"Democrats have deep divides over policy. In contrast, Republicans, at both the state and federal levels, are largely unified around an agenda of cutting spending for programs such as
Medicaid that are
targeted at low-income people, defending Americansā ability to
own and
purchase guns,
limiting abortion, and
reducing regulations and
taxes on
businesses. "
When President Trump entered office, it wasnāt clear if he would consolidate control of the Republican Party ā or even his own administration. We used to writeā¦
fivethirtyeight.com
Though as of late, the most unifying factor for republicans is just supporting whatever Trump says" nonsense. This current Pandemic though is going to test their ability to comply with Trump's anti science, anti truth stance as I am sure they will get quite a bit of blowback from the people and businesses for doing so. Trying to convince people that it isn't a problem and that the death toll is exaggerated does not go very far when their constituents are telling them their loved ones died from this due to the choices their representatives made.Yes, if your elected officials did not provide basic PPE and your loved ones died because they could not access basic protection equipment , those officials are responsible for those deaths. Yes, if your elected officials took away your unemployment and you were forced to go back to work unprotected and you get sick and become disabled due to getting sick, and they refuse to pay your disability, the elected officials are responsible for this. Yes, if you get sick or get your loved ones sick because of the polices your officials make, your officials are responsible for this, and they should be held accountable. The officials are going to be hearing about this, so it will be much harder for them to ignore when the people losing their loved ones are not just going to forget it is happening and believe their rhetoric this time.
The republican's standard playbook is " keep people bickering about Abortion and Guns so they do not notice us taking their healthcare, unemployment, food and housing away" as much." They scapegoat " immigrants taking their jobs" rather than businesses not paying a living wage because much of the country is still basing their business model on the slave economy.
The reason why Lindsey graham wants to take away people's unemployment is he wants to be able to force people to suffer enough to work for less than a living wage and that the people make more on unemployment than the companies he support's is willing to pay them for doing work that is not only physically taxing on their bodies, they are being paid not even enough to live on to do work that puts their lives at risk. Being able to profit off the backs of others keeping them too poor, sick and hurt to fight back is the business plan that Lindsey Graham is proposing here and sadly, he is only representing the wealthy whose money is made off the backs of the poor in this manner. Much of the republican party is directly kept in power by these same businesses that profit by refusing to pay a living wage to those doing the actual work .
As long as the republicans can keep the people distracted bickering about things that are not as important and blaming someone else for all their problems , they can continue to exploit the people for profit without drawing attention to themselves, further siphoning the wealth into fewer and fewer hands:
The biggest lie they sell the people is " we cannot afford this" because they keep the vast majority of the population not being able to afford much of anything so they convince them that they will take away what little scraps they do have to be able to make the needed changes, when in reality, they just need to take from that big pile on the right of that graph, there is enough in that pile to make every single man, woman, and child, citizen or not " wealthy" in the US. so taking just a small amount of it and using it to keep people from struggling with basic necessities isn't really taking much from them at all. It certainly is not taking as much as the wealthy took from ll of those families by not paying them adequately for their work all these years. All they are doing is giving the back wages that should have been paid already that the wealthy should not have had in the first place because if they had paid a living wage in the first place, that wealth would have already been more evenly distributed throughout the general population to begin with. We can afford it, and the people will be better for it, we just have to end the very false idea that " the poor don't do their share" when they are the ones who ARE doing more than their share, just they are having their share taken from them and not being given back. We just need to give them back their share and we could solve so many of the problems this is causing all at once.
EDIT: In comparison, the Democrats are in no way united around cutting programs to the poor, they instead primarily want to increase them, it is just a matter of how much, which ones and how to go about it which often causes endless bickering over the best way to do things:
Thereās a lot of news right now about conflicts within the Democratic Party, and similar stories will likely continue to pop up for the next two years. Much of ā¦
fivethirtyeight.com
These strong divides among democrats are also the reason that if democrats fail to find agreement over a policy, it often gives the republicans the little gap they need to seize control entirely due to the democrats endlessly bickering about the best way to solve issues. They do not get to solve anything once the republicans seize control, but the republicans being unified is what makes it so much easier for them to gain power, yet we still have so many democrats willing to say " my way or the highway" instead of compromising along the way so they can get more done in the long run and actually be able to achieve their goals eventually.