For what it’s worth, I’m an American & American politics strains my American relationship with my American friends & family. Fuck this red/blue shit.
A cousin in my family has a very valid grievance against business owner uncles that support politicians who don’t want to provide meal breaks or bathroom breaks. This cousin has to work 12 to 14 hour shifts, and eat standing up while working and sneak in bathroom breaks.
That’s not “red/blue” shit.
The world is more complicated than that.
It’s easily verifiable that Democratic states have better laws for wage earners, and have pushed for policies that benefit wage earners. They’re nowhere near perfect, but there’s no reason to pretend Dems and Repubs are the same.
I could just as easily turn it around and say, "It's easily verifiable that Republican states have better laws for gun owners." Now do you see the issue? Your above statement matters only if your primary goal is benefiting wage earners. It would be like me saying that Republicans are better at building a border wall. Maybe so, but that's not top priority for Democrats.
More recently, we are seeing the rise of the Zero Issue Voters who don’t care about any particular issue at all. It’s purely a team sport. They love their team, love their candidates and they just want to “own the other side”.
The difference between the two is mostly how they think it best to go about improving things for wage earners, who are the vast majority of their voters in both states. Not saying this makes them equal, but the difference is not what you assert.
The most solidly blue state, California, just enshrined a law to screw over gig workers and has among the worst housing crises in the country for average (and below) wage earners. Both parties are not equally bad, but the idea that the Democrats support working people is pretty laughable at this point. Yes, they’re not as awful as Republicans on these issues, but that’s a pretty low bar and still so far below the wage and labor protections in places like Europe as to be laughable.
This has been Democrats tactics with this stuff for decades, “we tried to do something good, but then something happened that we couldn’t do anything about it. Sorry.” It’s intentional fecklessness, while posturing at progress, so they can keep getting checks from the tech industry.
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_22,_App-Based...
No, they were operating in violation of California law for less than a year.
> instead got friendly with them and took piles upon piles of their money.
If that's the case, why didn't they get a carve out in AB5?
> systemic corruption in the Democratic party,
Which overwhelmingly voted for AB5 and was in opposition to Proposition 22. You are alleging corruption without any evidence.
I fail to understand why you see this whole situation as what happened with one law and one proposition and not the culmination of a bunch of corrupt people who have been in bed with each other for some time.
What state law were they violating? None. What difference would not taking money from them have done? None.
> not take jobs with the companies when they left office (several former, high-level Obama people work at Uber, Kamala Harris’ brother-in-law is behind Prop 22’s legal team),
What does that have to do with the state legislators, who created AB5?
> pursued anti-monopoly action against Uber for engaging in market dumping.
Uber was not a monopoly and still isn't a monopoly, as a court already confirmed. https://lawstreetmedia.com/tech/court-rules-that-uber-must-f...
> The list goes on and on.
No item in that list makes any sense. Why did they go through all the trouble to pass AB5 to begin with?
For example, there are many people who in a race where one candidate favors restricting or ending abortion and the other favors reducing restrictions on abortion will choose whichever of the two agrees with their position on abortion, regardless of where the two candidates stand on anything else such as economic issues or foreign policy issues.
AFAIK the idea of immigrants impact being a net negative isn't supported by the studies I have read.
I understand this isn't necessarily in line with the rhetoric du jour.
Immigrants as a whole being a net positive might be clear, but the demographics most commonly under debate are things like "refugees" or "illegal immigrants" or "people seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border". Now, it's possible that those groups are still a (financial) net positive, but I'd be a lot less confident in that than "doctors" or "people with a degree".
This also doesn't really address the issue of "what impact does immigration have on US wage earners". An immigrant doctor or programmer might be clearly beneficial financially and to the country as a whole, but the doctors and programmers they're competing with might not be quite so happy. And while those demographics can "take it" so to speak, unskilled laborers facing the same competition are in a bit tougher of a spot.
However, if we go by cumulative per capita COVID deaths, then the result would have been 228 Trump, 310 Biden.
Why the big swing? I think it is because the big early outbreaks that swept through retirement and nursing homes before we got better at treating it were in big urban areas. By the time it got big in rural areas, we'd gotten a lot better at dealing with it.
It would be interesting to do a similar calculation, but using say the rates over say the last three months instead of cumulative from the start. If someone wants to do that one, a good place to get the COVID data is here [1]. They have links to download the data for all the graphs as CSV files.
Or by the time it hit rural areas, we'd also gotten better at testing for it. Perhaps the IFR is the same across both demographics, but better testing means a higher proportion of cases were detected later in the pandemic.
Using cases, it comes out 344 Trump, 194 Biden. Using deaths, it comes out 354 Trump, 184 Biden.
The big difference this time is largely rural states that are getting hit much harder than the rest of the states. North Dakota in this allocation gets 35 cases EV and 46 deaths EV, and South Dakota gets 30 and 36. Montana get 21 and 23.
For comparison to some high population states, California is 4 and 4, New York 4 and 3, Texas 8 and 10, Florida 6 and 10.
Now I'd be curious to see something that looks at various sliding windows on the data and sees how to allocations change, but that would be a bit more elaborate than I want to do.
See, I can play this game too.
https://www.patriotsoftware.com/blog/payroll/states-with-pai...
Similarly, see the list of states (and cities) with half decent unemployment benefits, minimum wage laws, non tipped wages, sick leave, required meal breaks, non compete bans, Medicaid, marijuana legalization, etc.
You will see a trend in which parties’ governance wage earners have these benefits (which are a pittance compared to civilized countries in the first place) and which don’t.
https://hechingerreport.org/why-oklahomas-public-preschools-...
That never got talked about by Trump detractors. Union working class Joe-Schmoe's used to vote democrat, and now solidly do not. There's a reason for that.
Edit: Please note that I never said he did those things, just that they were what he promised. He is completely full of crap on almost everything he says, those promises at the top of the pile. But that is the reason working class Joe love him. He says the things they want to hear.
He said the needed lines, gave them a villain in immigrants (stealing yur jerbs) and then did nothing of the sort for WORKERS. He certainly did go all in on cracking down on immigration, of non-white people, as that matched the narratives of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.
Meanwhile, Oligarchs here are richer than ever, and workers are holding on for dear life. And 72 million plus, voted to keep him in office.
I don't think that matches exit polls—lower wage workers still voted primarily democrat, and higher wage workers voted primarily republican: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
The output of Fox is bad enough, but the QAnon nonsense isn't some weird aberration that appeared out of nothing. It's the logical conclusion of a huge social experiment to see how much political benefit you can wring from an industrial lie machine.
And it's working far better than anyone on the left was expecting it to.
The downside is that the US now has a huge voter demographic that is literally disconnected from reality. These are the people who scream that Covid isn't real - because something something George Soros and Bill Gates - while they're in hospital dying of it.
This doesn't end well. You can't push a large percentage of your population into delusion without some very destructive consequences. Even if it does mean you keep your Senate seat.
I would argue that, for the individuals in question, the long-term consequences literally have no meaning, do not matter, and absolutely are not part of the calculus.
If I get power during my life, and secure my legacy as an important, and very wealthy person, my children can buy away any problem that may pop up for them.
Therefore, my actions of destruction today do not matter, as long as I am the one in power.
This is why I believe it is only going to keep getting worse; if the incentive is to stay in power, at all costs, we're in for a wild ride.
All of my fellow republican business owners were bristling at the idea of Obama’s executive order increasing the minimum salary for exempt workers. This is because they would have had to pay their immigrant workers $44k per year for 60+ hour work weeks who they designated as “managers”, rather than $30k per year under current rules.
Again, I’m not saying Democrats are perfect, and they are far from it. But at least some Democrat states, and politicians are making an effort, whereas I can’t say the same about Repubs. Hence, it’s not just color A vs color B.
I wonder if that would help. I experience a lot that people expect me to have all kind of weird opinions because they think I'm part of a group which they think holds these opinions. They think I'm part of that group because some of my opinions match with the group.