Comments by "wvu05" (@wvu05) on "The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder"
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@jackhammer3423 If you have to pay or tax time off work to get it, it is absolutely a poll tax. If you allow someone to use a more exhaustive list including things like a lease, mortgage payment book, tax records, utility bills, etc., that is fine. In my adopted home state, when they pushed this law ten years ago (in the words of the then-House Majority Leader, so Romney could win the state), it was estimated that 9% of adults statewide and 18% in Philadelphia didn't have an acceptable ID... all to prevent something that they admitted they couldn't find any examples of.
Oh, and the most cruel provision of the law? Even disabled voters who were homebound were expected to go to the courthouse to show their ID in order to vote absentee. Do you agree with that?
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@LifeStrike2030 First of all, I have run for offiice (WV House of Delegates, 2006), so how many offices have you run for?
Second of all, Green Party organization is notoriously poor because of the obsession with getting to 5% to get that sweet, sweet matching fund cash. Never mind the fact that the only independent or third party movement to get 5% or more in successive elections was Perot, and he got less than half the vote the second time around. (The next closest was the Socialist Party going from 6.1% in 1912 to 4.9% in 1916.) Never mind that Greens have tried for over 50 years and never topped 2.74%
The Green Party is notorious for focusing its efforts on the top of the ballot at the expense of down ballot races, even when rules help them out. In Philadelphia, the Green Party ran a candidate in 2015 for at-large seats on city council. The logic was that voters only get to choose five, the top seven get elected, and everyone knows that the bottom Democratic candidate will more than double the top Republican, so use one of your votes to get us on City Council. The candidate got 11,000 votes, with 38,000 being the cut off. I only found out about it a few days before the election seeing a postcard at the train station explaining her strategy.
In 2019, several other third parties got the same idea, and a Working Families Party candidate finished in the running. Four years later, both Working Families candidates won, reducing Republicans to the third party on city council (14-2-1, with Republicans winning one seat in NE Philly). Where were Greens the last two municipal elelections? Nowhere to be seen. This should have been a layup, and they didn't even try. Funny how they try hardest in races where their efforts help Republicans.
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He stopped working on me when he came to the 2006 West Virginia Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, gave an underwhelming speech, and couldn't leave fast enough. I went to five of them before I moved to PA, and of the keynote speakers (Edwards, Mikulski, Albright, Mark Warner, and Obama), Obama was the only elected official who didn't have time for the people who paid for tickets or worked to set things up. He had time for the people who gave the maximum $1000 to the party, though. Then, to hear him running for President and complaining about money in politics, I knew that he wasn't who he said he was.
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@44hawk28 If there is evidence of all of this malfeasance, why do Trump's lawyers admit that there isn't when they are in a place where they can't lie? You can lie to Tucker Carlson with impunity, but not a judge.
And how could someone lose when they are several points ahead in several key states on Election Night? Let's use a little simple logic. Many states had Republican legislatures that refused to let counties begin the count of absentee and mail-in voting until Election Day (my adopted home state of Pennsylvania even had the governor ask the legislature to pass a law to allow them to open the ballots early to speed up the count, but they refused to even do that). One side is being encouraged to vote by mail, and the other side insists that voting by mail is a scam. Of course, the vast majority of those who vote by mail will be on that side (in Pennsylvania, where this was the first election with no excuse absentee voting, nearly 80% of all mail-in votes were for Biden, and he won mail-in votes in all 67 counties despite only winning 13 counties overall), and when that is nearly half of the vote, it's not a stretch of the imagination at all.
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@dcaseng What "Medicare for All movement"? What have you actually done to build support for Medicare for All? Facebook comments don't count.
And all those marches that were supposed to make this big splash? I am on multiple mailing lists for the sponsors in Philadelphia, and I never heard a thing about it until someone complained that Nina Turner would have an event ten days before her election, so now she's a sellout, too.
And AOC changed her position because she realized that it was counterproductive. She probably wasn't familiar with the tactic of Catch and Release, which completely invalidates show votes as a strategy. There were one of three possible results in relation to the sponsor list:
1) The list matched the vote and confirmed what we already knew.
2) The Soft Yes members become Hard No, thus meaning that we are now farther away from passage.
3) Catch and Release is invoked, and the members in lefty districts who oppose it vote Yes to fend off a primary challenge. Then, if it ever actually has a chance of becoming law, they'll vote No, thus meaning that you are opening yourself to snakes in the grass.
That's the difference between AOC and Dore. She learns and adjusts accordingly. And she didn't support the candidate who called Medicare for All "un-American" in an interview with Anderson Cooper multiple times in the same interview, so it was no slip of the tongue.
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Andrew Yang got kicked off the Ohio ballot because he didn't bother to submit a sheet with his petition drive saying that what office he wanted to run for. Campaigning 101 will tell you that you must follow the rules to the letter to qualify.
I ran for office. West Virginia did not have a petition drive for major parties, but you had to pay a filing fee and fill out a form that included the phonetic spelling of your name so audio files could be created. I filed on the first day the window opened, and there was a bit of confusion about whether I filed at the Secretary of State's office because it was a state office (House of Delegates) or the County Clerk's office (because my district was entirely contained in part of one county). I filed with the Secretary of State, and a week and a half later, I found out that it needed to go to the County Clerk. So, I drove the 40 miles to the Capitol to get my refund and then drove to the County Clerk the next day to fix it. If you are prompt, make a good faith effort, and follow the rules, you will get on the ballot. They didn't follow the rules, and they know that the consequences of failing to do so was not getting on the ballot, so they did not earn their place on the ballot.
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Alabama Man 2.0 "Whatever small amount of power we have"
My God, you right wingers are pathetic. When you control the White House, both Houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, the majority of governorships, and the majority of state legislatures, "we only have a little power." Which is it, are you weak or are you strong?
"If we try to push through a Republican nominee in an election year, you can hold it against me." Lindsey Graham, 2016, before sticking his head of Trump's butt
Numbers are besides the point. I get that your party has no principles other than the pursuit of power for its own sake, but people would at least respect your honesty more if you just admitted it.
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@blaze556922 I never understood that at all. The baby boom generation was the first one whose parents actually made sure that they had the best they could afford. I am paying way more in rent than I otherwise would so my daughter can get a quality education, because I don't want her to get to high school age and have to go to a school with curtains falling off the rod because they're all torn and whatever the equivalent at the time will be of having an Apple II plus in a chemistry lab in 1998 or doing a computer class on an Apple IIe in 1992.
Then again, when I invite my parents and my niece to visit (my brother refused, saying that he didn't want to drive in the big city, even though I now live in the suburbs), my brother's girlfriend is furious that I take her to do fun things because she didn't get to. Well, I didn't get to do a lot of things that I wanted to do growing up, so I'm trying to make sure my daughter can. (Except she wants to go to Disney World, which I can't afford, but at least I take her to a lot of other attractions close by.) If those are things about your childhood that you didn't like, why force them on your child?
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@sargentpilcher The percentage is 5% among all adults, and senior citizens are nearly three times as likely as the general adult population to get diabetes. In the words of Principal Skinner, "your metabolism will change someday, too, young man." Even without that, there are people who still get it despite diet and exercise. My grandma was a skinny woman, and she got it in her 50s. My uncle knew this, and tried to avoid it. He keeps his weight under control, exercises, the whole deal, and he got it in his late 40s.
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People shouldn't have to choose. Yang calls it a "right of citizenship," but the poor and disabled have to choose. However, the rich don't. Here is an example: if someone gets a $10MM house with an $8MM mortgage and a 3% interest rate, we are talking about a mortgage interest of $240,000. With a top marginal rate of 37%, this means tax savings of $88,800. Why don't they have to choose?
Here's another example of how the "choice" can screw you if you are middle class. Imagine someone making $39,000/year who takes the "freedom dividend." He/she gets laid off. If this person hadn't taken Yang bucks, this person would have been eligible for biweekly unemployment of $900. Let's hope that person has his/her house paid in full, because mortgage could easily by over $700/month, so that person would be screwed, because he/she is limited to $1000. And that is yet another example of how cruel it is to construct a universal basic income that operates at the expense of the existing social safety net.
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I remember a few years ago when Manhunt devoted a seasom to how they found the Unabomber. In terms of making TV, they did a good job, but the writers did seem very sympathetic to Kaczynski. At one point, when the linguistic profiler (they focused mainly on the linguistics and the manifesto) meets Kaczynski, he says that the part where the manifesto clicked for him was when there was a red light, and even though no one was around, "I obeyed. I stopped." Really, there was no better way to show how technology enslaces us all than stopping at a red light? That sounds like something I'd expect to hear Sam tear someone apart for saying.
However, while in the middle of a true crime binge, I came upon a show that featured interviews with Kaczynski. Hearing him talk, you realize just what a psychopath he is. Also, the voice was very strange. Not what you'd expect from someone his size.
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@MrMagnaniman No, I just want people to act in accordance with what they say are principles. In my experience, a lot of the talk about "freedom" from libertarians rings hollow, because it often ignores competing claims of freedom or constantly sides with one side over the other, and it ain't working people (i.e., while I would consider Ron Paul a paleoconservative rather than a libertarian, he does use the same buzz words, and he is opposed to anti-trust laws under the Free Association Clause, but he sees no such protection in the First Amendment for workers who want to form a union), or people who want to reap the benefits of society without paying for them. I decided to forego unemployment benefits after my tour because I didn't need the money, while some of the anti-tax and anti-welfare people in my unit gleefully collected them. I also refused to take a housing allowance because I broke my lease when I got activated. Those two decisions probably cost me close to $10,000, but I did it because of a higher principle (don't take what you're not entitled to, and don't ask for what you don't need). Was that "hurting myself," or was that deciding that principles matter and being willing to pay the price?
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@belakthrillby That was as a negotiation to try to get a final package. And your idea is that the MSM will cover it and give it more publicity. The most overarching bill the House passed in the 116th Congress was HR 1, but did it get any press? I heard TMR talk about it far more than TRMS.
The difference of wasting whatever leverage that you have on a bill that you know will fail instead of, as the OP derisively mentioned, pushing for changes to committee assignments and chairs is that with the former, all you have created is bad will, and with the latter you actually gain power.
No, you don't delay it indefinitely. You do actual organizing, and you get more and more sponsors until it develops a critical mass. Then, if the Speaker does not want to put it up for a vote, you push a discharge petition, and once 218 members sign it, it has to come up for a vote. That is how Shays-Meehan (McCain-Feingold in the Senate) came up for a vote when Hastert didn't want it. They had the cards, and they played them. We don't. So, what have you yourself actually done to try to build actual support for the bill. In Philadelphia alone, my way got two more sponsors onto the bill.
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@alwayz247 What am I basing it on? They wrote a book (well, compiled their radars to be more accurate) stating that their goal was to get "left populists and right populists" to work together, "because we agree on almost everything." Even if you take any feint towards economic populism seriously from Saagar, does it affect his vote? No, because Bernie doesn't go after foreigners. He wanted to use the military to break up peaceful protests, and he supported a fascist. And he is a protege of Tucker Carlson.
Krystal Ball spent most of her time on Rising going after Democrats. In the primary, it was easier to hide her true motivations (although seeing her chum up to people like Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard was clearly a red flag in retrospect). However, once the primary was over, she still spent all of her time going after Biden, and so did Saagar. It doesn't take a political scientist to see the end result of that.
She repeatedly sang the praises of Tucker Carlson and wanted to work with him, and she belittled anyone who pointed out the dangers of a coup attempt, even responding in sarcasm to 1/6. She is a disgrace. Just because she is pretty doesn't mean that she isn't doing something incredibly ugly.
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@GenXGamez I am a proud union worker. I did the math. Between the employer and employee share, I pay 32.01% of my income in health insurance [27.6% employer, 4.41% employee]. Under Bernie's plan, that would drop to 8.58% [7% employer, 1.58% employee].
For the longest time, I looked at that gap of 23.43% and thought, "Well, my union might be able to use that savings to get me a raise." After his Workplace Democracy plan has released, this removes all doubt. So, would I rather pay the tax than the premium, knowing that I no longer have to pay deductibles or co-pays, and knowing that I would get a raise in either pay or benefits of over 20%? You bet, I would!
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@janos6644 Congratulations! You have just given the most ridiculous take imaginable. As several others have said, if his plan added to those existing benefits and used a progressive tax to pay for it, there would be no objection.
You want scenarios? Here are just a few:
1) Single parent with two kids has SSI and SNAP. Those total $1300/month. That is more than $1000, so this is someone who will be hurt by paying a regressive tax to pay for benefits that he/she can't take.
2) Parents with multiple children in daycare. Daycare is very expensive, so this will definitely hurt them.
3) Someone makes $39,000/year ($1500 biweekly) and takes the "freedom dividend." That person gets laid off. Because he/she already took the "freedom dividend," that person can't get unemployment, which pays out at 60% of income ($900 biweekly). If that person is still paying rent or mortgage, chances are that this is someone who will be easily using over 70% of income to pay rent.
So, yes, it is true that very few programs benefit everyone, but the people who Yang hurts are the poor, the disabled, and those who lose their jobs, i.e., the people who need help the most. If his ideology and stealth libertarianism wouldn't be blocking him from helping those people, just maybe there wouldn't be so many complaints about who gets hurt.
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@Jack Tharp Unemployment spiked because he tried to balance the budget. The reason is simple: the government is the spender of last resort. When the economy sinks, people cut back, causing a vicious cycle. You have to have some entity to step in, and businesses can't do it, because people aren't buying. By 1945, in part because millions were coming home and in part because price controls were lifted, there was pent up demand, and that's why the economy grew. Having learned the lesson of 1937, budgets in the 35 years after were only balanced in times of plenty (and not necessarily then), and the debt as a share of the economy shrank from 120% to 33%. When supply siders took over (and Democratic Presidents have not fully gone away from that consensus), even before the Great Recession the debt was over 80% of GDP.
See, that's what happens when you subscribe to an economic theory based in the real world rather than what you want the world to be: over the long run, your theory actually holds up.
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@alwayz247 Anti-war is not pro-peace. Sam Seder pointed out the truth about both Yang and Gabbard repeatedly. As far as the shine being off, the only people who supported Tulsi Gabbard were anti-anti-Trump types like Dore, Iversen, and House. Seder pointed out for years the dangers of the wrong kind of UBI, and pretty much everyone in his orbit pointed out how that Yang had the worst possible version of a UBI, because the poor and disabled still had to pay a tax for it but didn't get a penny. Clean campaigns is a far better model than democracy dollars, and if you honestly think that lobbyists and corporate interests won't just outspend the democracy dollars anyway, that is incredibly naive. While Pakman said that the idea for a UBI was interesting, he expressed a lot of concern with how Yang structured his version.
And again, "feuding with the MSM" (even at a time where she repeatedly acted as wing woman to Biden) shows the fatal flaw of defining yourself against something else. It allows awful actors like Yang and Gabbard to be seen as heroes. Well, the establishment hated Trump, too, and if you read their book, they praised Trump for that. Except the establishment hated him because he was a bigot. That is far different than hating someone who wants to increase their taxes and give workers more power in the workplace.
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@HispanicAt7heDisco You think it was a strong move? You do know that a) there is a sponsor list, b) they could only get 50 people to a national rally, and c) the media that most people actually watched was far more concerned with attempts by Republicans to challenge the Electoral College certification, right? No matter what, Pelosi was going to be Speaker. So, what would have happened with the vote?
1) The sponsor list was accurate, which would then be shoved in the face of everyone who tried to bring it back.
2) A lot of Soft Yes members become Hard No, and now you are farther away than before from passage.
3) Pelosi uses Catch and Release, and members in lefty districts vote Yes knowing it will fail, so they can avoid the fate of Engel.
So, where was the "strong move"? And what happened the second time around for the Truman health care plan? Or the Nixon plan? Or Hillarycare?
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@adaminfinity1733 Oh, look, someone who doesn't understand basic things saying, "I want answers!"
Here are your answers: no one ever said that the vaccine is 100% effective. The polio vaccine that the anti-vaccine crowd keeps bringing up to pretend to be reasonable? 61% effective. So, why don't you hear about people getting polio in this country? Because pretty much everyone gets the polio vaccine. When you have a third of the population that absolutely refuses to get the vaccine, the cumulative societal effect is lower, so the virus has a chance to mutate. The original coronavirus is pretty much dead by now. However, because of dummies who either didn't get it or want to spread misinformation, the virus continues to mutate, and there are only nine letters left in the Greek alphabet for variants. We had our chance to eradicate it, but stupid people had to ruin it for everyone.
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@1369Stiles So, you give up before you start. And when did I say anything about Presidential primaries? And this is a long-term project. I grew up in what was the bluest state in America, but now it is one of the reddest. Virginia went red in every Presdiential election since 1964 until Obama won it (including dominance at the local level), and it hasn't gone red since. If you give up before you start, you'll never build anything, and you've already lost. Then again, vote forcing is admission of defeat, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Oh, and the reddest state of all through 1988? Vermont. It had literally only voted for a Democrat once for President in its entire history (1964), it had only sent one Democratic Senator to Washington (Leahy), and was dominated at the state level as well. Realignments happen lots of times at the state and local level, but they require work.
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@DubhghlasMacDubhghlas It does, because if no one gets to 270, it goes to the House. Therefore, coalitions are encouraged by voters rather than parties. When there are close elections and a candidate becomes President without winning the popular vote, the winning margin comes from states where the President-elect got the electoral votes in states with a plurality of votes put him over the top, and third party voting made a key difference. In 2000, Bush got pluralities in states (including Florida) totaling 54 electoral votes. Based on how Nader voters would have voted had he not been on the ballot, Florida wouldn't have been close enough for the Supreme Court to steal it. Without those electoral votes, Bush only gets 217.
In 2016, Trump won pluralities in states totaling 108 electoral votes, meaning that without them he only gets to 198.
When people see how third parties help elect people whose views are farther away, fewer people vote third party the next time. In 2000, the total third party vote was 3.76% of the total. In 2004, it had fallen to 1.00%.
In 2016, third party voting was 5.83% of the vote. In 2020, it had fallen to 2.03%. When actual voters see the consequences of voting third party, they move toward the major parties again. Even if a third party candidate were to catch fire, the best he/she could hope for would be to throw the election to the House... where it will be decided by Democrats and Republicans. Our system has always gravitated to two major parties for a reason.
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@IvanDaGrVIII What have you actually done in this world to try to make a difference? Rather than backing a supporter of torture because she went on my show, I knocked on doors, made phone calls, served as a captain for a petition drive, and did a reading at a fundraiser for the only Presidential candidate who fully supported Medicare for All. I have written an opinion column, run for public office, and now work at a job where I help people get the help they need to make their lives better. Oh, and I don't grift to help right wingers, either, or simp for those who do. If it wasn't for people like me, the people whose names you know would be nowhere.
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@Jack Tharp We wouldn't have any sort of modern economy if we were bound by the amount of gold we own. That's why every modern economy abandoned the gold standard and it's more prevalent in Third World countries. Yes, both parties have had debts and deficits, but since people like to throw around the family analogy, going into debt to buy a house is a lot different than going into debt to buy a bunch of stuff on Amazon.
You are not getting how the phrase "spender of last resort" is used. It doesn't mean that the government never spends money, it means that there are times that it needs to spend when no one else will. There was also the government as employer of last resort. Not civil service positions, but temporary jobs to help remove the slack in the market.
Yes, let us look at the successes: we are having this discussion on the internet (defense project) with products that were shipped via trucks (roads built by the government), trains (tracks built by the government), ships (ports maintained by the government), and planes (air control administered by the government). If you are in a rural area, you have electricity because government stepped in when the free market deemed it cost infleffective. If you went to public school, government again. If your water is not polluted, the EPA made sure it isn't. If you ate food, the FDA inspected it to make sure that it wasn't poisoned. As Sam told another debater, you think you are standing suspended in mid air, but you don't see the building supporting you.
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Bernie lost because too many on the left are lazy and don't think long term. How many of the people calling Bernie weak actually did something to help him win? Not just sending a few dollars and thinking that was enough, but actually knocking on doors, making phone calls, talking to your neighbors and coworkers, working a petition drive, etc. When Barry Goldwater lost, the right decided to focus on local races and organize, slowly going for bigger and bigger fish in the pond. By the time Reagan came along 16 years later (in what was actually his third attempt at the nomination), they were unstoppable.
The last realignment for good in this country was the New Deal era (the Great Society was largely an extension of the New Deal, and it turned out to be a zenith rather than a horizon, so that doesn't count). Did people just wake up and say Screw Hoover, which convinced FDR to abandon balanced budgets? No, it was the result of 40 years of planting the seeds that began with the Populist movement and the Socialist movement. If you are ready to give up after five years, you are part of the problem.
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@davidm1926 True, but they were also the one country that had its first known case the same day we did, so it offered the most direct comparison. Yes, we had our own failures that put us in league with the biggest blunders like Russia, India, and Brazil (even the UK wasn't quite in our league of awful response, and they were pretty bad). If people want to embrace American exceptionalism, then we need to look at the best of what is possible. Even with Japan botching its vaccine, they are still doing far better. Then again, funny how the Orange Crush always make excuses for how the country they said should be first and great again can't compete with places like New Zealand and Australia, either.
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@SportsZombie54 He also said that "Amazon would have to pay for every purchase," which was a ridiculous notion, because every study has shown that any consumption tax in any form gets completely passed onto the consumer. Do you consider books to be a luxury item? I don't. If it is only on luxury goods, it is by definition not a VAT, and it isn't enough to raise $2.5T. A VAT is a broad-based tax.
The existing social safety net should not be either/or. Making people give up their existing benefits is the very definition of a right-wing UBI. The key distinction is whether or not is in addition to or instead of the existing benefits. Robert Reich proposed one that doesn't take away what people already get. There are some needs that are specific and acute, and a UBI is wholly inadequate to address them. Why force people in that situation to choose?
Example: Of the few that he was willing to specify, Yang mentioned daycare subsidies. Imagine a single parent with two small children making $20,000/year. Since Yang doesn't support increasing the minimum wage, this is entirely feasible. Daycare for two kids is $1500/month. Therefore, it is either take the subsidy or quit the job. Since the former is clearly the best option, you are now making that person pay extra for goods, thus making his/her position worse in absolute dollars, and worse in relative dollars, because the friends from the job who don't have small children are now getting more money to spend. How is this progressive?
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@peaceoutpeaceout4267 Wrong on so many levels. First, she used the same line as Delaney in saying that people with Cadillac plans can keep them. Her website even said "public option" on her Medicare for All page.
And as a veteran, I am sick and tired of Tulsi and her defenders hiding behind her veteran status to justify the indefensible. She was asked about torture, and her response opened by saying that she was conflicted (if you really oppose torture, there is no conflict on the question), she invoked a ticking time bomb scenario, and then said that she "would do whatever it takes to keep America safe." Of course, very few people are dumb enough to come out and openly support a war crime, so they speak in code. She used literally every part of the code that indicates support of torture. And her back track isn't because it is wrong to even in passing give even the slightest impression of supporting a war crime, but to say that she hadn't read the report (which was one in a series that says torture doesn't work) is a valid defense means that you think that she either never thought about the thing that the Army Field Manual and Geneva Conventions have been very clear is forbidden, or she was looking for a reason to support it. Both of which at unworthy of a would-be commander in chief.
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@youknow9092 Ah, yes, the "regulated didn't mean that" dodge. Jefferson wasn't at the Constitutional Convention. In fact, most of the people who you cite weren't there, nor were they in the First Congress that debated what ultimately became the Bill of Rights. And the Militia Act clearly defines what a militia does, as does Article I, Section 8, and Article II, Section 2. After all, how could the President call the entire citizenry to war? That seems like a pretty huge government right there. And contrary to this notion of taking down the government, one of the purposes of a militia is to put down rebellions, and it served this purpose in 1794.
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@sudoleone4159 That's not how it works. It is not based on dollar amount, it is based on a percentage of income. If you give a poor person an extra $1000/month, that will either be spent or used to pay off debts. If it goes into spending, it will only really be about $909/month, if that person spends it all. Given how much corporations hold in cash reserve, and how much of the tax cuts went to things like stock buyback, the rich already have more money than they know what to do with, so they most likely aren't going to do anything but stockpile that money, so it won't get taxed at all, and since Yang's vision is not big enough to either include a wealth tax or tax the unrealized capital gains on inherited stock (as it is now, if Bezos dropped dead tomorrow, his heirs could take their Amazon stock and cash it out tax free, which is obscene), that would be far superior to taxing the poor at a higher percentage of income than the rich.
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@AhsimNreiziev If you think that people haven't given reasons why a tax on consumption is regressive, you clearly haven't been paying attention. Lots of studies have shown that VAT gets passed to consumers, and consumption taxes are regressive because there are certain things people have to buy that are a much larger portion of income for the poor. Since Yang also refuses to list more than six or seven of the 125 programs that people have to forfeit if they take his money, and he won't provide any sort of guideline for what will be exempt (and when trying to court a left wing audience and falsely claiming Amazon will pay the tax, that implies that he thinks books are a luxury item), I have no reason to trust that it will be remotely fair. Oh, and my current home state has a flat tax on income and exempts groceries, clothing, diapers, and medicine, among others, from taxation, and we still have one of the most regressive systems in America. THAT is why I say his tax proposal is regressive. I did think harder, and that is when I realized how horrible most of his solutions really are.
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@MrGolov-te5eb Yes, because Pat Buchanan or Howard Phillips are the ones who drew 15,000 more Gore voters than Bush voters in Florida. eye roll
Like it or not, there is literally a zero chance that anyone other than a Democrat or a Republican will win a national election. Therefore, if you are closer to the Democrat ideologically and you don't vote for the Democrat, you are helping the Republican. You know how I know it is a zero chance? If by some miracle, a third party candidate arises, builds a substantial base of support, and either takes evenly from the two major parties or mobilizes a sufficient amount of new voters, if that candidate doesn't get to 270, the election goes to the House... where it is decided by Democrats and Republicans.
But, wait! What if this third party actually builds a grassroots and wins Congressional seats? Well, in order to actually sit on committees in Congress, you have to caucus with one party or the other, meaning that once they do get there, they become de facto Democrats and Republicans, anyway. Meanwhile, the Republicans move the judiciary so far that you get nothing past them of consequence. Great strategy!
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@brasshouse-fireball Okay. Let's follow your logic. You are aware that there are a list of sponsors, right? Unless anyone else has signed on between the beginning of the Congress 54 days ago and today that I haven't noticed, we are up to 118 & 13. It takes 218 & 50 (assuming you can get reconciliation) to pass. If you hold a vote, one of three things will happen:
1) The sponsor count is an accurate reflection of support, and the bill loses with less than 1/3 of the vote in each House. The bill goes nowhere, and bringing it up again does nothing.
2) The Soft Yes sponsors are angered by the tactic and vote No. It fails by an even worse margin and you have alienated potential supporters
3) Several people who fear a primary opponent on the left will vote Yes, but not nearly enough to pass the bill, and you have taken the heat off several members who, like when Republicans voted to repeal the ACA knowing it would fail who got cold feet when it was real, are not going to vote Yes when you need it.
Literally none of those end in passage, which tells me that either you listened to someone with no understanding of how politics works and didn't bother to think of step two, or you are trying to divide the left to help Republicans.
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@thomas2082 You've debunked nothing. All you did was say, "No, they didn't!" With thinking like that, no wonder you like Jimmy Dore.
Well, with your logic, you are defending Jimmy Dore, who endorsed someone who called Medicare for All un-American to Anderson Cooper. Twice. Someone who defended torture, compared the Iran nuclear deal to Munich, praised Sisi for killing protesters in Egypt, praised Modi repeatedly, made it harder for Syrian refugees to enter the United States, praised Putin for bombing civilians in Syria while complaining that Obama didn't, tried to get a job as Trump's secretary of state, and praised Trump for leaving the Kurds to the slaughter. If I go down, you're going down with me.
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@Jason MacNeil How will giving $1000/month to people not currently receiving benefits "take the boot off their neck"? Not that $1000/month is insignificant, but he has been saying that it is to help displaced workers. If it is that, $1000/month won't be nearly enough.
So, do you see this as a welfare program for the middle class? If so, that isn't universal, and it is misleading to call it universal basic income. Universal means everyone gets it, and he doesn't do that.
For someone who is supposedly so open to suggestions, there have been two main criticisms of his proposal from the left: it doesn't cover everyone, and the method of taxation. Has he moved an inch on either of those? Not that I've seen. Given his insistence that these major concerns are trivial, I don't trust him to come back and say, "I realized that it was a mistake to design this program in a way that the poor and disabled either don't get the maximum benefit or even benefit at all, so I will make my program truly universal and open it up to everyone no questions asked."
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@3ld919 I do mean a fake leftist all along. Greenwald is a libertarian, and when you look at the Snowden story and what they really believe, it is obvious that he is hardly a hero and (considering the fact that he has outlasted so many dissidents in Russia), possibly an agent.
I don't know if coordination is necessarily the correct term amongst the anti-anti-Trump crowd, but there is a lot of overlap. Probably the biggest gateway is caring more about being anti-establishment than any particular set of beliefs. I met Krystal Ball last year when she came to Philadelphia, and she is one of the most dangerous of all. It was at a DSA meeting, and she had the group eating out of her hand. I kept hearing her talking about how rewarding it was to write a book, and I waited in line and got my copy, as well as taking a picture with her and my then 4 1/2 year old daughter. When I got the book, I was shocked to find out that it was a brief essay about what I realized later was a red/brown alliance, and transcripts of the radars I can get for free online. I always thought it odd how often she went after Establishment Dems, but I just chalked it up to the nature of the primary, although her love for Yang and Tulsi suggested a blind spot. I still keep the picture and the book... as a reminder to always beware of possible grifters.
My guess is that like Dave Rubin before them, they realized the money was in dumping on the left. The people behind them, on the other hand, are probably coordinating.
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john Doe You're the one defending centrists, but giving the right wing points, so either you are trolling about centrists and showing your true right-wing self, or you are showing that the Republican Party has pushed things so far right, that Barry Goldwater would be "center" these days.
I didn't say failing economy, even though anyone with eyes can see that the economy stopped working for most people in this country around 1980. I said Republicans believe in a theory that has been proven not to work. For decades, Republicans have insisted that tax cuts pay for themselves, and every time they get the tax cuts, they turn out to be even more costly than the CBO thought.
As far as voter suppression, Republicans control the voting procedures in Florida, so you only proved my point.
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@jocksharerock7318 I think you are right, my friend. I did everything I could to help Bernie get elected in 2020 (my daughter was born in Nov. 2015 and there was the one car between me and my then-wife who usually got it because she was more likely to work nights and my job was closer to a continuous route for public transportation, which really limited my activism), but looking back, I think that he may be better off where he is, because with this or a similar partisan makeup, do they honestly think that he would have better luck moving Manchin and Sinema? Then, if he was ineffective, it would have been seen as proof that the left can't do anything. It would have made what the UK establishment did to Corbyn look mild in comparison.
What really amazes and saddens me is the laziness. We have the better ideas, and we're fighting to actually improve people's lives, but because Bernie lost, they want to give up. It took 16 years for the Goldwater wing to take over the Republican Party, and they had money. Giving up after five is proof that too many are lazy and expect it to fall to them. As much as it pains me to say it, if people aren't in it for the long haul, maybe we're getting what we deserve.
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@robinsss How ironic that the libertarian finds a fee or a payment to the government he fully supports... by making it more difficult for the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and the urbanites to vote.
Let me make this as simple as possible: if you have to pay for a government ID, that is a tax. If you have to do so in order to vote, that is also a tax. If you are poor, elderly, disabled, or live in a city, you are less likely to drive, and thus less likely to have said government ID (and wanting people to have to have an ID also goes against your otherwise insistence on small government). In my adopted home state of Pennsylvania, people in Philadelphia are twice as likely to not have a government photo ID as the rest of the state. Therefore, you want those people to pay a tax in order to vote. Therefore, the proposed voter ID laws are poll taxes.
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@MrMarket1987 The point is that when a bill for universal or near-universal health care fails, it kills any such legislation for a generation. Edward Kennedy learned that lesson when he killed the Nixon plan in 1971 because he wanted to hold out for something better. He spent 38 years trying and failing to get anything better. LBJ, arguably the most effective vote wrangler ever, knew this and only tried to get it for seniors, because he knew that was the best he could get.
If you look at the four major pushes for universal or near-universal health care in the United States, not only does it go away when it fails, but each version gets weaker (Truman in 1948, Nixon in 1971, Clinton in 1993-94, Obama in 2009-10). Failure leads to more failure, but success tends to create a toehold as legislation tends to improve after it is passed (for example: Social Security didn't originally cover domestic and farm work). Medicare itself has expanded over the years as well. The ACA was an exception to the rule because Mitch McConnell has basically broken the United States government. The last major health care bill that passed before the ACA was Medicare Part D, and it was a hot mess, but Democrats worked with Republicans to improve the bill and make it work better.
Besides, given the fact that literally one-seventh of the economy will rebel against this and throw everything they have at it, you don't need symbolic votes guaranteed to fail, you need a grassroots army mobilizing to educate and get people on board so they won't fall for the scare tactics of Harry and Louise. Given your username, I don't know if you remember them, but when those ads started, support for Hillarycare plummeted.
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@sergeikhripun So, you wanted them to waste their time to demand a vote that they knew would fail, and then what? No matter how many times you hold out, no one not named Nancy Pelosi was going to become Speaker, and there is already a sponsor list. This means one of three things would happen relative to that list.
1) The list is completely accurate, and the bill is 100 votes short, which then wastes that leverage for a failed vote because Pelosi can say, "See? Medicare for All is going nowhere and this was a waste of time."
2) The Soft Yes members become Hard No, and we're even farther away. You saw this even with the calls for Force the Vote when Dwight Evans, who sponsored the bill in the 116th Congress, is no longer a sponsor. Now, you're even farther away than before.
3) Pelosi uses Catch and Release, and allows a few members in lefty districts who would be vulnerable to an AOC or Bowman to vote Yes knowing that it will fail. Now, you have taken the air out of the primary challenge to the establishment that you claim to hate and those Yes votes would become No the instant there was a realistic chance of passage.
Congratulations, you have just advocated something that accomplishes absolutely nothing. If you want to engage in self-indulgence, get a room and some lube.
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@exiledhebrew1994 So, Russia, which has already conquered one province in 2014, invades a country and doesn't want them to join an alliance that will protect them? Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaking of agreements, the whole "NATO will never expand eastward" was discussed but dropped from negotiations as the Iron Curtain was falling, but Russia did say that they would respect territorial sovereignty of Ukraine if they got rid of their Soviet-era nukes, and they signed an agreement, but Putin invaded twice and said that Ukraine was never a real country, but an extension of Russia. Yes, he can really be trusted to make peace. /s
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@brentnoury7626 Catch and Release is a legislative strategy that was pioneered by Tom DeLay in the 1990s. The theory behind it was that the vote total didn't matter nearly as much as the final result. (In his first Congress as House Majority Whip in 1995-96, he was either 300-3 or 301-2 on bills he pushed.) So, realizing this, he let moderate Republicans rotate the bills that they would support, but he wouldn't let any of them actually vote against him until he had the votes to pass. A decade later, Barney Frank summed up the best I've heard it: "There is no such thing as a moderate Republican. They say that they vote with the President 70% of the time, but they vote with him 100% of the time when he needs their votes."
So, given this strategy, and that the whole theory behind Force the Vote is that it will expose members so they can be challenged in primaries (ignoring that there is a thing called a sponsor list), and that the bill is 100 votes shy of passage if the sponsor list is remotely accurate, what would keep Pelosi from allowing members in lefty districts to vote Yes knowing that they will a) extinguish support for a primary challenge to their left so they don't suffer the same fate as Crowley, Engel, or Klay, and b) that they will never vote for Medicare for All when it actually has a chance of passage?
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Here's an answer where you get stuck at 14:20 From 1932-1996, when liberalism was mostly defined in economic terms, no state voted Democratic more often than West Virginia (14-3, with the exceptions being 1956, 1972, and 1984, with popular Republican incumbents). Not that it will suddenly turn blue, but the only chance for places like that is to embrace full-throttled economic populism (the real kind, not the fake right-wing version of it). Going along with all of the social issues and sucking up to business will only speed the decline, because as Truman reminded us, if given the choice between a Republican and a Republican, people will vote for the Republican every single time.
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@blasphimus True, but I think that too many people eschew electoral politics. Even if you lose, you can either a) have an impact on what people are talking about, or b) help people develop a muscle memory for voting for Democrats. In 2006, I ran for a seat in the WV House of Delegates (won the nomination unopposed, and got 38% in the general election). At one point, an elected official lamented why there were so few pro-choice legislators (even in a body that was 68-32 Democratic at the time, only about a quarter were reliable pro-choice voters). The reason? West Virginians for Life not only gave money, but ran ads on behalf of their candidates. WV Free, the leading pro-choice group in the state was a 501c3, so it couldn't give money or run ads for candidates. The rationale? "We can raise more money as a non-profit that is tax deductible." Yeah, but a fat lot of good that does you if you hardly have any allies in the Legislature.
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@JamesBond-st4qu So, you've done nothing? I've voted for good candidates, volunteered for the one candidate who supported Medicare for All in the Presidential election, and I worked with others in Philadelphia (my particular action was with DSA and Philly for Bernie, but many others did so and deserve praise such as Neighborhood Networks, and Health Care for All) to gather petitions and get others to contact their representatives, and thanks to our efforts, two members of Congress (Dwight Evans and Brendan Boyle) signed onto the bill, so yeah, I think that I have the right to point out that you have done nothing.
What does your puffery and non-action have to do with whether or not Jimmy Dore is right? Well, the mere fact that you think you have done things when you really haven't means that your energy is wasted and not going towards something that will actually get closer to your stated goal of Medicare for All. Hashtag activism is not activism.
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@TimeBandit2007 That's not quite how Supreme Court replacements work. Unless someone dies on the bench, it is his/her decision when to retire, so chances are Kennedy would have stayed on the bench. Instead, you might have had RBG retire so we don't have to worry about whether or not Trump gets to name her replacement. As of right now, Roberts is the "swing" Justice. If RBG dies between now and when Trump leaves office, then you have to convince Roberts and one other right-wing Justice not to do something awful.
As far as Obama locking kids up, did I say "locking kids up"? No, I said kidnapping. Obama didn't separate children from their parents, he didn't adopt those kids out, and he didn't send a two year old in court to defend herself without a lawyer to defend herself. If you can't tell the difference between the two, either you are very, very unaware of the worst abuses that he is doing, or you are trying to salve your conscience because of the very real consequences of what you advocated on this front.
As far as TPP, if Hillary was elected, Democrats probably would have controlled the Senate by a 50-50 margin (with a swing in PA & WI). Given that Republicans would have done everything possible to spite her, and people like Bernie and Warren wouldn't have gone along, TPP would have been DOA.
We would still be in the Paris Accords, we wouldn't have destroyed our reputation in the world, we wouldn't have been playing nuclear chicken with North Korea and then emboldened Kim to thumb his noses at us after dangling the disarmament carrot in our faces, we wouldn't have a President with a long history of scaremongering on vaccines, and maybe these severe measles outbreaks wouldn't be happening. We would have had a bloc of five Justices who wouldn't be trying to turn our country back to the 19th century (with only one right-wing Justice over the age of 65) to the point that minimum wage and overtime, worker safety laws, child labor laws, civil rights, and voting rights wouldn't be in danger for the next 30-40 years. Even President Cruz or President Pence wouldn't have the chance to do more than a like-for-like switch on the Supreme Court, so they couldn't do their damage.
And I heard the "No Republican for a generation" after Bush, and that didn't work. No party has won more than three consecutive terms since the 22nd Amendment, so I won't hold my breath. Instead, we have someone in office who we have to legitimately worry might not leave if he is defeated in 2020. But, yes, Hillary wouldn't have given you everything you want, so instead you decided to pout and throw everything away for a generation as though it would suddenly have this great awakening. I heard that argument about 2000/2004, and how did that work out? What makes you think that this time will be any different?
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As far as the motivation, I was a delegate to the WV Young Dems state convention five times (three representing WVU, two at-large [basically college graduates in a county that didn't have its own chapter]), and I spent three of those years (2005-07) on the Resolutions Committee. In that time, I got eight resolutions to the floor (Social Security, Patriot Act, single payer, living wage, global warming, public financing of campaigns, the Iraq War, and "a conversation on guns"). Guess which one of those was the only one to fail to pass?
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@meltedsnowman9637 You can include them, but he doesn't. It was on his website. Social Security Disability (which part of RSDI, and based on payment) was allowed, SSI (which is need based) is not. I gave the example of a single parent making $20,000/year with two kids in daycare. At that income level, probably also getting SNAP, WIC, and LIHEAP, and maybe a housing subsidy. The total package is easily worth $2000-2500/month. You tell me which is a bigger "hassle," filling out the forms once or twice a year, or having to suddenly pay a 10% VAT?
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@TheBushdoctor68 A vote that will go absolutely nowhere is the textbook definition of a symbolic vote. The bill has 118 sponsors, so it does not have nearly the votes to get passed.
So, let's say that they demand Pelsoi has a vote, and then it fails, then what happens? Then, it is dead on the table, and it will be dead for another decade to come, and Pelosi will say that she gave us what we wanted, but it is an unpopular bill that can't pass, so that is yet another excuse to ignore us. If we are going to demand leverage, it is much better to demand it for something that actually has a chance. Great plan!
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@reav3rtm Catch and Release is a strategy perfected by Tom DeLay. It involves letting members appear to not go along fully with his agenda, while making sure that everything gets passed. As Barney Frank put it in 2005, "There are no moderate Republicans in Congress. They say that they only vote with the President 70% of the time, but they vote with him 100% of the time when he needs their votes."
So, given that strategy, and the fact that if the sponsor list is remotely accurate, Pelosi could easily allow people in lefty districts to vote for Medicare for All in order to weaken a primary challenger, only to see that member "change his/her mind" and vote No if there was ever a realistic chance if the bill passing. It's why Republicans could vote over and over to repeal the ACA, but it didn't pass when they had unified control of government. Therefore, Force the Vote doesn't "expose" anyone. It protects the worst actors, because they can pretend to support it in a cost-free vote.
Yes, Jimmy Dore cares about Medicare for All. So much so that he supported a candidate in 2020 who called it un-American in an interview with Anderson Cooper.
My plan is to do the actual grassroots organizing. If your member isn't a sponsor, you knock on doors, sign petitions, and make calls. If that member still won't sign on, you primary him/her. If your member is on the list, go to a neighboring district and help others doing the same thing. Then, once you get to 218 & 50, you put the pressure on every sponsor to make sure that he/she is a Hard Yes by pushing for a discharge petition if the Speaker and Majority Leader won't schedule a vote.
What have you actually done to get Medicare for All?
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@OwentheKingofDudes Look up who is affected by the policies. When PA passed a voter ID bill, the then-House Majority Leader (now Speaker) Mike Turzai said, "Voter ID, so Mitt Romney can win our electoral votes. Done." Statewide, 9% of the population did not have photo ID, but 18% didn't in Philadelphia, the biggest Democratic stronghold in the state. It ultimately got overturned because its advocates could not find one example of in-person voter fraud, but demographically and ideologically, they knew who they were targeting.
Or, look at NC-9, where all those absentee ballots got tampered with. Yeah, Republicans never did that at all.
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@estherc.5559 He told Dave Rubin that his ultimate goal was to end the existing social safety net, but he saw this as a politically palatable way to do so. Funny how when talking to lefty opponents of Yang, you Yang Gang bangers insist that he never said what he clearly did.
And why is "choice a bad thing"? Because everyone else gets both/and. Why does some millionaire get every penny of a deduction for a mortgage on a mansion (which is way more than $12,000/year) while the poor and disabled have to choose? Now, why is this a bad deal to make it either/or? Imagine a single parent making $20,000/year. This parent has two small children who need daycare, or else the parent can't work at all. The average daycare subsidies in this situation far exceed what the Freedom with 125 Strings Attached Dividend has to offer. So, not only does this single parent not get a penny, but he/she now has to pay more for purchases because Yang used a VAT. And did I mention that someone with that income level is probably also getting WIC and SNAP, and possibly housing subsidies?
And this response about companies not raising prices is just wishful thinking, which is what is required to make the numbers work. Funny how a guy who liked to wear a MATH pin lied about his math repeatedly.
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@sherlyn.a My dear God! What is with the people who cannot tell the difference between "lose" and "loose"? The former is the opposite of win, and the latter is the opposite of tight.
Oh, poor Jeff Bezos lost half of his money because he got divorced. Cry me a river. No one forced him to cheat on his wife.
And, no one is going to make a million dollars and spend 80% in cash to buy a house. And Gates wouldn't have to give up shares to the government. He could, but he wouldn't have to. Let's just say that the strictest wealth tax proposal went through, the one that Bernie proposed. He is married, so he would pay 1% on assets over $32MM, 2% on assets over $50MM, 3% over $250MM, 4% over $500MM, 5% over $1B, 6% over $2.5B, 7% over $5B, and 8% over $10B. Since marginal rates only apply to the level above the bracket, this means $180,000 for the first bracket, $4MM for the 2% bracket, $7.5MM for the 3% bracket, $20MM for the 4% bracket, $75MM for the 5% bracket, $150MM for the 6% bracket, $350MM for the 7% bracket, and (assuming a total fortune of $100B even to make the math round for demonstration purposes), $7.2B for the top bracket, for a total tax of a little bit over $7.8B. Here's a secret: this tax wouldn't even get to the average for stock market growth since 1929, so he would still get to keep his obscene fortune that was gained through underpaying workers, stealing ideas from competitors, and using basic government research to get started, not to mention government infrastructure to move his products, a military that insures that we won't be invaded, and a relatively steady economy so that he could build. Anyone who claims to be self-made is someone who thinks he/she is floating through the air without seeing the building he/she is standing on.
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If you want to understand Manchin, I actually knew him at one point. I ran for WV House of Delegates in 2006 while he was governor, and even a year after the campaign was over, he recognized me by name and face. With that background, here is what you need to understand: with few exceptions, Manchin will go just as far to the left as he needs to go to defeat any primary challenge, and not an inch farther.
There have been exceptions, but something has to stir him in order for that to happen. I can think of two (when he raised the state minimum wage, there was a lot of pressure there, so he got in front of it): after two coal mine explosions in the first two weeks of 2006, Manchin closed every mine in the state until full safety audits were completed and a mine safety bill was passed. It took three days. The other was after Sandy Hook where he pushed the background check bill. He lost his A rating from the NRA with that one, and I am sure that cost him in the general. Either appeal to his emotions or his calculations, but he can be moved.
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@brasshouse-fireball Here in Philadelphia, several groups (I did it with DSA and Philly for Bernie, but others such as Health Care 4 All PA and Neighborhood Networks played a role as well) did just that, and we got two members of Congress to sponsor the bill (Dwight Evans and Brendan Boyle). It can be done, because it has been done.
And again, forcing a vote in hopes that a primary challenge would defeat them ignores the fact that Biden won the nomination while saying that he wouldn't sign the bill. If your theory of the case was accurate, Biden would have lost.
You can hold your breath and have tantrums all you want, but if you are too lazy to do the actual work (which is what Force the Vote is an admission of), you'll never be able to do that much work to defeat 104 incumbents in primaries. And forcing the vote will ruin any goodwill for getting it passed. Your way is like saying, "It takes too long to put the car engine back together, so I want to put it on the road right now."
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@jordanwirth3738 I think I can answer that question (although, if anyone you know had a pre-existing condition and can now get it, or anyone between the ages of 22 and 26 who were able to stay on their parents' plans, or women with gynecological issues, they benefited even if they didn't see it). Basically, there are four ways to get to universal or near universal coverage. Going from left to right, they are nationalization (think the NHS or the VA), single payer (think Canada or Medicare), managed competition/public option (Hillarycare in the 90s and the early drafts of the ACA), and universal mandate (what the ACA became). The full name of what many call Obamacare is The Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act of 2010. Something Sam Seder said that I think was very accurate about it was that it was undersold on the patient protection part and oversold on affordability, which is partly why many people tend to think of the ACA as only the exchanges.
However, its ultimate shortcoming is that it was designed with the assumption that people can just be "smart shoppers" when it comes to health care, so market forces really can't do as much to lower prices. After all, nobody will know what emergencies will befall you over the next year. Since you can't really say no to treating a heart attack, market forces of competition don't lower prices. The market incentive for private insurance is to deny care, because that is cutting costs. The market incentive under a single payer or nationalized plan ends up spreading the risk over everyone and gives incentive to ask for lower prices, like a massive bulk discount. That's why it is a more efficient approach than the ACA.
Republicans haven't been able to come up with an alternative to the ACA in ten years of yelling "repeal and replace" because a) what became the ACA was imagined as their alternative to Hillarycare, and b) there's nowhere they can go to the right of the ACA and still offer anything remotely near universal coverage. This is why their repeal attempt in 2017 would have resulted in 24-32MM people losing their health insurance according to the CBO.
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@xaqbennett You can say that nobody wants to all you want, but when someone says "the disabled won't benefit from my plan," I take him at his word. When someone says that he wants to ultimately get rid of the existing social safety net by letting it wither on the vine, I believe him.
As far as "the perfect being the enemy of the good," never mind that this is often an excuse that I have heard from elected officials who do nothing, the ultimate question is who benefits. If I take your estimate at face value that 70% will benefit, that sounds good at first, but when the 30% that don't are the most vulnerable in society, and those 30% will have to pay a regressive tax to pay for something that won't benefit them, then I think this is a net negative. If it was the 30% who needed help the least who didn't benefit, then that is far different than what you are talking about. As FDR reminded us, society should be judged by how we treat the poorest, not how much the rich get.
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The biggest irony is how many people insist that her father, one John Sidney McCain III, got where he did on merit, and the apple fell far from the tree. Well, he was a legacy admission to the Naval Academy (whose father and grandfather were admirals), graduated next to last in his class, and crashed five planes. And he is the one who told his captors that his father was the commander of the Pacific fleet (which is why he got the offer to go home early), far more than name, rank, and serial number. Oh, and he made it to captain. Nothing to sneeze at, but not an admiral. So, it looks like he also got where he was because "John McCain is my father." The only difference is that he was smart enough not to constantly say it, and he at least accomplished things other than being the child of his father.
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@blazedones She never said that it is morally wrong in all situations, it is a war crime, and she was wrong to even suggest that it might ever be acceptable. I saw the interview, and (after Jimmy's flippant response of trying to "get it out of the way" and breathing a sigh of relief after her initial no without explanation, that doesn't show that he was an honest broker on that question and just wanted to hear the magic phrase) she insisted that she was being misrepresented, because who are we going to believe, her or our lying eyes and ears? On Status Coup, she said that she hadn't yet read a 2014 report that said it didn't work. On this issue, there can be no equivocation. Since her statements as to why she now says she opposes it all have to do with its efficacy, that tells me that another report might get her to change her mind yet again on torture, so until she apologizes for the 2014 interview rather than dismissing it, and opposes torture on moral grounds, I will not trust her on torture.
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@matthewrobinson7379 Oh, I have known some fundamentalists like that in my day, which reminds me of a joke.
Peter was taking someone through the pearly gates of heaven. Soon, they come to a building, and Peter says, "These are the Baptists. Make sure to be quiet as we pass by." Then, he comes to another building, and says, "These are the Methodists. Make sure to be quiet as we pass by." Then, he comes to another building, and says, "These are the Presbyterians. Make sure to be quiet as we pass by." Finally, the guy asks him why he keeps telling him not to say anything, and Peter says, "Because they think they're the only ones here."
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@anonymouszebra1239 You are so right. I think that another thing that hurts us is that too many people have given up on labor and class issues after the ascendancy of Bill Clinton. People tend to forget this, but from 1932-96, no state voted Democratic in Presidential elections more often than WV (14-3 [1956, 1972, 1984 being the exceptions]: Massachusetts and Minnesota tied for second with 13-4). If people want to blame racism, note that this is both before and after the Southern shift in the 1960s and '70s.
However, I think that some talk of white privilege is alienating, because if you tell a poor person in Appalachia that he/she is inherently advantaged, that person will say, "If this is privilege, what is hardship?" I am not saying who has it harder, but when you talk privilege to people who are suffering, that only leads to resentment.
And, because of the focus on cultural issues, some want to give up on rural voters altogether. I was at an election night party at the union hall in November, and someone asked me why I thought we started losing in places like WV, and how to get them back. I laid out my theory of full-throttled left-wing (or real) populism, and someone was offended, insisting that these were racists who were irredeemable. Well, white conservatives talk down to black liberals and wonder why they won't vote Republican, so why would rural white people. That's also why I never, ever give thumbs up to anyone who talks about inbreeding when badmouthing Trump voters. When we figure out who the real enemy is, and we help rural America understand who we are fighting, they will come running back.
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@GormTheElder What is your evidence that a majority supports Medicare for All? Do not say polls, because even if people agree with you on an issue, it doesn't mean a thing if it doesn't affect how people vote.
In 2016, Colorado had a ballot initiative for Medicare for All. It got 21%.
In 2020, Biden said that he wouldn't sigh Medicare for All during the beginning of the pandemic (since the Force the Vote people love to use that as a talking point) and his polling numbers in the primary didn't move, so it doesn't sound like a vote over a year out is going to have the desired effect if the sponsor list more or less is accurate and defeat over 100 incumbents.
The poll that the Force the Vote people love to point out to insist that all they need is the vote to garner public support shows some much more discouraging things below the headline question. A majority think that Medicare for All will allow people to keep their private insurance (and a higher percentage of supporters think that), and support drops below 50% when asked if they support a single payer system. I have done the actual organizing work, and I have heard similar responses several times. So, you have to do the actual work to make sure that support is not really for a public option and that it will actually move people at the ballot box.
No, this is not a video game, but that applies in ways that help my argument rather than yours, because it requires that people to get off their butts and do the actual work. And given that all of the talk is about going after members of the party where a majority in the House have sponsored the bill and none of it is targeting the party where literally zero members support it, that tells me that there is no strategic thought at all to this plan. Organizing isn't about instant gratification or a willy waving contest. It is about going to your neighbors and making your representation know what you want.
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@ubuu7 So, you want a VAT to redistribute wealth, but the rich pay a lower effective tax rate, and the poorest are forced to choose between their current benefits and his plan?
If Yang was really interested in the redistribution of wealth, he would support progressive taxes instead of something that screws over the poor and is the equivalent of hitting the gas and the brakes at the same time for most of the population.
And let's just say for the sake of argument that Yang is right about automation. And that, instead of giving workers actual power or requiring businesses to act in the interest of the stakeholder rather than the shareholder, the only way to do that is through the freedom with 125 strings attached dividend and a regressive tax. It turns out that he also told Ben Shapiro that "the magic of a thousand bucks a month is that it is below the poverty level for one person, so it forces people to work if they want any life of meaning." So, he is opposed to increasing it and wants to keep it as a program that is universal nor basic income. And if there aren't any jobs left in the future, we will end up with a few trillionaires and everyone else scraping by on less than the poverty level for one person. Great plan!
Oh, and there are different levels of annoyance. Yours rises to the level of leaving out the asterisk. The worst are the ones who literally don't understand basic terms no matter how many times they are presented.
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@TheClayCoKid I voted for Bernie, and I actually did the work. However, Bernie did not get the most votes. Coalescing around one candidate is something that people do to win elections. It's called being smart. If Elizabeth Warren wasn't controlled opposition, she would have dropped out after New Hampshire and endorsed Bernie. If he had a showing as poor as hers in New Hampshire, he would have done so, because he is an honest person. Maybe if lefties would have coalesced around a candidate in MA-4, we wouldn't be stuck with such a horrible candidate.
If you think that is the equivalent of kidnapping children, forced sterilization, stormtroopers kidnapping peaceful protesters, and ignoring the effects of coronavirus, you clearly have your priorities all wrong, and are just fine with people suffering because you didn't get your way. Maybe you don't understand me because I'm not a psychopath.
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@rowanlees9779 First of all, when someone complains that someone else isn't holding someone accountable, don't join in the feeding frenzy.
Second, and more important is to understand that 1) building the grassroots movement necessary to complete a realignment takes a long time (the last one took 16 years and had big money on its side), and 2) always be building. Once there is a concrete need, call your elected officials, write letters, sign petitions, and encourage others do the same. And keep doing that to hold the people who win to the fire whether you voted for them or not. Don't be a jerk about it, but be firm and polite in calls and letters. Sooner or later, the people who answer those calls will know who you are. That is the only way that shoe leather can beat wallet leather.
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@brentnoury7626 You are defending Jimmy Dore and his strategy. He is the one pushing MPP.
And why are Republicans more effective at getting things done than Democrats? Well, because they are and have been since at least the 1910s, a much more ideologically consistent party than the Democrats. Like it or not, the people who elected Joe Manchin want different things than the people who elected AOC, so there are always limits. That, and since all Republicans really want are tax cuts for the rich and judicial appointments, they are just fine gumming up the works.
People point to FDR and LBJ, but what they forget is that they both had much larger majorities when they got stuff done (which meant they had a margin for error), and they didn't have to face a silent filibuster that one party has taken to mean that everything requires a supermajority to pass the Senate, either. It's not enough to say that you want things, it takes a strategy, and anyone who is advocating a third party strategy rather than taking over the Democratic Party has a strategy that is doomed to fail.
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@5675492 The candidate with the most money doesn't always win. As someone who has actually run for office, I would argue that anything over and above getting your name out, mobilizing voters, and talking about issues is wasted. (In my race, I ended up raising $3400 for a seat in the WV House of Delegates, but looking back, it probably would have taken $8000-$9000 to run a solid campaign to get the word out.) Yes, getting money out of politics is the reform that makes all other reforms possible, but people can still decide that they don't want what people are selling. Sadly, I think that what 2020 showed is that probably a third of Bernie's vote in 2016 was from people who were more against Hillary than for him. While we can complain about the tactics used to clear the field, voters still let it happen.
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@5675492 Before he went all MAGA and just wrote about how crazy the workplace is, I remember reading something by Scott Adams that I thought did an excellent job of explaining corruption in politics. He said that it could either be that politics attracted corrupt people (which he didn't see as likely), honest people enter politics and get corrupted (which he didn't think was very likely, but I can see how it is possible when you get in that bubble), or that people were corrupt, and we just notice it more often in politicians. He thought it was the last of the three. I have been around long enough to have personally known some pretty cynical people in politics personally or somewhat superficially behind closed doors, but probably no more than the population as a whole. That being said, I think that money in politics is what makes the corruption worse. There has to be a way of fighting the government to K Street pipeline.
It often comes up in these conversations, but I don't like term limits because I think that people should vote people out or keep them in. When I still lived in WV, I wanted to give Byrd a ninth term. After I moved to PA, I wanted to deny a sixth to Specter. Both should have been my right.
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@vincesmith2499 When you had your way about the minimum wage, poverty was much higher. And, yes, if you are a business owner, and you insist that every penny earned is yours, you tend to give workers as little as you possibly can. Once you work with other businesses to keep wages low (since you don't believe in antitrust laws or doing anything to help anyone who isn't already rich and/or propertied), poverty goes up, interfering with my freedom to not starve.
Personally, I don't think that an existence that is cold, nasty, brutish, and short is very free at all.
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@cosmicgiraffe4071 Gore specifically said in 2002 that the Iraq War made no sense. Had he been President, the Afghanistan War could have also been much, much shorter.
It's not enough to "harness discontent." You have to also have the credibility to mobilize and get votes. Not only did Nader directly make a difference in Florida and possibly New Hampshire, but his campaign gained a lot more traction in Washington, Oregon, and Wisconsin, which forced Gore to put more effort there to shore up his support.
Nader is not the only example. In 2016, Johnson and Stein both got more support from Clinton than Trump. (Exit polling which combines Johnson and Stein shows a huge preference for Clinton, and Johnson got three times the support Stein did, so it's obvious he also drew support from Clinton.) It was definitely enough to make the difference in Michigan and Wisconsin, and possibly enough to make the difference in Pennsylvania. Again, it's not just about states that spoilers directly affect, it is also about the shifting of resource that harms efforts in other close states.
Trump undercut any effort to get coronavirus under control and pushed quack "cures." He deserves zero credit for his response to coronavirus.
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@DavidRichardson153 In addition to the issues that Susi raised, some people get more than $1000/month now. Given that Yang never gave a full list of the 125 programs that would be either/or, based on the few that he did specify (TANF, SNAP, WIC, SSI, LIHEAP, daycare subsidies, housing subsidies), here are some examples:
1) SSI is $841, and SNAP for one person is $250. People who get the former almost always get the latter.
2) New Hampshire has TANF of over $1000, with Alaska, New York, and California over $700. You have to have a kid to get TANF, and SNAP for two people is $459.
3) Daycare for two children is over $1500/month.
4) Housing subsidies can easily he worth $1000 in high rent areas, and people who qualify for that usually qualify for other things as well.
Not only do those people not get more money, but now they have to pay a regressive VAT, which means that they have to stretch that money even farther.
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@alwayz247 Either you are mistaken, or you are lying. At the time, I heard people say that they equally go after both sides, so I looked at their radars for samples, and every single time, I had to wade through several going after Biden and Democrats to find one going after Trump and Republicans.
The dynamic was as follows:
KB: Democrats are bad, so don't vote for then.
SE: Democrats are bad, so vote for Republicans.
And don't go to how great Krystal Ball is, because as stated in their book, their goal is to work together to find a new political coalition. You have to look at their entire body of work, and red/brown alliances never work out for the left.
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@meoff7602 It doesn't have to be that way. Two years ago, my parents niece came to Philadelphia to visit me and my daughter. Among other things, while they were here, we went on two factory tours (Herr's Snack Factory Tour in Nottingham, and the Martin Guitar Factory Tour and Museum in Nazareth). Each one found that human hands caused a bottleneck in production (finding rotten potatoes at the former, lacquering at the latter), and having machines do those things increased the number of employees, and at the Martin factory, everyone in the Lacquer Department was retrained so that no one lost any jobs. If we had Workplace Democracy in place, automation could lead to more leisure.
That being said, if Yang gets his way about how to deal with automation, and he is right that all of the jobs will be gone, he will leave us a world where we have a few trillionaires and everyone else scraping by on less than the poverty level. No thanks.
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@lucaswilliams8572 Okay, I have tried to explain the objection, but you keep responding with "nuh uh!" and just repeating the same thing over and over again without even bothering to address the issue that I and others have had with his proposal. I will lay it out one more time. I will make it as simple as I possibly can. If you still don't understand what I am saying after this, you are either a bot, someone who cannot internalize any objection to this proposal because you are brainwashed, or you have reading comprehension problems. Here is why people on current disability programs that he does not allow to stack are harmed by his proposal:
1) People who are disabled already get more than $1000/month in most cases.
2) Those people will not get any more money.
3) Even those who do get more money will not get the full $1000, because they will have to give up their existing benefits.
4) Those people will still have to pay taxes to fund this program that they don't get. Therefore, they will have to stretch their dollars farther. So, they have a net loss in after-tax dollars.
5) Even if that loss is mitigated, that still doesn't help people whose rent will go up when Yang said "use your UBI to absorb the blow, because rent control is a local issue."
6) As "Inequality for All" demonstrated, if the absolute dollars are the same, but the rings above you get farther apart, it is more difficult to climb the economic ladder.
So, if you just go back to your talking points without substantively addressing those issues, I am done, because there is nothing left to say.
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@titaniumismagical8643 The United Kingdom has all that, and it's not a republic. My point was that they are different categories. You can be an authoritarian republic (China) or a democracy with a monarch (UK, Spain, Norway, Sweden, etc.), because they ask different questions. Republic asks if there is a monarch, and democracy asks if the people get a say, either directly (Athens) or through representation (pretty much every modern democracy with more than a few thousand people).
I agree that the problem is that we have minority rule. We should also abolish the Electoral College while we're at it. Another example of the "republic, not a democracy" to show how ridiculous it is would be, "It's not paint, it's white."
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@3ld919 Oh, I don't disagree that a second Trump term would be a horrible blow to our country, and I will vote for Warren if she is the nominee, but "pragmatism" has really screwed us. What it has really led to is labor getting shortchanged, and the Democraitc Party relying on a charismatic leader in the White House (Clinton and Obama) while hemorrhaging down ballot so there is no one left to help along the agenda.
Yes, Warren has a reputation as someone fighting Wall Street, but why do you think that Wall Street has suddenly softened their views of her? Unless there's something I'm missing, they must be confident that she won't actually do anything against them in office, any more than Obama did to help unions after sponsoring card check as a Senator and promising to walk the picket lines.
Instead, Wall Street bonuses were "sacred contracts" and UAW members "had to make sacrifices." Last time I checked, union workers at auto assembly plants aren't the ones who put us on the brink of another Great Depression.
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@avidanrev If you are against monopolies and corporations, what do you want to actually do about it? And in regards to my prior point about natural monopolies, that is something that occurs when there is a system that, by its very nature, there can really only be one owner. An example of that is a local power grid. At that point, there are three things that can happen: 1) it can do whatever it wants, 2) it gets heavily regulated, 3) it becomes publicly-owner. Based on your statements, we can agree that the first one is bad, and the second one clearly isn't working, so public ownership is the only option left.
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@sharifsalem Again, to use the example of someone who looks like a woman externally, but has testicles instead of ovaries, how should they be treated? And intersex does not mean "biological male."
Now, I don't think that just saying "I'm a woman" should be sufficient. (For example, the Boston Marathon took people at their word, but given how unscrupulous that some people can be, and that women of the same age get an extra 30 minutes to qualify compared to men, and they will bump you if you are marginally qualified but others have applied who are farther under the cutoff than you.) However, to insist that everyone born a man shouldn't be allowed to compete goes too far the other way. For example, I was reading a book that was a collection of essays from Runners World. One of them included a MTF athlete. As John, he tended to have an age-graded performance of around 75% (a score of 100% would be equivalent to the world record based on your age and gender, and 50% would be twice as long as the world record based on age), but after fully transitioning, Jane also got age-graded performance scores of around 75%. Thus, she slowed down roughly the same as the difference between men and women her age.
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@dirkdiggler7277 So, you have no problem with a party that reserves the right to overturn an election and take the decision away from the election boards? Yeah, that's not going to have a problem.
It all depends on how the question is worded. My adopted home state tried to enact a poll tax, I mean voter ID law, in 2012. The then-House Majority Leader admitted that it was done to try to throw the election to Romney, and the state was unable to find any examples of impersonation voter fraud. A Supreme Court that was majority Republican at the time threw it out.
And why do I not want to move because of this alleged potential for fraud? Well, the mere fact that it would have left 1 in 11 voters without the necessary documentation to vote, with disproportionate numbers of poor, elderly, and urban voters, it's not hard to see the real intent of these laws.
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@MyBrainVent Oh, yes, it is a conspiracy to keep Yang down. A C-O-N...spiracy. Someone is paying me to point out that there are negative effects in a regressive tax and forcing poor and disabled people to choose between their current benefits and a universal basic income that is neither universal nor basic income. All to keep someone getting 1% at the polls from opening all of eyes. Yang could get rid of all of the criticism on the left very easily: apologize for telling Dave Rubin that his ultimate goal is to get rid of the existing social safety net, say that he will increase taxes on the wealthy (repeal Trump tax cuts, a new millionaire bracket, a wealth tax, increasing the estate tax, taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income, you name it), and literally everyone gets it. No exceptions or opting in. If he makes his plan a good one, people like me will stop pointing out how bad it is because it is the watered-down version of Friedman's proposal, not King's.
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@luperamos7307 Krystal Ball is every bit the grifter Jimmy Dore is. The main difference is that she is pretty and doesn't scream. If you ever find the book she co-wrote with Saagar Enjeti (actually, it's more accurately a collection of radar transcripts, which is why I got so annoyed that she and Saagar kept talking about "the writing process," because the only thing new was a brief introduction) advocating a red/brown alliance. On Rising, she never criticized a Republican without also finding a way to turn it to a Democrat. I must admit that I fell for it early on, because I thought she was focusing on centrist Democrats because of the primary dynamic. Her weird "anti-establishment" praise of Tulsi and Yang was always off-putting. Eventually, I realized that that is who she hates the most, because she blames them for losing her sweet, sweet MSNBC gig.
At this point, I think that anyone who is still there is either not online at all, or they are in for the grift, too. It was painful seeing the Graham Elwood debate, because you could see in real time someone who realized that he didn't know one of his best friends after all. It would be amusing if Sam were able to call in with something to distort his voice, but sadly, Jimmy Dore doesn't take calls.
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@Strongflower1 Here in Philadelphia, the Green Party actually figured out a rule so that they could try to gain power. We have seven at-large city council seats, but each party is only allowed to nominate five candidates and voters can only pick five, guaranteeing two seats for the minority party. They finally realized, "Nothing says that has to be a Republican" in 2015, and tried to run one candidate. The cut off to win a seat was nearly 40,000 votes and the Green Party candidate got 11,000. They didn't bother to publicize this strategy until a week or two before the general election. In 2019, they didn't even get a candidate qualified for the ballot (it only takes 250 signatures, and groups like A Better Philadelphia and Term Limits Philadelphia met this hurdle), and the Working Families Party got one of the two seats. Even when the rules help, the Green Party is too lazy or incompetent to get the job done.
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@turboaram1970 Well, then it is clearly a method of eliminating the current social safety net. While some want to do it faster, he admitted to Dave Rubin that his ultimate goal is to let it wither on the vine.
Okay, so someone getting current benefits that help the poor have to choose, but someone could get an $8MM loan at 3% interest on a $10MM house. The mortgage interest deduction has no cap, so that is $240,000 in interest. With a top marginal rate of 37%, that means a deduction of $88,800. So, that is just fine for collecting an extra $1000/month, but someone who is disabled and getting $1200/month not only can't, but now has to pay an extra 10%? Yeah, that's fair.
And your preferred candidate talks of it as a "right of citizenship" when he insists that the rich should still get, but the poor don't. Does that mean that Andrew Yang sees the poor and disabled as somehow less than?
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@Devinchi_Art At a certain point, I have to wonder if I am speaking a different language. Let me just use a hypothetical situation that will spell it out. Imagine someone who gets $1200/month when all benefits are calculated. If this were truly a humane thing trying to actually lift people out of poverty, Yang woukd say, "Okay. You get an extra thousand, so your new grand total is $2200." That way, they would get an increase, because it would actually be about helping people rather than a stealth attempt at gutting the existing social safety net. However, because it is a stealth attempt at gutting the existing social safety net, people can only get one, but not both.
By forcing people to choose, he will also screw over people who cannot see the future. If someone is making a middle class income, let's say $39,000/year for the sake of math. That works out to a biweekly pay of $1500. That person gets laid off. Unemployment pays 60% of income, or $900 biweekly. But, this is someone who took the "freedom dividend." Oh, no! No unemployment for you. Let's just hope that you paid off your house before you lost your job, because your rent or mortgage will eat up most of the "freedom dividend." Some freedom!
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@Bolivian654 Thank you for your response. People amassed power before they amassed capital. There was always some arbiter of wealth. There will be some sort of exchange of goods and services, so how do you ensure that someone isn't able to acquire them again without some larger power making sure that they don't?
There are also questions of distribution. For me, the most Underpants Gnomes part of The Conquest of Bread was the idea that given that there would be no more private property, and thus no private farms, that in order to ensure that people had enough food that with no organizing force, people would take field trips to farm land for two days out of the year, that you wouldn't have a fight for the glamor jobs, that you'd have no problem finding someone to muck the stables, and that there would be a sufficient rotation for everything to get done. So, with no organizing force, with no taxation, with no money (and thus no bonuses for the people who do the dirty work that nobody else wants to do), other than hoping there are enough Hufflepuffs willing to do the job, how do people get fed?
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Exit polls beg to differ. In 2000, Nader voters were asked who they'd vote for if Nader wasn't on the ballot. Gore had a net of 16% (37-21) to 26% (44-18) over Bush, with the rest saying other third party or they wouldn't vote at all. If you add 16% of Nader's total to Gore, he has a lead of 15,000 votes, meaning that he made it possible for the Supreme Court to steal it.
So, if he wasn't on the ballot, there would be no Iraq War, no Citizens United, no gutting of the Voting Rights Act or the right of public workers to organize. Of course, he admitted that this was his goal at the time, so we shouldn't be surprised.
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After watching The Mighty Macs about the early days of women's college basketball, I told my six-year-old daughter that I would take her to see a game since Immaculata is about 20 minutes away. She was so excited that she said she wanted to go there someday. I told her that she has to study hard to get a scholarship, because it wasn't cheap. I looked it up, and tuition alone was $26,900/year. Then, I started wondering about state schools, and Penn State is $19,000/year. The system is broken.
I remember as an undergrad that a lot of people from PA, NY, and NJ came to WVU because out-of-state tuition there was cheaper than in-state tuition in their native states. I was shocking to see this in action. (When I graduated, in-state tuition at WVU was $3600/year.)
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@darrenfaber2334 There are 125 programs that people have to forfeit if they take his money. However, Yang only ever bothers to specifically list a few (TANF, SNAP, WIC, LIHEAP, housing subsidies, daycare subsidies). And, yes, people have to give something up. Yang has made it very clear that you can't get both.
And "a full-time job"? Here in PA, daycare for multiple children is over $1500/month. Do you really think that applying for that is "practically a full-time job"? At a certain point, you Yang Gang bangers keep resorting to try to using words in a different way in order to try to make it sound better than it is.
Because we don't know what the programs are that are either/or In the freedom with 125 strings attached dividend, there are a lot of people who might end up worse or surprised to find out that they have to choose at all. And there is also the question of how long taking the freedom with 125 strings attached dividend disqualifies someone from other benefits. You might think that you're in a place where you are better off taking the thousand, but, boom, you are expecting twins or triplets. Now, the funding model changes dramatically. Or, you might find out that the EITC is no longer available. Or maybe you went to grad school in a field that doesn't pay very well, but is vital, and you have to choose between the Student Loan Forgiveness Program and this money. And if you keep your current benefits, how long does that mean that you can't take the freedom with 125 strings attached dividend?
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@MyBrainVent But the sick, injured, disabled, etc., don't get the whole thousand under his proposal. Therefore, as he told Dave Rubin, it is a Trojan horse to eliminate the existing social safety net, even though for some people (for example, nursing homes have bills that are hundreds of dollars a day), that social safety net is literally a matter of life and death, and such things cannot be foreseen or planned for.
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@assiduous2011 No business taxes for 25 years is "not a bad economic policy"? How many businesses do you think will actually last 25 years?
And defending $2B in corporate welfare for a company owned by the richest man in the world that already knew that it wanted to come to NYC anyway, but just wanted to push poor people out of their neighborhood? It looks like Amazon didn't need that office with the helicopter pad after all.
Corporate welfare is what made Cuomo's initial handling of the coronavirus so bad that NYC is the disease epicenter of the world. And don't give me big population, because Mexico City and Sao Paolo have much bigger populations, and they didn't get it nearly as bad. South Korea has Seoul, a big metropolitan area, and they did a much better job. And, in the middle of this, he wants to cut Medicaid, which you are defending. It's obvious that you want a New York of, by, and for the rich, so I have to ask, is it because you are rich yourself, or is it because you hope to be rich one day and don't want Albany or Washington to take your money but don't realize that such a philosophy means that you'll never get rich?
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fa q No, it means that they aren't going to run at all. At a certain point, if you want to sound informed, you should actually know the basics.
Yes, it is true that it doesn't mean that Republicans will lose every seat. However, it does make it more difficult for Republicans to hold those seats. Of the five, the most likely for pickups are Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Missouri is the least likely unless the former governor who was forced out for sexual harassment wins the primary. However, it does give an indication of how Senate Republicans feel about their chances to regain control of the Senate. And if Democrats gain seats, the votes of Manchin and Sinema are not necessary.
So, you don't understand what it means to control the Senate, and you don't understand what it means when all of the retirements are on one side, so what else don't you know that misinforms you?
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@MistahJigglah What did they get? Two Supreme Court Justices. Once again, funny how you completely gloss over the Supreme Court and the fact that, thanks to pretending that there is no difference between the two, we will have a hard right majority backing the campaign finance laws that you decry for decades. And before you say, "Well, they could expand the Court," the instant Republicans get unified control, they can expand it even farther, leading to a never-ending judicial arms race.
Ralph Nader ran in 2000 with the explicit goal of throwing the election to Bush. Well, given that exit polls show that he took anywhere from 16-26% more votes from Gore than Bush, 16% of Nader's total is 15,587, and if you add that to the certified count, Gore wins by 15,050 votes despite the shenanigans of Jeb! and Harris, and we don't get an Iraq War. And Nader responded to people putting the obvious dots together (multiple members of his 2000 exploratory committee said that he promised that he wouldn't go to swing states) by denying it once his support dried up, but he relied almost entirely on Republicans to collect signatures for his 2004 campaign, and he has since been trying to convince people that it will take Michael Bloomberg or Rand Paul to save us all. Smart hill to die on.
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@billyconnelly3568 Can't get rid of the Senate. The Constitution specifies that changing the Senate representation rules would require ratification by every state.
As far as the Electoral College goes, because every time it has screwed over Democrats and all but the first favored Republicans, it won't get the votes for outright repeal, but there is a way to effectively neuter it. There is a movement called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The way it works is, if enough member states join to equal the majority of the Electoral College, member states will award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote instead of the state popular vote. Article II gives states a lot of leeway in how they decide to award the winner (in theory, they could all decide to just award their votes based on any other standard as long as they do so ahead of the election), and at this time, states totaling 215 electoral votes have joined, so we're getting close. While it's not perfect (you can't deal with the spoiler effect), it will be a massive improvement over the election being irrelevant in over 49 states.
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@Nick-gp9et So, you did the organizing, but you didn't answer the question. See, when people ask me the question, I have a ready answer because I have done the work, and as a result of the efforts of thousands like me, we get two members in Philadelphia to sign on to the bill.
What is my step two? We keep doing the work until we get to 218. If someone is an obvious ideologue in the way (and that is not a given, because Evans had a primary challenge in 2018 over his advocacy of vouchers and charter schools, and Boyle is a moderate who represents the suburbs and the least Democratic part of Philadelphia) or in a key position to do the most damage, we concentrate our efforts on that person in the primary. Then, we fight hard to win every vacant seat and gain Republican seats. And, then, once we get to 218, if the Speaker refuses to allow a vote, we file a discharge petition. Which means that there is actually enough support for it to pass. You want to throw away any possible goodwill on anything for something that is guaranteed to fail and think that you will get the same person who didn't want to do it in the first place (who controls the calendar, btw) to just keep letting you have votes that will fail. My prediction? Doing that will alienate members, and that will mean fewer sponsors, which means that we are farther away from passage. Thank you very much.
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Quite frankly, this election has proven to me why Republicans win. Too many on the left are lazy. Of course, someone will read this and say that I am "shaming" people. Well, they can like it or not, but after Goldwater got hammered in 1964, the right didn't whine about how they would stay home to spite Nixon, they worked hard and won party committee seats, precinct and ward jobs, school boards, city council and state legislative seats, so that by 1980 they were unstoppable. Quite frankly, from a political standpoint, they deserved to win, and if we aren't willing to do the work and go vote, they deserve to lose. Kyle Kulinski encouraging people not to vote is the equivalent of saying, "I tried for four years, and now I'm giving up."
I think you're right that it makes more sense if Jimmy Dore is a Republican plant. Sadly, I am starting to worry that Krystal Ball is also going down that road, because she seems to be going far harder against establishment Dems than Trump, who is objectively worse. I am 40 with a four-year-old daughter, and I will NOT see her future destroyed over some tantrum.
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@MrGolov-te5eb Nader ran with the explicit purpose of throwing the 2000 election to Bush. If he really wanted to get 5% (his stated goal), he would have gone to California (the source of nearly 1/5 of his 1996 vote), New York, and Texas. He didn't. Given that his vote in Florida was 180 times the official margin for Bush, and exit polls showed him taking a net of 16-26% more votes from Gore than Bush, had he not run, Gore would have had a net gain of over 15,000 votes in Florida and won the election. Given his opposition to the Iraq War, and the fact that he wouldn't have put Roberts on the Court (so no Citizens United, Shelby, or Janus rulings), Nader did a lot of harm in running in 2000. And he knew it, which is why he has spent the last 20 years denying what he did, despite having nearly all of his petition drive in 2004 coming from Republican operatives, and spending the time since his repeated runs for President trying to convince people that Michael Bloomberg or Rand Paul will save us all.
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@MrGolov-te5eb I just gave you examples. Al Gore opposed the Iraq War, and George W. Bush started it. That alone is enough. Also, Rehnquist died in office, so Gore would have named his successor instead of Bush, so we would still have a robust Voting Rights Act, public employees wouldn't all be switched to right to work for less laws, and there would be no Citizens United. Stevens would have almost certainly retired in Gore's second term, and Souter would have also retired during a Democratic Presidency, so these two would be unchanged. If Trump isn't President, RBG is not succeeded by Barrett, so you don't have the Texas abortion bounty law allowed to stand for any amount of time. The so-called Partial Birth Abortion law gets overturned, and any number of horrible decisions never happen. And if some other lefty down the road can get Medicare for All through Congress, it will actually stand a chance of survival.
So, at this point (never mind the fact that the first few examples were me repeating myself), either you don't know who your real enemies are, or you really think that all of those things that the Bush and Trump Presidencies wrought are actually good.
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@aquatictrotsky1067 Thank you for replying. If there is evidence that at one point we had a more or less tribal and communal system, clearly somewhere along the way, we went a different path. There may be some basic needs that can be shared, but as long as someone has the idea of "mine," I just don't know how to avoid it. In agricultural societies, it was the ability to produce a surplus. In others, it was livestock. Given the way communal farms failed in places like Russia and China, I'm just not sure what would be different if private property was abolished. Yes, it is true that Native Americans largely didn't have a concept of private property, but a lot of times, those places have been overrun. I am not saying one is better, but I just don't know how to deal with what we know about human nature to make it work. Ultimately, someone will say, "I worked for this, and this is mine," and I don't see what will restart the cycle.
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@aquatictrotsky1067 I get that there is some theory involved, and to a certain extent, there always will be because there isn't really an example of this on a large scale today (and intentional communities and communes aren't the same thing, because it is totally voluntary membership, which is quite different than everyone being in a system).
However, I just don't see how Pandora's Box can be closed again and greed will be eliminated. As long as someone wants to, there is always a way to hoard wealth, and if someone does, regardless of what wealth will look like, it just seems to easy for me to see a world where left-wing libertarianism has a similar problem that right-wing libertarianism does. If there is something I am missing, I would be glad to hear it.
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@cmack17 1) My apologies. It was HR 1829 in a previous Congress. It's HR 1976 now.
2) But they weren't in Congress before, were they? You need to get to 218 & 50, and getting them in Congress gets you closer.
3) And what will your vote accomplish?
4) You contacted your member of Congress. I guess that's better than the absolute nothing I usually get when I ask that question of FTV people. Did you follow up in any way? Did you try to organize anyone else to do the same, or did you just think, "My job here is done"?
5) Just saying it's a bad analogy doesn't make it so. Why do you think that it's a bad analogy?
6) First of all, you've accomplished nothing. Second of all, Catch and Release is a legislative strategy first used by Tom DeLay. It was originally done to allow supposed moderates to keep their veneer while voting for a right wing agenda. It is a way of allowing people to cast votes that ensures the desired result. This is why Force the Vote is useless.
7-8) "We will get the society we want when we are willing to plant trees whose shade we'll never be able to sit under."
There is no timeline. It's done when we do the actual work, get 218 & 50 Yeses, and then we apply the pressure to make them Hard Yeses. Riddle me this, Batman, how is a vote that is guaranteed to fail going to move the ball down the field at all?
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@cmack17 1) Oh, okay. So, you're a jerk who wants to nitpick and then get mad when someone acknowledges making an error. Got it.
2) Once again, none of those people were in office. She helped them get into office. If you can't understand this basic concept, no wonder why you think Force the Vote will get results.
3) Then, why did you ask basically the inverse of it to me?
4) If your representative "claims to support M4A," what about your Senators? What about friends or family who live in states/districts of those who don't support the bill? Re: "no need to 'follow up,'" I'd hate to see you if you were in a movement that literally took years or decades to come to fruition.
5) So, it's terrible because you say it's terrible? Got it.
6) What a shock. You don't understand the basic reason why your proposed strategy won't work. I can give an example of someone your boy Jimmy Dore saw as a hero to the point that she won his endorsement in 2020. Tulsi Gabbard claimed to support Medicare for All and supported Bernie Sanders in 2016. Both conveniently cut off the oxygen from primary challenges to her left. However, once she started running for President and had to answer questions about specifics, not only did she not support it, but she called one of its key provisions "un-American" in an interview with Anderson Cooper. Twice. Jimmy Dore saw this as "a smart strategy" at the time.
7-8) When all you've done to try to move the needle for Medicare for All is make one phone call to your representatives, you have no room to talk about inaction.
The abolition of slavery in the UK took over 50 years. So did women's suffrage, and one of its most important supporters, Susan B. Anthony, died 14 years before it was won. Would you have said these people were wasting their time?
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@justr6982 Most of what Biden was offering was "I'm not the one who botched the pandemic," so that's hardly "giving people want they want." Bernie tried to do that, and he got a lower percentage in 2020 than in 2016. I did everything I could to try to help him win the nomination, but it doesn't change the fact that voters made another choice.
But the problem is that you have one group that for all of their many faults actually does show up to vote every time, to the point that they keep winning even though the people disagree with them on almost everything. On the other side, you have people who insist that they need to be wooed, and almost because they have this weird amnesia and forget how bad Republicans are at governing, periodically they think they can ignore their duty and that things don't matter. However, because of how finely tuned one side has been in weaponizing the judiciary, there is no time where such a move is safe. We suffer every time this happens, and I refuse to pander to egomaniacs who insist that they're above it all like Homer Simpson bragging that he voted for Kodos.
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thesparitan Tell me where Bernie said white people becoming less tha 50% of the United States population is bad. I can show you where Yang said it. That is the difference. You take it as inherent that this is a bad thing (assuming that Hispanics won't go the way of Italians, Jewish people, and Irish, and start counting as white, but that's a question for another day). Speaking of motivated reasoning, I said that it was good that Yang said what he did about white working people, but just because I didn't get his phrasing exactly right, you're saying that is what I criticized, when it is not. I will say it again: I am critical that Yang said that it would be a dangerous time when white people are less than half of the US population. Yang said it, Bernie didn't. I don't know how much clearer I can make it, but the fact that you're not arguing against my critique doesn't help your case.
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thesparitan Okay, you want honesty? You want context? Yang wrote about minority majority status on the same day that he wrote about the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting. I did not see the time stamp, only the date stamp, so if he came back hours later, I will apologize, but the thread (and you can't tell where one ends and the other begins because he does no 1/, 2/, etc.) starts with two tweets expressing sorrow for the shooting, then minority majority status, then two or three tweets about UBI. All of those were from the same day. Even if your interpretation is correct, and I am reading too much into his statement about it being "socially dangerous," do you honestly and truly believe that the time to say it is right after people are killed in a synagogue, before making a segue into a pitch for UBI? Worst case scenario, he's playing a dangerous game of dog whistle politics. Best case scenario, he is extremely insensitive to the suffering of others, using a tragedy as a jumping off point for saying that it will get even worse in 27 years, but not if people adopt his one proposal. On an absolute scale of 10, that's going from a -10 to a -9.
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thesparitan There are lots of things that racists will use as an excuse to do racist things. White people being less than 50% of the US population (ignoring the fact that lots of people who are considered white now weren't in our past, that there are already light-skinned Hispanics who are identifying as white, that even according to the US Census Hispanic is not a race but an ethnicity), and since White is a social construct anyway, that there is a real possibility that by that point Hispanic people may very well be considered white, so there is no need to get the vapors about such possibility. I see it as not positive or negative, but something that may very well be.
As to his second point, there are some who exploit economic anxiety, but the instigators and the leaders of extremist groups are rarely poor. So, I would say that the answer to the second question is mixed.
As far as the context question, let's just say that, for the sake of argument, that he didn't know that anxiety over minority majority status is a common dog whistle among white supremacists (i.e., "Jews will not replace us" chants in Charlottesville), and it really was an innocent comment, do you really think that mentioning it as a follow up to expression of sympathy after a hate crime is really the best time? To me, the most charitable explanation is that he's as tone deaf as Yoko Ono.
As far as "I could have resolved this sooner," if you hadn't seen the link or it didn't work for you, you could have simply told me that you couldn't see the link. Defending someone on semantics when you don't know the quote is the height of intellectual dishonesty. I don't go into discussions trying to defend or attack people, I go in trying to get answers, and while you might not have agreed with my interpretation, at least I was honest enough to examine the evidence rather than blindly defend someone.
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thesparitan There is no evidence that minority majority status is used as a dog whistle?
That said, I think it's interesting that you said that it was after a white person shot "brown people." They were Jewish. Usually, someone of Jewish descent is considered white in America. I guess that might bolster your point that people acting with racial motives won't start to consider Hispanic people to be white but a) we're talking about a quarter of a century from now, so who knows what people will accept, and b) if most people start to consider Hispanics white (the way they did Irish, and Italians, and Jewish people), the Census won't release a report that minority majority status is here. That was my point.
I blindly defended nothing. I saw the context, and the context didn't seem to help in my opinion. You, however, defended Yang's statement while not having read it. What's next, are you going to say that I'm the one who defended the libertarian version of UBI?
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@joekopsick1540 Voting third party won't make a lick of difference, especially given the obsession with the Presidency. Let's say that a third party comes around and somehow doesn't take votes disproportionately from one of the two major-party nominees to hand it to the other side on a platter. And then, let's say that candidate builds broad support. If that candidate does not get an absolute majority in the Electoral College, it goes to the House... where it is decided by Democrats and Republicans.
Even still, let's assume that somehow, all the third party people can get united enough to win the Presidency. Then, they have to try to pass their legislative agenda... in a body comprised of Democrats and Republicans.
But, wait! You say, let's actually build a grassroots movement and build from the ground up. Well, once you get to Congress, you want a committee seat so you can actually do things for your district... which means you have to work with Democrats or Republicans.
So, please tell me exactly how this "break up the duopoly" is supposed to change the fundamental rules that gave us two parties in the first place.
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@garysmokesmeat Another example of evil regulations. In 1906, San Francisco had a major earthquake. Lots of buildings collapsed, and 3000 people died. So, the evil government made a regulation that buildings in San Francisco had to be built to better withstand the force of an earthquake. The next major earthquake in San Francisco came in 1989, and 63 people died. Oh, the horror! Those survivors were slaves to regulation.
Haiti has no such regulations. 220,000 people died. Once again, your utopia is a world that is cold, nasty, brutish, and short. (In case you were wondering, I'm quoting Hobbes, who is especially relevant in any discussion with a libertarian given how many, when you dig deeper under the surface, really want the war of all against all.)
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@garysmokesmeat "capitalists would let that worker keep ALL of that money"
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Hold on a minute. Let me catch my breath.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
First of all, you are literally praising the idea of someone giving you crumbs. Second of all, and perhaps more importantly, the capitalist has plenty of ways to separate you from that money, and you defend them all.
Third, I answered your question. Just because you don't like the fact that there is no blanket answer to the question (and, no, there is not a blanket answer for how much of GDP the government should spend, either), that's a you problem. The algorithm thanks you for not understanding that, though, and drawing more people to see the video where yet another libertarian gets flummoxed, and the defenders in the comments section live in Fantasyland.
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@garysmokesmeat "I don't know how every single problem would be solved."
And this is where pretty much every single discussion with a libertarian leads. Some insist that such issues are "a distraction," but they are literally life and death.
"There would literally be hundreds of thousands of different ways to solve those problems."
And, yet, you give up and can't even name one.
And, yes, many of those problems did occur despite government oversight, but do you know what happened before government oversight? Literally nothing was thrown out from a meat processing plant. If someone should lose a hand, an arm, or even fall into the machinery, pack it up and send it out. You know the meat is rotten? Put some extra seasoning on it and send it out. If the private sector could do such a good job of preventing such things, why didn't it do such things?
Personally, I appreciate not inadvertently becoming a cannibal.
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@gorillaguerillaDK I was there for the second war in Iraq. I agree that there are times when you must fight a war, but that doesn't mean becoming Team America: World Police, either. You can't really force a democracy on other people, because it is a contradiction in terms. In all honesty, I think that there should have been a more federalistic approach to Iraq, with the provinces getting a little bit more power in their government. Treating it as more or less a unitary system was never going to be sustainable. And as soon as you say "majority rule," the group that actually is a majority knows that all they have to do is stick together. This is part of why there were efforts to make a 2/3 majority necessary for any government functions.
For me, one of the key questions about whether or not to get involved is if the group in question is contained. Yes, Putin is awful, but if he kept his awful confined to Russia, it's the place of the Russian people to address it.
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@jd0604 Yeah, and let's look at some of Jimmy Dore's predictions:
1) Der Orangefuhrer would never get two or three Supreme Court picks (the exact phrase was that it was as likely as "the moon falling into Lake Michigan")
2) and if he did, it wouldn't really change anything,
3) that Democrats could filibuster the Supreme Court seat Mitch McConnell stole and that he wouldn't get rid of the filibuster for the Supreme Court,
4) and that such a cause would lead to Democrats taking over the Senate,
5) and then we'd get someone good "like Elizabeth Warren" as the Democratic nominee in 2020,
6) and the Republican Party would implode.
Literally nothing he said that day happened. He also tried to convince people that Tulsi Gabbard was the One True Lefty and that her Medicare Choice was "smart politics," and then a year later saying that forcing a vote would magically give us health care. Then, there's the anti-vaccine stuff and bashing teachers unions and the coronavirus denialism. But yeah, he's "been right about everything." Right wing, maybe, but not correct.
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@stephenbailey9969 And when Congress actually tried to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment with the Voting Rights Act, the Roberts Court decided that racism was over, and unless something explicitly made it more difficult to vote based on race, it passed Constitutional muster, never mind that the biggest weapons against allowing black people to vote (the poll tax, the literacy test, and the Grandfather Clause [in this case, allowing people to vote if their grandfathers were on the voting rolls]) did not explicitly mention race, and the first two affected a lot of poor white people, too, but the powers of the day were fine with that as long as black people also couldn't vote.
The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection, and a lot of the social issues that you are saying should be left to the states are questions of discrimination. You can pretty it up all you want, but your argument is the descendant of John C. Calhoun.
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@joebrandon8750 No, you are being contradictory. You like those Justices because you like what they did.
However, you have this complaint that you love to make that if the person doing the nomination ahead of time says that the nominee will be part of a group, that therefore makes them invalid. Well, Reagan said in 1980 and Trump said in 2020 that they would pick women and Bush said he'd pick a black candidate before they made the pick. Therefore, by your logic, they were "picked because they were part of a group, not because of their qualifications."
Nobody on the left complained that those Presidents (or in Reagan's case, nominees, because he wasn't elected yet) would do so. While O'Connor was relatively smooth sailing, the case against Thomas and Barrett had nothing to do with the fact that they were going to be part of a group. However, you keep complaining that Ketanji Brown Jackson is part of a group that Biden said that he'd select from. Therefore, your argument about an affirmative action pick is hypocritical. If you want to argue the merits, argue the merits, but all you've done is complained that Biden said ahead of time that he'd pick a black woman.
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@whyamimrpink78 The one trying to justify police killing people with impunity calling someone else a racist is especially rich.
Let's just take everything that you say at face value for the sake of argument. Let's just say that George Floyd was a junkie who was about to die, anyway. If you don't have a pulse, you are physically incapable of moving your muscles in a way that makes you a threat to anyone. Therefore, if you keep someone in that chokehold after you know that person is incapacitated, and you refuse to allow someone else to intervene, you are ensuring that he cannot be resuscitated. Therefore, you are killing him. So, even if what you supposed is the reason that he died was because of the drugs is true, the fact that Chauvin made sure that Floyd was dead means that he is responsible for the death. If you want to argue to which degree, have at it, but Chauvin is guilty.
I get that when you hate other people and want to justify their death that it is frustrating to be called a racist, but that doesn't make it any less true, or the reverse automatically true. I am against any abuse of power to kill people. Funny that the so-called libertarian isn't.
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@awake3607 Assuming that you are not the person making the original reply, let's look through the thread of conversation, shall we?
OP: Ron Johnson ran for a third term, so we should have term limits.
My reply: It's not the term limits, because voters in Wisconsin elected Ron Johnson to a third term.
Reply to me: It's unfair to blame voters in Wisconsin for Ron Johnson, because the state is the most gerrymandered in America.
My reply: Gerrymandering has nothing to do with the US Senate.
Reply to me: But Wisconsin is very gerrymandered.
And, yes, voters in Wisconsin currently have one Democrat and one Republican in the US Senate. They also re-elected Tony Evers as governor at the same time they re-elected Ron Johnson. None of that changes the fact that if more voters had voted for Mandela Barnes, Ron Johnson would be out or the Senate, and gerrymandering doesn't let them off the hook, because the entire state voted for US Senate.
The context clue comes from the reply saying that it is unfair to blame voters for Ron Johnson because the state is so gerrymandered. Since you are so determined to try to save yourself or the person who replied to me (many times on this channel, people have used multiple usernames to agree with themselves, so I can't rule it out), tell me exactly how being the most gerrymandered state in America when it comes to legislative districts absolves people in a statewide election who voted for an awful Senator.
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@kurtzFPV For the first decade of this century, HR 676 (the predecessor to the current bill written by Bernie in the Senate and Jayapal in the House which was written by Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers) never had more than 70 or 80 sponsors. The current version has 117. Failed votes aren't going to change that fact, except either to make it worse because the Soft Yes will be alienated.
Colorado tried to get it statewide through a ballot initiative because of the polls that showed that it was popular. It got 21%. Polls show that a majority of people who talk about Medicare for All are really talking about a public option. I dealt with several people in petition drives who were obsessed with the idea of "not taking away people's health care" or "denying choice" (which is part of the reason why I think "support reproductive rights" is a better slogan than "pro-choice").
You don't see the votes come about a second time because health care legislation is by definition a lengthy process, and failing is going to lead a lot of time lost, and that is why it doesn't come back. It's not as simple as having a vote.
Yes, Bernie showed that he could raise a lot of money, but the level of spending for a general election is completely different than a primary. Bernie raised hundreds of millions, but the general cost billions.
I am all for putting more attention on state and local raises (as someone who raised all of $3400 in my campaign compared to my opponent's $20,000). However, that is clearly a long-term strategy to get things passed, and Force the Vote is a short-term strategy. A long term solution is what we need, because ignoring the mountain that we face is just going to leave people discouraged and reluctant to try again when it does fail.
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@LarryKach Warren has terrible political instincts. She didn't run at a time when she could have easily won the nomination and probably the election because she was actually a more popular figure at the time rather than someone who had been eclipsed. Then, instead of using them as a cautionary tale of what not to do, she followed the advice of the people who lost the last time. Then, when her campaign was sinking, she made up a ridiculous story that the person who begged her to run in 2016 told her that a woman couldn't win. Then, her tendency to exaggerate or lie reared its ugly head when she changed being the only candidate to beat an incumbent in 25 years to 30, and when that "loser" accurately noted that he had done just that within the last 30 years, the candidate who was supposed to be about plans and having a solid head for math and economics suddenly tried in an embarrassing way to do 2020-30=1990 in her head on live TV.
That's not to start going into her attempts to go just this side of Rachel Dolezal to make up ridiculous stories about her Native American ancestry and her father's profession to the point where her brothers angrily defended their father and people found evidence of her trying to use her exaggerated heritage to advance her legal career or lying about getting fired for being pregnant (she didn't have credentials and was given a temporary job and never finished getting her qualifications in order for a permanent job), she had a veil of phoniness that would have doomed her. And, yes, a lot of people will talk about how we have some Native ancestry, but most of us know better than to check a box claiming a race that we have no cultural ties to and take a DNA test to prove it (unaware of just how sensitive the topic of blood quantum is among the actual people, and thus never enough to prove her ancestry to the people who questioned it), plagiarize a recipe from The New York Times for a book called Pow-wow Chow, or let our boss call us the first person of color hired in order to help that department avoid making a diversity hire. She would have never survived the gauntlet because she didn't have the mettle.
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@RJG7203 I'm not canceling anybody. Did you see me call for a boycott? No, you saw me say that I made a personal decision to unsubscribe to a channel that I have watched less and less and this was the last straw. Is he as bad as Rising? No. Does he have a horrible strategic blind spot that does more harm than good? Yes.
Oh, my God, with all of this weakness and handwringing about "vote shaming." Never mind just how many are bad actors there are for a minute, if someone doesn't like the consequences of their actions pointed out, then maybe they should think things through before coming on a public forum and trying to enable fascism, because that is what they're doing.
And if people want to come here and lie or be useful idiots, they will be called out so others can see how bad their take really is. The Green Party has been an arm of the Republican Party for 20 years, getting money and volunteers in close elections. If someone is going to lie about what actually happened in Wisconsin, they deserve to be called out. If someone falls for those lies, that person is too stupid for me to follow as a commentator.
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@chuletaization What experts? There were hundreds who signed off that it was. She specifically said "he was guilty," and that is why she wouldn't vote No. The line about "partisan impeachment" is ridiculous if you just think for two seconds, because that means that if one side acts in bad faith and refuses to ever, ever, ever turn on their own, every impeachment vote would be "partisan." No, what takes courage is to take a stand. Anybody can refuse to take a stand. If she thought he was guilty, she should have voted Yes. If she didn't, she should have voted No. Censure isn't in the Constitution. Impeachment is.
She almost certainly thought that it would play better than it did, as evidenced by so many people at her event the night of the debate asking about impeachment, and her decision to cancel several events over the next few days. She has an instinct for publicity, and she was learning the hard way that not everyone appreciates masking cowardice in courage. Go read Profiles in Courage. All of the examples of the book were people who took a stand, not people who appealed to some vague notion of centrism or compromise.
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@tannermcnabb4836 The standard term limit proposal is 12 years. Even if you went with 20, that still forces her into retirement at age 49. Now, tell me how this is reasonable.
If you like Bernie and AOC, why propose something that would kick him out of office and something that would force her out at a young age? Or did you just maybe stop to think that blanket solutions to "I don't like who other people vote for, so I want to make it so that no one can ever vote for someone like that person ever again"?
And, ultimately, that's what age an term limits is: changing the rules because you don't like who wins. Yes, people vote for familiar names, but incumbents lose all the time. If people really want someone else, they'll vote out the incumbent. AOC is there because she beat not only an incumbent, but an incumbent in leadership who was being groomed to take over. Saying "it's too hard" isn't a reason to get rid of the actual good people.
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@ubuu7 For someone who opened by talking about enjoying seeing someone seethe in anger, you sure do show an awful lot of anger. To quote Walter Sobchack, I'm calmer than you are.
So, just a tiny sliver are getting one or more of the 125 programs that people have to forfeit if they take his money? And what are you basing that on, since Yang has only mentioned six (TANF, SNAP, WIC, LIHEAP, daycare subsidies, housing subsidies), you don't know, and there are probably a lot of people who would be quite shocked to see themselves on that list.
So, you support regressive taxes? Instead of basing it on the ability to pay, you are just fine with making the poor pay a higher percentage of income?
But, I thank you for demonstrating the stereotypical Yang Gang banger who doesn't care who gets hurt, as long as you get $1000/month. I couldn't have done it better myself.
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@ubuu7 TANF is decided at the state level, as are the levels for daycare subsidies, but a lot of the funding comes from the federal government.
And, perhaps you forgot about the ruling that allowed the ACA to survive, but it gave states the right to set their own benefit levels for programs like TANF and SNAP, among other things. So, Yang could say, "pretty please adjust your benefits to compensate for the VAT" all he wants, but they don't have to.
And given the fact that TANF is one of the few programs that Yang has mentioned by name, and TANF is awarded on the basis of having children, so if someone is getting something from the list of 125 programs (which I guarantee has to be pretty expansive and affect a lot of people in order to get the count that high), the household probably isn't getting anything either.
Apparently, you don't seem to understand the point that I was making. It was not that everyone wants to keep what they have, but there are plenty of examples now of the benefits being over $1000/month now just based on the programs mentioned. Since you want to talk high rent, those areas have housing subsidies that are worth way more than $1000. So much for saving to move out!
But the point was that there is no reason to use a regressive tax to pay for it other than ideology. You could avoid all of these issues by using a progressive tax to pay for it, and not forcing the poor to choose. The rich get to keep their welfare, so why do the poor have to give up theirs in order to get this "right of citizenship," unless Yang sees them as second class citizens to begin with?
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John Doe The right wants power, and they don't care what they will do to get it. Oh, I get what they tell themselves, but it doesn't stand up to the least bit of scrutiny. Surely, Lindsey Graham knew that there was a real chance of someone on the Supreme Court dying in 2020, but he still confidently said in 2018 that he absolutely would never have a hearing (something he could stop as the committee chairman) so close to the election. When you say things are principles and then you ignore those principles constantly, it is going to get scorn and it deserves it. If the record gets tied in the time between vacancy and confirmation, we are literally talking two days before the election.
We have a party that called using an executive order for prosecutorial discretion "tyranny" while supporting someone who is ordering child kidnapping and forced sterilization of women. Yes, you can say that I'm "contributing," but I really don't care. Democracy is at stake, and this is no time for both siderism. Both sides are not equally bad. Period.
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@recklart8592 Actually, hundreds of billions, if not trillions, have been repaid. Remember about ten years ago when the Chicken Little crowd insisted that we were headed for catastrophe because the SSTF took in less than it paid out? That was because some of the Treasury bonds were redeemed in order to make Social Security payments. When Social Security was established, it had two rules that made it different from all other government spending: 1) it had to be paid for by separate funds from Social Security payroll taxes, and 2) the money would be kept in a fund separate from the general fund.
Whether you agree with the basic mechanism or not, the rule changes with the Greenspan Commission worked as intended (except they underestimated wealth concentration since 1983, which meant that instead of 90% of all earned income being subject to the tax, it's closer to 82% now, which would have made it fully solvent until 2063 if that were still the case), because the idea was to take in way more than needed at the time when there were far more workers to retirees, and use that money to weather the storm as that ratio shrinks and the baby boomers start to collect.
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@johnhand46 My point is that even if "the DNC" wants to get rid of her, it's really up to voters. As far as "useful" goes, if the Democratic Party were to remove them, there wouldn't be a majority, and voters would revolt. People keep acting like we live in a Parliamentary system or miss the point that in this country, the party is the people. If voters wanted rid of her, she would be gone. If enough voters wanted Bernie as the nominee, he would be President now. The days of the smoke-filled room are long over. If they were still here, I gah-ron-tee that Trump would have never won the Republican nomination, let alone the election. Yes, they have been spineless since, but it was ultimately Republican voters that stuck us with him.
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@johnhand46 Again, you seem to keep using "the DNC" like the establishment boogeyman. Dole outspent Clinton, and that race was so far gone that people later admitted that Dole picked the venues he did for his 96 hour marathon final campaign push to try to help down ballot candidates so Republicans could hold Congress. And Bernie held the lead in fundraising through February 2020 in the Democratic primary. Yes, money helps, but anyone who has actually either been a candidate, run a campaign, or worked on a campaign can tell you, it is not raising the most money that gets you victory. You have to raise enough money to get your message out there.
As others have pointed out on this thread, there was a lot of boots on the ground and signs for Omar's opponents. Participate in enough electoral politics, and you get on plenty of e-mail lists. I saw plenty from Our Revolution asking for funds to save Omar, but I don't remember any from the DNC or the DCCC. The latter is there to protect incumbents first and foremost, so they aren't going to tout her opponent, but they clearly weren't giving her the help of other endangered candidates like Engel. You want to invoke conspiracies, but you bristle at that when I say that is what you are doing.
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@Kyle Jones No, it is saying that in addition to RT and Sputnik loving Tulsi, Jill Stein is a Russian asset. The "also" refers to the Russian asset. The question was about Republicans encouraging Tulsi to run third party: "So he [Trump]'s going to try and drive the people not to vote for him but just to say, 'You know, you can't vote for them, either.' And that seems to be, I think, to the extent that I can divine a strategy, their key strategy right now."
"Well, I think there's going to be two parts, and I think it's going to be the same as 2016: 'Don't vote for the other guy. You don't like me? Don't vote for the other guy [...]
"They're also gonna do third party again."
You're forgetting an awful lot of stuff before the quote that the "they" is the Trump campaign. And if you don't think Tulsi is the favorite Democratic Presidential candidate of Russia, how do you explain the positive RT coverage and the way that she keeps lining up with their objectives, to the point of praising Putin for bombing civilians in Syria while complaining that Obama didn't?
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@himynameisrev And automation all depends on how it is done. A couple years ago, my parents and my niece came to visit me and my daughter. Among other things, while they were here, we went on two factory tours (Herr's Snack Factory and Tour in Nottingham, and the Martin Guitar Factory Tour and Museum in Nazareth), and at each one, they found that human hands caused a bottleneck in production (finding rotten potatoes at the former, lacquering at the latter), and having robots do it led to an increase in employment, and everyone at the Lacquer Department was retrained, so nobody lost any jobs at Martin.
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@sergeikhripun Oh, okay. I'm not dealing with a liar, I'm dealing with an idiot. I guess the object of your admiration meant that one went without saying as far as the latter. If you want me to answer your question, I just want to figure out if I am dealing with someone who is dishonest, someone who is your garden variety stupid, or someone who is genuinely cognitively limited.
Show me where you find someone else, anyone else, using your definition of supermajority? Since you claim that you are using "the political definition" and I am using "the dictionary definition," are you not aware that the reason why the term supermajority exists is because some things cannot pass with a simple majority, and there needed to be a distinction so that people understand why things fail with a majority?
And I don't know where you are getting your numbers, but did you not notice that for all this talk from Angry Leader that the vote was planned to fail in the first place? Did you not notice that Biden's numbers didn't move when he said that he wouldn't sign Medicare for All in the primary? Apparently, you missed that the people of Colorado had a referendum for Medicare for All a few years ago and it only got 21% of the vote. You probably also didn't read below the actual top line of the poll and find out that a majority wrongly think that Medicare for All allows competing private insurance. Thank people like Jimmy's object of affection Tulsi Gabbard who insisted that she supported Medicare for All while saying that the thing that actually made it work is "un-American."
You probably haven't done the actual organizing work and talked to people who said that they liked Medicare for All while angrily insisting that you can't "take away people's choice for insurance."
I have actually done the work, and because of me and others like me, Brendan Boyle is a sponsor of the bill.
You also missed the point where I said that the Democratic Party is not an ideological party in the way the GOP is. It is a coalition. Party control is irrelevant to the question of Medicare for All having a chance of passage given that only half of the Democrats in the House and a quarter of Democrats in the Senate sponsor the bill. You know what percentage of Congressional Republicans support Medicare for All? Zero. So, what have you personally done to build support for Medicare for All?
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@NoWay1969 He said that the current programs are bad, and the freedom with 125 strings attached dividend will make it less likely for people to get caught in the system. However, this shows a total misunderstanding of how these programs work. The vast majority are off within two years. You will never eliminate the need for the existing social safety net, because there will always be disability and frictional unemployment and poverty. And Yang envisions a future with 1/3 of the population unemployed. His freedom with 125 strings attached dividend is already below the poverty level now, and I can think of several situations where it pays out well over $1000:
1) Single parent with two kids who gets SSI and SNAP gets over $1300/month.
2) TANF in New Hampshire is over $1000/month.
3) Housing subsidies.
4) Daycare subsidies with multiple children in daycare.
With nothing else to fall back on because those programs have been eliminated or for fear of losing what they currently get, his proposal would increase poverty if his worst-case scenario comes true, and create a permanent underclass.
And he won't provide a list of the 125 programs that people have to forfeit if they take his money, so we don't know if unemployment is one of them. We also don't know how long taking his money will keep someone locked out of the existing social safety net. Unemployment has a cap, but it pays about 60% of income. So, if someone is making $39K/year and takes the freedom with 125 strings attached dividend, that person would be giving up biweekly unemployment of $900. I hope that person has his/her house paid off, because Yang is opposed to actually doing anything about affordable housing.
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@NoWay1969 How do we know it doesn't include unemployment if he won't provide the list? Mother Jones asked for it back in April, his spokeswoman implied that he didn't have a final list (even though he had a count long before then) and they promised to update the story if he did, and it hasn't been updated yet. I have heard people say both. Because of his opacity, I don't have trust that it won't be.
And you seem not to understand how it works. There are a lot of situational things, and not only do those people not get benefits while everyone else around them does, thus exacerbating inequality (and wages have kept up with inflation over the last 40 years, so that shows why just staying the same isn't sufficient when the rungs get farther apart on the economic ladder), but they now have to pay a VAT because Yang refuses to even try to address wealth and income inequality. So, in both an absolute and relative way, they are worse off than before.
And the Yang Gang bangers seem not to understand that there is often more than one program that people will qualify for, which is why it is dishonest to only mention one program to try to pretend that it is better.
Yes, it makes things a lot worse. If we only have the $1000/month, that won't be enough, and that is why it will be a permanent underclass. I keep hearing that we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but a program that hurts the most vulnerable in society and lets the rich keep every single tax loophole is not a good, it is a bad, if not an evil.
And Bernie proposed things that are far better. His was similar to what Richard Wolff proposed of, instead of letting the monopolies and big corporations get most of the benefits, use the benefits of technology to force increased wages and decreased hours to increase quality of life and make room for more people to work. You can scoff at that idea if you'd like, but why do you think we have overtime laws?
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@NoWay1969 You still don't understand how progressive and regressive taxes work, and why a VAT is regressive even with the freedom with 125 strings attached dividend fits. So, I will explain one final time, and use the example that you gave. The person who you mentioned making $24,000/year and getting an extra 12 will still probably spend it all or close to it. That means an extra $3272 in taxes, or 13.63% of income in taxes. If you say, "Yes, but that person got a third of their income," the freedom with 125 strings attached dividend is not treated as a tax rebate. If it were, it would not affect existing programs, which again shows that he doesn't understand how the machinery of policy works.
Someone who is rich doesn't spend all of their money. So, let's take your person making $240,000/year. That person will only spend about half of income, because they invest the rest. They won't spend that extra money except to offset the taxes. So, that person will pay taxes of $12,000, or 5% of income. 5 is a lot less than 13.
That is the fundamental flaw in literally every single argument that tries to insist that a consumption tax can ever possibly be progressive: it forgets the fact that the rich have far different spending habits, because there are plenty of things that are needed, and those things are a much larger portion of income for the rest of us. You can give your hypotheticals all you want, but the fact that 45 states have overall regressive taxes and they rely more heavily on consumption than the federal government betrays your argument and proves mine. At a certain point, you can talk hypotheticals all you want, but I have actual proof of what happens when you tax consumption rather than income or wealth.
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@NoWay1969 "All we can do is repeat what the stated policies are."
And this is the irony of someone who supports someone whose slogan is Make America Think Again saying to just trust him at his word and not actually look at the implications, whether or not someone actually has the authority to do something that he/she says, or whether or not it is contradictory with other things that are said.
You said that you trust him, despite the fact that he has said several contradictory things about his proposals, especially between right-wing and left-wing audiences.
And if you can't understand that making someone forfeit current benefits in order to get his money is a string attached, then you either have an understanding of it that no one else does, being intentionally dishonest, or being willfully ignorant. I don't know which, and at this point, quite frankly, I don't care.
Now, let's look at your proposal for just how easy it would be to give someone an EBT card to cover the VAT. Well, benefit levels for most programs are determined at the state level, and the Supreme Court has already said that the federal government can't force them to change benefit levels, so that's out. So, it would clearly have to be done at the federal level. So, the federal government would have to start keeping records of how many benefits people get, and calculate the "rebate." Oh, and someone also has to keep track of who gets the other benefits in the first place. Far from getting rid of bureaucracy, this creates a new one.
And you keep saying that the VAT is not regressive, when you have to add something else to try to not make it so. Do you know what would not be a regressive tax? Taxing capital gains to pay for it, because poor are less likely to own stock. Or, you could have a tax on income above a certain level. See, if you use an actual progressive tax, you don't have to use the benefit to insist that the tax is not regressive.
Finally, at another point, you said that $24,000/year was poor. I don't think you realize just how much you undercut your own arguments. If that is poor, then half that is clearly insufficient. If that is the case, then making people give up what they have in order to get that money is clearly wrong.
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@crumbtember You are correct. In many of the occasions where it was tried, it became a matter of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." I also think that greed is something that ultimately prevents the Marxist vision from ever taking hold. When I read The Conquest of Bread, I kept thinking, "but who will organize these field trips to the farm with no taxation and no government?" and when Jamie was still on the show, I kept thinking, "with no government, who is going to stop someone from seizing wealth and property and starting the cycle all over again?"
There is also the troubling fact that, outside of Allende, I can't think of a single Marxist head of state who tried to put ownership of the means of production more into the hands of the people without committing human rights abuses or stifling dissent. And Morales and Lula don't count, because they've largely governed as social democrats. I'm all for the idea of making it easier for workers to control their business, but I think that it has to be their decision to go that route.
If I could see those things being overcome (and people who identify as socialists, even the non-tankie variety, wave off human rights abuses), then I'd gladly sign up.
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@crazyoldworld7946 Well, the reason why it started in the 1980s is because the right didn't whine about how they were going to stay home after getting slaughtered in 1964 and seeing establishment candidates win the nomination three times in a row after that. They organized. They ran for stuff down ballot: party committee spots, precinct and ward chairs, school board seats, city council and state legislature members, and then by 1980, they became unstoppable. If they are going to spend 16 years fighting to hurt people, why are so many giving up in the fight to help people?
Republicans and centrists win because, quite frankly, too many on the left are lazy. I remember last week talking to someone who was insisting that Bernie should run on the Green Party, and I pointed out that sore loser laws don't allow it. Then, she accused me of being a Hill Shill from the last cycle. When I pointed out all I did to work for Bernie this time and asked her what she did, stony silence. I can't help but appreciate the irony that the people who believe government doesn't work always show up to vote, but it's true. It should be those of us who see its potential.
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@davidvenegas6401 Did I say "put kids in cages"? No, I did not. I said kidnapping children. As many faults as Obama had, kidnapping children is not one of them. He didn't order children separated from their families without keeping track of the parents, then send the children thousands of miles away. If you think that is the same as "putting kids in cages," then I don't know what to tell you.
And you are missing my point completely. For one, usually when I hear the word "shaming," it tends to be whining about someone saying something critical, as though someone can ignore the consequences of their actions. If you live in a swing state and don't want to vote for Biden, have at it. However, those of us who live in a swing state do not have that luxury. Like it or not, Joe Biden or Donald Trump will be President at noon on January 20.
And one thing I noticed that you didn't address at all was the Supreme Court. Four of the five members of the conservative bloc are there because they were appointed by Republican Presidents who most Americans rejected in favor of another candidate who snuck in via the Electoral College at least in part because people insisted that there was no difference between the major-party nominees and wanted to "teach the Democratic Party a lesson and force them to pick a lefty the next time." (Admittedly, this played a much more obvious role in 2000 than 2016, where there was some ambiguity over whether or not that was enough.) One of the Justices on the liberal bloc is 87 and has had multiple bouts of cancer. Another turns 82 in August. If Trump gets to name the replacement for one or both of them, we may very well see labor unions abolished. (Even before Kavanaugh, they cited a decision that was overturned that struck down child labor laws. This would be like using Plessy v. Ferguson to decide a civil rights case.) Even before this round of right-wing Justices, the Voting Rights Act was gutted. If you want to ignore the consequences of those things, I will not aide and abet your guilty conscience. And unless a plane carrying Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh crashes while a Democratic President and Senate are in office.
This election is not about the next four years. It is about whether any good things can be accomplished in forty years. I actually went out and did the work to try to help Bernie win the nomination. I knocked on thousands of doors, did a reading at a fundraiser, made dozens of calls, and served as a captain on a petition drive. What did you do? Did you do the work, or did you sit on the sidelines and complain?
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@davidvenegas6401 Did you knock on doors? Did you make phone calls? I knocked on doors, I made calls, did a reading for a fundraiser, and I was the captain of a petition drive to get Bernie on the ballot. This on top of giving money. Oh, and I'm a single parent, so I brought my four-year-old daughter along while doing several of these things. Everyone has something that they can use an excuse to say that they can't do the work.
And, yes, Republicans blocked Garland. But guess what? That means that you have to make sure that Mitch McConnell isn't the Senate Majority Leader anymore. And if Biden wins, it takes a net of three to make sure Turtle is irrelevant. Jones in Alabama is probably a goner, so let's say four. There is a real chance to win seats in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Iowa, Montana, and North Carolina. Win four of six, and we get someone like Sotomayor or Kagan on the bench, so that way a generation doesn't have to worry about the abolition of child labor laws, civil rights laws, and environmental laws.
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@compactinfinity So, the answer is to just give up, let corporations get all of the say in what automation will look like even though it can be done in a way that actually benefits workers (more below), gut the existing social safety net, and force people to live on a pittance meaning a world with a few trillionaires and everyone else scraping by on less than the poverty level for one person?
Explanation of automation working for workers: this summer, my parents and my niece came to visit. We went to a couple of factory tours (Herr's Snack Factory and Visitors Center in Nottingham, and the Martin Guitar Factory Tour and Museum in Nazareth) and it turns out that human hands caused a bottleneck in production (finding rotten potatoes at the former, lacquering at the latter), and letting machines take care of these caused and increase in jobs, and at Martin, every single person who worked on lacquer was retrained to a new job, and there was not one person who lost a job. If workers had a say in how automation was done, and/or companies looked at stakeholders as well as shareholders (it probably helped that each company is still family owned and has a lot of ties to each community, with over 70 (Herr's) and 175 (Martin) years in the community, why can't other companies do that? Why can't they raise wages and cut hours to actually give people more leisure time?
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@compactinfinity What are you basing that assumption on? Does he have a track record? Does he have any consistency at all on how he talks about these things? In fact, based on the few programs that we know, there are a lot of people who won't get any benefits from his program:
1) TANF in New Hampshire is over $1000. It is $923 in Alaska, and over $700 in New York and California, which means that with SNAP, it will be over $1000.
2) Daycare for two children is over $1500 in Pennsylvania, so I am guessing that applies in plenty of other states.
3) Housing subsidies are easily worth more than $1000 compared to market prices in many high rent areas.
So, no only do those people not get any money, but now they have to pay a VAT, which means that they will suffer. Any proposal that hurts the poor and doesn't affect the rich is horrible, and it deserves all of the criticism it gets.
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@inspectortanzi No, she asked about his "initial support for FTV." Sam never supported FTV. He said that the squad and the CPC should try to "use some leverage, but I'm not sure that this is it." This is what he said in real time, and this is what he told Gray. After a day or two, he was unequivocal that this particular usage of "leverage" was a bad idea, and it wouldn't get us any closer to Medicare for All. Then, after a week, he realized that Jimmy Dore and his ilk were using it as an excuse to go after the Squad, which he wholeheartedly rejected. She asked his position, he told her, and she kept lying and said that he supported it until he heard that Jimmy Dore did. The title of her show was very apt.
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Adept HNIC Archives Apparently, you don't understand the legislative strategy of catch and release, and why forcing the vote was a stupid strategy that wouldn't have gotten us any closer to Medicare for All (and given his support of Tulsi Gabbard, who called Medicare for All "un-American" in an interview with Anderson Cooper, not once but twice just in case people thought it was an accident). There are exactly three things that could have happened relative to the sponsor list and a vote on Medicare for All:
1) the vote would have exactly matched the sponsor list, and it would have been a total waste of time;
2) a bunch of people who put their name on the list would have voted No, and you would have seen a demoralized base;
3) knowing that the vote was doomed to fail, people in lefty districts who were didn't want Medicare for All would have voted Yes to fend off primary challengers, knowing that they would never vote Yes if it actually had a chance of passage.
And either way, Nancy Pelosi becomes Speaker. So, what exactly would forcing the vote accomplish?
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AUTONOMEN LX I wrote, made calls, and signed petitions to get Medicare for All, and I supported the one candidate who actually supported Medicare for All in the Presidential race. As part of a larger effort in Philadelphia (I did mine with DSA and Philly for Bernie, but other groups such as Health Care 4 All PA and Neighborhood Networks played a role as well), I personally knocked on hundreds, if not thousands of doors and got others to sign petitions, call their member of Congress, and do the same thing I was doing, and we got two members of Congress (Dwight Evans and Brendan Boyle) to sign on.
And yes, I used a first person that didn't include the Force the Vote crowd, because when I ask what you have done, I either get silence, people who think that hashtag activism is activism, or excuses. Considering the fact that you tend to think that demanding a vote and "holding people to their word" when if people actually followed their word would be 100 votes shy in the House and 37 in the Senate shows a lack of understanding of how to accomplish anything.
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@TheAcousticgrace I have watched enough of Jimmy Dore to know what I saw. If anyone else had invoked 24 to justify torture, he wouldn't have said, "You don't really support torture do you?" "Okay, good. Now we've got that out of the way."
The votes simply are not there, so what good will having a vote do? It will do worse than nothing, because it will discredit the movement as wasting time on a bill that was 100 votes shy.
I care because stuff like this distracts from the necessary work, and it is done to discredit those people who actually are doing the work. You said "if not now, when?" The answer is when the work is done and we get 218 & 50. Every attempt at universal or near-universal health care that failed in this country meant that any effort would lie dormant for at least a decade, and the next one would be weaker than the last. Why do you think this time would be any different? If it is what you really want, do you really want to see it fail only for a public option vote more than 10 years away to follow? If Force the Vote isn't going to Do the Work, why do you think that you would be successful in primarying 104 incumbents?
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@DemonDante1000 You're not "part of a coalition that can't be taken for granted and has to be listened to." How well did that work out after 2000? Or 2016? You're not part of any coalition as long as you are Green, except for with Republicans given how much they help you out with ballot access and lawyers when you're too incompetent to fill out a petition form properly and you can gum up the works to make it harder for everyone else to vote like in Wisconsin the last time.
No, you didn't answer the question. You just insist that by helping Republicans win that you are the power breakers. Well, Democrats won plenty of elections without you. With that less than 1% Greens get in most elections, you're barely an afterthought. Oh, but this one, where you openly say that you want the would-be fascist dictator to win, will be the one where Democrats do what you want. You didn't answer because the first step to your plan has happened twice, and instead of the leftist utopia you promised, we got the Iraq War, the Roberts Court, and an attempted coup. Great plan!
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@DemonDante1000 No, wait. I just woke up, and my brain is just now seeing it. Here is what it means that enough people tried it your way: at one point, you specifically said that WHEN (caps yours) Trump wind in November, then Democrats will have no choice but to listen to you. Well, in 2000, the number of Nader voters in Florida were nearly 200 times the number Bush "won" by. And did a hardcore lefty win the nomination in 2004? No, Kerry did. In 2016, exit polls showed that Johnson and Stein voters overwhelmingly favored Hillary to the point where it definitely made the difference for Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin and possibly in Pennsylvania. So, using the accelerationist argument that you made in that sentence, the Democrats should have done what you wanted, but Bernie got a lower percentage of the vote the second time out. And Bush and Trump nominated five members of the Supreme Court.
So, Step One of your Underpants Gnomes theory if political change not only didn't bring the leftist utopia you claim to want, but it brought us to the brink of a fascist dictatorship.
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@DemonDante1000 Re: what the American people want, how many Americans have you actually talked to to try to organize to get the world that you claim to want? I'm guessing my number is higher than yours. In some of those conversations, I was working with the DSA to help Bernie and to build support for Medicare for All to pressure members of Congress in the Philadelphia area to sign on to Bernie's bill. In several conversations, I noticed that there were a lot of people who actually wanted a public option when mentioning Medicare for All. The Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed that a majority who supported Medicare for All were vaguely talking about universal coverage. (This was no doubt helped along with grifters like Yang calling his proposal Medicare for All when it wasn't even a public option, and Buttigeig with Medicare for All Who Want It.) So, when the needle didn't move despite Biden saying he wouldn't sign Medicare for All, once I was removed enough from the bubble of a campaign, I realized that was because those numbers didn't mean what we thought we did. So, to apply this to your argument, if Americans really wanted a third party, we'd have one, but the fact that none has gotten 5% since Perot, only one third party or third-party candidate has gotten 5% or more in successive elections (Perot, although the Socialists just missed that in 1916 after getting 6% in 1912), and every third party that has gotten 5% has gotten far less votes the second time around says that maybe, just maybe, Americans don't want a third party long term, especially if one or both of the major parties will adopt their proposals if they actually prove to be popular enough.
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@hydratanksamari I don't know if the OP is being sincere or trolling, but expanding the child tax credit helps pay bills, but we need construction (including public housing) so people can actually buy a house, and we need to do things that our capitalist system will not crack down on when it comes to who can buy a home.
In order to get a home loan, banks tend to say that you can't borrow if the house to income ratio is greater than 4:1. In 1950, the median house was less than twice the median income. Today, that ratio is closer to 8. And it's harder to save because rent is so high, so the down payment is that much lower, which means that mortgage payments are higher and people have to pay mortgage insurance. If you can somehow manage to overcome all this and still find a house, shell purchasers will offer to pay above the asking price and in cash, so good luck competing with that. Then, the shell purchasers turn around and put a For Rent sign up, and because way too many people who should be in the housing market are forced into the rental market, prices go sky high, meaning that you can't save, and the cycle gets worse and worse.
Housing is in a death spiral at this point, and everyone except for renters benefits from higher prices (landlords get to charge higher rent, sellers get more money, real estate gets its cut, local governments get more revenue from property taxes, which means schools are better, and homeowners get to show off how rich they are), so there is no market incentive to address the problem.
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@nicholasrapose196 I agree that he's incredibly frustrating. When I lived in West Virginia, I voted for other candidates as a protest, because he was never in any close races. (Had I stayed longer, I would have voted for him in the 2008 primary because his primary opponent ran to his right.) However, I would have voted for him in a heartbeat if those races were close. But what do you expect from someone in a state where Trump won by 42 and 39 points? Maybe if we mobilized ourselves more in close races in Maine and North Carolina, we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place. I get the frustration, but we shouldn't take it to self-destructive places. I'm all for anything to embarrass him as long as he does awful stuff like this and won't vote in a way that helps his constituents more often. (In all honesty, I think he's going to retire, because he used to be much better at threading the needle to avoid completely alienating the left, and when he was the deciding vote, he didn't torpedo legislation in the past, just wanted to water it down.)
Now, Sinema on the other hand, hers is just baffling. Her state went blue in 2020, barely went red in 2016, and there is another Senator to her left in the state who is far more popular.
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@nodnarbeht9505 Yes, because autocorrect forgets that there are two Virginias all the time. I've had autocorrect change words, but I've literally never seen it delete words when you spell out an entire word that fits the contexts and works as a state.
And you want to know what helps Republicans get into power? They celebrate every accomplishment no matter how small, and if we get 90% of what we want, we spend all of our time complaining about the 10% that we didn't get. That, and the fact that too many of our voters are a) lazy (won't bother to vote), and/or b) have no sense of strategy (think that voting third party is a viable strategy to get what you want). I dealt with tons of people who whined that the stimulus check was $1400 instead of $2000, and others who complained that because they didn't have kids, they didn't get the child tax credit.
Then again, I'm not the one who wants to literally hand power to Mitch McConnell and think that's going to suddenly help. Pro tip: the American people don't really care who controls Congress. If things don't happen, they blame the President's party, and you want to guarantee that literally nothing will happen for the next year, which will guarantee that literally nothing will for the next two.
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@ravendawnhead97 Yang doesn't just want to cut SSI and SNAP. He wants to cut a total of 125 programs, but he has only listed seven that he didn't walk back because they were politically unfeasible: TANF, SNAP, WIC, SSI, LIHEAP, daycare subsidies, and housing subsidies. Just to use an example about people "not needing it," imagine a single parent making $20,000/year. That parent has two young children. Daycare for two children is well over $1000/month, so either that person will have to give up the benefits that make his/her job possible (and someone at that income level is almost certainly also on SNAP and WIC), or get nothing and have to pay an extra 10% on everything that Yang doesn't deem essential.
And your talk about making it more generous and including children is rebutted by Yang himself who told Ben Shapiro that he wouldn't increase it because the "magic of a thousand bucks a month is that it is below the poverty level for one person, so people would need to work in order to have any life that motivates them" (emphasis his). He doesn't want a more expensive program. He wants to destroy the existing social safety net. There will always be poor and disabled people, and there will always be frictional unemployment. Ignoring that is totally callous.
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@OfficialSeth Heck, yeah! I, too, was one of the Draft Warren people, although I gave up by the summer of 2015. I remember seeing Bernie on The Ed Show (sadly, the last consistent voice for workers on major American TV to this day), and Bernie kept saying, "If no one will run to stand up against Wall Street greed, I will!" Looking back, I think that he was probably one of the people behind the scenes begging hard for her to run, but sometimes in life, fortune favors the brave. Now, her proposals seem disappointing in comparison.
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@Xianfaquanli Ah, yes. The old right-wing talking point about how you don't oppose increasing wages for workers because you are anti-worker, but because you are really pro-worker and don't want to see workers lose jobs. Well, besides the fact that it is phased in over several years (Bernie's plan is four, the House bill that passed was seven), and the states and municipalities that increased it to $15 did not see an increase in unemployment or inflation relative to the surrounding areas that didn't do it, what opposing increasing the minimum wage wage really tells me is that a lot of people who claim to care about working people are just fine with poverty and starvation wages.
And I think you missed my entire point. First of all, I don't care if they get one book at all, that is a tax that still harms them. Second, there are plenty of things that people do buy that may very well be considered a "luxury" under this definition that they will pay. Third, if he had made his proposal both/and and actually wanted to use a progressive tax to pay for it instead of continuing his streak as the I Give Up candidate, then there would be no chance of imagining a scenario where his plan hurts the poor and disabled. Finally, in your "not hurting them," you are forgetting how inequality works. The complaint about wages isn't that they have gone down, but that they have stagnated relative to inflation, and as the rungs get farther apart on the economic ladder, that harms the people at the bottom, so if everyone gets benefits but them (and the ones who currently get benefits that are less than $1000/month don't get the full benefit because they have to give up what they currently get in order to get his money), they will suffer and income inequality will get worse. Great plan!
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@AdamSmith-gs2dv The leaders per capita within the last week were Idaho, Montana, West Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Wyoming, Alabama, South Carolina, Kentucky, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania. In other words, you have to go through nine red states and a state with a Republican governor shunning such mandates before finding a blue state with a Democratic governor, and that governor lost a lot of his power of emergency declarations when the Legislature took it to the people that they could override any emergency declaration after 21 days.
In the rolling per capita count, New Jersey is 44th, being led by Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Kansas, and Rhode Island. So, either blue states or states with a Democratic governor.
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@aliamjon2550 I do have a child. Then again, the fact that I am not a selfish jerk tells me that I should feel sorry for the life lessons that you are teaching your children.
No, why I feel that way is because when I was younger, my family didn't have health insurance. My dad worked harder than just about anyone I know, but he didn't make much money and worked a job that didn't offer it. My brother broke his arm when I was in fifth grade and he was in third, and three weeks later, my mom found out that she needed her gallbladder removed, but no one would do it because of a nearly $5000 outstanding bill. Finally, after eight months, a bank gave him a loan for a down payment on the surgery, and the gallbladder became gangrenous. My mom nearly died because of selfish jerks like you whining about "long lines." I'm not teaching my daughter to fail on the lessons of basic humanity like you did and do.
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@robinsss No, that is not the issue. Things are owned privately and publicly, and there are things that are for public use and not for public use. If either or both are public, you are not allowed to discriminate. The fact that you want anything that is for public use to be allowed to be discriminatory is appalling.
Aside from my example of travelers not being able to use public highways due to discrimination by restaurants, gas stations, and hotels is shameful, and you want to go back to the days where such things are possible, there are also small rural towns with only one grocery store. If that store suddenly decides that it wants to discriminate (which you want them to be allowed to do), you are in effect making that town unlivable for those who are discriminated against. Once again, libertarian thought is based on self-centeredness and callousness, because you don't care about how your beliefs affect others.
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@robinsss No, it is your job to prove you care, when your actions show indifference to people and you insist that you actually do care. The effect on people never seems to matter at all in libertarian thought.
I get that you want to pretend that you're engaging in the issue, but I have answered your question about the difference between a private club and a business that is open to the public many times. When you open your business to everyone, you are bound by certain rules in how you treat the public.
Re: government owned grocery stores and gas stations, I never said that it was inherently good or bad. There's a town in Florida that bought its grocery store when the Almighty Market said that it was too small to be profitable and threatened to turn them into a food desert, and they're doing just fine. You're the one who has no problem with people doing business using public infrastructure to discriminate against people to the point where you pretend that you are compassionate by saying that you'd make an exception if it was life or death, but the Texas abortion ban proves how hollow those exceptions are, because those who want to ignore the exception will insist that it's not really a life or death situation after all. And you getting mad when I point out the effect of discrimination in gas stations and grocery stores, especially in isolated areas, seems more like someone mad that he got called out than someone who actually cares about how it affects people.
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@vincesmith2499 "Then GET property. It's not that hard."
Do you know anything about the real world, or is everything a hypothetical for you? The usual rule of thumb in order to get a loan is a debt to income ratio of no more than 4:1. In 1950, the median house in America cost a little less than twice than the median income. Today, that ratio is over 7:1. Still, if you somehow manage to save up enough to make a down payment and make a bid even though rental costs are through the roof (since you want landlords to be able to charge whatever they want, obviously that isn't going to change), then you have to deal with fronts for private equity firms bidding way over market price (a friend of my daughter had to move a couple years ago when her dad got a job out of state, and someone bid $40K over asking price in cash), and a few months later, the For Sale sign gets replaced with a For Rent sign, with astronomical rates that cause a ripple effect throughout the market, both increasing demand for rent (which increases the price) and reducing the supply for buyers (which increases price). All things that your belief system encourages, or at the very least does nothing to rein in. How does it feel to be a 21st-century Marie Antoinette?
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@definitiveentertainment1658 I think of it this way: you don't get a dollar by asking for a quarter. Obama tried to get the public option, which was already a compromise, and we ended up with the Republican alternative to Hillarycare that Bill said didn't go far enough. If Bernie tries and fails for Medicare for All and has to settle for a public option, I can live with that, but if we start with a public option, we're doomed from the start.
I think there is also the Overton Window effect. In 1981, Reagan was considered radical for dropping the top marginal tax rate to 50%. Now, asking for a top rate of 50% is seen as radical on the left. Even if Bernie doesn't get all of what he wants, he'll get some, and that's good enough for me, because instead of the last three Democratic Presidents each having a legitimate claim to the title Most Conservative Democratic President Since Grocer Cleveland. Bernie will stop that streak, and maybe be Most Lefty President Since Franklin Roosevelt, or maybe he won't even need the qualifier.
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@1MarkKeller You started by saying "be careful about Vote Blue No Matter Who," and you gave Manchin as the example and how he tries to appeal to Republicans. Well, like it or not, if we are going to win races in red states, they might have to get a little slack. (And before you point out that Bernie won WV in 2016, that was obviously a case of people voting against Hillary. Heck, an incarcerated felon got 41% against Obama in 2012.) Then, you pivoted to Ryan "appealing to Republicans." Well, assuming turnout more or less matches 2020, he needs his base to be 15% of Republicans to get over the top. Manchin needs his to be at least 40% Republican. Can you see the difference between the two? What am I missing?
I, for one, follow the adage of "the farthest candidate to the left who can win." Like it or not, that is Manchin in West Virginia. (Or was, because he burned a lot of bridges on BBB, and since he barely beat Morrissey in 2018 and will be 77 at the end of his term, I doubt that he'll run again.)
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@Nekulturny So true about meeting your heroes. When I was four, I was big a fan of George Jones. My parents found out that he was doing a show about an hour from our house, and we were supposed to get to meet him. Not only did that not happen, but his bodyguards were quite hostile (and I didn't remember all of the details because I was four, but my mom who stands all of 4'8 was trying to get a picture of the concert, and said bodyguard "moshed" where we were standing right into her and when she got the pictures, every single one was blurry.) The next day, I said, "I don't think I like George Jones anymore," and 38 years later, I've never voluntarily listened to his music since.
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I get the feeling, since Iowa was never really close until 2016 (Obama won by seven, Kerry won by six, Gore won by 29, Harkin won by 72, Gephardt won by four, Mondale by 33, Carter won by 15 the first time and 28 the second time, and Muskie won by 13), close enough was all they thought they needed since the real vote was delegates to the county convention which came later. Not defending it at all, but this is an example of the margin of error exceeding the margin of victory, and you'd think they would have been ready, but you would be wrong.
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A Oh And as long as we are talking about personal experiences, my parents and my niece came to visit, and while here, we went on a couple of factory tours (Herr's Snack Factory and Tour in Nottingham, and the Martin Guitar Factory Tour and Museum in Nazareth), and in each case, human hands caused a bottleneck in production (finding rotten potatoes at the former, lacquering at the latter) where having a machine do it caused an increase in employment, and everyone in the lacquer department was retrained so no one lost a job. Automation can be done in a way to benefit the few, or the many, and giving up and just saying "take away all of our jobs and give us a little bit of money" is not going to benefit anyone.
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@bluesrockfan36 "We progressives" don't support regressive taxation and a version of the UBI that was descended from Milton Friedman and Charles Murray that was designed to get rid of the existing social safety net. The difference between the two is that they wanted to get rid of it right away, which made it more obvious what they were doing, but Yang wants to do it gradually. Yes specifically told Dave Rubin that this was his ultimate goal. He told Ben Shapiro that he wouldn't increase it because "the magic of a thousand bucks a month is that it is below the poverty level for one person, which means that people have to work if they want any life of meaning" (emphasis added).
Now, just like the other people who think they have crunched the numbers, you are forgetting one thing: a lot of poor and disabled people won't get jack squat. Here are some examples, based on the six programs of the 125 that Yang has mentioned that will force people to give up in order to get his money:
1) TANF in New Hampshire is over $1000
2) TANF in Alaska is $923 (and they don't forfeit their oil reserve fund, either), and it is over $700 in New York and California. Once you add SNAP, they are over $1000. And those families are probably also getting LIHEAP.
3) Daycare for two children in PA is over $1500/month, and those families will almost certainly get WIC.
4) Housing subsidies is well over $1000 in high rent areas.
So, you want some poor single parent who is working to get nothing and then have to pay a VAT? That is the lefty objection to the freedom with 125 strings attached dividend. It doesn't help poor people, it hurts them.
You think that techno-libertarian is a dog whistle? You're funny. It refers to a lot of Silicon Valley types who like to present themselves as lefties, but when you dig into their politics and their business practices, they are as libertarian as they come. So, what did you think I meant?
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@coreysaylor4736 Yeah, that happened in 2000 and 2016. How did that work out? The only way that these sort of things work is to take over from the inside. People who make that argument seem to forget that, looking at the last realignment that took place, establishment Republicans won in 1968 and '72 and had a narrow miss in '76. Instead of taking our ball and going home, which only makes the establishment more hostile to us and leading too many voters to be so worried about who is there that they don't dare to dream, we need to run down ballot. People need to run for school board, city council, state legislature, and state and local party committees. This way, we get to take over from the establishment. Otherwise, you have to start over from scratch on hostile territory every time.
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@vibefrequencyable In the national polling average, she is eighth. In no early state is she higher than fifth or sixth. Quite frankly, if you look at actual polls, Bernie was not the beneficiary of the Harris attack, it was Warren. But in a deeper sense, the bigger beneficiary was and continues to be Biden, because he was the one getting attacked when Tulsi decided to change the subject. She defended Biden on busing and Iraq. The latter should prove once and for all that she isn't the peace candidate she claims to be.
How much more evidence do you need that she is helping Biden? She isn't viable anywhere, so if her votes would have otherwise gone to Bernie, that hurts him. If you argue that you want to see her in the debate, so be it, but if you didn't notice, her attack on Buttigieg totally backfired. She is losing her mojo.
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My family did not have health insurance until my dad got a union job as a saw mill worker when I was 16. When I was in fifth grade, my brother broke his arm, and we got harassed every day for months right at dinner time because the hospital felt that he wasn't paying the bill quickly enough (even though Democrats were still in charge in WV at the time, and it was the law that hospitals had to take any payment no matter how small, as long as you were making an effort to pay). Three weeks later, my mom was told that she needed her gallbladder removed. No hospital would do it without a down payment. Finally, eight months later, she got her surgery, but the gallbladder had become gangrenous. By the grace of God, she is still here. No 11 year old should ever have to worry about his mom dying, and no mother should have to worry about leaving a widower with an 11- and 9-year-old because of a lack of health insurance. This is why I straight up loathe anyone who talks so blithely about how either the free market doesn't kill people who aren't covered or pretend that it is trivial. It's not trivial when it's your family.
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@MrEboxez Indeed. A few years ago, some guys at work asked me why I cared so much about universal health care. I told them about growing up without health insurance until I was 16, and the time I was in fifth grade and my brother was in third, and he broke his arm (two days before my dad got paid so he could get the insurance that covered us on school property), and how we got harassed by creditors for months because they felt that he wasn't paying them fast enough. Then, I told them how a few weeks later, my mom found out that she needed her gallbladder removed, but no hospital would do so for months while my dad tried to get the money together for a down payment on the surgery. In the seven months that it took for him to succeed (he literally had to get a bank loan), her gallbladder became gangrenous, and there but for the grace of God she didn't became a statistic, and they responded with silence. None of them ever did change their position on the issue to my knowledge.
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@Johnny-h7v1f Date of show and timestamps. You know why? Because there are these things called variations, and the vaccine was so effective against the original virus and the early mutations that, had people have gotten the vaccine in late 2020 and early 2021 and taken it seriously for just a few more months, the virus would have never mutated, and Delta would have never become a thing. As a matter of fact, the original, the Alpha, and the Beta variants? They're pretty much gone. Maddow never said it would happen, she said it could happen, and that was the case before the anti-vaccine crowd insisted on endangering themselves and others. You see, in science, there are these things called data points, and when they change, often the conclusions change as well. A third of the population refusing to get vaccinated or practice any mitigation factors? "Watch me spread and change!"
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@unevilGenius Okay. You didn't answer the question about Catch and Release. It was a tactic pioneered by Tom DeLay. It involves making sure that you get the desired result while allowing members a chance to keep up appearances. In his case, it was about letting "moderate" members appear to be. Barney Frank famously described it as "There is no such thing is a moderate Republican. They might say that they vote with the President [Bush at the time] 70% of the time, but they vote with the President 100% of the time when he needs their votes."
So, there are one of exactly three possible results relative to the sponsor list.
1) The sponsor list is accurate, and the bill falls 100 votes short, killing any possible momentum.
2) The Soft Yes members become Hard No, and now you're even farther away than when you started (considering that at least one sponsor in the 116th who is still in the House isn't on the list in the 117th, this may have already happened).
3) Pelosi uses Catch and Release to let a few members in lefty districts to vote Yes in order to avoid another AOC/Bowman, so you have deflated the momentum against someone like Hakeem Jefferies, and now you have someone who'll never vote Yes if it really is possible.
Tell me, please, how any of these are good if your goal is to actually get to 218 votes in the House?
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@Red Leader Okay, now you have just shown what a liar you really are. I don't care if his running mate moved four houses down the road, the rules say that all information has to be accurate on the form. Someone noticed the address discrepancy and Wisconsin sent the Green Party an affidavit they could fill out to correct the error. They didn't do it, so the Elections Board proceeded without the Hawkins/Walker ticket. Municipal clerks did their jobs and went forward with the full list. Then, two weeks later, the Wisconsin Green Party files a lawsuit. They only wanted to gum up the works, and you present this as onerous.
Andrew Yang got kicked off the ballot in the Ohio primary because his campaign didn't bother to include a page saying what office he was running for in his petition. Like you, his campaign went on and on about what an affront to democracy this was, but those rules hadn't changed at all. They were there for all to see. If you are that incompetent, that proves that you are not ready to be President.
If you want to defend such stupidity, that's your business, but the fact that you feel the need to lie about it shows who you really are.
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@standupguy12 Except Yang refuses to provide a full list of the programs that people have to forfeit if they take his money. He has listed a few (TANF, SNAP, WIC, LIHEAP, daycare subsidies, housing subsidies). Based on what we know, there are already people who get more than $1000/month:
1) TANF in New Hampshire is over $1000. In Alaska, it is $923, and New York and California are over $700. With SNAP maxing out for two people above $350, people in those states get more on those programs alone, and they will almost certainly get LIHEAP, too.
2) Housing subsidies
3) Daycare subsidies with multiple children in daycare (and they are probably getting WIC, too)
Those people pay VAT on dollar one, so they will be worse off.
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@standupguy12 *This offer does not apply to the poor who don't get it and have to pay more in taxes.
There, I fixed it for you by putting the asterisk that Yang Gang bangers so conveniently forget. Oh, yes, the Almighty Market will reduce rental costs. Other than a depressed economy, when has the Almighty Market EVER seen an overall reduction in rent? Rent will go up, not by the full thousand, but it will go up. When it does, people won't be able to save for their down payment, and if Yang is right that there won't be any jobs left, and no one can get other benefits, you are creating a world with a few trillionaires and everyone else scraping by on $12,000/year.
The reason why I can't go by what you Yang Gang bangers mean is because you support someone who is so fundamentally dishonest that I have no way of knowing whether or not you really think that or just conveniently always phrase things in a way that makes it sound more generous than it is, like your initial assertion that people have to spend $120K to lose out, even though there are people who won't see any extra money at all and now have to pay a tax.
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@standupguy12 I asked about rent, and you never provided an example of rent going down.
So, let's look at your argument that the freedom with 125 strings attached dividend will let people be mobile. Never mind the inherent contradiction of pimping the extended family in order to make the benefits look more generous, or moving in with friends (which only sounds like a good idea to a poor college student), yes, some people who are close to retirement will be able to move to cheaper land and retire. In my native state, a lot of people from the DC area started to realize how much cheaper the Eastern Panhandle was than the inner metro area and moved out there. End result? Yes, there was economic growth, but rent skyrocketed and homeless tripled from 1980-2005. So, when people have tried your theory, it didn't work. Your candidate opposes rent control, so rural homelessness will increase. It takes a far smaller influx of people to drive up housing costs in a down of two thousand than in a city of two million.
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