[Winstonm]

rmnka447, on 2019-June-30, 23:32, said:

Genuine discussion? Are you kidding? Most of the posters on this thread are such progressive zealots that any sensible discussion will never happen.

I happen to be toward the other end of the political spectrum.

I didn't like President Obama because I thought his policies and agenda were wrong headed. But I would never in my wildest dreams engage in the name calling and vitriol toward him that more than a few of you engage in toward our current President. If that's your idea of moral superiority, I pity you.

I laugh at the incestuous way that you engage in trying to prove that everything you think is true. You proffer tons and tons of BS analyses by people who obviously dislike President Trump to prove how deplorable he is. Gee, those conclusions are no surprise. What would be a surprise would be if some of those experts didn't come to those conclusions some time. It's too much Quiggian logic. (Think -Wouk's The Caine Mutiny)

Yes, I still consider AG Barr a straight shooter. I think he has legitimate concerns about how the investigation of the Trump campaign got started. I think he did exactly the right thing in appointing Connecticut US Atty Jon Durham to look into it. He has an impeccable reputation for investigating and prosecuting political corruption cases. He also operates in a state that is not exactly right-wing. There's been enough information coming out through FOIA lawsuits to at least justify an inquiry into what happened.

Ultimately, I'd like to see that the DOJ/FBI are perceived to be completely free from bias in the investigation, prosecution, and administering of our laws. With the information that has come out over the last 2 years, there is at least a cloud of uncertainty about that now.

Unfortunately, I'm going to be dealing with some serious health issues over the next 6-8 months, so I probably won't be available to toss an occasional grenade into this thread and attempt to wake you up. It might be an impossible task, but I keep hoping. Prospects are pretty good that following that period I'll be back better than ever. See you then.

If you don't recognize the nature of Donald Trump there is no hope for you so let's forget that part. You like autocrats. Fine. That you claim posters like Kenberg and PassedOut are wildly leftist makes me question your integrity or at the very least the integrity of your statements.

But "disliked his policies" is such a meaningless phrase that it requires definition. Tell us which policies of the Obama administration you found objectionable and perhaps we could talk about them. What "agenda" do you think he had?

I do agree with you that AG Barr is a straight-shooter insomuch as he strictly adheres and tries to advance his conception of an imperial presidency without bounds to its power. That concept of presidential power that he promotes and works to implement is for most of us antipathy to our concept of the presidency and how U.S. democratic Republic is supposed to work, and certainly not what the originators thought.

Congress for many, many years has been complicit in allowing their own powers to be supplanted by presidential, btw, so it is not about Barr and Trump other than they are using that weakness to their advantage - Barr for idealistic ones; Trump for personal gain.

But the way Barr conducts his operation is underhanded, even giving him credit for his point of view - and he is aware that there is no power that is willing to dissuade him from his goals. As head of justice in America, he is a dangerous man. Trump is only echoing what he has been told about his powers. Barr is the whisperer. Perhaps you think the US should have an imperial president. That is a genuine ideological claim. We don't. But to support Barr and Trump is to support that ideology, whether or not you want to admit it.

I don't care about the investigations Barr has started. What concerns me is whether the results can be trusted and if faked or cherry-picked results will be used politically to try to sway elections.

It seems obvious that the Republican party no longer supports democracy but is only interested in holding to power - that is the purpose of the gerrymandering and voter suppression that Republican party promotes. And now, with the SCOTUS on that side, there will be many more losses of democratic protections. Maybe we will survive. Maybe we won't.

You are helping the won't side.

[Winstonm]

A pre-rebuke to Jim Jordan's question of Robert Mueller:

From Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel.net

Quote

The Mueller team told Amy Berman Jackson that Paul Manafort had breached his plea agreement on November 26, 2018. His last grand jury appearance — on November 2 — did not show up in his breach discussion (meaning he may have told the truth, including about Trump’s personal involvement in optimizing the WikiLeaks releases). But in his October 26 grand jury appearance, he tried to hide the fact that he continued to pursue a plan to carve up Ukraine well into 2018, and continued to generally lie about what that plan to carve up Ukraine had to do with winning Michigan and Wisconsin, such that Manafort took time away from running Trump’s campaign on August 2, 2016 to discuss both of them with his co-conspirator Konstantin Kilimnik. Mueller never did determine what that August 2 meeting was about or what Kilimnik and Viktor Boyarkin did with the Trump polling data Manafort was sharing with them. But the delay in determining that Manafort’s obstruction had succeeded was set by Manafort, not Mueller.

my emphasis
I think it is important for rmnka447 and other supporters of this president to closely read the above facts as laid out by Dr. Wheeler.

Manafort shared polling data and the campaign plans to win two critical states with a Russian known to be associated with the GRU. Due to lack of cooperation and other factors, Mueller was unable to uncover how that information was used.

That Elliot Ness could not charge Al Capone with murder and racketeering does not mean Capone did not orchestrate murders and rackets.

Likewise, the proven facts of the Trump campaign's knowledge of, appreciation of, and expectation of help from the Russians' activities does not exonerate the campaign and its members.

Unable to prove is not the same as finding no proof of - and Mueller went on to say that had no proof been found he would have so stated.

Anyone who refuses to see that there was plenty of smoke and a lot of people trying to hide fires is being blinded by loyalty to ideology.

[Winstonm]

A friendly invitation to our Republican neighbors to read a critical article from a fellow Republican:

Quote

Having known Barr for four decades, including preceding him as deputy attorney general in the Bush administration, I knew him to be a fierce advocate of unchecked presidential power, so my own hopes were outweighed by skepticism that this would come true. But the first few months of his current tenure, and in particular his handling of the Mueller report, suggest something very different—that he is using the office he holds to advance his extraordinary lifetime project of assigning unchecked power to the president.

[johnu]

‘The Daily Show’ Finds No Difference Between Fox News And North Korea State TV

An outrageous claim if true. I, for one, see no similarities. For starters, North Korea State TV broadcasts in Korean. Secondly, .... I'm going to have to get back to you when somebody sends me some talking points.

Whew, I thought I was only going to have 1 point. Second point, North Korean State TV only has North Korean anchors and news people. 3rd point, North Korean State TV is broadcast to North Koreans, Fox Propaganda broadcasts to the US. 3 major points I came up with in only a couple of hours.

The differences are staggering

[y66]

From The Welcome Humiliation of John Bolton by Michelle Goldberg at NYT:

Quote

Say this for Donald Trump. He may be transforming American politics into a kleptocratic fascist reality show and turning our once-great country into a global laughingstock, but at least he’s humiliating John Bolton in the process.

Many people who get involved with this president end up diminished, embarrassed or, in quite a few cases, indicted. Rex Tillerson, once known as a corporate titan, will now be remembered for his brief, ineffectual record as secretary of state. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, and Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, are in prison.

Bolton’s comeuppance is of a different kind. By taking to Fox News to kiss up to Trump, he became national security adviser, a job that no other president would have ever given to a discredited warmonger. His reward is that, after devoting his life to the expansion of American power globally, he’s a hapless party to its contraction. For a person to sell out his putative ideals for such a hollow victory would be like a Greek drama, if the Greeks had written dramas about such small men.

Bolton is sometimes described as a neoconservative, but that’s not really right. Neoconservatives purported to champion the expansion of American values, while Bolton just wants to impose American might. On the surface, he seems an excellent fit with Trump, who is also uninterested in human rights and contemptuous of multilateral institutions. Both are bellicose nationalists, dismissive of climate change, eager to empower the Israeli right, hostile to Islam but solicitous of Saudi Arabia.

But the uber-hawk Bolton, who still refuses to admit that the Iraq war was a mistake, has long believed that America’s most implacable enemies include North Korea, Russia and Iran. One multilateral organization he appears to value is NATO, a counterweight to Russia that he once called “the most successful political-military alliance in human history.” Now, at the summit of his career, he’s part of an administration that makes a mockery of his longtime foreign policy philosophy.

When the George W. Bush administration, in which Bolton also served, lifted some sanctions on North Korea in 2008, Bolton seemed almost heartsick. “Nothing can erase the ineffable sadness of an American presidency, like this one, in total intellectual collapse,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

So one can only imagine the ineffable sadness he felt over the weekend, when Trump stepped into North Korea to shake the hand of his friend Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s totalitarian leader. On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration was considering putting aside the goal of getting North Korea to surrender the nuclear weapons it already has, instead trying to get the country to stop making new nuclear material.

Given Trump’s limitations as a statesman, that’s probably the best that can be hoped for. But it’s almost certainly not what Bolton, who was calling for pre-emptive strikes on North Korea just before Trump appointed him, thought he was signing up for. In response to the Times article, Bolton tweeted angrily that he’d heard of no such plan, though he might have simply been out of the loop. After all, while Trump was flattering Kim, Bolton was in Mongolia.

Also on Sunday, Politico reported on a white paper prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff about expanding Russian power. “Russia has a growing and demonstrated capacity and willingness to exercise malign influence in Europe and abroad, including in the United States,” the paper said.

Bolton used to decry this influence. Vladimir Putin’s efforts in the 2016 election, wrote Bolton in 2017, was “a casus belli, a true act of war, and one Washington will never tolerate.” When Putin lied to Trump’s face during their first meeting in Hamburg, Germany, Bolton hoped Trump would take it as a “highly salutary lesson about the character of Russia’s leadership.” Obviously, Trump learned no such lesson. At the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, last week, the president joked with Putin about election interference and the murder of journalists, a scene that will now be part of Bolton’s legacy.

There is one major issue left on which Bolton could shape history. On Monday, news broke that Iran had breached a limit on how much nuclear fuel it can possess under the 2015 nuclear deal, which the Trump administration abandoned. That comes after months of escalation on both sides, and the threat remains that Bolton could goad an erratic Trump into war.

Standing between us and that apocalyptic possibility is the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has been urging Trump away from a military confrontation with Iran. Last month, Carlson used his opening monologue to eviscerate Bolton, calling him a “bureaucratic tapeworm” for whom war is “always good business.” In normal administrations, national security advisers have more authority than cable news hosts, but it was Carlson, not Bolton, who was with Trump at the Korean Demilitarized Zone this weekend. (Carlson later called into “Fox & Friends” and rationalized North Korean atrocities, said that leading a country “means killing people.”)

It’s nightmarish to live in a country where our foreign policy has been reduced to an intramural battle between Fox News reactionaries. And there’s still a danger that Bolton could outmaneuver the isolationists. But right now there is a thin, bitter consolation in knowing that he, like so many others who’ve worked for Trump, sacrificed his principles for power and will likely end up with neither.

Talk about hanging your partner.

[y66]

From Democrats are learning the wrong lesson from Donald Trump by Matt Yglesias at Vox:

Quote

Many progressives have what they believe to be a knock-down answer to nervous Nellies who fret that talking about desegregation busing, decriminalizing illegal entry into the United States, banning assault weapons, and replacing private health insurance will kill them at the polls in 2020: Donald Trump is president.

If Trump is president, the thinking goes, it’s the ultimate proof of “lol nothing matters” politics. And if anything does matter, it’s riling up your base to go to war, not trimming and tucking to persuade precious swing voters. The old rules no longer apply, or perhaps they were never true at all.

Activists are pressing candidates to take aggressively progressive stands on broad issues like Medicare-for-all but also narrower ones like including undocumented immigrants in health care plans and providing relief from graduate school debt.

This is, however, precisely the wrong lesson to learn from the Trump era.

It’s true that Trump is president, but it’s not true that Trump ran and won as an ideological extremist. He paired extremely offensive rhetoric on racial issues with positioning on key economic policy topics that led him to be perceived by the electorate as a whole as the most moderate GOP nominee in generations. His campaign was almost paint-by-numbers pragmatic moderation. He ditched a couple of unpopular GOP positions that were much cherished by party elites, like cutting Medicare benefits, delivered victory, and is beloved by the rank and file for it.

The research case that moderation matters for electoral wins, meanwhile, remains pretty solid. Lots of other things matter too, and it would be foolish to label any particular position or candidate as categorically “unelectable.” But overall, moderate candidates are more likely to win; more precisely, candidates who take popular positions on the issues are more likely to win than candidates who take unpopular ones.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2019-July-02, 03:29, said:

From The Welcome Humiliation of John Bolton by Michelle Goldberg at NYT:


Talk about hanging your partner.

Quote

....hostile to Islam but solicitous of Saudi Arabia.

This should go into the "antithetical phrases" hall of fame.

[Winstonm]

In the spirit of the 4th considering this particular executive branch:

Here in the water of our greatest city stands
his likeness, with 5-iron, whose shaft
is graphite, on his balls his name:
Fooker of Mothers. From his empty hand
comes a middle finger, a world-wide gesture, a command
The air-brain dead-ender in a city of fame.
"Shitehole countries, the arseholes!" cries he
from metal lips. "Give me your whites, your rich,
your Norwegians who've been yearning to meet me.
The wretched refuse of your shitehole countries?
Lock them in cages, take away their kids,
Whack 'em with this ugly lamp....
at least the door is golden.
I don't know. We'll see.

[y66]

There will be tanks but no citizenship question apparently.

[johnu]

It's been well documented that many professional psychiatrists who have gone to medical school and had years of advanced training have agreed the Dennison checks all, or almost all, the boxes for being a psychopath. Nothing new here.

What's becoming more evident that Dennison is on the verge of a psychotic breakdown.

Trump claims homelessness is 'phenomenon that started 2 years ago,' blames 'liberal' mayors

Quote

President Donald Trump in an interview with Fox News painted a dark picture of people "living in hell" due to homelessness in major U.S. cities, claiming that it is "a phenomenon that started two years ago," blaming Democratic mayors for the problem.

Homelessness as a problem started 2 years ago???

And with Dennison taking 200% of the credit for continued economic growth and lower unemployment, why would he take "credit" for creating homelessness as a problem?

As for facts in the matter:

Quote

According to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, homelessness overall has decreased by 15% since 2007. Between 2016 and 2018, the rate of homelessness has stayed between 550,000 to 553,000 per year, the HUD figures show.

So the facts say that homelessness has been trending downward for the last 11 years. One more example of Dennison losing his already tenuous grip on reality.

[y66]

How is Trump's ignorance of basic facts about homelessness different from his ignorance of basic facts about everything?

[y66]

Guest post from Paul Krugman:

Quote

I’ve been reading a recent Rockefeller Institute report on states’ federal “balance of payments” — the difference for each state between what the federal government spends in that state and what it gets back in revenue.

The pattern is familiar: Richer states subsidize poorer states. And the reasons are clear: Rich states pay much more per person in federal taxes, while actually getting a bit less in federal spending, because Medicaid and other “means-tested” programs go disproportionately to those with low incomes. But the magnitudes are startling.

Take the case of Kentucky. In 2017, the state received $40 billion more from the federal government than it paid in taxes. That’s about one-fifth of the state’s G.D.P.; if Kentucky were a country, we’d say that it was receiving foreign aid on an almost inconceivable scale.

This aid, in turn, supports a lot of jobs. It’s fair to say that far more Kentuckians work in hospitals kept afloat by Medicare and Medicaid, in retail establishments kept going by Social Security and food stamps, than in all traditional occupations like mining and even agriculture combined.

So if you really believe that Americans with higher incomes shouldn’t pay for benefits provided to those with lower incomes, you should be calling on “donor” states like New Jersey and New York to cut off places like Kentucky and let their economies collapse. And if that’s what you mean, you should let Mitch McConnell’s constituents know about it.

The point is that while you can criticize particular Democratic proposals, you can only portray progressives as radical or irresponsible, especially as compared with the modern G.O.P., by ignoring or suppressing a lot of facts. I guess facts really do have a liberal bias.

[johnu]

y66, on 2019-July-03, 04:15, said:

How is Trump's ignorance of basic facts about homelessness different from his ignorance of basic facts about everything?

OK, Dennison is a psychopath who lies because he doesn't care if people might know he is lying. His ignorance of facts required to run the country is frightening. So he lies because he knows he is lying, and he lies because he is so ignorant he doesn't have a clue what the truth is.

That being said, almost without exception he lies to make himself look better. Biggest inauguration crowds in history? In the decades since photography was invented, how is that lie supposed to be believable? Of course, that lie was supposed to make him look better. He could have lied and said that the inauguration crowds were the smallest in history. That would have made him look bad, maybe humble, but not a favorable comment about his popularity.

It's the fact that "creating" homelessness in the US would be a devastating indictment of his presidency and overwhelming proof that the economic recovery is only really helping the already rich. Why would he want to go there? I can only credit that to the beginning of a psychotic breakdown where he has completely lost track of reality.

[y66]

From Frank DeFilippo at the Virginia Mercury:

Quote

Here’s one set of eyes and ears that won’t be fastened on President Donald Trump’s speech on Thursday at the Lincoln Memorial.

The aural and visual blackout has nothing to do with politics or ideology, though Trump’s policies and politics are 18th century leftovers, at best. Everything a president says, good, bad, even ungrammatical, is important to the nation and the world. Forget that he lies, misrepresents and dissembles.

The personal boycott has more to do with the remarkable sense (hearing) that converts sound waves into language, and the visual impression of body language that acts as a decoder to the intent of the spoken word. They clash and they’re harsh. They create confusion and cacophony.

Simply put, the man is a lousy speaker.

So what we have here is an invitation that’s being consigned to the shredder. On Feb. 4, Trump tweeted his plans to speak to America on the Fourth of July: “HOLD THE DATE! . . . Major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favorite President, me!”

The president will speak. There’ll be fly-overs and fireworks and the fife-and-drum tootling of John Phillip Souza polluting the air.

Great speeches, like all great writing, are all nouns and verbs. Trump certainly is no Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama, probably among the best orators to occupy the White House. And right up there with the best of them is Sen. Edward Kennedy, brother of the president. These men could sell a phrase or a line the way Sinatra sold a lyric.

And no one really knows whether the man can write, and if he can, he’s surely no match for Theodore Roosevelt or Obama.

And let’s remember that Trump will be occupying the sacred space that is reserved for Abraham Lincoln, who wrote and delivered some of the most memorable oratory in the nation’s history, and where Martin Luther King Jr. elevated the phrase, “I have a dream,” to a meditation.

But give Trump his propers. He is a “stable genius,” in his own estimation.

Great orators speak with their ear as well as their voice. They hear the richness of the words and the cadences of the phrases and the sentences. They hear when to let the words rise and fall and they hear when to pause and when to let the rhythm and the punctuation do the work for them.

Obama is a good example. His speech, or eulogy, at the funeral service following the shootings at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, S.C., captured in its delivery not only the solemnity of the occasion, but it had the lyrical flow of a spiritual and a cadence that strummed to the black patois of the audience. It was rap for the religious. Obama’s singing of “Amazing Grace” was the coda to a beautifully written and delivered speech, among his most memorable.

The great British writer and wit, Max Beerbohm, wrote a series of essays on the difference between words that are written for the ear and those that are meant for the eye. Beerbohm was bedeviled by the difference when he switched from writing for publications to writing for radio broadcasting.

Trump has a tin ear. Working from a teleprompter, he usually delivers two or three words in a puff, with no rhythm or cadence to carry a thought, and he pauses where there is no punctuation, or worse, no reason to halt except that he can’t carry a sentence, let alone a tune. A read-through of the printed text reveals well-structured and smooth sentences. But there are no distinguishing style points to Trump’s speeches aside from his awkward delivery.

Trump has another annoying speech tic. He often sounds like Jimmy Two Times in the mob movie “Goodfellas,” repeating in rapid sequence words or phrases that he believes are important.

And it’s even more awkward to watch Trump, a grown man of self-ordained brilliance, use his forefinger as a pointer when he reads a type-written text from a binder or note cards.

Another key to solid public speaking is proper breathing. Breathing from the diaphragm, and not from the back of the throat, as Trump seems to do, is essential to putting the proper force behind words and carrying sonorous phrases to their maximum effect. And this is not about shouting but about giving the microphone enough air to do its work.

Come to think of it, in Trump’s nearly three years in office, with the millions of words and thousands of tweets and hundreds of gaggles in the White House driveway, he has yet to produce a single memorable phrase or figure of speech that sums up. . .well, anything. (Name-calling doesn’t count. Neither do campaign slogans.)

When Trump speaks, the result sounds as if he’s trying to convert six diphthongs into a primitive language, or that he’s mashing his fricatives against the roof of his mouth. Demosthenes, among Greece’s greatest speakers, overcame his oratorical shortcomings, it is said, by practicing with pebbles in his mouth. He also studied the speeches of previous great orators.

In fact, in ancient Greece and Rome, oratorical skill was considered a condition of fitness for public office. Competitions were held regularly in the Agora, kind of like our modern-day television debates only with competence and substance and prose powerful enough to call people to action.

Yes, Trump would flunk Rhetoric 101.

Trump drew his inspiration for pageantry from a Bastille Day display he witnessed in Paris. He vowed to replicate the event in America, though this country frowns on displays of military might as it rumbles and roars on boulevards, passing balconies, in other nations.

He attempted to stage an extravaganza on the last Veterans Day, Nov. 11, but was discouraged and unable to marshal the necessary machinery. And now Trump has co-opted the nation’s birthday to stage what many view as an extension of his campaign rallies at public cost.

In addition to his uninvited presence at America’s birthday party, Trump has promised additional entertainment (the circuses part of “bread and circuses”) to the goers and the TV audience (which is what it’s really all about).

They include a relocated burst of fireworks and a fly-over as a tribute to the armed services along with military demonstrations and a parade, something Trump knows little about since he ducked the draft five times and never put on a uniform. All of this adds to the assault on the ear that emanates from Trump’s vocal cords.

R.S.V.P. No thanks, and no excuses, Mr. President. The Fourth of July comes with reverence for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, along with echoes of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan and Obama.

They were speakers who had something to say and said it well.

Did he say no tanks?

[y66]

From Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker:

Quote

A Mississippi prosecutor went on a racist crusade to have a black man executed. Clarence Thomas thinks that was just fine.

[kenberg]

y66, on 2019-July-03, 04:17, said:

Guest post from Paul Krugman:

I took a look at the Rockefeller report. I often advise skepticism about data and this seems to be exhibit A. Even if we want to look at which states do better and which do worse, and use this to speak of fairness, surely the per capita figures are more relevant. On per capita basis, Connecticut has last place nailed down at negative $4000 per person. New York is 4th fr, bottom at $1792 while North Dakota is 5th from bottom at $720.

Krugman makes the point he wants to make by citing Kentucky, 2nd from the top with a positive balance of $9,145 but of course he does not mention the top state, Virginia, with a positive balance of $10,301 since this would be less supportive of the point he wishes to make. Virginia has areas of poverty, most states do, but much of the state does pretty well.

But what to make of the report? Very little, I think. I do not think that the high listing of Kentucky and Virginia is a reason to move to either or the low listing of New York, or North Dakota, is a reason to not move there. Or a reason to do much of anything.

My favorite example of meaningless data: Eleanor Roosevelt High School, in Prince George's County Maryland, would score well on any list of average wealth per graduate. Sergei Brin graduated from Roosevelt. So parents, if you want your kid to become wealthy, obviously you should send him to Roosevelt High. I have nothing against or for Roosevelt, but I do not think a decision on where to send your kid should be based on the average wealth of graduates.

[y66]

Although Table 6 in the Rockefeller Institute report does not show all states, of the states shown Kentucky is at the top of the list in terms of direct payments per person where direct payments are mostly (75%) Social Security + Medicare payments. Therefore, as Krugman notes, people living in the Kentucky part of the Trump/McConnell heartland and their politicians are not in a strong position to say it's morally wrong for people to receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes. But yes, Krugman is most definitely making the point he wants to.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2019-July-02, 17:23, said:

There will be tanks but no citizenship question apparently.

So, they have tanked on the citizenship question?

[barmar]

kenberg, on 2019-July-03, 07:14, said:

I took a look at the Rockefeller report. I often advise skepticism about data and this seems to be exhibit A. Even if we want to look at which states do better and which do worse, and use this to speak of fairness, surely the per capita figures are My favorite example of meaningless data: Eleanor Roosevelt High School, in Prince George's County Maryland, would score well on any list of average wealth per graduate. Sergei Brin graduated from Roosevelt. So parents, if you want your kid to become wealthy, obviously you should send him to Roosevelt High. I have nothing against or for Roosevelt, but I do not think a decision on where to send your kid should be based on the average wealth of graduates.

Bill Gates walks into a bar. Now the average patron of that bar is a billionaire.

[kenberg]

y66, on 2019-July-03, 08:52, said:

Although Table 6 in the Rockefeller Institute report does not show all states, of the states shown Kentucky is at the top of the list in terms of direct payments per person where direct payments are mostly (75%) Social Security + Medicare payments. Therefore, as Krugman notes, people living in the Kentucky part of the Trump/McConnell heartland and their politicians are not in a strong position to say it's morally wrong for people to receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes. But yes, Krugman is most definitely making the point he wants to.

In this case I was criticizing the report, any criticism of Krugman was (mostly) incidental. It seems to me that with such a report more or less anyone can cite the report in support of more or less any view. Take Connecticut. I don't really know, but my guess is that there are a lot of rich people living in Connecticut, successful wallstreeters close to Manhattan. So they pay a lot of taxes, and so a lot of money flows to the Feds. But it flows from rich people, the fact that they are living in Connecticut is of little importance. Which was really Krugman's point I think, and there I agree with him. Data can be useful, but it can also be irrelevant or misleading. There are times I read data presentations and think "yeah, and so?"