditch nostalgia - including for 1945 - and project itself as the party of future possibilities and of solving current and future problems.
                                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A] This address to the royal institution slagging off baby boomers, by er, David Willetts. [/url] covers that phenomenon. Thatcher attached the old age pension to inflation rather than earnings, which fucked pensioners. However when the time came for the first baby boomer to hit the old age pension mark, they started the pension accelerator which is in a race with brexit to kill the NHS. There used to be a time when being old meant being poor. That is no longer the case. That's the thing that has butchered Labour's support among the old. The current group of people between the ages of 65 and 75 are among the wealthiest cohort of people who have ever lived. They're also going to get twice as much net out of the social welfare system as people in their thirties. Baby boomers in the UK (Born between 1945 and 1965) were between 14 and 34 when when thatcher took over and 26-46 when she retired, and were more into the tories than pensioners at the time even allowing for people becoming more conservative over time.

                                  That's quite an interesting speech. There are whole aspects to this problem that hadn't occured to me. One of the factors in the low rate of wage increase in the UK is that people no longer move job, or move around as much as they used to, because in large part the only way people below a certain age get a house is by getting the deposit off their parents, who in turn kind of force them to live close at hand, and then the mortgage is so big and so lengthy it shackles them to their job. or that the wealth of the UK being 7 times the size of its economy as opposed to the more normal 3-4, means that inheritance is a more important means of acquiring wealth, than engaging in the actual economy, which seems to be leading inexorably to a sort of feudal society. (My conclusion, not his, which isn't far off)

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                                    How does that square with people moving from job poor gammon deserts like the NE to that there London? (Or even in a small scale from culchie Scotland to Embra or Glasgow, darkest Cumbria or Lancs to Manc, even all of the non urban highlands to Inverness?)
                                    Last edited by Lang Spoon; 26-02-2020, 00:09.

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                                      When I were a lad my home town of 50000 supported a fairly diverse local (if declining) economy. Now it's a dormitory town to Edinburgh. That's also the case for Greenock, Paisley (as Glasgow satellites), Dunfermline etc in Scotland, doubtless the likes of Rochdale or Burnley in England have suffered the same fate to their sexy biggish city neighbour.
                                      Last edited by Lang Spoon; 26-02-2020, 00:21.

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                                        Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
                                        How does that square with people moving from job poor gammon deserts like the NE to that there London? (Or even in a small scale from culchie Scotland to Embra or Glasgow, darkest Cumbria or Lancs to Manc, even all of the non urban highlands to Inverness?)
                                        It likely has effected those trends in its own way. It's an interesting talk, coming as it does from a former tory minister, born in the exact middle of the 1945-65 period, it's not as angry as it might be. But there's a lot of interesting stuff in it.

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                                          The link ain't working for me (on mobile at least).

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                                            The home ownership thing really depends on where you live. I know loads of people in their 30s (and some in their 20s) around here who own a house. Basically any couple where both people manage to get a job can quite easily afford a house in our area, where the prices are still 10-15% below their 2008 level.

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                                              My gf is still in negative equity 34km from boomy boomy Dublin.I could buy a three bedroom gaff in that commuter town just on my income despite the massive housing shortage. 6 minutes closer to Dublin on the train, our combined income probably wouldn't get a mortgage on a two bedroom gaff. I can't afford even a 1 bed apartment in Dublin proper (discounting fuckin Darndale/Coolock/Donaghmeade or seaside Irish Cumbernauld Clongriffin) rent or buy. Part of the price differential is prob racism (her gaff is in the most multicultural town in the state), but even so.

                                              In the last boom we both would have been able to buy in Dublin city itself (she didn't thru prudence, me thru being a low level 20 tokes a day degenerate with no savings), and our combined income would have got a nice gaff in a "decent" area.
                                              Last edited by Lang Spoon; 26-02-2020, 02:19.

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                                                Oddschecker for 2020:

                                                https://www.oddschecker.com/us/insig...t-us-president

                                                Donald Trump -162 (8/13)

                                                Bernie Sanders +300 (3/1)

                                                Michael Bloomberg +1000 (10/1)

                                                Joe Biden +2800 (28/1)

                                                Pete Buttigieg +4000 (40/1)

                                                Elizabeth Warren +15000 (150/1)

                                                Amy Klobuchar +20000 (200/1)

                                                Trump's likelihood has gone from low 30s% to 61.9% in the last few months.
                                                Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 26-02-2020, 12:24.

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                                                  Originally posted by TonTon View Post
                                                  Lots of people die before they get to be old.
                                                  Except for the one who wrote it and the one who sang it...

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                                                    Where does one even begin with this?

                                                    https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1232493987614740482

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