Comments by "Roger Dodger" (@rogerdodger8415) on "For All | Bernie Sanders" video.
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Bolshevik Bernie???? FOR WHAT?? Tax breaks for "the rich"?? Poor people don't pay taxes now!! Conservatives know that strong families are what make America thrive. They build up our neighborhoods, sustain our communities, pass down our values, and create a brighter future for every American citizen.
Yet for years, Washington has treated families as an afterthought—at best—and an outright barrier to “progress” at worst. President Donald J. Trump knows that bureaucrats shouldn’t have the final say in raising our kids. So from child care to school choice to paid family leave, the Trump Administration is putting parents back in control.
🎬 Watch: President Trump is putting control back into parents’ hands!
Today, President Trump and Ivanka Trump hosted a White House Summit on Child Care and Paid Family Leave. “Our goal is simple,” the President said. “We want to expand child care options and reduce unnecessary regulations so that parents can choose the best care for their children, including, and very importantly, in-home and faith-based care.”
After all, how families balance work and raising children is a deeply personal choice. Government’s mission should be to support parents as they make the best decision possible for their families, not to dictate a one-size-fits-all “solution” for every household.
That support begins with access to quality child care, both from safe providers and from parents themselves. “In more than 60 percent of American homes, both parents work,” President Trump said. “Yet many struggle to afford child care, which often costs more than $10,000 per year. And it’s devastating to families, frankly. Devastating.”
Help is on the way. In his State of the Union Address this February, President Trump called for Congress to pass paid family leave into law. One week ago, legislators introduced “very strong bipartisan legislation, Paid Family Leave legislation,” the President said today. “We were thrilled.”
This kind of support for working families has defined the Trump Administration’s economic and social agenda since day one:
The President signed legislation last year securing historic funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which helps low-income families access quality child care programs.
The Trump tax cuts included a new tax credit that incentivizes companies to offer paid family leave to their employees.
The Administration worked with Congress to secure paid parental leave for all Federal employees as part of the National Defense Authorization Act.
The President’s tax cuts also doubled the child tax credit, benefitting more than 40 million American families with an average of over $2,200 apiece this year.
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Bernie is a fraud... Successive French administrations of both the left and right have been trying to reform this and other aspects of the country’s statist economy for decades, with limited results. Social benefits, once given, are hard to pare, much less withdraw. Hence the frequent strikes: Since 1789, French governments have been acutely sensitive to mass protests, and too often have capitulated to them.
Hence also France’s perennial economic crisis.
The country’s unemployment rate has not fallen below 7 percent since 1983 and is now at 8.6 percent. Long-term unemployment exceeds 40 percent, compared with 13.3 percent in the US. The country’s annual growth rate has barely exceeded an average of 1 percent per year since the 21st century began. It’s expected to come in at 1.3 percent for this year.
As of last year, the median monthly take-home pay was just $1,930, meaning half of all French workers make even less. It’s why the country erupted in protest when Macron proposed raising fuel taxes a few cents per liter.
How much of this is a matter of the French making different, arguably better, choices when it comes to balancing work and leisure? Surely some. And how much of it is made up for by quality public services, strong worker protections, and fewer economic inequalities? Some, too.
Then again, the health service that used to be the toast of Francophiles is overwhelmed, understaffed, and “on the brink of collapse,” according to a report in The Guardian. French universities, while cheap, are overcrowded, underfunded, and notoriously mediocre: “Too easy to get in and too easy to get out,” as one local observer put it. French workers exercise their right to strike roughly seven times more frequently than German workers do, and 125 times more than Swiss ones.
As for income inequality, France is certainly much less unequal than the US. But France’s top 1 percent still held 22 percent of the country’s wealth at the beginning of 2018. That was despite a draconian effort by the previous Socialist government to impose a super-tax on high earners. It raised scant revenue while accelerating the exodus of the rich. Like many European attempts at imposing a wealth tax, it was quickly repealed.
All of this should stand as a stark warning to Democrats. France has the highest overall tax take among OECD countries (46.9 percent of GDP), the highest rate of government spending, (56.38 percent of GDP), the highest rate of safety-net spending, and the third-highest rate of pension spending.
Whatever else all this taxing and spending might be doing, it’s clearly not creating jobs or prosperity.
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