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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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Will Trump counter with some asinine scheme of his own? Probably.

Trump has mostly resisted the urge to engage in explicitly ethnic spoils, other than the obvious problems for certain Hispanics in certain places in an environment of mass deportation, which is priced in at this point.

Trump has mostly preferred, in the "asinine scheme game," stuff that sounds great if you don't think about it too hard. "No tax on tips;" "no tax on Social Security;" "X% Tariffs on everything in the world" etc.

WSJ Economists rated Trump's economic proposals worse than Kamala's, but also rated hers as terrible. Unfortunately, in this election I'm left hoping that the winning candidate is not able to implement their policies.

Did they double blind the proposals? How do they even know what the proposals are?

Trump had a Platinum Plan in 2020 where he was offering about half a trillion for blacks. Who knows if he ever intended to follow through on that or what exactly he meant but he absolutely plays the ethnic spoils game...

If you vote Republican over the next four years, we will create three million new jobs for the Black community, open 500,000 new Black owned businesses, increase access to capital in Black communities by $500 billion. This includes investing in community development, financial institutions, and minority depository institutions. Build up peaceful and safer urban neighborhoods with the highest standards of, and you know this, of policing. We want the highest standards. We have to have highest standards of policing. Bring even greater fairness to the justice system. We did criminal justice reform. We remember that. Even greater.

Trump's big tent rhetoric definitely makes the rising tide that happens to do all this interpretation somewhat reasonable. But Kambala's talking about straight up giving helicopter money and other benefits to black men at the explicit exclusion of others.

Oh man I forgot all about that. Good pick.

Yeah, both candidates have bad proposals. I believe that, in both cases, the proposals are meant to be taken "seriously, not literally". So what does that mean?

Trump cares about working people while Kamala cares about racial spoils.

Unfortunately, in this election I'm left hoping that the winning candidate is not able to implement their policies.

For the last 3 presidential elections I've explicitly been hoping for partisan legislative Gridlock as the only real check on bad policy. Granted, partisan gridlock tends to produce even worse policies, but at least its fewer of them.

With the added bonus this time around that the Supreme Court has managed to hamstring and will possibly continue gutting Administrative agency authority, I'm REALLY hoping for gridlock now.