On 12/01/2025 4.11, Scall5 wrote:
On 1/11/2025 12:23 PM, Sawfish wrote:
We have many astute political and social observers here at RST, so all
we need to do to get an expert, well-considered opinion is to simply
ask a question, so, how about it: were Perot and Trump roughly the
same contrarian symbol in the vast sea of US politics? If they were
alike, in what ways? Dissimilar? In what ways?
Who needs AI, huh?
Briefly, I greatly admire Ross Perot because:
1. He did something that hadn't happened in six or more decades; he
forced (or scared) the Demo/GOP duopoly to balance the federal budget!
Maybe. Maybe not. The credit for actually doing it, giving you the last
surplus budget goes to Mr Clinton, though. The rule of thumb is: The GOP
blows it up, Demmies are called in to fix stuffs.
The easiest way to pull a budget deficit out of the hat is to do the
second half of "less government, less taxes" without the first. The GOP specialty. Trump did it in the first season too.
This deficit thingy is way overblown (in the US). Sure, you need to pay interest, but what's a couple of billion off from trillions? The US
government borrows almost 9/10 of the dollars it needs from domestic
sources. Borrowing, paying interest amounts to shifting money from one
pocket to another. While the expenditure takes away from some, it
benefits the other.
What debt amounts to is injecting money into the system. Stimulus.
Paying debt is the opposite. In the end what matters is what the
stimulus buys. At present, a +3% growth. Ballpark it into dollars, if
you wish. If you want a comparison, you can look at the trajectory of
the US and the little Finnish economies. One injected money, the other
injected fear, uncertainty, and doubt. You can read the results from
growth charts.
Biden put $2T into the economy post-pandemic. The growth, the envy of
the rest of the world, is there now. Unfortunately for Biden the fact
is, once prices have risen due to inflation, getting the inflation down
doesn't make the prices go down back to where they were. This is what
the sod in the trenches sees, and misattributes cause and effect.
Sad, but that's the way it goes.
2. He started a strong political third-party that is needed more than
ever in US politics/government. Granted his party eventually fell apart,
but at least it was around for a while!
You can start as many parties as you wish. But first-past-the-post will
kill them all. It's like gravity, you can't escape it. Newton got it right.
Again, the good Demmies had a sorely needed federal voting bills
package. TBH, I doubt proportionality was in that, lol. Anyway, you
gotta start somewhere. But ... the status quo favours the Republicans,
so you pretty much know how any effort to change anything will go.
The fingers all point to one general direction. Again.
Trump joined and then took over the GOP. Some of his viewpoints were contrarian to the 1980's GOP but his love for excessive budgets was
right on par. Not to mentioned he allowed COVID shutdowns that would
have never happened with Reagan.
Who knows. Reagan did believe in experts, though. I believe the global
effort in the ozone layer thingy was a pet project of his. At least he
was in it with the rest. He also believed in containing Moscow with a
couple of hand-held aircraft missiles. Despite the minuscule costs.
Perot was an outsider and Trump became an insider thru his GOP conquest.
Nobody ever believed Trump was an outsider draining swamps. Nobody.
Well, ok. Maybe bob did. Anyway, it's just political lingo.
--
“We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him. We shouldn’t have listened to him, and we can’t let that happen ever again”.
-- Nikki Haley
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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