A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 238 of 725
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
With a program like Medicare-for-Kids-Only, all the childless people and all the people with grown-up-children don't want a program for Kids Only. Republicans can use that against Medicare-for-Kids-Only.
Exactly. I managed to say in one single sentence what it took you 5 paragraphs to say.
Given how many working class people have family insurance that already covers their kids until they're out of college anyhow, and that this extended family insurance for the kids is markedly cheaper than individual plans are, the amount of children who would benefit from this is extremely small.
It doesn't do anything at all to address the fact that after 18 not only won't they have insurance anymore, but now they'll be paying for other kids insurance.
Social Security is already a ponzi scheme. I don't see what the point of Medicare-4-Kids is, other than to hook them on government benefits when they're young.
It's not even worth debating since this program has even less of a chance of ever passing than the UBI would.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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The relentless Republican assault on unions in the industrial belt states during the first half of this decade was an unquestionable success, politically speaking. It resulted in decreased Democratic turnout.
Three scholars have produced a detailed analysis of the political effects of right-to-work laws which have been enacted in 27 states. The authors found “strong causal evidence” for the demobilizing “effects of right-to-work laws — examining state and federal elections from 1980 through 2016.” For Democrats, the demobilization after passage of such laws is devastating. “County-level Democratic vote shares in Presidential elections fall by 3.5 percentage points relative to bordering counties.”
Let me repeat that: in places with right-to-work laws, which effectively shut down unions entirely, the Democratic vote share drops by 3.5 percentage points. With that many additional votes, Democrats would have won every presidential election since 1992. This is why destroying unions is so important to Republicans.
Of course, it’s also important to the rich. The decline of union membership matches the decline of working-class income. As the working-class income share declines, the top 1% income share goes up by almost exactly the same amount.
More at www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/05/why-unions-are-so-important-to-
republicans/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Bernie Sanders doesn’t do bipartisanship. He doesn’t even do unipartisanship, refusing to call himself a Democrat even as he seeks the party’s nomination. But what Sanders appears to believe is that he can convince voters not just to support progressive policies, but to support sweeping policy changes that would try to fix things most people don’t consider broken.
That, after all, is what his Medicare for All push, which would eliminate private insurance, amounts to. He is saying to the 180 million Americans who currently have private insurance, many of whom are satisfied with their coverage: “I’m going to take away the insurance you have and replace it with a government program. Also, you’re going to pay a lot more in taxes. But trust me, the program will be better than what you have now, and the new taxes will be less than you currently pay in premiums.”
Could those claims be true? Yes. Will voters believe them? Probably not. Polling shows that support for Medicare for All falls off drastically when people are informed that it would eliminate private insurance and require higher taxes.
You might try to rationalize the Sanders position by saying that Medicare for All is an aspirational plan, and that in practice he would be willing to accept a more gradualist approach. But that’s not what his behavior suggests. On the contrary, Sanders has conspicuously refused to support measures that would enhance Obamacare, even as a temporary expedient.
For Sanders, then, it seems to be single-payer or bust. And what that would mean, with very high likelihood, is . . . bust.
Sanders is a romantic. He appears to live in an imaginary future where a popular tidal wave for him washes away all political obstacles. The man seems unready for the tough fights that will follow even if he wins.
www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/opinion/sanders-biden-2020.html
Most American workers would have more money with socialized health care:
https://qz.com/1610307/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Trump's negotiations on infrastructure leaves Republicans pushing back against Trump.
Every few months, President Donald Trump gets in the negotiating room with Democrats and everyone leaves happy — except for the president’s own party.
This time, Republicans had to rein in the president from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue since they didn’t have a seat at the table. But the message was basically the same: Trump’s tentative infrastructure agreement with Democrats is little more than a pipe dream that won’t go far in the GOP-controlled Senate. “A lot of us enjoy watching … the trial balloons he floats. And oftentimes they’re extreme and aspirational,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.). “And then the pushback comes, oftentimes from his own party.”
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) emphasized that any legislation needs to be fully paid for and sought to put some perspective on the massive price tag. “Two trillion is really ambitious. If you do a 35-cent increase in the gas tax for example, index for inflation, it only gets you half a trillion,” said Thune, a former commerce chairman.
www.politico.com/story/2019/05/02/trump-republicansinfrastructure-demo
crats-1296825
Well, fine, let’s do a 35-cent increase in the gas tax and settle for half a trillion. We’d get more infrastructure and a little less gasoline use. What’s not to like?
Just kidding, of course. That’s a tax increase. We all know that’s impossible. Really, the only way to fund infrastructure is to cut Medicaid and food stamps and then privately finance all the construction, to be paid for by tolls on its usage.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
With a program like Medicare-for-Kids-Only, all the childless people and all the people with grown-up-children don't want a program for Kids Only. Republicans can use that against Medicare-for-Kids-Only.
Exactly. I managed to say in one single sentence what it took you 5 paragraphs to say.
Given how many working class people have family insurance that already covers their kids until they're out of college anyhow, and that this extended family insurance for the kids is markedly cheaper than individual plans are, the amount of children who would benefit from this is extremely small.
It doesn't do anything at all to address the fact that after 18 not only won't they have insurance anymore, but now they'll be paying for other kids insurance.
Social Security is already a ponzi scheme. I don't see what the point of Medicare-4-Kids is, other than to hook them on government benefits when they're young.
It's not even worth debating since this program has even less of a chance of ever passing than the UBI would.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Republicans, do you remember your great fear of inflation?
In 2010-2011, the U.S. economy remained deeply depressed from the aftereffects of the burst housing bubble and the 2008 financial crisis. Unemployment was still above 9 percent; wage growth had slowed to a crawl, and measures of underlying inflation were well below the Federal Reserve’s targets. So the Fed was doing what it could to boost the economy — keeping short-term interest rates as low as possible, and buying long-term bonds in the hope of getting some extra traction.
But Republicans were up in arms, warning that the Fed’s policies would lead to runaway inflation. A Congressman named Mike Pence introduced a bill that would prohibit the Fed from even considering the state of the labor market in its actions. A who’s who of Republicans signed an open letter to Ben Bernanke demanding that he stop his monetary efforts, which they claimed would “risk currency debasement and inflation.”
And supposedly respectable Republicans engaged in conspiracy theorizing, suggesting that the Fed was secretly in league with the Obama administration. Paul Ryan and the economist John Taylor declared that the Fed’s policy “looks an awful lot like an attempt to bail out fiscal policy, and such attempts call the Fed’s independence into question.”
Of course, all these warnings were totally wrong. Inflation never took off. Although almost none of the people who waxed hysterical over inflation have so much as acknowledged having been wrong, Bernanke and Fed economists were proved right: printing money isn’t inflationary in a depressed economy.
Fast forward to today: Donald Trump attempted to install Stephen Moore at the Fed. But Moore should have been rejected out of hand simply on the basis of his economic views. Not only was Moore wrong, again and again, during the financial crisis and its aftermath; not only did he refuse to admit error, or learn anything from his mistakes; but he turned on a dime as soon as Trump was in office. He demanded higher interest rates when unemployment was above 9 percent; now he’s demanding lower rates with unemployment below 4 percent.
The whole GOP has followed the same path. Mike Pence, who demanded higher rates in the deeply depressed economy of 2010, wants lower rates now. No Republicans in Congress seem to have criticized Moore for his policy views, as opposed to his misogyny. Aside from Harvard’s Greg Mankiw, not one prominent Republican economist stepped up to oppose Moore, even though he clearly was engaged precisely in the kind of politicization of monetary policy Taylor and Ryan claimed to see in 2010.
More at www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/opinion/the-sabotage-years.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How Abraham Lincoln helped rig the Senate for Republicans
https://thinkprogress.org/how-abraham-lincoln-rigged-the-senate-for-re
publicans/amp/
By 2040, according to a University of Virginia analysis of Census population projections, about half of the country will live in just eight states — which means 16 senators for one half of America and 84 for the other half. Meanwhile, according to Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden, partisanship closely correlates with population density — “as you go from the center of cities out through the suburbs and into rural areas, you traverse in a linear fashion from Democratic to Republican places.”
America is fast approaching a tipping point where the GOP will enjoy a permanent supermajority in the United States Senate — and with it, permanent control over the federal judiciary. Democrats have no choice. They must embrace the Party of Lincoln’s tactic of selectively admitting new states, or they must perish.
In 1860 the virtually unpopulated Nevada became its own territory. Republicans would admit it as a state just four years later. That gave the Party of Lincoln two extra seats in the Senate — helping prevent Democrats from simultaneously controlling the White House and both houses of Congress until 1893.
Nor was this selective admission of the Republican state of Nevada an isolated case. Among other things, the reason why there are two Dakotas — despite the fact that both states are so underpopulated that they each only rate a single member of the House of Representatives to this day — is because Republicans won the 1888 election and decided to celebrate by giving themselves four senators instead of just two.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The traditional economic analysis is that growth comes from innovation, innovation comes from competitive markets, and competitive markets come from government getting the hell out of the way. We’ve gotten that dead wrong. Yes, growth comes from innovation, and innovation comes from competitive markets, but competitive markets — be they economic or political — don’t come from a laissez-faire government. They come from policymakers breaking up concentrations of power, because the last thing power wants is competition.
At heart, the role of power in our society is straightforward. Unchecked power does what it does best: It replicates and concentrates. Power chokes off competitive markets, tilts political outcomes, rewrites the rules in its own favor.
Moreover, the idea that the rich and the powerful just want the government to leave them alone has been disproven again and again. What they want is to be protected from competition and subsidized by taxpayers:
Over the last 50 years, we see evidence of this approach in every sector of our economy. Agricultural giants not only fought for less oversight of food safety, but they also sought big subsidies for their companies. Drug corporations fought regulations that oversee the products that they introduce to the market, but they welcomed those that lengthen market exclusivity rights and allow their prices to skyrocket.
The story of this era is we handed our government over to markets and handed our markets over to corporations. The results speak for themselves. Slow growth. Weak wages. Rising inequality. The 2008 financial crisis. An angry populace that turned to an even angrier demagogue for salvation.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/5/10/18527233/democrats-2020-powe
r-sanders-warren-socialism-money
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The congressional process for addressing disasters has been around for some time, and it’s heavily flawed. The sluggish appropriations process can cause significant delays in the delivery of aid.
It’s an unsustainable approach, disaster preparedness experts say, given the surge we’ve seen in natural disasters in recent years. And it desperately needs to change as this trend continues.
Over the past several decades, the government responded to roughly six disasters a year that caused $1 billion each in damages. But between 2014-2018 that number spiked to 13 disasters a year.
Massive flooding overwhelmed multiple states in the Midwest. A “bomb cyclone” exacerbated the issue. And lawmakers still have yet to approve a dime, on a package they’ve been debating since last December.
All of this is to say that the way the US approaches disaster aid hasn’t kept up with the pace of climate change.
Congress is currently caught up in a spending battle over disaster aid, and it’s largely because of Trump’s aversion to helping places that did not vote for him. The politicization of disaster aid has been disheartening for some experts.
According to a FiveThirtyEight analysis, “voters reward presidents for spending on relief, but not for spending on preparedness.” The argument for spending more on mitigation, though not as self-evidently and immediately beneficial, has been proven by numerous studies: A review by National Institute of Building Sciences found that every $1 invested in preventative efforts translated to $6 saved in longer-term relief costs.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/5/16/18617697/disaster-aid-senate
-puerto-rico-trump-climate-change
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The congressional process for addressing disasters has been around for some time, and it’s heavily flawed. The sluggish appropriations process can cause significant delays in the delivery of aid.
It’s an unsustainable approach, disaster preparedness experts say, given the surge we’ve seen in natural disasters in recent years. And it desperately needs to change as this trend continues.
Over the past several decades, the government responded to roughly six disasters a year that caused $1 billion each in damages. But between 2014-2018 that number spiked to 13 disasters a year.
Massive flooding overwhelmed multiple states in the Midwest. A “bomb cyclone” exacerbated the issue. And lawmakers still have yet to approve a dime, on a package they’ve been debating since last December.
All of this is to say that the way the US approaches disaster aid hasn’t kept up with the pace of climate change.
Congress is currently caught up in a spending battle over disaster aid, and it’s largely because of Trump’s aversion to helping places that did not vote for him. The politicization of disaster aid has been disheartening for some experts.
According to a FiveThirtyEight analysis, “voters reward presidents for spending on relief, but not for spending on preparedness.” The argument for spending more on mitigation, though not as self-evidently and immediately beneficial, has been proven by numerous studies: A review by National Institute of Building Sciences found that every $1 invested in preventative efforts translated to $6 saved in longer-term relief costs.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/5/16/18617697/disaster-aid-senate
-puerto-rico-trump-climate-change
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
The Russiagate lie didn't work. The tax issue is going nowhere.
Pray for violent acts of god to destroy everything so you can blame it on Trump.
Maybe that will work.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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