There are people who consider themselves 4th generation Republicans. It's passed down through their family like their religion.
When (not if) the economy craters, each team's news bubble will spin it how they like, and ultimately both teams will keep doing the same things and voting the same way for the foreseeable future.
Are you sure? People often claim this, but don't follow through. There's even an expression, "fair weather fan".
It's true some people seem to support some political parties beyond all reason. But to keep the support through personal hardship is different, and hasn't been tested as often. Worldwide, nothing particular to US.
America is getting less and less involved with traditional organized religion, and I honestly think this personality cult is taking a lot of its place.
That story applies to both sides of the aisle in US Government. The battle is for the 1/3 that doesn't vote and the sliver of folks who switch back and forth.
Just fair weather fans exist. They are probably a majority. The minority that is die hard fans are still significant though.
Arizona Coyotes?
Not many fans in seats anymore.
go kings (sacramento)
That will only intensify if his policies go and tube the economy; the reason he got re-elected was because enough people wanted the 2019 economy back and thought his policies would do it better than Harris's.
It wasn't because they're ontologically evil. It's because order is a very delicate thing. As we've seen, it's incredibly easy to espouse reactionary sentiments and get a lot of people supporting things out of misplaced fear.
If for example you're trying to build a social/political project based on dialectical materialism, a particularly enigmatic liar is like a fire in a barn. You can't "Marketplace of ideas" your way out of a liar who serves to benefit off their lies.
So what do you do? You throw them in the gulag, shoot em, put them to work, put them into reeducation. One liar isn't worth sacrificing the project as a whole.
Cuba reached near 100% literacy, eradicated parasites in children, and took the mob bosses who ran the country out of power. Of course they had to show no mercy to the bay-of-pigs types. The people who benefited when children had feet full of worms and the laborers couldn't read. They were a fire hazard.
Sure, but if the Eagles lose every single game, it doesn't materially impact your brother.
Imagine if the size of your tax return was determined by the win rate of your selected football team and I suspect you'd have a lot less loyalty to losers.
Long term, the estimate is a 15% hit to the economy.
And only 12% of people think that it went well. (For reference, that's about the same proportion as 'Americans who believe shape-shifting lizards control politics, or aren't sure' [1].)
In personal experience, my purchases of UK products have taken a massive drop.
And that's not even mentioning the losses to the environment or human rights.. So... Not what I would call a mixed bag. More like a deeply homogeneous bag.
0 - https://uk.news.yahoo.com/damning-statistics-reveal-true-cos...
1 - https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
Like, I worked for a few companies (I live in Ireland) who had moved their roles from the UK to Ireland because of it.
More generally, it's just made life much harder for UK exporters, as they now have way more customs declarations and tariffs on both sides.
The big thing for me (and lots of Irish people) was that we now avoid ordering from UK sites as it's likely to take longer and cost more.
Overall, it's been bad and kneecapping your productive industries on the promise (not fulfilled) of reducing immigration seems to be a bad idea.
That being said, the UK is still there, still a big market so it's more that they get less investment from multinationals than they otherwise would have, and their companies face much higher barriers to export.
And the worst part was that the EU introduced checks on agriculture immediately, while the UK didn't which basically meant that EU farmers were much more competitive in the UK than UK farmers could be outside it.
To be clear, Brexit could have been managed much better, but it was a bad idea executed poorly.
I'm curious what the response is from folks who voted for it. Denial? Didn't go far enough? Resignation? Change of mind? Something else?
I guess the original commenter may have been surprised how long it took for that reversal to come (and that it didn't happen until after Covid exacerbated everything).
For me personally, nothing much really has changed. You can't bring as much wine back from France on holiday, and it is harder to take your pet to Europe.
The UK economy is shite, but it's not a significant outlier amongst other EU countries.
There is a huge impact on people who export things like food to the extent that some of them have given up
What does "senate reform" mean other than filibuster reform, which if you ask anyone who has studied government will tell you is an intentional design decision for a more deliberative body. "Pass laws quickly" is, depending on who you ask, either not the right thing you want to optimize for, or the exact opposite of what you want.
"Tax law reform" okay great but that's going to mean 15 different things to 10 different people.
The former is much shorter to say, but... not really accurate.
Tangential gripe: Anyone who says it's "to protect the rural areas" or whatever is talking nonsense. The greater NYC area could legally convert to ~14 new states, and all those very-urban voters would reap the same kind of unfair benefits that Wyoming does with the equivalent population.
Why is that important? Put a little more crudely, and with a lot of hand-waving generalization, Senators aren't supposed to represent people in a district, they're supposed to represent the interests of their state as a whole. They're not just "Representatives but Bigger," they're something else entirely.
So the fact that "but disproportionate representation!!1" is even an argument belies the lack of understanding about why the system was set up that way in the first place. It has nothing to do with rural or urban but that's a great "I don't like Republicans" dog whistle. The needs of Wyoming are different than the needs of Kansas, which are different than the needs of Upstate NY (even considered in isolation from NYC) and a representative body concerned primarily with the interests of a state protects those needs better than one Senator covering several states would be able to.
Your reply belies a lack of bothering to read before making a hostile rant.
I literally just said the situation involves "a join-up bribe from 237 years ago", and I don't see how any minor-amendment-citer such as yourself could have missed the meaning, namely: Smaller states were granted disproportionate influence on federal policy, via the Senate, as an inducement to get their state-legislatures to ratify the federal constitution.
That decision involved sacrificing democratic principles and ethics in favor of reaching a deal. The same tradeoff occurred with the infamous "3/5ths compromise." One of those two thankfully became moot, and it's high time we got around to fixing the other.
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> a representative body concerned primarily with the interests of a state
You have provided absolutely nothing to justify giving some states disproportionate influence on federal policy which affects all states.
At best, you've provided an argument for reverting the 17th Amendment and changing how senators are chosen. That is orthogonal to how many senators a State has.
_________
> > Anyone who says it's "to protect the rural areas" or whatever is talking nonsense.
> that's a great "I don't like Republicans" dog whistle.
LOL, this is one of those times when the indignant response is an indirect admission. Yes, it is nonsense, and yes, you disproportionately see it from Republicans.
Kind of like when a context-free "Nazis=Bad" sign leads someone to complain that the sign is hostile to their party.
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> pretty glaring ignorance of how the government worked prior to 17A
A pedantic non-sequitur:
1. How senators are chosen is orthogonal to how many exist.
2. Only tangentially related to "gerrymandering" if you mean that the state legislators' boundaries were gerrymandered. If anything, 17A change made gerrymandering less relevant.
This shows you're thinking about population which is irrelevant. Wyoming is a state and California is a state and as states they have equal weight in how their federal government is run. There are 50 equal states, regardless of how their populations differ.
That was literally the only point I was making, was that decrying disproportionate representation based on a population:Senator ratio has nothing to do with how the Senate operates. California gets the same number of Senators as Wyoming because each state gets two Senators.
> you're thinking about population which is irrelevant. [...] There are 50 equal states, regardless of how their populations differ.
Imagine it's 1915 and you're campaigning for women's rights to vote, and and somebody says: "You're thinking about population which is irrelevant. Women can't vote, regardless of how many there are."
I think you'd be pretty frustrated at such an obtuse dismissal.
Along with more conventional and familiar ideas, I like to toss in the occasional radical one like "abolish the senate" to stretch people's minds a little.
Opinions on the filibuster are often also time dependent. If the person's preferred party has a majority in the Senate, then the filibuster is called an evil relic of the past that should be removed. If the other party has a majority, the filibuster is a sacred part of democracy and must not be touched.
These same people have no object-permanence, and would vote for someone even worse than trump in 4 years though.
Up to US citizens to decide how they want their future to look like.
From the outside we can only express our sympathy to those that suffer under it.
I have a friend who voted for Trump because (paraphrasing) "he's different or we need to shake things up". Like our entire country is some game where the outcome doesn't affect people.
Whether he’s on their side, lying, or a net negative is irrelevant. Things steadily getting worse for the poor and lower-middle class is nothing new, but things finally not going the way the elites want and seeing them seethe is cathartic. The fact that nearly everyone who is responsible for the erosion of the middle class hates him is reason enough put him in power, because what else can the average voter do to make those who hold all the power feel the same uncertainty they have.
That’s what people don’t understand about a significant part of who they think is his “base”, who in reality just consider the enemy of their enemy to be their friend.
Trumpists have been telling everyone, everywhere, precisely this at every opportunity, on every platform since before Trump was even elected. We know. They won't fucking shut up about how badly they want to burn the country down and piss on the ashes just to spite the elites. And the wokes. And the city dwellers. And the gays. And the transgenders. And the immigrants. And every woman who wouldn't return their texts. And everyone else they have a grievance against.
But the thing is, the country is full of poor and lower middle class people who are suffering but also haven't turned into the Joker, even, apparently, including a lot of Trump voters. Maybe it isn't the country, or the elites, or the wokes, or the city dwellers, or the gays, or the transgenders, or the immigrants, or the women who are the real problem. Maybe it's them. Maybe they're the assholes.
Of course maybe it’s not just losing a job. Maybe it’s watching your whole community fall apart piece by piece. Maybe the tax base dries up so the schools get worse, the local stores shut down, the houses rot, and the kids who can leave bounce the moment they’re able to. Maybe the ones who can’t are left behind with no real options and no way out leading to all the shitty outcomes one would expect. And maybe… none of the people responsible for any of it have to live with the fallout. The politicians, the executives, the media, none of them are losing sleep over it. Their towns don’t get gutted. Their futures don’t disappear. Their kids aren’t overdosing.
But hey, it’s probably easier to just write off 70 million people as brainwashed idiots who joined a cult for no reason. Occam’s razor certainly suggests that your internalized caricature courtesy of r/politics is far more likely than any of these far-fetched hypotheticals right?
No. No, it really isn't.
Because your sprawling victimhood narrative describes the situation of many in the US to some degree or another, but not even that of most Trump supporters. And not even most Trump supporters voted for him just for the catharsis of seeing the people they hate suffer. Although again, many did, and will admit so openly so I'm not the one engaging in caricature here. I never mentioned "brainwashed idiots" or a cult, although Trump does have an actual, literal goddamn cult so I don't even know what you're objecting to in that case.
It isn't my fault that the more you try to defend these people, the worse they come off.
Good day.
And no, it’s not everyone. It doesn’t need to be to win the election.
If it makes it easier to maintain your narrative of being on the good side, go ahead and pretend everyone who doesn’t agree with you is an asshole. Cheers.
That's fucking capitalism, the thing these voters dick suck all the time. They are constantly afraid of any government control of the economy or socialism in general
Trump is a rich real estate mogul and Elon Musk is the richest person in the world.
>The fact that nearly everyone who is responsible for the erosion of the middle class hates him is reason enough put him in power
Republicans aren't also responsible for the erosion for the middle class? If so, they don't hate him, so how is this a meaningingful coloration?
>who in reality just consider the enemy of their enemy to be their friend
Who are their enemies? Democrats exclusively? Why?
Do not imply that both parties are the same on this. That is factually incorrect and Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated an interest in improving democracy.
The GOP, on the other hand, is cheering Trump on as he arrests judges and ignores due process.
While Democrats don't like losing to Republicans they also don't like losing to a third party. Elected Democrats oppose any system that modifies the status quo that "correctly" elected them.
These are not the same.
Honestly IRV is worse than plurality so there are plenty of reasons to oppose it other than a two-party domination conspiracy theory. Using IRV gives up monotonicity, possibilities for a distributed count, and some elements of a secret ballot (for even a medium-sized candidate list) for basically nothing.
Monotonicity is not a theoretical concern. Alaska almost immediately ran into a degenerate case [2].
[0] https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html
[1] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Alaska%27s_at-large_congr...
And probably without even trying. Once it becomes better known, gaming the system like this will happen more often.
It's a shame that's not what everyone uses :/
though: this does go the right way. Condorcet methods are worth discussion. IRV, not so much.
IRV gets implemented a ton in the US, surprisingly. It tends to get enacted because people understand it really quickly, and it tends to get repealed because of center squeeze.
Range voting may well be much better, and there are certainly more mathematically sound versions of ranked-choice than IRV, but I think they utterly fail to convince that IRV is just as bad as plurality. They also seem to only take their game theory as far as necessary to reflect Range Voting in the best possible light. For instance, they argue that voters will almost always rank their less preferred of the front-runners last even if they have greater opposition to other candidates, but they don't explore that candidates can and do chase higher rankings among voters that won't rank them #1. It's an obvious and common strategy (candidates were already doing it in my counties first ever RCV election) so I can only assume the reason its not mentioned is that it improves the soundness of RCV in practice.
Their link is referring to the Irish presidential election, which does use IRV—but it’s a meaningless figurehead position, so it’s unclear how relevant the comparison is.
Also to note, there's nothing technically stopping the US House from moving to proportional representation along with ranked-choice and dems have proposed it recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Representation_Act_(Unite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote#Unite...
Because we have a two party system. Third parties are nothing more than spoilers. If their ideas were good enough, they could gain traction with one side or the other, and build a caucus to get their candidates elected. But they don't, because that's never the actual goal.
I don't see any reason to think this is accurate.
We are living through a successful attempt at this right now. The Tea Party completely engulfed what was once the GOP and morphed into MAGAism. Sadly the progressive wings of the Democratic party never got the memo, and wrote them off until it was too late.
Eh? They've never meaningfully had control of the party, and are surely far more willing to e.g. abandon neoliberalism to avoid that handicap vs. a MAGA-ified Republican Party that's abandoned neoliberalism, than most of the rest of the Democratic Party is. It's the 3rd-way sorts and "centrists" who've been, and remained, in charge of setting direction and who've just kept on trucking with the "we mustn't upset the status quo!" and "maybe courting traditional Republicans will suddenly start working, so we should keep trying that" strategy, no?
What we've lost is independent media having outlets to reach an audience. Pre proliferation of centralized social media platforms, it was easier to find independent voices on the internet through more de-centralized means. I remember coming across the works of Fredrich Hayek and Paul Krugman via the same message board in the early 2000s. Diversity of thought was at least respected, even if it got heated.
I've noticed a steady decline in diversity of thought co-existing on the internet as general social media coalesced around Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Snapchat, Twitter and TikTok. Reddit has also had a slower but meaningful decline in the co-mingling of ideas on merits, and perhaps subjectively, I feel it took longer to get there but ultimately has ended up in the same place, an echo chamber.
There was a time I remember, when progressive, liberal, and conservative people also could seem to agree on some baselines, like not enabling racists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...
If they don't like it, they should be pushing for ranked-choice voting.
The Washington State Democrats are about to have one of our regular meetings this coming weekend, and I guarantee as is the case all all of our meetings, there will be a contingent encouraging all of us to support RCV. As a candidate, I've already been approached again this year as to whether I will support it. It's absolutely a discussion point within our party.
Oops
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3040...
I don't think RCV would do much to change that. In order to be elected, you need to be seen, so you need a sizeable media presence. The billionaire class controls enough of the media (traditional, social and "independent") that the people will keep voting for their servants under pretty much any voting system, bar a few exceptions here and there. It's a fundamental issue of electoral democracy, not of the voting system.
One potential alternative would be to switch to non-electoral democracy, e.g. drawing representatives at random rather than electing them, but that's even less likely to happen, and it may end up having different problems. At least it'd suppress all the circus around elections and all that party nonsense, so there's that.
Example? I hear this constantly and yet there's one party that has spent decades trying to protect the environment, protect workers, fund schools, fund health care, provide day care, prevent gun violence, equalize economic opportunity, increase and protect civil rights -- and then there are Republicans acting to stop all of that. I cannot even begin to fathom how anyone - especially in light of the past 100 days -- can tell me with a straight face that my party is the "lesser of two evils."
And as for RCV - how, please offer me an example - of how you think it makes one bit of difference in freeing us from being the "servants of the billionaire class." You want to actually do that? End citizen united and get money out of politics; and good luck with that.
- Repeal of 1999 Glass-Stegall act, leading directly to the 2008 crisis
- Biden’s support for fossil fuel (Willow Project)
- Obama and Biden’s continued expansions of the mass surveillance state
- Prosecution of whistleblowers under Obama
- Fusion centers and protest surveillance
- Bailing out the investment banks in 2008. Refusing to prosecute bankers.
- The Libya regime change
- Support for Saudi in the Yemen war leading to humanitarian crisis
- Drone warfare including extrajudicial killing of American citizens
- Guantanamo Bay. It’s still open.
- Continued material support for the Palestinian genocide (Biden)
- Sanctions on Cuba
- Obama’s “pivot to Asia” to begin a Cold War with China
- Support for many dangerous Latin American right-wing governments
- the continued rise of wealth inequality
I agree Democrats are still better than Trump. That’s why I described them as the lesser of two evils. I also think it’s rational to support Democrats and other factions against the Republicans - without losing sight of the big picture.
> good luck with that
The billionaire class can only see its own narrow interests and actively engenders destruction in the long run. The fossil fuel industry is going to run us into the ground with climate change. The billionaires are instituting a dictatorship that has a long term goal of war with a China (a nuclear power). The long term plan of many of these billionaires is to live on seasteads and in luxury bunkers - or maybe inhabit a dead planet.
Society is undergoing a deep crisis. You speak with confidence that citizens united won’t be overturned. The fact is society is going to be overturned. It’s already being overturned. The future holds for us outcomes such as mass migration and death due to climate change, political instability, nuclear war. These are the outcomes everyone is faced with. We are collectively choosing our future - and the choice is between self-destruction under the reins of these narrow interests - or the divestment of these interests in the spirit of solidarity and democracy.
If you had open system (not one or two-party system) there would be more than three parties.
The Democratic party is a god damn big tent. It's the equivalent of 3-5 parties in any other country. It is mind-blowing how much diversity of thought exists in the Democratic party and we spent an ungodly amount of time and effort fighting amongst ourselves to produce meaningful policy and platform ideas. If you don't like our party, the best thing you can do is join us and use the party as a vehicle to go in the direction you want. I can't say enough - people need to understand that you don't need another party, you just need to understand how you can shape the party to be what you want. It's absolutely mind-blowing how much opportunity there is to work inside the party and move the ball forward rather than stand on the sidelines trying to form some other party and all the BS that would go along with trying to be viable.
Open a news website. Several news websites. Turn on the TV. Talk to some people about politics. How often do those topics come up?
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/de...
I'd rather use the scientific method: make predictions, let the experiment run, and compare to the results. Predicting that the national debt ceiling will be raised or removed, taxes cut, labor unions attacked, and "elites" not correcting anything or being heroes.
Next, I was amazed at a lack of coordinated opposition. Nobody joined the barricades, there was no unrest, no opposition party garnered votes.
Biggest take away was that life went on. There was no shortage of goods on the shelves and nobody cared that the pound lost 25 percent or so.
From Brexit, I anticipate much the same in America, for the economy to linger on due to generational wealth, with people just getting on with it.
The pricing due to tariff taxes will also be easier to absorb than what people think.
Imagine a finished good such as a bicycle, imported from China. Retail margins are not great for the retailer because they expect sales from accessories.
If the bicycle costs USD 1000 at retail, what does it cost to the importer?
The retailer buys the bike from a wholesaler for USD 500 and the wholesaler buys the bike from the distributor for USD 250. The distributor buys it from the importer for USD 125.
Margins will be negotiated with volume and delivery schedules, but the bicycle, at import is only valued at 125, not 1000 in this simplified example.
Lets assume the tariff works out so the importer has to pay 300 rather than 125 to get the bike out the port. Let's assume a 175 tariff fee. This can be passed down the chain much like how duty is charged on tobacco that gets imported.
Hence the customer is paying 1175 for the 1000 bike, not 2450.
The customer can buy a lower specification model of they don't like the price hike, or the retailer can shave their margins to gain market share, shift inventory and gain a customer. In time the price can creep up.
If the tariffs were collected at Walmart rather than at the port then this means of handling the tariffs would not be possible.
For a cycle manufacturer that owns the factory in China as well as the distribution chain to the customer, they could set up a shell company that imports the bicycle for a dollar, to then sell that bike to the retailer they own for proper money. The customer then pays the same 1000 with the 1.45 absorbed.
The company could also own a design office in the Chinese factory and sell their design consultancy services back to the US sales operation for millions, millions that won't be taxed as a tariff since it is a service, not goods.
In this way the USD profits are repatriated with the factory. The factory sells it's goods almost for free. Next there is the problem of what to do with those dollars since the factory workers are paid in Yuan. Those dollars need to be sold or used to buy oil, rubber and other raw materials.
This type of Hollywood accounting is standard for multinationals but beyond the reach of small businesses.
Apple do this type of magic accounting, most famously in Ireland. Amazon use Luxembourg. So why the exemption for iPhones? Well, if Apple have to pay USD 2 in tariff taxes on a 1000 iPhone then that is a big deal to them. They were never going to have to charge 2450 for that same iPhone.
Ideally a multinational makes a loss in the country of manufacture and a loss in the country of sale. This means minimum wages and no taxes paid. They then make billions in their chosen base for the shell company in the middle and use a tax haven to get the dollars out, which they then use to buy their own shares, thereby not paying dividends.
Most of the costs would be in assembly, marketing, retail, shipping and sorting forth, so there would be just the imported parts to get the tariff tax, but you could just pass those costs on, for the customer to choose a lower specification model of they can't afford the product.
Some easier components could be sourced from the USA, for example, the handlebars are just a bent tube, so why get a Chinese person to make it? However, the aluminium for that tube will be taxed with a tariff so it is unlikely that a guy down the road will step up to make these things.
As mentioned, it will be like Brexit, the worst fears won't materialise, people will still be eating food and everyone will just become a lot poorer with a stagnant economy.
With Brexit the little guy stopped selling to Europe but the multinational didn't skip a beat.
this is in indication you live in a bubble
I know plenty of people that were watching the clock
some were very unhappy, some were jubilant, but most were completely indifferent
I'm not sure why anyone outside of the UK would ever care about a minor change in governance
in the same way I don't expect anyone in France to be particularly interested in the abolition of the Essex District Councils later this year
No, all of these business rely on percentage margins to stay cashflow positive, not absolute revenue. It's possible that a few companies will absorb a small amount of the percentage, and result in it costing 2200 or something, but the tariff is not like VAT, it won't get "tacked on at the end", because each step in the chain depends on economies of scale that in turn depend on demand that are sensitive to price. Price going up decreases sales, which incurs additional overhead per sale, etc. Businesses are not going to give up their net margin for free, they'll only do it if it's the least bad way to address the shortfall of sales as a result of price increases.
In B2B there is typically a doubling of price at each step so the 'trade price' appears incredibly cheap to a customer, yet that is a multiple of the import price.
Each step has its own risks and overheads so it is not greedy to have these markups.
B2B customers are in a strong position to negotiate prices and B2B sales staff know their customers well. It is therefore entirely possible for costs due to tariffs to be passed down the chain without everyone doubling that tariff tax at every stage. There is no incentive to do so, or for those costs to be absorbed.
What I am saying is that it works more like a customs duty rather than a simple price hike.
Wait for the panic to die down and see how this happens.
Two observations, much like Brexit, life goes on, shops are full and people still eat. Then, as for the vast bounty that the guy in the White House expects to raise, there is very little and no cash windfall arrives.
Clearly some products are more complex than others, I only really know typical e-commerce stuff, not automobiles that go across the Mexican border three times as they get assembled.
I have noted that the media has mom and pop entrepreneurs importing things such as plastic spoons for autistic pigeons to clean their ears with or diapers for left handed crypto-bros, where they are going to be exposed to the tariffs bigly. The media have not had typical medium sized retail businesses that buy goods from wholesalers that deal with distribution companies.
I am no fan of the tariffs or the orange man but I did live through Brexit and have my reasons not to go into panic mode.
I also think historical comparisons to tariffs a century or more ago are not helpful as the distribution chain has evolved over time. In these distant times a tariff would act like a customs duty on tobacco or alcohol.