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It shut down because trump wanted to show how unnecessary the government was, and it opened because a few ex-senators and ex-congressmen serving as lobbyist complained about how their clients might not be able to afford their 9th private jet this year.

1. didn't ask you
2. i'm only interested in serious discussion, don't just make up nonsense.

I dont think this is an accurate assessment; they try to pressure the reps all the time. Problem is they end up asking for too much to be accepted by the reps and too often refuse to back down. That they keep picking bad hills to die on makes it worse like when they blocked the covid support bills and attempted to shoehorn all sorts of nich bullshit and pork barreling. So they end up being pressured by popular opinion into caving and have to walk away looking like assholes.

When they dont find a bad hill they get stubborn and block bills for years, pretty much never even attempting to gett a middle ground compromise that could be considered worth while use of their power.

The problem isnt that the dems are inactive and never pressure the reps, the problem is they just plain suck at doing it and end up just pissing everyone off and with little to nothing to show for it beyond obstruction.

1. DM him if you don't want others in your conversation. This is a public forum not your personal hangout
2. Even if he had given a source you likely would have disregarded it and called it biased

Says you posting washington post

“they just wait for a while before caving to the reps“

If you are interested in serious discussion, then stop circular debating “how am I doing that/what do you mean by this” in response to everything

asking you to prove your claim isn't circular debating

“In March 2018, Congress appropriated $1.6 billion out of a $1.3 trillion spending bill towards the border barrier”

Thats a great quote, Kenetic Kups, but do you know how much quotes are worth without a source? Nothing.

People are being a bunch of freaking idiots, and are protesting stay-at-home orders.

You know, those same stay-at-home orders that are reducing the COVID-19 virus spread to flatten the curve?

It's like these people want to die, and take as many people with them.

Let them. They're the same people who would unironically quote ebinezer scrooge about decreasing the surplus population. If they want to be that surplus population to die quickly, fine by me. It's nature sorting itself out. I'll be staying home and continuing to social distance.

>I'll be staying home and continuing to social distance.

Thats great that you are privileged enough to apparently never have to leave your house ever, but some of us have to go out and do things like shop for groceries.

Well, it's simple. If these people are currently in your area, don't shop where they shop. You see someone trying to do stupid shit like cough on products or ignoring quarantine, Call the police. Carrying hand sanitizer and sanitize whenever these people come in contact with you. Heck, if you can't use hand sanitizer, use gloves and try to be extra careful.

Why would I bother wasting my breath on people who aren't worth allowing to breath? These idiots want to die, they can go ahead and die on their own stupid terms. For a person who was equally shocked at the idea of ending quarantine early as I was, you certainly seem ready to try and save these idiots. You know the procedures to keep alive, keep 6 ft apart, wash your hands often, don't touch your face, wear a mask, and avoid human contact.

If these people want to kill themselves, fine. But you have the power to avoid following them into a early grave by simply not following their example. It's the same reason I've stopped having sympathy for smoker's who want to smoke in public places. They want to kill themselves? Fine, but no reason I gotta die because of their smoke.

Unless you're gonna pull some bullshit about how not-smoking or trying to stay hygienic is somehow a sign of privilege, and that we should be doing our best to "educate" ie screaming and getting no where with these people. By all means, waste your time and your health doing so. You can't save stupid, and this is one of those times we should just let stupid get what they deserve.

They're spreading the disease, and then they'll be spreading it to their familes, and who knows what goes on from there.
It's not okay!

Just stop being poor then

@Black Graphic T
>If these people are currently in your area, don't shop where they shop.

"just don't go shopping! lol"
you really expect me to take you seriously?

>You see someone trying to do stupid shit like cough on products or ignoring quarantine, Call the police.

Ok, and if I DON'T see that? Since you don't seem to know how the virus spreads, if someone coughs on a product and I don't see it, and pick up that product, I could get the virus. Just accidentally touching my face once or having a cut on my hand I didn't know about can be what does it for me.

Nice bait, bro. But petty insults and strawnen aren't gonna ducker me into another circular argument with you.

I ordered a Bernie Sanders campaign shirt and button right after he won the Nevada caucus and it just shipped this morning. I fucking hate USPS. Sorry I just had to vent.

Tons of people apparently have a death wish in the US. Or more then likely it's a horde of Facebook Karens and Boomer Bills who think Corona is just a ploy for government to keep them from hair dressers or cracking open a cold one with the boys. Chews people it would seem, and will probably sort themselves out due to their lack of social distancing.

Don't feel too bad, at least your president it's not the dumbest on this regard
If it makes you feel better, the schadenfreude promises to be at its peak very soon.

Or more likely they don't live in any of the major cities or hotspots where the vast majority of COVID-19 cases tend to be. A quick look at this map and you can see the vast bulk of the COVID cases are isolated to massive urban centers, especially, New York City, and Los Angeles (where I live). In fact, you can scroll through the entire map and see what I mean. The overwhelming amount of US Countys have a small number of infections per 100,000 people. (some figures are actually large because there are counties with less than 100,000 people.) Yet at the same time, most state governments that have instituted economic shut downs tend to make it state-wide. So it's kind of shitty as hell when you're in a area where there is a forced shut down for something that you, nor your neighbors, don't have to really contend with.

Keep also in mind, that so much information out there is constantly in a state of flux, disjointed, so utterly drenched in political bias and confirmation that to take anything objectively is incredibly hard. At this point you pick and choose who you want to believe – and almost all of them have an entirely unique and partially subjective perspective on it. It doesn't help that politics color which you are going to believe or not. I mean, for example, even in the above link that I have it makes notes that every state reports differently how they classify COVID-19 deaths! How can we have objective national figures about deaths if we don't have a national standard by which to determine if the death is ruled because of COVID-19? And then have our news agencies report that and compare that data with other countries? We don't even have a global standard by which to determine this and we are throwing out these figures as if they are supposed to really mean something?

Since I live in Los Angeles, and in my tiny part of the city has more covid cases than certain states as a whole I wear a mask out everywhere I go, my outdoor and non video game hobbies are effectively on permanent hold. I am pissed and angry that my city has handled it so poorly. I am even more pissed off at the deliberate political games that are being played in my local government, which I won't get into. But I am treating this seriously, because I also have an elderly person who is in a high risk area that I have to care for.

And if I had a people? They would be spending their time sitting at home sharpening the guillotine blades. At least figuratively. They wouldn't be so eager to tear each other apart and belittle people who don't adhere to the orthodox viewpoint or bring up uncomfortable questions, or who are angry and frustrated at the way their state governments and local governments handled the situation or the solutions that were made.

At least it got to your house.

'There are more important things than living.' says the Texas Lt. Governor with an apparent death fetish.

I said it shipped. It’s not delivered yet.

wait, then why are you mad at usps then?

The USPS is going bankrupt you say?

Good news from my state over absentee ballots!

And balanced by negative news from my State's GOP megadonors trying to outdo North Carolina's Republicans as the most politically craven.

The money demands death.

Because they take such a long time to deliver. Have you never had a package shipped by USPS?

But if it was just recently shipped that's not USPS fault. I ship packages with USPS every single day, it's rare for a.package to take over a week to deliver

Are you a mailman or something?

I sell stuff online.

They wouldn’t be sp shit if they had funding

Well it’s still usps fault. My mom mailed a check to my cousin(meaning there was no corporate middleman needed for delivery.) and it still took two months to reach it’s destination. An envelope going from Dallas, Texas to Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Not really sure what that has to do with bernie campaign taking weeks to give your order to usps to pick up, but ok
and yea, they aren't perfect, its easy to lose mail, especially small pieces, but I've shipped around 3,000 packages in the past 5 years (half of those from the past 2 years) and usps has only completely lost 1 package (an international package), and only maybe a dozen or two took more than twice the estimated delivery date to arrive (but arrived, so doesn't matter too much).

majority of the messages I get from people involving a lost package is them not checking their front door or mailbox before messaging me………….

Mitch McConnell wants the states to declare bankruptcy.

related

So between texas lt governer saying that "there are more important things then living" in regards of opening the state back up and how utterly unsafe it would be to do so, and Trump firing the person who was in charge of developing a coronavirus vaccine because they wouldn't push chloroquine as a miracle cure because, you know, it's fucking poison that only helps a narrow amount of diseases and doesn't have any proof to working against covid. I feel the need to ask once more why we should allow this branch of the party to exist? Because i don't see how keeping a group who seems to hold nothing but contempt for the American people and their lives from both the lowest and highest offices is worth while for "freedom".

For many states and local municipalities that can often be the only realistic reform-based solution. For many cities the biggest problem of cost is pension plans which are incredibly hard to renegotiate and would certainly be a death knell to any local political campaign. Government employees sure love their benefits.
Most states cannot meet the liabilities of their pension funds.

A bankruptcy would force the budget of the city to be restructured and approved by a judge, not a legislature, or any elected body which means a lot of special interest groups wouldn't be able to get heavily involved.

Sounds like a load of bullshit to me. All it means is the bribe money, oh sorry i meant "Lobbying Funds" goes to one person instead of spread out among a ton of elected officials. A bargin deal with the corporate state and with 0 ability for the average citizen to do a thing about it.

I've been noticing this too.

It's almost as if these actions are coordinated malice that are deliberate attempts at killing as many of us as possible.

Also, just another point that even other republicans are talking about when it comes to McConnell's state bankruptcy plan. If the states declare bankruptcy, all of their service's would basically cease during the long, long, very fucking long time litigation and the legal case would take to carry out. This would also entail laying off every public and civil servant, including police, fire departments, a ton of municipalities, and Judges. No judge would be able to actually rule on this case due to them having a conflict of interest and so there'd first need to be a entire process of selecting an out of state judge, then the combing through funds and discovery phases of going over all government financial records and all assets to be sold off.

And for the months this is going on, said states would not be able to provide stuff people need, especially the fire fighters and police officers, during a major pandemic. The sheer lunacy of it just screams that the person proposing this is either completely naive or malicious intented.

It sounds like a load of bullshit if you presume that the average citizen does anything about it in the first place , and if you don't understand what a bankruptcy means for a city. Local voter turnout is abysmally low in most major cities The most active voters tend to vote because they are pushed to by an interest group. That is why in places like California, public unions have such a massive dominance over state politics – that they were able to negotiate pension plans that were clearly unsustainable – and politicians all to ready to accept political support today for the financial problems of tomorrow. Hence why in the graph I show California is a massive leader in pension liabilities.

However, a bankruptcy doesn't mean that a city get's rid of it's debts, instead it means that the city no longer has to pay it's creditors while it renegotiates how it's going to pay that debt. Those debts still exist, mind you, but they can be renegotiated.

Since Bankruptcy often comes with the ability for the city to massively restructure it's debts (at the expense of some creditors over others), most creditors tend to be open to negotiations. So this is often a good solution for an untenable situation.

I consider it a check on "interest democracy" which is what I call many elections in major cities. That is, the major voting participant is a person who has an incredibly vested interest in voting, i.e. urged by a union, a corporation, a business, non-profit, etc, because of a very specific promise to them.

It's also why I am a big believer of instituting electoral college like system in big states like California and Texas, so state politics won't be entirely governed by a highly concentrated interest blocs. It forces politicians to contend with and campaign in places out of these densely grouped interest blocs.

Considering it's Mitch McConnell, I'm going with the latter.

Trump owes the state-owned Bank of China millions in loans.

What do you base any of this on? Currently states are unable to declare bankruptcies anyway since it's not really spelled out how they would do so. But if we're going to use an example of municipalities like cities declaring bankruptcies as an example of how a state would do it then we cannot say that civil servants including police, fire, judges, etc, would be let go and their services ceased. The cities and states are obligated to still provide basic government services and functions. The first things that are looked at are unfunded liabilities, which are primarily bonds and pensions – those are the biggest hits on the chopping block. Some police and fire services could be scaled back because the city/state would have to put it's house in order, but it's not going to stop entirely.

I mean, even for individuals, if you declare bankruptcy (which I have done in 2011), it doesn't mean you are free to stop paying your utility bills. It doesn't mean your earnings and expenses cease.

2020 Election Year is going to be who's tougher on China

You assume that they'll be something akin to Chapter 11 or Chapter 9. I feel like if a State goes Bankrupt, it's gonna end up going full on Chapter 7.