Oh No, The New Awesome Primary Thread

I've seen a lot of debate knocking around over the years since the birther controversy started over this controversial 'natural-born citizen' business in the Constitution. Maybe this is just my outsider's lack of understanding of American constitutionalism, but isn't the meaning plain as the bollocks on a well hung donkey? It means someone born a citizen, as opposed to someone naturalised later in life.There - just solved you the trouble of a court case.

No, they're both fine, as long as the woman in the first case was resident in the US for at least one full year at any point before the child's birth (assuming the info in the Wikipedia article on brithright citizenship in the US is accurate).

Debt and deficit are not the same thing. Deficit is the amount spent over what is received in income. If I owe $1,000, and I spend $100 more than I earn this month, my debt will increase, even if that $100 deficit is a lot less than last month's, when I spent $300 more than I earned.Having said that, RAZD still appears to be wrong. According to the White House's figures, the Federal government has consistently run higher deficits under Obama than Bush. The record deficit was in 2009, and it has decreased since then, so I suppose the thinking is that the 2009 deficit was the legacy of Bush, which Obama has been slowly undoing (in the same way that there was a budget surplus in 2001, but we can't really give Bush credit for this). However, the 2009 record deficit probably had something to do with the stimulus package.

I'll be honest - the thought had crossed my mind.

I don't think he makes them look stupider - on the contrary he makes the rest of the Republican field look more reasonable by contrast. But if he continues to do well in the polls it encourages other Republican candidates to extremify their pronouncements to appeal to the base, simultaneously making themselves unelectable to moderate swing voters.And imagine if he won the nomination. The Democrats could win the election with an actual donkey running.

That's so astonishingly incorrect it's hard to believe you understand the words to mean the same thing as other English-speakers.It's an uncontrovertible fact the US has one of the least equal standards of living of any rich country. Every metric of equality shows the US as being one of the least equal countries there is. Wikipedia's list of countries by wealth distribution, for example, which is based on a study by the National Bureau for Economic Research, has only four countries with a less equal distribution of wealth. Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Databook from 2013 includes only 5 countries with less equal income than the US. The OECD's income inequality measures, taking into account taxes and government payments, shows the US as less equal than any OECD members except Turkey, Chile and Mexico.Now, there's more to life than equality of income or wealth. Many countries which are more equal than the US are quite poor, and average Americans have better standards of living than average people in lots of other countries - even if some of those countries are more equal. There is an argument to be made that the same mechanisms which lead to the huge inequality in the US allow everyone to advance overall. I don't agree with many of these types of arguments - but they're sensible arguments nonetheless.To claim that the US is good because it's one of the most equal countries in the world, however, is not a sensible argument. It's risible and clearly false.

Equally distributed income (or wealth, at least) leads to a more equal standard of living, because most things cost money. Your example dealt directly with income, because it was about the fact that someone had sufficient income to buy a nice car. Comparisons with Cuba are irrelevant, because the option is not limited to 'America as it exists now' or 'Communist dictatorship'.That said, America has a lot of dirt poor. Finding a country where there a less people who are dirt poor is easy, because I live in one. We have about 9% of the population living below the poverty line, compared to about 15% in the US. Now, these are difficult figures to compared, because our government's have different definitions of poverty' but by coincidence they are actually pretty similar in their definitions of how much money a family would need to earn to count as being below the poverty line at the moment. The same amount of money means different things, of course - taxes are higher here, and so are property costs. But equally we have cheaper health care and better social security, for example.Now, it's also true that, while we have less people living in poverty, we also have far less people who are rich, and median income is considerably lower. The point here is not that America is some hellhole. It's not - it's a rich country. But it's not the only rich country. Other wealthy or moderately wealthy countries exist, and some of them have more equal standards of living and less people living in poverty. There are no utopias. The question is whether it's possible to have a competitive capitalist economy whilst improving social security. I'd say that several examples in Europe show we can.

Stumbled across a news story today which made me a bit depressed, but might make some of you feel less alone. The headline translates roughly as "Trump would get along well with Milos Zeman in foreign policy". Milos Zeman, if you're wondering, is our president in Czech Republic. Not a radical candidate, but our actual president.True, he lacks the power of an American president, but he is the first president since the introduction of the popular vote for presidential elections.Think on this, next time you're depressed about the state of American politics.Edited by caffeine, : typo

Maybe he just played too much Civilization II. The pyramids worked as granaries in that game.To be fair to the man, though, he did say this 17 years ago. I'm sure he said enough stupid things last week that it's not necessary to go digging in the archives like this.

The scary thing, of course, is that Franco won all the way up to the end. Franco died at the age of 82, still President of Spain. His last statue stood until 2008.Trump is not a fascist, however, if we want the word 'fascist' to actually mean something and not simply be a catchall word for people whose politics we disapprove of. For example, this claim: Is obvious nonsense. Franco's regime introduced a compulsory health insurance scheme funded by taxation - similar to those much of Europe uses today. There is a distinctly socialistic element to fascism, which is missing from Trump's ideas. Trump is simply a racist populist, in a country where populism is unusually devoid of socialist ideas.

Whilst not a fan of Reagan, I don't really think he's comparable to Trump. Can't see Reagan proposing you ban all Muslims from the country.

A pointless correction, both since Pressie was not wrong,

quote:

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I am a socialist and everyone knows that - Bernie Sanders

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and since 'social democrat' is a subset of socialist, as most people use the words.Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

Which is interesting, because as the terms are traditionally used in western European politics 'democratic socialist' does not sound like a milder and less intimidating form of socialism. Socialist political parties and factions (excluding those advocating armed revolution) were generally divided into two categories - social democrats, who wanted to use government intervention to ameliorate the ills of capitalism; and democratic socialists, who wanted to use the ballot box to abolish capitalism peacefully. I'm not sure that's what he really means.

I don't think you're getting an honest answer with Trump. I think his political persona is equally as scripted as those who pick their words carefully to avoid giving offense, he's simply decided he thinks he can win with a different strategy, and that's precisely by cultivating the image of a no-nonsense straight talker who has no truck with all this 'political correctness'. His words seem calculated both to speak directly to a constituency he thinks is big enough to win him the election; while provoking others into looking like shrill, whiny, liberal elitists when they criticise him.