Mr.TaterSalad

Who exactly are we winning over with that type of praise on Reagan? That's the same kind of failed strategy we just tried last election by trotting out Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger on the campaign trail and hoping there was some moderate base of Republicans sitting around, ready to vote for Democrats. The Republican Party of Reagan is dead and gone. It's a MAGA Party now and fully controlled by Donald Trump. There aren't a magical group of old school, 1980s-style Republicans that Democrats can win over. Those people either don't really exist or have already decided to cross over and become Democrats. Democrats need to win back over non-college educated, white working class people in the middle who may have voted Biden in 2020 and then Trump again in 2024. Voters who's brains aren't fully rotted out by MAGA. They need to win back over more young men under the age of 35 of all racial makeups. They need to hold down the fort on black men under 50 and stop the erosion of Latino men under 50. Pandering to some yesteryear of Ronald Reagan isn't going to do that with any of those demographic IMO. Furthermore, if we're concerned about the assault on the federal workforce, let us not forget that started under Reagan. Reagan spent years trashing the federal government and federal employees. He fired air traffic controllers and made millions of Americans believe that nothing good can come out of the federal government. Reagan's rhetoric against federal bureaucrats and bureaucracy is part of the reason we ended up in this mess.

I don't know what specifically bothered people last night, but I know her past affiliation's with the CIA and Bush Administration have always been a criticism of the left in Michigan. I've gotten involved with Michigan Democratic Party internal politics and other progressive organizations and those have been common criticisms I've heard from the left. More recently, people were mad that she was later to the game on supporting the end of the filibuster (she eventually came around) and supported banning the pride flag on military bases when her own mother was a lesbian. I'm fine with Slotkin compared to the alternative which is a Republican. But I reject the idea that you have to moderate yourself to win. I look at other midwest states like Wisconsin with Tammy Baldwin and until recently Ohio with Sherrod Brown. I'd love for Slotkin to have a voting record and policy positions in-line with Senators like those two. If a lesbian progressive, who was a co-sponsor of Medicare For All, can win in a purple state like Wisconsin, I don't think it would hurt Slotkin to take a few more progressive, left-leaning positions. Edited to add this, her line about how she was thankful that Reagan was in the White House during the Cold War and not Trump is one critique I've seen this morning. It shouldn't have been said. Everyone who is being intellectually honest knows Reagan should have been impeached and removed from office for Iran-Contra. As well, the damage Reagan did to working Americans and unions in this country is still being felt to this day. We shouldn't be holding up a crook like Reagan and it added nothing of substance to her speech by praising him.

Yeah, America looks real affordable now. What a ****ing moron.

What a bitch, he couldn't even last a full day.

Call it socialism or whatever you want, but I'd prefer federal price controls and a maximum wage/maximum compensation on corporate executives to tariffs.

Well you have to do something to win back non-college educated voters in midwest and southern states and defending NAFTA isn't going to be it. The reason that there was a Bernie/Trump voter in 2016 was because of issues like NAFTA. Sherrod Brown hung on as long as he did in Ohio because he went around the state assailing and speaking out against free trade and he stood up for workers rights at every turn. If Sherrod Brown decided to be a pimp for free trade like some of his Democratic colleagues became and sold out workers he'd have lost a lot sooner in Ohio. I think Jared Golden recognizes the same thing in Maine.

And they were all right to do so. The difference is Sanders was the only no vote on NAFTA to have a shot at being President. Looking through the roll call vote he may have been the only Democrat/Independent to vote no on NAFTA that ended up running for President. Jay Inslee ran for President but he voted yes. NAFTA was a flop for manufacturing heavy states. Sure, places bounced back a bit like Detroit or transformed like Pittsburgh did, but it took two decades for that to happen and some people suffered greatly in the meantime. As well, some place never recovered from NAFTA's devastation on manufacturing. I want to be the party of people like Shawn Fain and the UAW or Jared Golden or Sherrod Brown where we hammer bad trade deals like NAFTA and bring non-college educated voters back into the fold.

We did see these things you reference above. But we saw an acceleration of job loss with NAFTA too. Again, the Economic Policy Institute has published multiple studies on NAFTA and they've estimated up to or beyond 700,000 jobs lost due to NAFTA. Regarding the movement of the auto industry down south, this is why we need to get rid of Right-to-Work (For Less) laws and make every manufacturing job a union job. And in a place like Pittsburgh, how many people were devastated for decades while its local economy transformed from primarily being dependent on manufacturing to where it is at today. Truth be told, every worker, in any job, white collar or blue collar, should be represented by a union. If the corporate executives get bargaining power, legal representation during contractual negotiations, and a work contract to secure their wages and benefits, so to should the worker.

It was a talking point for leftists in the early 1990s because they saw the global order in America shifting away from the legacy of trade unions and the social welfare state to a lite-version of Reaganomics under Clinton. Bernie Sanders, leader of the left movement, spent much of the 90s railing on NAFTA and being proven right about the job loss.

If we'd be willing to have an honest conversation about capitalism and it's modern failures this would help a lot more too. Capitalism in its current form is an unsustainable business model. You can't have less than 1% of people own 30% of wealth and obtain over 40% of all new wealth generated. I'm not going to acknowledge the benefits of NAFTA until we start to talk about things that reign in and regulate modern capitalisms excesses. NAFTA was apart of those modern capitalist excesses. NAFTA did what corporations wanted it to do. It provided for a new, cheaper labor force in Mexico. We need to be discussing major reforms like like workplace democratization, electing corporate executives by a vote of the companies workers, allowing workers a vote/say in major decisions that impact a business, ending at will employment (or at least make firing an employee harder), maximum compensation regulations, and more.

I think we'd be better off without NAFTA or the UMSCA. The free market in general has been a failure with the levels of inequity and outsourcing of labor it has allowed. I do believe that trading with underdeveloped and impoverished economies has done an immense amount of damage to workers in America. One estimate I read from Economic Policiy Institute, which is a union-funded think tank, said NAFTA cost us over 700,000 jobs. Many of the jobs good paying, manufacturing jobs that non-college educated people came out of high school and worked in. Democrats should not ever be the party defending trade deals like NAFTA or promoting new ones like the TPP. Golden is right to rail on NAFTA.

Democrats need to be messaging in-terms of the Lord Farquaad approach that the average voter understands. I think it would be effective to hit Republicans with some version of a "sure that where be pain, job losses, income loss, and higher prices, but that's a sacrifice Trump is willing to make that will hit you and your family hard." Trump's whole game is the economy and if Democrats can make that house of cards fall he's politically in deep ****.

I think the view of the economy has shifted. I think capitalism, whatever Adam Smith intended it to be, has been bastardized and become an exploitative game for the rich. How can I make the most money possible while paying the fewest people, the very least amount possible? Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and on are more representative of modern capitalism and its exploits than your average small business owner or business.

I was in Lansing a few weeks back for the first big protest organized. There were about a 1,000 that showed up. Not amazing turnout, but not bad either.

Trump understands things in the most elementary-like terms. He talks about things the way elementary school kids would if you asked them a simple economic or policy-related question. He has no capacity to articulate a factual, measured, thoughtful policy point of view or statement. Mr. Trump, how are you going to lower oil prices? Drill baby drill! Mr. Trump, how are you going to lower natural gas prices? Frack, frack, frack, frack, frack! Mr. Trump, how are you going to lower grocery prices? It will be easy to lower them. We'll just make them lower.

I don't understand the need to have a lower, 10% tariff on natural gas and oil versus the 25% tariff on everything else because Trump and his merrymen told us it's the country that get hits with the tariff that pays it, not consumers in the country levying the tariff.

I don't think society and conditions today are mirror images of the 1970s and what created stagflation back then. But the economic conditions are increasingly becoming an environment where stagflation could return. How can the Fed combat inflation with increased interest rates if the economy is sliding off a cliff? Higher borrowing costs would only steepen a recession I would think. And if the Fed tries economic stimulus through some form of money printing or quantitative easing program, that runs the risk of heating up Trumpflation more and still not actually turning the economy around and getting it out of a recessionary slump.

I disagree. I think we're headed for 1970s style stagflation potentially. A situation where Trumpflation and higher prices are created because of his tariffs, trade wars with other trading partners, and economy volatility. Then, intermixed with that, you will have a recession because of the economic pressures put on businesses by the Trumpflation, trade wars, and overall day-to-day volatility and uncertainty of his policies.

It's TDS alright, Trans Derangement Syndrome. That's what people like our resident MAGA suffer from. They can't stop talking about trans people and other people's private parts and genitalia.

In your esteemed estimations, do one or both of Iffy and Levi come back?

Former Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown gets it. Democrats need to rebuild a bigger, better, economically progressive, New Deal coalition built to take on big corporations and represent the working class.

As long as Mahomes still gets to snap the ball a second after the buzz and Jawaan Taylor gets to keep lining up offsides I think the NFL would be ok with a buzzer. Seriously though, the shot clock in the basketball buzzes loudly, no reason the NFL's play clock cannot either.

You know Pearce is going to end up being drafted by Howie Roseman and the Eagles now.

I don't know if anyone posted this here yet or over in the investment thread. But the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank is now projecting negative GDP growth for Q1. I would presume this would have to be because of Trump's tariffs and the higher inflationary pressure that comes with them. Due to concerns around Trump's tariffs, increasing Trumpflation, and the volatility of his economic policies, companies may have been pulling ahead on a lot of purchase orders. With the pull ahead of orders and the manufacturing that goes along with it, companies, I would presume, are trying to get ahead of the tariffs. Which means we'll see a dramatic slowdown afterwards. Is this an unfair assessment? https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow