Furlough Estimates

SlumTodd_Millionaire said:
This is blatantly false. What you're calling "supplemental health insurance" is actually premium boutique care insurance. It allows those people to get premium care like home visits by health care professionals. In other words, the kind of stuff that only rich people get here.

You should talk to the thousands of Canadian ALPA members about how this stuff really works in Canada. I was fortunate to serve in a national position where I got to talk to them on a regular basis. Whenever somebody from the States said something like you said above, they'd look at him like he had three heads and ask where he got that nonsense, then tell us how the rest of the the world thinks we're a bunch of backwardsass fools for clinging to the abhorrent system that we have.
Click to expand...

have Canadian in-laws. Can confirm.

SlumTodd_Millionaire said:
I really don’t know what parallel reality you’re living in, but I’ve never seen a homeless person in ANY city in Canada, and I‘ve spent considerable time in most of the large and medium sized cities there.
Click to expand...
But, this is laughable. Have you been to Vancouver, Winnipeg, Calgary or Regina? Plenty of homeless people. Vancouver feels no different than downtown Seattle in regards to people living on the streets.

Edit: since I’m sure you’ll want numbers:

The 2020 Metro Vancouver count found that in Vancouver:

  • 2,095 residents identified as homeless
  • 547 people were living on the street
  • 1,548 people were living in sheltered locations, including emergency shelters, detox centres, safe houses, and hospitals, with no fixed address
Seattle + king county to contrast has approximately 11,500 homeless and over 2 million population.

patch.com

King County Homelessness Up 5 Percent In 2020, Annual Count Finds

The yearly "snapshot" count in January found 11,751 people experiencing homelessness in Seattle and King County.
patch.com patch.com
 
Last edited:
Fearless said:
Up until a few years ago, I didn't worry too much about the U.S. becoming a rogue nation... armed with a few thousand nuclear weapons.
Click to expand...

Wow. Ok, some of you guys need a reality check. I understand politics has divided people up a bit in the US, and to be honest I’m not in a huge hurry to move back there right now.

But the US is hands down one of the best countries in the world to be born in, and basically you’ve hit a pretty big life lottery just with that.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very critical of the US and Trump right now. But I also see very serious poverty, actual dystopian societies, and so on fairly frequently. Most people in the US and almost certainly close to 100% of the people on this forum are extremely coddled and living a very privileged life.

Maybe turn off the TV or something and get some exercise. Thinking the US is on the brink of revolution is ridiculous and probably very unhealthy for you mentally if you really think that.
 
RMCBear08 said:
Democrats take the Senate (and keep the House). Filibuster ended. DC and Puerto Rico (maybe even Guam?) get voted into statehood. Vote is passed expanding the number of Supreme Court justices. Universal healthcare becomes law.

The above scenario is obviously the “nuclear” option, as described by many Democrats, but something not that far out of left field I don’t think, especially in today’s political environment. If the Republicans are going to jam through ACB, when they took the exact opposite position in 2016 about Merrick Garland, then I think the Democrats will have little choice but to retaliate, and retaliate big.

Universal healthcare could absolutely happen in our lifetime. It could easily get repealed too, if/when Republicans take the Senate back and vote to have infinity and 1 Supreme Court justices.

Basically, we’re all f’d.
Click to expand...

Sorry, but that's not even close to being the same thing.

Republicans played some dirty politics, yes. But they are simply playing by the rules: the Senate majority will vote to confirm the POTUS selection for SCOTUS. Too bad for Obama, the Republicans led the Senate in 2016 and did not vote to confirm his choice. Now that the same situation exists and Trump is President, looks like they will confirm his choice in an election year. At worse, that is just dirty politics that plays WELL WITHIN the rules that are already established.

Taking the Senate and House, ok, that's happened before for Democrats. BUT. End fillibuster? DC, PR, Guam become states, Supreme court packed to 15? That's a direct attack on our Democracy and not what our Constitution stands for. You don't destroy America because republicans followed the CURRENT rules and voted to confirm a SCOTUS candidate.

Conservatives have dealt for the past 20 yrs with liberal court decisions being handed down and they "put up and shut up" because they had no choice. It's good if the SCOTUS becomes 6-3 conservative. About time we get some balance, and vote the other way for the next 20 yrs. NO, abortion isn't going away. That is scare tactics all the way. And Nancy scaring Americans about the ACA and losing your pre-existing conditions? More scare tactics. No matter what happens these things will persevere. You won't lose abortions or pre-existing conditions.

I think the individual mandate was a bad SCOTUS decision. The government should not be able to force you to buy an insurance product. This portion passed 5-4, with Roberts (RINO), Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. Roberts has routinely sided with the Dems and the SCOTUS passed 5-4 decisions that way. One might argue, we've had way too many liberal decisions passed down the past 20 years. A 6-3 conservative court will be a good thing in the long run. It adds balance to a system that was tilted out of balance.
 
Last edited:
milleR said:
And if you re-elect “your guy” it’s probably 20-30 years.
Click to expand...

The supreme court will re-elect him. ;)

He's better for business in general, far more likely to keep and/or extend their tax breaks, and make for an environment that gets business travel back more quickly. The Trump admin will be better for the airlines than Biden's. And yes I know the one big rebuttal is that for labor relations/NMB it wouldn't be labor-friendly, but it won't matter because we aren't going to have any pilot strikes this decade.
 
Cherokee_Cruiser said:
The supreme court will re-elect him. ;)

He's better for business in general, far more likely to keep and/or extend their tax breaks, and make for an environment that gets business travel back more quickly. The Trump admin will be better for the airlines than Biden's. And yes I know the one big rebuttal is that for labor relations/NMB it wouldn't be labor-friendly, but it won't matter because we aren't going to have any pilot strikes this decade.
Click to expand...
He’s better for anyone who kisses his fat tax-cheating ass, including some honest to goodness enemies of the United States.
 
Cherokee_Cruiser said:
The supreme court will re-elect him. ;)

He's better for business in general, far more likely to keep and/or extend their tax breaks, and make for an environment that gets business travel back more quickly. The Trump admin will be better for the airlines than Biden's. And yes I know the one big rebuttal is that for labor relations/NMB it wouldn't be labor-friendly, but it won't matter because we aren't going to have any pilot strikes this decade.
Click to expand...
When I was much younger and still had an inexperienced world view, I used to believe that “if it’s good for business, it’s good for the country!”.
 
Autothrust Blue said:
Our tax code now almost expressly favors SOME businesses at the greater public and national expense, too, with little hope for recouping those expenditures.

Grand, isn’t it?
Click to expand...

I mean, I own those kinds of businesses. I'm still paying a lot more than $750. :) Of course, I'm not taking out hundreds of millions in loans from Russian gangsters...

HJB said:
If you own any kind of business in the US, you can always show a loss, no matter how much money you pocket.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's not really true. You can do that for short periods of time, but it eventually catches up with you if you're running a business that's actually generating cash.
 
SlumTodd_Millionaire said:
I mean, I own those kinds of businesses. I'm still paying a lot more than $750. :) Of course, I'm not taking out hundreds of millions in loans from Russian gangsters...



Yeah, that's not really true. You can do that for short periods of time, but it eventually catches up with you if you're running a business that's actually generating cash.
Click to expand...
Yeah it actually is. Not many if any business generate and sit on cash. Most businesses in this country are small business, some that generate millions in revenue. What’s considered small business here in the US is laughable. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, if you want to lower or eliminate your tax bill as a small business it’s beyond easily done. You can generate all the cash you want, but any CPA can show the IRS that “cash” went to “something” that generated a write off or loss.
 
Cherokee_Cruiser said:
At worse, that is just dirty politics that plays WELL WITHIN the rules that are already established..
Click to expand...
The “rules” that were established, at least by McConnell back in 2016, was that no Supreme Court vacancy should be filled until after the election, when the American people could decide who should be elected president, and thus who should be appointed to the court. That was 11 months prior to the 2016 election.

It’s now less than 2 months to the 2020 election and McConnell and the Republicans are saying the EXACT opposite thing. Let’s not pretend that there are RULES and DECORUM that are being followed here and call it for what it is; they’re taking advantage of their current political power, plain and simple.

If/when the Democrats retake the Senate, I imagine they’ll start taking advantage of their political power as well. Knowing that bipartisanship is a relic of a bygone era, they know they’ll need to do something drastic to pass their legislative agenda, lest the Republicans just stonewall everything. Given the lackadaisical attitude towards Senate rules (see above) I think it’s almost a forgone conclusion the filibuster goes bye-bye in a Democratic-led Senate. Republicans will scream about RULES! and Senate DECORUM! and the INSTITUTION! to anyone that will listen, but it will be hard to ignore what they just did, ramming through ACB while conveniently forgetting their own previous “rules”.

Btw, I’m not advocating for any of that or for the other options I listed in my last post. I think if what I laid out happens (and I believe it’s a high possibility that it will) then we will have truly passed the rubicon and I fear our political institutions will be forever fractured beyond repair. It’s close right now, but something as seismic as that would certainly be the end.

Like I said, we’re all f’d.
 
Last edited:
Cherokee_Cruiser said:
He's better for business in general, far more likely to keep and/or extend their tax breaks, and make for an environment that gets business travel back more quickly.
Click to expand...

I seriously doubt that based on Trump's disastrous handling of the pandemic. Business travel won't be coming back until the pandemic is over or at least contained. Trump has shown no ability to manage any sort of competent response.

Cherokee_Cruiser said:
And yes I know the one big rebuttal is that for labor relations/NMB it wouldn't be labor-friendly,
Click to expand...

Which is a very valid rebuttal, based on what I've heard from people who have worked at extremely profitable foreign airlines based in countries where there are no unions and laws are very anti-labor. One such person left a job flying 777s for a foreign carrier to fly the Dash 8 at my bottom feeder regional.

SteveC said:
When I was much younger and still had an inexperienced world view, I used to believe that “if it’s good for business, it’s good for the country!”.
Click to expand...

It's debatable that Trump has been good for business at all. Sure, he inherited a good economy, but that's all gone with the wind largely thanks to his catastrophic failure to handle the Pandemic competently. As I've said before, under Trump the country is in the worst shape I can remember it being in.

1601403197311.png
 
Cherokee_Cruiser said:
DC, PR, Guam become states, Supreme court packed to 15? That's a direct attack on our Democracy and not what our Constitution stands for.
Click to expand...
Btw, the Constitution says nothing about how many states there can be or how many Supreme Court justices there can be. How would adding more states and/or adding more justices be an “attack” on it? I get that Republicans wouldn’t like it, but wouldn’t it just be, in your words, “dirty politics”?
 
RMCBear08 said:
Btw, the Constitution says nothing about how many states there can be or how many Supreme Court justices there can be. How would adding more states and/or adding more justices be an “attack” on it? I get that Republicans wouldn’t like it, but wouldn’t it just be, in your words, “dirty politics”?
Click to expand...

Admitting new states is so unconstitutional we've done in 37 times. Washington D.C should have been made a state decades ago- it's criminal that its residents have no representation yet are still taxed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top