Why doesn't the Democratic Party just change it's name to the Socialists Party ?
Warrior15
Anywhere there are Titties.
Every candidate is now attempting to prove they are more "progressive" than the next. Government taking over healthcare, mandated energy policies, expanding medicare and welfare. Never ending new ways to spend other people's money.
I'm kinda OK with it. Makes it easier for the Republican's to win in 2020.
I'm kinda OK with it. Makes it easier for the Republican's to win in 2020.
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We’ve had too much of a swing from extreme left thinkers wanting the answers to have government take care of our problems, when I’m fact Hitler, Mousalini, Stalin, and many other dictoators also promised the same things Ortasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren politicians are stating. We all know how that ended up, because their policies take too much from the people and hand it over to the government. You can’t have a progressive society when a few powerful people control over the majority of the working class, and that’s what these liberals are trying to do, force their beliefs of socialism.
The right drives the cart, and the left is along for the ride....
Not sure anybody from the right can put up a challenge with the momentum Trump has on the base. The Democrats need a youthful centrist who can gather attention from suburbanites and the working class, like Beto O’Rourke. I could support someone like him to get my vote. Klobuchar is a good campaigner but she comes from too far left of constituency. Warren and some of the other liberals turn too many people off with their far left thinking.
Pelosi being Speaker was a bad move long term--a very bad move. I'd like to see a competitive race in both parties primaries and a good independent run ( but I also find it very telling that when Mr. Starbucks decided to throw out there he might run as an independent how liberals reacted. )
When pendulum sit in middle clock stop running.
Where Trump needs to shore up more support is with the Independents, who generally cannot vote in the primaries (in many states) but are very active in the general election. If the Dems trot out some left wing wack job, it's going to go a long way in helping Trump firm up support with the Independent swing vote. OTOH, someone like Biden could pose a serious challenge to Trump, so here's hoping that Warren or Harris get the Dem nomination. ;)
This is important to understand. Trump looked very Presidential up there, like him or not. Trump is, first and foremost, a showman who understands his audience. If the Dems trot out some nut job, you can bet that Trump is going to switch gears and position himself as the voice of reason, just like he did during the SOTU.
The thing is, the Democrats are conservative and the Republicans are way off the charts whacko right wing extremists today.
There are no socialists among the Democrats really. Bernie is more conservative than Mondale was or Carter...
If we could go back and have Republicans like Eisenhower and Democrats like Roosevelt, I'd be happy with the 2 party system when it comes to domestic policies.
I've asked this question to @Dugan, @25, and @Warrenboy but I've yet to get an answer: What would you do under the old healthcare system if you had a pre-existing condition (say metastatic cancer) that knocked you out of the workforce? Under the old system you would be denied health insurance, perhaps for the rest of your life. Under the old system, you lose your job, you run out of COBRA, you go bankrupt and die. It's not an academic question -- there about 50M people who could not buy insurance under the old system and another 50M that would pay substantially more.
So what would you do @Warrier? Guessing you'll be the 4th to ignore the question.
As far as socialism, I can't think of a more sensational example than the $750M TARP program that was signed into law under GW Bush, with support of Republicans Paulson and Bernanke. The government took partial control of our biggest banks, basically a welfare program for investment banks. Nobody wanted to bail out the banks; we had to.
Obamacare is the same thing as Romneycare which was invented by Jonathan Gruber (MIT economics professor, and probably one the countries most prominent experts on healthcare policy). It's the most market-friendly system available to keeping everyone covered.
Fuck you.
Obamacare is a monstrosity designed to pander to a variety of special interests while moving us one step closer to a government takeover of healthcare. The main problems are the essential health benefits, which created bloated and obscenely expensive policies, and allowing anyone who voluntarily reduces their income (without any sort of disability) to become subsidized with lower deductibles and out-of-pockets. All of this had made it unaffordable for anyone who is NOT getting a handout.
Even worse, they knew this was going to happen, yet they went ahead anyway. The politicians who created it lacked the political courage to do what they truly wanted, which is to make everyone contribute via their premiums. So instead they built a system destined to fail, no doubt figuring by that point that politicos would be forced to fix it. Every knowledgeable pundit at that time was saying the same thing, which was that the individual market was too old and too sick to support Obamacare by itself and they were right. Instead all we did was substitute subsidized people for the millions of unsubsidized who were once in the market, but have since been forced out and instead pay cash now.
Trump 2020. ;)
Obama was worse than Clinton... What got me was when he was asked his biggest regret... it wasn't not getting universal health care, or even trying to cut student debt, or anything that could have helped the country. His biggest regret was not getting support for a ground invasion of Syria... yeah, very "liberal" of him...
Don't know when you guys will be smart enough to realize its not about the parties, they're two sides of the same coin, which is the system...
As a rule our government tends to complicate whatever they get themselves involved with --more costly--more red tape--more problems . I use to say the one thing we did well was go to war but even in recent years that hasn't been the an exception either.
Our government from both parties isn't very good at taking a macro view of how changes impact other sectors and how the changes are typically more far reaching than anticipated. and liberals are worse at it then conservatives from what I have observed. To a large extent it is why everything ends up costing three times as much as what they budget for and think it is going to cost.
I don't mind progress but before we roll out the new vehicle for health care lets make sure the tires are not square and we have a real plan in place with a good understanding of what impact it's going to have on everybody and everything else we are dealing with at the present and into the future.
The only reason I can come up with is the cost to change the branding on collateral (stationary, signs, buttons,... )
No, Obamacare was not designed to fail. Moderate Democrats don't want single-payer. Moderates don't want to wait in line for medical care, they don't rationing, and they don't want MDs pushed into the middle class.
The "mandate" that you've been complained about in other threads was intended to keep healthy people in the insurance pool, to reduce the premiums for everyone else; so you're complaining about the mandate, yet the mandate was there to reduce premiums for people like yourself.
Just like with the bail outs a decade ago you got penalized for being responsible.
@Flag: As 25 rightly stated, insurance is precisely designed to spread risk across a broader pool of participants. The problem with Obamacare is that they tried to do this by relying upon too few healthy and unsubsidized participants to pay for the medical care of too many sick and older subsidized participants. This was of course doomed to fail, as was predicted by many insurance experts prior to its passage. So instead we've just brought one uninsured group into the fold and forced another group out of the insurance market in the process.
Having a government w/ so much control means one is at their mercy and the government will dictate a big portion of your life and how much you can progress, if they allow you to progress at all - big government means its citizens are beholden to it (the bigger the government, the more they will have you by the balls).
Up through the mid-1960's, the US and Western Europe were largely in sync. Canada's first U-Health Care was patterned after our Medicare. And expanding welfare was a first move to address what John F. Kennedy saw as an expanding permanent unemployment rate coming up to 1%.
Advanced industrialization pretty much mandates that you go to a large degree of Socialism, or you have to sacrifice democracy and go to a two tier society. This later is what we are coming to have. It does not work.
So while Europe continued to the Left and much of Western Europe has a moderate degree of Social Democracy, with the unveiling of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, using racism to take over the South, and then with the Republican Party adopting the doctrine of Christian Reconstruction and main streaming the views of the John Birch Society, the US has gone far to the Right.
We need to reverse this and move to a moderate social democracy. It is said that we will need to have about a 15% higher top tax bracket.
Likely our society is already paying far more than this to deal with the consequences of not now having it.
SJG
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IMO Obamacare happened b/c of the abuses and special-interests pre-Obama - but I def don't believe the government running anything is the best-option; it only becomes an option when the special-interests fuck over the vast-majority of people and too-often politicians allow this.
Talking about big-medicine - I heard the other day that only two countries in the world allow commercials/ads for drugs/medicines, the US and New Zealand.
SJG
Trump is challenging that, but he’s still pretty much on his own. The supposed battle between left and right is Kabuki theater.
As Marx and Engles explain, society has always involved class conflict.
The idea which you are expressing Mark94, is just one of the disinformations of Right Populism. It runs on Christian Fundamentalism and Racism, to broaden its base of support beyond the super rich.
SJG
SJG