Hate Base

So it's the Mexicans fault that there are Americans who are losers and addicted to drugs? You're basically saying that people don't kill people, guns do. The entire drug argument for a wall, DOESN'T WORK.

I worked near the border in Arizona for a while, and the "mules" I spoke to weren't doing it for money. They were carrying 80 lb backpacks of pot as ransom for a kidnapped sister, daughter, mother , wife or aunt. All they wanted to do was drop the backpack off in a van on I-10 and then hope they got back before someone they loved was raped, murdered or tortured. That is fact. Don't tell me pot never killed anyone- again please watch Cartel Land to see what goes on.

Again, you're blaming the individual who is simply trying to fill the demand, not blaming the demand. Who's fault is it that this is happening? It's the fault of the drug user American that there is a demand. As long as there is a user demand, there will be people finding ways to meet the demand, whether or not we have a wall.

I've found most people who abuse are deeply hurt. Whether they are crawing into a bottle or sticking a needle in their arm, they are doing anything to not feel how they feel. It might start as a party, but it never ends up with a solution to the problem. If people believe the propaganda that this planet is dying, and it is not, and they believe that other generations have selfishly and hopelessly destroyed any prospect of a future, which they have not, then the key ingredient of being a human is robbed from them, and that is hope. If you haven't, read Victor Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning". From your comments I think you'd like what you can learn from Cartel Land, I keep going back to that film because it fleshes out ideas so solutions can be found by creative people.

The main contributor to people being down is either a lack of jobs or low pay. We've had stagnant wages for 35yrs. People on the right have every reason to be angry. People on the left do too. There are many contributors to stagnant wages. Maybe even some of it is due to people crossing the border and working for less.

Between the mid 50's and late 60's, for around 15yrs we had a strong progressive tax rate that taxed income above 200k at 94% or greater. One year was 95%. These were the greatest growth years for the American middle class. We'll never see those numbers again in our lifetimes but to tax hedge fund managers who pull billions of dollars out of the economy at a rate of 15% tax, while someone working 60hrs a week is taxed at 34%, this is wrong. When people see a future where they can do better than their parents because the tax rate is based upon helping those who work hard to prosper and that they have unlimited prospects in their life, people always rise up to any challenge. The planet has problems but nothing that can't be solved if people are given the opportunity. Right now, Great Britain has greater upward mobility than America. A country with a strong class system that most of us left because it was keeping us down. That is a sad sorry state of affairs.

You forgot broken hearts, loss of loved ones, failed relationships and non-financial traumas which is a greater source of pain than progressive tax rates. Stagnant wages have more to do with inflation which is caused by excessive government spending and the invention of money with no service or product to produce it. Key indicators of inflation have been purged from the measure for decades making it inaccurate to measure anything. Believe the Fed that we have low inflation? After Obama became president you can no longer buy a 5 pound bag of sugar, you can buy a 4 pound bag for the same price or more. Cereal boxes went from 16 ounces to 11.5 ounces of product. Even toilet paper rolls have gone from 5 inches wide to less than 4 inches in some cases. This has happened in every inflationary period, the difference this time is the effort to hide the inflation from the public. Before you start blaming big business for this evil, take a harder look at big government. Social Security and the Medicare system account for a huge segment of government costs. Cost of living allowances are keyed to inflation, if inflation is measured and reported truthfully at around 20% both programs go bankrupt almost immediately. However, a 2% inflation rate allows them to continue a bit longer, but Social Security recipients come up shorter every year. This is just not an Obama phenomenon, but it accelerated under his administration due to factors well known to qualified economists. In your progressive tax scheme advocacy you neglect that these high taxes also had built in shelters and other means to dodge the tax. No one in those brackets paid 95% of their income, but they did create an industry of people who helped them avoid those rates with a number of strategies. In the 1970's I earned $7/hr as a carpenter, I could buy a house ($125/mo), I could buy a car ($65/mo, I could feed my family, I could have a hobby and I had more discretionary money in my pocket than when I have had when I earned $50/hr. Houses cost 1/4 of what people are paying for cars now.
Your economics knowledge is Keynesian which holds that the government, which produces nothing is a better manager of an economy than the participants in it who will make decisions based on their own needs and self interest, with debt ("owning" something without having paid for it) being the means to economic growth. It fails because it does not take into account debt has to be paid. That is how our government rationalizes

If what you say is the true cause of our problems, there is no solution to the spot we're in. We cannot erase the debt and things will continue to spiral out of control. We need solutions. I remember the 70's as well. My dad was a carpenter earning $7.00hr and that bought us two new snowmobiles in 72, we had two cars, a brand new car in 1978, new pickups over and over again, my mom was a home maker and did not work and us four kids had better clothes than almost all kids in school. Yes, inflation numbers are skewed. But, you can buy a new table saw today for less money than it cost in 1978. A lot of items that were big ticket back then, are now cheap. But, I can't help getting sticker shock whenever I look at new truck prices.

Much of these increases are due to the ADA and other regulations. Bush signed this into law and it was a good idea but it is burying us. Small towns have the responsibility to completely upgrade their schools and public buildings for handicap accessibility. The ADA is pitting neighbor against neighbor. Millions of dollars in expense for every small town in the nation is hurting everyone and raising property taxes to the point that people can't afford them.

People just trying to work and make a living, have to park to the side of the entrance of the lumber yard because to the two front spots remain empty. Those need to be handicap accessible and are reserved for non-existent customers. There are not that many handicap people in construction. Most are handicap so they can get out of construction.

Our cars are safer than they have ever been due to regulation. If you hit a small rock in the road you may total your car because half the airbag system goes off and now the car in non-inspectable. This just happened with our teen son. $3,800 in damage yet the car looks perfectly fine and runs perfectly fine. There is no reason these systems need to be so expensive. If I choose to buy repair kits, send seat belts in to repair facilities, I can repair the car for less than $500.

So much today is vastly better than it was in the past due to regulation but we've gone over the top with it. TSA has ruined airports and for what? Since 9-11, we've lost 6 people a year to terrorism and we've spent more than 2 trillion dollars fighting it. In 2017 alone we lost more than 600,000 people to cancer and spent 5 billion on it.

Sorry. I'm ranting.

Part 2 - (see below I think) Nothing about computers even though we were using them before they were in diapers (do the numbers 186, 286, 386 and 486 mean anything to you? That really dates me) So I rant. My generation spent our careers making things better, and some political movement wants to paint us all with the same dirty brush for making the environment better than we found it. I too rant,as you can tell, but I really appreciate your ranting because you make a lot of sense and I get a lot closer to middle ground by the end of the rant. I meme, therefore I am. Best wishes for you.

All excellent points. A significant number of states have elected fiscally responsible representation and turned debt into surplus, but when you start talking trillions it is mind boggling. Gov. Bill Owens left office with Colorado having a $4 billion surplus, then Colorado elected Dem, Gov, House and Senate. Within 7 months we were $10 billion in debt, taxes were raised on everything and Gov. Ritter chose not to run for re-election because the whole state was against him. I had been working in the third largest natural gas province in the world in western Colorado when they got the great idea to raise well permit fees and make permitting much more time consuming and impossible with the logic "Where are they gonna go, the gas is here, neener, neener, neener." Well they went to Pennsylvania and now the Marcellus is the largest producing natural gas province in the world. and thousands like me had to travel for work, worse yet we got laid off from our careers. Just FYI, oil and gas uses water well drilling methods when drilling through aquifers, all rock is naturally fractured, hydraulic fracturing is simply using the hydrostatic pressure from a column of fluid to open those fractures so that a sand medium can be placed in the fractures to create microscopic passages for oil and gas to flow to the well. Oil and gas is not in large underground lakes or bubbles, it is in the pores and cracks of certain types of rocks that are favorable to hold it. Frac (no K in tracture) jobs use food grade thickenersto suspend the sand in water, and anti microbials to kill bacteria that can thrive in the higher subterranean temperatures and block off a well.Hydraulic fracing has been done for almost 70 years and only became a problem when it was used as a political weapon. Directional drilling was used over 100 years ago, technology has developed where we can microfracture a well specifically where it increase production and we can steer a drill bit three miles or more to a target the size of a refrigerator. If someone wants a career with an environmental sciences degree, they can make a real difference by working for an oil and gas company, they have the budget and sincere intensity to protect the environment. In 35 years, I had no environmental violations, and no lost time accidents under my watch, but age discrimination is keeping me out (and everyone else I know over 50) because near college age HR people believe we destroyed the planet, we don't have any teeth, and we kn

$22 trillion ind debt as inconsequential. Hyperinflation has many historical precedents, the outcome is predictable. Keynesian is a failure, and has always led to failure, but a government run Ponzi scheme makes it appear viable. If I took away every penny you earn to fund my government, how has that improved my life?

It's fascinating that you are a supply sider on illegal drugs but the opposite on the above ground economy. Let me ask you another economics question. If high taxes produce more wealth, ie. encourage more economic growth, the why do we tax cigarettes at a high rate to discourage use? By your logic, if we didn't tax them at all consumption would cease. Your assumption that wealthy people do not work hard is absurd and uninformed. You also neglect that the 50s and 60s were post depression years, there was no where to go but up after the progressive policies of FDR extended the Great Depression. I am a living example of economic mobility in the US, I have gone from middle class to upper middle class to poverty to top 5% income earner back to poverty to middle class. The truth is people in poverty move up and the wealthy move down all the time, wealth is not static, nor is it a good measure of quality of life. You example of 15 and 34% tax rates, beside being vague, is wrong. Look at IRS tax tables. Blather on all you want with your dogma, it may impress some, but it is grossly ignorant.

I know my comments won't come up in the order I submitted them, but I want to ask, if income redistribution is so good, why is the greatest concentration of wealth in the US in Washington, DC?

Nearly 40,000 People Died From Guns in U.S. Last Year, Highest in 50 Years.
Cartel Land opens with a bit of misdirection. https://film.avclub.com/cartel-land-examines-anti-drug-vigilantes-on-both-sides-1798184311

The report did not include the impact of about 400,000 federal workers who were furloughed in December because of the government shutdown. That's because the data for Friday's report was collected before the shutdown started on December 22. The unemployment rate rose to 3.9% as more people were looking for work.

Black, Hispanic, Asian and female unemployment are at record lows. These rates have been falling relatively steadily since around 2010, early in President Obama's tenure in the White House. So have the unemployment rates for all races and ethnic groups tracked by the Labor Department.

Americans Oppose Border Walls, Favor Dealing With DACA https://news.gallup.com/poll/235775/americans-oppose-border-walls-favor-dealing-daca.aspx?utm_source=twitterbutton&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=sharing

"The vast majority of the people that move illegally into the United States are not bad people," John Kelly said. "They're not criminals. They're not MS-13" gang members.

The GAO report does not say, at any point, how many homicides were committed each year by undocumented immigrants. Rather, it estimated the number of “historical arrests” for the population of criminal aliens incarcerated in federal or state penitentiaries or local jails.

"Nearly 40,000 People Died From Guns in U.S. Last Year" Over 90% of them were from "repeat offenders" who are not aloud to own any type of firearm.In fact most violent crime in general is from "repeat offenders" , why do we keep letting them out of jail???

Which begs the question imgflip.com/i/2q5wpv

40,000 BS. And as for your other numerical perversions, BS.
BUT you are still a hater of the first order in addition to being a major purchaser of lies.

And of course you never watched Cartel Land but point to a review. If you had read a little further you would have seen this-
"Fortunately, Cartel Land spends considerably more screen time in Mexico, where the real action is. Sick and tired of being intimidated, robbed, and murdered, a vigilante group called the Autodefensas, led by a middle-aged surgeon named José Manuel Mireles Valverde, has been driving the cartels out of the state of Michoacán, one city at a time. To say that Heineman has been granted remarkable access to their activities would be an understatement—more than once, his camera is present when gunfire breaks out, and he charges ahead anyway, intent on capturing whatever goes down."
Classic lazy ass liberal, google it and act like you thought it.

So your argument is basically that man, is man's worst enemy. Don't do anything because the basic instinct to kill people is something we are born with.
Even though other countries that have some gun control measures don't see the numbers we see. Ignore the reality and just be ready to duck and cover...... Brilliant.

It's not the gun any more than a club or atom bomb can be used as a tool to destroy- it is what is in the heart and soul of the individual. If you believe you are accountable for nothing and to no one, you may do everything for your self interest. Or you may have a compassionate soul and do everything for others. If someone wants to kill someone they will do it with a rock if that's all they have or with their fists. The fact that there are over 300,000,000 million guns in the US and 60,000 violent acts perpetrated with guns statistically shows that guns are not the problem, individuals are. Taking guns from a law abiding citizen does not one thing to make anyone else safer- the law abiding citizen is not going to harm anyone whether they have a gun or not. Punishing those who obey the law does not stop the evil person. It's simple logic.