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The 2018 Trump Presidency thread

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Cream Gravy? said:
I used to make roughly $12/hr and my woman makes less than that to this day, and we lived paycheck to paycheck. No fancy dinners. I stopped buying weed. Couldn't afford repairs my car needed. Yeah sure, $11/hr gets you so far. Thank you so much shopmart, I'm sure your hourly employees are ecstatic.

And I live in a place with 'low' cost of living/rent compared to many in the States.

Oh yeah, and both of us have bachelor degrees.
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Thats really sad. I would be out of there. As a RN8 - Registered Nurse 8 years experience and above i get $1644 per week before tax. Thats not great pay over here for a degree but no one goes into nursing for the money lol. I own my own home and rent it out for $650 a week to friends. I could get a few hundred more due to its location but i dont need the money and my friends have a young family. Yep cost of living in Oz is high, it shouldn't be but we export most of our gas and food but the wages make up for it. Aussies travel cause we can and travel is awesome. But there is shitloads wrong with this place. There is a lot of inequality, a lot of racism, major companies paying no tax on billions of profit including Murdoch's (Fox's owner) News Ltd that has not payed any tax in years and constantly bashes people on welfare and our universal healthcare system. Murdoch likes to pull the strings of politicians and he certainly does here, in the UK but now to a lesser degree after the phone tap scandal and he is doing a great job with Trump. He will expect payback for all that Fox and friends support. He is a cunt
 
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spacejunk said:
wow. that's fucked up.

thank you for posting that - i knew it was bad, but it's worse than i was expecting.

when there are such problems with housing affordability, it has a huge amount of flow-on social effects.
like, when people in bad situations (like violent relationships) they realise that being able to sustain themselves financially would be impossible on their own, they're kinda forced to stay.

i mentioned the opioid crisis in passing a post or two back - and that's just part of the mental health aspect to it. working all the time for so little must take a serious mental toll on people - especially when they're employed but still struggling to keep a roof above their heads.
then if you look at the cost of psychiatric treatments - they're generally not cheap are they? health treatment costs generally... not good.

it's irrelevant to me what country this is - i'm not having a swipe at america by pointing out how fucked it is that so many american workers are so exploited so badly.
when mammoth companies like walmart post huge profits, they're not just profiting off their customers, they're profiting by underpaying their employees.
if fulltime workers can't afford to pay the rent on a two bedroom house...there's something drastically wrong there.

the irony - that some of the people getting paid $11/hr must certainly have voted for this gaudy rich howard hughes wannabe who shits in a golden toilet bowl - is pretty hideous.

but what's worse than that, is that before trump, there was actually a growing class consciousness in american political discourse, especially amongst some of the younger people. this has been pretty absent in mainstream american politics, from what i know of it.
it's a lot more about religion (predominantly christian, with a big evangelical presence?) and 'race' (often referred to indirectly - vaguely, euphemistically, or using stereotypes)
"identity politics" right?

this was helped along by sanders who even put clinton into a position where she had to commit to increasing the minimum wage (not as high as he was pushing for - but still, a positive proposal that could make a significant improvement in the lives of an awful lot of hardworking people who deserve a living wage.

instead, a buffoon who incoherently blamed and scapegoated people got in.
a buffoon who unapologetically governs in the interests of those doing the under-paying (making them also undertaxed...) and definitely not the people being underpaid.

his various distraction tactics - ranging from crass comments to escalating global nuclear tensions by bullying on twitter - have robbed the discussion, as well as the airwaves and the news columns - of discussing serious - real issues.

i've said this many times before about racist politics, which is bad enough in the effect it has on the people singled out by it, but it shifts the blame for things like unemployment, housing affordability issues and decreases in standards of living onto immigrants, and other people struggling economically and socially - but they're not at fault.
a lot of the social issues people are contending with are symptoms of poverty and wealth inequality. it ain't the 'dreamers' fault, is it? do people asctually believe that, or is it just an effort to have deportations for the o

but are people still talking about about things like? sadly, we've spent much of the last year grappling with absolutely inane shit relating to trump's infantile behaviour, his ignorance and his hate.
he's shifted the focus away from working people campaigning to improve things for common people, and onto him and his bizarre worldview.

it's pretty bleak, but i hope the backlash that follows his presidency is able to gather a lot of steam and introduce some long-overdue increased protections for american workers.
i hope the shit storm of the trump presidency doesn't make people on the progressive side of things lose focus on what's important.
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Such an important point. I can't even imagine a scenario where I will be able to purchase a home. My grandparents bought a home and raised 3 kids solely on the salary of an electrician as my grandma was a house wife. That wouldn't be possible today.

Wealth inequality and the societal unrest it causes is by far the worst threat facing the US. I don't see how things can continue on thus way forever. There will eventually be a reckoning
 
LucidSDreamr said:
i don't really know where to ask this so i figured this was the most appropriate place, why did Liquid Method get banned?
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He was infracted for violating our BLUA#4 rule. Unfortunately for Liquid, he has accumulated a number of infractions so every subsequent one now leads to him getting banned. Which is a shame but he made his bed. :\
 
I was a kid in the 1980s but anyone older, was Reagan really as shallow as Trump? My dad, an old-school Eisenhower Republican hated Reagan. He called him a "soothsayer." I can't say because I didn't know shit from shinola in 1980 but maybe someone with a few more years on me can chime in. Someone just texted me that ridiculous video of him honking the horn of that 18 wheeler after the Obamacare repeal failed and I just have no recollection of Reagan ever acting that silly.
 
Trump is definitely more profane in his reactionary bleating than Reagan was...he's not one for subtlety, our Trump

tathra said:
"vukojebina" ahahahaha. foreign journalists are struggling to translate "shithole" for their readers. a croation paper used "vukojebina" which means "the place wolves like to fuck" lol. seems its an idiom for the middle of nowhere, like the US's - or maybe just midwestern US - "bfe" (bum-fuck egypt - dont ask me where these colloquialisms come from, i dont know). all these foreign outlets should have simply gone with "toilet" for "shithole", its a nice, clean synonym that carries the same idea in a less vulgar way.
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I heard "bum fuck" a lot growing up. That's where my parents said we lived. Never heard of the "egypt" qualifier though
 
Back when I was in school in Arkansas, we called places bum-fuck-egypt, particularly the cheap student parking that was a mile walk from our dorm 8)
 
alasdairm said:
we need stop measuring the economy by how well rich people are doing...
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They employ the majority of Americans so it's of benefit to every citizen that profits continue to grow, so long as the gains are legitimate and not based on a fake bubbles like the subprime crisis.

Seeing that jobs are growing in nearly all sectors, and the announcements of higher starting wages it appears legitimate.


alasdairm said:
his central campaign promise - repeal and replace obamacare - went down in flames. it was going to be so easy! only trump knew how to fix healthcare! what happened there? (no bonus points for blaming the democrats when the republicans control both houses and the white house).
alasdair
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Obamacare is in flames by removing the individual mandate.

When you're forced to buy auto insurance you don't pay the same for a Hyundai as you would a Lamborghini, the same should apply to health insurance.

It eroded the freedom of the country, it's not fair to force healthy young citizens to pay the bills of people of people that neglect their health.

He kept the preexisting conditions and the coverage of young adults via their parent's insurance, that's pretty huge.

The fact that it didn't get repealed all together shows how profitable healthcare has become, at the same time to pull out completely would give no time for the system to adjust and would put people at risk due to closures of hospitals nationwide.
 
David Wooderson said:
They employ the majority of Americans so it's of benefit to every citizen that profits continue to grow, so long as the gains are legitimate and not based on a fake bubbles like the subprime crisis.
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more profits != more employment. more profits only == more profits. increased profits dont even correlate to increased employment, so no, its not in our benefit to allow the profits of the extremely wealthy to continue to grow. decades of supply-side economic policies have done nothing but destroy the economy, increase unemployment, and funnel wealth to the wealthy, where its useless because an economy only works so long as money has velocity; money sitting in an account doing nothing has zero velocity.
 
David Wooderson said:
When you're forced to buy auto insurance you don't pay the same for a Hyundai as you would a Lamborghini, the same should apply to health insurance.

It eroded the freedom of the country, it's not fair to force healthy young citizens to pay the bills of people of people that neglect their health.
.
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I don't think your analogy makes sense. Who is the lamborghini?

Would you consider the elderly (a demographic that is growing) to have "neglected" their health by, you know, growing old?
 
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