PhineasC

Sounds like a great time to massively raise taxes on businesses and force them to produce here in the US with a $30/hr national min wage. I'm sure that will help lower prices.

I feel like this debate only exists because certain people just don’t have the balls to say they want to implement a system wherein the “means of production” are owned by the “people” and the “rich” are liquidated with the funds being transferred to the “people.” Why be afraid to just say what you want? The world of 1935-1980 isn’t coming back via tax increases. It existed under very different global conditions.

There was a massive world war in the middle there that literally destroyed our global competition and the US became outrageously rich and powerful rebuilding Asia and Europe. The standard of living before the rise of the suburbs in the 1940s and 1950s was very different. Would seem foreign to you now. “Income equality” as you are envisioning it will mean everyone has less spending power due to higher prices and fewer goods, despite more money nominally being in the hands of the lower classes. Again, maybe not a bad thing but be prepared to stretch that used car several more years.

I think the “leadership” of Baltimore is content to just let all legit businesses leave and continue to simply panhandle for handouts from the counties. The victim mentality is very deeply ingrained there now. Basically all of the customers of these bars and restaurants live in the county now anyway so it’s time for these businesses to move. I bet the county executives would give them a really sweet deal to relocate.

I feel like more of you need to pull back from the economic numbers and spend some time studying historical information on people’s lifestyles, quality of life, and spending habits under various economic and political systems across time. The “poor” in this country today are very rich in a relative sense and have access to luxury goods that people in past generations never dreamed of. The basic “starter” home is enormous compared to what it was in the past. Home ownership itself is mostly a dream even in large parts of Europe. Are you and your comrades ready to go back to a time when all you might have would be a small govt-subsidized apartment and a bus token? If you implement crushing taxes on the producers and cut-off foreign trade that’s what will happen to most middle class and below Americans because that’s how most urban dwellers lived in the past and how most people still live today in Europe and Asia. A reset in standard of living might be a good thing, I just find most of the suburban socialists expect that they will still be living in a McMansion and buying a new car each year even after the socialist paradise is implemented.

I am wondering why you guys keep pinning this entirely on the rich fat cats when there is an entire consumer side of the equation that demands extremely low prices for luxury goods and will have a fit if those prices go up?

It's getting pretty hard to believe anything in the economy is real and naturally-occurring at this point. It all seems very fake and manufactured. A giant bubble, or a balloon that is being squeezed at different ends by someone.

Or they will simply raise prices and create artificial shortages. It's not like people really have a choice to not shop at Walmart and Amazon now. Those two are sometimes literally the only reasonable retail choices people have. It's not really a free market where people can simply take their money elsewhere. I doubt anyone in Congress has the guts to confront Amazon, who will be taking over basically all retail if Walmart is forced to confront higher costs due to US-based manufacturing and then raises prices. Amazon and Walmart only "work" as business models because of cheap overseas goods. I don't think anyone disagrees with bringing the jobs and production back to the US, but we will need to get used to paying higher prices in that kind of environment. Our economy is geared around endless consumption these days so there hasn't been much effort to go there. You talk about soaking the rich for billions of dollars, but is the average middle-class American family ready to forgo the latest laptops, TVs, cellphones, video game consoles, new furniture, etc?

I couldn't find any shock here. Otherwise, I would have just used that. I checked three stores around me, Home Depot and Walmarts. Home Depot had no pool supplies whatsoever. Walmart at least had one box of tablets left. Might be a localized thing, but the pool rush time should be over here by now. People open the pools around here in mid-April.

I guess those of you with pools have been hit by this "chlorine shortage" deal? I have a saltwater pool but the chlorine generator died so I have to add chlorine myself until it can be fixed. Sheesh, had to go to different stores and then finally got the last box of tablets I could find and it was 90 bucks! I bought some regular household bleach last night to pour in just to clear it up as it was starting to turn green. But it takes many jugs of regular bleach to do the job. First a lumber shortage and now a chlorine shortage? I wonder what random thing will suddenly be suffering from a scarcity problem next... perhaps waffles or vacuum cleaners?

It's a skimmer bot for my pool. It collected tons of the little dudes. The pool skimmer itself was also stuffed to the brim. It's a killing field over here. The air is filled with bug sex and death.

Starting to pile up the dead here. Catching a whiff of dead, baked insect from time to time…

Freakin’ gross.

It's hitting 92 dB here last few days.

It came from "science."

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/05/three-vaccines-show-promise-against-covid-variants The natural course of variants are steadily eroding vaccine efficacy from the prior laboratory and trial results. I don't think that is unexpected. Just saying that we are still learning about this virus and the vaccines, hence my original "experimental" comment.

I am definitely an acquired taste, like a cicada. There are hundreds of media outlets repeating the same messaging every day all day about COVID and vaccines. I'm sure you guys can handle one lone crazy person on the Internet saying something else.

I don't disagree. There are many things we allow kids to do that are more dangerous or detrimental to them than a vaccine. I would say that allowing your child to be morbidly obese and eat McDonalds every day also makes you a monster. There is a good chance you are actively shortening their lifespan due to your own laziness.

I give a shit about paranoid parents injecting their kids to make themselves feel better, I guess. Guilty as charged.

We have already seen a steady decrease in the purported efficacy of these vaccines from the trial data as we get data back from real world usage. So the data will definitely be different under full auth. Also, it’s very likely these vaccines will be superseded by a second-generation of vaccines. The pharma companies have already discussed this and there was already talk about how to adjust the AstraZeneca vaccine to reduce the incidence of blood clots. I am not trying to impugn the good name of these vaccines. They are effective and generally safe. But we shouldn’t lie to people and tell them the situation with them at this time is no different than the flu vaccine or polio vaccine.

If you are comfortable injecting a little kid with the Pfizer EUA vaccine against a disease that is incredibly low-risk for him/her, that is on you as a parent. Please don't try to convince the rest of us you are making the right call based on the "science." It's all on you, parent.

There has never been an mRNA infectious disease vaccine approved for use in humans. Of course it is still experimental since we have had zero experience with these vaccines in humans until very recently. It's ridiculous to even assert these are not experimental vaccines. Most new medicines and therapies are experimental by nature of the fact that they are adjusted and changed based on feedback from real patients. This is just gaslighting, dude. Here is what Pfizer has to say: And Moderna: The very "fact-check" you posted states: Let's not obfuscate by pretending this is a well-studied and well-documented vaccine at this time. There is no legal claim being made that is even effective at preventing COVID infection. We know now that it is effective based on real-world observations, but we should not hide the reality of where the vaccine is in the approval process or where liability for the manufacturers stands.

Considering that many "experts" and "trusted media voices" spent all of 2020 gaslighting and lying to us about the origins of the virus to protect their own skin/funding streams and hurt their political opponents, I would hope that we would have learned to be very suspicious of anyone telling us matter-of-factly that toddlers need the jab to "prevent variants." You have to stop blindly trusting the man on TV. The appeal to authority fallacy is rampant right now, and people tend to fall for it.

There have definitely been deaths across the world from the vaccine. That isn't really unexpected. It can cause very bad reactions in people.

Any parent that forces their toddler to get injected with an experimental vaccine due to their own paranoid fear is a monster.