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Tom Perez B/K/M? This poll is closed. |
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77 | 25.50% |
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160 | 52.98% |
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65 | 21.52% |
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Ardennes posted:The problem is it comes against the hard face of American electoral politics and its two party controlled FPTP system, which is the whole reason they have so much influence in the first place. I don't see it changing either since both parties have a massive amount of funding, and control ballot access at the state level. There are ways around it. Alternative 1: Primary the gently caress out of them. Join the democratic party, force change. Run for State, Municipal, Local, whatever. Point at the new deal, point at progressive causes, call them out for being the traitors to the working class that they are. Keep pushing for reform, keep calling them out for refusing to support change. With gerrymandering in full effect , if you can get your candidate into a primary, he has great chances of winning that district. Their power comes from people believing that they actually care, or at least isn't the "bad option". If you reverse that, show how little they care and present them as the "bad option" and you as the alternative, you win. This is how Trump won. Trump is HATED by a large degree of his party, a party that ran a campaign against him becoming the candidate. Yet he won the primary, and then won the election. And his popularity was to a large part his outside status, that he wasn't "more of the same". It's not impossible that someone like Bernie will run against someone like McCain, and produce similar results. Alternative 2: Build your own party. Support the democrats in major elections, but run your own candidates in lower level elections. Again, state and local levels. Keep building support, do some good on the way. Eventually, switch to running for major elections. If the democrats haven't petered out of existence, expect a couple years of turmoil. But parties have existed, run the country, and then disappeared. It happens. The collapse of the democrats would surely lead to a couple of years of republican victory, but again the alternative is to do nothing and accept the situation exactly as it is. And for many people, the apocalypse everybody is saying is around the corner is already here, so what is there to lose? asdf32 posted:This is probably true. The spectrum I've always cared about is ideologty - more or less which is far more important than left or right. You have more in common with ideologically driven trump supporters than anyone else. The ideology vitalsigns put on display earlier hints at the same forces driving the right to focus on walls rather than reducing illegal immigration and Muslim bans rather than fighting terrorism - examples, again, of how ideology can be the opposite of "standing for something". Your definition of "ideologically driven" is funny. Your assumption is that there is a clearly a rational choice that everybody agrees to and anybody that disagrees is somehow confused and have let their emotions get the best of them. You have an ideology too. It's just hidden from view because it is the ruling one. It is the one you are defending right now. That ideology is globalist capitalism and liberal technocracy. Your ideology is rated on what it can provide, and the consensus that this is the greatest ideology is undermined by people suffering under it. Now, people like Trump has proven that there it is not only option, and so more options will materialize. Or as Zizek puts it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ch5ZCGi0PQ
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May 22, 2017 19:01
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Nate Silver makes an interesting point about the upcoming Montana special election: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/866737544414859264 https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/866737892202295296
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May 22, 2017 20:32
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DaveWoo posted:Nate Silver makes an interesting point about the upcoming Montana special election: i hope quist wins. he's really cool and good
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May 22, 2017 21:05
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DaveWoo posted:Nate Silver makes an interesting point about the upcoming Montana special election: A very good point, although one hopes that the Democratic Party leadership won't learn the wrong lesson from the outcome either way.
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May 22, 2017 21:06
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On the Media recently did a piece on Montana voters and it does dampen the good feeling of Quist drastically out polling Clinton. The story made it sound like Montana's voting habits don't really map as neatly onto other Republican-leaning districts as we'd like and that a big part of the state's political identity is tied up in the notion that Montanans can vote both D and R. (After all, Montana's governor is a Democrat.) Couple all that with the fact that Quist is a more naturally charismatic candidate with stronger Montana bona fides and it kind of paints a slightly less flattering picture for the Dems' 2018.
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May 22, 2017 21:19
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fsif posted:On the Media recently did a piece on Montana voters and it does dampen the good feeling of Quist drastically out polling Clinton. The story made it sound like Montana's voting habits don't really map as neatly onto other Republican-leaning districts as we'd like and that a big part of the state's political identity is tied up in the notion that Montanans can vote both D and R. (After all, Montana's governor is a Democrat.) Oh sure, I think most of us can agree it's important to keep our expectations in check, even if Quist wins. There are more factors at play than just overall Democratic Party messaging. But as with so many election strategy things, what matters most about this is the ~~optics~~, the media narrative, that sort of thing. The more this election can drive the narrative that the Trump ship is sinking and the rats had better start fleeing, the more it will help the Dems retake the House IMO.
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May 22, 2017 21:28
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fsif posted:On the Media recently did a piece on Montana voters and it does dampen the good feeling of Quist drastically out polling Clinton. The story made it sound like Montana's voting habits don't really map as neatly onto other Republican-leaning districts as we'd like and that a big part of the state's political identity is tied up in the notion that Montanans can vote both D and R. (After all, Montana's governor is a Democrat.) This is 100% correct. Mountain Republicans are absolutely not Southern Republicans.
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May 22, 2017 21:53
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asdf32 posted:The opposite is true. asdf32 posted:Ironically this second comment mocks the emotionally charged "I just want it" ideology of the first since that fact-downplaying sentiment is exactly what leads to "tough on crime" policy which doesn't reduce crime, terrorism fighting policy that makes us less safe and climate denying policy that's economically self-defeating. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 03:05 on May 23, 2017 |
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May 23, 2017 00:36
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Ytlaya posted:It takes an astounding amount of raw stupidity to say that only people currently making minimum wage would benefit from a minimum wage increase, especially one of this magnitude. There are a hell of a lot of workers who make between current minimum wage and $15/hr though. Dozens of people have corrected asdf32 about this for years, it makes no difference, the only reasonable conclusion at this point is he's deliberately lying. I mean you're doing a good job, but everything you're saying has been explained to him before. I don't even know if he's lying out of any particular antipathy for the poor. He might just have been white knighting sweatshops for so long that to admit now that decent living wages are good, he would have to face that he really has been perpetuating human misery and exploitation for years, and for nothing.
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May 23, 2017 00:51
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Apoplexy posted:I somehow doubt he was being 100% sincere. Although, yes, when someone starts complaining about bilingualism in this country, it's time for let some air into that skull cavity. You know, facetious answers for facetious questions, is all. If anyone here actually feels the need to form Einsatzgruppen to track down low-information voters, Reagan Democrats, and roughly 70% of white people, seek help.
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May 23, 2017 03:51
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call to action posted:This is 100% correct. Mountain Republicans are absolutely not Southern Republicans. Instead of trying to discover a single formula of policies and messaging for winning that they extrapolate to all of their candidates, if the democrats want to do well nationally, they should run candidates that evoke a sense of genuine advocacy for the issues specific to that district, state, or region. there should be an info-gathering operation where dem operatives eke out local niche issues that affect local voters which are being ignored or made worse by republican rule, and this info assists local candidates' efforts to be elected. if elected, those things can be included in upcoming bills and when reelection comes around, they can point to ways they've aided their constituents (so that even if there's an unpopular national-level candidate at the head of the ticket, a voter might say "well all democrats are bad except for my representative.")
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May 23, 2017 09:42
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VitalSigns posted:Dozens of people have corrected asdf32 about this for years, it makes no difference, the only reasonable conclusion at this point is he's deliberately lying. I think that what happens with people like asdf32 is that they've heavily committed to the idea that "people with leftist ideology are naive and ignorant", and through confirmation bias they only acknowledge the dumber people with that ideology. So they end up by default assuming anyone with that ideology must be dumb/wrong, and even if they can't counter an argument they just assume it must be wrong because it's being made by a leftist (or whatever). It's kind of similar to the way that most liberals might argue with right-wingers; they go into the argument with no doubt that their opponent is wrong, and brush off any arguments they can't address since "they're obviously wrong, I just can't explain why yet." Of course, it turns out that right-wingers actually are almost always wrong, but the same isn't true for leftists, especially when they're just arguing for pretty milquetoast social democratic policy (as opposed to actual socialism or something).
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May 23, 2017 17:01
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White Rock posted:The splitting of the democratic party cannot come fast enough. Already happened. That's why they can't hold any branch of the federal government.
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May 23, 2017 23:12
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Ytlaya posted:The thing you seem to keep ignoring is the fact that there's not a 1:1 ratio of money put towards increased minimum wage and increased costs. A non-zero amount of costs (probably a pretty significant percent, especially in certain industries) would not get passed on to consumers. This means that a minimum wage increase would, ultimately, represent a wealth transfer from the wealthy (in the form of owners, higher paid employees, and wealthier consumers) to the working class (literally everyone who would be affected by the minimum wage increase to begin with). So you're assuming the next minimum wage increases causes a permanent decline in profit rates for impacted industry? Not likely (and terrible for employment). More likely is that the vast majority of costs get passed on, as indicated in the study I posted earlier. Second, no, because not all minimum wage workers are poor, many of them are rich (also as cited earlier). So rich consumers need to pay for rich min wage workers before their money goes to the poor. But the cost pass-on is probably regressive (the wal-mart effect) so that hurts things too. Please tell me you at least understand what I"m saying at this point as I've repeated each point. Ytlaya posted:edit: Wait, I think I misread this with my initial reply. I'm still not sure what you're saying though. "left/right" is ultimately ideological, though it's kinda poorly defined in that regard. Left/right isn't ideology though. An economicst could perform years of research to conclude minimum wage is good or bad. We can't call that ideology automatically. Ideology is more about the process of arriving at a conclusion, not necessarily the conclusion itself. Ytlaya posted:I believe that what many people like this don't seem to realize is that, ultimately, they value the idea of being a calm, rational, pragmatic person making decisions based off of data or whatever, and this leads to some massive bias in the sense that they end up ignoring (or flat-out denying) the ideological underpinnings of their views. This leads to them often believing that their ideological opinions aren't really opinions, but are just facts of reality that are true independent of ideology. The climate denying right likes this. It's true that no one can divest themselves completely from ideology or bias yet there are ways to try which matter. Science is that by definition with a method and culture that matters for discovery and truth. Certainly we can see the scientific method and see when its lacking. Likewise we can see the difference between more ideology and less and 'more ideology' (build the wall!!) so often guarantees it will fail at what it 'beleives in'. asdf32 fucked around with this message at 02:03 on May 24, 2017 |
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May 24, 2017 01:58
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asdf32 posted:Second, no, because not all minimum wage workers are poor, many of them are rich (also as cited earlier). You're going to need to clarify this, how exactly are "many" people making $7.50 an hour rich?
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May 24, 2017 02:05
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WampaLord posted:You're going to need to clarify this, how exactly are "many" people making $7.50 an hour rich? Family.
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May 24, 2017 02:08
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asdf32 posted:Family. And so, in the name of making sure that The Undeserving are not paid real-people-money for their first jobs, we will condemn the adults working them to poverty. A-plus logic there, friend. Who do you think does those jobs while school's in session?
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May 24, 2017 02:43
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asdf32 posted:
This man is legitimately an idiot. There are no words.
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May 24, 2017 03:27
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asdf32 posted:
It is very unlikely that the majority of the working poor are actually in the top 50th percentile of income, such that raising their wages is a net transfer from the lower half of households to the upper half. This sounds like something you're telling yourself now that you've finally given up insisting in the face of all empirical evidence to the contrary that the minimum wage increases unemployment. Anyway, rich families with teens working retail or whatever also pay much higher marginal tax rates, therefore they benefit less from a minimum wage increase. If they still benefit too much in your opinion we can increase the top marginal rate until you're satisfied. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 03:32 on May 24, 2017 |
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May 24, 2017 03:28
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The Democrats are a waste, in which a man thinks simply believing in something is bad, despite rejecting facts to reach his conclusions. Also in which a man equates raising the minimum wage with building the border wall.
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May 24, 2017 03:29
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asdf32 posted:Family. This is incredibly stupid. There are far fewer college kids working these jobs than you think and far more grown adults working them out of necessity. And even if that's not the case who cares? Why should someone be exploited and taken advantage of just because their parents have money? Even setting THAT aside you're still wrong. College kids (even ones from wealthy families) tend to spend most of their income out of necessity, which makes giving them more money a good economic decision. College isn't cheap. Nor is rent, food, clothing, car repairs and everything else involved in getting started in life. Increasing the min wage will not only ensure that they actually CAN afford things like college but the money they spend will also recirculate back into the economy, which in turn will increase demand, which in turn will cause businesses to hire more employees (even at the more expensive rate). It's a win/win and history reflects this. Oh, and before you come back with "Well why don't we give them ten trillion dollars each!?" the answer is because at a certain point people stop spending their income and instead just find ways to stash it. This is healthy at low levels since people need to retire at some point, but eventually you get diminishing returns where they're not being productive anymore and are just playing money games. Ideally you want the min wage to rest at the point where people just barely start saving. Which is probably closer to $17-18/hour when you think about it. Considering the question in this context, it seems pretty obvious that a mere $15/hour is hardly a risky economic gamble and if anything doesn't go far enough.
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May 24, 2017 03:51
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readingatwork posted:"Well why don't we give them ten trillion dollars each!?" where do i sign
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May 24, 2017 04:20
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This conversation sounds like those endless """''moderate"""" Democrat campaigns to cut Social Security and Medicare because a rich person somewhere is getting it, so we need to exclude the top two quartiles from the programs. And then conservatives come in behind them and tell the middle class "you're struggling to save for hospital bills and retirement while liberals are taxing away your money and giving it to underachieving moochers", ride into office on suburban resentment and deliver death blows to the country's social insurance.
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May 24, 2017 04:34
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asdf32 posted:Family. In what possible universe does this actually matter? Who cares if a rich person's child also benefits from a minimum wage increase? It doesn't matter because you're taxing the high earner in the family anyway. Not to mention that the value of a job doesn't change just because a teenager is doing it. If a job is worth a living wage then it's worth paying a living wage to some rich kid too. It's not the intended goal of the policy, but it's not some horrific and unacceptable side effect either.
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May 24, 2017 06:22
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How about we put the very rich to death, distribute their assets to the poor, and then force their kids to work minimum wage jobs? And then we won't raise the minimum wage to $15. Is that an acceptable compromise?
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May 24, 2017 06:27
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Kilroy posted:How about we put the very rich to death, distribute their assets to the poor, and then force their kids to work minimum wage jobs? And then we won't raise the minimum wage to $15. Is that an acceptable compromise? Yeah, that'd be pretty dope actually, just make sure you raise the minimum to 15, since they'll need the cost of living adjustment.
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May 24, 2017 10:46
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Just loving LMAO that one of the reasons we can't raise the min wage is because 0.00000000001% of the population working low wage jobs come from rich families.
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May 24, 2017 12:59
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BadOptics posted:Just loving LMAO that one of the reasons we can't raise the min wage is because 0.00000000001% of the population working low wage jobs come from rich families. Well, we can't be giving welfare to the Undeserving, BadOptics. Better a hundred starve than one gets a dollar he has not earned.
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May 24, 2017 15:53
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Kilroy posted:How about we put the very rich to death, distribute their assets to the poor, and then force their kids to work minimum wage jobs? And then we won't raise the minimum wage to $15. Is that an acceptable compromise?
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May 24, 2017 16:04
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Funny how liberals worship meritocracy but are more keen to apply it to the poor than to their own class of professional technocrats. How 'bout they raise the minimum wage and lynch Elizabeth Holmes? Win-win.
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May 24, 2017 16:25
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Halloween Jack posted:Funny how liberals worship meritocracy but are more keen to apply it to the poor than to their own class of professional technocrats. How 'bout they raise the minimum wage and lynch Elizabeth Holmes? Win-win. oh did Elizabeth Holmes stop her car in a rural town after sunset?
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May 24, 2017 17:11
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Submarine Sandpaper posted:oh did Elizabeth Holmes stop her car in a rural town after sunset?
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May 24, 2017 17:21
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edit: Just as a quick note, I agree that there are better ways to transfer wealth to the poor/working class than increasing the minimum wage. In an ideal world we would just greatly increases taxes on the wealthy and directly give the money to the poor. But in this case the discussion is just whether it would be beneficial or harmful, since it's currently one of the few politically viable ways to improve conditions for the working class.asdf32 posted:So you're assuming the next minimum wage increases causes a permanent decline in profit rates for impacted industry? Not likely (and terrible for employment). More likely is that the vast majority of costs get passed on, as indicated in the study I posted earlier. The study does not seem to support what you're saying. As I mentioned, whether costs are passed on (and how much of costs are passed on) depends entirely on the industry in question, and the study you linked supports this. In the abstract it says "We introduce a general model of employment determination that implies minimum wage hikes cause prices to rise in competitive labor markets but potentially fall in monopsonistic environments." In other words, some businesses do not see significant price increases (and I guess might see price decreases according to that study, not sure how that works though). And this is pretty intuitive; industries where 1. consumers are less likely to tolerate price increases and 2. labor is a smaller portion of total costs are less likely to increase prices. Restaurants (as the study mentions) are probably one of the industries most likely to increase prices in response to a minimum wage increase, because restaurant consumers are usually more willing to tolerate increased prices. edit: I forgot to mention the most important point here; it doesn't matter if prices increase for the sake of this discussion. It only matters if all (or the vast majority) of the increased cost from minimum wage is translated to increased prices. If, say, 50% of the cost from increased wages was translated to increased prices, that's still a win in terms of being a wealth transfer. And even if you assumed 100% of costs were passed on for the sake of argument, it's still a win if the extra money poor people have to spend as a result of the wage increases is less than the extra money poor labor earns from the wage increase. edit2: Also I'm completely ignoring the other benefits of a minimum wage increase, like increased spending in communities with more working class people. You're treating this like a zero sum game, when that isn't the case at all. quote:[ You're going to have to give some actual statistics here regarding this "a significant portion of minimum wage earners have rich families" thing. Otherwise you could say "many" = like 0.1% of minimum wage earners. Specifically, you would need to show that the number of rich laborers affected by a minimum wage increase is greater than the number of rich consumers affected by the increased cost of goods/services resulting from the wage increase. quote:Left/right isn't ideology though. An economicst could perform years of research to conclude minimum wage is good or bad. We can't call that ideology automatically. Ideology is more about the process of arriving at a conclusion, not necessarily the conclusion itself. What a person considers to be a positive outcome is part of what constitutes their ideology. Different ideologies prioritize different outcomes to varying degrees. There's no such as an "objectively good/bad policy"; everything is only good/bad with respect to a particular set of priorities. These priorities are determined by ideology. There are certain ideas that are more or less universal (it's best for a society to maximize the number of happy/healthy people, for example), but even within that sort of idea there are varying ideas of what constitutes "happy" or "healthy." quote:The climate denying right likes this. It's true that no one can divest themselves completely from ideology or bias yet there are ways to try which matter. Science is that by definition with a method and culture that matters for discovery and truth. Certainly we can see the scientific method and see when its lacking. Likewise we can see the difference between more ideology and less and 'more ideology' (build the wall!!) so often guarantees it will fail at what it 'beleives in'. Yes, there are certain issue where there's some objective right/wrong, but that's not usually the case when discussing political/economic issues. The universe doesn't supply us with any information on what constitutes an "ideal society/government"; these things are determined by the values of individuals. To put things another way, there are certain topics that fall within the domain of ideology and others that can be objectively ascertained. There's no such thing as more or less ideological; it's just a matter of whether the topic being discussed is something that even has an objective truth in the first place. Using the current topic of minimum wage as an example, it's up to an individual to decide how much they value the relative improvement in quality of life for people with improved wages (which undeniably is a result of a reasonable minimum wage increase) and how much they value the potential downsides (increased costs for some goods/services). There's no universal right or wrong answer; there are only answers that are right or wrong relative to some set of subjective values. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 18:01 on May 24, 2017 |
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May 24, 2017 17:42
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If you're pitching a minimum wage hike as an anti-poverty/redistributionist policy, then yes, it matters who will benefit and who will pay for it. If the wage increases come from business profits, and the recipients are all poor, it works as redistribution. If the wages are paid for with price increases, and the beneficiaries are both rich and poor, the effect can be ambiguous, depending on the proportions. Economists are pretty confident that the overall effect is redistributionist at the levels they've studied, but it's not particularly efficient, and poor people out of the labor force are unambiguously worse-off. There is a way to increase wages for the poor, without raising prices, without hurting the poor out of the labor force, and without inadvertently transferring some of the benefits to the rich--the earned income tax credit. The only good reason to prefer a minimum wage hike to raising the EITC is pragmatic, the minimum wage is more popular with conservatives and therefore it's easier to pass.
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May 24, 2017 17:44
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JeffersonClay posted:If you're pitching a minimum wage hike as an anti-poverty/redistributionist policy, then yes, it matters who will benefit and who will pay for it. If the wage increases come from business profits, and the recipients are all poor, it works as redistribution. If the wages are paid for with price increases, and the beneficiaries are both rich and poor, the effect can be ambiguous, depending on the proportions. Economists are pretty confident that the overall effect is redistributionist at the levels they've studied, but it's not particularly efficient, and poor people out of the labor force are unambiguously worse-off. actually welfare is better but your beloved new democrats scrapped it in favor of the lovely reagan/ford plan called the EITC. also the EITC does literally nothing to help poor outside of the labor force so i dunno why you even bother bringing that up. the eitc is a really lovely way to help the poor, like any kind of tax deduction is, and worse yet repubs are already complaining about abuse so they're gonna try to slash it. it's got all the weaknesses of welfare cept it's way worse at helping the poor
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May 24, 2017 17:57
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I agree with you, if the goal is to help the poor or redistribution, welfare>EITC>minimum wage. But public support is minimum wage>EITC>welfare, so again it's about pragmatism. One caveat is the EITC works better when accompanied by a moderate minimum wage so that employers can't lower wages once the government starts subsidizing them.
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May 24, 2017 18:03
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I love how JC can't even defend any BC polkcies. But then attacks any attempts to fix them.
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May 24, 2017 18:23
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Actually the western Canadian polish community has no greater friend than me, although they do chafe at the suggestion they need fixing.
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May 24, 2017 19:33
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JeffersonClay posted:There is a way to increase wages for the poor, without raising prices, without hurting the poor out of the labor force, and without inadvertently transferring some of the benefits to the rich--the earned income tax credit. The only good reason to prefer a minimum wage hike to raising the EITC is pragmatic, the minimum wage is more popular with conservatives and therefore it's easier to pass. Getting a lump sum once a year as opposed to an increase in every single paycheck is much much worse, for reasons that should be obvious. Also, you are now putting all of the burden of the policy squarely onto the government's budget, which is already pretty heavy on deficit spending, whereas minimum wage increases actually lead to an increase in revenue generated through taxes.
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May 24, 2017 20:12
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JeffersonClay posted:Actually the western Canadian polish community has no greater friend than me, although they do chafe at the suggestion they need fixing. Hearing this in a Hillary Clinton voice like some alt-reality where she's a Canadian politician and claims the Polish call her their Babcia as she pulls a box of pierogies out of her purse.
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May 24, 2017 20:17
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