Democratic (Party) Direction

yup

http://www.gallup.com/poll/191504/majority-support-idea-fed-funded-healthcare-system.aspx

xps to milo you are just making the same criticism and its still ridiculous tbh

Public option is incrementalism toward single-payer - if everyone can buy into Medicare, eventually everyone will.

xps qualms- Nice!

because it would be electorally unpopular, given that most of the middle class are on employer based plans? im all in for the 'more direct provision of public goods, less wonky indirect tax noodling', but PO is the former. is there evidence that SP is popular?

― flopson, Tuesday, May 9, 2017 4:00 PM (four minutes ago)

bro every sweeping legislative change is unpopular. the ACA was unpopular. dems thought that by watering it down as much as possible they could avoid electoral defeat. (ron howard voice: they didn't.) if the purpose of your half-measures is simply to avoid backlash among the uninformed, i think it's misguided

One problem with public option as opposed to single payer is that it must be coupled with mandatory coverage (as with the Obamacare mandate) and it frames the monthly premiums as a direct out-of-pocket cost to the citizen. Psychologically speaking, this is enrages people x100 more than framing it as "health care is universal and free or nearly so" while raising the revenue to pay for single payer in whatever way the public is least unhappy with -- e.g. a financial transactions tax would be highly acceptable to the general public and hard to gin up a scare-tactic ad campaign against.

if ACA had good public option they wouldn'ta gotten away w repeal

my point is more, health policy is path dependent (look how different it is across countries) and voters are insanely risk averse about Their Healthcare. So u gotta think about the path, ie, starting from an employer based system in the US, and about selling it to selfish wimps. maybe ur right tho and they're ready, idk! I certainly like living in a country with SP and wish the best, just wondering what that angle is on Medicare For All

maybe you and Bernie can start your own party

hey Shakey, Jimmy "Reagan Lite" Carter is a BernieBro. gtfo

it really doesn't matter where on the spectrum of liberal health insurance expansion you're proposing when the spin on fox news is going to be "death panels" regardless. again, look at the ACA

xp

hey Shakey, Jimmy "Reagan Lite" Carter is a BernieBro. gtfo

racist war criminal Jimmy Carter? didn't know you were a fan. Aren't you worried that he's going to contaminate Bernie?

my point is that Bernie is only 'left' in this country, u ass

as Barack Walker Bush himself said

I think everything hinges on what McConnell & co do next

why is Party in parentheses in the thread title?

You gotta fight for your right to not parenthesize "Party."

Single-payer/Medicare-for-all appears to assume that people will be comfortable paying $200ish on average for Medicare-level coverage - maybe it's taking too positive a view of Americans, but I don't think hostility comes from having to pay for care, it comes from having to pay too much for shitty care that you're not sure will even actually cover you.

The rest of the developed world doesn't, AFAICT, rely on obfuscated taxes, the citizens don't think healthcare is just appearing for free.

(the rest of the developed world also couldn't pay for an entire NHS with a quarter of its military budget, either...)

Possible projection, though - I initially resisted getting an ACA plan (my first health insurance ever) not out of any hostility to the idea of paying for insurance but because it was ~$275/mo the first year for a $5000 deductible, which just meant I was giving Blue Cross/Blue Shield over $3k to not pay a minor emergency clinic the one time I get sick per year.

If I could pay $275/mo and walk into a doctor and get hernia surgery without the deductible bankrupting me and having no clue about what the total cost would be, I would have been overjoyed to pay it.

cool how hilary didnt type her own plan up thats a resounding rebuttal of my point

I don't think you know how party platforms work in the US.

I think he does know about the platform she ran on during the primary, which went further and further left the more she talked to people like BLM

I have no trouble believing she'd have instituted a few fine policies and possibly some checks on police power. Barring nuclear war, though, I'd expect a similar body count per term overseas.

no way. trump will outpace obama in that metric very shortly

You sure about that? This roundup doesn't even include Syria, Iraq, or Libya.

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush

comparing metrics is too simple. you need to establish how many foreigners *needed* killing and not just go for the lowest figure available

~management~

That's just drone strikes though. There's got to be a good roundup somewhere of civilian casualties from US military strikes overall in the Obama years vs Bush years.

You can't manage what you can't measure

There's a pretty large contingent of Americans who, when faced with the question "establish how many foreigners *needed* killing," would simply answer, "durn near all of 'em, amirite?"

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-working-class-trump-cultural-anxiety/525771/

Does this go here?

There's a pretty large contingent of Americans who, when faced with the question "establish how many foreigners *needed* killing," would simply answer, "durn near all of 'em, amirite?"

and an equally sized contingent washing their hands of doing anything to stop the war machine because it is the fault of the first contingent

I liked Pierce's response: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a54982/trump-voters-cultural-anxiety/

doing anything to stop the war machine

I feel like this deserves its own thread. did anybody read Maddow's book?

barely even deserved its own post as a sentiment tbh

lol, otm.

not as a sentiment, I meant that specific phrase as a problem statement, like basically what would it take politically to actually steer the leviathan of the DIC away from perpetual conflict operations and back to some semblance of a peacetime. it wasn't really that long ago that we didn't have the all but weekly cruise missile / drone strikes. it's not for this thread though since clearly neither party is interested in taking on the entrenched intelligence and defense hegemony that likes this status quo.

i agree with your part of it

ahem

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/10/black-election-turnout-down-2016-census-survey-238226

Congrats, GOP in Wisconsin.

please nothing more about 2016, i'm content with the party line that the most qualified candidate in history stimulated historic minority turnout and do not appreciate evidence to the contrary

why 2016 autopsies are so annoying ->

As the margin of an election goes to 0, the number of factors that decided the election goes to infinity.

Just nominate better candidates.

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) May 8, 2017

even without that last statement (which obv i agree w/), the first statement is probably widely underappreciated

one thing i was thinking about is how like, during the entirety of Obama's term, his Unique Individual Greatness [insert fart sound effects as you read the inevitable Morbs quip scoffing at this] so thoroughly eclipsed anything else in the Democratic party, like not just their mediocrity but their very existence... sometimes i'm like, who tf are these ppl

this is a relatively easy argument to get behind imho

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/democrats-should-propose-an-actual-middle-class-tax-cut.html

Democrats have every reason to make taxes one of their signature issues. Voters want the tax code to be simpler and fairer — which is to say, they want the middle class to pay less, the rich to pay more, and for everyone to spend less time on government-mandated paperwork.

Republicans cannot deliver these goods because they are beholden to interest groups that oppose them. The libertarian billionaires who shield the GOP from popular rebuke demand tribute. And those billionaires — along with tax-services companies — have an investment in keeping Americans confused and overwhelmed at tax time.

my purely in-it-to-win-it party name wd be Raise Taxes On Rich People

This seems interesting: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/30/15698378/house-democrats-pac

In days past, a proposal to slam the rich to reward the working and middle classes meant hitting Republicans to benefit Democrats.

Even as recently as 1976, according to data from American National Election Studies, the most affluent voters, the top 5 percent, were solidly in the Republican camp, 77-23. Those in the bottom third of the income distribution were solidly Democratic, 64-36.

In other words, 41 years ago, the year Jimmy Carter won the presidency, the Sanders (2016 tax) proposal would have made political sense.

But what about now?

In the 2016 election, the economic elite was essentially half Democratic, according to exit polls: Those in the top 10 percent of the income distribution voted 47 percent for Clinton and 46 percent for Trump. Half the voters Sanders would hit hardest are members of the party from which he sought the nomination.

The problem for the Democratic Party is that “them” has become “us.”...

Richard V. Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, highlights the contradictions of modern Democratic liberalism in his new book, “Dream Hoarders: How the Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust.”

Reeves argues that those in the top 20 percent of the income distribution have become an increasingly isolated class; if the country is to restore the American tradition of upward mobility, this elite will have to pay for it....

The preliminary evidence from actual events is that demanding sacrifice poses major risks. Asking people to think of themselves as compassionate and to pay higher taxes is one thing — many Democrats have made that leap — but ask them to live in a mixed income neighborhood or ask them to have their kid give up her spot at Princeton, and you get a different response.

Reeves himself points to the Democratic uproar when President Obama proposed a relatively modest change in a tax-based mechanism to help pay college costs. The change in what are called 529 College Savings Plans was designed to make the program more advantageous to people with moderate incomes and less so for those with high incomes. An estimated 70 percent of the tax benefits of 529 plans currently go to families with incomes above $200,000.

The moment Obama suggested the reform, prominent Democrats from both the House and Senate were inundated with angry complaints from affluent constituents. They pressured Obama to drop the proposal. In less than a week, he did.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/opinion/democratic-party-rich-thomas-edsall.html?_r=0

Rich "liberals" who don't support desegregation, public schools, and progressive taxation should be driven out of the party. Fuck those people. I make a good living, but I'm happy to pay more taxes to support liberal ideals.

In the 2016 election, the economic elite was essentially half Democratic, according to exit polls: Those in the top 10 percent of the income distribution voted 47 percent for Clinton and 46 percent for Trump.

This part is total BS -- affluent highly-educated white people are still predominantly Republican, but they're the kind of Republicans who are least likely to support Donald Trump. Ask how they voted in house races and you're gonna get a very different answer.

Reeves argues that those in the top 20 percent of the income distribution have become an increasingly isolated class; if the country is to restore the American tradition of upward mobility, this elite will have to pay for it.

This part is kind of true; I see why it's politically effective to say "the 1% are making out like bandits while the 99% are getting screwed" but it's actually not just hedge fund bros who are doing fine, it's also the doctors, the lawyers, the rest of the top 10-20% of the income distribution.

The moment Obama suggested the reform, prominent Democrats from both the House and Senate were inundated with angry complaints from affluent constituents.

This part is 100% true and was a moment at which my fellow liberals were indeed supremely annoying.

now we just need to convince Dem officeholders

xp

i remember them being inundated w angry complaints from the public during the bailout fiasco but they conveniently ignored those

Spotted on Twitter:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DBfIAbkW0AI-3aq.jpg:large