What are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Flaws?

I didn't say "nothing good has happened."

There are thousands of people who now have their heath insurance fully subsidized by the govt, some of them or someone in their family having health conditions that before ACA would've meant they couldn't get health insurance no matter what. Yes, private health insurance should've been rendered unnecessary, but perhaps some of these people would disagree with your stance.

Forgive me for interpreting there's been "a lack of positive change" as "nothing good has happened"

Lol the disingenuous shit itt is too much

When positive changes do occur (ACA) you just mark them as total failures because they're not ideal changes

This isn't a referendum on the existence of the ACA?

I'm arguing against the idea that people don't believe in the possibility of change (via electoral politics most of all) because of propaganda, rather than it being a reaction to what they've actually lived, what they've experienced from electoral politics.

You're arguing something different in every post, who can keep up

Granny, do you think life has gotten better or worse for most Americans since 1990?

Milo, do you think there have been zero positive changes since 1990?

Changes to what?

You think MY question is the one that's more vague and difficult to answer?

guys

Yes?

Texting beats the hell out of ever calling someone. That's certainly a positive change.

You're arguing something different in every post, who can keep up

He made that point a few posts ago.

It’s true that incremental change is harder to see and even quantify milo, as I noted, a 3% change in poverty rate doesn’t seem much (even if it means tens of millions of people) but the reality is that countries that have less inequality, better health-care, countries that are closer to what you want the US to look like, well they got those changes incrementaly.

So I think it’s always worth noting that while incremental change is not always the best possible change, it’s still a positive step forward.

xxp - if you think things are generally getting better for most people, then I imagine that it makes more sense to think that disaffected people are being fooled. I think most people are pretty rational about their lives in general.

... and yet they vote for centrists and their stupid policies, or even worse, the GOP.

People have been shown to be irrational actors in just about every facet of life.

I think most people are pretty rational about their lives in general.

lol

Funny because that is one of the core assumptions of neolibs.

Or they don't vote (which is the group I think is more important) in normal times.

We saw it in exit polling in the SC primary - most Biden voters supported Medicare For All but didn't trust Bernie Sanders (or anyone else) to deliver it so they voted for the safer centrist. That's not the result of propaganda, it's lived experience telling them good things won't be given to them (since the Democrats abandoned the transactional politics of the mid-20th century).

Likewise, the percentage of young men of color who switched to Trump in 2020 - their lives pre-COVID probably didn't get worse from Obama to Trump (because actually the decline in life expectancy, for one, reversed, unemployment held steady, etc.) and he at least promises things.

Or you can write them off as dumb and/or hateful in some way, rather than responding to the material conditions of their lives.

You go from "most people are pretty rational about their lives" to people voted for a lying conman cause he promises things

gyac OTM.

Of course things have become marginally better, in many respects. I'm weird white guy married to a weird brown guy, and I would have died last year without the ACA. These issues actually aren't abstract to me.

But we also spent years homeless, living out of a U-Haul truck parked under a freeway or next to our friends' warehouse, or later, on very isolated land projects in nowhere towns of rural California. We had jobs or gigs, but they were part-time and/or seasonal, always with side hustles, too. It was fucking awful in most respects, and it all happened during the Obama administration. Part of the reason I didn't post much here for years and years was because of unreliable access to internet! I bathed in a river for almost a year because we didn't have running water!

So things have gotten better, sure. But as the class of serfs continues to grow because of the way the economy works, the consequences of that growth are appearing more and more dire.

Incrementalism is the worst, literally telling people to be happy with scraps.

In my view, incrementalism is happily embraced only by those who fear change because it might be inconvenient to their present comfort. It is grudgingly accepted by those who only prefer scraps of progress when the alternative is no change at all or retrogression.

I, for one, would be ecstatic to discover there is a visible path within US politics that delivers even-handed justice and ensures FDR's Four Freedoms more rapidly than incrementalism. I'm open to anyone who can describe that path to me in such a way that I can see it and help to implement it. Please, someone, rescue me from this damnable creeping pace toward a just society. I'm as impatient for it as the rest of you.

Aimless, sarcasm isn't helping

table otm in the post above

both of these things can be true:

When positive changes do occur (ACA) you just mark them as total failures because they're not ideal changes

and

hungry and desperate people won’t continue to tolerate decline in their living conditions forever. It’ll spill out one way or another.

TF was sarcastic about Aimless's post?

I think incrementalism vs. radical change is largely an illusion, things happen slowly and then quickly without an immediately obvious cause in many cases. I'd love to see capitalism have a Berlin Wall moment but who knows when/how that will come, in the meantime I will continue to work for "pragmatic anarchism" as sarahell memorably put it

OL I really don't have to parse that post do I?

Please, someone, rescue me from this damnable creeping pace

this is his usual snide, superior centrist garbage FYI

I think incrementalism vs. radical change is largely an illusion, things happen slowly and then quickly without an immediately obvious cause in many cases

I believe a long-dead Russian guy might have said something like this once

xp to sleeve. So, do you not find this creeping pace to be damnable? Do you not ardently wish that a way could be found to speed it up? How the living FUCK is that thought "snide, superior centrist garbage"? Get out of my face, asshole.

I took Aimless' post as sincere.

And you can take the subsequent one as sincere, too.

If there's a shtick to Aimless, it's being very earnest

I'd love to see capitalism have a Berlin Wall moment

Capitalism works very well for other countries, thank you.

I took the post in question as sincere, Aimless, fwiw

Even where capitalism hasn’t consigned 20% of the populace to permanent misery, it’s boiling the seas. Depends on your definition of working.

imo milo’s point is that despite some good things happening, bad things also happened and those overwhelmingly dominate and therefore people who have lived through the last 30 years haven’t seen a net improvement in their lives; some people now make 15$ an hour or are now insured under medicaid, but they also lost their life savings in 2008

it’s an important point and worthwhile distinction to keep in mind. is policy (and other sources of increases in well being) outpacing the other countervailing forces making people’s lives worse?

in terms of post-tax income, i think the answer is yes. in fact, most people’s lives have improved. however, it’s very underwhelming for the bottom half of the income distribution. if you look at the distribution of pre-tax income 1980-2014, it declined by 25% for those in the bottom 20% of the income distribution. however, post-tax, it increases by 4%. so policy is outpacing the headwinds, but just barely. compare this to the previous period 1946-80, where income for this group doubled. for the next 30 percent, those in between the 20 and 50th percentile, income increased by 7% pre-tax and 26% post tax.

btw these numbers come from piketty saez and zucman distributional national accounts

I follow AOC on twitter, AMA

― jaymc, Monday, November 9, 2020 11:05 AM (one hour ago)

I follow her on Twitter too!

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, November 9, 2020 11:08 AM (one hour ago)

story checks out:

AOC is cool and smart

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re: post-tax income, how does that correlate with costs of living?

Between 2010 and 2016, my rent for a below average 1 bedroom in a flyover state city increased by a bit more than 50% from $600 to $950 (and presumably has kept climbing, I lucked into renting a house that's been stable), after being pretty steady from 2000-10. When I enrolled in college in 2000 vs. enrolled in 2010, tuition had roughly tripled IIRC.

tuition & fees*

And in populous cities, the sorts of numbers you're citing are even more wild.

i don’t have a citation off the top of my head; ill look into it and get back to you with some numbers. that’s the best data in the world for national stuff but it’s not available at any subnational levels yet. they use gdp deflators in that paper so rent is accounted for relative to its share of gdp

one reason why rent likely won’t overturn those results is incomes in expensive cities rose far more than for the country as a whole. many of the poorest people in the country, those who have *really* been left behind, live in places like the rust belt where rent is low but incomes decreased by even more

this is interesting discussion. i don't have anything but more personal anecdata - seeing the same massive increases in rent etc, way outpacing increases in wages. i just assume it's the same everywhere, which it sounds like it .. basically is?

i also really feel like i see a lot more people out there living out of their cars etc. than i did four years ago. i'm in a mountain west city.

i feel like it would be a good idea to tax rich people more and use that to give poor people more money.

Social housing is something that needs to gain more traction, even within the progressives, I see it as an emergency on par with health-care.

otm

(also feel compelled to say I'm not disaffected, I do believe in change, just generally not via the Democratic Party)

Americans spend far less on clothing and housing than in the past, but more on housing and healthcare. I see health insurance companies as an unnecessary middleman, but they are responding to prices set by pharma and hospital/doctor companies/orgs.

Americans spend far less on ... housing than in the past, but more on housing...

You may want to correct that.