Just normal American Utopia...

[deedsker]

7 hours ago, Archy1221 said:

Not necessarily as you could be a car.   Cool snark though.  

 

There is no such thing as “his money only”.  That’s not the way it works.   It’s his/her money plus the employer portion.   So I pick the scenario that includes ALL the SS tax inputs not just half

 

 

Just glad to see your happy that SS works as a method of keeping a majority of people out of intense poverty due to outside forces or personal choices. It really is a remarkable program.

[Guy Chamberlin]

Of course Social Security is based on economies of scale, actuarial tables, and the safest possible investment - Treasury Bonds -- in order to work as a true safety net.  The possibility that you could pull out and make more money elsewhere was always considered, but its not really in the spirit or math of true social security. 

[Archy1221]

 

[TGHusker]

Interesting article on why we have such partisan polarization at this point.   Quoted in part below.

 

 

https://www.wsj.com/politics/why-tribalism-took-over-our-politics-5936f48e

Quote

Ahead of his arrest on Thursday in Georgia, Donald Trump repeatedly told his supporters about the legal peril he faced from charges of election interference. But the danger wasn’t his alone, he said. “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you,” he told a campaign rally.

It was the latest example of the Republican former president employing a potent driver of America’s partisan divide: group identity. Decades of social science research show that our need for collective belonging is forceful enough to reshape how we view facts and affect our voting decisions. When our group is threatened, we rise to its defense.

The research helps explain why Trump has solidified his standing as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination despite facing four indictments since April. The former president has been especially adept at building loyalty by asserting that his supporters are threatened by outside forces. His false claims that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election, which have triggered much of his legal peril, have been adopted by many of his supporters.

Democrats are using the tactic, too, if not as forcefully as Trump. The Biden campaign criticized Republicans in Wednesday’s presidential debate as “extreme candidates” who would undermine democracy, and President Biden himself has accused “MAGA Republicans” of trying to destroy our systems of government. 

The split in the electorate has left many Americans fatigued and worried that partisanship is undermining the country’s ability to solve its problems. Calling themselves America’s “exhausted majority,” tens of thousands of people have joined civic groups, with names such as Braver Angels, Listen First and Unify America, and are holding cross-party conversations in search of ways to lower the temperature in political discourse.

Yet the research on the power of group identity suggests the push for a more respectful political culture faces a disquieting challenge. The human brain in many circumstances is more suited to tribalism and conflict than to civility and reasoned debate.

The differences between the parties are clearer than before. Demographic characteristics are now major indicators of party preference, with noncollege white and more religious Americans increasingly identifying as Republicans, while Democrats now win most nonwhite voters and a majority of white people with a college degree.

“Instead of going into the voting booth and asking, ‘What do I want my elected representatives to do for me,’ they’re thinking, ‘If my party loses, it’s not just that my policy preferences aren’t going to get done,’ ” said Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist. “It’s who I think I am, my place in the world, my religion, my race, the many parts of my identity are all wrapped up in that one vote.”

 

 

 

Quote

 

More than 60% of Republicans and more than half of Democrats now view the other party “very unfavorably,” about three times the shares when Pew Research Center polled on it in the early 1990s. Several polls find that more than 70% within each party think the other party’s leaders are a danger to democracy or back an agenda that would destroy the country.

 

Party allegiance can affect our judgment and behavior, many experiments show. When Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University and Sean J. Westwood, then at Princeton University, asked a group of Democrats and Republicans to review the résumés of two fictitious high-school students in a 2015 study, their subjects proved more likely to award a scholarship to the student who matched their own party affiliation. People in the experiment gave political party more weight than the student’s race or even grade-point average.

In a landmark 2013 study, Dan Kahan, a Yale University law professor, and colleagues assessed the math skills of about 1,000 adults, a mix of self-described liberals, conservatives and moderates. Then, the researchers gave them a politically inflected math problem to solve, presenting data that pointed to whether cities that had banned concealed handguns experienced a decrease or increase in crime. In half the tests, solving the problem correctly showed that a concealed-carry ban reduced crime rates. In the other half, the correct solution would suggest that crime had risen.

The result was striking: The more adept the test-takers were at math, the more likely they were to get the correct answer—but only when the right answer matched their political outlook. When the right answer ran contrary to their political stance—that is, when liberals drew a version of the problem suggesting that gun control was ineffective—they tended to give the wrong answer. They were no more likely to solve the problem correctly than were people in the study who were less adept at math.

To explain why the animosity in American politics is greater today than in the past, some researchers have focused on the nation’s political “sorting”—the fact that Americans have shifted their allegiances so that the membership of each party is now far more uniform. In the past, each party had a mix of people who leaned conservative and liberal, rural residents and urbanites, the religiously devout and those less observant.

 

 

[Lorewarn]

For as much as the right wing media machine whined and fearmongered about 'identity politics' for years they sure seemed to have perfected the thing they hate.

[Archy1221]

How so?

[JJ Husker]

2 hours ago, Archy1221 said:

How so?

The innocent, I don’t get it thing is wearing thin. You know how so and, if you don’t, that’s even worse.

[Archy1221]

49 minutes ago, JJ Husker said:

The innocent, I don’t get it thing is wearing thin. You know how so and, if you don’t, that’s even worse.

 

He made a statement and I asked what he is using to come to that conclusion.  
 

And what the heck is it to you anyways.  No one was talking to you and you have me on ignore (supposedly).   

[JJ Husker]

37 minutes ago, Archy1221 said:

 

He made a statement and I asked what he is using to come to that conclusion.  
 

And what the heck is it to you anyways.  No one was talking to you and you have me on ignore (supposedly).   

It’s like a train wreck….you just can’t look away.

 

And BTW, you’re posting on a public message board. If you want it to be a private discussion, you’re doing it wrong.

[Archy1221]

8 hours ago, JJ Husker said:

 

And BTW, you’re posting on a public message board. If you want it to be a private discussion, you’re doing it wrong

Noooo waaayy!!!!  
 

Since you snarked in, why don’t you tell us all how R’s perfected identify politics

[Archy1221]

 

[Archy1221]

Take out everything else they discuss except the budgeting process and Matt Gaetz actually makes sense on how budgets ought to be made vs the current way of jamming one gigantic bill of $5 trillion to get a yes/no vote on.  Smaller appropriations will solve a good portion of all this government nonsense going on 

 

https://www.mediaite.com/news/matt-gaetz-throws-down-with-maria-bartiromo-after-fox-anchor-accuses-congressman-of-blowing-up-gop-wins-which-wins-please-enumerate-them/

[BigRedBuster]

18 hours ago, Archy1221 said:

Take out everything else they discuss except the budgeting process and Matt Gaetz actually makes sense on how budgets ought to be made vs the current way of jamming one gigantic bill of $5 trillion to get a yes/no vote on.  Smaller appropriations will solve a good portion of all this government nonsense going on 

 

https://www.mediaite.com/news/matt-gaetz-throws-down-with-maria-bartiromo-after-fox-anchor-accuses-congressman-of-blowing-up-gop-wins-which-wins-please-enumerate-them/

True.

 

But, to do that, they actually would have to be in session and working...and when there, actually doing something that is productive to America.

 

 

[Archy1221]

2 minutes ago, BigRedBuster said:

But, to do that, they actually would have to be in session and working...and when there, actually doing something that is productive to America.

Some appropriations bills have already been passed through the committees they are assigned to.  They just haven’t been voted on by entire House which is BS (and yes McCarthy’s fault).   

[Archy1221]