how to bridge the divide

So easy to overlook the real policy tragedies happening in America today given the best ongoing societal distractions that money can buy.

Adults are retreating to the safe confines of news sources that happily feed their biases,

Exactly what you been doing all along and STILL doing ......

Our politics is devolving into the pathetic spectacle of liars indignantly calling out liars for lying. Rule-breakers are outraged that other rule-breakers break rules. Norms that could be violated with impunity for “social justice” can’t be violated for “nationalism.” We stick with our tribe, through thick and thin — through truth and lies.

It doesn't matter if many think they are a bridge.
They will be ignored.
The repugs with a minority of the vote have taken over the federal government and various states, due to

If you think Trump and his supporters are gonna play nice if we all hold hands and sing kumbaya you are more naive than I thought.

Standing up to Nazis and Fascists and White Supremacists and Racists and Misogynists and people who hate everything about the minority populations in this country (of all kinds be they POC or LGBT etc) is nothing I am ever gonna back down from, ever.

Trump is hijacking every fear of the "other" that isn't White FOR CORRUPT PROFIT, is trying to destroy the EU for Putin and he and anyone that supports him is what stands between Humanity and real civilization.

F*#k them and anyone that supports them. Trump's main advisors are Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon...2 white supremacists that would look nice swinging from a rope before they cause any more damage to the nation.

You don't play nice with people who play with other's lives to gain power and tell any disgusting lie about good people to make it happen (Trump 3000++ and counting since inauguration).

Its a divide alright, between Good and Evil and Trump is pure Evil. You don't play nice with Evil, ever. If you can't see that, I pity the fool.

There is nothing wrong with detesting veritably Evil people and calling them out for what they are: Its called having a backbone

A desire to truly address nutagain’s question is a personal one and must come from the individual. Frankly most heartfelf and vocal partisans seem utterly incapable of it.

So you misjudged me. But good news, I didn't misjudge you.

Asshole.

The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.

Or, perhaps you think it's time to pick up a gun.

On the contrary. Tolerance will bring you no-where you want to be when you're dealing with strategic kleptocracy...

That would be great if we could do it without a Civil War. We haven't seen this much vitriol since that era.

xCon:
before a bridge worth a damn can bridge the divide between good people doing right and good people doing wrong
we need a mighty pile of the bodies of conservative leaders and the scum who go to bat for them sitting in plain sight
tore to pieces
rotting fetted and telegraphing what the guilty are due

Well, I didn't mind, as long as it kept these people talking, for nothing is more revealing of a person's mind than a person's anger. - Paul Theroux

we need a mighty pile of the bodies of conservative leaders and the scum who go to bat for them sitting in plain sight
tore to pieces
rotting fetted and telegraphing what the guilty are due
as a backdrop for those left alive on that side with some agency to contemplate before they dare to think that their going to survive to fight another day
f*#k them!

Second, the Dems ( mainstream conservatives to my mind), caused the refugee crisis in Syria and Europe with our Regime Change Plans (for oil and banking) in Libya and Syria (Yemen etc.).

we need a mighty pile of the bodies of conservative leaders and the scum who go to bat for them sitting in plain sight
tore to pieces
rotting fetted and telegraphing what the guilty are due
as a backdrop for those left alive on that side with some agency to contemplate before they dare to think that their going to survive to fight another day
f*#k them!

please indicated the address of your 'innocent' loved ones and the appropriate response will be on the way...

the only people using chemical weapons in Syria were on the US dime...

It is about belaying others up to the point we have reached, rather than cutting the cord because they are holding us back. Belay on!

18.6 million registered voters in california. divide by 55 electoral college votes means each delegate represents 340,000 of them.

200,000 wyoming registered voters divide by three means 67k get an electoral college vote.

340k/67k=5.07

california, with more registered voters than 46 other states, rolls with less than one fifth the per capita representation wyoming enjoys.

come on, six kids graduate from gillette high. five head for twenty first century jobs in cal and even voting as a progressive block,
the kid that stays to mine coal trumps them in the presidential race.

gerrymanderers have a lot of nerve to dance on the shortcomings of the woman that got 2.8 million more votes

Hooblie, thank you for the comparison of how many people are represented by each member of the US House of Representatives. That is a major screw-up for which there is no rational justification, completely against the principle of creating the separate House and Senate. There is no logical defense for that and no motive other than trying to cheat the design of the system.

xCon: high time we did

yes,
slave owners were the whiney bitch minority whos despicable selves had to be catered to in order to form the union at that time.

most of the constitution is pretty clear about what those people deserved and what we shoulda done with them the week after they signed

pitty the founders were so limp wristed they didn't get around to it...

high time we did

but think schhol teachers should still make $20,000 or less a year to RAISE THEIR F*#KING KIDS.

Wow, I guess I never realized science was "liberal."

In a physical fight, are you willing to be more depraved than your enemy? If not, you will lose. If yes, what of the high minded ideals that motivated your fight? You lost them. Now it’s not a battle for right and wrong. It’s just a battle between two groups of stubborn people, with a lot more suffering added to the world.

It would be nice if someone could resurrect Mr. Rogers and set him on the adults.

I don’t think a big group of people are fundamentally against facts. I think they have emotional needs that are met by the identity labels of “conservative” and/or “Republican” that overpower their perception of a need for facts (notwithstanding their need for cars, air conditioning, heaters, smartPhones, Internet, and other stuff associated with science and engineering). People have a vested interest in not changing their team, especially in a society that rewards loyalty and rooting for the underdog. An altered version of this goes for “liberals”/“Democrats” who feed off of divisive memes.

AntiChrist:
So you are saying the deep down the Taliban, Isis, and white supremacists (mr trump, sessions, bannon, and their supporters included) are good people and their ideology is okay because it makes sense to them?

Just not that liberal sciency crap and conspiracy theories about glbal warming.

so they latch onto fairytales of an all powerful controller who created all their frustrations as a test.

I’d say there is something very important missing there

MikeL:
I’d say there is something very important missing there ...

Every peacenik ( like you and me) thought the DMZ and Korean Conflict was the biggest embarrassment and a monument to stupidity.

You guys are showing why the Democratic platform is the most mainstream conservative POV.

And if you're a left/ prog ( like me) you should feel deep shame about Syria. We did this. Back when Obama was getting the benefit of the doubt.

John M:
I want to drastically reduce the national debt and create a rainy day fund.
I want a strong military, but not spend the crazy amount that we currently do. I do not see the need to spend more then the next 8 largest countries.
I want strong support for workers rights.
I am against banning abortion.
I want sane gun laws.
I want campaign finance reform.
I want strong public schools.
I want a repaired infrastructure
I want to continue to protect national lands
I want to separate the forest service from fighting fires to help them with their budget.
I want single payer health care for basic care, with supplemental insurance for higher levels of care.

I noticed that many progressives are willing to sucrifice these for more important issues such as a right of a male to pee in a girls washroom.

Sessions cited "a dangerous movement" aimed toward stripping away the First Amendment right to freedom of religion as a basis for forming the new task force.

"A dangerous movement, undetected by many, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom," Sessions said in his speech. "There can be no doubt. This is no little matter. It must be confronted and defeated."

build a bridge to those people and together create viable alternatives so that insane ideologies

This is true although I don't like clean water, fresh air and safe food to be lumped in as liberal entitlements.

Both groups have different things that they feel entitled to, but both the liberal mindset and the conservative mindset have a spectrum of entitlement.

Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Argentina this month that his department was studying whether it could use its regulatory powers to allow Americans to account for inflation in determining capital gains tax liabilities. The Treasury Department could change the definition of “cost” for calculating capital gains, allowing taxpayers to adjust the initial value of an asset, such as a home or a share of stock, for inflation when it sells.

I love how this ALWAYS applies to a conservative think tank but NEVER to the worldwide scientific community.

Satan wins again!

The Long Answer:

https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/10/30/452905475/fact-check-do-tax-cuts-grow-the-economy

Tax cuts can boost economic growth. But the operative word there is "can." It's by no means an automatic or perfect relationship.
We know, we know. No one likes a fact check with a non-firm answer. So let's dig further into this idea.

There's a simple logic behind the idea that cutting taxes boosts growth: Cutting taxes gives people more money to spend as they like, which can boost economic growth.

Many — but by no means all— economists believe there's a relationship between cuts and growth. In a 2012 survey of top economists, the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business found that 35 percent thought cutting taxes would boost economic growth. A roughly equal share, 35 percent, were uncertain. Only 8 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed.
But in practice, it's not always clear that tax cuts themselves automatically boost the economy, according to a recent study.

"It is by no means obvious, on an ex ante basis, that tax rate cuts will ultimately lead to a larger economy," as the Brookings Institution's William Gale and Andrew Samwick wrote in a 2014 paper. Well-designed tax policy can increase growth, they wrote, but to do so, tax cuts have to come alongside spending cuts.

And even then, it can't just be any spending cuts — it has to be cuts to "unproductive" spending.

"I want to be clear — one can write down models where taxes generate big effects," Gale told NPR. But models are not the real world, he added. "The empirical evidence is quite different from the modeling results, and the empirical evidence is much weaker."

It's not just Gale. According to a 2012 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (referenced by the New York Times' David Leonhardt in a 2012 column), top marginal tax rates and economic growth have not appeared correlated over the past 60 years.

One other nuance — it depends on the type of tax cut. You can imagine how cutting taxes for lower earners might boost activity more than cutting the top marginal rate — lower-income Americans with an extra $100 are more likely to spend that money than a millionaire.

Likewise, the economic research firm Moody's found in 2008 that temporary tax cuts (like rebates) could boost GDP, but permanent ones had a much weaker effect. Meanwhile, boosting spending on programs like food stamps and unemployment had a stronger effect, they found.

In short, if your sole, ultimate goal is faster growth, tax cuts might not be the best policy.

Why It Matters, Part 1: What do these plans cost?

This might seem like a stupid question — of course economic growth matters! — but it matters doubly for these tax plans because it affects how much they end up costing. And most of the Republicans' plans look really, really expensive.

A lot of the conversation about revenue in this week's debate focused on estimates from the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning tax policy think tank in Washington, D.C., that has scored many of the GOP candidates' tax plans.
That group releases what are called static and dynamic scores. Dynamic scores are complicated: They take into account potential economic effects — for example, they assume that tax cuts can generate economic growth and therefore, revenue. Static scores are much simpler, ignoring those effects.
And that's a weakness of static scores — policies have effects. But dynamic scores involve the impossible task of predicting the future. A perfect dynamic score would be the best option, but no one knows how to do a perfect dynamic score. So dynamic scores are inherently uncertain as well, and there are a lot of ways to get them wrong.

To see this fight in action, look back to earlier this year, when the Congressional Budget Office, with a new GOP-appointed director, announced it would start issuing dynamic scores.

Or look at the Tax Foundation. Many (Gale included) say the group's dynamic scores are too generous, making policies like tax cuts look cheaper than they really are.

And here's where the bottom line comes in — even if you do believe the Tax Foundation's dynamic scores are way too generous, as of earlier this month, they found that one candidate (Rand Paul) comes out with a plan that won't slash revenue, while most of the other candidates will cut it by more than $1 trillion over 10 years.

Trump's plan, by this math, cuts revenue by $10 trillion over 10 years.

Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both cut taxes deeply on the promise of economic payoffs, putting aside concerns about deficits, which grew during their tenures. Mr. Trump at points during the campaign talked tough about deficits, promising not only to eliminate them but also to wipe out in just eight years the entire $19 trillion in national debt that has accumulated over the history of the United States — a pledge so wildly unrealistic that even he has since dropped it.

While a corporate tax rate cut of the dimension Mr. Trump envisions would reduce tax revenues by more than $2 trillion over the next 10 years, Mr. Mnuchin noted that an increase in economic growth of a little more than one percentage point would generate close to the same amount. The goal, he said, was to produce a sustained national growth rate of 3 percent, instead of the 1.8 percent now projected over the next decade. That would not include the cost of personal income tax cuts.

The question comes down to how the effect of a tax cut is measured. Under what is called static scoring, changes are judged without assuming any difference in growth. Under what is called dynamic scoring, assumptions are made about how much growth will change. “Under dynamic scoring, this will pay for itself,” Mr. Mnuchin said at a public forum last weekend. “Under static scoring, there will be short-term issues.”
Critics scoffed at the math. “There is not a shred of evidence to support the secretary’s pay-for-itself claim,” said Jared Bernstein, a top White House economics adviser under Mr. Obama. “Sure, significantly faster growth would spin off more revenues. But there’s simply no empirical linkage between tax cuts and growth that’s both a lot faster and sustained.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group focused on reducing deficits, said that Mr. Trump’s tax plan was more likely to increase growth by 0.2 percentage points than by the higher estimates Mr. Mnuchin forecast. “These tax cuts, of course, would not pay for themselves,” the group said in a statement. “As we’ve explained before, there is little evidence to suggest any major tax cut could pay for itself with economic growth alone.”

I'm for reducing tax rates to zero. According to how you think you understand your charts, it would not change anything.

Looking at those charts,
it shows average marginal income tax rate being 40% or higher
ever since 1978.
Please advise.

Fritz,

Stimulating the economy by lowering taxes is not about stimulating consumer spending. It's about increasing production.

Alter it, nothing changes. Lower it, nothing changes. Lower it again, nothing changes.

The fallacy Kris is that the only way production gets increased is in response to demand

that's the only point he even tries to make with his graphs.

Looking at those charts,
it shows average marginal income tax rate being 40% or higher
ever since 1978.
Please advise.

why they should be allowed to walk around with a holstered 9 mil in Home Depot ...

The answer is, since in the very next chart the TOP marginal rate in many of those years was 30-36%,
it's not possible for the average rate to be higher than the top marginal rate.

Hitler-"By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise."

"If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed."

"Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong."