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The Progressive Revolution: From Democratic to Liberal to Progressive to Socialist


Muda69

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4 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

I am saying MS-

1. Has always made subpar products 

2. Only ever became successful due to monopolistic practices that they could only sustain through shady and borderline illegal business practices 

3. Contributed nothing original or anything of substantive value or original to household computing

4. Is only able to stay in business due to legacy applications 

 

and all of this has bore out in every segment of computing outside of PCs, where Microsoft failed. Microsoft is not a company to be lauded, it is one to be despised; and Bill Gates is a parasite upon the world of computing.

Spoken like a true Apple fanboi and worshipper of the late Steve Jobs.

And what exactly do you mean by "every segment of computing outside of PC's"

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1 hour ago, Muda69 said:

Spoken like a true Apple fanboi and worshipper of the late Steve Jobs.

I'm actually more of a Linux man.

 

1 hour ago, Muda69 said:

And what exactly do you mean by "every segment of computing outside of PC's"

Smartphones, tablets, and servers. Microsoft was blown out of competition in all three. 

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On 1/24/2020 at 11:56 PM, DanteEstonia said:

I'm actually more of a Linux man.

 

Smartphones, tablets, and servers. Microsoft was blown out of competition in all three. 

How is Linux working at the Clark County School District?

And once again you are talking about hardware, not software.   There is a difference between the two, you realize that?

 

 

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1 hour ago, TrojanDad said:

DE.....they must be doing something right.....pretty nice revenue growth trend line.....

https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global-revenue-since-2002/

image.png.f8d0c01690da50243aa2d6f9a3fa2c3f.png

They may suck at hardware, but this keyboard was a game changer for me. The most brilliant intuitive designed keyboard ever produced.

 

 

MS Natural.jpg

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1 hour ago, Impartial_Observer said:

They may suck at hardware, but this keyboard was a game changer for me. The most brilliant intuitive designed keyboard ever produced.

 

 

MS Natural.jpg

I have this keyboard and the matching mouse. I have sold a lot of these in the past on EBay. I even have a spare in case mine ever fails. I had a pretty lucrative little side business going for a while buying BestBuy and Amazon returns in bulk and reselling the good stuff. Which was usually almost everything. 
From everything I’ve read about Chromebooks, they’re ok for web browsing and that’s about it. Our high school currently uses MacBooks. Before that, it was iPads. 

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4 hours ago, gonzoron said:


From everything I’ve read about Chromebooks, they’re ok for web browsing and that’s about it. Our high school currently uses MacBooks. Before that, it was iPads. 

In a school, all you need is proctored web browsing. GSuite has a word processor and an equivalent to PowerPoint. I want our next desktops to be ChromeBoxes, since they are only $179/unit.

 

Gotta love that Hamilton County $$$, and the Apple products it buys.

 

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2 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

In a school, all you need is proctored web browsing. GSuite has a word processor and an equivalent to PowerPoint. I want our next desktops to be ChromeBoxes, since they are only $179/unit.

 

Gotta love that Hamilton County $$$, and the Apple products it buys.

 

Yes, it’s a wonderful place to live. We even have great dances!

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46 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

Microsoft’s software is a distant second in the server market.

Yes,  but I know of a number of large manufacturing facilities here in Indiana that run their operations, from factory floor to the administrative areas,  on Windows servers.

 

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48 minutes ago, Impartial_Observer said:

That's just crazy, it'll never work!

A couple have been in business, and growing,  for 30+ years now.   So I guess it has worked.

 

 

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1 hour ago, TrojanDad said:

seems pretty open and diverse....speaking of dances, love your prom photo you provided us on the other thread.  You are the tall gal in the middle, right?  BO and Dante on each side of you?

image.thumb.png.f18ea6fb6162089fb5b6852226bdb10b.png

 

Nope, that’s my great-great Grandpa Gonzopat with his/her first 2 “wives”. He/she was OOB before the GID was cool.

 

 

4F3A1A90-8DF4-4256-8E96-9A90BE9260C7.jpeg

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Socialism Always Fails: https://mises.org/wire/socialism-always-fails

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The Nation, which enthusiastically has supported every totalitarian communist regime that has existed in the past century (and that includes Pol Pot’s Cambodia and North Korea) is now firmly riding the Bernie Sanders bandwagon. This article, entitled “Why American Socialism Failed—and How It Could Prevail Today,” unwittingly gives away the mentality of American socialists which claims all economic issues as being “solved” by the implantation of socialism—regardless of the actual economic outcomes.

Three years ago, I wrote “The End of Socialists is Socialism, Not Prosperity,” and this article follows some of the same themes. In that article, I argued that socialists do not necessarily believe that socialism produces better economic outcomes than capitalism—indeed, one would have to be willfully blind to fail to recognize the differences—but that socialists believe it doesn’t matter. Socialism is a moral imperative, and the only thing holding back the implementation of this system in the USA has been the failure of socialists to present a plausible alternative—something that socialists claim now is being done.

People who follow the arguments based in Austrian economics are intimately familiar with the economic calculation problem of socialism as laid out by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and Murray N. Rothbard on numerous occasions, as well as the secondary “knowledge” argument presented by F. A. Hayek in 1945. Mises and Rothbard presented what clearly are irrefutable claims that the only kind of socialist economy that could exist would be a primitive, extremely basic economy that could not support any kind of complex economic activity. Even a die-hard socialist like Robert Heilbroner would admit to as much in his 1989 commentary in The New Yorker:

The Soviet Union, China & Eastern Europe have given us the clearest possible proof that capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism: that however inequitably or irresponsibly the marketplace may distribute goods, it does so better than the queues of a planned economy….the great question now seems how rapid will be the transformation of socialism into capitalism, & not the other way around, as things looked only half a century ago. 

However, as I pointed out three years ago, the collapse of the USSR and the eastern European socialist states did not “convert” Heilbroner to becoming an advocate for capitalism, nor did China’s transformation from Mao’s giant commune to a quasi-capitalist economy (and subsequent economic growth) change his mind. Indeed, socialists seem almost impervious to factual arguments, and despite a gaggle of “what would a socialist economy look like” articles in publications such as Jacobin, socialists have never refuted the Austrian arguments. For that matter, socialists really cannot appeal to economics at all despite their claim that their goal is to provide a better economic society for those ubiquitous workers. Jacobin declares:

For socialists, establishing popular confidence in the feasibility of a socialist society is now an existential challenge. Without a renewed and grounded belief in the possibility of the goal, it’s near impossible to imagine reviving and sustaining the project. This, it needs emphasis, isn’t a matter of proving that socialism is possible (the future can’t be verified) nor of laying out a thorough blueprint (as with projecting capitalism before its arrival, such details can’t be known), but of presenting a framework that contributes to making the case for socialism’s plausibility.

(Note that the Jacobins are famous for unleashing the infamous Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, in which thousands of so-called enemies of the state were murdered. That American socialists today willingly associate themselves with genocide speaks volumes of what these people will do if they ever gain real power here.)

In other words, the implementation of a socialist order is not so much dependent upon a plausible model of a socialist economy, but rather is an exercise that depends upon convincing people that somewhere over the rainbow we can make the whole thing work, despite the failures of the past. And that is where the recent articles in The Nation and the Daily Mail reveal much about the socialist mentality.

In The Nation, Ross Barkan argues that the barriers to implementing a socialist system are political, not economic. Indeed, in “Why American Socialism Failed” he writes that there was just too much political resistance to reorganizing the United States into something like what at that time was being done in the Soviet Union. (It should be noted that he seems to view the Russian Revolution with much sympathy—and fails to note that perhaps Americans at that time were not interested in implementing a regime that would mirror the atrocities being committed by the Red Army and the new Soviet government.)

Instead of following the old political strategy of having people run as members of a socialist party, Barkan says that the better plan is for socialists simply to take over the modern Democratic Party by electing socialists from the presidency on down. He writes:

Today’s Democratic Party is a shell waiting to be inhabited by whoever claims the prizes of elected office. If Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, is elected president of the United States, the Democratic Party will slowly become his party. And if he loses, inspiring still more DSA recruits and fueling down-ballot victories, socialists can continue to win council, legislative, and even congressional seats on Democratic lines, wielding tangible clout.

In New York, there is one socialist in the state legislature: DSA member Julia Salazar. She has helped lead campaigns for public control of power companies and a universal right to housing. Five DSA-backed candidates are seeking legislative seats this June, challenging establishment-backed Democrats. If they all win, they will start to gain back the momentum of the 1920s.

This time, there will be no reactionary legislative leaders to unseat the new socialists, no Red Scare to feed a public frenzy against their anti-capitalist views. Salazar is a member of the Democratic majority, an ally of the progressive block, unlikely to lose an election anytime soon. The DSA members seeking to join her will be free to advocate for radical change. It’s a future that would have surprised the class of 1920 because Socialists never took over New York, let alone America. But today’s socialists march into the 2020s without the daunting roadblocks of a century ago. They don’t need their own party anymore. They can just take someone else’s.

In other words, the entire question of socialism is political; socialists can speak about their utopian visions, be elected on those platforms, but really don’t have to explain how they actually will make a socialist economy perform in a way that will even begin to match the output of a private enterprise–based economy. Yet, when confronted with the reality of the actual performance of a socialist economy, all the writer can do is to appeal to the election of socialists, which should not be surprising, since the end of socialism is political power and nothing else.

The death of a Canadian teenager of leukemia while waiting for the government’s permission to have a bone marrow transplant speaks volumes both of the performance of socialist systems and the way that people under socialism submit to the system. Laura Hillier, 18, of Ontario died before she could receive a transplant, which is not particularly unusual in the Canadian system, as “standing in line” for care is the typical experience, even when a life is at stake. From the Daily Mail:

Laura might have experienced a few more milestones if a Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, hospital had been able to accommodate a bone marrow transplant for the young woman. Numerous donors were a match with Laura and ready to donate, but Hamilton's Juravinski Hospital didn't have enough beds in high-air-pressure rooms for the procedure. Hospital staff told her they had about 30 patients with potential donors, but the means to only do about five transplants a month.

Although Hillier’s obituary “slammed” the wait times in Canada, nonetheless, nothing will be done because Canada’s “single payer” system is both politically sacrosanct and a socialist politician’s dream. It is sacrosanct because it provides the “free healthcare” that socialists promise and a politician’s dream because it provides unending opportunities for “reform.” In reality, the economic calculation problem is front and center, making it impossible to “fix” the Canadian single-payer system, something no Canadian politician will admit.

One doubts that Hillier would have died in the same way in the United States. For all of the criticism American medical care receives from the left (and the current system hardly fits the claim by socialists that it is “free market”), one can be reasonably assured that a young woman here would not die because of a lack of hospital beds.

In Canada, however, such deaths are a matter of course, and for all of the “this shouldn’t happen” statements from both politicians and victims’ families, it will continue to happen. (Canada, perhaps not surprisingly, has relatively poor cancer survival rates.) Under socialism, one stands in line and does not challenge the system, since the system is based not upon the successful delivery of services, but rather on the prospect of such services being made available “to the people” for no fee, the product of a “compassionate” socialist state.

Note that at no point in his article does Barkan write of any way that socialism would improve the lives of Americans. Socialism is not about providing needed services to those who cannot receive them otherwise, nor is it about raising the living standards of the poor, despite socialist claims to the contrary. Socialists do not create goods and services; they commandeer them for political purposes, and such things are useful only as a means of putting and keeping socialist politicians in power.

No politician in Canada will be voted out of office for the premature death of Laura Hillier, nor will any hospital administrators be sacked. Had medical officials given in to sentiment and bumped Hillier up the transplant list, someone else would have died for lack of space. The enemy here is scarcity, and under socialism, scarcity is multiplied. Canadians have come to accept this situation, all the while convincing themselves that theirs not only is a morally-superior system to anything that exists in their neighbor to the south, but also enables them to receive medical services that they believe would be denied them if their government were not paying. They have become like the cave dwellers in Plato’s allegory, believing that the medical shadows they see on the wall represent the best care possible.

Socialists might well take over the Democratic Party; indeed, American voters are capable of putting someone like Bernie Sanders in the White House. They well could make the electoral gains that the writers at The Nation have coveted for decades. What they cannot do, however, is tell the truth about socialism. Another article in Jacobin, written by Sam Gindin, demonstrates this last point:

Murray Rothbard, a lifetime disciple of the archconservative Ludwig von Mises, lamented that when he entered grad school after World War ii “the economics establishment had all decided, left, right, and center, that…socialism’s only problems, such as they might be, were political. Economically, socialism could work just as well as capitalism.” With socialism carrying such a degree of economic credence, the elaboration of the details of a functioning socialist society seemed decidedly less pressing for socialists than developing the politics of getting to it.

Gindin then goes on to “refute” Hayek’s “knowledge problem” critique of socialism (while ignoring the Austrian “economic calculation” issue). The rest of the piece essentially can be shortened into this one sentence: forget the past failures of socialism; this time we will make it work.

We have been hearing this kind of thing for more than a century. Socialists tell us that if the rest of us will give them total power over our lives, this time they will provide prosperity, and unlike previous socialist regimes, they won’t strip us of our liberties. We should have as much confidence in their words as the loved ones of Laura Hillier had in the empty promises of Canadian medical officials.

 

Spot on analysis by Mr. Anderson.  And I personally I will take a system based on the successful delivery of goods/services (Capitalism) rather a system based on making those goods/services available "to the people" for "free" (socialism).  The latter is doomed to failure, as history has repeatedly proved.

 

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Seattle Is Socialism’s Laboratory, and It’s Not Pretty: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/seattle-socialism-city-council-faction-pushes-new-taxes-regulations/

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Democratic socialists are in the middle of a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. Led by the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and the “squad” of newly elected congresswomen, the hard-left coalition has laid out an ambitious agenda to transform the United States into a democratic socialist nation. While many commentators have dismissed the rhetoric around the Green New Deal, Housing for All, and End Cash Bail as pie-in-the-sky abstraction, in Seattle, the socialist coalition is quickly translating this agenda into a political reality.

After the socialist Left’s stunning victory over business-backed moderates in last year’s municipal elections, Seattle has effectively become the nation’s laboratory for socialist policies. Since the beginning of the year, the socialist faction on the Seattle City Council has proposed a range of policies on taxes, housing, homelessness, and criminal justice that put into practice the national democratic-socialist agenda. In the most recent session, socialist councilwoman Kshama Sawant and her allies have proposed massive new taxes on corporations, unprecedented regulations on landlords (including rent control and a ban on “winter evictions”), the mandated construction of homeless encampments, and the gradual dismantling of the criminal justice system, beginning with the end of cash bail.

Seattle’s socialists have established a narrative that provides the rhetorical basis for their policies. They argue that the corporate-technological elite, led by companies such as Amazon, has hoarded the rewards of the digital economy and created widespread misery for workers, renters, and people of color. As Seattle-based commentator and Marxist theoretician Charles Mudede has written: “We are in the 21st century. We are in one of the richest cities on earth. And yet, the old war between those who employ labor and those who sell their labor is still very much with us.”

In the socialist vision, the “new class war” is now entering a more direct phase of conflict. They have launched a political campaign to dramatically curtail the power of corporations, landlords, and traditional neighborhood interests, and to build a coalition of socialists, progressives, unions, and the dispossessed that is capable of achieving power. In short, the solution to the class war is to win the class war.

While conservatives and moderates have typically dismissed the socialist movement as a “big-city problem,” the new socialist agenda is no longer confined to the municipal boundaries of places such as Seattle, San Francisco, and New York. Increasingly, the hard-left coalition has turned these cities into “laboratories for socialism,” with the goal of eventually commercializing their policies through the national Democratic Party. Already, Bernie Sanders, the current front-runner in the Democratic primary, has proposed a nationalized version of the Seattle agenda: Tax Amazon, enact national rent control, construct public housing, and end cash bail.

But Seattle’s socialists have gone one step further. In order to consolidate their newfound power, the progressive-socialists have begun to manipulate the democratic process in their own favor: first, by providing all Seattle voters with $100 in taxpayer-funded “democracy vouchers,” which are easily collected by unions, activists, and socialist groups; and second, by implementing a ban on corporate spending in local elections by companies like Amazon. At the same time, black-bloc activists and Antifa militants intimidate any potential opposition by disrupting events, vandalizing homes, and even orchestrating death threats against political adversaries.

What can opponents of socialism do? First, recognize that it must be fought on all fronts. While the socialists form a small minority of the national electorate, they have demonstrated the capability of seizing power in America’s major cities, which are home to much of the digital “means of production” in tech, media, advertising, entertainment, and research. The business sector in cities such as Seattle must recognize that the progressive-socialists are no longer interested in gaining reasonable concessions; they intend to overthrow capitalism itself.

Over the past decade, the dominant corporate strategy has been to quietly advocate for neoliberal economic policies, while pandering to the cultural mandates of “diversity and inclusion.” That era is now over. As the experience in Seattle reveals, the socialist Left cannot be appeased on cultural issues — they are fighting a war against capital and they intend to win it.

If the business sector wants to protect its own interests, it must rapidly adapt to this new reality. It’s no longer enough for local Chambers of Commerce to drop leaflets before local elections; they must build a permanent counterbalance to the progressive-socialists. They must begin by commissioning original policy research, funding local neighborhood groups, and building a political alliance of conservatives, moderates, and old-line liberals. In other words, they must reestablish a balance of power in America’s cities.

If nothing is done, the laboratories of socialism in America’s cities will become a national problem. It’s time to shut them down.

The war on the scourge of socialism has begun.

 

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Paid Family Leave Act Will Raise Taxes: https://reason.com/2020/03/05/paid-family-leave-act-will-raise-taxes/

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Following increased interest in expanding access to paid family and medical leave, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D–Conn.) joined forces with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D­–N.Y.) to promote the Family and Medical Insurance Leave, or FAMILY, Act. If we believe the act's supporters, it would cost close to nothing and provide essential benefits to employees who don't currently receive them.

Unfortunately, these claims are bogus.

Under the FAMILY Act, the federal government would offer 12 weeks of paid time off to enable workers to care for infants, recover from major illnesses, and care for severely ill relatives. During that time, employees would receive benefits administered by the Social Security Administration equal to 66 percent of their regular earnings, with a minimum monthly benefit of $580 and a maximum monthly benefit of $4,000. To pay for this new handout, the federal government would impose a 0.4 percent payroll tax to be divided evenly between employers and employees.

Gillibrand argues that the act would provide greatly needed benefits to employees at a minimal cost to them. One of her favorite talking points about the proposal is that it would cost employees only $4 a week, or the equivalent of a cup of coffee.

Unfortunately, the senator's assertion is quite misleading. For starters, a 0.4 percent hike in the payroll tax would not be enough to pay for the federal spending under the plan. The Congressional Budget Office, or the CBO, released a score of the bill as introduced and found that the FAMILY Act would increase spending by $547 billion in benefits and administrative costs over 10 years, but it would only increase net federal revenues by $319 billion during that time. That means that $228 billion in spending wouldn't be paid for by the FAMILY Act's new tax.

While the federal government is no stranger to deficits, in this case—and contrary to what FAMILY Act supporters seem to believe—this deficit will require either more tax revenues or fewer government benefits. The CBO points out that the act "would limit program outlays to amounts in the trust fund," which the Heritage Foundation's Rachel Greszler explains in her recently released paper "is the accumulation of the FAMILY Act's payroll taxes." This means that one way or another, spending must equal tax revenues. Therefore, Congress will have to either ration benefits or raise the payroll tax.

By how much? It would double within four years of the first benefits, which would be paid in October 2022.

Greszler calculates that as the number of people claiming the benefit increases, if benefits aren't rationed, "In 2023, the initial 0.4 percentage point payroll tax would have to rise by 25 percent to 0.5 percentage points. By 2026, the necessary payroll tax would need to double to 0.8 percentage points, and by 2028, it would need to rise to about 240 percent of its initial level, to 0.95 percentage points." And that's just the beginning. This, of course, is on top of the already steep and regressive existing payroll tax.

Moreover, even though employees and employers split the FAMILY Act's payroll tax, most of the employer's share of the tax will still fall on workers. That's because, over time, employers shift the costs of new taxes onto employees in the form of lower wages. In other words, employees will shoulder most of the payroll-tax increase. The CBO accounts for some of this shifting as it projects a $42 billion reduction in federal revenues because employers will reduce workers' wages and benefits.

The FAMILY Act would also lead to other undesirable changes, like a shift in resources from those with lesser means to those who already have more. Greszler explains that in the United States, "where substantial employer-provided paid family leave exists, a government program could be even more regressive because it would provide windfall benefits to larger companies and higher-income employees who already have paid family leave policies." This is currently happening with state-based paid family leave programs. Companies that used to provide the benefits are now asking their employees to tap into the taxpayer provided program first.

Finally, but importantly, economic research reveals that employees—and women in particular—in countries where government has implemented such benefits face more discrimination, fewer advancement opportunities, fewer hours of employment, and lower wages. These are the unseen costs of such programs that the act's supporters ignore.

All of these facts together make for a very expensive cup of coffee.

Once again we have socialists attempting to have the federal government stick it's nose into something where it has no constitutional basis to do so.    Why should I in Indiana be forced to to support the paid-leave of another citizen in Oregon, or vice-versa?

 

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Let's Give Bernie-Syle Socialism a Try in California First: https://mises.org/wire/lets-give-bernie-syle-socialism-try-california-first

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I have a suggestion for the people in America who dream of the US becoming a socialist paradise—try it in California first and see what happens. Of course, I don’t really want this to happen. I live in California. But I think that this idea of California becoming an independent republic based on “democratic socialism” would be a helpful thought experiment.

Socialism has imploded everywhere it has been implemented, but socialists always give the excuse that they “just didn’t do it right.” If California’s experiment with socialism failed, there would be no more excuses. No state has a more diverse amount of natural resources. No state has better weather. No state has a better technology sector. California is the fifth-largest economy in the world. And California is primed for socialism already, having one of the most progressive legislatures in the country. Bernie Sanders could be president of the Socialist Republic of California, which would secede from the union. Their new currency (called the “pinko”) would have Bernie’s and other socialists’ pictures on it.

Think of all the programs the Bern and progressives/socialists could enact—Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, free college education, and providing a living income to those who choose not to work would fly through the state legislature in pursuit of the socialist utopia. The problem is that all these government programs have been shown to lower economic output, because they divert lots of money to unproductive ventures. Lots of money means lots of taxes on everyone.

But people don’t like high taxes. California has already lost many businesses and workers to higher taxes and a bad business environment. Once socialist, California would lose thousands of millionaires more, who would pack up and leave the state, taking with them their investments, businesses, and the tax money that they would have paid. I’m willing to bet that even the big shots in Hollywood would leave, even though they claim to want to have more of their earnings and wealth confiscated. The middle class would continue to emigrate from the state as well. And nonproductive people would pour into the state for all the free benefits. That is a recipe for disaster.

Commensurate with the outflow of producers, tax revenues would plummet. The top 1 percent of income earners pays 48 percent of the income tax collected. The state is expected to receive around $100 billion in income tax revenue this year, amounting to 68.8 percent of all revenues; total revenues are estimated to be just $146 billion. These revenues are way too low to provide for any of the socialists’ grand schemes.

And those grand schemes will cost ever increasing amounts of money. People not just from Mexico but from all over the world will come to the promised land for all the handouts, such as Bernie’s proposed free medical care for undocumented immigrants. And migrants will be able to easily enter the state, as Bernie wants to significantly relax immigration laws. The costs of these programs will explode at the same time that revenues plummet, something that is not sustainable for very long.

In fairness, California would be able to increase its income tax rates, since no one in the state would owe federal taxes any longer, which should raise revenues. But even if they raised the tax rates to 52 percent (Bernie’s ideal top tax rate) for those with adjusted gross incomes of over $100,000, they would still realize less than $400 billion in total income tax revenues. Since the amounts raised would not be sufficient to fund the socialists’ programs costing trillions of dollars each year, huge fiscal deficits would be created. Then the only way to pay for all of Bernie’s handouts would be for California to borrow like crazy, even if all the producers remained in the state and paid the higher taxes (which they wouldn’t).

A vicious cycle would ensue. Borrowing tremendously to fund these programs would reach a tipping point. The state’s credit rating would go down precipitously, forcing it to offer junk bonds at much higher rates of interest, compounding its cash flow problems. At that point, their only option to provide for government spending would be the death knell for an economy—printing more pinkos. Printing money that is not commensurate with wealth production results in hyperinflation. Venezuela’s inflation rate hit a high of over 344,000 percent in February 2019, mostly from printing money that is worthless. And we all know how life in Venezuela is right now.

Why subject the entire country to a socialist experiment that everyone knows will fail in the long run? Instead, allow one of the strongest economies in the world, California, to vote itself socialist, secede, and then elect Bernie as president. After it became the next Greece and failed, the rest of the country could welcome California back into the fold, where the state would become a powerhouse once again.

If my predictions of the demise of California under socialism ended up being wrong and the state became a paradise instead, then the rest of the country should emulate California’s socialism. However, if my predictions of gloom were to come true, we could finally put to bed the notion that socialism can be successful if “just done the right way.”

Sounds like a good plan.

 

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  • 3 months later...

Bari Weiss Resigns from New York Times Due To ‘Constant Bullying’ By Colleagues: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/bari-weiss-resigns-from-new-york-times-due-to-constant-bullying-by-colleagues/

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Opinion editor Bari Weiss resigned from The New York Times on Tuesday, penning a scathing letter of resignation in which she alleged that she was subjected to “constant bullying” from colleagues who deemed many of her ideas “wrongthink.”

Weiss said she was hired by the Times in 2017 to bring in “voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages,” including centrists and conservatives, as part of an effort prompted by the Times’s admitted “failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers.”

“But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned,” Weiss said in her letter addressed to publisher A.G. Sulzberger. “Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”

Weiss said her work and character were “openly demeaned” and she was the target of “unlawful discrimination” in the toxic work environment she described at the Times.

“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times,” Weiss wrote.” But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space.”

“My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again,'” she said.

During her three years with the paper, Weiss faced intense scrutiny and battled a string of controversies, including the opinion staff’s recent decision to publish an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton that provoked backlash among Times staff members. Cotton’s op-ed, which the paper eventually said did not meet its standards, called for the military to be mobilized to quell the riots that erupted in cities across the country this summer. In response to the internal backlash over Cotton’s op-ed, Weiss wrote on Twitter that a “civil war” was underway at the paper between “the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals.” The comment earned her swift condemnation from other Times staffers.

In 2018, Weiss was accused of racism after she commented on U.S. Olympic skater Mirai Nagasu’s historic triple axel at the Olympics, writing in a tweet, “Immigrants. They get the job done.” Nagasu, the daughter of Japanese immigrants, became the first American woman to successfully perform the triple axel at the Olympic figure skating competition. Weiss deleted her tweet, which was also a reference to “Hamilton,” after online criticism.  

The opinion editor and writer also faced harsh criticism over the opinions she expressed in several of her columns, including one in which she described meeting in person and getting along well with Vice writer Eve Peyser despite their previous Twitter spats over politics.  

 

Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery,” Weiss wrote in her resignation letter.

In a statement on Weiss’s departure, acting editorial page editor Kathleen Kingsbury said, “We appreciate the many contributions that Bari made to Times Opinion. I’m personally committed to ensuring that The Times continues to publish voices, experiences and viewpoints from across the political spectrum.”

 

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She's not wrong - and I'm not "woke" enough.....

I used to think I was pretty much just a regular person, but I was born white, into a two parent household which now labels me as "Privileged", racist and responsible for slavery.
I am a fiscal and moral conservative, which by today's standards, makes me a fascist because I plan & budget. But I now find out that I am not here because I earned it, but because I was "advantaged”.
I am heterosexual, which according to some folks, now makes me a homophobe. I believe the Lord did not give me a heart to judge others.
I am not a Muslim, which now labels me as an infidel.
I believe in the 2nd Amendment, which makes me a threat to the liberals and I get labeled as being part of a militia.
I am older than 40, making me a useless person with outdated ideas and values.
I think and I reason, and I doubt much of what the "main stream" media tells me, which makes me a "Right-wing conspiracy nut”.
I am proud of my heritage and our inclusive American culture, making me a xenophobe.
I believe in hard work, fair play, and fair compensation according to each individual's merits, which today makes me a target of socialists and Antifa.
I believe our system guarantees freedom of effort - not freedom of outcome or subsidies which must make me a borderline sociopath.
I believe in a strong defense and protection of America for and by all citizens, now making me a militant.
I am proud of our flag, what it stands for and the many who died to let it fly, so I stand and salute during our National Anthem - so I must be a racist. I kneel only for The Cross, which makes me racist.
I think the Confederate monuments around our country symbolizes history, so I'm labeled as having hate in my heart when some suddenly are offended by their presence.
I'm labeled racist when thinking the erasing of history will potentially cause us to repeat the problems.
I think that all lives matter, which labels me as a racist.
I support the President, which labels me as a racist.
I think the riots and destruction of property around our country is wrong and is just an excuse to push a political agenda, so I'm labeled a racist.
I support our cops, which labels me as a racist.
I question how fear is being used to control us during the COVID-19 pandemic and think the crisis is being used for political gain, so I'm labeled careless and non-sympathetic.
LIberals have tried to make me feel bad about who I am! Based on everything above, some want me to believe I am a bad person; I'm not, I'm a good person who loves my God, my family and my country.
Feel free to copy paste!!! I did — feeling fed up. So fed with anyone trying to destroy our America
Edited by swordfish
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