Elizabeth Warren 2020 campaign megathread

[John Dule]

Policy-wise, she's one of the biggest threats to the American economy right now.

[John Dule]

Elizabeth Warren is just not presidential material to me. Outside of the whole Native American stuff, she comes off as a nerdy professor. Coincidentally, that's exactly what she was before entering politics.

I like most of what she is proposing but she's just not electable. Also, she's not going to get even close to winning the primary.

She's the opposite of Trump, and that's what Democratic primary voters want.

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLL. Don't make me laugh.

Most.primary polls show that most Democratic primary voters don't care about Warren.

Please. Primary polls are strictly a measure of name recognition at this point.

Call me crazy, but wouldn't that give Warren a significant boost? She's got a higher national profile than almost any other candidate aside from Biden and Bernie.

[John Dule]

Warren's main problem is that her message just doesn't resonate in a good economy.  P

 It just came out that the richest Americans are getting much richer and the poorest are getting poorer.  It was also recently reported that millennials are falling out of the American middle class. The white/black wealth gap is growing. Only Warren has proposed the policy remedies to address all these issues.

 Trump gave a $1 trillion dollar tax cut that might end up actually being $2 trillion from what I read, to Corporations that were already doing well and the very richest Americans. How anybody can do this in a time of rising income inequality is crazy. If people are waiting for things to get much worse to vote for a candidate like Warren than they might deserve their fate.

Just out of curiosity, what do you see as the actual cause of this inequality? Do you really think it's just a matter of government policy (i.e. it's all Reagan's fault)? I'm of the opinion that a lot of this trend is truly irreversible; globalization decreases the wealth gap between countries but raises the wealth gap within countries. If you can't halt that process, all you can do is try to balance it out with flimsy, increasingly costly social welfare programs that will never be enough (and will ultimately bankrupt the country).

[John Dule]

Just out of curiosity, what do you see as the actual cause of this inequality? Do you really think it's just a matter of government policy (i.e. it's all Reagan's fault)? I'm of the opinion that a lot of this trend is truly irreversible; globalization decreases the wealth gap between countries but raises the wealth gap within countries. If you can't halt that process, all you can do is try to balance it out with flimsy, increasingly costly social welfare programs that will never be enough (and will ultimately bankrupt the country).

 It starts with compensation and then a tax code that's written by the wealthy for the wealthy. Executive compensation has runaway from what the average worker in the same company makes. Tax rates for the wealthy have kept going down, and there are more loopholes and tax shelters for them to minimize taxes paid(sometimes paying zero) to pass their wealth down dynastically.
 The American public is also massively and utterly financially ignorant. They have fallen for lines like "taxes are punishing the wealthy". Something that if you knew basic math would be laughable to anybody who heard the statement.

Is it really just about executive compensation, though? When I see charts like this, my first thought isn't that the execs are getting paid too much.



There's a reason for this that can't just be boiled down to "billionaires are greedy" and "the government is helping them with the tax code." Why is the average worker not seeing the gains that the economy is making? I think the answer comes down to three things: Automation, globalization, and immigration. Trump would like you to believe it's solely the latter; the Democrats would like you to think it's just automation. But the truth is that:

1) Increased use of automated production lines has completely devalued the average worker in America's industrial cores.
2) The US is now competing with industrial centers in Asia, Europe, and (increasingly) Africa. If those regions remain politically stable, companies will continue to invest there. And nobody will pay Joe Smith of Michigan $15 an hour to do a job that Mtumbe in Kenya can do for 50 cents.
3) Illegal immigration brings down average wages because they don't demand health benefits, pensions, or any of the other things that "on-the-books" workers do. Companies therefore have a huge incentive to employ illegal workers.

I think Democrats have a bad habit of looking at the 50's as the rule for economic growth rather than the exception. You get people like Cenk Uygur pointing out that we had a 92% top marginal tax rate, but growth still continued-- and he says that this proves that those same policies could work again today. But he neglects to mention that half the world had been destroyed at that point. Europe was in ruins, the East was under the fist of Communism, and the rest of the world was much too politically unstable for investors to put capital in. Of course America thrived back then. We were the only country where return on investment was practically guaranteed.

[John Dule]

In the 1950s, a typical CEO made 20 times the salary of his or her average worker. Last year, CEO pay at an S&P 500 Index firm soared to an average of 361 times more than the average rank-and-file worker, or pay of $13,940,000 a year, according to an AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch news release today.

Yes executive pay is one of the main problems.

An example that also shows it's not automation, globalism, or immigration is Silicon Valley engineers. They make a great salary, are highly skilled, and work for the countries wealthiest companies. And it was discovered that those companies were colluding to depress their wages. They got a slap on the wrist for it too.

I didn't say that executive pay wasn't a problem, but I see it more as a symptom rather than the actual catalyst. Silicon Valley engineers aren't the ones whose wages are driving these macro trends in the economy. The stagnating wages of Americans across almost every sector of the economy can't be explained away just by pointing to greedy CEO's. The key question here is "Why are Americans willing to work for less?" The answer is that their skills are no longer as valued as they once were on the global market.

No, the Democrats are not saying it's automation. Blaming these problems on automation is just another way of saying "it's inevitable and you can't do anything about it." Blaming it on immigrants is just another way of saying "it's those brown people." Blaming it on globalization has some truth but who signed those trade deals in the first place? It doesn't get to the root of the problem.

Democrats (or at least Warren, Sanders, and some others) are saying it's politics. It's because the labor movement, which once gave workers power, is now decimated. It's because at some point in American history we illegalized corruption for the poor but kept it legal for the rich. We're saying that these are conscious political decisions being made in Washington and we can choose a different path with the will to do so.

All right, not all Democrats are saying that it's automation-- but Yang is hardly the first to point to it as the key issue. During Trump's campaign, a major talking point on the left was that the immigrant boogeyman wasn't the primary cause of the Rust Belt collapse, rather, automation was. It is inevitable, and yes, there is a limit to how much we can do about it. Don't think I'm saying this to be callous or defeatist, I'm not; at the same time, I think that trying to artificially inflate wages will only serve to accelerate this process.

Companies will always try to find cheaper ways to produce their goods. Whether this is done through hiring illegal workers domestically, outsourcing low-paying jobs, or automating the work of low-skilled laborers, the result is always going to be the same. And a new labor movement brought on by Bernie or whoever will hasten this. Artificially higher wages will force companies to explore more innovative options in production-- i.e. the workers get screwed again, either with layoffs or being limited to part-time jobs.

You argue for the glory days of American unions, but you fail to look at the global context in which those labor movements existed. As I said, outsourcing was simply not an option after WWII due to the political instability of the rest of the world. Technology also hadn't reached the point of widespread automation. So companies were forced to put up with unions and labor laws in the United States, because at the end of the day, what other choice did they have? But after China opened up and Europe began to repair itself, the American worker was forced to compete with laborers in every corner of the globe.

Now, I will say that this chart indicates otherwise:



The divide between productivity and compensation emerges immediately when Nixon ends the Bretton Woods agreement and turns the US dollar into a fiat currency. What are your thoughts on this? Genuine question; I never hear it talked about these days, but the trend difference is so apparent I find it hard to discount.

So you’re essentially saying we should have a race to the bottom where we attempt to match Chinese or African levels of labor standards so we can attract sh**tty paying jobs and work more of our populace to death? What a terrible idea.

And here we find the problem with having a reasonable discussion about this. I made no policy recommendations or prescriptions whatsoever in that comment; I simply laid out what I consider to be simple, immutable facts. The response I get when I point out these issues always comes down to "So you're saying we should do nothing while people starve? What are you, heartless?!?"

So I will reiterate: I'm not saying we should just abandon the entire Midwestern white working class to Africa levels of poverty. But I am saying that the prosperity of other nations will come at a cost to ours. American wages and corporate tax rates could be high in the 1960s because we were the only game in town. Now American workers-- who, contrary to what you might think, are not imbued with some immutable uniqueness that makes them better than workers in every other country-- will have to compete with people who will see starvation wages as a gift from God. If you genuinely believe that this enormous paradigm shift is having no consequences on the American economy, I don't know what to say to you.

There is a mentality on the left that pushes for policies out of pathos, and wants the government to nebulously do """something""" to combat inequality. But bad, poorly planned policy will only make things worse. UBI will cause inflation when companies raise prices. Protectionism will inflate the prices of goods on the market and lead to resources being allocated inefficiently. Mass immigration will disrupt the economic security of people with low-paying jobs. Increased welfare payouts will balloon the debt and won't provide meaning or purpose in the lives of laid-off workers. Higher tax rates will send businesses and wealthy people out of the country. Stronger laws protecting collective bargaining will lead to more outsourcing and automation. These are real effects of policies that are actually being proposed, and I'd like to discuss them honestly instead of putting up with comments like this:

So you’re essentially saying we should have a race to the bottom where we attempt to match Chinese or African levels of labor standards so we can attract sh**tty paying jobs and work more of our populace to death? What a terrible idea.

Liberals need to learn that the American economy is not their laboratory guinea pig. Government policy that is created with the best intentions can have long-lasting, disastrous consequences. We both want the best for people; we just disagree on how to attain it. Let's have that conversation instead of assuming that the other side is deliberately trying to screw over the poor and the working class.

[John Dule]

What Yang is saying has nothing to do with the argument for automation during Trump's campaign (because he is actually proposing to do something about it, which is the only reason why he gets traction talking about it), which was not coming from the left-- it was coming from centrist Democrats like Clinton. And their point was not to propose UBI, but to say essentially "throw your hands up, and there is nothing we can do except retraining." And that is why they lost. You are making the same argument, basically saying that with immigration, globalization, automation there is nothing we can do.

This is a good point about the motivation behind Yang's and Clinton's rhetoric, even though it sometimes aligned. But to reiterate, I am not taking the 'defeatist' Clinton stance. I think it is a very bad idea to reject arguments against policy proposals like Yang's as 'throwing up your hands.' It's not that I think nothing can be done, I just genuinely don't think UBI would help. In order to bolster this, I'll make two policy endorsements now (something that I want to stress I haven't done so far): A negative income tax on low earners, and abolishing the income tax for the vast majority of Americans.

The actual progressive argument from people like Warren is different. People like Warren is saying that these things are not inevitable. It is not inevitable to have an immigrant underclass living in the shadows. It is not inevitable to have unbalanced trade deals where we buy lots of things from other countries but they don't buy the same from us. It is not inevitable that technology means people will be out of good paying jobs. She is saying that government policy can make a difference.

Yeah, so again, I'm not saying that all Americans are doomed to Africa levels of poverty and we should just do nothing about it. But the trends of globalization, immigration, and automation can't be halted or reversed; I don't think they can be slowed very much either. Democrats, to this day, fail to see the fact of this, and they refuse to set realistic expectations for what policy can do. You want to get rid of the illegal immigrant underclass that's depressing wages? Well, if you deport them all, as Trump wants, it torpedoes the American economy. But if you give them citizenship, putting them on the books and forcing employers to pay them a minimum wage, that'll send jobs overseas anyway. I am open to hearing proposals, but most of what I hear from both sides is reckless top-down policy formulated by people who haven't thought through any of the ramifications of their ideas.

Also, you keep talking about workers from other countries. The postwar world was not some time of destruction and devastation for workers from other countries. It was boom times. Workers from all over the free world prospered together.

The postwar world, in which half the world was enslaved under communism and millions of people starved to death? Yeah, sounds like a great time to make overseas investments.

[John Dule]

It's counter-majoritarian.  It's antidemocratic. 

Yeah, but those are genuinely good things. It prevents the government from enacting stupid, destructive policy.

[John Dule]

It's counter-majoritarian.  It's antidemocratic. 

Yeah, but those are genuinely good things. It prevents the government from enacting stupid, destructive policy.

Ah yes, the tyranny of the minority is good actually position.

Yeah, no, it is terrible and such rule has been the prime reason for the long decline of government effectiveness. Which I suppose a Libertarian assumes is a good thing I suppose?

Tyranny is an active undertaking. If you want to enact sweeping welfare expansion, and someone prevents you from doing so, that does not make them a "tyrant."

[John Dule]

Uggggggghhhhhh....

https://twitter.com/FirstDogBailey/status/1124334218342010880?s=19

Beto's not the only candidate indulging in this juvenile trash. My condolences to the social media interns tasked with cutesy pet impersonations.

As a former congressional intern myself, I have nothing but sympathy for these people.

[John Dule]

The Democratic senator released results of a poll of Fox News' viewers that showed that 1/1024 of viewers are bigots which according to Elizabeth Warren is "strong evidence" to back up her claim of Fox News "profiting of racism"  


All jokes aside that was a right choice for her. Her "Native American heritage" and her WOKE policies would be ridiculed and I don't think she could defend that. She anyway doesn't resonate much with non-college educated whites (in contrast to Bernie and of course Biden) while there is a lot of college educated who might love her bashing Trump/Fox News. She can probable steal Buttigieg's voters?

Stop gaslighting. FOX News is inherently anti-black, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant. And so are its viewers.

Yes, every single person who's ever glimpsed FOX News on TV is a racist and a sexist. And anyone whose hand has ever brushed against a leather jacket should be jailed for animal cruelty.

[John Dule]

My point is that if she calls out Biden for his record, he could just say, "well at least I was a Democrat." She needs to preempt that by owning up to it.

Dawg she was a private citizen then. She reevaluated and changed course. There's nothing really to apologize for.

Yes absolutely. But if you voted for Ronald Reagan she should absolutely be disqualified in the mids of Dems voters.

Reagan was 100 times worse than Trump & he is the reason why there is someone like Trump today.

No. I can 100% guarantee that your obsession with Warren being a Republican until the 1990s is a way of rationalizing your support for Bernie.

It functionally has absolutely zero effect on how she would govern. You're looking for reasons to not vote for her because you're threatened by her.

This is precisely shy Bernie won't be the nominee too--through no fault of his own, but rather through the puritanism of his supporters.

Being disproportionately white, I would be willing to bet that most of them were raised in conservative or at least liberal homes, and came to Leftism only by virtue of our higher education system like I did. Even then, sometimes the ideology takes years to incubate. Unlearning your ideological conditioning (and by the way, the way that some of his male supporters haven't really unlearnt racism or sexism) takes time. Warren should be commended for overcoming her upbringing, just like most of them did, but instead they use it as a weapon against her.

If they want to criticize her taking big $ in past campaigns, fair. Policy differences, sure. Waiting to endorse Medicare for all, yes. Not endorsing Bernie, I am here for that. But the "she was a Repub" argument is so weak when many of them were too.

This is precisely what I've been saying about Tulsi Gabbard's upbringing for months, though that seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

Also, lol @ the notion that college is somehow an anti-indoctrination system.

[John Dule]

Also, lol @ the notion that college is somehow an anti-indoctrination system.

It absolutely is if done properly, and for many top-tier colleges remains so. The problem is that standards of liberal education in America have slipped now that costs are so high and college is being sold as an 'experience' rather than an education - like any business, modern colleges which challenge students to think as they should tend to do poorly compared to those willing to cater to preexisting notions.

A shame that college is now just a way for liberals to indoctrinate students

It isn't and never has been. It's just seen that way since education about society is anathema to conservative dominion.

The overwhelming majority of college professors are leftists, and it'll be hard for you to keep a straight face while arguing that they don't let their beliefs bleed into their teaching.

[John Dule]

Otoh, all economics majors know that the free market maximizes marginal utility.

Didn't AOC major in economics?

I won't deny that. But it's not like those beliefs aren't informed by their education in turn. That's just what happens when one is better educated, they tend to become more left wing. The more you learn about the world, the more you want to address its problems.

... Or it could be that the well-educated conservatives go into the private sector instead. Regardless, I find it pretty silly to claim that you have to be a liberal in order to address the world's problems. This is the part of political discourse that rubs me the wrong way; the implicit assumption that those on the right want nothing other than to preserve the status quo and that the left has a monopoly on empathy for the poor. For the record, there's actually no significant correlation between level of educational attainment and party membership.

Yes, the want to address them and have the tools necessary to understand those problems enough to offer up solutions. There's a long running humorous saying that goes like this: reality has a liberal bias. It is often brought up when, in order to support conservative talking points or policy, conservatives invent data and stories to show that sure all their nonsense would totally worked... if they didn't have to contend with reality mucking up their plans.

Keeping this conversation grounded in the subject of college education, I wouldn't say that political discourse in this nation's universities is all that connected to reality. I might be getting the worst sample size with my particular university, but a not-too-insignificant minority of students openly praise socialism and communism, while the vast majority support left-wing economic policies that have demonstrably failed (like rent control). Being in touch with reality means having the ability to admit that a policy doesn't work, and I think many universities fail to teach their students that valuable skill.

Perhaps if the American conservative movement hadn't waged all out war on American higher-ed (up to, and including, ridiculous hand wringing about "free speech on campus") there would be more conservatives in the academy?

Also: as someone who has worked in a STEM department in a university, the majority of college coursework is apolitical. Good luck finding "indoctrination" in a course about plate tectonics, probability theory, or Charles Dickens.

Yes, and thank God for the STEM majors of the world. But sadly, we're already beginning to see the breakdown of objective science in realms such as economics and biological gender. I hope I don't live to see the day when someone asserts that physics is a patriarchal construct.

[John Dule]

Yes, and thank God for the STEM majors of the world. But sadly, we're already beginning to see the breakdown of objective science in realms such as economics and biological gender.

Isn't "biological gender" just sex? As somebody who works with a lot of developmental/organismal biologists I don't really know what you mean.

Well, right here you've stated that there is an actual connection between gender and sex, which is more ground than some people are willing to give. There's really no working, universal system for the terms that "gender-as-a-social-construct" people want others to use, so any attempt to use the proper terminology will be met with vitriol from one person or another.

[John Dule]

Can we make this about Elizabeth Warren's campaign again and take the pissing and moaning about college to general discussion?

Thank you! I'm overwhelmed with responses from something that I didn't think warranted it.

You said that better-educated people are generally more left-wing. I wanted to clarify that there's no evidence to back that up. One's degree of political involvement does increase the more education they have, but they don't sort disproportionately towards the Democratic Party.

[John Dule]

Can we make this about Elizabeth Warren's campaign again and take the pissing and moaning about college to general discussion?

Thank you! I'm overwhelmed with responses from something that I didn't think warranted it.

You said that better-educated people are generally more left-wing. I wanted to clarify that there's no evidence to back that up. One's degree of political involvement does increase the more education they have, but they don't sort disproportionately towards the Democratic Party.

But...data literally shows that college-educated voters tend to be more Democratic...

The divide you're referring to emerged only in 2016. I was surprised about this too, but up until 2015 the parties were basically neck-and-neck among people with high school degrees and college degrees. Republicans actually used to have an edge among the college-educated. So the claim that "education is anathema to conservative values" is pretty dubious in my opinion.

[John Dule]

Honestly, her use of "Latinx" in the first debate was much more ridiculous than this.

[John Dule]

Honestly, her use of "Latinx" in the first debate was much more ridiculous than this.

How and why does that bother you? LOL.

Because no words in Spanish end in two consonants, and the word is grammatical nonsense in Spanish.

This is true. Projecting sexism onto -o/-a endings is the whitest thing ever and wildly misunderstands the Spanish language. Even if you really wanted to get rid of language genders, one could always use the already existent -e ending. -x is linguistically absurd, blatantly disregards Hispanic worldviews, and has a distinctly Anglo orgin.

Fair, but I know plenty of Hispanic people who refer to themselves as Latinx

Speaking only for myself, almost every Spanish-speaker I know thinks the term is idiotic and an invention of white Twitter activists. Literally the entire language is gendered; are we going to go through noun by noun to render the whole lexicon as sterile and sexless as Social Justice-speak is? News flash for everyone: Conjugating your words properly is not sexist, or "non-binary exclusive" or whatever.

[John Dule]

Honestly, her use of "Latinx" in the first debate was much more ridiculous than this.

How and why does that bother you? LOL.

Because no words in Spanish end in two consonants, and the word is grammatical nonsense in Spanish.

The people I know whose first language is Spanish liked it when Warren said Latinx.

Is this a sample that's likely to be representative of the general Spanish-speaking population, or is it limited to young third-generation Mexicans with purple hair?

[John Dule]

Y’all sound like Agustín Laje and all the Latin American reactionaries who complain about “gender ideology” right now, except you’re also making disprovable claims of objective fact. Here’s four examples of actual Latin Americans, native Spanish speakers, using “lenguaje inclusivo”. Uruguayan student union. Another one in Argentina. Costa Rican indigenous movement. And one in Mexico.

*Lenguajx inclusivx

[John Dule]

https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1153273559395000322?s=20

If Warren is elected, this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[John Dule]

On many economic issues, Donald Trump was further to the left than Hillary Clinton. That's just a fact.

[John Dule]

Why are people acting like this is a surprise? It was already known that Warren leaned protectionist like Trump. Tucker freaking Carlson even endorsed Warren's plan not long ago.

Excited to see the people who yelled about Tulsi Gabbard getting along with Tucker Carlson freak out when they hear this news. They'll probably take a principled stand and revoke their support for Warren as well, because as we all know, anyone endorsed by anybody on the right is a closeted Trump supporter/Nazi who loves dictators.

[John Dule]

I am a Bernie 2016 voter who switched to vote for Trump for exactly the reasons you listed above. You see, as sjoyce said, the Democratic party is largely bankrolled by millionaires and billionaires. This is despite saying they are a "grassroots movement" and funded by small donors.

This is outright unacceptable for me - I joined the Republican party in protest to teach the Democrats a lesson. They deserve to lose for as long as they pull this kind of stuff. If the Democrats can't see the light and become a truly progressive party in all aspects, they aren't worthy of my vote.

This is why Trump won.

I’m strongly considering a Dick Cheney write in vote for 2020 if Dems don’t get it together.

Billionaire Jeffrey Katzenberg is a big-time gay rights supporter.  The Democrats have fought for gay rights for decades and ultimately succeeded in legalizing gay marriage nationwide.  Katzenberg gave millions of dollars to keep them in power, rather than letting Republicans roll back that progress.

This is fundamentally unacceptable to me and demonstrates the horrifying corruption of the Democratic Party, which doesn't give a hoot about the voter and only answers to fat cat billionaires and their deep pockets.

To teach them a lesson, I will be writing in serial killer BTK on all my ballots.  I only wish there was someone more horrible I could write in.  The worse of a person I actually vote for, the more of a lesson the Democrats will learn.

The lesson, of course, being that I am a f**ing moron and they shouldn't waste their time including me in the coalition.

The implication being that billionaires generally give to the Democrats for good reasons, and give to the Republicans for bad ones? Yeah, okay.

[John Dule]

Cramer: Wall Street executives are saying Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 bid has ‘got to be stopped’

Lol, imagine believing anything Jim Cramer says.