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Real questions. I'm not a history buff. Has there ever been a time in US history that the federal government has been so openly antagonistic and overtly willin

Real questions. I'm not a history buff. Has there ever been a time in US history that the federal government has been so openly antagonistic and overtly willing to attack opposite-party state governments? If so, what were the outcomes? If not, is there anything even close? Current question - what is the endgame for those who what blue states to go bankrupt? What do they get if that happens, outside of talking points? I assume they profit off of it (because that's the reason anyone does anything that I can tell), but how?

empath75 7y ago
Yeah, the civil war.
- eropple 7y ago
  The federal government was attacked to touch off the Civil War. Like, by men with guns. That's a rather critical distinction.
  - wonderwonder 7y ago
    Sure, but look at the recent protests. Armed men protesting state level governments openly egged on by the whitehouse and organized by rich political dark money.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      Armed men with guns were militarily consequential during the Civil War. Today, they are a danger only to civilians.
      - SauciestGNU 7y ago
        Small arms and asymmetrical tactics have quite substantive results in places like Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iraq. Let's not write off potential danger because of lopsided resourcing.
  - coredog64 7y ago
    There was a distinct period before the armed attack of hostilities between the federal government and the southern states, e.g. Nullification crisis and the “tariff of abominations”.
  - empath75 7y ago
    I’m not sure it particularly matters which side started it, you still had basically open violent conflict between democrats and republicans for decades, before and after the war.
    - eropple 7y ago
      One side was fundamentally built upon slavery (and for the "but but but" kid in the back you will notice that the Union did not exempt their slave states from the Thirteenth Amendment) and attacked the other out of fear that their slaves would be taken away. I dunno, that feels like that kinda matters, too.
wonderwonder 7y ago
End game for people like McConnell is that it puts downwards pressure on unions. A bankruptcy if a law is passed actually allowing states to go bankrupt would be a process overseen by federal courts, many of which are chaired by Trump appointed judges now. The judge gets to decide which debts are paid, meaning that pensions are very likely going to be chopped, hurting union members. There are other reasons. Bottom line is that they want rich people (their primary donors) to get richer and don't care about poor or middle class. They are very open about it now and still somehow supported. This is a good read on it: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/why-mitch-mcconnell-wants-states-go-bankrupt/610714/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/why-mitch-...
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > The judge gets to decide which debts are paid, meaning that pensions are very likely going to be chopped, hurting union members. I don't understand this. What is the connection between pensions and union members?
  - ForHackernews 7y ago
    Historically, pension benefits were one of the main benefits unions fought for (and won) so that their members could have an income in their old age and retire. Today, very few workers still have pensions, but the few that do tend to be those represented by a union. In many states, this includes government employees: teachers, firefighters, police, etc.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      > Today, very few workers still have pensions I've never seen a professional job that didn't include a pension - certainly not in the tech industry.
      - wikibob 7y ago
        Are you in the USA? Pensions are defined benefit. That is, it is specified exactly how much money you will receive in retirement. A 401K retirement plan is not a pension. You save your own money and possibly an employer contribution, and you make your own investment decisions. The value goes up and down in accordance with what you invested in.
cpursley 7y ago
> overtly willing to attack opposite-party state governments It might be straight-up politics. But there is a real situation where state governments have been financially mismanaged. Should the "working class" person in Alabama without any retirement prospects be forced to bail out (via the Federal Gov't) the state of California's very generous pensions that were not fiscally sustainable in the first place?
- nightsd01 7y ago
  The state of California is actually in a pretty decent financial position. In fact, the blue states are net contributors to the federal budget while red states are net negative (they take more resources than they provide back in federal taxes) If there weren’t any blue states around to sign the red state welfare checks, they’d be in a pretty poor position.
  - Acrobatic_Road 7y ago
    According to Mercatus Center fiscal rankings, 4 out of 5 of the bottom 5 fiscal performers are run by democrats: illinois, new jersey, conneticut and massachusets. Kansas, a red state, is the outlier. https://www.mercatus.org/publications/urban-economics/state-fiscal-rankings https://www.mercatus.org/publications/urban-economics/state-...
    - Loughla 7y ago
      Mercatus is not exactly the most unbiased source that exists.
    - wonderwonder 7y ago
      Its easier to be in better financial shape if you are taking in more federal funding than you are contributing via federal taxes. 8 of the top 10 states that take more funds than they contribute are red. Exceptions are Hawaii and New Mexico. Good read on the matter: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-s...
tenpies 7y ago
> Has there ever been a time in US history that the federal government has been so openly antagonistic and overtly willing to attack opposite-party state governments? If so, what were the outcomes? If not, is there anything even close? To be honest the most interesting thing to me is the US media. I don't think it has ever been so openly hostile towards one party and so hungry to cause a civil war. They're not even hiding it any more. They're operating as if the country were at war against the Republican Party and any person who is not a card-carrying Democrat must be eliminated, de-platformed, or represented in the most farcical way possible. It's incredible. It's the stuff that totalitarian states struggle to achieve, yet it seems to have happened "organically" in the US. If I were a hostile actor I wouldn't even need to mount propaganda or spend money on my own content - I would just need to amplify the US media's message.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Depends on the channel you listen to. This comment is just more of the hate-mongering. "I saw an article I didn't agree with: I'm being attacked!" In the same threads, we hear of the bubbles people build by reading only agreeable news. How can all that be true at the same time? It cannot.
- anoonmoose 7y ago
  Voting predilections in the US are strongly correlated with the highest attained educational level of the voter. "The Media" as a monolithic structure has a higher average attained educational level than the country at large. The "why" is obvious; I find a better question would be, are they wrong?
- adamsea 7y ago
  If you were a member of the media and the President of the United States - of any party - suggested people try injecting bleach as a cure (for anything), what would you do? What would you say about other politicians who implicitly supported such irresponsible behavior. This isn't even a political question - I mean it's basic science. Bleach.
  - rajup 7y ago
bhupy 7y ago
I can try to give you the most "good faith" argument in favor of allowing Blue States to go bankrupt. There's a caveat here that the Federal laws will need to change a bit to allow States to go into packaged restructuring. And to ensure that we are bailing out specific individuals to ensure that they are not too negatively affected. One of the strongest arguments against "bailouts" of large corporations is that it negatively impacts price discovery. More specifically, it removes a company's ability to thrive in certain extreme conditions from the pricing equation entirely. An example: Amazon is at all-time-highs right now, and it's because it's proven itself to be a hugely important institution, both during wartime and peacetime. Its market price should reflect this value. Airlines, OTOH, are an institution that can be prone to failure when some things go wrong (exogenous or otherwise), and the price should reflect that. A theoretical airline doing $1B in revenue should be worth less than a theoretical Amazon doing $1B in revenue, even if both have identical profits, growth, balance sheets, etc. The net effect of this is inefficient and poor capital allocation, where more capital would be allocated towards airlines than warranted, and that capital could be allocated elsewhere in more productive / less risky endeavors. This may come across as overly fundamentalist about the market, but where this really manifests is in the Fed's bailout of junk bonds, which is absolutely nuts. The whole point of junk bonds (I.e. the type of a loan that WeWork would have to take) is that it's default risk is high, but the yield is also high. If junk bonds are bailed out, then that means that we all ought to go and buy junk bonds. High yields for everyone! The Fed is going to bail you out no matter what. This, then, overly inflates the demand (and price) for junk bonds, and you now have a total capital mis-allocation, with a lot of capital going into AirBNBs and WeWorks of the world, rather than the Amazons of the world. How does this relate to States? Taxation is the price we pay to live in a society, and States are a really underrated way we can accurately come up with the correct "price" for the correct basket of services society might offer. This is the Charles Tiebout school of thought. Bailing out states with shitty fiscal policies is 1) a moral hazard and 2) messes with the long run calculation of the optimal level of taxation. Okay great, so then what happens if we just let States "fail", like we might let Corporations fail? If we allowed States to declare bankruptcy, the bond-holders won't get paid, and the State credit ratings will shift to reflect their true creditworthiness. In this regard, bailing out bad States is no different from bailing out junk bonds — the only difference is that today State bond-holders don't know that they're holding onto junk bonds — most States have a generally high credit rating (except Illinois, because, well lol)[1]. The only mechanism we know of for the system to correct the ratings of these bonds is to 1) let States relieve themselves of their debt obligations, and 2) organically allow the bonds for those States to become more high-yield. You might argue that this makes it difficult for States to fund infrastructure projects and safety nets. Yes, it makes it difficult to finance projects in the short run, because the bond failures are reflective of the quality of the current governance. Who comprises the government, who is running things can change democratically — if citizens want more infrastructure projects / better development, they will have to vote for better policies and better representatives. It's the democratic equivalent of swapping out the entire executive team at WeWork with the executive team at Amazon. The alternative is that you never see these governance changes at the State and local levels, and you have the same problems in perpetuity because the same people are always in power, and we never learn from mistakes — institutional rot. Better governance might be to restructure bad pension systems, or raise their own State taxes (IMO State taxes are far too low). TL;DR — the best argument for letting States go bankrupt is that it's an effective way to weed out institutional rot in the long run, and come up with the optimal level of taxation for the optimal basket of State provided services. Such a scheme can only work if individuals continue to be bailed out so that they are not caught in the onslaught. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_credit_rating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_credit_...
TrackerFF 7y ago
End game is: GOP knows they're gonna lose the election. They want to hand the dems the worst economy possible. Then, 4 years down the road, they can start campaigning against "do-nothing-dems" and point to the horrible economy they had to start fixing.
- whylie 7y ago
  Dems are going to lose the election and are actively attempting to sabotage the current presidency as much as possible. I don't believe you actually think what you're typing. Who's paying you lol?
  - maxlamb 7y ago
    How are the dems attempting to sabotage the current presidency? Holding someone accountable =/= sabotage. Seems like Trump is sabotaging his own presidency more than any one else.
  - megamittens 7y ago
    Go drink some bleach and then we can talk about who is sabotaging this administration.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  The thing is, right now there seems to be a disturbing pattern of the world falling apart at the end of every GOP administration. This is problematic, because we still need the GOP so that we can vote out democrats when they mismanage the nation's affairs. We can't have one party, that's not safe for us as the citizenry for obvious reasons. At the same time, we can't have this, "the world ends", at the end of every GOP administration either. So we really do need to fix this. The alternative is we get some different parties, and I've seen little to no indication of that happening. The other parties have neither shown an ability to evoke a response large enough to get elected. Nor have they shown an ability to govern even in the extremely unlikely event that they were elected. For the foreseeable future, we are stuck with the dem-rep dichotomy. Which can work. We just need for the reps to stop running the nation into the ground when it's their turn. Other nations have shown us that reasonable and effective responses to the pandemic were possible. Why are we here? What is the set of missteps or issues that got us here? We have to identify those issues, and fix them.
lacker 7y ago
Well yes - there was a civil war! And more recently, the national guard was used to enforce school integration. Things have been much more antagonistic between the federal government and the states at times in the past.
- gkop 7y ago
  For others curious, while the National Guard is a joint state-federal organization, the feds took control to enforce integration against the orders of the Arkansas governor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_National_Guard_and_the_integration_of_Central_High_School https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_National_Guard_and_...
- oarabbus_ 7y ago
  >Well yes - there was a civil war! Hah, this really puts it into perspective. Despite how bad things are now, it's not 1865.
  - kaesar14 7y ago
    Don't know why this is downvoted, a Civil War would objectively be worse than this.
  - RonanTheGrey 7y ago
    In the years leading up to the Civil War, the states often passed bills specifically intended to hurt each other, and the Federal government passed laws intended to economically harm the south. It was a complete shitshow. Today's politics are positively gentrified by comparison.

empath75 7y ago

Yeah, the civil war.

eropple 7y ago
The federal government was attacked to touch off the Civil War. Like, by men with guns. That's a rather critical distinction.
- wonderwonder 7y ago
  Sure, but look at the recent protests. Armed men protesting state level governments openly egged on by the whitehouse and organized by rich political dark money.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    Armed men with guns were militarily consequential during the Civil War. Today, they are a danger only to civilians.
    - SauciestGNU 7y ago
      Small arms and asymmetrical tactics have quite substantive results in places like Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iraq. Let's not write off potential danger because of lopsided resourcing.
- coredog64 7y ago
  There was a distinct period before the armed attack of hostilities between the federal government and the southern states, e.g. Nullification crisis and the “tariff of abominations”.
- empath75 7y ago
  I’m not sure it particularly matters which side started it, you still had basically open violent conflict between democrats and republicans for decades, before and after the war.
  - eropple 7y ago
    One side was fundamentally built upon slavery (and for the "but but but" kid in the back you will notice that the Union did not exempt their slave states from the Thirteenth Amendment) and attacked the other out of fear that their slaves would be taken away. I dunno, that feels like that kinda matters, too.

wonderwonder 7y ago

End game for people like McConnell is that it puts downwards pressure on unions. A bankruptcy if a law is passed actually allowing states to go bankrupt would be a process overseen by federal courts, many of which are chaired by Trump appointed judges now. The judge gets to decide which debts are paid, meaning that pensions are very likely going to be chopped, hurting union members. There are other reasons. Bottom line is that they want rich people (their primary donors) to get richer and don't care about poor or middle class. They are very open about it now and still somehow supported. This is a good read on it: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/why-mitch-mcconnell-wants-states-go-bankrupt/610714/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/why-mitch-...

chrisseaton 7y ago
> The judge gets to decide which debts are paid, meaning that pensions are very likely going to be chopped, hurting union members. I don't understand this. What is the connection between pensions and union members?
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  Historically, pension benefits were one of the main benefits unions fought for (and won) so that their members could have an income in their old age and retire. Today, very few workers still have pensions, but the few that do tend to be those represented by a union. In many states, this includes government employees: teachers, firefighters, police, etc.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > Today, very few workers still have pensions I've never seen a professional job that didn't include a pension - certainly not in the tech industry.
    - wikibob 7y ago
      Are you in the USA? Pensions are defined benefit. That is, it is specified exactly how much money you will receive in retirement. A 401K retirement plan is not a pension. You save your own money and possibly an employer contribution, and you make your own investment decisions. The value goes up and down in accordance with what you invested in.

cpursley 7y ago

> overtly willing to attack opposite-party state governments It might be straight-up politics. But there is a real situation where state governments have been financially mismanaged. Should the "working class" person in Alabama without any retirement prospects be forced to bail out (via the Federal Gov't) the state of California's very generous pensions that were not fiscally sustainable in the first place?

nightsd01 7y ago
The state of California is actually in a pretty decent financial position. In fact, the blue states are net contributors to the federal budget while red states are net negative (they take more resources than they provide back in federal taxes) If there weren’t any blue states around to sign the red state welfare checks, they’d be in a pretty poor position.
- Acrobatic_Road 7y ago
  According to Mercatus Center fiscal rankings, 4 out of 5 of the bottom 5 fiscal performers are run by democrats: illinois, new jersey, conneticut and massachusets. Kansas, a red state, is the outlier. https://www.mercatus.org/publications/urban-economics/state-fiscal-rankings https://www.mercatus.org/publications/urban-economics/state-...
  - Loughla 7y ago
    Mercatus is not exactly the most unbiased source that exists.
  - wonderwonder 7y ago
    Its easier to be in better financial shape if you are taking in more federal funding than you are contributing via federal taxes. 8 of the top 10 states that take more funds than they contribute are red. Exceptions are Hawaii and New Mexico. Good read on the matter: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-s...

tenpies 7y ago

> Has there ever been a time in US history that the federal government has been so openly antagonistic and overtly willing to attack opposite-party state governments? If so, what were the outcomes? If not, is there anything even close? To be honest the most interesting thing to me is the US media. I don't think it has ever been so openly hostile towards one party and so hungry to cause a civil war. They're not even hiding it any more. They're operating as if the country were at war against the Republican Party and any person who is not a card-carrying Democrat must be eliminated, de-platformed, or represented in the most farcical way possible. It's incredible. It's the stuff that totalitarian states struggle to achieve, yet it seems to have happened "organically" in the US. If I were a hostile actor I wouldn't even need to mount propaganda or spend money on my own content - I would just need to amplify the US media's message.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Depends on the channel you listen to. This comment is just more of the hate-mongering. "I saw an article I didn't agree with: I'm being attacked!" In the same threads, we hear of the bubbles people build by reading only agreeable news. How can all that be true at the same time? It cannot.
anoonmoose 7y ago
Voting predilections in the US are strongly correlated with the highest attained educational level of the voter. "The Media" as a monolithic structure has a higher average attained educational level than the country at large. The "why" is obvious; I find a better question would be, are they wrong?
adamsea 7y ago
If you were a member of the media and the President of the United States - of any party - suggested people try injecting bleach as a cure (for anything), what would you do? What would you say about other politicians who implicitly supported such irresponsible behavior. This isn't even a political question - I mean it's basic science. Bleach.
- rajup 7y ago

bhupy 7y ago

I can try to give you the most "good faith" argument in favor of allowing Blue States to go bankrupt. There's a caveat here that the Federal laws will need to change a bit to allow States to go into packaged restructuring. And to ensure that we are bailing out specific individuals to ensure that they are not too negatively affected. One of the strongest arguments against "bailouts" of large corporations is that it negatively impacts price discovery. More specifically, it removes a company's ability to thrive in certain extreme conditions from the pricing equation entirely. An example: Amazon is at all-time-highs right now, and it's because it's proven itself to be a hugely important institution, both during wartime and peacetime. Its market price should reflect this value. Airlines, OTOH, are an institution that can be prone to failure when some things go wrong (exogenous or otherwise), and the price should reflect that. A theoretical airline doing $1B in revenue should be worth less than a theoretical Amazon doing $1B in revenue, even if both have identical profits, growth, balance sheets, etc. The net effect of this is inefficient and poor capital allocation, where more capital would be allocated towards airlines than warranted, and that capital could be allocated elsewhere in more productive / less risky endeavors. This may come across as overly fundamentalist about the market, but where this really manifests is in the Fed's bailout of junk bonds, which is absolutely nuts. The whole point of junk bonds (I.e. the type of a loan that WeWork would have to take) is that it's default risk is high, but the yield is also high. If junk bonds are bailed out, then that means that we all ought to go and buy junk bonds. High yields for everyone! The Fed is going to bail you out no matter what. This, then, overly inflates the demand (and price) for junk bonds, and you now have a total capital mis-allocation, with a lot of capital going into AirBNBs and WeWorks of the world, rather than the Amazons of the world. How does this relate to States? Taxation is the price we pay to live in a society, and States are a really underrated way we can accurately come up with the correct "price" for the correct basket of services society might offer. This is the Charles Tiebout school of thought. Bailing out states with shitty fiscal policies is 1) a moral hazard and 2) messes with the long run calculation of the optimal level of taxation. Okay great, so then what happens if we just let States "fail", like we might let Corporations fail? If we allowed States to declare bankruptcy, the bond-holders won't get paid, and the State credit ratings will shift to reflect their true creditworthiness. In this regard, bailing out bad States is no different from bailing out junk bonds — the only difference is that today State bond-holders don't know that they're holding onto junk bonds — most States have a generally high credit rating (except Illinois, because, well lol)[1]. The only mechanism we know of for the system to correct the ratings of these bonds is to 1) let States relieve themselves of their debt obligations, and 2) organically allow the bonds for those States to become more high-yield. You might argue that this makes it difficult for States to fund infrastructure projects and safety nets. Yes, it makes it difficult to finance projects in the short run, because the bond failures are reflective of the quality of the current governance. Who comprises the government, who is running things can change democratically — if citizens want more infrastructure projects / better development, they will have to vote for better policies and better representatives. It's the democratic equivalent of swapping out the entire executive team at WeWork with the executive team at Amazon. The alternative is that you never see these governance changes at the State and local levels, and you have the same problems in perpetuity because the same people are always in power, and we never learn from mistakes — institutional rot. Better governance might be to restructure bad pension systems, or raise their own State taxes (IMO State taxes are far too low). TL;DR — the best argument for letting States go bankrupt is that it's an effective way to weed out institutional rot in the long run, and come up with the optimal level of taxation for the optimal basket of State provided services. Such a scheme can only work if individuals continue to be bailed out so that they are not caught in the onslaught. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_credit_rating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_credit_...

TrackerFF 7y ago

End game is: GOP knows they're gonna lose the election. They want to hand the dems the worst economy possible. Then, 4 years down the road, they can start campaigning against "do-nothing-dems" and point to the horrible economy they had to start fixing.

whylie 7y ago
Dems are going to lose the election and are actively attempting to sabotage the current presidency as much as possible. I don't believe you actually think what you're typing. Who's paying you lol?
- maxlamb 7y ago
  How are the dems attempting to sabotage the current presidency? Holding someone accountable =/= sabotage. Seems like Trump is sabotaging his own presidency more than any one else.
- megamittens 7y ago
  Go drink some bleach and then we can talk about who is sabotaging this administration.
bilbo0s 7y ago
The thing is, right now there seems to be a disturbing pattern of the world falling apart at the end of every GOP administration. This is problematic, because we still need the GOP so that we can vote out democrats when they mismanage the nation's affairs. We can't have one party, that's not safe for us as the citizenry for obvious reasons. At the same time, we can't have this, "the world ends", at the end of every GOP administration either. So we really do need to fix this. The alternative is we get some different parties, and I've seen little to no indication of that happening. The other parties have neither shown an ability to evoke a response large enough to get elected. Nor have they shown an ability to govern even in the extremely unlikely event that they were elected. For the foreseeable future, we are stuck with the dem-rep dichotomy. Which can work. We just need for the reps to stop running the nation into the ground when it's their turn. Other nations have shown us that reasonable and effective responses to the pandemic were possible. Why are we here? What is the set of missteps or issues that got us here? We have to identify those issues, and fix them.

lacker 7y ago

Well yes - there was a civil war! And more recently, the national guard was used to enforce school integration. Things have been much more antagonistic between the federal government and the states at times in the past.

gkop 7y ago
For others curious, while the National Guard is a joint state-federal organization, the feds took control to enforce integration against the orders of the Arkansas governor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_National_Guard_and_the_integration_of_Central_High_School https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_National_Guard_and_...
oarabbus_ 7y ago
>Well yes - there was a civil war! Hah, this really puts it into perspective. Despite how bad things are now, it's not 1865.
- kaesar14 7y ago
  Don't know why this is downvoted, a Civil War would objectively be worse than this.
- RonanTheGrey 7y ago
  In the years leading up to the Civil War, the states often passed bills specifically intended to hurt each other, and the Federal government passed laws intended to economically harm the south. It was a complete shitshow. Today's politics are positively gentrified by comparison.