caulfield12

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ May 1, 2017 -> 03:09 PM) Late to the party on this, but it is a lot harder for the middle class and down to accumulate wealth when interest rates are so low. Savings accounts pay pennies in interest, so there's not a lot of financial benefit to saving. Most gains from the recovery have been in the market. People who can't afford to be in the market, or don't have the same ability to be in the market haven't been able to accumulate wealth through savings. Not to mention the 20% downpayment has made home ownership after 2008 increasingly difficult for the middle class members who are increasingly cash poor. Health care costs have to be another big redistributor of wealth to the top, as well as student loan repayments...not to mention quantitative easing Federal Reserve policies. Lastly, you can look at the evisceration of blue collar workers due to automation and globalization, tax policies highly favoring the 1%, inequality in educational outcomes in public education for the top 20% vs. the bottom 60%, deregulation in the financial industry and the growing divide between the start-up culture of Silicon Valley/NYC and the way of life on Main Street for everyone in-between the coasts. Heck, Amazon and Wal-Mart monopolies alone explain a lot about what happened to the middle of America and the shopping mall experience completely disappearing, replaced by high tech gadgets that are increasingly the domain of wealthy kids.

Finally, ticket prices that even Greg can't complain about! That only leaves parking and concession prices.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 1, 2017 -> 08:01 AM) Organized labor also fell steadily. So did manufacturing jobs. Productivity gains and wage increases became decoupled. The economy became increasingly financialized. The salaries between upper level executives and the rest of the workforce diverged quicker and quicker. And actually, the federal budget as a share of national GDP has been more or less steady with some up and down modulation for the past several decades: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S And exactly who has been trying to destroy organized labor since the 1980's? http://mashable.com/2017/04/25/iphone-fact...a/#jPkJYAa5Xmq2 NYU student goes undercover in Chinese iPhone factory...those jobs are never coming back, not to China, either.

More Jacksons, more Nathan Bedford Forrests, problem solved. John C. Calhoun was the man! I wish I could beat some of those Tuesday Club and House Freedom Caucus members with a stick like he did. Damn you, Henry Clay. Wait, isn't that the owner of the Lions? And if it wasn't for that darned meddling Frederick Douglass, I would have won the popular vote bigly. He registered five million "illegal" freed men to vote single-handedly in the Carolinas, along with Nat Turner. That's what Matt Drudge and that cute blonde on Fox and Friends say, at least.

QUOTE (gosoxgo2005 @ May 1, 2017 -> 06:22 AM) How do you figure this? Lucas Harrell returned Travis Demeritte last year who's on a lot of top 100 lists. This is just a few months after Harrell was pitching in Korea. James Shields returned Fernando Tatis Jr, also on top 100 lists. There are other examples too, I'm sure I know it's not apples to apples but saying Gonzales and Holland will get you NOBODY is incorrect. Of course, Tatis wouldn't have been included had the White Sox asked for less money back from the Padres.

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/331181-...s-trade-threats GOP growing frustrated with Trump's trade "policies"

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-just-m...-185102206.html How Trump claimed to have stopped Chinese currency manipulation...despite the fact that they have been spending massive amount of capital reserves to actually prop up the RMB since late in the summer of 2015. Trump said: "Pre-existing conditions are in the bill. And I just watched another network than yours, and they were saying, 'Pre-existing is not covered.' Pre-existing conditions are in the bill. And I mandate it. I said, 'Has to be.'" Trump said during the interview that if he's unable to renegotiate a long-standing free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, then he'll terminate the pact. He also spoke about tensions with North Korea. Asked about the failure of several North Korean missile tests recently, Trump said he'd "rather not discuss it. But perhaps they're just not very good missiles. But eventually, he'll have good missiles." Trump also said he is willing to use the trade issue as leverage to get China's help with North Korea. "Trade is very important. But massive warfare with millions, potentially millions of people being killed? That, as we would say, trumps trade." And he acknowledged the presidency is "a tough job. But I've had a lot of tough jobs. I've had things that were tougher, although I'll let you know that better at the end of eight years. Perhaps eight years. Hopefully, eight years." Also this week, the president will welcome Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the White House. And he'll head to New York City on Thursday where he'll visit the USS Intrepid to mark the 75th anniversary of a World War II naval battle. On Sunday morning, Trump headed to Trump National Golf Club in Virginia. The White House did not immediately clarify whether he was holding meetings or golfing. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/100-days-tru...-064021825.html http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/201...politico-215087 All the outreach has hardly convinced Europeans that Trump has their back, and the overall feeling of gloom hanging over the relationship is palpable. A recent Pew Research Center survey of European thought leaders found 77 percent preparing for worsening diplomatic relations with the United States in the Trump era and 62 percent looking at troubled times ahead on security and economic issues. Eighty-five percent in the survey said Trump was “dangerous”—and another 87 percent said they had little to no confidence that Trump would do the right thing in world affairs, a far worse rating than even for Russian President Vladimir Putin. ... Early one February weekend, President Trump let loose a cryptic complaint, followed by a barrage of Fox News-inspired tweets, about Sweden of all places. He made the Nordic country, home of gleaming lakes, cheap modernist furniture and one of the world’s highest standards of living, seem like a dystopian hellhole overrun with rampaging refugees. Sweden was not amused. “They thought the man had gone bananas,” says Carl Bildt, Sweden’s former prime minister, foreign minister and defense minister, in a new interview for The Global POLITICO, our weekly podcast on world affairs. “It was a somewhat unsettling thing to see the president of the United States without any factual basis whatsoever lunge out against a small country in the way that he did.”

QUOTE (greg775 @ Apr 30, 2017 -> 08:44 PM) I'd love to hear the speeches of first term presidents at the correspondents dinner after 100 days in office. I said Nixon might have been the last president to have been hated like this. He wasn't too thin skinned to attend, he was smart. He is in a WAR with the press. The press is at war with him. He copied my mama's saying: "If you have nothing good to say about somebody say nothing at all." I still think I am a good American. Sure I am wishing Trump well and hope he succeeds. Why wouldn't I? I want what is best for our country and myself both. Why would I want four years of suck? I didn't vote for him, but I support him. Like I said if and when he commits an impeachable offense, get rid of him. But until then hope for the best. And this Korea thing could get pretty ugly pretty fast. I predict in fact it will get very ugly. Nixon was smart enough not to attend the WHCD.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/30/us/winston-s...tion/index.html Folks Don't Feel Safe, the story of Winston-Salem's attempts to become a "welcoming City" for immigrants

Last time a president missed was Reagan, who had been shot by John Hinckley in 1981. And Richard Nixon, for obvious reasons.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Apr 30, 2017 -> 02:13 PM) You are obsessed with Trump. I could post on the genocide in Armenia and you would respond with some conspiracy theory about his kids, talk about how he's a sexist, make a comparison to Mark Teahen and then post some alphabet soup with italics, bolds, paraentheses and quotations to which the forum's readers will scroll past as if it's an ad trying to sell them a car. I am on left on abortion, same sex marriage, keeping religion out of the public, punishments on nonviolent crime, etc. You are right on what exactly? I don't post links unless entirely necessary or there's breaking news so I don't know what you're talking about. If I post something in line with leftist thinking or mainstream accepted link no one from the groupthink around here will respond to it. They only want to respond to me when they disagree with me and they won't respond if they agree. If I posted a link from some site that leans right I'd get laughed at and condescended and then that same person will go on and post a Salon or Vox link as if they're not a complete and utter hypocrite. You don't have to live in America to know what's going in the world but you can totally be out of touch on what's going on in America and that seems to be the case. That's why you don't think there are any rich people paying a 20% tax. Because that's what Vox and Buzzfeed will tell you as that's what lines up with their distorted reality. You don't know any illegal immigrants. You don't have any take of opinions from people within the coasts. You don't live amongst those who are rich or impoverished. You get your entire intake on America from middle aged white people with journalism degrees living in big cities putting up headline articles to meet their quota. I post articles lots of times that are mainstream or even right-leaning. Believe it or not, if you did post such an article with an opposing viewpoint, the earth would not stand still. Some people would look at it as a sign of maturity in political discourse. But you just talk about your personal hot button items of the day, then defend yourself by arguing you don't have enough time to follow politics as others do. Barack Obama paid 20.3% in tax in a recent year. I'm not sure where you arbitrarily came up with rich as your definition, but I would love to know all those who work at start ups in Silicon Valley or Wall Streeters paying over 20% in Federal taxes. You went by that 20% standard because of capital gains, and honestly think that rate is still too high. You also aren't distinguishing exactly which taxes you're referring to, so you can later include State, local, Sales, VAT/ad valorem, AMT, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc. So what is your definition of rich, and how many of them are paying more percentage-wise than Warren Buffet's secretary? Grew up in Iowa. Heart of Trump territory now. See Steve King and Terry Branstad. We had plenty of illegal immigrants who were itinerant farm workers. I played soccer with lots of them. We also had plenty of illegal immigrants in the Kansas City Missouri Public School District, as well as refugees from Sudan and Somalia, from 2002-2007. I've linked to lots of articles about Trump followers in Wisconsin and Iowa...because I grew up in the Midwest and have seen a lot of those changes firsthand whenever I go home in the summer to visit. Same with Kansas City, where I lived for nearly a decade. But nice assumptions. As to your last point about middle aged journalists on the coasts, that's because 80% of the news we consume comes from there. And the average age is closer to 30-35 now because of the online revolution in publishing. Duh! But I read the Quad City Times, all the Chicago papers, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Kansas City Star, Detroit Free Press and Minneapolis Star Tribune. Last time I checked, those were all flyover territory papers. I just included a Post Dispatch economics article in this very thread. Now if you want to complain about those papers carrying syndicated columns from the coasts, have at it. Maybe you should start your own paper if you feel that passionately about informing everyone about "what's really going on out there." Democracy Dies In Darkness.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/28/opinions/uni...llos/index.html How much did Dao case settle for? That's why Dao's attorneys did the right thing in settling quickly. It also indicates that United probably paid well north of a million dollars. Why? Because by settling early, Dao takes a risk by giving up the opportunity to build the value of his case the traditional way: a couple years of medical records documenting the nature and extent of his injury and treatment. The settlement amount had to be a number that Dao felt comfortable accepting, even if his injuries take a turn for the worse in the future. That's good for him, but not an indication of what other plaintiffs might get if they file cases against airlines. Dao's case is one-in-a-million. For the rest of the would-be plaintiffs out there, United will probably see you in court.

It's actually healthy for our prospects to have an incentive to push the veterans. Guys like Kahnle, Swarzak, Garcia, Davidson, Saladino, Omar and Leury are getting extended opportunities. Let's go back to the worst trait of Ozzie/Ventura teams...too many over the hill veterans content with their situations, complacency, and not enough talent at the minor league level to push them out. Look at the Sox roster from 2012 to today...Q I think is the longest tenured now, unless you count Saladino's time in the minors as well.

We have legit replacements in the minors for most positions. The biggest issue would be replacing Cabrera in LF...the DH position could feasibly be improved with Delmonico or Hayes...and CF. Not to mention Willy Garcia or Rymer Liriano. Potentially Tilson, though not counting on it. Robertson/Jones=Burdi, Fulmer, Lopez, Kopech Q, Gonzo, Holland, Shields=Same list, possibly adding Giolito and Danish Frazier=Saladino Saladino=Moncada It's hard to see any move other than trading Q or Rodon being a move that can't be overcome. And, for now, they've survived without much from either of those two guys. Enough to lead the majors in ERA.

With Gary Sanchez and now Judge, hard to see getting fair value from lesser Yankees' prospects.

Q: During the Clinton administration was the federal budget balanced? Was the federal deficit erased? A: Yes to both questions, whether you count Social Security or not. The Clinton years showed the effects of a large tax increase that Clinton pushed through in his first year, and that Republicans incorrectly claim is the "largest tax increase in history." It fell almost exclusively on upper-income taxpayers. Clinton’s fiscal 1994 budget also contained some spending restraints. An equally if not more powerful influence was the booming economy and huge gains in the stock markets, the so-called dot-com bubble, which brought in hundreds of millions in unanticipated tax revenue from taxes on capital gains and rising salaries. Clinton’s large budget surpluses also owe much to the Social Security tax on payrolls. Social Security taxes now bring in more than the cost of current benefits, and the "Social Security surplus" makes the total deficit or surplus figures look better than they would if Social Security wasn’t counted. But even if we remove Social Security from the equation, there was a surplus of $1.9 billion in fiscal 1999 and $86.4 billion in fiscal 2000. So any way you count it, the federal budget was balanced and the deficit was erased, if only for a while. http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budge...-under-clinton/ Number of Americans killed by terrorism in the last decade: 24. Number of Americans killed by guns in the last decade: 280,024. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/st...and-terrorism-/ By the New America count, in the time since 9/11, jihadists have killed 26 Americans on U.S. soil, while those with right-wing leanings have killed 39. The single-most deadly event by an Islamic extremist was the 13 people killed at Fort Hood. On the right-wing side of the ledger, the worst was the six people slain at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin. http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/state...d-more-america/

QUOTE (raBBit @ Apr 29, 2017 -> 02:34 PM) You live in a la-la land where the verdict is decided by left wing think pieces. You bring up Trump in every single post of yours regardless of whether he's relevant or not (usually he's not). I hold far more left wing views than you hold right wing views and I am far more balanced across the political spectrum. All of this is entirely irrelevant and your need to analyze me and mansplain to me is unnecessary and laughable. You don't know anything about taxes and you proved that in this thread. To be fair, I wouldn't either if I was secluded in China. You look at things in isolation because the more granular the conversation gets the more your lack of understanding shows. Yes, Trump's irrelevant to everything going on in the world today. He's certainly more relevant to world security today than fighting Obama like Don Quixote is to Donald Trump. What left wing view do you have, exactly? I'm sure you will refuse to list any. When have you ever cited a politically-balanced article in the last two years? As far as tax policy goes, you've already exposed yourself...especially if you can't even acknowledge the basic issue of capital gains on the top 1% being much lower than rates for the Rust Belt blue collar workers in their 40's and 50's. More laughable is arguing the mundane rehash of the estate tax being indefensible, when, once again, the rich don't pay more than 20% taxes (or anything) compared to regular people who can't afford lawyers to set up tax shelters in the Cayman Islands, Bahamas or Panama. Heck, look no further than Donald Trump as an example of tax avoidance and your supposed "job creation." Republican tax and health care reform policy finally emerges after 8 years and this is the best talking point you can come up with? Jack Kemp looks like Milton Friedman compared to Cohn, Mnuchin, Ross and Peter Navarro. Granular conversations here? Okay, sure. It doesn't require being in Washington or Chicago to understand what's going on the world. Living outside of the US, one can actually discern the big picture and have a more objective reading on world affairs. Once again, would love to see a single example of a granular conversation emerging from a single one of your right wing conspiracy hit pieces against the Clintons and Obama. Trump says his tax plan helps the middle class (but it helps the rich a lot, too) As promised, Trump's tax plan includes cuts for middle and moderate income folks, but the rich and corporations get even more goodies. "The majority of the benefits go to high-income people," says Joe Rosenberg, a senior research associate at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank. Tonight, he touted the plan as one for the middle class. www.cnn.com http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/26/news/econo...dex.html?iid=EL Get rid of the estate tax The current estate tax only applies to estates over $5.5 million. As such, it only affects about 0.2% of all estates in any given year, according to the Tax Policy Center. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_...1982_-_2010.gif

Willy Garcia red hot now. 2/2 with 3 rbi's early, now hitting .345.

Six in a row for the Sox. Four losses in a row for a Tigers. We don't win these road games with Ventura, especially a blown save one. Shades of 2012.

Martinez again...don't give him anything offspeed to get his buggy whip going.

Dammit. No walks.

Is it too early to be excited about Carrasco getting hit around by the M's, lol? Optimism is dangerous. This year, a letdown won't be a surprise, at least.

Wow, Avi really getting revenge on his former team. Another 400+ blast. Hanging slider. Davidson went cold really quick, but rest of lineup is heating up to compensate.

Robertson going back out for second inning instead?

Kinsler, Collins and Castellanos won't be easy for Ynoa. Just have to cross your fingers.