2016 Presidential Election Thread

Which renders your point about journalists, rather pointless.

They're partnered with NBC, which assures that they have a lot of liberals who would support Hillary. Their conservatives, meanwhile, feel that Trump isn't a conservative. They're on the Mitt Romney bandwagon of failure.

And of course the media sees themselves as the gate-keepers, and Trump is busting down the gate. None of them like that.

Or he's simply a typical Democrat from the 1970's or 1980's, actually concerned about working people losing their jobs, etc.

Dumb or delusional? You decide.

Meh, probably both like most of his actual supporters and not the ones who just want to watch the world burn.

Let's see ... where to begin with this dodgy sequence of half-truths strung together with no apparent logic or understanding to create vague innuendos?

First, we should probably bring @shootER in here to explain how TV network affiliations work. The Arizona Republic is not partnered with NBC. They do share ownership with a local station, KPNX, which is an NBC affiliate. NBC does not own KPNX; KPNX simply has a contract that allows it to carry NBC programming, the vast majority of which is entertainment. The odds of NBC News having any influence over KPNX's editorial content are slim to none; the odds of NBC News having any influence over the Arizona Republic are even slimmer.

Second, the connection between the Arizona Republic and KPNX comes from their ownership by Gannett. The chairman of Gannett's board of directors is John Jeffry Lewis III, who is the son of a Reagan administration official and donates heavily to Republicans. He has given $12,500 to the RNC and $5,000 to the Illinois Republican Party. He did give $2,300 to Obama in 2007 -- some donors like to hedge their bets -- but there is no doubt which party he wants to see control the government. He gave $16,000 to Mitt Romney, and has also supported George W. Bush and Carly Fiorina. He also gave $50,000 to S.C. Johnson & Son's PAC, which gives 82% of its money to Republicans.

Meanwhile, your mouth-frothing about "the Mitt Romney bandwagon of failure" rings hollow, since the Shrieking Loon Brigade also declared McCain and Romney "not conservative enough," yet the Republic endorsed them both.

How much twisting, dodging and weaving are you willing to go through in order to deny that your boy Trump is such a raging dumpster fire that even longtime Republican stalwarts refuse to have anything to do with him?

Trump realized that none of the candidates was actually supporting the views of ordinary working-class Americans. Both the Republican and Democrat elites were sold on unlimited immigration and massive trade deals that are shipping US jobs overseas because they're shipping US factories overseas. None of the other candidates were for limiting immigration from Muslim countries.

The problem is analogous to the vast disconnect between EU decisions and the European public's interests. The elites aren't the ones who have to live surrounded by Hispanics or Muslims, the voters are.

Trump is probably going to be the death of the Republican party. All the old fiscal conservatives will leave and create something new, leaving the alt-right Nazis to form their own. The Democrats probably close to splitting too, but they haven't elected Kanye West yet.

I mean seriously, wasn't he a Democrat until just recently? The man has been a sort of self-parody for years to the point where Christopher Walken was basically playing him in Batman Returns. This is cry for help.

What is Trump going to do for these people?

Make America Great Again!

Whatever that means.

Bluster around beating his chest like an insecure drunken redneck in a bar fight, which won't do much to help anyone, but it'll make a handful of the more shallow members of the electorate feel good.

Build a wall, for starters, and actually vet Muslims from countries with severe terrorist problems, such as Pakistan. He'll also no doubt change US policy to allow Christians to immigrate from the Middle East. Currently they don't have a prayer of getting into the US. Some are coming in through Mexico because the normal routes are closed.

And he's going to push for changes in US tax laws so that companies are less likely to relocate overseas just to ship cheaper products back to the US, while making it much easier for them to report their profits here instead of holding them overseas in tax havens, such as Apple does.

And most importantly he's going to push back against political correctness and SJW bullshit that is strangling freedom and political discourse.

So he's going to do things not connected to the problems in their communities. Looks like Tafkats was right.

Those things are deeply connected to problems in communities. The local factories closed down and relocated to Mexico and China. Several neighborhoods filled up with illegals, driving what little wages were left even lower while causing all sorts of crime problems. Farmers are having their copper pipes and backup generators stolen. But when they turn on the news all they here about is more Muslim terrorist attacks, Iran threatening US Navy ships, China claiming the South China sea, ISIS beheading yet more Christians, and black rioters burning and looting another city.

Hillary promises more of all that, as she rakes in millions from Sunni dictators and mysterious Chinese. Trump promises to stop it.

Funny how all our problems are caused by minorities and how getting rid of them will solve them. I certainly haven't heard that before.

So this is packed with contradictions. The jobs all left for Mexico, so the Mexicans came here looking for jobs? You are fucking insane.

He's not trying to get rid of minorities, he's trying to control their numbers by making everyone use the legal immigration system. You see, America has the same problem as Europe. Having built a huge infrastructure and welfare state, the planet's other 6 billion people would love to move right in and sign up for benefits. Europe saw what happens when Merkel threw the doors open. Africans started walking north. The Middle East arrived in endless waves, leaving hundreds of miles of trash strewn along the way. About a third of them can't even read in their native language. They will not find jobs.

So now the social safety nets in Europe are at a crisis point. Either all the native Europeans will have to pay a whole lot more in taxes (and they're already heavily taxed), or the safety nets will have to become a whole lot smaller.

Even Bernie Sanders said that without borders, there is no country, because if everyone can just show up and claim a slice of what was built over centuries, then what's the point of building? Black people sometimes talk about how they're owed something for all the work they did to build this nation. Well, sorry, but the Guatemalans showed up and are claiming a bigger slice than the blacks managed to get.

I guess you haven't read any news in the last 30 years. American factories move to Mexico so they can replace Democrat union workers making $18 an hour with Mexicans making $4 a day. Meanwhile, the Mexicans who aren't content with $4 a day move here and have anchor babies, while sending most of their earnings back to Mexico.

The thing that actually scares me about Trump isn't that he'd actually pull off what he claims he'll do. He can't come close, mainly because Presidents don't have the power to do that and Trump has clearly shown he'll say anything to get support. If a decent portion of the country hated cats, he'd promise to ban catnip. But how much of a clusterfuck things will be for four years. I keep all my shit here. At least with Ted Cruz he would have only banned dancing and executed Kevin Bacon.

Hello, this is reality. Have we met?

No, sorry, that can't be true, because we have no jobs here, they were all shipped to China and Mexico. So that means Mexicans have no reason to come here.

Things will be far worse under Hillary. She's never done anything that didn't become a disaster, a major scandal, or both.

Electing Trump may be like playing Russian roulette, but electing Hillary is playing Russian roulette with a Glock.

Ah, the old misdirection when you've lost the argument.

When why not nominate a more qualified Republican? Is this actually about what's best for the country or scoring a win over Hillary? I thought Republicans were the ones who really loved America, but this proves they're petty children.

We have fewer good union jobs. Those are the first to get shipped out. We have tons of jobs if you like mowing lawns, harvesting tobacco, or picking strawberries at below minimum wage.

The Republican and Democrat elites, and their economists, assured us that all the trade deals would result in more and better jobs. They were wrong. The result was that factory owners shipped their factories to countries with cheaper labor, allowing them to have higher profit margins. This helped the poor in the Third World, but also meant there are no longer Electrolux appliance jobs in town. That union card is now worthless wallet clutter because the owners figured out how to replace the union not with scabs, but with Salvadorans working in El Salvador.

In conventional trade theory, we were good at making vacuum cleaners and refrigerators and Salvadorans were good at growing bananas. So we would trade bananas for refrigerators and both sides would benefit. In reality, our factory owners realized that instead of shipping refrigerators to El Salvador or China, they could ship the whole factory there. Competitive advantage can be boxed up and shipped like any other commodity, and this will make countries compete on wages, which is great for those at the bottom rung in the Third World, but it sucks for those who'd struggled for generations to build a successful working-class life here in the US, complete with two cars and a house with a garage. Instead of the average US wage of $58,000 a year, shipping factories around the world will allow our wages to move toward the world average of $18,000 a year.

Neal Stevenson discussed this in Snow Crash.

When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else

music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
​

Nope, sorry, you don't understand that we are actually bad at making vacuum cleaners. Americans are good at making tech products. Workers in cool places like Seattle and Boston are thriving in industries barely imagined when NAFTA passed. But vacuum cleaner jobs were already gone. Even in the kind of shit holes that wish they could make vacuum cleaners, those jobs were already gone, because Mexicans do it better. NAFTA makes it possible for Americans rto afford Mexican vacuum cleaners. It is not the reason they are manufactured there.

Vacuum cleaners are tech products. Just ask Dyson or Oreck.

And of course our advanced electronic manufacturing has also moved to Mexico, where countless plants churn out satellite radios, cell phones, and TV's.

What you fail to understand is that we don't actually have some genetically bestowed advantage that makes our workers better than Filipino or Chinese workers. We just cost more to employ. The Electrolux plant in Michigan thrived for generations. Then wham.

West Michigan Links: How workers are doing 5 years after massive Electrolux plant closed in Greenville

It has been five years since Electrolux closed its Greenville plant and sent 2,781 jobs to Mexico.​

So we were apparently great at building Electrolux appliances until 2005. And as part of the tragedy, Electrolux sent people from the Greenville plant to Mexico to train their replacements. A lot of plants do that when they move. All that human capital we have built up over countless decades, the hard lessons learned and put in books of standards and procedures, the management secrets, the production short cuts? We take all that, go into a Third World country, and pass all that knowledge to them along with all our tooling and equipment. The profits soar. The stock booms. Nobody in Greenville can find an equivalent job to the one they lost. Now they work at Dairy Queen.

Conventional trade theory didn't consider that a country could actually box and ship its competitive advantage, or that any sane person would ever do that. But it's actually extremely profitable for the owners, who get to hire the cheapest labor in the world to do the work that very expensive labor figured out how to do.

Many other countries don't do things like that. Japanese car companies build cars all around the world, even in Russia and India, but they don't ship many back to Japan. That's because Japan was paranoid about imports.

China, too, views trade as a one-way street. Instead of buying an American or British product, they'll buy an American or British production line and sell us the products we used to make here. They make money. The factory owners make money. Our workers find another job at Sir Pizza.

It's going to be great when all the manufacturing comes back to America and promptly fails because it's going to have to still compete with manufacturing all around the globe.

Americans want cheap cheap cheap and they're conditioned for cheap cheap cheap. Walmart isnt going to start buying 100% American, especially when those American goods are 12x the cost. When Americans start seeing the cost associated with goods produced domestically they're going to lose their shit.

The only way there's a hope of it working are to import workers from around the world who will work for $20 a day, and even that might not work - right now I can buy a container of peaches from china for $17,200 and ship it over the pacific for $1300. If I bought out of California the container would cost $36,000 and the freight over land would cost me $4500.