Trump/Republicans will further entrench income inequality

[BlackEyedDog]

I am so tired of people reducing things down to, oh all politicians are in it for themselves, that there's no difference.

Trump is a grifter, in fact the whole family is one big grift. He is entirely selfish. Jared picked up $2billion from the Saudis trading favors in first term.

Trump fans, Republican voters in general, are very much like a duped cult enthralled with a guru who collects followers simply to enrich himself. You have to be incredibly ignorant if you think Trump and Republicans are going to improve things for you economically. Ummm, in case u missed the last four decades, the Republican party has always favored deregulation, favored big business, favored corporations, favored the wealthy. It really began with Thatcher/Reagnomics/neoliberalism in the 80s bringing us to late stage capitalism today. Republicans always favor tax cuts for the wealthiest and corporations because this will "trickle-down" to benefit all. Ummm, not exactly how it turned out is it? All the while cutting social services. U think a party that always favors big business and moneyed interests protested as American companies outsourced their production in droves to countries like China? Thereby giving rise to the economic powerhouse that China has now become?

Deregulation just created consolidation/monopolies. Less consumer choice and price gouging. Deregulation pretty much always hurts consumers. Like cable tv, internet service providers, the telcos. And Republicans always push for deregulation.

You will get high prices when "Today, the top four corporations control more than 60% of the U.S. market for pork, coffee, cookies, beer, and bread. In beef processing, baby food, pasta, and soda the top four companies control more than 80% of the U.S. market."

You think Trump and Republicans are going to change this?? Dems at least appointed someone for FTC that took on Google, sued to stop more consolidation in supermarkets to protect food security. Guess what, Republicans are no fans of the FTC head and will soon appoint a more business/corporate friendly head of the FTC.

In late November the antitrust enforcer requested that Walmart, Kroger, Kraft, and Tyson, among others, hand over information in an investigation into price hikes and food shortages.​

There is one clear indicator of excessive monopoly power: record corporate profits. If rising food costs only reflected higher production costs, economists wouldn't expect net profits to rise, yet they are at historic levels. Non-finance corporations are reporting their largest profit margins in 60 years. For some 100 of the largest publicly traded companies these profit margins are 50% higher than in 2019. Net profit margins for top meat companies Tyson Foods, JBS, Marfrig, and Seaboard are up over 300%, according to the White House. Tyson earned $1.36 billion in the 2021 fourth quarter, more than twice as much as last year. McDonald's, Coca Cola, and Kraft Heinz also reported better than expected fourth quarter profits.​

And Republicans have never favored worker rights. They are the epitome of wageslavery, prefer people worry about their income/livelihood because that makes exploitation of labor easier. I gave an example how Abbot (TX) and Desantis (FL) outlawed water breaks for construction workers working outside in the deadly heat. When you dont have unions, which republicans successfully worked to dismantle, you have companies and businesses who abuse their workers.

Look at the minimum wages of "red states", it's 2024 and it's $7.25/hr in Alabama. Look at the poverty

I am no fan of corporate dems, in fact i loathe Bill Clinton because that is when dems sold out and went corporate. But make no mistake, Republicans don't care about improving the lives of everyday people economically or provide something basic like affordable health care. They will never focus on the systemic problems of which they are deeply entwined and very much helped to create. They will throw out hate, sow division, scapegoat entire peoples to keep u distracted from this very fact. They have been masters of distraction especially since the Karl Rove days.

Some people on here seem like nihilists who just want to see things get worse because their situation is not so great. Some are hateful and know Trump and Republicans are a party of hate. Those who reduce things to both sides are the same seem to me to also have a nihilist type view, not even acknowleding that peoples rights are threatened, people are fearful for good reason, and one side personifies hate and the other does not. But the most foolish are the ones who think Trump will improve their lives economically, that Republicans actually give a shit about them and have ever cared about people having living wages. When they've always favored the wealthy, big business, corporations and banks. Hope you have the right bootstraps to pull yourself up with, cuz thats the bullshit they're all about. The rich, wall st, will only get richer.

 

[diseasedPOS]

You lost me at 'red' and 'blue'. They're all thieving assholes, just with different bedtime stories to read you while they rock you to sleep and take advantage of you.

This is a rich -vs-poor clusterfuck, not a Republican/Democrat, white/non-white, etc battle which will be fought. Rich folks are going to lose theirs. History says so. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt at least had the good sense to be mindful what happened in Russia and give their money away.

Pretty sure this current group of robber barons is going to make folks rip it from their cold, dead hands. Which is fine, too. It only ever ends one way, until the point at which they're able to start overwhelming us with robot armies.

 

[DarkRange55]

As food companies (Nestle, General Mills, etc) get larger and buy up smaller producers, competitive pricing tends to get worse for the consumers. They become near monopolies.
At first prices go down because the larger companies have larger reach for the products and have economies of scale for producing and distributing them. But when they become large enough to become near-monopolies, reduced competition allows increasing prices to achieve higher profits.
Theoretically the higher prices then allow newcomers to enter the market and restore competition, but often the monopolies act to restrict competition (sometimes in ways that are illegal).

Hopefully we will see a resurgence in small farms/large gardens for those who have land. I would argue that having a garden or small farm nowadays isn't so much to save costs but to get quality food. Comestibles seem to have taken a nose dive in the last few years.

Victory garden - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[DarkRange55]

Whether you like the election, at least it will shake something up. I shouldn't say anything is better than what we have now but shake it up. I'm not really a republican or democrat but whatever the status quo has been for the last 20 years is so ridiculous. The amount of money spent on wars in Asia.

Republicans can be corrupt too, I'm not saying they're not. But Republicans tend to be more euntrapenurial and business minded. Where democrats tend to be basically government employees and people that work in bureaucracies. A lot of federal employees are democrats because the democrats let them keep their scammy jobs and they give them pay raises and benefits. And republicans don't like that. But I really do think that the republican party does have the interests of basically the 1% as their primary motive. And then they're mostly bought and paid for. Of course there's corporate democrats.

I look around at the infrastructure falling apart and the insane bureaucracy and the military and government not being able to find a trillion dollars of spending. Wasteful people and organization.
Our airports are in shambles. Sweden, Denmark their airports are ten times nicer. We're spending too much money, $800 billion on military, which they can't even account for. Be defensive, fix the infrastructure of the United States. If there is a war you need the airports to be efficient. Put money into American infrastructure. Put half a billion into each major American airport. Fix the bridges, fix the roads. LA is the richest part of the world and there are pot holes everywhere. California is extracting tax dollars, if you are in the top tax bracket you pay 39% plus 13.5% which is 52.5% thats the same as Sweden but Swedish people get more benefits from their tax dollars.

Fix our country - roads, bridges, farms