Along with the economic boom, the biggest reason it was balanced in the late 90s with split control is because Democrats singlehandedly (zero R votes) raised taxes in an effort to balance the budget and got murdered for it in the next election cycle (1994).  Ever since, they haven't had the courage to be responsible.  (And large numbers of them don't even want to—they're in fantasyland with most Republicans.) 

It's due to framing of how Americans view taxes.  It is seen as money being taken away rather than invested into the society.  I've tried to explain the merits of medicare for all in the US, but I get a lot of resistance from people who'd rather pay insurance companies than a tax.  Oddest part is some of these people will admit they are looking forward to being on medicare when they are of age, but still don't want it expanded.  I think attitudes are changing, but be on young (under 40) people to vote in large numbers to see a shift in mentality.

Update: I still don’t like him. He’s a complete idiot that makes this country look worse than it already was. The plus side is that he’s shown America the consequences of abstaining from voting.

It won’t happen, but I do hope eventually we get a trojan horse candidate that opens the doors for more than a 2 party system in this country. You can argue, ‘we have many more than 2 parties here’ -but do any actually stand a real chance? No. Absolutely not. We have a platform with 2 parties that take turns skull fucking the country. Two parties opens up room for extremists to enter the fray like Trump and cut the number of choices between bad and worse (ex. see 2016 election).

But going back to Trump, even if the dude was somehow completely proven not to be a treasonousness bastard (which is hard to believe), he’s so covered in scandal, so incompetent in his position -hiring literally the worst people possible for positions (see: Scott Pruitt, Betsy Devos) that I find it very hard to see any reason to support him. There are plenty of better balanced Republicans out there and much better representatives of the Conservative ideology than this idiot

Well most people grasp that politicians just blatantly lie but Trump is a whole other level:



Today he also attacked Amazon. Normally I would semi agree but he did already in the past and blamed Amazon for being cheap and being the reason why USPS loses so much money while it is pretty clear that USPS that sees their revenue shrink year by year and cut their workfore, If you have 300K employees but have to pay retirement benefits for 500K then yeah you lose billions.

In fact after his last tweet about Amazon, Amazon announced to start with their own delivery service short term it will not hurt that much for USPS/Fed ex etc but long term it will because Amazon spend 20Billion on shipping costs and that's a lot of revenue USPS/FEd ex etc will miss out on.

Ideally he would not attack Amazon but the cities/States that are like 'Open your new HQ in our state/City and we give you a 1 billion in tax reduction'.

I was neutral, he didn't accomplish anything but benefit the already rich people.

I wonder why the USPS is shrinking -- UPS outsources tons of small packages to them for last mile delivery. I personally get the feeling the post office is being ripped off, but that should help in terms of number of postal workers required to handle the volume.

While the US economy has been improving, that is not a new trend, it’s a continuation of what has been occurring since 2010.
Economically, Trump is a disaster with public funds, he’s pretty much destroyed years of hard work toward balancing the budget and has blown up the deficit. He’s not running a very efficient government, and is exacerbating one of the primary issues he was critical against Obama on - that’s a massive failure, not a good job.

The only thing Trump has successfully done is shown that a buffoon with a child’s mentality can head up a nation and not see it collapse. While this may seem unique in today’s world, this was commonplace through history where we saw literal insane people, inbreds, and children (occasionally a combination of the three) rule Empires as absolute Monarchs. While these sorts of leaders aren’t going to destroy a country, they do damage it’s potential, which is one of the reasons why democracy came about in the first place - and also why demagoguery (like that of Trump) should always be shunned, never celebrated.

Social media and the 24/7 news cycle enables Trump to be constantly in the public attention and feed the ego of the megalomaniac that is Trump. I miss the great days when Presidents barely got any news attention and there was no social media.

Happy Easter everybody!
https://streamable.com/up1oo

TITLE: You Scream, I Scream, Will We Ever Stop Screaming?
by Jim Carey