Official LRC President Joseph R Biden Thread

Yes, I could refute them too, but minimum wage was the central point. I didn't really want to debate 5 points in parallel that would be mostly ignored. But as for the rest of the points, they are mostly straw men. For example, the gender Equal Pay Act is nice on paper, but it did very little in practice because gender-based pay discrimination just isn't that common. There's no law that mandates an 8-hour workday, nor are most of us in a union that mandates it. Also, the current economy is a refutation of the minimum wage argument because it shows that in a tight labor market, wages go up.

But my real issue is agip thinking "conservatives are always on the wrong side of history." He has such a ridiculously whitewashed view of the left, ignoring the ideas they've sympathized with and the problems they've caused, many of which we're still living with today.

The California state budget is in horrible shape. They have about $2 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Their 2021 surplus (btw every state had a surplus in 2021, big whup) was fueled by their capital gains tax on a great year for stocks. In 2022, they won't get those revenues, plus MANY of those wealthy taxpayers moved out.

Newsome even admitted all this a few weeks ago. I'll post the link if I find it.

So the doctor heading the NIH was flip flopping around about how to respond to covid and that’s excuseable because “the science was changing”. But the non science person he was advising doesn’t get a pass for being inconsistent?

If we have another raging pandemic, we could see gas prices fall significantly. Gas can be had in Ohio for $2.89 a gallon this morning, and it is under $3 a gallon in a LOT of states. That's pretty solid. There was a period of time during the Bush Administration where gas was above $4 a gallon. Meh.

come on man.

conservatives have been against so much that we treasure today that it's hard to even list them all.

Liberals? I mean 'conservatives' try to blame them for crime in the cities when crime in the cities has fallen what - 80% since 1990. Ok, ok, there is 0% chance conservatives will credit libs for that, but it happened on their watch.

What else is there? I guess some peope don't like safe food, social security, medicare, public schools, workplace safety, making slavery illegal, controlling the police...so yeah from their point of view libs are bad. I do get that.

Conservatives have indeed been on the wrong side of history on a massive number of things. 10 or 20x as many more bad things than liberals.

That's right. The Blue State Bailout was a powerful piece of legislation. That's why Pelosi did her little dance when it was passed by the house and why everyone has been paying out the nose on inflation. It greatly rewarded state governments that penalized their populations.

joe how come you know so much about energy and so little about anything else? Why is that? are you some sort of idiot savant or just a liar?

Per capita, that bill helped red states more than blue states. Because red states are the poor states and lord knows they need the help.

forbes.com

Blue State Bailout? Red State Residents Received Largest Stimulus Checks, And Millions In Federal Aid

Shahar Ziv

Blue state bailout? The numbers don’t support the claim; any way you slice the data, the answer looks much redder.

Open link

From the released affidavit. Trump has done yet another thing to warrant an FBI investigation.

Now, 'conservatives,' you DO know that you aren't supposed to break laws, right?

Right?

I mean your party leader told us that anyone under FBI investigation shouldn't be in public office.

1. The government is conducting a criminal investigation concerning the improper
removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unlawful
concealment or removal of government records.

Well, I dunno about 80%, but certainly crime rates across the country have dropped drastically since ~1990.

And here in NYC, in 2021--which was a comparatively bad recent year--homicides were still down 78% from what they were in 1990.

en.wikipedia.org

Crime in New York City

Crime rates in New York City have been recorded since at least the 1800s. They have spiked ever since the post-war period. The highest crime totals were recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the crack epidemic surged,...

Open link

I didn’t even respond to his highly questionable point about hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters dying. There were 425K or so that had died when Trump left office and there’s no proof that they were Trump supporters or had even followed his adviser. I’d suggest that he’s the moron.

Just because the crime rate was worse in 1990 doesn't mean it's not bad now...your logic escapes me.

Oh, you and your "facts" and "logic"! Joe knows what he *wants* to be true, and that's good enough for him.

agip is correct about history, but it doesn't mean liberals are always right.

The liberal's job is to make the world a better place. The conservative's job is to make sure the liberals don't go too far too fast.

William F. Buckley, who some consider to be the father of American conservatism, said:

Liberals will usually be proven right by history because history is told from the perspective of the modern world that the liberals created. It's just that conservatives don't get much credit for erecting the guard rails along the way.

See, this is why I stick to one argument at a time. Address my points on your minimum wage video.

Progressives in the first half of the 20th century openly sympathized with fascism and soviet style socialism. They trampled all over constitutional rights and some of them (e.g. Woodrow Wilson) were racist even by the standards of the day. If not for the conservative revival post FDR we would have slid further towards centrally planned socialism. Even despite this, we're still dealing with new deal era nonsense market-distorting tariffs and price controls and racial redlining.

Wow. Q- Who would go all the way back to 1990 to see the trend in crime rates. A- Someone looking for a specific result. That’s like two generations and five administrations ago. Too funny. Just a quick glance shows most violent crime trending up over the last few years.

If you ignore the part in the middle it looks good.

Forgot to add, thanks to conservatives, even "liberal" things like environmental regulations were done in a conservative, market-oriented way (cap and trade) rather than how the leftist greens wanted to do it. But the EPA is too powerful and is now counterproductive towards even climate activist goals because it makes it too hard to build infrastructure.