>>Trump’s heretical denial of Republican dogma about government incapacity is exactly what we need to move the party — and the country — in a new direction.
It's contradictory for libertarians to be calling for more government spending on the economy. Most of the issues, like crumbling infrastructure, would be better spent not by advocating for effective spending, but rather privatization and letting people vote online on which firm to contract out to various public works paid for by tax money that we vote on how to allocate.
>Most of the issues, like crumbling infrastructure, would be better spent not by advocating for effective spending, but rather privatization
I think the hundreds of billions of tax dollars we've spent on privatizing the expansion of internet hardware/fiber is a iron-clad evidence to this being flat out wrong. It's been a complete and total failure with no accountability.
> letting people vote online on which firm to contract out to various public works
This is getting into an entirely different argument about direct democracy. How about just having an election and voting system that is better for voters and the public will, and actually being able to elect officials who are willing to implement a fair and balanced bidding system for government contracts?
Your next door neighbor Jim who listens to Rush Limbaugh 2 hours a day and watches mainstream news outlets another 2 hours every evening and makes his voting decisions based off television commercials is not the person I want selecting a government contractor. It will become a marketing contest and needlessly increase the cost to tax payers as a result.
> I think the hundreds of billions of tax dollars we've spent on privatizing the expansion of internet hardware/fiber is a iron-clad evidence to this being flat out wrong.
Well, it would be evidence it it had actually happened, but the claim of hundreds of billions of tax dollars on this is very questionable [1].
Ok, not literal tax dollars, but dollars from the American population at large, essentially tax dollars that aren't going through the government first and instead straight into the pockets of telecom providers.
Here is my understanding, which largely disagrees with the guy in your link arguing against the $200 billion statement:
It's 1991 and the US government says "our telecom infrastructure sucks". They knew there'd be tremendous economic impact based on the quality (or lack thereof) of this infrastructure. The monopolistic nature of a system involving hardware infrastructure installed literally everywhere on essentially public land (easements) meant that existing companies owning this infrastructure have no incentive to expand it.
The options we were faced were either:
1. Using tax payer money and having the government directly build out this infrastructure to the tremendous and direct benefit of everyone
2. Changing the regulations around the existing infrastructure so that the barrier of entries were lower and more people could theoretically participate in expanding the infrastructure
These two options are the subtext for the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The guy in the thread you posted is trying to argue that the act wasn't about quid pro quo, but about deregulation. He's correct but also misleading. The act itself is marketed as being about deregulation, but the entire reason the act existed was quid pro quo. This is blatant and obvious - the most visible part of the entire act are the goals that the telecoms were required to reach in terms of expansion. It's also funny how this is marketed as deregulation when there's a huge list of requirements regulating what has to be done by certain dates.
Of course, as it often happens, immediately after this passes we have the exact opposite of expectations. There is tremendously less competition and constant mergers to create only a few massive telecoms. Today it's literally only three companies providing long distance according to Wikipedia - AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. Instead of having a government lead initiative to expand what is inarguably a utility service, we naively trusted private companies to fulfill their end of the bargain and meet the legally required goals.
Obviously this didn't pan out. Our infrastructure is shit and the progress was/is laughably short of the specified requirements.
The short summary is: we allowed private companies to continue operating in a space they really should not have, or at least in a manner they should not have. We did this because they said they would, as legally required, expand the infrastructure. That didn't happen and there's never been any accountability for it. As a result, Americans have paid hundreds of billions of dollars to these companies in excess of what they would have otherwise paid, and that excess was legally required to spent on infrastructure and never was to any significant extent.
So yes, Americans were scammed out of hundreds of billions of dollars, even if it wasn't money that went to the government first as tax income. This is also entirely ignoring the economic impact from our lack of infrastructure, which could be estimated anywhere from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars.
While I agree with most of what Thiel has to say here in terms of policy...I don't see how this leads him to conclude that Trump being president would be a good idea.
During the current democratic presidency, and whether it can be justifiably blamed or not, we've seen:
- Housing bubble burst and destroy the assets of tens of millions of Americans;
- Private health insurance costs increase 100% [0] as the administration bungled the implementation of the solution to those incredible cost increases;
- College tuition costs increase 50% [1];
So if you're the 2-income family and over the last 8 years, while your kids became college age, you've seen health insurance and tuition skyrocket.
If you took a second mortgage in 2007, you lost it all by 2009 and had a high probability of being wiped out as the stock markets went on a tear over the next 6 years. You had to watch from the sidelines.
If you're blue collar, there's a high probability you were unemployed and possibly laid off more than once.
That's a lot of people with recent, seriously adverse, major life circumstances who need to point the finger somewhere. They are hurt and angry enough to rally around a candidate who curses the incumbents to their face.
By saying these things happened during Obama's presidency, you make it sound like his administration is somehow to blame.
* The housing bubble burst before he was elected
* The WSJ chart projects private insurance costs being 100% above 2007 rates not now but in 2023. The chart also doesn't show what the rate of change before 2007. Obamacare contained huge compromises to get passed, hasn't even been fully implemented, and has had its implementation hampered by Congress's inaction and some Republican-led states. Its primary mission was give the uninsured access to insurance, not to keep insurance affordable for those who already have it. It was never going to solve the cost increases, at best it could ease the rate of change a bit, and it has, a little.
* Tuition rates increases are a long-standing trend, long before 2009. There are multiple factors, only some of which are practically correctable through politics.
Bernie did a lot more cursing the incumbents, Trump seems to focus more on brown foreigners. Bernie also described actual plans instead of handwaving and random adjectives like "beautiful" and "great." But you can completely ignore me because I've always supported Clinton.
The problem is when blame is not cast on the removal of regulations that let banks run wild, and it is not cast on for-profit healthcare companies that post massive premium increases while posting massive profit increases.
Instead, some of those injured rally around the same group of people that deregulated banks, the same group of people that killed a public-option plan, and the same group of people that make it illegal for the government to negotiate lower costs for drugs, bolstering the current run of multi-thousand-percent cost increases.
I'm really at a loss. I agree whole heartedly that the destruction of the middle class while the super-wealthy get rapidly richer and corporations post huge profit increases while dodging taxes lead to absolute disillusionment. But this time around doesn't feel like disillusionment on its own. It feels like it's being married heavily to racism and religion, which really does skew things.
Edit: although, maybe that's not all that different than usual. It's just a lot braver and mob-mentality-ish.
What exactly is wrong with it? They use the same numbers as the BLS, they just don't remove BLS's own figures for discouraged workers etc.
It's ridiculous to say that because someone has been so unsuccessful in finding a job and gave up searching over a certain period that they shouldn't be counted in the most commonly accepted unemployment figures.
To say that "unemployment has become less of a problem" is an outright lie and yet that's the phrase we constantly hear due to "convenient" sampling for U3/U6.
According to U3 and U6, we could have 99% of Americans out of work and totally given up trying to find work, but still only have 5% unemployment.
It's contradictory for libertarians to be calling for more government spending on the economy. Most of the issues, like crumbling infrastructure, would be better spent not by advocating for effective spending, but rather privatization and letting people vote online on which firm to contract out to various public works paid for by tax money that we vote on how to allocate.