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The Democrat's roster for a Trump - beater in 2020


swordfish

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So far: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2019/jan/17/2020-election-candidates-list-democrats-primaries-trump-bernie-sanders-joe-biden-elizabeth-warren-kamala-harris-beto-o-rourke-running

Elizabeth Warren - (Fauxcahontas) Everybody knows her by now.......

Richard Ojeda - West Virginia - He believes the Democratic party has forsaken its working-class roots by catering to special interests and corporate donors.

John Delaney - Maryland - The multimillionaire banking entrepreneur wants to build a big-tent party that appeals to independents and moderate Republicans. 

Andrew Yang - His central plank is a plan to give every American adult a salary of $1,000 per month paid for by a tax on companies that benefit the most from automation. 

Julian Castro - Former HUD guy, grandson of an immigrant......

Tulsi Gabbard - The Hawaii congresswoman is an Iraq war veteran who has vowed to run a campaign focused on issues of “war and peace”.

Kirsten Gillibrand - New York Senator, Female Activist

Kamala Harris - California Senator and Certified Trump hater.

And now (I told you so) Pete Buttigieg - Indiana Mayor from South Bend.  Openly gay Rhodes Scholar, served in the Navy Reserve - Did a tour in Afghanistan.  Championed roundabouts all over in South Bend and St. Joe County.....

https://www.apnews.com/b6a09c1f2a0646a7b68b3091873279a5

When all is said and done (IMHO) - the mayor from South Bend, Indiana just wants a seat at the democrat's table.

 

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On 1/23/2019 at 12:48 PM, gonzoron said:

Where’s the Republican list of Trump-beaters?

I still think it is plausible that Donnie decides not to run for reelection. He didn't want to win in the first place and he is simply too old, meaning from my point of view too late in his life to want to deal with the job.

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On 1/23/2019 at 1:26 PM, gonzoron said:

I think if Johnson hadn't pulled out, he may well have been primaried too.

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1 hour ago, DK_Barons said:

I still think it is plausible that Donnie decides not to run for reelection. He didn't want to win in the first place and he is simply too old, meaning from my point of view too late in his life to want to deal with the job.

Or he was just unfit for the job in the first place, and did a poor job (as was expected) once in office, and this allows him to “save face”?

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47 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

Or he was just unfit for the job in the first place, and did a poor job (as was expected) once in office, and this allows him to “save face”?

Unfortunately, I see that as the primary reason I could be wrong. That is just the type of thing that drives him. 

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2 hours ago, DK_Barons said:

Unfortunately, I see that as the primary reason I could be wrong. That is just the type of thing that drives him. 

While that kind of thing drives him, I think he's likely to take a potential opening if it's offered to him in the form of a split in the GOP ranks where he can blame issues on them and then exit stage left.  He can say, "I had everything going my way, but the Deep State folks like Romney, Murkowski, Collins, Flake, just could let the status quo go and, until they are all gone, it doesn't make sense to waste any more of anyone's time on this.  When the people get serious about getting rid of the status quo in the GOP, then perhaps I'll come back."  Now that will never come to fruition, but it will provide for him to "even some old scores" as he exists.  It'll also allow him to do birther-like attacks across the board, but especially against any Republican's who didn't give him full reign ... including folks like Graham who flopped back and forth.  I also would not put it past him to buy part interest in a news outlet and continue his "fight" from the outside where he can be the guy in the spotlight without actually having to worry about being in the story.

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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/84-year-old-ex-san-francisco-mayor-so-what-if-i-dated-kamala-harris

The 84-year-old former Mayor of San Francisco also claimed a role in boosting Harris’ political career in a piece published in the San Francisco Chronicle over the weekend titled, “Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?”

“Yes, we dated,” Brown wrote in the piece. “Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker. And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco.”

Brown engaged in an extramarital affair with Harris when she was a 30-year-old prosecutor and he was in his 60s and serving as speaker of the California Assembly.

In 2003, the San Francisco Weekly reported that Brown had appointed Harris to two highly paid patronage positions in California’s state government and also appointed her to the California Medical Assistance Commission, where she attended two meetings a month for a $150,000 salary, in inflation-adjusted terms.

After their relationship ended, Brown continued to boost Harris’ career by supporting her run for district attorney and later clearing the field for Harris to become a U.S. senator when he called on former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to stay out of the Senate race.

Harris, 54, launched her 2020 Democratic bid for president last week and is one of the more high-profile lawmakers to join the race, which is expected to be crowded.

Brown said in his piece that he helped multiple lawmakers' careers, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; Gov. Gavin Newsom; Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; among others.

“The difference is that Harris is the only one who, after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I 'so much as jaywalked' while she was D.A.,” Brown wrote. “That’s politics for ya.”

OMG - I could understand this guy sleeping with Harris, he should be proud of that, but I am having a hard time with the other 2 listed, hoping for a different story there......

Interesting - Harris is leading in the early polls, so it looks like the mud has started slinging on the Dem side.......

 

 

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27 minutes ago, swordfish said:

Interesting - Harris is leading in the early polls, so it looks like the mud has started slinging on the Dem side.......

 

Yep. Here is some more:  https://tomluongo.me/2019/01/27/democrats-begin-eating-themselves-prepping-for-2020/

Quote

Ideological possession always ends in pogroms. When the leadership of the most powerful organization in the world is at stake nothing is off limits, especially for power-hungry Democrats.

This is why we’re now seeing a concerted effort to smear Bernie Sanders just after he announced his Presidential campaign for 2020. The Democrats blame him for splitting the party in 2016 which allowed Trump to win.

This, of course, is nonsense. Trump took up Bernie’s mantle of championing Hillary’s ‘deplorables’ and repackaged it as MAGA. Simply good marketing. And since she didn’t have a campaign and was seen as one of the architects of the policies which brought those people out for Bernie, handicapping the election was really easy.

The response was predictable. The American left lost its collective mind in November 2016.

Since then, to assuage their grief, they have latched onto the patently insane idea that Trump was an agent of the Kremlin. As Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has dragged on and on we’ve been given the pretty clear picture that it was Hillary and the rest of the DNC who concocted this story to get Trump removed from office.

And failing that it would be an open wound to keep Democrats hopeful, Trump chasing his tail and any reforms he might make to the unreal levels of corruption in D.C. stymied.

All of this in the hopes of ruining Trump for the Democrats to win in 2020. It was coldly calculated. The media was happy to oblige. And what’s next is the demonization of Bernie Sanders.

Burning for Bernie

Because Bernie Sanders is a secret Kremlin agent.

You see, at some point in the past Bernie’s campaign manager worked with *gasp* Paul Manafort! And that makes him a suspect. Then he wouldn’t vote for sanctions and wasn’t for endless war with Russia.

Caitlin Johnstone has a great article up detailing the insanity of the Bernie as Russian Spy story. She’s right that it is the delusional RussiaGate that has made this possible.

Since it [RussiaGate] has no basis in facts or reality, the only way to keep alive a crisis that is made of pure narrative is to keep feeding it with more narrative. Anyone who has helped do that is partly responsible for the frenzied, hysterical environment we now see before us in which a Bernie Sanders campaign which hasn’t even begun yet is already being undermined by completely baseless allegations of Kremlin collusion.

And Ms. Johnstone is also correct that Bernie himself, keeping his 2020 aspirations high, has helped the very thing being used to smear him now, RussiaGate.

But, this smear campaign has a cause, and it isn’t just the lunatic Left smarting over the rejection of their lunacy by desperate, ten-toothed deplorables.

Because the DNC are delusional enough to think that it was Bernie, like Ralph Nader in 2000, who cost the Democrats the presidency. It couldn’t have possibly been a terrible candidate, lack of message, and appearing as the party of the unelected oligarchy who were too busy strip-mining the country to notice that a lot of people were really angry about it.

No. It was Bernie’s fault. Self-reflection is not a strong point of ideologues.

You see, Bernie could have been a Manchurian Candidate all along as part of Putin’s nefarious plot to thwart the imperial aspirations of the anointed femi-Nazi Hillary.

These are talking points created by the Clinton wing of the DNC to discredit Bernie by painting him with the guilt-by-association brush.

There are few things in this life that made me laugh louder than this.

But it is also very dangerous.

Proxy Wars

Turning the mob on Bernie is exactly the same type of thinking that led to funding the Mujahadeen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

It’s the same misguided planning that created ISIS to overthrow Assad. Use proxies to undermine your opponent. Accuse them of things patently untrue and raise suspicion of them and their motives.

Then create an army of radicalized, frothing-at-the-mouth, unthinking lunatics to do your bidding on the battlefield. It doesn’t matter whether its the Syrian desert or the digital ones of Twitter and Facebook. What matters is keeping people hating The Other with an intensity that defies reason and ensures that no outside information makes it through the filter of the cult.

Alinsky 101. And who is the chief Alinskyite of the DNC? Hillary Clinton.

Make no mistake that’s because Hillary still thinks she can win a rematch in 2020.

Still think Hillary isn’t running? So it’s just coincidence that days after Kamala Harris (D – Herself) announced her candidacy Willie Brown breaks his silence on their affair.

This is prima facia evidence that the Democrats’ crazy has jumped the shark, however. In their single-minded quest to beat Trump the Clintons and their allies do not see the damage they are doing to not only the institutions they think they deserve to control but also to their own feathered nests.

The problem here is the unintended consequences of unleashing forces you can’t control. Proxy wars (political or military) create knock-on effects that grow beyond you.

They take on lives of their own. This is especially true among leftists who have rejected all other forms of limits on their behavior. They have been encouraged, by people like Clinton, to view culture as despotic.

Pelosi calls walls immoral.

New York has made infanticide a legal right.

The MAGA hat is the new Swastika.

It’s not about ideas anymore. It’s about purity. And the left turning on Bernie Sanders was already in full swing before Hillary mobilized a few of her media quislings.

This mania leads to people becoming so insane they think it’s okay to incite violence against 15 year old kids for standing still and smiling inext to grown men act like jackasses in public while cheering on pre-pubescent transvestite drag queens.

Do you think Hillary has the chops to navigate this insanity for a year and a half?

She couldn’t handle Trump in 2016… or campaigning for that matter.

Eat the Rich

Your clue that things have reached that point is none other than everyone’s media darling, Marxist lunatic Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez.

Machine Democrats lost seats in the primaries to ideologues like Cortez. She’s not stupid, folks. She’s Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton 30 years ago. And she’s going to run their playbook better than they ever did.

Pelosi has no idea what she’s up against. She still thinks she’s got this under control. But she is in a fight for her political life with Trump over the border wall which he will win if he wants to.

Because he’s laying the groundwork to declare the emergency after raking them over the coals politically. He can’t lose this fight to her now when he has all the tools to make it happen. She’s the one with no cards to play now that the government is back in business looting people.

All it will take to beat her is a small cadre of Democrats to cross the line and cut a deal with Trump. He already offered a politically reasonable trade.

Does anyone think AOC won’t lead a small insurrection against Nasty Nancy over this? Or, at least, demand even more concessions from the party vis a vis committee appointments.

The Hildebeast

Hillary is the queen of slash and burn politics. She is Emperor Palpatine without the charisma.

And she’s also, like all generals, fighting the last war. Sending her media shock troops out against Bernie Sanders, a man already reviled for selling out to her in 2016, is an admission that she’s completely out of touch with the realities of 2019.

What Hillary is missing is that the political calculus of her past is over. If you don’t speak for the people you cannot win today. She will not be able to remake herself into a populist. She is damaged goods at a fundamental level. The kids who voted for AOC will never vote for her.

The Deplorables no matter how upset they are with Trump, if he stands firm on the wall and throws them some crumbs on foreign policy, will happily vote for him over her.

Hillary’s not stupid, however. She knows the Democratic field is a puddle rather than a lake. So she is looking to destroy up front those candidates she thinks are the strongest.

It’s why Fauxcahontas will get a pass because she’s a laughing stock and even more unlikeable than Hillary is.

And that’s why Hillary’s throwing her hat in the ring now, via her proxies. But, between now and when she actually announces she will let her opposition Democrats fall on each other like zombies on the last corpse.

Hillary 2020.  It's just a matter of time.

 

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https://apnews.com/0a2b5a89587e44568481c133356f262c

NEW YORK (AP) — Some of the most influential forces in Democratic politics revolted Monday against former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s prospective presidential bid, insisting that an independent run would unintentionally help President Donald Trump win another four years in office.

The critics included the Democratic chairman of Schultz’s home state, another billionaire businessman who long flirted with an independent run of his own, former President Barack Obama’s chief strategist, and the most powerful super PAC in Democratic politics.

“If Schultz entered the race as an independent, we would consider him a target. ... We would do everything we can to ensure that his candidacy is unsuccessful,” said Patrick McHugh, executive director of Priorities USA, which spent nearly $200 million in the 2016 presidential contest.

Specifically, he seized on Schultz’s apparent willingness to cut entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security to narrow the federal deficit.

“The bottom line,” McHugh said, “is that I don’t think Americans are looking for another selfish billionaire to enter the race.”

The intense pushback in the early days of the 2020 campaign reflects the passion Democrats are bringing to the race to deny Trump a second term. Rank-and-file voters and party officials alike are anxious about any hurdle that would prevent them from seizing on Trump’s unpopularity.

While no independent has won the presidency since George Washington, Democrats fear that Schultz would almost certainly split their vote and give Trump an easier path to re-election. Yet Democrats concede that they had few tools to dissuade Schultz from launching an independent campaign — as he told CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday he was considering — though many were skeptical that he would actually follow through.

Schultz felt the passion of the anti-Trump resistance moments after he took the stage Monday evening in New York City to promote his new book.

“Don’t help elect Trump, you egotistical billionaire!” a protester shouted before being ejected by security.

In an interview with The Associated Press after the appearance, he acknowledged that his prospective run might be “threatening” to some Democrats, but said, “my heart’s in the right place.”

Wow - The backlash from the left is swift on this one.....Will there be anyone allowed by the left to run as an independent in 2020?  If the dems are successful with their "boycott Starbucks" march, Starbucks may have to close......

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3 hours ago, swordfish said:

https://apnews.com/0a2b5a89587e44568481c133356f262c

NEW YORK (AP) — Some of the most influential forces in Democratic politics revolted Monday against former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s prospective presidential bid, insisting that an independent run would unintentionally help President Donald Trump win another four years in office.

 

Who's Afraid of Howard Schultz? Just About Everyone, and They're Right To Be: http://reason.com/blog/2019/01/29/whos-afraid-of-howard-schultz-just-about

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The former Starbucks CEO is getting dragged by liberals and progressives because he is talking about debt and spending in ways they don't like.

Last night I went to the Barnes & Noble bookstore in New York City's Union Square to hear Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, talk about his new book, From the Ground Up, and his possible presidential bid. It's an understatement to say that Democratic Party activists, liberals, and progressives have responded negatively to Schultz's talk of running for president (he says he'll make a final decision after roaming around the country in an obligatory book tour cum "listening campaign").

That's a shame for at least two reasons. First, Schultz is foregrounding serious issues, especially the gigantic and endlessly metastasizing national debt, but also ever-proliferating calls for new and massive entitlements—Medicare for All!, Free College for All!, Guaranteed Jobs for All!, etc. Second, Schultz's style of talking and engagement is a welcome respite from the amped-up, over-the-top rhetoric in which both Donald Trump and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez traffic. I don't think Schultz has any real shot at becoming the next president and I don't agree with him on many things, but for god's sake, he is staging exactly the sort of conversation we desperately need to have as a nation.

 

Within the first couple of minutes, Schultz, a billionaire who grew up in projects in Brooklyn, was heckled by a protester shouting:

Don't help elect Trump, you egotistical billionaire asshole...Go back to getting ratioed on twitter. Go back to Davos with the other billionaire elite, who think they know how to run the world.

 

The heckler speaks in only slightly more graphic terms than many folks on the Democratic-to-left side of the political spectrum. For instance, New York Times columnist and former Nation scribe Michelle Goldberg pleaded, "Howard Schultz, Please Don't Run for President: A bid by an ex-chief of Starbucks would be reckless idiocy." She calls his potential bid "a narcissistic spoiler campaign." The fear, which is widespread on the broadly defined left, is that Schultz will somehow take votes away from any Democratic challenger and thus hand Donald Trump a second term (this fear is wrong on multiple levels, not least of which is that it's wrong about electoral history). But here's former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau wheezing out similar anxieties while also slagging Schultz for being rich.

None of the explanations coming from Howard Schultz or his advisors answer a very simple question: if he thinks he has a winning message, why can't he run in the Democratic primary? Why does he get to skip that contest? Just because he's a billionaire?

Would love an answer.

— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) January 29, 2019

Schultz, adds Favreau, "is afraid that if he tells half the country's voters what he truly believes, they'll reject him. So he's buying his way right to the general."

Actually, no. Last night and in other interviews, Schultz is perfectly clear on why, if he runs, he will do so as a "centrist independent." He openly disagrees with a lot of ideas that dominate Democratic Party discourse and he doesn't want to be forced into accepting those policies. Specifically, he's criticized Sen. Elizabeth Warren's asset tax on "tippy-top" earners, and a whole host of tax-funded giveaways that he says we can't afford. For instance, he spoke about the cost of single-payer health insurance plans, which will almost certainly be part of the DNC's 2020 platform. He noted that California's total state budget is currently around $150 billion but the cost for Gov. Gavin Newsom's version of single-payer runs toward $400 billion. Even as he talked forcefully about growing up poor, with parents from the Greatest Generation who failed to participate in the post-war economic boom, he refused to say government should be all things to all people. In his various interviews over the past week or two, he never misses an opportunity to talk about how a $21 trillion debt is the single biggest problem we need to reckon with. He's right to say it not only ties the hands of government (and the ligatures get tighter as interest rates rise) but also that it inhibits broad-based economic growth, the best way to increase living standards. He also refused to be penitent about being rich last night, at one point saying he helped to create a great company and wasn't going to apologize for his or anyone else's success. He called the class-warfare rhetoric used by so many Democrats "so un-American"! In other words, he doesn't fit very well in today's Democratic Party.

 

Cue Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is running for president herself:

 

What's "ridiculous" is billionaires who think they can buy the presidency to keep the system rigged for themselves while opportunity slips away for everyone else. The top 0.1%, who'd pay my #UltraMillionaireTax, own about the same wealth as 90% of America. It's time for change. https://t.co/D04G5fNvpa

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) January 29, 2019

 

 

Well, that's what elections are for, to hammer out definitions of what's ridiculous, right? It's an odd thing, really, to see Democrats and progressives mad as hell that Schultz won't run as a Democrat but than never missing an opportunity to put him down as latter-day robber baron who is so out of touch with the little people that he should go back to sipping lattes on his mega-yacht. Over at the Center for American Progress, a liberal political group, Neera Tanden calls Schultz's possible run as an independent "disgusting" and calls for a boycott of Starbucks if he goes through with it. "Schultz," sniffs the Times' Goldberg, "appears to share the conviction, endemic among American elites, that the country hungers for a candidate who is socially liberal but fiscally conservative."

Ah, now we're getting somewhere, aren't we? It's not really that Schultz is threatening to run as an independent, it's that he's already thinking as an independent. At Barnes & Noble, he hit any number of great notes beyond fiscal responsibility. He stressed the need for economic mobility, made a practical and humanitarian case for immigration, questioned both Trump's and earlier presidents' foreign policy as often reckless and open-ended. Mostly, though, he was raising topics for actual debate, rather than as occasions to bark out increasingly shrill or stupid talking points. He was at times emotional but never shouty or irrational. He also stressed that voters who identify as independent are the single largest group. He's also betting that people are tired of contemporary, increasingly tribal politics. When he ran Starbucks, he was regularly pilloried by conservatives for all sorts of irredeemably liberal things, such as refusing to use the phrase Merry Christmas on their cups to Schultz's endorsement of Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the current context, liberals hate him because he actually believes in free market capitalism.

Which isn't to say he isn't angering folks on the right. As Scott H. Greenfield observes, Schultz's economic realism mixed with liberal social ideas is to progressives what garlic is to vampires. At the same time, Schultz "is the real deal of the businessman-president model, because he's actually a wealthy, successful businessman." That helps to explain why Donald Trump was quick to call Schultz out when he appeared on 60 Minutes:

 

Howard Schultz doesn't have the "guts" to run for President! Watched him on @60Minutes last night and I agree with him that he is not the "smartest person." Besides, America already has that! I only hope that Starbucks is still paying me their rent in Trump Tower!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2019

Others on the Republican side of things are more welcoming, and not because they think he will drain votes away from the eventual Democratic nominee. Writing in National Review, John Fund notes:

Regardless of what he ultimately decides, Shultz's decision to run would be welcome if for no other reason than that he might address issues that both Trump and the Democrats are afraid to touch. "I think the greatest threat domestically to the country is this $21 trillion debt hanging over the cloud of America and future generations," Schultz told CNBC.

"If he is anything, Howard Schultz is a straight shooter," says John Carlson, the leading talk-show host in Seattle, where Starbucks is headquartered. "He could force both parties to expand the political debate," he told me.

Based on what I've read so far and what I saw last night, this is exactly right. Schultz is certainly not a doctrinaire libertarian, even if he is "socially liberal" and "fiscally conservative." He almost certainly believes in a government that is bigger and more expensive than I'm comfortable with.

There's almost no way he can actually win, especially if he runs as an independent, but since when should getting elected be the main goal of politics? He's staging an alternative conversation to the increasingly awful one that Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, insist on having while the ship of state bears down on that deadly iceberg on the horizon. Schultz is pointing in a new direction, one we should all be heading towards unless we are committed to self-destruction.

As one of the comments to this excellent commentary by Mr. Gillepsie says:

Quote

In all seriousness, the sense of entitlement Democrats give off when they bitch at Schultz is telling. They think they have a right to win in 2020 simply because Trump is bad. This says a lot.

 

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Ms. Harris is on the socialism bandwagon right from the start of her campaign: Under Medicare for All, If You Like Your Insurance Plan, You Can’t Keep It: http://reason.com/blog/2019/01/29/kamala-harris-medicare-for-all-private

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Under Medicare for All, if you like your private insurance plan, you can't keep it.

When President Obama made the case for the Affordable Care Act, he said on dozens of occasions that anyone who likes their doctor or their insurance plan would be able to keep it under the new law. That proved untrue when the law resulted in several million people losing access to their existing plans. But the promise was made because Obama and his advisers believed it was necessary to maintain public support for the law. Two decades earlier, President Bill Clinton's effort to remake the U.S. health care system failed after industry-funded advertisements drove public opposition by warning that some people would lose their existing insurance plans.

Obamacare's backers thus believed that promising to avoid disruption was a key—arguably the key—to ensuring the law's initial political success. Without it, the whole effort would collapse.

 

Heading into 2020, single-payer proponents appear to be adopting essentially the opposite strategy. The national health care plan put forth by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would eliminate all current private insurance over a four-year time frame. And at a town hall event last night, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Ca.), who recently launched her presidential campaign, said she wants to eliminate private insurance entirely, which would mean that about 177 million people would lose their existing plan.

After noting that the Sanders-sponsored Medicare for All legislation that Harris supports would totally eliminate all private insurance, moderator Jake Tapper asked, "So for people out there who like their insurance—they don't get to keep it?"

Harris responded with a somewhat winding answer that amounts to a yes.

"The idea," she said, "is that everyone gets access to medical care and you don't have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through all the paperwork, all of the delay that may require. Who of us have not had that situation where you have to wait for approval and the doctor says, 'I don't know if your insurance company is going to cover this.' Let's eliminate all of that. Let's move on." (Emphasis mine.)

It's worth taking a moment to think about what Harris is saying here, and just how condescending it is.

She is not just saying that dealing with private insurance is sometimes annoying, which most people would agree is true, and that this should be fixed. Nor is she saying that private insurance has limitations or is insufficient, that it sometimes leaves people and conditions untreated. She is not making a case against private health insurance that is dysfunctional or disliked; she is arguing for the complete elimination of insurance plans that people have had positive experiences with—plans that, as Tapper says, people like.

In other words, if you like your private health insurance plan, you can't keep it, because the plan that you like is bad, and politicians like Harris will decide what you really need instead. A majority of Americans with employer-sponsored plans are satisfied with their insurance coverage, according to an industry survey. Harris is starting her 2020 campaign by telling them they are wrong.

Perhaps the politics of health care have changed since Obama made his pledge; I suspect not. Just last week, a surveyfound that that only 37 percent of the public supported Medicare for All when told it would eliminate private health insurance. The disruption of existing coverage remains broadly unpopular.

Harris is not only promising disruption (and on a far larger scale than what occurred under Obamacare), she is promising to fully eliminate coverage arrangements that millions of people are happy with in order to radically expand political control of the provision of health care. What she is saying is that it doesn't matter if you like your health care plan if she doesn't.

Scary.

 

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https://wsbt.com/news/local/south-bend-mayor-talks-possible-2020-presidential-bid-on-cbs-this-morning?fbclid=IwAR0bvoNbZcdX7V3gWBVlr1nG9xj9W38TUN2XrJlGUDXn-xp6YQURLq8a7UY

Here is a transcript of the interview:

NORAH O’DONNELL: The Iowa caucuses are 368 days away, and the potential field of democratic candidates is quickly growing. The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, launched a presidential exploratory committee last week. The 37-year-old has spent seven years in charge of the city he grew up in. He's a Harvard graduate, he’s a Rhodes Scholar. He’s known as Mayor Pete. He was also deployed to Afghanistan for seven months with the U.S. Navy Reserve. And he’s got a new book out called "Shortest Way Home: one mayor's challenge, and a model for America’s future." we have the interview you'll see first on "CBS This Morning." Mayor Buttigieg, welcome.

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Good morning thanks for having me.

NORAH O’DONNELL: How's—how’s the great state of Indiana?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: A bit chilly, but other than that we are good.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Very cold indeed. I also wanted to start by giving our condolences. I know your father passed away on Sunday.

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Thank you. Appreciate that. I know he would have been watching if he could.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Thank you for being here, so you're 37. Uh your town-- you represent a town of 102,000 people. Did I get that right?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: That’s about right. Yeah.

NORAH O’DONNELL: What qualifies you to be President of the United States?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Well for starters, the experience. I know that I’m the youngest person in this conversation, but I think the experience of leading a city through a transformation is really relevant right now. Look, I’ve got more experience in government than the president of the United States. I’ve got more years of executive experience than the Vice President. I have more military experience than anybody who's arrived behind that desk since George H.W. Bush. I get that it's not a conventional background, but I don't think this is a time for conventional backgrounds in Washington right now.

JOHN DICKERSON: Can you explain to people what that experience means when the rubber meets the road. What -- how's that going to help people in this country?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: See the instinct to do the job. So whether we're talking about the presidency or a job like governor or mayor, you know, there are three parts to it. It’s bringing people together, it's implementing good policies, and it's capably running an administration. All of those have been missing right now in Washington. And I think, you know, American mayors in cities of any size, I think represent one of the levels, maybe the only level of American government left that's generally working well.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Well we all like to say that all politics are local. But the last time that a sitting mayor was nominated for President to a major party was 1812.

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Why should you be different? Why should you be the outlier?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: I mean that’s doing better than the last time a reality TV star was elected president, right? Things are changing tectonically in our country. And we can't just keep doing what we've been doing. We can't nibble around the edges of the system that no longer works. The experience of the industrial Midwest is exactly the kind of experience that uh politics, forgive me, but here on the coast uh has been ignoring. And especially in my party, that's come at a terrible cost.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Let's talk about something that you're familiar with and obviously that's time serving overseas in Afghanistan. You spent seven months there. What do you think of the president's potential plan now of moving troops back home?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Well, we've got to get out of Afghanistan. I mean, there are people we are now old enough almost to be deployed who weren't even born when 9/11 took place. We’ve also got to make sure that the way we do it doesn't leave us vulnerable as some Intel assessments have said we would be, to being attacked again within two years if we allow terrorist networks to develop in a failed state. It’s a good sign that the Taliban is willing to talk, and if they're serious about putting their weapons aside, that could be a pathway to peace. But, I’m a little puzzled that we haven’t had the Afghan government itself that we recognize as a legitimate government at the table. We’ve got to make sure that they're involved because any peace we come up with could very quickly collapse if we don't have them as a party.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Those peace talks have not included that?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: It's shuttle diplomacy, right? They go – they sit down with the Taliban in Doha, then you know, we’re told that Khalilzad was conferring with the Afghan government, giving them, I guess a heads-up. But, we’ve got to find a way to get them to the table.

JOHN DICKERSON: When you talk about nibbling around the edges, if you look at the other Democrats who are running, they're not nibbling around the edges. They’re talking about Medicare for all. Some are talking about getting rid of private insurance. So, that’s the competition you have. So what is your idea that it is so big that it -- nobody would mistake it for nibbling around the edges?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Well, first of all, we've got to repair our democracy. The Electoral College needs to go because it's made our society less and less democratic. Now we can talk about a lot of different policy ideas, and will on everything from security to health care. But you know, our party has this tendency to lead with the policies, go to the 14-point plan and give you the binders and the power points. First we've got to explain our values and explain why democrats are, are committed to freedom, to democracy, to security. That democracy piece has to be fixed before anything else will go well in this country.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Just to, just to clarify what John was asking about -- do you support Medicare for all?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: I do. I also think that on the road to get there, there are a lot of things not being talked about enough.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Mayor Bloomberg, who likely joined the race, says it would bankrupt the country.

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Well, it would bankrupt this country if we didn't pay for it. And right now in Washington, a lot of things are being done that aren't paid for. By the way, my generation's the one that's going to face the bill for that. So as somebody who's, god willing, planning to be here in 2054 when I reach the current age of the current president, I care a lot about making sure that anything we do is sustainable. But this is the norm in most developed countries. So the idea that it is radical or impossible to do something that the citizens of most western countries already enjoy, that just doesn't add up to me. If other people can have that, why can't Americans have that, too?

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: That’s conversation that many in this country are currently having right now, including potential president hopefuls. Thank you so much. Again, our condolences on the loss of your father.

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Appreciate it, thank you.

He doesn't mention Round-a-bouts and Limebikes for the entire country......But he does mention "the Electoral College" needs to go.......

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9 minutes ago, swordfish said:

https://wsbt.com/news/local/south-bend-mayor-talks-possible-2020-presidential-bid-on-cbs-this-morning?fbclid=IwAR0bvoNbZcdX7V3gWBVlr1nG9xj9W38TUN2XrJlGUDXn-xp6YQURLq8a7UY

Here is a transcript of the interview:

NORAH O’DONNELL: The Iowa caucuses are 368 days away, and the potential field of democratic candidates is quickly growing. The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, launched a presidential exploratory committee last week. The 37-year-old has spent seven years in charge of the city he grew up in. He's a Harvard graduate, he’s a Rhodes Scholar. He’s known as Mayor Pete. He was also deployed to Afghanistan for seven months with the U.S. Navy Reserve. And he’s got a new book out called "Shortest Way Home: one mayor's challenge, and a model for America’s future." we have the interview you'll see first on "CBS This Morning." Mayor Buttigieg, welcome.

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Good morning thanks for having me.

NORAH O’DONNELL: How's—how’s the great state of Indiana?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: A bit chilly, but other than that we are good.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Very cold indeed. I also wanted to start by giving our condolences. I know your father passed away on Sunday.

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Thank you. Appreciate that. I know he would have been watching if he could.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Thank you for being here, so you're 37. Uh your town-- you represent a town of 102,000 people. Did I get that right?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: That’s about right. Yeah.

NORAH O’DONNELL: What qualifies you to be President of the United States?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Well for starters, the experience. I know that I’m the youngest person in this conversation, but I think the experience of leading a city through a transformation is really relevant right now. Look, I’ve got more experience in government than the president of the United States. I’ve got more years of executive experience than the Vice President. I have more military experience than anybody who's arrived behind that desk since George H.W. Bush. I get that it's not a conventional background, but I don't think this is a time for conventional backgrounds in Washington right now.

JOHN DICKERSON: Can you explain to people what that experience means when the rubber meets the road. What -- how's that going to help people in this country?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: See the instinct to do the job. So whether we're talking about the presidency or a job like governor or mayor, you know, there are three parts to it. It’s bringing people together, it's implementing good policies, and it's capably running an administration. All of those have been missing right now in Washington. And I think, you know, American mayors in cities of any size, I think represent one of the levels, maybe the only level of American government left that's generally working well.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Well we all like to say that all politics are local. But the last time that a sitting mayor was nominated for President to a major party was 1812.

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Why should you be different? Why should you be the outlier?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: I mean that’s doing better than the last time a reality TV star was elected president, right? Things are changing tectonically in our country. And we can't just keep doing what we've been doing. We can't nibble around the edges of the system that no longer works. The experience of the industrial Midwest is exactly the kind of experience that uh politics, forgive me, but here on the coast uh has been ignoring. And especially in my party, that's come at a terrible cost.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Let's talk about something that you're familiar with and obviously that's time serving overseas in Afghanistan. You spent seven months there. What do you think of the president's potential plan now of moving troops back home?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Well, we've got to get out of Afghanistan. I mean, there are people we are now old enough almost to be deployed who weren't even born when 9/11 took place. We’ve also got to make sure that the way we do it doesn't leave us vulnerable as some Intel assessments have said we would be, to being attacked again within two years if we allow terrorist networks to develop in a failed state. It’s a good sign that the Taliban is willing to talk, and if they're serious about putting their weapons aside, that could be a pathway to peace. But, I’m a little puzzled that we haven’t had the Afghan government itself that we recognize as a legitimate government at the table. We’ve got to make sure that they're involved because any peace we come up with could very quickly collapse if we don't have them as a party.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Those peace talks have not included that?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: It's shuttle diplomacy, right? They go – they sit down with the Taliban in Doha, then you know, we’re told that Khalilzad was conferring with the Afghan government, giving them, I guess a heads-up. But, we’ve got to find a way to get them to the table.

JOHN DICKERSON: When you talk about nibbling around the edges, if you look at the other Democrats who are running, they're not nibbling around the edges. They’re talking about Medicare for all. Some are talking about getting rid of private insurance. So, that’s the competition you have. So what is your idea that it is so big that it -- nobody would mistake it for nibbling around the edges?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Well, first of all, we've got to repair our democracy. The Electoral College needs to go because it's made our society less and less democratic. Now we can talk about a lot of different policy ideas, and will on everything from security to health care. But you know, our party has this tendency to lead with the policies, go to the 14-point plan and give you the binders and the power points. First we've got to explain our values and explain why democrats are, are committed to freedom, to democracy, to security. That democracy piece has to be fixed before anything else will go well in this country.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Just to, just to clarify what John was asking about -- do you support Medicare for all?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: I do. I also think that on the road to get there, there are a lot of things not being talked about enough.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Mayor Bloomberg, who likely joined the race, says it would bankrupt the country.

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Well, it would bankrupt this country if we didn't pay for it. And right now in Washington, a lot of things are being done that aren't paid for. By the way, my generation's the one that's going to face the bill for that. So as somebody who's, god willing, planning to be here in 2054 when I reach the current age of the current president, I care a lot about making sure that anything we do is sustainable. But this is the norm in most developed countries. So the idea that it is radical or impossible to do something that the citizens of most western countries already enjoy, that just doesn't add up to me. If other people can have that, why can't Americans have that, too?

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: That’s conversation that many in this country are currently having right now, including potential president hopefuls. Thank you so much. Again, our condolences on the loss of your father.

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Appreciate it, thank you.

He doesn't mention Round-a-bouts and Limebikes for the entire country......But he does mention "the Electoral College" needs to go.......

Uggh.  He wouldn't get my vote.  The only sensible thing he put forth was getting the U.S. military out of Afghanistan.

 

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Elizabeth Warren's Wealth Tax Is a Stunt Policy That Other Countries Have Tried and Discarded: http://reason.com/blog/2019/02/01/warren-wealth-tax-unconstitutional-2020

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Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is the worst form of stunt policy: a bad idea that gets us nothing.

Also, of passing importance, it's probably unconstitutional.

The plan, released last week as the Massachusetts senator launched her bid for the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nomination, would impose a 2 percent annual tax on assets for households worth more than $50 million, plus a 1 percent surtax on households with a net worth of $1 billion or more.

 

Warren says the tax would affect only the "tippy top 0.1%," or about 75,000 households. She has framed the proposal as a way to make them "pay their fair share," to reduce wealth concentration, and to "accelerate badly needed investments in rebuilding our middle class." Estimates from the Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who back the proposal, suggest it would raise about $2.75 trillion in new tax revenue over a decade.

So it's being advertised as a revenue raiser that boosts the government's capacity to fund programs for the middle class. But the real-world experience of nations that have imposed wealth taxes suggests that this is a bit optimistic. Regular wealth taxes tend to be a challenge for tax collectors. They require annual assessments of wealth, and the very rich tend to own unique assets that can be difficult to value.

As the Tax Foundation's Nicole Kaeding and Kyle Pomerleau note, the very rich "own more than publicly-traded stock, such as real estate holdings, trusts, and business ownership interests. It is difficult to value these assets on an ongoing basis. Imagine a large privately-held company—its value could change almost daily. How would the tax handle these fluctuations?"

To handle the challenge, Warren has called for increasing the number of agents at the Internal Revenue Service—rarely a promising sign for a campaign proposal. In any case, inherently tricky valuations remain tricky no many how many bureaucrats you throw at the problem.

More likely, the rich would find ways to avoid those assessments entirely. Sweden's wealth tax, for example, was frequently blamed for capital flight and a depressed rate of national entrepreneurship. Relative to other European nations, Swedes were less likely to own their own business, and those who did often took their money elsewhere rather than reinvest it at home. The founder of Ikea, for example, moved much of his wealth into offshore foundations that shielded the money from the tax.

I say it was blamed because a little more than a decade ago, Sweden eliminated its wealth tax. The move was easy to make, because the government lost essentially no revenue. As The Financial Times reported, the elimination of the tax had "virtually no effect of government finances." So much for making the rich pay their share.

Nor is Sweden an outlier in its decision to nix a tax on wealth. European countries that have imposed wealth taxes have largely given up on them; of the dozen OECD nations that had wealth taxes in 1990, just four still have the tax on the books. Warren wants the U.S. to adopt an idea that has been tried and discarded.

Her proposal is unlikely make it through Congress and past the president's desk. But even if it does, we might not ever find out what sort of revenue it would raise, because it would be quickly challenged in court as unconstitutional.

Aside from the income tax, which required a constitutional amendment before it could be implemented, the Constitution prohibits the federal government from levying "direct taxes"—taxes that aren't spread out amongst the states according to population. Some proponents of the estate tax have argued that it could pass constitutional muster, but opinions are split, and there's probably more reason than not to believe that it would be struck down. When estate taxes were challenged, for example, they were upheld as taxes on the transfer of wealth rather than on its existence. That wouldn't be true in this case. Warren's wealth tax would target fortunes simply for existing.

Which I suppose is the point. Taxes are typically imposed for one of two purposes: to raise revenue, or to discourage behavior that politicians dislike. In this case, what Warren doesn't like is the fact that some people have amassed large personal fortunes, sometimes through inheritance, but often by starting or running successful businesses. She wants an America where that happens less often, or where, when it does happen, the wealth ends up elsewhere.

Warren's proposed wealth tax is thus best understood not as a targeted revenue raiser, but as a symbolic declaration of opposition to the existence of outsized wealth, irrespective of how it was obtained. It is a presidential candidate's way of saying, "I oppose the existence of very rich people." She could have just said it.

If this horrible tax would ever become law, it would be an abject failure.  I can see loads of household suddenly with "only"  $47, $48, $49.5 million evaluations.

 

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