Everyone loves Bernie Sanders. Except, it seems, the Democratic party
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
So increasing minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, universal health care, protecting/expanding social security, and a bunch of other policies that would help the working class don't count?
The thing is policy doesn't matter. People want 140 characters that make them feel good even if it's bad policy.
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/8/14848636/hil...
[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/01/13/hillary-clinton-single-p...
Policy definitely won't matter if the messenger chooses not to make it part of the message.
It's definitely fair to say a large share of Trump voters went with their emotions as you said, but I think a lot of folks didn't believe Hillary would enact a progressive policy. If you look back to when she established herself as a politician in the 90s-00s (I'm being generous here), most of those issues were not what she was championing.
To someone that doesn't vote with their lizard brain, it's clear that establishment Dems have the wealthy as their #1, just like the GOP. That's the problem.
Maybe a lot of liberal folks thought that. I think there were many Trump voters who assumed that she would and they didn't want to see the country go further in that direction, and some of those voters would have preferred staying home to voting for Trump if they thought it wasn't necessary to vote for Trump to stop the country going further left.
This might fall under "lizard-brain" but you can see it in the kind of more-apocalyptic-than-usual rhetoric many people were using, e.g. "this is the Flight 93 election!!!" People saying that sort of crap aren't going to be feeling the Bern.
I wouldn't have voted for Bernie either but I would have been more likely to follow my initial desire to case a protest vote for a third party candidate.
She pushed Universal Healthcare in 93.
Those are issues that Obama ran on twice...
>but I think a lot of folks didn't believe Hillary would enact a progressive policy.
Did they not realize the alternative?
And then completely failed to enact or really even push (outside of ACA which I acknowledge as an improvement).
> Did they not realize the alternative?
They sure liked her in primary season despite plenty of evidence she was weaker against Trump.
Despite what every source of 'truth' that you have self selected has trained you to believe, we don't actually want more bennies. Subsisting on the bennies you decide you can afford for us is not our aspiration.
What would you consider a "pro-worker" agenda?
To be honest, no. Those don't count because most of the people who consider themselves to be the "working class" would be hurt by several of them.
A skilled tradesman who is making the equivalent of $25/hr doesn't want the minimum wage to go up. If it does, it dilutes his buying power. His wage isn't going to magically increase by $8.00/hr.
Unions have done themselves a huge disservice, by alienating the people who are not members but still have to work with them.
The ACA has turned off a lot of people from the idea of government managed health insurance. Many people, myself included, saw the quality of their coverage decrease because of the ACA.
It's weird how true this is. The ACA is the one thing that has accomplished the following : there was public talk on the streets about how democrats/Obama suck several times due to the ACA :
the two weeks when employer contribution became effective
then when the plans got changed in California and people had to choose
and finally when the plans were adjusted
In a lot of other places the employer mandate (which cause quite a few people to lose their jobs because their employer was forced to fire them, esp. in small businesses) mattered more. But Obamacare and the incredible cost increases it brought for everyone should be looked at as a failure.
It is really bizarre. She's said to be an awful politician, yet won the popular vote in '08, and in '16 during the primaries and general.
The voters she won in the primary were not the voters she needed to win. Oops.
EDIT: @akhilcacharya: Why expect independents to vote for your candidate if the party doesn't give them a say in the nominee? You want your cake and eating it too, and hence, you lose.
And after all, progressive candidates like Feingold and Teachout lost by an even bigger margin than Clinton in WI and Faso's district, respectively.
Personally I'd prefer the ballot process to be completely based on petitions, with parties having no direct role (they would of course endorse candidates; that endorsement shouldn't change the names that appear on ballots).
If they want a say, they are free to register with a party to do so.
Hillary Clinton is 69, female life expectancy is 78. Maybe not waste those 7 years not ruining America further for vanity?
78 - 69 = 9, and anyway that may be life expectancy at birth, but at age 69 female life expectancy in the US is 17.1 years.
People who generally stayed out of politics and were largely unenthused about voting turned out to vote for a candidate who engaged with their concerns and ideologies. This was a really complicated election cycle that, (again) to me, highlighted the idea that this is all one big popularity contest and that, ultimately, the media picked the popular kids for us all before we knew it.
The anti-Semitism included in that initiative, plus the xenophobia of blaming the Russians for exposing the truth (which I don't think they had anything to do with), sounds a lot like a certain other major political party we're familiar with. No wonder these people don't like Bernie... they're not Democrats and he is.
They have a compelling message for the working class. It's a message of contempt and hate. The long marriage of the working class and Democrats has ended and it wasn't the working class that walked out the door. The Democrats are down to the comfortable professional class preening its "values" and a coalition of grievance groups. Everyone else is on the other side pulling back on the stick to stop the dive before we run out of altitude.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/432796/working-class-wh...
This isn't going to happen, at least not anytime soon, though there are attempts to try[0]. America doesn't have the infrastructure to bring back manufacturing things like the iPhone[1].
> how about deregulation so employers can hire more people?
Deregulation of what exactly? What's the regulation that's prohibiting "hiring more people"?
> how about lowering taxes?
On who/what? Citizens? Corporations? What's fair? How do you increase military spending, then, if you lower taxes and are already slashing other budgets? [2]
> how about enforcing legal immigration so that working class people stand a chance of getting a job?
Can you provide examples of un-enforcement? As I understand it, most illegal immigration comes from people who immigrate legally on a green card that expires and just don't leave.[3]
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/17/made-in-america-iphones...
[1] http://www.heraldtribune.com/news/20120123/apples-jobs-to-ob... (There are better sources out there)
[2] http://www.npr.org/2017/03/16/520305293/trump-to-unveil-hard...
[3] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/03/homeland-sec...
Everyone that reads your response will likely assume that you didn't have anything to back up your ill-informed position on the matter. Having seen this frequently on the internet, I wonder if this is the reason your account is new.
This, unfortunately, leads me to wonder if people with such hostile perspectives are too proud to ever concede an argument (and thus admit they are wrong) or if they consider their understanding too superior and complex to explain to others if they don't already "get it". Both of which are signs of serious arrogance.
How do we, as a society, move past these internal walls that keeps us from having meaningful dialogue?
https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/questions-...
It's more expensive to have 50 employees than 49.
Also, a green card doesn't really expire, people overstay travel and work permits. A green card is for immigrants that have permanent permission to stay.
Immigration policy certainly has lots of discretionary enforcement. DACA is a big example. I think it's reasonable and the right thing to do, but it is discretionary enforcement of immigration law.
You're right, my use of green card is incorrect -- it's visa. Green cards do expire, though, after 10 years if I'm remembering correctly (it almost happened to me).
I just looked up DACA, thanks for pointing that out. Am I misreading it on Wikipedia?[0] It doesn't seem very discretionary from that second paragraph of requirements and guidelines. That seems pretty concrete.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Action_for_Childhood_...
Repealing the ACA and cutting taxes is pretty well in keeping with stated Republican goals (one of the stopping blocks they have for their repeal is the group of conservatives that think it leaves too much government in the insurance system).
DACA is discretionary in the sense that the government has information that the registrants are not following a regular immigration process and still is not deporting them. "Deferred action" is discretionary enforcement.
Not deferring action is also discretionary enforcement, it's just a different choice on how to apply the same discretion.
> This isn't going to happen, at least not anytime soon, though there are attempts to try[0]. America doesn't have the infrastructure to bring back manufacturing things like the iPhone[1].
So your message to flyover America is to just give up ? Good luck with that. This is a problem. It needs a solution. Let's stop complaining about how it's unsolvable and change it.
And let's face facts here : an import tariff on everything (like every country except the US has, mostly) will help. Finding policies that will help do this is pretty easy.
There needs to be a solution for jobs and economic activity in flyover America. A solution different from calling them white trash racists and abandoning them.
> Deregulation of what exactly? What's the regulation that's prohibiting "hiring more people"?
Are you joking ? Let's take everyone's favorite regulation : the ACA. The ACA is making it much more expensive to hire more people, and thereby preventing people getting hired to a certain extent. Raising minimum wage, same thing.
> On who/what? Citizens? Corporations? What's fair? How do you increase military spending, then, if you lower taxes and are already slashing other budgets?
You slash other budgets more.
> Can you provide examples of un-enforcement? As I understand it, most illegal immigration comes from people who immigrate legally on a green card that expires and just don't leave.[3]
Some 12 million immigrants are illegal aliens. That's half a percent of the population, and 12 million enforcement failures. Furthermore, legal immigration can be reduced as well.
Note that this isn't racist, or even anti-immigration. The goal is not to be anti-immigrant. The goal is to protect the status of the working class by lowering supply in the labor market. Despite the unemployment figures (which is really only everyone who lost a job in the past 12 weeks), there is a massive job shortage in many parts of the US.
Will this make cleaning silicon valley toilets more difficult and expensive ? Yes. That's good.
>Will this make cleaning silicon valley toilets more difficult and expensive ? Yes. That's good.
If you were looking to advance the status of the working class as a final goal, there are several other things you would do first before talking about deregulation, immigration overhauls, or austerity. A short list:
* Raise taxes on the rich, and invest the money in infrastructure, schools, and civic life. You want to push up wages, you hire people directly.
* Move from the ACA to single-payer health-care. This reduces expenses on bureaucracy and bullshit all around the economy, frees people to pursue entrepreneurship, and frees people to change jobs -- all good for the working class!
* Shore up Social Security by lifting the contribution cap. People who make $120k/year are not working-class, and they can afford to pay taxes so that the working class can afford to retire in dignity. The more elderly working-class people can retire, the more jobs are freed up.
* Nationalize natural-resource extraction industries, pour the profits into the national coffers, and use those to reduce taxes and increase wages for the working-class people in those industries. This will especially help in industries where competition has pushed wages and prices to near-zero, most employers are conglomerates rather than small proprietorships, but the products remain essential. For example, farming.
* Encourage the formation of worker cooperatives over other forms of business.
* Strengthen labor unions. Revamp the Taft-Hartley Act to bring back the powers organized labor had in the mid-1930s New Deal period. Pass the Employee Free Choice Act.
* Break up all monopolies and oligopolies. This is a convenient alternative to nationalization.
* Universal overtime pay for everyone who works more than 40 hours/week, no matter their job role. If they work for a living, they get overtime pay.
Your proposals don't sound at all like they're designed to strengthen workers against management and owners. They sound like they're designed to do the opposite: strengthen owners and managers in exploiting labor as cheaply as possible.
Coming from a country with a vastly bigger public sector than the US, allow me to say : no. Thanks. Don't do this. I'm not against public sector jobs, but I am against the government (or large companies supported by the government) taking care of anything that can realistically be done by anyone else.
> Shore up Social Security by lifting the contribution cap. People who make $120k/year are not working-class, and they can afford to pay taxes so that the working class can afford to retire in dignity. The more elderly working-class people can retire, the more jobs are freed up.
The numbers don't work. And the numbers are positively disastrous starting 10 years or so in the future. This is generally true about your raise taxes ideas.
When push comes to shove, money represents value. The only way to provide more goods and services to the elderly is to have everyone work more, produce more. Tax raises cannot affect this, in fact they make it harder.
But it would depend on what tax to raise. I think I'd most like either a direct wealth tax, or a land value tax. With serious punishments for cheating with undeclared wealth or colluding with government to lower land value. Move the tax burden away from labour.
> Strengthen labor unions. Revamp the Taft-Hartley Act to bring back the powers organized labor had in the mid-1930s New Deal period. Pass the Employee Free Choice Act.
I like the idea of strengthening unions. Sounds like a great idea.
> Break up all monopolies and oligopolies. This is a convenient alternative to nationalization.
Whilst I definitely agree in the case of Comcast, I'm not sure this would work well in general.
> Universal overtime pay for everyone who works more than 40 hours/week, no matter their job role. If they work for a living, they get overtime pay.
Sounds like a good idea, except perhaps that it's too easy to cheat rules like this.
The Immigration you speak of is likely doing more good than bad, what American wants to work a low paying, back breaking job in the fields or in some factory where the second they complain, they are fired?
Whenever the topic happens to be energy higher costs are offered as proper penance.
How brave.
Someone that is representing a large majority of voters in this country, and not going along with the democratic line.. I call a true patriot. I hope he never becomes a team player.
"It goes against one of the core principles of being American, the ability to work your way up, without limits." is horseshit. Tell that to a child born in the inner-city with a single parent working 2 jobs and a garbage primary education.
Is there any evidence of this? I see this argument used a lot to dissuade from the "handouts" thing and for not helping people. Don't non-profits technically receive handouts? Aren't grants technically handouts?
A handout, as I understand it, is money given that isn't meant to be paid back. I think a good portion of handouts already exist, it's just easier to justify not giving handouts to people that are societally (or personally) perceived as inferior because it's easy to not empathize with their situation.
Can you cite any of these claims? I'd like to understand this a little better.
Kind of like Trump did? Or the current generation of Walton family?
Anyway, I thought this was short and to the point on this subject: https://brightside.me/article/what-you-should-think-about-be...
Yes, please continue. I'd like a large enough sample to dig into.