GOP Debate Notes

[homersapien 11,357]

http://nymag.com/dai...candidates.html

(Emphasis mine.)

....Ohio governor John Kasich launched a Huntsman-esque tirade against the fantasy plans circulated by Donald Trump and Ben Carson. But Kasich quickly faded from the scene and his positioning of himself as the champion of reality-based governance fell flat; indeed, judging the performance by body language alone, Kasich appeared to be the twitching neurotic, and his colleagues smooth and assured.....

....The debate allowed the candidates mostly to agree with each other and against the moderators, whom they especially resented for their intrusions of reality. A recurring trope was for candidates, when presented with uncomfortable facts, to simply deny them. (Becky Quick: "You'd have to cut — you'd have to cut government about 40 percent to make it work with a $1.1 trillion hole.” Ben Carson: “That's not true.”)

Quick went on to quote Donald Trump calling Marco Rubio Mark Zuckerberg’s "personal senator," a quote Trump denied so staunchly and convincingly that Quick apologized, despite being utterly correct. Later, John Harwood asked Rubio about the proportionately higher benefit his plan would give to the richest earners versus people in the middle. Harwood asked:

The Tax Foundation, which was alluded to earlier, scored your tax plan and concluded that you give nearly twice as much of a gain in after-tax income to the top one percent as to people in the middle of the income scale.

Since you're the champion of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, don't you have that backward?

This description is completely true. The Tax Foundation, a right-wing group, analyzed Rubio’s plan and found that the richest one percent would get an 11.5 percent increase in their after-tax income, as opposed to a 1.7 percent increase in after-tax income for taxpayers in the middle of the income distribution. Because it is a right-wing group, the Tax Foundation also prepared a “dynamic” analysis assuming the most fervent dreams of supply-side economics would hold true. That analysis — the numbers from which Harwood used, perhaps as a concession to Rubio, found that the middle would get a 15 percent increase in after-tax income, and the top one percent a 27.9 percent increase.

Rubio denied it flat-out. (“No, that's — you're wrong.”)......

.............This is the sort of exchange that will be replayed endlessly in the general election, since the entire Republican field is unified on the necessity of regressive, debt-financed tax cuts as the centerpiece of their economic strategy. Predictably, when the subject changed from revenue to outlay, the candidates’ moods shifted suddenly from the insouciant conviction that the budget can withstand the loss of trillions of dollars in revenue to rabid parsimony. All the retirement programs are going broke, in dire need of cutting — for younger people, not for current recipients! — and backed by worthless IOUs. Republicans agree that no connection can be made between the federal government’s revenue levels and the levels of social spending it can afford to maintain.

What the candidates agreed upon above all else is that any intrusions into their alternate reality represent a gross offense by the liberal media. Media-bashing provided the most popular subject for contemporaneous sermons, a foolproof way for candidates to bat down any inconvenient query and win wild applause from the partisan crowd. The currents of anti-Establishment rage that had seemed to roil the debate were, at least for one night, drowned out by satisfied unity.

[homersapien 11,357]

...But Ben Carson had one of the more bizarre statements of the night when, in promoting his 10 percent flat tax, he claimed it would bring in plenty of revenue because we would tax the "$18 trillion GDP" of the US economy which would equal $1.8 trillion in taxes. Earth to Ben: you tax INCOME, not gross domestic product. Mr. and Mrs. GDP don't earn a penny of income, because they are not people. But average Americans earn plenty of income, and that's who you tax.

In watching the debate, I kept thinking to myself, "These are the job applicants for the position of CEO of the World." Yet there was more carnival barking on the stage than insights or observations about the economy or economic policy. Indeed, their performances were distinguished more by what they avoided talking about than what they actually managed to toss into the air for their part in this skeet shooting contest....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-hill/gop-candidates-avoid-the_b_8414564.html

[homersapien 11,357]

Noticeably missing from their discussion was American workers, and what's happening to jobs and the labor force. In the face of a weak economy, many workers are having to work as contractors, freelancers, temps and part-timers, and as gig-preneurs and Uber-bots, with low pay, no safety net and no job security. The only question of the night contemplating this major labor market shift was offered up to Carli Fiorina, who was asked if the federal government should play a role in assisting "small businesses, and the growing ranks of Uber drivers and other part-timers in the freelance economy," to set up retirement plans for these workers. Fiorina responded by...ignoring the question, and using it as a moment to launch a diatribe against federal government regulation.

I would like to introduce Fiorina and the other GOP candidates to Chris Young, an assembly-line worker at Nissan's manufacturing plant in Smyrna, Tennessee. Chris works alongside dozens of other employees, but Chris doesn't get to wear the coveted Nissan jersey that many of his fellow workers wear--because he doesn't work for Nissan. Instead, he is what is known as a "perma-temp." He works for Yates Services, a private contractor who now provides a majority of Nissan's workers. Chris says, "I build the same Infiniti SUV" as the Nissan workers, but he and other Yates employees receive half the salary, less job security and way fewer safety net benefits.

Nationwide, temps like Chris Young have provided nearly a fifth of the total job growth since the recession ended, according to federal data. And increasingly the temps aren't very temporary. Some workers originally hired as "temps" have been employed at the same company for as long as 11 years without receiving a full-time position -- hence the new term "perma-temp."

Or how about Frederic Larson, who enjoyed a successful thirty-year career as a staff photographer with the San Francisco Chronicle, during which time he won numerous awards, including being a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He got downsized during the recession, and so needing income he monetized -- he turned his house into an Airbnb hotel and his spiffy Prius into a Lyft taxi. Now for 12 nights per month -- 40 percent of his life -- he shutters himself in a rabbit hole inside his own home while complete strangers have the run of the place. This award-winning professional photographer has been turned into an innkeeper in his own home, and a taxi driver in his own car.

And there's Leena Chitnis, another scrappy "gig-preneur" and a Fulbright scholar who completed her MBA at Syracuse University. To keep herself afloat while she looked for a permanent job, she set up a bunch of micro-gigs on Fiverr. Fiverr is part of the "sharing economy," an online job brokerage that connects buyers to sellers of numerous tasks and services, which pay as little as $5 per job (hence, its name). After fulfilling a total of 27 orders, she found that she had made a grand total of $176. "I've seen panhandlers get more money outside of the 7-11," she said.

The advantage for any business to use 1099 wage-earners over regularly-employed (W-2) workers is obvious: an employer can lower its labor costs dramatically -- by 30 percent or more -- since it is no longer responsible for paying for a 1099 worker's safety net. Corporate America is increasingly relying on these types of workers as a core part of its business model to cut costs and maximize profits. As one new economy booster put it, "Companies need a workforce they can switch on and off as needed" -- like a faucet or a TV.

Things have gotten so topsy-turvy that even the most talented workers are not immune from this trend. Tina Brown, the flamboyant media mogul and former editor of Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and Daily Beast, has noticed with disbelief the impact on her own associates and friends.

"Now that everyone has a project-to-project freelance career, everyone is a hustler," she says. "No one I know has a job anymore. They've got gigs," which she described as a "penny-ante slog of working three times as hard for the same amount of money (if you're lucky) or a lot less (if you're not). Minus benefits, of course." For a while, she added, "the downsized people I know went around pretending they enjoyed the 'freedom' and 'variety' of doing 'a whole lot of interesting things.' Twelve months later, nobody bothers with that cover story anymore."

For all those Americans who lost their good "New Deal" jobs and have entered the disordered world of "Uber-ized" work, many of them now exist in a whole new universe. They don't get paid for the many hours it can take to search for the next job, and attending meetings or gabbing around the water cooler with co-workers while "on the clock" is history. It's all piecework today, practically dialing back the labor clock to the 19th century. It's as if Tom Brady only gets paid for those moments when he throws a touchdown pass, and everything else is on his time and dime.

The accelerated use by employers of the independent contractor loophole is causing a rapid erosion of the safety net for workers and families, one that was forged over many decades. Under the current system, employers actually have an incentive to fire their entire workforce if they can get away with it and dramatically reduce labor costs by using all 1099 workers. And now the apps and websites of "sharing" economy companies like Uber, Instacart, Task Rabbit, Upwork and others make it easier than ever to do. These perverse incentives are threatening to undercut the U.S. labor force and turn millions of workers into little more than day laborers.

Sounds extreme? The pharmaceutical company Merck sold its factory in Philadelphia and the new owner fired all 400 Merck employees and rehired them as independent contractors--Merck then contracted with the company to continue making the same antibiotics for them.

So the problem created by the new digital economy is not merely one of income inequality. We must also re-establish a degree of economic security for the broad swath of American workers. Here's how we can do that....

http://www.huffingto..._b_8414564.html

[autigeremt 6,588]

With all due respect most of the candidates talked about the middle class, the poor and how we need to get them back on their feet again. Huffpo just proved what Rubio and others stated last night. The media has proven itself to be the largest Super PAC the Democrats have.

My opinion.

[homersapien 11,357]

With all due respect most of the candidates talked about the middle class, the poor and how we need to get them back on their feet again. Huffpo just proved what Rubio and others stated last night. The media has proven itself to be the largest Super PAC the Democrats have.

My opinion.

Come on EMT. These candidates are purposefully avoiding addressing the actual consequences of their policies. Should the media just allow them to do so without challenge?

And it's a Republican debate for crying out loud. Obviously it's going to look like they are challenging Republicans, there's no Democrats there.

[MDM4AU 330]

Democrats will never get challenged in their "debates." Well, maybe until it's time to drop the hammer on the insurrection by Sanders, O'Malley, et al.

[AURex 1,990]

The GOP candidates say the words "jobs" and "working families" and such. But the policies they propose tell a different story. The policies are all about giving more to the 1%. Hello United States of Kansas.

[AURaptor 1,122]

The GOP candidates say the words "jobs" and "working families" and such. But the policies they propose tell a different story. The policies are all about giving more to the 1%. Hello United States of Kansas.

Except none of what you said is remotely true.