Ok, then prosecute him for racketeering or murder for hire.

If the point is to just take out the kingpin, for the sake of taking out the kingpin, I don’t think that’s an effective strategy for public safety. When the kingpin goes to jail violence goes up as their underlings usually fight for the throne. Availability of drugs and other illegal services may go down temporarily during the war and reconsolidation but long term they’ll return to antebellum levels. The only thing taking out the kingpin does is boost cops egos.

How am I framing it like he got caught with an ounce, my original comment mentioned the amount. Why should the amount matter, it’s legal now, a dispensary is probably moving tons of marijuana a year, should the owners of those dispensaries be prosecuted simply because of the volume of the operation?

I will make the argument that all marijuana charges should be pardoned expunged in legal states because we as a society decided it’s a relatively harmless substance and that we shouldn’t be locking people up for possessing or selling it.

Yeah he’s not the best poster boy, and Willie Horton isn’t the best poster boy for furlough programs, and the guy who killed laken Riley isn’t the best poster boy for immigration reform, hell kilmar garcia has charges equivalent to this guy. That’s the thing about criminal justice reform, you don’t choose your poster boy your opponent does. That’s why you have to defend it on principal not individual cases, because there will always be someone who uses that reform and goes on to commit some atrocious act which your opponents will use as “proof” that the reform is dangerous.

Trump blowing up boats is bad Trump commuting non violent drug offenses is good

You can hold these two opinions if you’re mature enough to understand no one is a pure hero or villain and can do both good and bad things

Do you think this guy should still be locked up for smuggling weed in a state where its now legal? I don’t and I’m not going to compromise my morals just so I can disagree with trump on every issue. If you are taking the stance that anything trump does is automatically bad then your letting your politics be defined by him and becoming a sort of reactionary. Your politics should be defined by what you believe in, not what the other side says.

I also believe that trump pardoning his co-conspirators is wrong because it’s corrupt, not just because Trump is doing it. Criticize an action on its substance, not just who is doing it.

Are we really doing Willie Horton style “look at this monster our opponent let back on the streets” tactics. This is how we end up with every politician being afraid to pardon anyone or even let them off on parole because there opponent or the press will yell at them if they ever so much as run a red light.

This guy wasn’t even sentenced for rape or murder or anything violent:

Braun was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2019 for smuggling 220,000 pounds of marijuana.

Trump was right to pardon him, marijuana offenses are BS. Yeah the guy fucked up after he got out but that’s not Trump’s fault. There’s a million things we can criticize trump for, this isn’t one of them.

I’m not saying to always take the high road, play dirty when it actually helps people and will make you more popular. Pack the courts to reinstitute roe, deschedule Marijuana with an executive order, release the epstein list and start prosecuting trump for his connections to it, prosecute and fine the oil billionaires funding the GOP.

Taking billionaire pac money and redistricting just to win elections isn’t popular, at best people view it as a necessary evil, at worse people become apathetic and view both parties as corrupt and not worth there vote.

with further gerrymandering in Texas, they’ll probably not get a majority

The gerrymandering in Texas is expected to give the gop 5 seats and they currently have a 6 seat majority, so the dems would have to flip 11 seats, that should be dead easy in a midterm with an unpopular president to play off of. For reference the dems flipped 41 seats in the 2018 midterms.

The reason the democrats are worried is because they know they’re polling at 30 year lows in approval and that will counteract the inherent advantage of the opposition party in a midterm. Playing dirty with the Republicans will only make them more unpopular while obfuscating that unpopularity with a couple more house seats for bland centrist dems.

It’s just like the dems taking billionaire pac money and pointing to the Republicans doing the same and saying they wouldn’t be competitive without it. When really they could turn down the money and run on a campaign of getting money out of politics and gain way more voters than they’d get from running more TV ads.

No this isn’t them doing what I want. I want democrats to use there power to stop Trump from bombing and abducting whoever he wants. I don’t want them entrenching there power for the sake of power. I want them to explain how they’re gonna use there power to stop fascism to justify them taking away people’s democratic power over disrricting.

I’ll give them props for holding out on the shutdown for Healthcare subsidies people need, that’s standing up for your constituents, but this redistricting is just a power grab.

It’s absolute, not per capita. Mexico for example has a higher birth rate then the US but less people so it has a lower number.

Trump hasn’t sent troops to sf yet you stupid fuck.

Probably will get it anyway, companies don’t like to build and maintain software for two different markets so they tend to just follow the regulations of the strictest market, especially if those regulations don’t really cut into there bottom line like this one.

So your version of UBI is just increasing everyone’s taxes by $12,000 then giving that back to them at the end of the year? So your average person isn’t effected, the “oligarchs” get taxes a bit more to pay for the unemployed who are the only ones getting the $1,000 each month. How is this different then unemployment insurance? You only get the benefit if you’re making no money / unemployed so in a sense it is conditional.

UBI prevent corruption through an obvious individual cash sacrifice.

I thought UBI was revenue neutral and wouldn’t effect other programs / the budget. If the government wants to build a bridge theoretically they won’t want to touch UBI so they’ll just raise taxes / deficit to cover it. This is the same system we have now, UBI doesn’t change that.

you are taking cash away from everyone to accomplish it.

You are already doing that, that’s how taxation works, that doesn’t stop corruption. That’s also only looking at graft style corruption, it does nothing for the campaign contributions for regulatory changes that is more common. This isn’t stopping an oil billionaire from donating $1 billion to trump’s campaign so he can poison the drinking water of a minority neighborhood. The only way to stop that is to take away there money. Even if you do campaign reform money will always find it’s way into government.

Marx by advocating for labour’s supremacist

While Marx was firmly on the side of labour you don’t have to be a labour supremacist to benefit from understanding his analysis on capitalism and class conflict. A trade unionist benefits a lot from reading Marx to understand how to fight for there members while not advocating for the abolition of capital. Same with you, you seem to want more labour power and less capital power, understanding Marx’s analysis on capital power can help you.

Rich people employing you to make useful stuff that makes you both richer than not having that opportunity, while again, making useful stuff that people want

Why do I need that rich person employing me? Me and all the other laborers can make useful stuff that makes us all richer without the employer. A capitalist does not make anything, they own things and use that ownership to get a cut of your productive labor. If the workers of an enterprise just stopped giving the capitalist there profit and distributed it evenly there wages would go up and production would keep going. The only thing keeping them from doing that is property rights.

Your complaint with oligarchs is that there squeezing labor for production is one inherent to capitalism. The capitalist will always try to lower wages and increase production to increase profits. The best way to help workers then would be to remove the capitalist and there profit motive and replace it with management elected by the workers. This is true freedom as the workers are now in complete control of there wages and working conditions.

Also you can have free and fair markets without capitalism. The workers can own the means of production in co-ops and compete with each other on free and fair markets to sell there products, they just can’t trade there share/stocks.

Ok just answer me what you will cut then. If you’re saying this will be balance sheet neutral and no new taxes will be raised then your going to need to make cuts to fund it. It’ll cost $4 trillion, let’s say part of that is existing deductions so bring it down to $3.5 trillion.

A large majority of the federal budget is defense(war) (~$1T), Medicare ($1T), social security ($1.5T), and medicaid ($0.9T). Food stamps are pocket change $0.1T. Even if you completely eliminated defense any sort of major new spending/tax cuts of this magnitude will require major cuts / elimination of those programs. This is why the Republicans went after Medicaid even though they knew it would be unpopular, there was nothing else to cut that would give them the money for there tax cuts.

Medicare / medicaid costs $2 trillion and you aren’t getting out of that with universal Healthcare. Yes universal Healthcare would be cheaper for those currently paying into the system but the people on Medicare and Medicaid aren’t paying into the system, it is supported by the tax revenues of working people.

giving the discretion to replace programs with austerity for war.

How is it more difficult to cut UBI as opposed to other programs? If the fascists are in control of the government they can pass/repeal any law they want to further there war aims. Doesn’t matter if it’s food stamps or UBI. They can also purge you from the UBI roles just as well as they can food stamps for un-American activity or whatever. Ultimate power still lies with the state to tax and distribute funds, UBI won’t change that.

It gains everything to exterminate all of their influence and discretion.

If that’s the case then we need to take away there actual power which lies in there control of capital / the means of production. After UBI the billionaires will still have there money which they can use to fuck up the planet and our democracy. Seriously you need to read some Marx, you understand class conflict and that increasing worker power is good but you fail to understand capitalist power and the ways we can actually take it away.

it’s made up elsewhere

Where ?

basic exemption is technically $3,000-$4,000

Standard deduction is $15,000, for that to mean $3,000 in return your effective tax rate from the feds would have to be 20% , you have to be making $100,000 to have that rate, you’d have to be making $300,000 for it to be $4,000. Median income is $40,000

having $3,000 UBI and no basic exemption doesn’t change the government budget one bit

Yes it does because all the people who don’t make enough to get $3,000 from the standard deduction will now get it. Either way increasing that deduction by 4x to get a $12,000 UBI will definitely effect the government budget.

a tax funded Healthcare system that is less expensive then what we have now is more affordable

Yes but that doesn’t make it free, again Medicare is atax funded system and costs $1 trillion just to insure elderly, if we insure everyone that will necessarily cost more

40% clawback on SS benefits would mean the average gets more with UBI

SS costs $1.5 trillion, with a 40% clawback would mean it costs $0.9 trillion, again a trillion we don’t have because we cut revenues by 4 trillion. Even if you do your standard deduction math, which is off as I showed, were still losing 3 trillion in revenue. That leaves the 1 trillion either for a 40 % cut SS or Medicare, there is no scenario where an elderly person doesn’t come out behind.

when you don’t starve for your choices

That’s already true because of food stamps. There are also government run shelters for me to stay as well, that doesn’t mean I’m not afraid of quiting and losing my current standard of living, which my boss can use to “enslave” me. Your argument is answered by any sort of social safety net. An affordable housing program and food stamps can provide the same sort of support, expanding unemployment insurance to cover quitting would give all the benfits you mentioned, while costing a lot less because your only giving benefits to those who need it and not everyone even if there very well off.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a tax credit or your writing checks, losing $ 4 trillion in revenue from tax cuts is equal to spending $ 4 trillion on UBI checks on the balance sheet.

So a UBI of $12k/year would effectively eliminate federal tax revenue, that means there is no money for any other social programs. You aren’t just cutting food stamps, you’re cutting everything and telling people they have to make do on $1,000 a month. Now, the government can not afford to pay the $1 trillion for Medicare alone, much less a universal Healthcare system. If that’s not bad enough the elderly who on average are getting $2k/month for social security alone now have to make do on only $1k/month of UBI along with paying huge insurance premiums due to there age. Same could be said of disabled people who are also currently receiving on average $1.5k/month from social security and have there insurance covered by Medicaid. If you don’t increase taxes or the deficit massively to keep those programs you’re condemning the most vulnerable people to destitutuon.

People can’t live off $1k/month without any other assistance, that’s why social security is higher then that and it’s supplemented with Medicare. That’s today, if UBI goes in and devalues that $1k then it’ll be impossible to live off of alone and the benefit you keep touting of being able to tell your boss to fuck off and quit safely goes away. Sure if I quit I might be able to afford eating rice and beans in a shoebox apartment, but I definitely can’t afford health insurance or a car (as that’s the only way to get around because public transit has been gutted) or anything else that would make my life worth living. I can’t even go on a walk in the park because they were all privatized and sold to a members only country club.

USD are never destroyed, but if they don’t come back to the US in the form of buying exports or US bonds then they just start piling up internationally, increasing the supply and decreasing the value. Yes buying US bonds is better then a mattress but EU bonds could be safer, so the bank would exchange there USD for euro and buy euro bonds. The more people exchange USD for euro the more the value of the dollar goes down as supply increases and demand decreases.

You are describing the benefits of money if it is effective, part of it being effective is it has to be a good store of value and other people accepting it. If the value is constantly going down due to inflation, it’s less worth it to use money unless you plan on spending it immediately. Money also isn’t good if you have to beg people to take it. Money so abundant that you have to beg people to take it is not good money.

People begging you to take there money doesn’t incentivize production it just incentivizes raising your prices until they stop begging. If I can get more money producing less potatoes why would I produce more potatoes? So I can hoard this money that is losing value? I’d rather hoarding my potatoes and only sell a couple when I need money because the other farmer doesn’t need more potatoes.

there is no reason to believe UBI leads to wheelbarrow economy

Could you explain how it doesn’t. Because a modest UBI of $1,000 a month for every American would cost $4.08 trillion which is pretty close to the total revenue collected by the federal government of $4.12 trillion. Even if you massively cut defense spending you’d still have to nearly double taxes to cover that. Yeah you can shift more of the burden to the rich but there’s only so much you can do before they just leave. So most likely UBI will require massively increasing the deficit if not just printing money.

no one wants to invest in the US … the $ will chase US bonds

Why would you buy US bonds if you don’t want to invest in the US? People don’t buy treasury bonds because they have excess USD and don’t have anything else to do with it, they can always exchange it for local currency, which pushes down the value of USD. People buy US bonds because it’s a reliable asset as they can usually count on inflation being low, the US government being stable and able to tax a highly productive economy to be able to pay the bond back. If any of those three things becomes relatively less true, ie. The euro now has more stable inflation and productivity, then the people will just exchange their excess USD for euro and buy euro bonds instead, or demand a higher interest rate relative to the EU bond to account for the increased risk.

will make you rich in wheelbarrows of cash

Again why would I want to be rich in wheelbarrows of cash? Even if the government is smart and just starts minting million dollar bills to fix the space issue, it won’t matter if I have to beg the guy making the plow to take it. I might as well not sell the potato and keep it, it’ll keep it’s value better and I’ll have a better time convincing the plow maker that this potato, which they can eat, has value as opposed to this million dollar bill. Now that person with a million dollar bill can’t even buy a potato, again they have lost purchasing power, even though they have millions of dollars.

Again money is only as good as what you can buy with it, being rich with money you can’t buy anything with is about as useful as being rich in monopoly money.

lower interest rates go, as more imports mean more buying US debt.

More imports means currency devaluation/ inflation on the international market. This pushes interest rates up as people demand higher interest rates to counteract expected inflation. If I buy a bond at $500 and expect that $500 to be worth the equivalent of $400 in 5 years when it matures, I’ll demand a higher interest rate to counteract that loss in real value. If you want to see an economy that reliant on imports look at Venezuela during its first oil booms and tell me that’s a healthy economy.

you increase production because people are begging you to take there money

That doesn’t increase production. If I’m a farmer in Weimar Germany and some guy is begging me to take his wheelbarrow full of cash for a potato that’s not going to make me produce more potatoes. That’ll just make me doubt the worth of that wheelbarrow worth of cash and think about how hard it will be for me to try and get someone to take that wheelbarrow full of cash so I can get a new plow. Im not going to put in the extra effort to make more potatoes so i can fill my shed with this money that i have to beg people to take and is probably worthless. Money is only as good as what you can buy with it and if it’s hard to buy stuff with it eg. Your begging people to take it, then it’s not worth anything.

If you completely reject supply side economics, what would have been the solution to stagflation? Harold Wilson’s government proved you couldn’t just add more money and increase wages to get out of it. It only made it worse.

Stagflation doesn’t have to be a recession, it could just be stagnation. UBI would cause a recession though in the standard economic definition of high unemployment and lower productivity. Per wikipedia stagflation is caused by:

supply shocks, such as a sharp increase in oil prices, and misguided government policies that hinder industrial output while expanding the money supply too rapidly

The latter explanation matches what UBI will do very well, industrial output will go down because less people are working and the money supply will increase as people will have more money to spend on things. In general I think you should read that Wikipedia page on stagflation, it shows the pitfalls of only focusing on juicing demand without thinking about supply.

UBI will not be a jump in economic growth, again per wikipedia:

economic growth is an increase in the quantity and quality of the economic goods and services that a society produces

There is no mechanism in UBI to increase production. The numbers may go up but thats just due to inflation, real output will remain the same or drop due to the increase in unemployment

this is not how China works, private enterprises …

Yes it is, yes China has private enterprises that are subsidized by the state but there are also a lot of state owned enterprises. The second largest EV manufacturer in the world is a state owned enterprise SAIC.

job guarantees waste people’s time

Is cleaning up the environment a waste of time?, is building high speed rail a waste of time? Is building new affordable housing a waste of time? You seem to think everything productive and worth doing is already captured by the market when it’s not, there are tons of things that need to be done that the market ignores. The government can be productive if we allow it to, and productivity is literally the opposite of wasting time.

a job guarantee also suggests no possible cause for firing.

Yeah it does, you can still get fired for being bad at your job, it’s just the government has to give you a new job.

I’m not saying we need to optimize for lowering inflation and increasing productivity, I’m saying inflation without an increase in productivity (stagflation) doesn’t help workers, and inflation with a decrease in productivity hurts workers.

I think you’re underestimating specialization. You’re average person is not going to be able to make an addition on there home that is safe and up to code without a couple years of schooling and apprenticing. If that’s what your using to counteract wage inflation of the carpenter then that carpenter can charge the equivalent of 2 years of your wages in labor costs alone, that doesn’t get into materials.

Staying on the subject of home additions let’s imagine a neighborhood of say 5 people who want a new addition with 2 workers who can do it this year. Before UBI the houses will bid up the price of the addition until the two richest families win and get the addition. After UBI one of the workers quits, everyone now has an extra $1,000 though so they want to get an addition, but everyone else has it too so prices again get bid up until the one richest family gets an addition. That second richest family has lost purchasing power, they used to be able to purchase an addition, and now they can’t. Sure the carpenter is making a shit ton but so is everyone else so when he goes to buy a new car he’s competing for that more limited supply with other people now making $ hundreds of thousands a year.

These people are losing purchasing power because the supply is decreasing. Real wage growth (wage inflation - inflation) requires an increase in purchasing power, ie a worker can buy more stuff with there wages. The worker can not buy more stuff with there wages if the amount of stuff in general goes down.

This is why are jobs guarantee is better, the government can use the unused labor to increase the supply. Even if the government is shitty and inefficient at making cars, every car they make is one that wouldn’t have been created anyway so the total supply goes up and now a person who previously couldn’t buy a car can buy a shitty government car, there purchasing power has increased. And it doesn’t even have to be a shitty car, Chinese state owned companies have shown that they are fully capable of making decent quality low price electric vehicles.