Even with how shitty conservative elements are, most of the issues they raise are actually correct and often missed by progressive elements, but their proposed solutions or narrative around those issues is pure garbage.
I remember seeing Andrew Tate of all people start talking about how people are living a slave’s life, working for others while getting barely enough for subsistence with no real prospects for social mobility, a point that one could pull from Marx. However, the solution that he proposes is a theocracy and return to traditionalism for some reason, which is nonsense.
Even the dumbest MAGA fool who can barely read and write knows that in general, they are becoming increasingly worse off. And they’re not wrong. They just don’t understand the “why” or “how”.
Instead of looking into it, they tend to cling to their nostalgic perception of whenever they think times were better. Mistakenly conflating their memories of the “good ol’ days” – which are heavily condensed because that’s just how the human brain works – with the ideal picture of life and society.
People like Trump are able to tap into that, promising to effectively turn back the clock, even though that’s impossible and complete bullshit. But, it resonates with those nostalgic desires and that creates a powerful bond, for better or worse.
If the Democrats want to stage a serious comeback, they’re going to have to take some pages from the playbooks of people like FDR and LBJ.
For instance, shore up Social Security and Medicare. Remove the income tax cap from Social Security. Give all the old Boomers a decent raise. Unprivatize all of Medicare and put it to work making sure that senior citizens get the best quality healthcare possible.
Do whatever it takes to ram that legislation through.
Worst case, Republicans oppose it (which they will) and you can drag each and every one of them through the mud.
The Democratic party, as it currently stands, isn’t going to do that because they don’t have the balls.
Until they grow some, were going to continue this death spiral into fascism led by charlatans making false promises about returning to some utopia that never truly existed.
This is cute from people who live under left leaning governments who tax them ever harder and erect more and more barriers to social mobility though taxation, needless bureaucracy and regulations, and then erect more and more horribly inefficient and fraud prone programs to ensure that those at the bottom are trapped at the bottom because they get a “free” home, food, etc, but if they work too hard, those are cut off, making them worse off than when they just suckled the government teat and accepted their lot in life, which means they cannot EVER raise themselves up due to being made worse off than they are if they try.
Then these people breed and create more and more government dependent subjects who have little choice but the suckle the government teat, and then they have kids, and their kids have kids, creating an ever growing army of dependent subjects that cement the charlatans in power in perpetuity.
I’m all for a social safety net. The problem is that Democrats have turned it into a social gill net. A net you can get into, but is very hard to escape from. You should look harder into how it works. There is a point where you go from getting the full benefits to getting nothing and it’s well below the line you’d need to be to not need it anymore. The system is specifically designed to never let you escape.
There’s a reason why multigenerational welfare dependence exists. It’s an intentional setup to ensure that people cannot become socially mobile because that negatively affects political parties that rely on having a large population of people in poverty to draw their power from. It’s called a benefits cliff. In many places, you’re better off sitting at the bottom, making almost nothing and suckling the government teat than fighting your way to financial independence. It traps people not only in poverty, but where they live because moving to a different state or sometimes even city to seek better opportunities means losing some or all of your benefits, putting them in a worse off situation.
So, there is most certainly a cliff, but can you expand on your claim that “Democrats have turned it into a social gill net.”? From my reality, they’ve been the ones trying (albeit feebly) to expand services, while the fascists have done everything they can to cut services, creating that cliff.
They expand the services to trap more and more people in the gill net. The bigger the net, the more people trapped.
Also, the cliffs aren’t created by “fascists” trying to cut services. The cliffs are written into the programs specifically to stop people from escaping the gill net. This is even present in VERY blue states. Also, your casual use of the term “fascists” is telling.
If it wasn’t intentional, the losses would be gradual as the person makes more money to wean them off the benefits, rather than making them worse off for having the nerve to dare make more than the state sanctioned amount of money. Anyone capable of basic logic would know that this would be necessary to get people off of welfare, which SHOULD be temporary for people who fall on hard times, not a lifestyle for generations on end.
The problem is that when people rise to the middle class, they tend to be less receptive to the idea of voting for more and more taxes and government programs because then it’s THEIR money that is being taken. Those at the bottom who depend on the government are more than happy to vote for it because then it’s taking someone else’s money and benefits themselves. This is a problem for Democrats because they rely on a permanent underclass of impoverished people who depend on various welfare programs to draw their power from.
What a steaming load of conspiratorial bullshit. Yes, evil Democrats trying to expand services that help people are in actuality just trying to trap them in their “net” in order to…fuck if I know. And yes, you apparently haven’t noticed the ® party has gone 100% fascist, nothing “casual” about it.
In my future leaders program we decided it would be better not to have benefits tied to income at all. Everyone gets the benefit. No cliffs. No need to ween anyone off. Like the roads these benefits could be part of the social contract. This creates an actual safety net and removes the most negative incentives.
Your ideology killed people for little in return. We are done talking with your stupid philosophy after seeing it in action. It is for real, dumber than communism.
Famously, the industrial capitalists of the industrial revolution allowed fantastic upward mobility for the people stuck in work houses. These people where given gruel and a leaking roof over their head for christ sakes! So dependant! They should have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and worked 20 hours a day 7 days a week instead of 16 hours 6 days a week. Work sets you free, amirite?
I love how you rant about people staying addicted to welfare programs because of one of the exact things the commenter above you was advocating to remove (upper limits to receive benefits)
You mean like tariffs? Which are a tax on US citizens who import foreign goods? And which are ultimately paid by people who consume foreign goods? Which is fucking everybody.
needless bureaucracy and regulations
Like what’s needed to implement tariffs?
The only thing more annoying than your right-wing rhetoric’s inaccuracy is how fucking tired it is.
yeah, the attempt to present fascism as a people’s libterating movement, as a kind of socialism, is nothing new - these are old rhetorical tricks, which makes it all the more disappointing they work still…
Or immigrational issues. Where I live that’s a huge talking point that moved from right-wing to even slightly left of the center. Immigrants tend to bunch up in groups and sadly since a lot of them come from countries which are rather socially conservative, they bring those values with them and can be hostile towards women or queer people, sometimes even democracy. And since their social circle shares those values, as people are most likely to connect with other like-minded people, there’s no shift there over time or in future generations.
Yet politicians and many voters forget they are human. It’s just “send them back to where they came from” from the right-wing parties, instead of trying to find out how to actually improve things. What’s missing is integration. Something Denmark is doing for example is spreading immigrants, especially refugees since those don’t really decide where they go, out. Have a few scattered here or there, still able to find connections to people from the same places, but unable to build a complete social network without also interacting heavily with Danes. There are still awful people, immigrant or local humans will be humans, but this type of action means there’s a far higher chance for immigrants to adopt local values, especially second or third generation ones.
They identified a notable issue that needs to be addressed, but the response is always hate instead of actually trying to figure out how to live as humans side-by-side.
Even with how shitty conservative elements are, most of the issues they raise are actually correct and often missed by progressive elements, but their proposed solutions or narrative around those issues is pure garbage.
I remember seeing Andrew Tate of all people start talking about how people are living a slave’s life, working for others while getting barely enough for subsistence with no real prospects for social mobility, a point that one could pull from Marx. However, the solution that he proposes is a theocracy and return to traditionalism for some reason, which is nonsense.
Even the dumbest MAGA fool who can barely read and write knows that in general, they are becoming increasingly worse off. And they’re not wrong. They just don’t understand the “why” or “how”.
Instead of looking into it, they tend to cling to their nostalgic perception of whenever they think times were better. Mistakenly conflating their memories of the “good ol’ days” – which are heavily condensed because that’s just how the human brain works – with the ideal picture of life and society.
People like Trump are able to tap into that, promising to effectively turn back the clock, even though that’s impossible and complete bullshit. But, it resonates with those nostalgic desires and that creates a powerful bond, for better or worse.
If the Democrats want to stage a serious comeback, they’re going to have to take some pages from the playbooks of people like FDR and LBJ.
For instance, shore up Social Security and Medicare. Remove the income tax cap from Social Security. Give all the old Boomers a decent raise. Unprivatize all of Medicare and put it to work making sure that senior citizens get the best quality healthcare possible.
Do whatever it takes to ram that legislation through. Worst case, Republicans oppose it (which they will) and you can drag each and every one of them through the mud.
The Democratic party, as it currently stands, isn’t going to do that because they don’t have the balls. Until they grow some, were going to continue this death spiral into fascism led by charlatans making false promises about returning to some utopia that never truly existed.
This is cute from people who live under left leaning governments who tax them ever harder and erect more and more barriers to social mobility though taxation, needless bureaucracy and regulations, and then erect more and more horribly inefficient and fraud prone programs to ensure that those at the bottom are trapped at the bottom because they get a “free” home, food, etc, but if they work too hard, those are cut off, making them worse off than when they just suckled the government teat and accepted their lot in life, which means they cannot EVER raise themselves up due to being made worse off than they are if they try.
Then these people breed and create more and more government dependent subjects who have little choice but the suckle the government teat, and then they have kids, and their kids have kids, creating an ever growing army of dependent subjects that cement the charlatans in power in perpetuity.
What in the actual fuck are you on about? Some vaguely-racist, anti-welfare rant?
I’m all for a social safety net. The problem is that Democrats have turned it into a social gill net. A net you can get into, but is very hard to escape from. You should look harder into how it works. There is a point where you go from getting the full benefits to getting nothing and it’s well below the line you’d need to be to not need it anymore. The system is specifically designed to never let you escape.
There’s a reason why multigenerational welfare dependence exists. It’s an intentional setup to ensure that people cannot become socially mobile because that negatively affects political parties that rely on having a large population of people in poverty to draw their power from. It’s called a benefits cliff. In many places, you’re better off sitting at the bottom, making almost nothing and suckling the government teat than fighting your way to financial independence. It traps people not only in poverty, but where they live because moving to a different state or sometimes even city to seek better opportunities means losing some or all of your benefits, putting them in a worse off situation.
So, there is most certainly a cliff, but can you expand on your claim that “Democrats have turned it into a social gill net.”? From my reality, they’ve been the ones trying (albeit feebly) to expand services, while the fascists have done everything they can to cut services, creating that cliff.
They expand the services to trap more and more people in the gill net. The bigger the net, the more people trapped.
Also, the cliffs aren’t created by “fascists” trying to cut services. The cliffs are written into the programs specifically to stop people from escaping the gill net. This is even present in VERY blue states. Also, your casual use of the term “fascists” is telling.
If it wasn’t intentional, the losses would be gradual as the person makes more money to wean them off the benefits, rather than making them worse off for having the nerve to dare make more than the state sanctioned amount of money. Anyone capable of basic logic would know that this would be necessary to get people off of welfare, which SHOULD be temporary for people who fall on hard times, not a lifestyle for generations on end.
The problem is that when people rise to the middle class, they tend to be less receptive to the idea of voting for more and more taxes and government programs because then it’s THEIR money that is being taken. Those at the bottom who depend on the government are more than happy to vote for it because then it’s taking someone else’s money and benefits themselves. This is a problem for Democrats because they rely on a permanent underclass of impoverished people who depend on various welfare programs to draw their power from.
What a steaming load of conspiratorial bullshit. Yes, evil Democrats trying to expand services that help people are in actuality just trying to trap them in their “net” in order to…fuck if I know. And yes, you apparently haven’t noticed the ® party has gone 100% fascist, nothing “casual” about it.
Oof, my post must have caused you a moment of reality. You closed your eyes, covered your ears and began chanting Democrat mantras.
In my future leaders program we decided it would be better not to have benefits tied to income at all. Everyone gets the benefit. No cliffs. No need to ween anyone off. Like the roads these benefits could be part of the social contract. This creates an actual safety net and removes the most negative incentives.
That’s not the worst idea. The problem is the price.
Your ideology killed people for little in return. We are done talking with your stupid philosophy after seeing it in action. It is for real, dumber than communism.
And what ideology would that be?
Ayn Rand type
Famously, the industrial capitalists of the industrial revolution allowed fantastic upward mobility for the people stuck in work houses. These people where given gruel and a leaking roof over their head for christ sakes! So dependant! They should have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and worked 20 hours a day 7 days a week instead of 16 hours 6 days a week. Work sets you free, amirite?
I love how you rant about people staying addicted to welfare programs because of one of the exact things the commenter above you was advocating to remove (upper limits to receive benefits)
You mean like tariffs? Which are a tax on US citizens who import foreign goods? And which are ultimately paid by people who consume foreign goods? Which is fucking everybody.
Like what’s needed to implement tariffs?
The only thing more annoying than your right-wing rhetoric’s inaccuracy is how fucking tired it is.
I see another unserious person who can’t think beyond their political talking points.
Come back when you’re capable of thinking and speaking intelligently and not mindlessly spouting your political gods’ talking points.
I am also not “right wing” but you see anyone who doesn’t worship your poltiical gods as such, so I suppose you would see it that way.
yeah, the attempt to present fascism as a people’s libterating movement, as a kind of socialism, is nothing new - these are old rhetorical tricks, which makes it all the more disappointing they work still…
Or immigrational issues. Where I live that’s a huge talking point that moved from right-wing to even slightly left of the center. Immigrants tend to bunch up in groups and sadly since a lot of them come from countries which are rather socially conservative, they bring those values with them and can be hostile towards women or queer people, sometimes even democracy. And since their social circle shares those values, as people are most likely to connect with other like-minded people, there’s no shift there over time or in future generations.
Yet politicians and many voters forget they are human. It’s just “send them back to where they came from” from the right-wing parties, instead of trying to find out how to actually improve things. What’s missing is integration. Something Denmark is doing for example is spreading immigrants, especially refugees since those don’t really decide where they go, out. Have a few scattered here or there, still able to find connections to people from the same places, but unable to build a complete social network without also interacting heavily with Danes. There are still awful people, immigrant or local humans will be humans, but this type of action means there’s a far higher chance for immigrants to adopt local values, especially second or third generation ones.
They identified a notable issue that needs to be addressed, but the response is always hate instead of actually trying to figure out how to live as humans side-by-side.