News of the Day III

[RSchmitz]

There are examples of what Minneapolis is doing that have been done successfully (Camden and Compton) in extreme, chronic cases of police misconduct. That's like the DEFCON 1 response that isn't going to be appropriate in all (in fact, likely in very few) cities, but it'll be the one the right will cartoon as the reform approach to all cities if the issue gets framed as "Defund the Police".

Biden's position, which is very sensible sounding, is that federal funding to local law enforcement agencies will be conditioned on meeting certain prerequisites for law enforcement policies and performance. That's like the DEFCON 2-3 version of "Defunding the Police".

And then you have the activists who point out that police are arguably overfunded because law enforcement is being asked to do a number of tasks that it isn't trained or equipped to perform because other social services have been peeled back over the years, especially in low income communities of color. For instance, because mental health services have been cut, police are being asked to show up on the scene and deal with people with mental issues even though they don't have psychiatric training to deal with them. These are often some of the most dangerous calls law enforcement has to answer. The idea is to triage calls like these and send out mental health professionals instead of cops to deal with them. Likewise, a lot of domestic dispute issues could be handled by trained counselors rather than police. And, in the poorest of neighborhoods, it's been noted someone who gets ill or injured is more likely to get a ride to the hospital from the police rather than an ambulance, because ambulance services have been cut drastically in many of those neighborhoods. So the DEFCON 4-5 version of "Defunding the Police" is really to reallocate both resources and responsibilities away from law enforcement to other professionals who are better equipped to handle them.

I don't like packaging this as "Defund the Police" because a lot of very reasonable things are going to be caricatured by the right as just opening up the streets to crime and anarchy, when that's 1,000% not the goal. So, finding a better focus-tested way to encapsulate the above so it'll fit on a trucker hat is necessary.

All these things can't happen in isolation though, IMO, and truly be successful. First, if you're going to demilitarize how police are equipped or send unarmed people out to deal with mental health issues, you've got to simultaneously demilitarize the streets, too. As I've said, the number of guns per capita in the US is loony compared to most every other country in the western world. It's not fair to ask police to strip down their kits without simultaneously making the streets less dangerous by doing gun buybacks and a lot of sensible gun control like the assault weapons ban, closing up the gun show loophole, making background checks more stringent, etc. etc. that have been stalled now for decades.

Likewise, the broader societal investments in communities of color that also make the streets less dangerous by creating environmental conditions more conducive to health and affluence need to be in place. Investment in minority small businesses. Investments in education. Investment in infrastructure in underserved communities of color, etc. etc. And I don't just mean in urban America, either. Democrats would be very wise to recognize A.) a lot of communities of color exist in the rural America and particularly in the Black Belt of the South, B.) despite the animus between white and black communities in rural America and the cultural animus in white rural America that the right has been preying upon, a lot of the same issues negatively impact both communities. White and black folks need better, functioning, well-equipped rural hospitals. Rural schools, libraries, and homes need broad band internet access, especially to be resilient against shocks to the system like this COVID-19 epidemic has presented.

Democrats don't need to fall into this polarization trap where they ignore the 45% of the country that didn't vote for them a la the way Trump essentially has given the middle finger to us. Understanding how these issues dovetail to create a broad-based program capable of addressing the structural problems facing multiple stakeholder groups is what's sorely lacking right now but desperately needed.

IOW, we need to de-radicalize America in its culture a discourse, which also includes regulating social media (which is the devil) better and bringing back some of the other media regulations that got stripped decades ago. We can’t have a functioning democracy if the country is two armed camps that hate each other.

And part of that is to find messaging that is cooperative rather than confrontational. Anger alone isn't going to fix these issues.

This is a lot to digest, but here is my biggest question. If they didn’t have the budget for mental healthcare before, and were using the police instead to save costs, how are they supposed to find the budget now? Why didn’t they just reroute resources, why dismantle the police force?

They still aren’t going to have the money, it’s pie in the sky thinking that problems that only the police can handle, will suddenly go away. Government programs are just point blank underfunded is the problem. Lack of mental healthcare workers was the problem

[pete]

This is a lot to digest, but here is my biggest question. If they didn’t have the budget for mental healthcare before, and were using the police instead to save costs, how are they supposed to find the budget now? Why didn’t they just reroute resources, why dismantle the police force?

Since 1980 we've been on a nearly unabated run, with only a handful of exceptions, of tax cutting at the federal level which has diminished the revenue that the federal government is able to push down to the states to aid their social programs.

It's obviously controversial and I suspect you'll recoil at it, but given the great disparity between the wealth that is concentrated in the hands of a few multi-billionaires and what everyone else has (think about how much money Jeff Bezos has, for instance) we're due for some kind of corrective wealth tax like Warren proposed on the top 1% to fund these much needed and transformative initiatives and to also create a sort of "wealth cap" that discourages this gap between the haves and have-nots from growing any larger.

We had a 91% top tax rate in the 1950's and 1960's during some of the greatest periods of economic expansion the country has ever known. Part of that is because there was a disincentive for the ultra-wealthy to horde profits because they didn't want to bump into that top 91% tax rate, so they actually did all the things we claim tax cuts are going to lead to but never do: investments in re-tooling factories, R&D, increasing worker salaries and benefits, etc. etc. Basically, you kept some oxygen in the room for the middle class to be able to breathe and grow. You actually forced some trickle down.

Philosophically, at what point does profit for the sake of profit lose its utility? When does one amass so much personal income that the amount is beyond anything that can be spent or enjoyed by a single person or family? Whatever that number is, throw a sizable top tax rate on any income above that and take that money, which is otherwise likely just to be sitting out of the economy on a balance sheet doing very little productive, and make it available for the betterment of society either through redistribution by taxation or by incentivizing someone like Bezos (who I'm picking on horribly) to do something productive with that money other than sitting on it to avoid losing it to Uncle Sam.

And I get the idea, like a lot of progressive taxation ideas, can run afoul of most Americans ideas of economic fairness. But, when you consider Bezos and other billionaires pay effective tax rates lower than the lowest employees on their company's totem poles, I think most folks recognize that the system we have right now is already economically unfair and that the little guy is getting screwed. Comparing the two situations, I feel less sympathy for the mogul who has his annual income effectively capped at only several hundred million dollars (poor baby) as opposed to the people in the poorest urban AND rural counties in America who just don't have a pot to piss in even.

[pete]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EaE1rxOW...jpg&name=small

Let me help you Donnie:

[Donnie D]

Let me use a real life example. The homeless issue.

Whenever there is a financial crunch (generally created by republicans cutting taxes) the first thing to be cut are non public safety departments. So funding for case work and government grants to non profits go down. So during the Great Recession the problems of homelessness got much worse. Both because there are fewer resources, but more homeless.

So the merchants start calling the elected officials complaining that the homeless are crapping in front of their stores overnight. Now, I’m an old guy, but if you locked all the public bathrooms at 6:00 pm and didn’t reopen them until 8:00 am, I’d have a similar problem. So the elected officials say, arrest the crappers. Police get assigned to the problem. The homeless are arrested like crazy.

Then the sheriff gets pissed, because he’s increasing his jail costs housing these folks at $120 a night. The judges are pissed because they keep seeing the same folks every day and they begin to ask, wtf, I can’t hold it for 14 hours, stop arresting these people.

So, the commission decides that something has to be done. In Sarasotas case, they established Homeless Outreach teams to work with the homeless. Where did they put it? In the police department, because they had the funding.

So now you have police (the folks the homeless don’t trust) serving as social workers. They got the brilliant idea to pay people to get on a bus to go somewhere else. So they are paying people to go to Omaha to become their problem.

I remember talking to a commissioner about diverting money from enforcement to housing. “I work hard for my home, I’m not about to pay taxes to give a bum a house for free.” I told him that he was already paying to House him. $120 a night at the jail, $200 a day in police time processing his arrest, the court costs, not to mention the time you are spending dealing with merchants. For $1,500 a month, your problem goes away. Not to mention that when someone is housed their drinking and drug use goes way down (Are you homeless because you drink, or are you self medicating because you are homeless). And people who get into housing start to want something better than 4 walls - they are more receptive to training and employment.

I was able to get the manager to let me hire a firm to do a homeless study. It got rave reviews and much of it has been implemented. The HOT teams became civilian social workers. We put $2 million into housing vouchers. (How do you end homelessness? Put people in housing). Homeless rates went down by 50%.

But the money for all of this is still in the police department budget. The social workers report to the police. The police don’t want the Salvation Army to have the HOT team because they wanted them to report to them. If the HOT team finds someone with spice, the police still want to know. And when the next round of cuts come (later this fall?) who will the police cut? Not sworn officers, I can guarantee that.

It would be much better to put the money into a homeless agency (along with the homeless money I administered). The police don’t need to be enforcing peeing on the sidewalk. The homeless didn’t piss on the sidewalk during the day, because there are open restrooms. In fact, the places they hang out and the public complains are at city hall, the bus station and the library. You know where there are public restrooms. You should have seen the look I got when I proposed 24 hour rest rooms from the police. But I don’t give a shit how many times you arrest someone, their bladders aren’t getting larger.

So there’s a spot where you could defund a portion of the police department budget and make it more effective.

[Puckhead]

Thanks for the recap DD. Reno is starting to deal with the issue by way of "little houses" in certain sections of the city. And the management of this and other homeless programs comes under Human Services dept., not the PD.

[Flycoon]

Thanks for the recap DD. Reno is starting to deal with the issue by way of "little houses" in certain sections of the city. And the management of this and other homeless programs comes under Human Services dept., not the PD.

Is Reno still a shit show when the air races are in town?

[pete]

Stephen Miller, who crafted @realDonaldTrump
immigration policy at the southern border, including separating families and caging children, is preparing a @WhiteHouse
speech on race relations. @aurnonline
#AURN report

https://twitter.com/AprilDRyan/status/1270433974934999041?s=20

What could go wrong?

[Donnie D]

Who knew Bernie Sanders was such a Mitch McConnell fan?

[pete]

Who knew Bernie Sanders was such a Mitch McConnell fan?

Last time I checked his Twitter, Zeyk literally retweeted something that said God speaks through Bernie Sanders... so maybe God likes the turtle and the police too?

[Puckhead]

Is Reno still a shit show when the air races are in town?

Dunno. Funny, I was planning on going this year and may still if they go on. A friend has comped seats thru the Peppermill casino. The Balloon Races are pretty cool and free. We went two years ago and wound up within 50' of four balloons filling up/going up. Amazing.

[RSchmitz]

Since 1980 we've been on a nearly unabated run, with only a handful of exceptions, of tax cutting at the federal level which has diminished the revenue that the federal government is able to push down to the states to aid their social programs.

It's obviously controversial and I suspect you'll recoil at it, but given the great disparity between the wealth that is concentrated in the hands of a few multi-billionaires and what everyone else has (think about how much money Jeff Bezos has, for instance) we're due for some kind of corrective wealth tax like Warren proposed on the top 1% to fund these much needed and transformative initiatives and to also create a sort of "wealth cap" that discourages this gap between the haves and have-nots from growing any larger.

We had a 91% top tax rate in the 1950's and 1960's during some of the greatest periods of economic expansion the country has ever known. Part of that is because there was a disincentive for the ultra-wealthy to horde profits because they didn't want to bump into that top 91% tax rate, so they actually did all the things we claim tax cuts are going to lead to but never do: investments in re-tooling factories, R&D, increasing worker salaries and benefits, etc. etc. Basically, you kept some oxygen in the room for the middle class to be able to breathe and grow. You actually forced some trickle down.

Philosophically, at what point does profit for the sake of profit lose its utility? When does one amass so much personal income that the amount is beyond anything that can be spent or enjoyed by a single person or family? Whatever that number is, throw a sizable top tax rate on any income above that and take that money, which is otherwise likely just to be sitting out of the economy on a balance sheet doing very little productive, and make it available for the betterment of society either through redistribution by taxation or by incentivizing someone like Bezos (who I'm picking on horribly) to do something productive with that money other than sitting on it to avoid losing it to Uncle Sam.

And I get the idea, like a lot of progressive taxation ideas, can run afoul of most Americans ideas of economic fairness. But, when you consider Bezos and other billionaires pay effective tax rates lower than the lowest employees on their company's totem poles, I think most folks recognize that the system we have right now is already economically unfair and that the little guy is getting screwed. Comparing the two situations, I feel less sympathy for the mogul who has his annual income effectively capped at only several hundred million dollars (poor baby) as opposed to the people in the poorest urban AND rural counties in America who just don't have a pot to piss in even.

I support some progressive taxation plans. The ones that I do not support, it isn't because they are unfair, it's because they are punitive or runs counter to what makes capitalism effective.

A smart and aggressively sliding tax scale could give the government the funds it needs while also doing it in a fair and capitalism friendly way.

[Donnie D]

Pete: it’s 4:00 am. Are you still in line waiting to vote?

The republicans seem to have this mail in voter fraud thing down pat. Last week we learned that Derek Chauvin was voting in Florida even though he lives in Minneapolis. Now it’s Kayleigh McEnany. She has a New Jersey drivers license, yet voteDin in Florida using her mama’s address 11 times. Oh and Trump. He listed his legal residence at Mar-a-Lago despite signing an agreement with the county stipulating that he would never live there.

Republicans conducted a large investigation in Florida trying to find voter fraud and came up empty. Here are 3 leads for you.

[Donnie D]

Data from the feds on unemployment.

The official number is 13.3%. However when you add in the adjustment, the number of people who are working part time for economic reasons but want a full time job and those who want a full time job but aren’t looking, the number jumps to: 27.7%.

Interestingly, the census department reported that we were in an economic downturn in January and that COVID only accelerated the downturn. Shipments of products began decreasing in August 2019. Net you won’t hear that from Trump.

[gphockey]

Originally Posted by dannybolt View Post
Bull. Fucking. Shit.

I'm going to leave the whole failed health care system rammed down our throats statement alone, because it is a completely inane statement backed by nothing.

HOWEVER You yourself told us that you didn't carry health insurance and got tagged in your return for not having health insurance. Which was a requirement under the ACA
in the year in question. You claimed not to know about it at the time, however, the Republican Party (of which you are ostensibly a member), made such a big deal about that requirement they took it to the Supreme Court and it was a story on this board as well as every newspaper and news channel in the country. For. Months. We already had this conversation. I remember, because of how daft your argument was the last time you brought it up. This was not some arcane tax law that just so happened to catch you. It was front page, above the fold, top story news.

Quit your bullshit, bud. You are either being dishonest with us on this board, or yourself intellectually. Your choice, but nobody is interested in smelling the shit you are shoveling. You knew you were supposed to have it and chose not to buy insurance, or you are catastrophically ignorant of the issue you are complaining about. Either way, the IRS doesn't deem either of those as sufficient excuses to avoid a tax penalty. Nobody owes you 700.

This post is also perfection.

This post is also perfection.

Yeah, I am so sorry not having run right out and signed up for a newly enacted law in 2014.
And its totally my fault and for my blatant and "catastrophic" ignorance of a this new law, like you, or anyone else totally understood it when it was trotted out by BO, NP and CS.
Just a bit of real life perspective, which isn't bullshit...pal.
I was having 6 major moving sales summer 2013/2014 selling and clearing out personal belongings accumulated after living in Florida 21 years raising a large family. (I moved to Florida with 18000 lbs. in a tractor trailer, left in a self packed Penske).
Yeah, all this while continuing to work a full time job in preparation to make a move to Maine, a state I had visited a handful of times.
Finding, packing and moving the remainder of our belongings into storage with my wife.
Working on the house and grounds in preparation to sell by owner.
Looking for a camper, buying it and setting it up in a park to finish our months out in Florida.
Three major sales on my dads trailer in a neighboring town after my mom passed away, taking care of his business while he was out of state, selling his vehicle, and all their belongings accumulated in that place since the 1960's, cleaning, repairing and painting it for market ready.
All this within several months including 2014, yup, ACA enactment year.
Moving to Maine, had a job in 26 hours after arrival working part time at Lowes. Ooops, no health insurance there.
Looking for a suitable storage unit, driving and unloading truck from Florida.
Looking for a house to rent in a barren rental market while looking for and purchasing land, searching for subcontractors to build a home in a new state with limited available housing.
Finally deciding we better have something, so purchased a health policy thru Samaritans Purse, a Christian health bill share program after being turned down (again) by the VA.
After finding full time employment, shucks, there was a waiting period before I was eligible for their health care benefits.
So there it is, my gap in coverage, and then the nasty little surprise next tax season.
So yeah, real issues to a person making a legitimate move from one state to another and in my opinion got tagged unfairly, all the while tens of millions of dollars are handed out to illegal aliens.
I was busy, with real life.
It a hot, humid, stressful and exhausting process leaving Florida for Maine when that law was enacted. TV and news was pretty much non existent to us at that time as we did that move on our own, not hiring everyone in the world to do it for us while we laid on the beach.
For a person gainfully employed, which I was, I should not have been fined, ignorant or otherwise.
Screw you, your post and the perfect post comment as well.
It wasn't worth the electronic space it took.

Concerning Trump, in 2016 I voted for him because Clinton was not an option for me, and apparently about 50 Million others thought the same. So sorry if that hurts some of your feelings.
My past voting record does reflects voting mainly republican, but voted Democrat for Vermont Gov Dean, Independent/Dem for Sen. Bernie Sanders and Angus King, Independent for Ross Perot.
That covers both R, D and I.
Doubt most of you can claim that. If I was to guess, its mostly D.
For the most part, I vote for who I think will do the best job.

Everyone here has a right to their opinion without being absolutely trashed, whether you agree with it or not, at least be civil and respectful. If you cannot do that, maybe take a break, go for a walk and sit by the waterside enjoying a cold one watching a beautiful sunset.
We are all Lightning fans here, and I would go so far to say, all good people with families and friends so can we not be more tolerant of each other?
Life is too short to be hateful.

Hockey soon.....Go Bolts!

[ChaseSpace]

For the most part, I vote for who I think will do the best job.

So you legitimately thought Trump and his administration would do a better job than Clinton and hers at running the country?