2012 republican presidential nominee III: can romney get santorum out of his hair?

granted what "middle class" actually means well...

i take yr standard deviations and raise you marginal utility, a good reason rich people shouldnt have all the money is because it isnt doing them any good, where as even a measly additional standard deviation from the mean would represent a huge quality of life increase and even gasp a class power up to a poor person

As covers go, this is some new kind of bad.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4ttQGoQHihk/TyQcdlNHNqI/AAAAAAABPqY/fmdF_U6Rfck/s1600/NewsweekNipple.jpg

lol is that real

you should probably accustom yourself to the fact that newsweek is trolling everyone

Karl Lagerfeld running amok would be more poetic.

(It's real.)

such is the future of media

you should probably accustom yourself to the fact that newsweek is trolling everyone

― mookieproof, Wednesday, February 1, 2012 9:02 PM (40 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sage words

On that Newsweek cover, which one is wielding the Sword of Chang?

important question

Ricky Santorum:

http://us.cdn3.123rf.com/168nwm/imahe/imahe1110/imahe111000088/11083433-a-funny-cartoon-gladiator-about-to-attack-with-his-sword-and-shield.jpg

Gingrich criticizes the Romney statement about the poor because it's...divisive?

Newt: "There's no Red America and Blue America--we're just one nation, Newtonia, indivisible with liberty and justice for all."

on the moon

Where are the follow-ups to Romney on how the plans he is endorsing for Medicare, Medicaid will not keep that safety net intact for those poor people he does not want to think about?

all this Gotcha stuff about standard Mitt palaver that just happens to come out extra-badly on one occasion is beyond pathetic. It's like a motherfucking spelling bee.

and i won spelling bees, so I'm allowed to say so.

It's more than one occasion. But I see that I interpreted wrong. Conservatives are noting that Romney should be talking about these folks getting jobs, not taking money from the rest of us to stay on the safety net.

Senator DeMint from South Carolina:
I would say I’m worried about the poor because many are trapped in dependency, they need a good job; they don’t need to be on social welfare programs….

http://www.rollcall.com/news/demint_calls_on_romney_to_reframe_comments_on_poor-212035-1.html

I won a 3rd grade spelling bee

yeah re that DeMint shit; whether you believe him or not, Mitt was doing a stock speech that includes "fixing any holes in the safety net" which is well to the "left" of his co-clowns rhetorically.

I would say I’m worried about the poor because many are trapped in dependency, they need a good job; they don’t need to be on social welfare programs….

George W. H. Bush said he was for full employment but that's just not how the labor market works and unitl it does, this shit is either just stupid or essentially racist and sanctimoniously moralistic.

Aren't nets supposed to have holes?

Shockingly, I agree with Morbs. I actually read that bungled Mitt quote as perhaps foreshadowing his long-awaited move towards the center, now that he's feeling a bit more confident after trouncing Newt in FL. Even paying lip-service to "safety nets" is alarmingly moderate for a GOP primary candidate.

Kicking Mitt for saying "I don't care about the very poor" is lame. He was basically saying what every major party candidate has said for ages, "I'm worried about the 'middle class' not about the very rich or the very poor". It's essentially right-minded class warfare and he fucked up his delivery pretty badly but once they get the programming right, he'll be able to deliver these lines better even in sleep mode.

I think everyone knows that but it's fun to kick him anyway, and additional fun to see right-wingers kick him on it for different reasons. Question for DeMint or anyone:Why didn't Reagan and the Bushes and the various Congresses succeed in getting more folks out of the safety net (or do conservatives insist they have been making progress with their methods)?

but once they get the programming right, he'll be able to deliver these lines better even in sleep mode.

they've been programming him for, what, 5 years now?

mitts never gonna get it, his os cannot be upgraded

Agree with Morbius. As much as I'm enjoying the fallout from Romney's comment, it's just inartful political posturing meant to show how much he cares about the middle class. No more, no less. But I agree with all the commentary yesterday--some of it from the right--that said the major message of what Romney said is how inept he can be at rudimentary politics.

Essentially, being for full employment is also being against the middle class; to get anywhere near there you'd need to get rid of unions, minimum wage laws and any protections for wage earners up to and including max working hours, barring child labor, etc... Everybody has tried it over history and it still didn't work. It's typical bagger crack smoking. They want history to be as simple, digestible and suited to their lazy self-regard as it was (to them) in the 4th grade.

xp yeah but it's nice to see that middle class pandering is getting less traction these days!

Full employment was historically a communist rallying cry, wasn't it?

I mean it seems like the only way it could ever happen when all employment is state-mandated and state-provided.

well there is the economics term full employment which means i think roughly whats the minimum % of unemployed people at any one time thats possible all things considered, its around 4% iirc

Full employment was historically a communist rallying cry, wasn't it?

Yes

The United States is, as a statutory matter, committed to full employment (defined as 3% unemployment for persons 20 and older, 4% for person aged 16 and over), the government is empowered to effect this goal, and a job is a right.[4] The relevant legislation is the Employment Act (1946), initially "Full Employment Act", later amended in the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act (1978). The 1946 act was passed in the aftermath of World War II, when it was fear that demobilization would result in a depression, as it had following World War I in the Depression of 1920–21, while the 1978 act was passed in following the 1973–75 recession and in the midst of continuing high inflation.

The law states that full employment is one of four economic goals, in concert with growth in production, price stability, and balance of trade and budget, and that the US shall rely primarily on private enterprise to achieve these goals. Specifically, the act is committed to an unemployment rate of no more than 3% for persons aged 20 or over and not more than 4% for persons aged 16 or over (from 1983 onwards), and the Act expressly allows (but does not require) the government to create a "reservoir of public employment" to effect this level of employment. These jobs are required to be in the lower ranges of skill and pay so as to not draw the workforce away from the private sector.

However, since the passage of this act in 1978, the US has, as of 2011 never achieved this level of employment, nor has such a reservoir of public employment been created.

(so sez wikipedia)

It was Nixon who wanted a living wage.

I think the smart pro-free-market people realize that the safety net, regulations, and so on are there to protect the free market. Keynes was trying to save capitalism, though you wouldn't believe that from listening to conservatives these days.

xps

See, I am not against the market but I think it has some inherent glitches and contradictions (as Marx pointed out, it tends towards monopoly and w/o regulation, it tends not to reflect spillover costs) that govmt should rightfully oversee. I would love to see a dull center-right politics in an economy where the safety and welfare net for everyone was assured and where we could argue passionately over half percent tax or interest rate moves.

well there's no universal definition of what that safety or welfare net would be

Haven't we gotten really close to full employment at certain historical moments? I mean the postwar boom years and so on, obviously lots of people were seriously left out of the loop but certainly regulated market capitalism - - - under extremely specific, not-likely-to-be-repeated circumstances that do not necessarily produce social justice - - - CAN approach full employment...

no such thing at a free market, it just means regulated in the way i like

well it depends on your definition of full employment but countries can certainly have v low unemployment. context usually favors them.

Wouldn't a US economy booming along on nearly full employment, and a big thriving global economy, be dependent on a level of mass consumption that would put us at the beginning of Wall-E within, like, a generation?

you can invent a magical world where we're inventing things and have

er, hit submit on accident

you can invent a magical world where we're inventing things that require american-based labor and have forms of consumption that aren't as bleak as wall-e, but in any case I don't think 'full employment' is something we'll ever be worrying about, even w/ a booming us economy

usa had v near full employment v recently

also worth remembering that the way we define unemployment is on some level arbitrary and can affect the % pretty substantially

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/US_Unemployment_measures.svg

well we have lots diff definitions is what that charts saying

each one beautiful in its own way

don't privilege one definition over the other