uneducated white voters & voting for Trump

I was bothered a lot by the “uneducated” thing. Once was too much, but he kept saying it.

Even the polls he showed had enough common sense to use college or non-college, or something to that effect.

Ironically, Trump said he “loves the poorly educated!” so he has a bit of the same problem via college or non-college.

Also, Pakman, when he discussed the tax cut issue, forgot to mention that it has to be paid back, and with interest. Media forget to mention that too. They should always bring that up when people say how happy they are to get a tax cut. That they’ll be paying it back plus interest . . . and, of course, how the rich make out exponentially better whenever those tax cuts occur. Percentages. Math, etc.

Oh, well . . .

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

Enh. I guess what i object to (mildly) is the use of the term “educated.”
I would have phrased it “college-educated” I suppose.

Billy_T wrote:

I was bothered a lot by the “uneducated” thing.

Point taken.

Yet we ourselves talk about the corporatitized dumbing down of the public.

Things have been dumbed down for a long, long time. But I wonder if our crises are really amenable to improved “critical thinking” skillsa. What if society really has made a critical turn beyond all of that, and we really are in a “post-truth” era?

Boiled down, I think people can and do have the ability to “think critically,” with or without college, but in certain areas of life, they choose not to use those skills. Not consciously, necessarily. It’s likely not a conscious decision. But we all have blind spots to one degree or another — different ones, sacred and profane spaces that we just know 2+2=5 and won’t brook those arguing otherwise.

The usual areas, of course, are politics and religion. And they’re the biggies. But this kind of irrationality can rear its ugly head in all kinds of different places, and more “higher education” may just not be able to address it. I don’t think it really can. Otherwise, we wouldn’t see so many absolutely brilliant people believing in crackpot nonsense like apocalyptic religions, seances, or fascism, etc. etc.

I have no idea what the answer is. And while I’ve always been a huge believer in university education — I paid off three rounds of student loans in support of that — I think we’ve reached a time when Yeats’ widening gyre.

Cal wrote:

Ha! Pakman is talking about uneducated voters supporting Trump and Pakman doesn’t even have an educated opinion about Trump’s tax cut.

Trump and the republicans did a good job of targeting white working class voters without a college education with their tax cut. Part of the tax cut included doubling the child tax credit which reduces the taxes for anyone with kids.

I would guess most of those voters have children they can claim and saw a big reduction in their tax bill after the tax cuts.

Pakman’s explanation doesn’t even come close to explaining the savings that millions of tax payers realized with the tax cut.

Pakman’s solution of using education by teaching critical thinking earlier in schools is so perfect as it represents the mainstream Democratic solutions.

Instead of more education, how about giving these people more time off work, higher wages, and standing up to a system that tries to extract an extra dime from working class people at every opportunity.

The problem with tax cuts is, as mentioned, they have to be paid back. The federal government has to borrow money to make up for the revenue losses while it maintains the same levels of goods and services — or increases them. And because it’s deficit spending, an interest payment is tacked on too. It’s also pure economic illiteracy on Trump’s part to cut taxes while the economy is doing okay. Keynes was right. Stimulate the economy in down times; pay off the debt in relatively good times.

Of course, the real reason for these tax cuts is too obvious: Make rich people richer. This is one place where serious math education would really help:

Give someone a 10% tax cut who makes 30K a year and they’ll pocket an extra few hundred a year. Give that same percentage to someone who makes 10 million and they’ll pocket many hundreds of thousands of dollars more. If they have good tax lawyers, more than that.

Percentages. This means every time we include rich people in with any tax cut, the government is radically increasing income and wealth inequality. It’s doing “social engineering” for rich people.

Why this doesn’t piss off the poor, the working class and the middle class is baffling. It’s one more of those blind spots I mention above.

Oh, and Trump gave himself and his family a massive tax cut in the bargain — corporate and personal.

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

ZN,

That’s twice now. Did a post, hit submit, and couldn’t see the result until later.

The software must be trying to teach us patience.

;>)

Edit: And I just now see this one, which I did after posting a response to Cal, which hasn’t shown up yet.

It’s being marked as spam. From my end it means I go into the inner board only mods see, and find a post that is “pending.” I then “approve” it.

This happens sometimes. Don’t know if there is anything we can do about it, but as I said the worse alternative is to NOT have a spam filter (as I’ve learned the hard way).

I appreciate your patience.

No worries. I see the post now.

And the spam filter is a must. Without it, what’s to stop WV from spamming the board with his diehard Vikings propaganda?

wv wrote:

Well, i have no doubt I’m a hypocrite in a gajillion ways, and i dont have any clear, unified, solutions-thots on this stuff, but when i talk about a dummed-down public i AINT talkin about the Trump Voters. I’m talkin about the Harvard PHDs as well.

For example, if i was doin a video like that, mine would be about how dummed down the college-educated folks were AS WEll AS the never-been-to-college folks. My vid would be about how dummed-down you have to be to vote mainstream-DEM as well as how dummed down you have to be to vote Republican.

That video seemed to me like the usual stuff we get from libs about how smart the libs are and how dum the Reps are.

In my view things are way worse than just dummed-down-trump-voters. Thats only half the story.

Having said that, I like that guy in the vid. This is just my usual magnifying minor differences, probly.

w
v

I agree with all of that. Tried to find a way to express that above, but added a bit as well. I may be alone on this, but I think a huge problem is that even with a ton of “education” in whatever form . . . streets, formal, school of hard knocks, etc. etc. . . . we humans have our blind spots, our allegiances, our prejudices, and there’s no arguing us out of them. In fact, there have been all kinds of recent studies that show people digging in the more they hear those arguments. The attempts to change minds actually cement those views, etc. Push people up against a wall, and they cling even harder to their stances.

So one possible recourse is a very dark one, and it’s one “the other side” saw long ago. They see it and implement it every chance they get.

Power. Taking power and maximizing it while they have it. No holds barred. Pushing through their agenda without apology or hesitation, hyper-aggressively.

You can’t fight the unabashed pursuit and use of power with “good arguments,” generally speaking. Exceptions, of course. But they’re rare.

. . . .

One more ugly quandary for leftists of the radical egalitarian, small “d” democrat variety. Even moreso, perhaps, for those of us who also lean left-anarchist.

Cal wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

The problem with tax cuts is, as mentioned, they have to be paid back. The federal government has to borrow money to make up for the revenue losses while it maintains the same levels of goods and services — or increases them. And because it’s deficit spending, an interest payment is tacked on too. It’s also pure economic illiteracy on Trump’s part to cut taxes while the economy is doing okay. Keynes was right. Stimulate the economy in down times; pay off the debt in relatively good times.

The deficit problem created by the tax cut is part of the republican evil genius. You know who is voting against this enormous federal deficit? Republican representatives and senators all around the country.

The gov’t couldn’t continue to function and increase the deficit without Nancy Pelosi and the democrats continuing to choose to run the gov’t this way.

Republican representatives and senators get to have it both ways: the economy is great AND we are working to oppose those dumb democrats who are always spending money they don’t have.

Trump, of course, should have a more difficult argument to make. But the democrats seem like they don’t want to hammer the stupid economic predicament Trump has created. Or maybe they do and I missed it.

At the start I was excited about the possibility of a strong rebuke of Trump from the Democrats during the debates, but I’ve pretty much tuned out the Democratic primary nonsense at this stage.

Good points, Cal.

The Dems should also remind people about the major flip-flops by the GOP on deficits and debt. They screamed bloody murder when Obama ran them, and he ran them when they were actually needed. During a recession, that’s what you do. You run deficits to dig your way out of that recession. We’ve always done that.

But as soon as Trump took power — and he inherited a recovery, unlike Obama — they turned on a dime and signed off on massive deficits and new debt.

The pattern’s pretty clear throughout recent times. When a Republican is in the White House, they don’t care about deficits. Reagan tripled the debt; Dubya doubled it. When a Dem is there, however, Republicans suddenly remember to be “fiscally conservative” again.

The Dems dropped the ball on that hypocrisy and so much else too.