Quote:Monday’s debate should be to lay out her own motivations and policy goals. In recent months, both of these things have been overshadowed, partly by the scandal surrounding her e-mails and partly by Trump’s big simplistic slogans: build a wall, keep out Muslims, get tough on China, and so on. As it happens, Clinton’s agenda, as my colleague Adam Davidson also wrote the other day, does have a unifying theme. It’s the same one that Democrats have been running on for twenty-five years, a period in which they have won the popular vote in five out of six Presidential elections, and it involves using the power of the government to tilt the economy in favor of working people. Trump, although he talks like a populist, has largely adopted the regressive economic policies of the Republican establishment.

Quote:The Obama administration’s success in undoing some of this inequality, although reflected in the recent, welcome census report, is less well-known. Most notably, tax changes enacted during this administration have increased the share of income going to the bottom 99 percent of families by more than the tax changes in any administration since at least 1960.

Under Obama’s leadership, Congress expanded the earned-income tax credit, increased the child tax credit for working families, and created a new tax credit for students and families paying for college — steps that together benefit 24 million households annually. At the same time, Congress reinstated Clinton-era tax rates for high-income Americans, restored the estate tax and applied Medicare taxes to the investment income of high-income households, putting unearned income on greater parity with earned income. All of these changes have increased the tax code’s progressivity.

The Affordable Care Act has also had a significant impact on inequality. Because of the law, 20 million more Americans have health insurance, gains that have reduced the uninsured rate to the lowest level on record. The law has sharply reduced inequality in health insurance coverage by age, race and income. The financial assistance that made this coverage expansion possible has also reduced inequality in after-tax incomes..

Quote:Barnes—now a Fox contributor and executive editor of the Weekly Standard—had long believed that political consulting was bogus (he wrote a 1986 piece in the New Republic called “The Myth of Political Consultants”). But after watching Ailes work his magic on Bush in 1988, he seemed to change his mind, writing, “The effect of Ailes on Bush is unmistakable…. The Ailes theory is that you can win with a sharp line or two, since that’s what most of the electorate will see on news shows. Ailes coaches his candidates to do well in the sound bites, and Bush has scored heavily.”

Quote:Trump stuck out onstage because he didn’t sound like anyone else, and because his signature catchphrases stuck in your head. This was particularly true in the largest debates, when no one got much time to talk and other candidates’ answers tended to blend together. You might not remember the difference between Chris Christie and Rand Paul on immigration a week later, but you’d remember that Donald Trump wanted to “build a wall,” maybe a wall with a “big, beautiful door.”

(09-27-2016, 12:53 PM)stpioc Wrote: It was really extraordinary to watch how Trump framed the debate with the narrative that bad trade deals have ravished the US economy. Yes, there are losers from trade, but the problem is these are much more visible than the winners (mostly consumers benefiting from lower prices, and exporters for whom foreign markets opened), but trade is not the cause of all, or even most of industrial job losses in the US. This is simply caused by automation. One can run a steel factory with a fraction of the manpower compared to three, or even two decades ago and still produce more steel, and this experience is much the same in many industries. 

And the remedy, protectionism, is likely to cost jobs, not produce "millions" more..

Quote:Here is Trump:

Quote:"The other thing, I'm extremely underleveraged. The report that said $650 -- which, by the way, a lot of friends of mine that know my business say, boy, that's really not a lot of money. It's not a lot of money relative to what I had. "The buildings that were in question, they said in the same report, which was -- actually, it wasn't even a bad story, to be honest with you, but the buildings are worth $3.9 billion. And the $650 isn't even on that. But it's not $650. It's much less than that. "But I could give you a list of banks, I would -- if that would help you, I would give you a list of banks. These are very fine institutions, very fine banks. I could do that very quickly."

Given that Trump hasn't released his tax returns and still basically refuses to, we would love to see that list. But that's beside the point. The real point here is that Wall Street, by virtue of the developer's debts, in some ways owns Donald Trump. Owing favors to Wall Street is an aspersion he and others have cast on Clinton many times, accusing her of coziness with the industry because of her paid speaking engagement at banks, specifically Goldman Sachs.

Quote:If the debate doesn’t convince voters that Donald Trump is unfit to be president, then nothing will.
All his flaws were on display: the racism,the sexism, the nastiness, the mendacity.

Can you imagine what would have happened to Mitt Romney’s campaign if he had boasted that exploiting the housing crisis was just “business”? What would the pundits say about Hillary Clinton and her shady ways if she had declared that avoiding income taxes makes her “smart”? What if Barack Obama had only one idea—and a dangerous one at that—to improve the economy?

Quote:The polls Trump cites were unscientific — they allowed anybody anywhere to participate, regardless of whether they’re likely to vote in November or are even an American citizen. Not only that, but according to numerous reports, the results of many of them were rigged by Trump-supporting internet troll armies.