Societal collapse

[Higgenbotham]

What the article really points out is that per capita incomes are lower in the red states than they are in the blue states. The article then goes on to say that when per capita incomes are lower, less federal tax is paid. The real question is why per capita incomes are lower. Mostly, it's because pork projects are preferentially directed into blue states because, admittedly, they have the human capital and infrastructure to better handle them. Also, for the reason I stated earlier, that manufacturing was purposely gutted by the Democrats to reduce the power and influence of the red states (which I did not go so far as to say all of that previously). It's not just the social safety nets that are pork. I previously made the distinction between welfare cases and high class welfare cases. You said you worked for the government programming missiles, so you are a high class welfare case and your job was preferentially located in a blue state. When socialism runs out of other people's money, that job and your pension will go away, as well as the federal tax receipts that flow out of that magic socialist cornucopia. I realize it is difficult to get you to understand that because your salary depends on you not being able to understand that, but that is what is going to happen. Now please smile smugly as to verify that and I will smile smugly back at you.

In fact, manufacturing jobs go to cities as that is where the workers, infrastructure and educational institutions exist. We have institutions like MIT and Harvard, so the businesses their graduates start stay close. Manufacturing jobs just flow to high population density areas. I don't doubt that legislators try to get jobs in their district. I remember one meeting where it was presented that we all had to contribute to a certain candidate in order to get a contract. But this is more one blue legislator against another.

The last year that Obama continued in the Democratic tradition of gutting manufacturing and other red state jobs, these were the results:

Here are the five cities with the most job losses in the 12 months to October 2016:

Lafayette, Louisiana, lost nearly 8,500 jobs in the period, nearly 4.5% of its workforce. Most of the losses came in the manufacturing sector, and the unemployment rate at the end of October was 7.1%, compared with a national rate of 4.9%.

Casper, Wyoming, dropped about 1,500 jobs in the coal mining and energy industries. The unemployment rate in the city is 6.6%, and the one-year decrease totaled 3.77% of the city's jobs.

Houma-Thibodaux, Louisiana, lost 3.74% of its jobs in the 12-month period, a total of about 3,400, primarily in the oil and gas business. The unemployment rate in the city is 6.7%.

Shreveport-Bossier City, Louisiana, lost more than 4,200 jobs, or nearly 2.35% of the October 2015 workforce. The metro area is the hub of the natural gas-producing region known as the Haynesville shale play, and low gas prices hit the area hard. The unemployment rate is 6.8%.

Mansfield, Ohio, lost nearly 1,200 jobs, primarily in the manufacturing sector. About 20% of the area's jobs are in manufacturing, so reversing this trend is a particular challenge here. The unemployment rate in Mansfield is 5.6%.

Will President-elect Donald Trump be able to deliver on his promise to return manufacturing jobs to the United States?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/5-us-cities- ... 33729.html

You make it sound like the Democrats were gutting manufacturing out of blue city centers - places like New York City, Chicago, Philly, and Boston. My read of the above is those job losses came out of red states and maybe one swing state.

I agree with you that as jobs are gutted out of the red states, Democrats will try to create pork jobs in the blue states, preferably the big blue urban areas. If they can't stuff the new $100 billion Micron plant, for example, into a big blue city like New York City, they will try to direct it into New York State, as they have. It's a colossal waste of money to put it there, but that's where it went.

Chuckie Schumer delivered first prize in the pork competition.

After ushering through CHIPS bill, Schumer takes victory lap on Micron investments
By Kevin Frey New York State
PUBLISHED 7:28 PM ET Oct. 04, 2022

U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer is taking a victory lap after microchip-manufacturer Micron Technology announced plans for a major new factory in Central New York.

Over the summer, Schumer spearheaded the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act — a bill the Micron CEO said Tuesday was “essential” in their decision to make the investment.

Micron Technology said it will spend up to $100 billion over a 20-year period on a new megafab in the Syracuse area, estimated to create tens of thousands of jobs for the region, including 9,000 direct positions.

Schumer likened it to an “Erie Canal moment.”

The announcement comes just months after Congress approved the CHIPS and Science Act, which spends tens of billions of dollars to jumpstart America’s semiconductor industry.

“I said for many years, if I was lucky enough to be [Senate] majority leader, I’d use my position to deliver for New York in a really significant way,” Schumer said at Tuesday’s announcement.

Speaking to Bloomberg News, Micron Technology CEO Sanjay Mehrotra praised the CHIPS law, saying that without it and other tax credits, their investment in New York “would not be happening.”

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/centr ... nvestments

There are some small advanced technology businesses around blue cities that could be considered manufacturing businesses such as:

WORLD HEADQUARTERS
Axcelis Technologies
108 Cherry Hill Drive
Beverly, MA 01915-1088

https://www.axcelis.com/about/about-us/

However, I think they manufacture their equipment in Korea; please correct me if I'm wrong and that's not the prevailing model for most of these kinds of businesses.

[Bob Butler]

Did a little digging. Casper Wyoming has been hit. Obama put an emphasis on renewable energy which did hurt some traditional energy extraction. Covid also caused headaches resulting in a rough patch. A third factor is that the mines and energy sources are expiring. I saw some projections that the energy and mining sector in the area will continue a long term decline regardless. What I did not see was complaints about a Democratic conspiracy.

Louisiana was a bigger mess. They have big cities, a big farming sector, energy extraction, and a healthy education sector, They are in a hurricane sector, though Katrina was a while ago. Excess fertilizer flow coming down the Mississippi has created a large dead zone off the coast, effecting the fishing industry. The Deepwater Horizon blowout was again a while ago. They are active in immigration, reproductive healthcare and fighting woke. In short, various cities are going up and down seemingly haphazardly and it seems hard to point at a single decisive factor. It seems to depend upon the city. However, a blue state conspiracy to harm red states was not mentioned.

I haven’t look into Axcelis Technologies beyond visiting their Wiki page. They do play a role in semiconductor production. During the time globalization was being pushed they followed the trend and went for the cheap labor abroad. With the recent decision that critical manufacturing should be in the United States, it looks like they would have better sales locally. I’m not surprised to see their headquarters in New York and Massachusetts, their factories more spread about. Again, nothing on a blue state conspiracy.

But the tendency for manufacturing jobs to go to population dense areas is similar to energy jobs going toward areas with gas and oil, or steel producing jobs appearing in areas with iron ore and coal. If New York, Pittsburgh and Texas feature different jobs, it depends on other things than politics. I find your dastardly blue state conspiracy theory lacking merit. Oh, I do see some efforts. Republicans are not in favor of minorities, the LBGQ community, non European culture, the woke culture, and seemingly everybody not themselves. The Democrats seem to be prejudiced towards rule of law or against criminals. Some of these pushes are quite real. I’m just not sure of assaults against specific jobs.

[Higgenbotham]

Did a little digging. Casper Wyoming has been hit. Obama put an emphasis on renewable energy which did hurt some traditional energy extraction. Covid also caused headaches resulting in a rough patch. A third factor is that the mines and energy sources are expiring. I saw some projections that the energy and mining sector in the area will continue a long term decline regardless. What I did not see was complaints about a Democratic conspiracy.

Louisiana was a bigger mess. They have big cities, a big farming sector, energy extraction, and a healthy education sector, They are in a hurricane sector, though Katrina was a while ago. Excess fertilizer flow coming down the Mississippi has created a large dead zone off the coast, effecting the fishing industry. The Deepwater Horizon blowout was again a while ago. They are active in immigration, reproductive healthcare and fighting woke. In short, various cities are going up and down seemingly haphazardly and it seems hard to point at a single decisive factor. It seems to depend upon the city. However, a blue state conspiracy to harm red states was not mentioned.

I haven’t look into Axcelis Technologies beyond visiting their Wiki page. They do play a role in semiconductor production. During the time globalization was being pushed they followed the trend and went for the cheap labor abroad. With the recent decision that critical manufacturing should be in the United States, it looks like they would have better sales locally. I’m not surprised to see their headquarters in New York and Massachusetts, their factories more spread about. Again, nothing on a blue state conspiracy.

But the tendency for manufacturing jobs to go to population dense areas is similar to energy jobs going toward areas with gas and oil, or steel producing jobs appearing in areas with iron ore and coal. If New York, Pittsburgh and Texas feature different jobs, it depends on other things than politics. I find your dastardly blue state conspiracy theory lacking merit. Oh, I do see some efforts. Republicans are not in favor of minorities, the LBGQ community, non European culture, the woke culture, and seemingly everybody not themselves. The Democrats seem to be prejudiced towards rule of law or against criminals. Some of these pushes are quite real. I’m just not sure of assaults against specific jobs.

The Democrats have been a "Divide and Conquer" party at least since Bill Clinton became President with the strategy of false economic promises and denigration of the disenfrachised. The disenfranchised were basically anyone in the bottom 80-90% of the economic ladder. Their failure in strategy was probably one of overreach, as that is too many people to screw and keep it up for a long time, even with tight control of information. The "Divide and Conquer" idea was to disenfranchise both inner city blacks and rural whites and pit them against each other using the dog whistles like "White racists" and others.

Generally, Turchin refers to this as the money pump. It's just the normal part of any civilization going into decline. Actors will surface who do these things to hold onto their positions for a little while longer. As Bill Clinton revved the money pump up and Obama put it into overdrive, the wealth gap widened and widened. It's also been noted that small businesses were destroyed.

It worked for a long time, though, until Trump called the bluff. When he did, the beneficiaries of the Democrat strategy (mostly suburban Whites in the top 10-20% of the income distribution) protested vehemently and invoked the same dog whistles against Trump - racist, misogynist, criminal - basically the same ones you repeat. Due to their lock on the media it worked for awhile. Now everyone is clearly seeing through it and Trump is soaring in the polls. That has been well documented in this thread by jdp and John. It's really a beautiful thing to see Whites and Blacks come together under the Trump banner and understand who their overseers really are.

When a state or an inner city area is losing jobs for 20 years running, basically every year that a Democrat is in the White House, the trend becomes obvious. The 1992 promise that free trade will make us all rich rings hollower and hollower each year as wealth inequality increases.

To imply that this was not done in plain sight would be kind of wrong. I think my words were that it was done on purpose, Yes, it was. Not only that, as the Democrats destroyed the inner cities and the rural areas, they never acknowledged that anything was wrong. They just continued to destroy.

Next up are the consequences. I'm not in any hurry to see them but they are coming.

[Higgenbotham]

When a Democrat President has a hammer in his hand, every red state job looks like a nail. The evidence is plain to see every day.

The Biden Admin Says It’s Not Trying To Ban Gas Stoves, But Its Spending Binge Could Electrify Them Out Of Existence

NICK POPE

September 07, 2023


The Biden administration maintains that it is not attempting to ban gas stoves, but its spending on building electrification programs indicates that it may be able to effectively phase out gas stoves by helping local governments ban gas hookups in new buildings.

The Department of Energy (DOE) will spend $225 million to help state and local governments adopt building codes that are in line with its electrification push, according to its website. The push to achieve widespread building and appliance electrification could induce a de facto gas stove ban for new buildings by eventually phasing out new gas hookups, a policy pursued in several Democrat-controlled jurisdictions.

“Jurisdictions have tried to ban gas hookups, and they have lost in court,” Steve Milloy, senior legal fellow for the Energy & Environment Legal Institute and former Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team member, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They’re not going to stop, they don’t care what the courts say and they are going to try to bulldoze their way to policy objectives.”

https://dailycaller.com/2023/09/07/bide ... 8uCcekkVLA

[Higgenbotham]

Generally, Turchin refers to this as the money pump. It's just the normal part of any civilization going into decline. Actors will surface who do these things to hold onto their positions for a little while longer. As Bill Clinton revved the money pump up and Obama put it into overdrive, the wealth gap widened and widened. It's also been noted that small businesses were destroyed.

It worked for a long time, though, until Trump called the bluff. When he did, the beneficiaries of the Democrat strategy (mostly suburban Whites in the top 10-20% of the income distribution) protested vehemently and invoked the same dog whistles against Trump - racist, misogynist, criminal - basically the same ones you repeat. Due to their lock on the media it worked for awhile. Now everyone is clearly seeing through it and Trump is soaring in the polls. That has been well documented in this thread by jdp and John. It's really a beautiful thing to see Whites and Blacks come together under the Trump banner and understand who their overseers really are.

When a state or an inner city area is losing jobs for 20 years running, basically every year that a Democrat is in the White House, the trend becomes obvious. The 1992 promise that free trade will make us all rich rings hollower and hollower each year as wealth inequality increases.

To imply that this was not done in plain sight would be kind of wrong. I think my words were that it was done on purpose, Yes, it was. Not only that, as the Democrats destroyed the inner cities and the rural areas, they never acknowledged that anything was wrong. They just continued to destroy.

Next up are the consequences. I'm not in any hurry to see them but they are coming.

Elite overproduction is visible in the increasing number of college graduates who are over-qualified for the jobs on offer. The unseemly competition to enter top colleges came to public notice in 2019, when investigators found rich parents had paid bribes to get their children into the best universities. Elite infighting has broken out: Turchin describes former President Donald Trump as a typical “counter-elite” who capitalised on popular discontent. We have now entered the pre-crisis phase. “Many observers were taken aback by the intensity of ‘cancel culture’ that appeared out of nowhere. But such vicious ideological struggles are a common phase in any revolution,” Turchin writes.

Missing from this analysis is the important role played by monetary policy. Ultra-low interest rates proved the greatest wealth pump ever devised, loading the dice in favour of the financial elite. Easy money inflated asset prices, lowered corporate borrowing costs and facilitated financial transactions. More deals and higher stock prices pushed up the pay of Wall Street bankers and senior corporate executives. Since the turn of the century, when the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan reduced interest rates to a new post-war low, wealth has consistently grown faster than GDP. In the United States, household wealth soared even as net savings declined. According to a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute, some $160 trillion of paper wealth has been created globally over the past two decades.

In McKinsey’s analysis lower interest rates pushed up real estate and corporate valuations, and encouraged more borrowing, much of which was spent on existing assets, including corporate acquisitions and share buybacks. By early 2021, U.S. wealth had climbed to more than six times GDP, roughly twice its 1980 level. The explosion of paper wealth has been a global phenomenon. According to McKinsey, China’s net worth is now 800% of GDP, approximately the same level as Japan reached at the peak of its asset bubble in 1990.

When a crisis point arrives, says Turchin, the elite is doomed to shrink. In the past this happened through massacre, imprisonment or forced emigration. But the transition doesn’t have to be violent: “It is possible to shut down the wealth pump and rebalance social systems without resorting to a revolution or catastrophic war,” writes Turchin. Downward mobility is the most benign solution. That’s where higher interest rates come in.

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/i ... 023-06-23/

[FullMoon]

Using your logic, if as you allege, "the Trump family is into rape" because of Donald's issue, are you therefore suggesting that the Biden family is into drugs because of Hunter's issue?

That is more conservative logic.

At present, conservative IS the only side applying the reason and logic on a somewhat consistent basis. Liberalism has failed and the current crop of deplorable libtarded Leftrash will be denounced by future generations for their treachery and deliberate destruction of this Republic.

[Bob Butler]

I will say that from the perspective of Americans, globalism was a bad deal. Still, the rich were for it and gave money to politicians who supported it. We were stuck with it.

From another angle entirely, something had to be done to bring up the poorest abroad. Giving jobs to the cheapest labor did that. Not that I’d give kudos to the very rich who were profiting from exploiting the cheap labor. They were in it for themselves, as were the politicians who took their money. Still, there was some plus in globalism in spreading the jobs to some of those who needed it most.

It was just one corollary of colonial imperialism that was being turned upside down. During the Industrial Age, the manufacturing jobs were kept in the mother countries, not in the colony states. This was reversed during the globalist period. The rich and the politicians cared more for profit than their country.

Covid illustrated that critical jobs had to be kept in the country. We are heading the other way now. Bidenomics is emphasizing investing in local jobs and infrastructure. We will see if what was done during globalism was enough. As we switch back to protecting the developed countries, was enough done to protect the rest of the world?

I would question that calling Trump a racist, misogynist and criminal was part of any ongoing strategy. Other than a few of Nixon’s plumbers, who were the criminals? Like I disagree with a lot of conservative thought, but you call them misguided and selfish not generally criminals.

Whose fault are the accusations that Trump is a racist, misogynist and criminal other than Trump’s? Do you doubt any of the juries that have dissolved his charity, his university, found his business guilty of tax fraud and filing false financial statements? After reading the indictments, do you doubt Trump’s actions were criminal, sexually abusive and derogatory? If there was a habit of Democrats calling Republicans that bad, who did they target? There is only one person that bad.

MAGA is buying onto it. Trump is criminal. Trump is bigoted. Trump is sexist. So are we. Hurrah for bigoted criminal sexism. That is what MAGA is. That is the image they are tying themselves to. If conservative thought generally collapses at the peak of the crisis, if conservative values are generally trashed in the high, replaced by the virtues that solved the crisis, how do you expect this time will be different?

MSNBC had a segment recently on incumbents seeking reelection. The thrust was at this point, just over a year out, the incumbent was generally losing in the polls. People are often not satisfied, They are ready for something new. This generally changes as the election gets closer. As folks like Obama and Clinton 42 get close to and past their second nomination, the perspective changes as the known candidate challenges the unknown opponent. This made me feel a little better about putting myself behind the civic generation. The people who want to solve problems come out on top. People in rural areas do not confront as many problems. Reproductive health care, spree killers, prejudice, religious zealots, criminals and insurrectionists each bring votes to the Democratic table.

It is early yet. We will see how it goes.

[Bob Butler]

I can agree with Turchin to the point that if you ship manufacturing jobs overseas, the parts of the country that features manufacturing jobs will be hurt. This was deliberate on the part of the rich and the politicians that received money. They cared more for wealth than for country. Bidenomics emphasizes in country jobs and infrastructure. The Republicans have no conflicting economic plan.

I disagree that Democrats had a long term strategy of calling Republicans in general racist, misogynist and criminal. Who did they so accuse other than the world champion racist, misogynist and criminal?

You have yet to show blue state targeting of rural jobs. Globalism existed. Jobs went abroad that hurt urban areas here. This was not the result of some blue state conspiracy.

In general, while people on this site are predicting disaster, I am still looking for a new birth of freedom.

Edit: A problem with Turgin is similar to one I have often presented to John. Once you cross an age boundary, the patterns you have observed prior to that boundary have to be confirmed. A lot of things are happening now that are quite different from prior ages. As a result, his analysis is questionable at best.

[John]

** 08-Sep-2023 World View: Fascists

> I disagree that Democrats had a long
> term strategy of calling Republicans
> in general racist, misogynist and
> criminal. Who did they so accuse
> other than the world champion
> racist, misogynist and criminal?

That is the ONLY Democrat strategy since
they have nothing else.

Hillary referred to all Tea Partiers as
Teabaggers and as a "basket of
deplorables -- racist, sexist,
homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic —
you name it." For the last six years,
the Democrats have constantly described
all Trump supporters as "white
supremacists."

Biden himself called all Trump
supporters seim-Fascist, and you and
other Democrats joined in, adding
racist, white supremacist, and lots of
similar stuff.

So your post was a total lie, like
almost all your posts. But I've learned
something about you. Like all
Democrats, when you're caught in a lie
you don't apologize or correct it. You
simply move on the next lie, and repeat
the previous lie a couple of weeks
later. You have zero credibility, and I
don't think you even care.

[Bob Butler]

I consider Hillary’s deplorable comment as a mistake. That was no way to pick up votes. I often reflect that this would have been a very different crisis if she had not made the deplorable mistake, Russia had not interfered, and the FBI had not announced a new investigation just prior to the election. That’s just an interesting conjecture now. Without Trump as president, would the divide in America have been brought to a decisive head?

But to the extent the religious fanatic and bigoted elements of the Republican base existed, she was to some extent correct. Some of the people who opposed the Black Lives Matter protests called themselves nazis. I would count only members of the neo nazi movement as nazi, sort of. They are a really watered down version of the philosophy compared to those of the middle of the 20th century. The neo nazi launched no invasions, built no gas chambers. Still, in the hatred of various minority groups, the Generational Dynamics hatred of those who are different are oh so typical of nazi belief. It is proper to outlaw anti semitic posts on this site, but in banning only oppressing the Jewish minority rather than all minorities are you following nazi philosophy? If you are oppressing blacks, latinos, LBGQ and women, is the attitude different? Yes, the instinct to hate those who are different exists. Does that make it honorable to indulge and further it?

My posts are sincere. So are yours. Deplorable, but sincere. The Democrats do have an economic plan in Bidenomics. They support rule of law. They call white supremacy white supremacy. They defend minorities, women, LBGQ and others. They make the weaponization committee look ridiculous. There are many more elements to their approach than just one. But it is easier to lie when you don’t seem to care about consistency or your reputation.