US Presidential Candidates

biochem wrote:It doesn't. It allows you to evaluate Trump on your own without someone else cherry picking the facts. You can read all the statements for yourself and then decide for yourself liar, liar pants on fire, mostly false, mostly true, true etc.

Let people who have treated the Constitution like toilet paper shriek bloody murder over a constitutional issue they’re getting completely wrong (there’s no constitutional requirement that the Senate send presidential nominees so much as a gift basket).

People ask him something like “How would you fix Medicare?”, and he gives some vapid answer like “There are tremendous problems with Medicare, but I’m going to hire the best people. I know all of the best doctors and health care executives, and we’re going to cut some amazing deals and have the best Medicare in the world.” And yeah, he did say in his business tips that you should change the frame to avoid being negative to reporters. But this isn’t a negative or a gotcha question. At some point you’d expect Trump to do his homework and get some kind of Medicare plan or other. Instead he just goes off on the same few tangents. This thing about hiring the best people, for example, seems almost like an obsession... But it works for him. When somebody sues him (which seems like an hourly occurrence in real estate development no matter how careful you are) his response is to find the best lawyer, hire them, and throw them at the problem. When he needs a hotel managed, he hires the best hotel managers and tells them to knock themselves out. Even his much-mocked tendency to talk about all the people he knows comes from this being a big part of his real estate strategy – one of the reasons he can outcompete other tycoons is because he knows people on the planning board, knows people in the banks, knows people in all the companies he works with. It’s a huge advantage for him.

These strategies have always worked for him before, and floating off into some intellectual ideal-system-design effort has never worked for him before. So when he says that he’s going to solve Medicare by hiring great managers and knowing all the right people, I don’t think this is some vapid way of avoiding the question. I think it’s the honest output of a mind that works very differently from mine.

biochem wrote:Came across an interesting analysis of of Donald Trump's policy positions.

...snip to save scrollwheels...

thinkstoomuch wrote:

biochem wrote:Came across an interesting analysis of of Donald Trump's policy positions.

...snip to save scrollwheels...

Probably accurate and my thoughts even prior to reading your post.

Part of the problem with that for past presidents has been, who the hired "experts" are.

Remember President Kennedy and the war he started. How it was going to be won. Or President Bush and his "expert" VP.

In the end if you are a real expert do you work for the government for a cut in pay or in the private sector? Which gets into that expert's motivations.

Have fun,
T2M

PeterZ wrote:Taking your point a might further, T2M. Is the ideology of the President a benefit or a hindrance to selecting those experts? I suspect that ideology might well inhibit the best results. After all an strict adherence to ideology is an imposition of an intellectual construct upon reality. Not just that but an imposition of that construct on other people when considering the policies generated from that ideology.

Would it not be better to have people who are subject matter experts strive to achieve goals defined not by ideology but real world bench marks?

thinkstoomuch wrote:
Ah but there is the rub. As shown above in the fact proving charts above what is the real world?

PeterZ’s, Biochem, Daryl’s, mine, The E’s, spacekiwi. some of the other silent or occasional posters.
We all have our view on the real world and reality. Out 7+ billion on the planet there are probably 1 trillion real worlds.

If you trust others to interpet it for you they just bought your vote.

Trust wisely,
T2M

PS For the record I am fairly sure that PeterZ's "real world" matches mine much more closely than others. But then again he isn't cramming his view down my throat even when we disagree. Which is fairly often, interestingly enough.

thinkstoomuch wrote:Ah but there is the rub. As shown above in the fact proving charts above what is the real world?

PeterZ’s, Biochem, Daryl’s, mine, The E’s, spacekiwi. some of the other silent or occasional posters.
We all have our view on the real world and reality. Out 7+ billion on the planet there are probably 1 trillion real worlds.

PeterZ wrote:Agreed. I would posit that some goals with real world, objective metrics may bridge such divides.

Improving unemployment is a good one. Create some measurable amount of net new jobs than existed at beginning of the term. Improving the median wage by some stated amount or percentage. Whatever policies that are consistent with those goals should be fine for most people. That is the sort of ideology free goals I am discussing. Like South Africa using their policy on private hunting preserves owning the elephants in their property to increase the elephant population, effective policies might by distasteful but they do work.

Holding one's ideologically sensitive nose in the presence of effective policy is a measure of adulthood.