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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (161806)	8/28/2020 3:40:50 AM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217773

I think i got the drift of the article you cited, that https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-there-are-so-few-moderate-republicans-left/ Why There Are So Few Moderate Republicans LeftAnd why that’s not likely to change. Lee Drutman ... Would the GOP change course? This is a question I’ve thought about a lot, and it’s one of the reasons why I argue in my book, “ Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,” that America’s two-party system is failing us. With the two parties now fully nationalized, deeply sorted by geography and culture, and locked in a tightly contested, zero-sum battle over “ the soul of the nation” and the “ American way of life,” it’s nearly impossible to break that cycle. And so I think it’s unlikely that Republicans will become more moderate even if they were to take the shellacking I’ve outlined above. ... ... Moderate Republicans are few and far between ... Extreme right-wing media, activists and donors are increasingly influential ... Voters are becoming more extreme ... Public opinion flips between two extremes ... Few forces of moderation remain Can a Republican write a similar article about the Democrats? I take it there is at least one national-level politician sincerely calling for genuine unity to give rise to useful cooperation leading on to solutions. Who is that person? I take it that the silent majority still exist, and understand if the ship of state is to be set in the usefully forward direction, give & take must happen? Should the answers be “yes, Republicans can make same charges”, “no one advocating unity first”, “no silent majority, just two irreconcilable camps”, then someone just turned off the light in the crowded bar. Was there a period in American history similar to the current time? 1970s (Vietnam, Watergate) times? Earlier still time? 60s? Anytime ?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (161806)	8/28/2020 2:09:45 PM
From: Pogeu Mahone	Respond to of 217773

Rasmussen poll called the 2016 presidential correctly. Rasmussen Reports Calls It Right - Rasmussen Reports® www.rasmussenreports.com › elections › election_2016 Dec 5, 2016 - 1) Our final poll was the closest among all pollsters who correctly picked ... 2) The media created a false narrative about the 2016 presidential ... How We Did - Rasmussen Reports® www.rasmussenreports.com › elections › election_2016 Tuesday, November 15, 2016 ... IBD/TIPP and the Los Angeles Times in their final surveys correctly called Trump as the winner of the election, but they also ... Election 2016 - Rasmussen Reports® www.rasmussenreports.com › politics › elections › elect... December 15, 2016 ... Most voters agree it was the candidates themselves who decided the election, ... December 5, 2016. Rasmussen Reports Calls It Right. Rasmussen calls itself most accurate pollster of 2016 \| TheHill thehill.com › media › 306721-rasmussen-calls-itself-mo... Nov 18, 2016 - Rasmussen Reports says it was the closest of all major pollsters in predicting the presidential election's popular vote, pointing to final results ... ============================================= This article below is a lie! Why Nate Silver, Sam Wang and Everyone Else Were Wrong ... www.quantamagazine.org › why-nate-silver-sam-wang-... Nov 9, 2016 - The results of this year's presidential election made a mockery of ... There is only one person who correctly forecast the U.S. presidential election of 2016. ... Election Consortium (PEC), and Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight disagree “bigly. ... If Trump wins, Sam Wang would see a less than 1 in 100 event, and ... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Here is another MSM 100% lie: Why (Almost) Everyone Was Wrong The results of this year’s presidential election made a mockery of analytical election forecast modelers. 43 READ LATER Lucy Reading-Ikkanda for Quanta Magazine Updated on November 9, 2016: There is only one person who correctly forecast the U.S. presidential election of 2016. His name is not Nate Silver or Sam Wang or Nate Cohn. It is Donald Trump. Trump made a mockery of the predictions of all the erudite analytical election forecast modelers. Uttering the battle cry of “Brexit Plus,” he confidently grabbed the thin sliver of a chance that the models gave him by winning the Sun Belt states of Florida and North Carolina and then, in a near-miraculous example of threading the needle, flipping not just one but three of the ordinarily blue Rust Belt states that formed Hillary Clinton’s “firewall” — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — to red. Like everyone else, I am stunned. In my pre-election Abstractions post below, I commented that the “science of election modeling still has a long way to go,” but I must admit that the distance is far beyond what I had imagined. It seems pointless now to try to dissect the statewide predictions of the various models as I had promised to do — none of them were even remotely in the ballpark. It is unclear how long it will take before election forecasting is trusted again. Abstractions? navigates promising ideas in science and mathematics. Journey with us and join the conversation. You could be kind and say that the election results were not incompatible with the model that showed the most uncertainty (Nate Silver’s), but there is no doubt that all the model builders completely missed the Trump win. His surprise victory took perfect advantage of the vagaries of the electoral vote system, even as the margin in the popular vote was razor-thin in favor of Clinton. But the modelers also missed something more fundamental, and they will have to revise their models to accommodate it. This was a systemic undetected polling error — a kind of invisible “dark matter” of polling — that underestimated support for Trump in key states by two to six percentage points. In a comment on my original Abstractions post below, I said, “The uncertainty we have to account for is the uncertainty of things ‘we don’t know we don’t know.’” It turns out that this uncertainty is far larger than I thought. It will be interesting to read the full details of how Trump won as will no doubt be dissected in numerous post-mortems by both data analysts and pundits. In the meantime, it might be worth it to follow Sean’s suggestion and read about the professor who has been calling every single election correctly since 1982 on the basis of just 13 simple questions. He too, predicted a Trump victory, as did Michael Moore in an article that now seems prescient. Originally posted on November 8, 2016: Why Nate Silver and Sam Wang Are WrongWill the results of the U.S. presidential election discredit or vindicate popular election forecasting models? As voters head to the polls, two of the most celebrated and successful election forecasters, Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium (PEC), and Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight disagree “bigly.” The former predicts the likelihood of a Clinton win at over 99 percent while the latter put the chance of a Clinton win in the mid to high 60s all of yesterday, rising to the low 70s today. This has resulted in Silver blasting a Huffington Post article, which criticized his low estimate, and calling very high estimates “not defensible” in an invective-laced twitter storm, and Wang responding with a defense of his 99 percent model. It was bound to happen: These two models represent the extremes in public prognostication. Most other models, including those of The New York Times Upshot and betting sites, rate Clinton’s chances somewhere in the middle, at about 85 percent. Interestingly, both the PEC and FiveThirtyEight models agree that the aggregated polls show Clinton ahead of Trump by about 3 percent nationally, and their predictions for the number of electoral votes Clinton will get are 307 and 302, respectively (270 are needed to win). This disparity in the probabilities, and relative agreement in the number of electoral votes, validates my comments in the last Insights column — that aggregating poll results accurately and assigning a probability estimate to the win are completely different problems. Forecasters do the former pretty well, but the science of election modeling still has a long way to go. The problem is twofold: First, modelers do not estimate a margin of error for their uncertainty, and second, there is far too little empirical data to validate probability models. Mathematically, there are standard ways to generate a probability number as Sam Wang demonstrates. You let your model run, generate the difference between polling percentages (about 3 percent), calculate the expected error (say, 0.8 percent) and out pops the probability (say, 92 percent). This is based on the premise that all the assumptions that went into the model are true (Sam Wang considers the median of recent polls to be the true number). However, to get the margin of error of this probability figure we need to assign weights to all the other assumptions that you did not make — after all, an assumption is a plausible but unproven proposition and therefore its opposite also has some probability of being true. You would need to calculate the probabilities of a Clinton victory in hundreds of alternate models in order to find the margin of error of the probabilities. While this meta-modeling would put the probability estimate in perspective and be more accurate, notice that in the absence of enough empirical data, the likelihood of alternate assumptions would still be arbitrary. True accuracy would require a complex model that incorporated many more features than current models do, using data from hundreds of presidential elections, and we don’t have that luxury. An aggregation of existing models is the best simulation of such a meta-model that we have today. There is historic evidence against Wang’s tight forecasts — he predicted a gain of 53 plus or minus 2 house seats for the Republicans in 2010, and they actually gained 63, as Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight pointed out. On the other hand, there is no evidence that there is as much uncertainty as the FiveThirtyEight model suggests — it is far more likely that the observed tightening in the polls at this time is caused by people returning to their “home” party, as Wang has said. The best we can do is to aggregate models and discard the outliers — FiveThirtyEight and PEC —just as the modelers aggregate polls and discard outliers there. Tomorrow, the results will either validate election forecasting models or show that this is a fledgling, imprecise science. Here at Abstractions, we’ll compare the detailed state predictions and try to determine which poll aggregation model was the best. No matter which candidate wins, there is something to look forward to. Share this article COPIED! NewsletterGet Quanta Magazine delivered to your inbox Subscribe now Most recent newsletter The Quanta N

To: Snowshoe who wrote (161806)	8/28/2020 7:30:03 PM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217773

Does anyone know what the proposed solution(s) of Trump and Biden be w/r to issue encapsulated in below article? marketwatch.com The assault on Social Security is under way Pandemic panic is the perfect cover for gutting the program Brett ArendsPublished: Aug. 28, 2020 at 1:09 p.m. ET Brett Arends's ROI By George Bailey, you’re just too sentimental!Courtesy Everett Collection When I was growing up, Social Security used to be called “the third rail of American politics,” because it threatened to kill the career of any politician who dared touch it. Not, it seems, any longer. Senators are seriously considering trying to arrange for the cutting — or gutting — of Social Security under cover of the coronavirus pandemic. This is an attack on multiple fronts. It includes proposals to suspend, or even eliminate, the payroll tax on which Social Security depends, and arranging a secret — yes, indeed — conference on Capitol Hill to find ways to “save” Social Security. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants this secret conference to be a condition of agreeing any further economic rescue package. He’s already on record calling for Social Security benefits to be, er, “adjusted.” Suspending the payroll tax as a “crisis” measure won’t help people out of work. But it will apparently make it even more needed to cut benefits down the road. Oops! It will surprise no one that this attempt to violate commitments made to American savers and future retirees is apparently to be called the “Trust Act.” And my British friends always say we Americans “have no sense of irony.” This forthcoming election may decide the fate of Social Security. The president has vowed to eliminate the payroll tax if he’s re elected. Just one thing. There is no Social Security “crisis.” It is completely made up. There is no financial “crisis.” There is no economic “crisis.” The only Social Security “crisis” is the crisis of people believing there is a Social Security crisis. If anyone guts the program, or slashes benefits, they are doing so through choice, not necessity. And they are choosing to slash an absolutely vital program that keeps millions out of poverty and has functioned successfully for 80 years. Read: This eye-opening experience has me rethinking how Social Security fits into my retirement planning Is there a problem with funding? Yes, of course there is. But it is eminently fixable without draconian measures. The most obvious is to get rid of the cap on taxable wages, so people pay the tax on everything they earn. But there are plenty of others. Others include actually investing the Social Security trust funds in stocks, like almost every other pension plan on the planet. The Social Security Administration Trustees, in their latest report, said the so-called “trust fund” will run out by 2035. The technical term for that is “insolvent.” But it’s a word being bandied around deliberately to scare people. It doesn’t mean “insolvent” in any normal meaning of the word. It just means the trust fund, which is an internal accounting technique for the federal budget, will no longer have an accounting surplus. Money out will have to depend on money coming in. The Social Security Administration says the “unfunded obligations” will equal 3% of taxable payroll. Trillions of dollars. Congressional Research Service explains that from 2035 onward, without any changes, benefits could have to be cut by 21% to balance the books. Yikes. But whenever policy wonks—or political journalists, for that matter—write about these things they seem to try to blind us all with science. Sometimes they seem to find the biggest or most abstruse or complicated data possible. (Budget and tax changes, for example, are generally discussed in terms of 10 years’ numbers, because they sound so huge.) So let’s cut through all the scary numbers around Social Security, and just focus on these two items. The first is that the average Social Security benefit is just $1,514 a month. It’s chicken feed. On this, people have to live out their golden years. Cutting this by 21% would mean slashing it to $1,200 a month. That’s the average. Imagine the humanitarian crisis in this country if that happens. And here’s the second gem, which can be found on page 16 of the latest trust fund report. The alleged funding gap, the so-called crisis, represents no more than “1.0 percent of GDP (increased from 0.9 percent in last year’s report) over the 75-year valuation period.” 1%. That’s the “crisis.” Ahem. We were able to find a spare 1% of GDP for the 2017 tax cut. We’re able to borrow several percentage points of GDP every single year to run budget deficits every year. How big a deal is 1 percent of GDP to the federal government? Well, federal taxes were just 16.3% of GDP last year, according to the White House’s numbers. The average under Ronald Reagan? Over one full point higher. So we could fix this just by going back to Reagan-era tax rates. The average during Bill Clinton’s second term was a full 3 percentage points higher than today. And the economy boomed and the stock market soared. According to Statista, we’ve just found 13% of GDP just this year to pay for the pandemic and lockdowns. And apparently we are able to print that money without unleashing inflation or budget panic. Quite the reverse, actually. Long-term interest rates have collapsed. The only crisis facing Social Security is that more and more people under 65 are being convinced that the program will have to be gutted so they shouldn’t plan for it. And that lays the groundwork for the cuts. It’s a perfect circular argument. But: 15 hundred bucks a month. And 1% of GDP. Things to remember, next time someone tries to tell you there’s a Social Security “crisis.” I’m a 57-year-old nurse with no savings and I want to retire in 7 years. What can I do? Investors should be wary of Buffett’s crash warning Life will never be the same for people over 60 — even with a COVID-19 vaccine About the Author Brett Arends is an award-winning financial writer with many years experience writing about markets, economics and personal finance. He has received an individual award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for his financial writing, and was part of the Boston Herald team that won two others. He has worked as an analyst at McKinsey & Co., and is a Chartered Financial Consultant. His latest book, "Storm Proof Your Money", was published by John Wiley & Co.