Grading and politics

[freeloader]

The New Left for ya : )  

There really isn't any sort of common ground.

Hey, you can only listen to Rush Limbaugh for so long before you get the idea that maybe Republicans aren't in the mood to compromise.  Hehe.

The best way to be is to be honest about your positions, fight for them and then be prepared to make a deal.  The ability to make the deal is what made Reagan great.  Maximize leverage and then cut the deal.

Note: The ten senators who met with Biden had this kind of situation.  They had a lot of leverage in negotiations with Biden.  Instead of $1.9 trillion, maybe they could have proposed a $1.5 trillion deal and legitimately put some limits on spending.  I think Biden would have taken that.  Instead, they proposed a ridiculous lowball $600 billion package.  That was never going to fly.  They either couldn't make that deal or didn't want to make that deal.

So let's say my husband and I want to buy a house.  We know we're not on the same page when it comes to price.  I want to buy something for $300k. He wants to look at $800k.  We sit down to talk and I say "I think $300k puts us in a better financial position.  A large payment will stress me out."  He says "I think $800k makes it so that we can stay here forever, no need to move later, we can afford it." I say "let's compromise and do $400k." He doesn't agree.

Now, who is right here, and who is wrong?  I'm going to say the answer to that is neither.  We both have valid points.  Was I wrong in choosing $300k?  No, and even though he feels like I'm WAY off base in terms of what we can afford, if he'd said "well, you're just not willing to compromise" I'd have been pretty pissed.  How in the world is ONE side at fault here?

Same with the Republicans thinking we don't need to spend $1.8 TRILLION dollars, and the Democrats thinking $60 BILLION is too low.  It's looking at it from different perspectives, and both sides have their reasons for thinking this way.  Saying that the Republicans just don't want to negotiate is ridiculous.  NEITHER side wanted to negotiate.

 That is a reasonable but vastly oversimplified analogy. For your analogy to hold, the partner who wants to spend less money also should be employed by a company which says that if you spend more money on your house, you will be fired (political donors). The partner wanting to spend less money on the house also spends hours each day on the phone with his 2 uncles, we will call them Brush Lambaugh and Bull O’Brilley. Brush and Bull spend most of that time telling one partner that their spouse is Satan, that their spouse spends her spare time murdering babies, that their spouse wants all jobs to move to China, and, on their really good days, that their wife is part of a vast, global conspiracy aimed at raping children and worshiping Satan but that a magical orange baboon with small hands can make it all better if we just give him dictatorial power and allow cousin Vlad to exert near complete control over what the partners do each day when they leave their house. 

The partner who wants to spend less money on the house has a circle of roughly 200 friends. 199 of them are white. One of them is a very light skinned black person who went to Yale undergrad and rowed crew on an 8-man boat before getting an MBA at Stanford and becoming a bank Vice President. The partner who wants to spend less money on the house sees this person, on average, twice per year and speaks to him for 15 minutes. To one partner, this proves he is NOT a racist.  Racists don’t have a black friend. To the other, the fact that the partner who wants to spend less has a vast stockpile of guns to protect the family from angry mobs of black people and “the government” which, despite being composed primarily of white people is somehow a tool for black and brown people to oppress white people, pretty well demonstrates that the partner who wants to spend less is a racist.  

The partner who wants to spend less doesn’t like government interference in his life and doesn’t like taxes and he hates welfare. But he wants the government to pay for his children to go to a Christian school with 200 students. 199 of them are white. But it is not a racist school because they have a black student. Well, they have the banker’s daughter. The banker married a white woman and their daughter doesn’t really look black at all.  She has ruddy blonde hair and green eyes.  But, everybody knows she is black. She has 1 drop of black blood, so that makes her black. And, at the end of the day, isn’t that what really matters?  

Sure, the partners could buy a $600,000 house. They could even buy a $300,000 and a $300,000 beach/lake house.  They could, but they won’t. That would be bad for Brush and Bull and the people who own the company that employs Mr 300k. It would be bad for the orange baboon with small hands. But, above all else, if Mr 300k wakes up and realizes his wife isn’t the enemy at all, it’s the Brushes and the Bulls, and the businesses, and, yes, the Aunt Tiffas and Planet Parenthoods of the world, then how can Mr 300k and Ms 800k be controlled?