Will Joe Biden Drop Out of the Presidential Race
- Thread starter gorfias
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USA
I am not trying to scare you about Trump taking land, I do not think he will personally, though it is actually possible through his family. The thing I am MOST afraid of is unnecessary deaths. I have fiends, family, neighbors, patients, all whose lives will be at risk if Trump repeals Obamacare. They will all lose access to their medical treatment. Having that happen in the best of times is bad, but right now, in the middle of a Pandemic, in the middle of an economic collapse, could be far more lethal for so many due to not even having the charity options available because the resources are overwhelmed. The charity resources that existed for them previously are exhausted, there is nothing for them this time at all. I have seen what happens when it gets that bad, people suffer and die and since so many are suffering on such a large scale no one even seems to notice and become too numb to care. Some people cannot imagine large scale true poverty, starvation, complete hopelessness, pain and death. That is where we are heading right now. I am the one afraid here, not you. I am afraid to see this happen to so many. Me expressing to you my worries for these many people I know who will perish if they lose what little access they have is not be " trying to scare you". It is me trying to make it crystal clear what I know to happen here in our current predicament so you know exactly what is at stake here.
Dems doing it too sometimes =\= Republicans do it much worse ALL the time.
I will take the party that at least has SOME good people in it that will do some good than the party who has none.
TBH ANYONE who wins in November is being set up to fail BTW, they will either be handed a Pandemic and economic collapse ( again) or they will be the one who caused it to be this bad in the first place. There is no winning here for the next 4 years, just surviving it. I am hoping there are more of us in the head count after it is all said and done. That is my objective here. The probability of me personally surviving if I am infected is low, so the decisions Trump made already could already determine whether or not I am left standing when this is all said and done as well. I am sure these decisions already made will determine how many are still left afterwards as it is, 4 more years of these bad decisions and how many will actually be left at all?
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Your only argument is "but Trump" or "but Republicans", the only reason you would say that is if you thought the threat of them winning is what will persuade me to vote for them.
As has been said many many times by not just me, just pointing to Republicans is not an election strategy. It's not empowering to the people. Bootlicking the Republicans because if we don't a bunch of Democrats could change party is just about the worst thing you could ever say in support of them. This is perhaps the worst argument in their favor possible.
I know what's at stake, the continued death march behind people who stand for nothing but themselves. No thanks, I'm out.
But in real terms, all of that is nonsense.
For some reason, when the subject is taxing the rich, people readily recognize that not only is a dollar worth less to the wealthy, not only is 1% worth less to the wealthy, but 10% of a wealthy person's income might have less impact on them than 1% of the poor's. The 20% increase is the more significant change. You can talk about the raw numbers all you want (not that those are real, ownership of large corporations isn't actually liquid wealth the way people pretend it is) but the gap in actual living experience between the rich and the poor has contracted. The poor in America have access to basically all of human knowledge. Have access to affordable vehicles. Delicious foods. Infinite entertainment. A teenager on absolute minimum wage can work one week and afford a 40" 4k smart tv. At this moment in history, luxury is cheaper than necessities. The lifestyle difference between $100,000 a year and $100,000,000 a year is so negligible, who cares what these people's stock portfolios look like. Sit in your pjs and tweet things, you're basically a Kardashian already. The rich have nothing to spend it on to better their own lives and end up trying to fly to Mars or some nonsense. Proportionate wealth is such a meaningless thing to care about.
The Obama administration chose to resolve the crisis in a way that hurt ordinary people and enriched the people responsible for the crash. It decided to do that. It did not have to. There was nothing necessary about the misery caused.
It would be nice if you gave a decent explanation how, because none of the rest of your statement supplies it.
For instance, I don't understand your obsession with liquidity. Rupert Murdoch literally has the power to make or break a politician (in a close race, at least), and he can do so because he owns a huge media company. A landlord can evict tenants. Investments can create revenue that removes the need to work. Assets are a very real source of power. People like Bloomberg or Trump don't need to do all the hard years of work of climbing up the greasy pole of politics from local upwards to get to high office. Their wealth just bought them the status, contacts, advisors, and so on to go straight in at the top. ~50% of the population are poor or working class, but just 2% of federal legislature and 3% of states legislature come from that background. If you want to look at the movers and shakers in the economic elites, it's basically the same.
Simple consumption, being able to shove cheesy puffs into their maws and watch movies at will is an absurd notion of imagining people poor people lead lives like the affluent. Apart from the fact that the travails of poverty (and how many people are in it) are extremely well documented and your comment seems to have no awareness of this at all.
The social safety net exists for people to have necessities and simple consumption. "Your welfare programs aren't adequately equipping the poor to start billion dollar media empires" is not a good criticism. The vast majority of people held up by welfare initiatives, much like the vast majority of people in general, have no ambition to be Rupert Murdoch.
Like, people love throwing out how much more economic mobility there is in some other countries, but the criticism rests on the idea that everyone is always trying to get richer without limits, and that's just not true. Most people are happy with their lives and have made the evaluation that risking what they have for the chance at more isn't worth it.
I expect a welfare system to pay for basics as part of a wider program of public support that allows the poor not just to bounce along the bottom, but to assist them in self-betterment. Not do things like leave them dying or bankrupt because they were unlucky enough to be ill under a healthcare system doesn't really exist for them, their kids stuck in sink schools, living in slums rife with crime, drug-abuse and potentially even deficient in amenities like clean water.
There's a whole wealth of literature out there detailing what poverty does to people. You should try reading some. It's not just the obvious material limitations, but how it frames their ambitions and expectations. People generally aren't going to be Rupert Murdochs, but they could be IT specialists, dentists, Starbucks branch managers, etc. if even such modest ambitions didn't seem half a world away from where they started.
This is really just a nicer-sounding variant of the tired old right-wing trope that the poor deserve to be poor because they are idle and stupid.
Don't you think that's a bit reductive? There are a lot of motives in between, "I have simple needs and tastes and can live a frugal lifestyle contentedly," and, "MORE MONEY!! MAMMON COMMANDS IT!!"
A story I heard was when someone I know was doing outreach for a medical school in local schools to improve recruitment from low SES areas. They did a heart dissection to show how the heart worked, and one of the pupils was fascinated. The demonstrating academic asked the pupil whether it gave him any inspiration for a career, and the kid thought he could become a butcher. The idea he could try for a biomedical scientist or medical doctor just hadn't even occurred to him.
The best graduate we had the first cohort of our BSc programme came to university unsure people like him (black, working class, no history of higher education in the family) should get a degree. We spent two years working on him to encourage him to believe he was good for a PhD, because he has what it takes. I think there are a lot of kids who could go places, but they are held back by a lack of self-belief, low expectations, and underdevelopment from their social milieu.
I think people can underestimate how intimidating it can be to go to a place where you feel everyone will look down on you because of your class, your accent, your clothes, your interests - and in many cases actually will. One of the witnesses in the Trump impeachment hearings, Fiona Hill, was born in Britain and moved to the USA because she thought her background would hold her back in the UK. And sorry to say, she might well have been right. In the USA, she's primarily defined by being British. In Britain, she was a working class northerner up against snobbish farts who went to expensive schools and spoke with received pronunciation: "I applied to Oxford in the '80s and was invited to an interview. It was like a scene from Billy Elliot: people were making fun of me for my accent and the way I was dressed. It was the most embarrassing, awful experience I had ever had in my life." The rich always have ways of making poorer people know their place.
I don't think it is reductive in that way. A nation where people have fairly stagnant individual wealth could be because it's difficult to move up or down or because people are less driven to climb. A nation where people have rapidly shifting wealth could be because of high mobility, or it could be because of wild volatility. If everyone's needs are met, and few feel wealth is their ambition in life, you wouldn't expect to see a lot of rung climbing, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The person who is happy with their existence is typically wise, not stupid. I'm not speaking in judgment of those who don't want to be billionaires. There are clear and obvious downsides to being rich and powerful that most people would choose to avoid.
I can tell which of those theories you are more inclined to believe. And no, it's still pretty reductive.
Firstly, kindly read the file: nobody has said that the poor necessarily want to be billionaires. They don't necessarily want to eat smashed avocado on sourdough for breakfast, spend their time loooking at the Klimt and Kandinsky exhibitions at MOMA and enjoying golf club membership. What they don't want are things like to work two jobs 14h a day to make ends meet, have to decide whether to buy food or medicine that week, have to get their baby's nappies from a charity. They want decently paid, secure jobs; opportunities to advance and better themselves.
And yes, you can certainly make a society where people are expected to know their place, from which they can derive a sense of contentment. Most slaves throughout history knew their place. Medieval peasants generally knew their place. But as we're talking about social order and hierarchy, you should see what the ramifications of that are.
You're not describing reality. We have a safety net. There are 7x as many people supported by government assistance programs than there are people working two jobs. If someone works ~80 hours a week, it's because they're trying to advance and better themselves.
All these things are real, to some extent.
National Diaper Bank Network: US Basic Needs Organization
National Diaper Bank Network is a nonprofit organization with a nationwide network of over 200 diaper banks that provide basic essentials to those in need.
nationaldiaperbanknetwork.org
Your country's safety net isn't very good, e.g.:
You can look at a lot of other things too where the USA does poorly. It has a low minimum wage compared to Western European nations. The USA has no minimum amount of annual leave but the average American worker gets 17 days: lower that the statutory minimums of European countries. The USA is amongst the worst in parental leave.
And so on.
Sure, the USA has a welfare system and social spending. It's just not very good compared to a lot of its developed world peers.
When I worked 2 jobs, it's because that was the only way to pay the bills. I had co-workers with full-time jobs at minimum wage who still had to go on food stamps to feed their kids.
So, one of my favorite stupid things to compare other things to is a review for the movie Enough Said, where the critic described the film as "one of the best-written American film comedies in recent memory." This was meant to be an accolade, but when receiving a complement, it's best to assume that any qualifiers are necessary. So the critic couldn't say it was the best-written American film comedies in recent memory, only one of. Nor is it one of the best, just one of the best-written. And there are better outside of America. And you have to specify film, because books or tv have too many better examples. And it's certainly not noteworthy of all time, since it's just of recent memory. And when you actually think through what all that means, it's unclear whether it's not actually an insult. Flight of the Conchords has the song "The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room", full of really medium, qualified compliments. "You could be a part-time model, but you'd probably still have to keep your normal job." At what point is it no longer a compliment?
That's what this graph is. I noticed something was a little off when it claimed the US provides 0% housing benefits. Cause like, that's nonsense. Ridiculous nonsense. Millions of families in the US have housing vouchers. But this isn't as actual comparison. This is "% of average wage in country for a lone parent of two". That's what it took to make this happen. It's harder to get data on exactly two kids than it is to get data on all single parents, it's safe to assume they needed that qualifier to get the result they wanted. It scaled by average wage of the countries, again punishing the US for being wealthier. And with housing benefits absent from Canada and the US, it's safe to assume they're just excluding need based aid entirely.
We know what the big numbers comparisons in social spending are between countries. We know this graph is far more extreme a difference than overall numbers. We can deduce from it that the difference is likely because A) they picked a very specific scenario to compare that likely makes the case they want (BBC says UK is twice as good as US, big shocker), and B) they effectively penalized countries for targeting assistance deliberately at the poor.
A) It sounds like you no longer need to work two jobs, which is sort of the point I was making.
B) People have food stamps. The argument here is whether or not the US does much for the poor, someone getting government assistance when they need it is not a counterexample.
A. I'm one of the luckier ones. Do not pretend my story validates your assumptions.
B. You are deliberately missing the point.
It doesn't actually say that. The article in which that graph appeared (here) states that "welfare" in the US is categorised as a family benefit by the OECD, meaning that the graph excludes things that are categorised as "social assistance".
Uhrm, no, it's just good statistical practice to eliminate as many confounding variables as possible. Limit yourself to a like-for-like comparison (same size families) and you're eliminating confounding variables.
Pray tell, how would you scale it? Percentage of GDP? Absolute terms? Percentage of average wage is more meaningful by far.