Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

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Is this true? From my personal vantage point, young folks in the west don't seem to want change at all. They tend to support establishment politics. Even pop culture is full of artists promoting the establishment.

For example, consider John Stewart - he's somehow made a shtick of mocking the establishment while somehow calling for them to have more power and deligitimizing anyone who is outside the mainstream.

Insofar as young people want "change", it seems merely to be going back to mythical glorious past era when a single person could support a family, have "health care" and engage in real estate speculation via the proceeds of unskilled manual labor. They believe this "change" will happen mainly by funneling more money into existing programs and bringing back a few policies from the recent past.

(Admittedly, the tech world is an exception to this. And my vantage point might be skewed due to spending my US life in NY.)

What change do you believe the young want today?

I'm 23. Here's a few things I'd like to see progress on:

  Affordable education and access to high quality teachers.
  Bringing our healthcare cost/efficacy profile into line with other advanced economies.
  Repairing and rebuilding crumbling public infrastructure.
  Environmental reform, especially wrt carbon emissions & how we treat the oceans.
  Revisiting social security to ensure its long-term viability.
  Reducing the government's ability to invade privacy.
  Ending the "war on drugs" and regulating/taxing it like the alcohol or tobacco industry.

I'm happy to pay more taxes on my relatively small income if they go towards reforms in these areas. As ex-fed president Kocherlakota notes [1], exceedingly low interest rates and cheap labor are creating a great environment for gov investment. Unfortunately, fiscal policy is stuck in a quagmire due to deep-seated ideological divisions in Washington D.C.

[1] https://sites.google.com/site/kocherlakota009/home/policy/th...

> Unfortunately, fiscal policy is stuck in a quagmire due to deep-seated ideological divisions in Washington D.C.

I'm hoping Donald Trump helps to solve this (or rather, helps the GOP implode.). The Republican party has been an ideological mess for the better part of a decade, and that anti-intellectualism is coming back around to bite them in the ass. When men of substance spend all their time tearing each other down, why is it a surprise that a clown is the only one able to rise above the fray?

We've needed to hit the reset button on the Republican party since the mid-90s. We're finally getting a chance now that the GOP's corporate backers have so obviously lost control, so hopefully we'll be able to get back to normal within a decade or so.

Only the last two items on your list (protecting privacy, ending the war on drug users) remotely qualify as change. Everything else qualifies as "funneling more money into existing programs".

Consider the most establishment presidential candidate in the race right now. Would Hillary Clinton even use different words to describe her policy proposals?

I could imagine policy details that might count as change, but you don't seem to be advocating those. E.g., if you wanted to provide affordable education by replacing teachers with Khan Academy, or cut infrastructure costs down to everywhere-else-in-the-world levels [1] by breaking the back of public employee unions or other such reforms. Are you advocating big change like this?

[1] Delhi Metro Phase 2, 77 miles of track and 85 stations cost Delhi $2.9B and 3 years. Hudson Yards, 1 mile of track and 1 station, cost NYC $2.5B and 9 years.

From my vantage point in the US, it does seem like a significant number of young people do want change. I'm basing this on the contrast between Bernie Sanders supporters, largely young people, and Hillary Clinton supporters, who have a lot less young people than Bernie supporters. As for what change young people want today, I'd say it's what Bernie is campaigning for, which does include health care but also free college for all, among other things that primarily concern young people.

As I said, they believe this "change" will happen mainly by funneling more money into existing programs...

How do? Single payer is not a existing program today.

> Single payer is not a existing program today.

Sanders explicitly says that his "single payer" plan is "Medicare for all". Medicare is an existing program. It hasn't been a single-payer system for quite a long time, though; it has been -- longer than the ACA has been around -- a lot like a federalized, rather than state-based, version of the ACA with subsidized private plans but with a public default option.

Medicare for all is more of a sound bite.

A proper single payer system would not have Medicare broken down into part A,B etc. It would be end to end covering diagnosis, treatment, drugs etc.

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