#let’s have a big win so the republicans can’t cheat like they’re planning to do

[lenbryant]

Definitely better off now than we were in 2020.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Biden is going to win, I’m sure of it, but the Senate seems to have slipped through our fingers.  So long as McConnell is majority leader, he will continue to hold it hostage; Biden won’t be getting any judicial appointments unless he makes recess appointments.  The problem with that is recess appointments only last for a single congressional session (max 2 years), and McConnell isn’t going to let the Senate go int recess, so Biden would need to prorogue Congress, which would take approval from Pelosi (the president can only force a recess if the House and Senate disagree on a date), and would be political suicide because the American people are really on edge about authoritarianism right now, and nothing screams dictator like disbanding Congress to pack the courts.  People expect Republicans to be ratfucking bastards, they get a free pass to cheat the system, but Democrats are expected to follow the old rules, to stay in line, to uphold tradition and precedent and whatever the hell else will let Republicans walk all over them.  If a Democrat tried to skirt the rules the way Republicans do,their approval ratings would tank, and the Republicans would ride a red wave into the midterms.

I feel like Biden will be a doormat as president.  He has run on a platform of being palatable, inoffensive, milquetoast, he’s not going to make any waves, he’s not going to try and out maneuver the Republicans, because doing so would sacrifice his veneer of bipartisanship.  He has already said he doesn’t want to use executive orders to sidestep Congress the way Trump has, so he’s going to end up accomplishing very little, all the while completely misunderstanding why young people are becoming increasingly mad at him.  He’s not assertive enough.  I don’t think he has a clearly defined Biden Doctrine.  What will his presidency be about?  Healthcare will be a major issue when the Supreme Court gets rid of Obamacare next week, but he doesn’t stand a chance of getting a new plan passed while McConnell controls the Senate.  And Republicans across the country will blame him instead of trump for gutting their healthcare, saying that Obamacare was his fault when he was terrible and his fault when he was Vice President, but also that its absence is terrible and his fault when he is President.  It’s a lose-lose situation.

Republicans are scheming, Democrats are most definitely not.  Republicans know how to game the system, Democrats don’t.  Biden needs to hit the ground running.  He needs to hire young advisors who can help him play the game in the 21st century, but that’s almost certainly not what he’s going to do.  He’s going to surround himself with old white moderates and a few token moderates of color, and slog his way through the first half of his term before floundering at the midterms because the Republicans will have organized a powerful opposition by then.  He’s not particularly inspiring, he’s just a calming presence compared to Trump, and even THAT wasn’t enough for a blowout; a good 45 - 50% of the country is batshit fucking crazy, and will not hesitate to blow him and his presidency out of the water.  He needs to go big or go home, he needs to add some new songs to his repertoire.  Trump lost because all he knew how to play was Free Bird.  Biden needs to do some experimental shit, throw anything at the wall, see what sticks, make himself more exciting, not just boring, safe, old Grampa Joe.

I do not think Joe Biden is an evil man, I just think he is unambitious and unwilling to take risks because he is stuck in the past.  The country will be better off under him than under Trump, but I just don’t think he’s going to make as many big sweeping changes as we had hoped.  He needs to close the camps, he needs to reunite families (that is if Trump doesn’t actively sabotage this by erasing data to fuck him and the rest of the country over between now and January 20th), he needs to raise taxes and close loopholes so that big corporations don’t just move overseas to avoid paying said taxes.  Economic inequality should be a major platform issue for him, but I don’t know if he’s committed to it as much as we need him to be.  He is not a progressive, we won’t be seeing anything like a President Bernie Sanders, I just hope he has plans for the future; 2024 is going to be HELL ON EARTH if he stays the course.  America doesn’t need any more third-way, neoliberal, moderate centrist bullshit.  I would say we want major progressive reform, but I guess the majority actually doesn’t, because half of them still voted for the worst human alive today.  When Republicans are in power, they don’t give a shit about Democrats, so why should Democrats bother about them?  Why should Biden keep trying to placate them when they’re never going to vote for him; they didn’t this time, they won’t next time, especially if Trump runs for a non-consecutive term or one of his brood runs in his place to establish a dynasty.  Biden needs to play hardball and push through an agenda, regardless of what Republicans do.  We can’t always take the high ground, we need to stop playing fair when the other side plays dirty!

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): On Sunday, The Washington Post published leaked audio of an hour-long conversation President Trump had with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, where he urged the Republican to “find” enough votes to overturn the result in Georgia and declare him the winner.

This story has captured headlines, as it is by far Trump’s most brazen attempt to overturn November’s results, although it is hardly his first time trying to do so. Trump has repeatedly tried to cast doubt on the election results since Biden was declared the winner on Nov. 7, citing false claims of voter fraud and launching countless futile lawsuits to try and overturn the election. And now as Congress prepares to vote on Jan. 6 to certify the election results in what should be a largely ceremonial, low-key affair, a faction of GOP senators plans to mount a protest vote, even though it is destined to fail.

There is no question that this is bad for democracy — polls have found a record number of Americans distrust the election results — but let’s talk through some of the biggest consequences of this push to delegitimize the results, in addition to whether this jeopardizes Trump’s role as the de facto party leader once he’s left the presidency.

To start, what do you view as the biggest consequence of all this?

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): I think the biggest potential danger is that in any election where the Republicans earn fewer votes, they will make unfounded and exaggerated claims of voting irregularities and fraud and try to toss out or overturn the results. No election is conducted perfectly, but using minor problems as a pretext for invalidating the outcome is a huge problem. You can’t have a democracy if one of the main parties can’t admit defeat.

I am really worried about this in the context of these Georgia Senate runoff races. If Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock both win their races, that would give Democrats total control of Congress. So will Republicans be able to accept losing these races if they do? Or will there be an endless stream of lawsuits trying to prevent Ossoff and Warnock from being seated?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): Biggest consequence: This splits the GOP and deepens the dilemma for Republicans (and possibly Democrats) about how to deal with the other party. Namely, can they continue to thread the needle in arguing that the other party’s constitutional and political views are illegitimate, but the processes are legitimate and thus they sometimes win? Or will the other party’s victories, as Perry suggests, not be tolerated?

I don’t want to “both sides” this — obviously, the Democrats are not the ones creating the current situation, but I think this creates potential dilemmas for them, too, regarding the way they treat the idea of legitimate opposition.

sarah: What are some of the dilemmas you think Democrats face as a result of this, Julia?

julia_azari: Well, take the debate happening over how Democrats should react to this news. There’s a question of whether the House should consider impeachment, which I’m guessing they probably won’t do. On the one hand, I’m not sure impeachment would have much public support, and there’s plenty of other issues that Congress needs to work on. But on the other hand, it does sort of leave the impression that these kinds of norm violations are sort of begrudgingly tolerated.

This will linger after Trump leaves office, too, I think. You’ll have Democrats who want to move on and not ratchet up the stakes of partisan disagreement. And you’ll have others who want to seek accountability for some of the laws that they think were broken by the last administration.

sarah: That’s a really good point, Julia. One thing we saw after the 2016 election was a big drop in the share of Democrats who thought the election was fair and accurate, but it’s nowhere near as big as the drop we’ve seen among Republicans here in 2020. That’s why what you and Perry are hitting on — how the parties handle loss and what that means for voters’ trust in democracy — is the biggest consequence of all this to me.

But maybe you all disagree? Should Democrats be digging into Trump’s behavior more for the reason Julia cited — that this behavior otherwise seems begrudgingly tolerated?

julia_azari: Well, the fact that COVID-19 continues to pose a very real challenge for the country, creates a bit of a problem for Democrats, because if they look like they’re focusing too much time on investigating the Trump administration, they look like they’re ignoring the pandemic and its consequences. But if Democrats try to take this on in a less high-profile way — subpoenaing lower-level officials, etc. — then maybe they’re accused of not being transparent enough.

The impact of this norm-breaking administration isn’t just that it violates these unwritten rules, but that it behaves in ways that make the whole system of usual practices not work. That makes things extra challenging for Democrats.

perry: Questions about what the Biden Department of Justice, congressional Democrats and state attorneys generals do about Trump’s conduct are all still very much up in the air. If there was some criminal activity, he should not be above the law. Perhaps there are some congressional hearings — and maybe even charges filed by the DOJ and/or attorneys generals — involving some Trump associates and maybe Trump himself. I don’t expect Biden to talk about Trump that much, but other actors might weigh in.

sarah: What is the end game here for Trump and Republicans? Trump admitted on the call to Raffensperger that, “I know this phone call is going nowhere.” I know we can’t speak to the president’s state of mind, but what can we point to for why refusing to concede the election has become Trump’s defining stance?

julia_azari: Well, it fits in well into this idea that “grievance politics” have turned into a somewhat successful brand — especially in a place like Georgia, where a history of racist voter suppression informs the context, and where Democratic victories are especially tied to the mobilization of Black voters.

However, I don’t see how having this kind of split within congressional Republicans is helpful to the GOP in the long term.

perry: Trump has lied and cheated in a lot of different venues in his life. That is just the truth. So him insisting that he won an election that he lost is nothing new. He likes to push and push people and see if they will uphold their ethics or bend to his will. For the Republican Party, part of this is just the trajectory they were on anyway, even without Trump at the helm. When you are writing voter laws targeting Black people with “surgical precision” (North Carolina Republicans), making it harder for felons who served their time to vote (Florida Republicans) and gerrymandering in a way that almost makes a mockery of majority rule (Wisconsin Republicans), then unfounded voter fraud charges that aim to disqualify the votes of Black people in particular are just a more aggressive step in an anti-democratic direction.

But part of this is directly tied to Trump. Elected and aspiring Republican officials know he is very connected to the party base, so aligning with Trump is aligning with the party base. So that is why you see Georgia Sen. David Perdue, in light of this phone call, attacking the secretary of state for leaking it, and not Trump for what he said.

2/ “To have a state-wide elected official, regardless of party, tape unknowing – to tape without disclosing a conversation – private conversation of the President of the United States and then leaking it to the press is disgusting,” Perdue told Fox.

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) January 4, 2021

julia_azari: I think the intersection of what Perry and I have said is this: “The future of the Republican Party is the division between those who say the quiet part out loud and those who don’t.”

One key difference is that Republicans used to win national majorities with the quiet part. That’s no longer the case. Per Rep. Thomas Massie, who along with six Republican colleagues authored a letter that pointed out the necessity of preserving ‘s comments on the Electoral College, the bullhorn can occasionally at least win a plurality. Matt Glassman, who studies Congress as a senior fellow at Georgetown University, on it:

The Senate vote on the objections will be lopsided—at a minimum 70-75 votes against, probably more like 80-85—and also starkly split the GOP caucus.

It may feel like the end, but this is really the beginning of the party fight over the meaning and future of Trumpism. https://t.co/8E9AW9GJul

— Matt Glassman (@MattGlassman312) January 4, 2021

sarah: If Glassman’s whip count is right, though, we’re still talking about a smallish wing of the GOP, right? In other words, it’s possible that the battle over Trumpism splinters the party, but that maybe the movement loses power?

Calling the integrity of the election results into question has clearly become a litmus test or demonstration of fealty for those in the GOP, but some senators like Ben Sasse and Mitt Romney are speaking out against it. Do you think it’s possible that Trump is ruining his ability to be the party’s leader post-presidency?

julia_azari: Well, our readers should stay tuned for my upcoming piece where I address that question!

But to give you a sneak peak: I think political scientists would frame this question as, “Can populism, on the right, be compatible with participation in a pluralistic, multi-ethnic democracy in which you sometimes lose even when you claim to truly represent the Constitution and the people?” The issue is that a wing of the Republican Party has skirted answering that question for decades now.

perry: Having covered the GOP in the era of Trump for the last six years, I will always bet on the more extreme wing of the party carrying the day. The fact that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would not acknowledge Biden’s win until mid-December was extraordinary. If I had told anyone that in 2015, they would have thought I was crazy.

The moderate voices in the Republican Party are not well organized, not connected to the party base and have no real compelling leaders, whereas the more extreme voices in the party have Fox News, Newsmax, One America News Network, Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson and Trump. I see very little chance that the Republican Party changes its general direction, even if Trump himself recedes.

Would you bet on Sasse winning a battle over the soul of the Republican Party against anyone whose last name is Trump?

julia_azari: I would probably bet a small amount that it is possible, Perry, especially since Sasse seems like a fairly skilled politician and the Trump kids do not.

That said, I generally do not disagree, but I wonder about the sustainability of it all. I think I have some questions on what counts as “moderate” — specifically, considering the GOP, as political scientist and Bloomberg View columnist Jonathan Bernstein has been saying for quite some time, is post-policy.

perry: When I say moderate, I mean people like Romney or Sasse, who are quite conservative on policy but generally avoid white identity politics-style moves (attacking Black Lives Matter or immigration reform) and are full-throated in favor of democratic norms and values. Republicans who are moderate on policy, like Susan Collins and Larry Hogan, are basically nonexistent among top Republicans now.

sarah: That’s largely what FiveThirtyEight contributor Lee Drutman outlined in his piece on why there are so few moderate Republicans left, Perry.

Given how favorable the down-ballot results were for Republicans, however, one of my takeaways from the 2020 election was that a lot of voters rejected Trump but not necessarily the Republican Party, making it a little harder for me to understand the extent to which the GOP has lost moderate voters.

At the same time, it’s hard for me to see a Romney, Hogan or Sasse winning the 2024 Republican nomination, given the current dynamics we’re seeing play out in the GOP — a largely ceremonial, non-headline grabbing vote on certifying the results of the Electoral College, for instance, has now become this big-stakes issue. That said, I’m not sure we can know at this point the success of Trumpism moving forward. I think, for instance, Democrats will face some real tests in the next four years on whether they can keep their big umbrella coalition of both moderates and very liberal voters happy, and that might create opportunities for more middle of the road or moderate Republicans.

perry: I am not confident who will win the 2024 nomination. I have no idea. I do think in the short term, though, that Trump will remain highly influential in the GOP, as will his style of politics.

I just don’t see an easy path for the Republicans to get off that ramp.

julia_azari: This is a bit of a cop-out but I’d need to think more about the costs and benefits for various Republicans. I’m gonna hold off on 2024 predictions until I get a feel for what politics in the Biden administration looks like. And per my earlier comment about how Trumpism has changed the unwritten rules for everyone, I feel a lot more uncertain about what this will look like now once Trump is gone than I have in previous administrations.

sarah: A lot probably hinges on how the Senate runoffs shake out tomorrow, and like you’ve both said, I really don’t have a sense of how “Trumpism” plays out now. It’s unclear to me, for instance, whether Trump is doing a lot of harm … or if he’s the future of conservatism in the U.S.

But at the very least, can we agree that the lasting consequence of this might be an escalation in how the parties oppose each other when an outcome is in dispute?

I’d argue we’ve seen a ramping up of this in the last decade, but it’s largely been over more procedural things, like the Senate changing rules around judicial appointments, and making it a more partisan affair. But now we have this extreme example — contesting a free and fair election. That ups the ante, no? And it seems as if partisan infighting could get much worse.

perry: I’m not sure I’d say we’ll see an escalation in how the parties oppose each other, at least not yet. I think it’s a change on the Republican side. I don’t expect Biden, for instance, to be fighting his defeat for two months if he clearly lost by a wide electoral margin (not one state by 500 votes) in 2024.

julia_azari: I agree with that, Perry. But I think it’s possible that Democrats will start to feel pressure to both uphold norms and be “reasonable” while also responding to norm violations more forcefully.

perry: I am wary of suggesting we are seeing escalation on both sides, though, as I think we are really only seeing big escalations on the GOP side. And I worry things could get worse. If Republicans controlled the House right now, I would be really worried about this election certification issue, for example.

julia_azari: For me, it comes down to a question of sustainability, and of possible splits among Democrats on this issue. But to be clear, I don’t see any of them supporting the scenario you described, Perry. But I could start to see them play a bit more “constitutional hardball.”

sarah: Yeah, I think Julia is getting at what I meant. I definitely don’t want to “both sides” this. But I do think what Julia touched on earlier, about the mechanisms for expressing legitimate opposition being brushed aside, leaves Democrats in an awkward position, as Trump’s brand of politics has challenged how the whole system works.

julia_azari: My main point here is that the parties are not self-contained, and I don’t think the Democrats have really figured out answers to some of the questions posed by Republicans’ norm-violating behavior (which again, is a situation Democrats did not create).

perry: Julia is getting at an important and complicated question here, and one we kind of saw play out around whether Democrats should add justices to the Supreme Court given Republicans’ rush to nominate Amy Coney Barrett before the election.

Biden was clearly uncomfortable with it, but the party activists really pushed him on the issue. So what does Biden/the Democrats do about what we have seen over the last two months?

Biden, in this pre-inauguration period, is basically ignoring Trump and suggesting Republicans will work with him. And I can’t tell if he is 1) pretending, 2) clueless, or 3) Republicans will actually work with him. But Biden’s theory of the case and how other Democrats approach this issue, not to mention how the two parties interact on this, will be interesting. I truly do not know the answer to this question.

sarah: Exactly. It will be interesting to see how Biden and the Democrats work to address this — or whether Trump’s brand of politics has upended everything.

[berniesrevolution]

With their huge improvements in special elections across the country, it looks increasingly probable that Democrats will win big in the 2018 midterms, and perhaps take control of both Congress and the presidency in 2020. That raises a logical question: In an ideal world, what should they do?

American society is in dire straits, and things will likely be even worse by the time a Democrat takes office. They will have a brief window to fix multiple screaming policy emergencies, and reform American political institutions to prevent a resurgence of the diseased Republican Party.

Below, I will outline a draft platform that would both accomplish worthy goals and provide political benefits. Since the conventional wisdom on political feasibility and popularity has proved to be highly unreliable of late (see: President Donald J. Trump), I have focused on things that will provide immediate and concrete partisan benefits, while strengthening democratic liberties. The ideas are grouped under three headings: political reform, domestic policy, and foreign policy. Let's get cracking.

Political reform:

Now, Democrats should not cheat like Republicans do. It would be wrong to do a reverse Kris Kobach, and suppress the votes of old white people by making Fox News watchers present 14 different forms of photo ID before they can vote. However, there is nothing wrong with strengthening America's democratic institutions — making it simpler and easier for allAmericans to vote and obtain political representation — in part because it would provide a partisan benefit. To wit:

1. Make Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., states. 

This step would both address the greatest structural violation of democratic liberties in American society and provide the largest tangible partisan benefit to Democrats. D.C. residents and Puerto Ricans are quite literally oppressed colonial subjects, taxed without representation.

In D.C.'s case that creates frequent dysfunction and annoyance, but in Puerto Rico's case it is a full-blown emergency. It is obvious that the Republican government's ongoing failure to rebuild the island after it was flattened by Hurricane Maria (much less address its ongoing debt crisis) has a great deal to do with the fact that they have no congressional representation. Instead of futilely appealing to Paul Ryan's nonexistent conscience, actual Puerto Rican senators and representatives could vote, grab the ear of national media, trade favors, argue with other national politicians, and credibly threaten to gum up the wheels of Congress if their state was not fixed. (In other words, they would have power.)

2. Abolish the filibuster. 

Many big and controversial bills will need to be passed very quickly. Democrats cannot afford the swing vote in the Senate to be some quisling Blue Dog in the pocket of Wall Street, as Joe "The ObamaCare Hamstringer" Lieberman was in 2009-10. This should be done at the earliest possible moment.

3. Resurrect and strengthen the Voting Rights Act. 

Republican vote suppression and district boundary cheating has become their ace in the political hole, hugely enabled by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts' decision gutting the Voting Rights Act. Roberts' decision struck down the preclearance portion of the VRA — which forbade certain jurisdictions from making any changes to their voting procedure without first getting federal certification that they would not disenfranchise minorities — on the grounds that Jim Crow was a long time ago and so it was an unfair burden. That obstacle removed, Republicans immediately set about disenfranchising as many minorities as possible.

Roberts' "reasoning" was obviously 100 percent partisan pretext. But one solution that fits with his logic is to extend preclearance to the entire country. In keeping with Article Four, Section Four, an inalienable right to vote for all citizens and legal residents should be established, including for ex-cons and current prisoners, and all jurisdictions should be required to submit a plan to the federal government ensuring easy and universal access to the franchise. (This can be made easier by establishing a federal template for all levels of government, which would include universal mail-in voting, if people would rather not bother.) Any changes will have to be pre-cleared. Election Day itself should also be moved to a Friday and made a national holiday.

Incidentally, this will have the salutary effect of sharply improving the voting rights in many blue states like New York, where the corrupt Democratic regime is none too eager to have millions of poor people casting ballots.

Finally, as part of the voting rights package, both national and state-level district boundaries should be taken out of the hands of partisan legislatures, and put under control of nonpartisan committees required to draw maps which produce a legislature whose partisan composition at least approximates the raw vote totals.

All this aligns high moral principle with grubby partisan motives. It would mean probably four more Democratic senators and several representatives, and sharply improve Democratic prospects in several states with preposterously unfair gerrymandering or where a huge proportion of minorities have been permanently disenfranchised. However, that is no reason to get squeamish about it. On the contrary, the likeliest way that D.C. residents and Puerto Ricans are going to get their freedom, and the effectively tyrannical aspects of many American political institutions are going to be expunged, is if it can be successfully clubbed into the heads of the Democratic leadership that it is in their partisan interest to do so.

Domestic policy:

1. Climate change. 

This is one area where politics absolutely must take a back seat to principle. If Democrats believe what they're saying about climate science, and they accumulate some political capital with the above program, this is where it must be spent first. As I've argued before, this is by far the most important problem facing American society, because it is a serious emergency that will require a top-to-bottom overhaul of society. Trump's climate denier presidency almost could not have come at a worse time. The next administration will have to cut emissions as fast as it possibly can, both to slow climate change and to avoid the risk of tripping feedback loops that could push warming into an uncontrollable self-sustaining spiral.

People can and do argue all day about precisely the best way forward on climate, but one simple way of thinking about it is to take what China is doing with decarbonization, energy efficiency, and renewables, and aim to beat them by 50 percent. That both gets in the right ballpark of what needs to happen (China's climate policy is extremely aggressive, though still not good enough), and indicates the international nature of the issue. Such a "competition" — in reality, a mutually-beneficial international coordination — would be both excellent policy and a worthy national project. If we're lucky, it might even inspire China to up their game even more as well.

2. Health-care reform. 

This has been the main policy axis of mobilization for lefties during the Trump presidency, and it's not hard to see why. The ObamaCare policy approach has proved to be a massive headache with multiple pitfalls and unforeseen consequences. Its political bargain — that a more conservative, free-market road to universal coverage would be more politically stable — turned out to be wrong. Though Republicans have not managed to repeal the law outright, it is suffering major damagewith the repeal of the individual mandate and regulatory attacks. Tellingly, the market-oriented part of the law — the individual exchanges — are doing the worst.

Democrats should aim for something like an upgraded Medicare-for-all system, with complete medical coverage and no cost-sharing. It both makes the best policy sense and has steadily increased in popularity. What precisely that should look like is not to be hashed out now — the Sanders and Ellison bills and the "Medicare Extra" plan from the Center for American Progress are reasonable — but the best direction to head is obvious: away from markets, and towards traditional social insurance.

Doing so would both address an ongoing humanitarian crisis and deliver a major win to Democratic base voters who have been advocating for this for generations. Moreover, after the dust settles most people would be immensely relieved by being permanently placed on a high-quality Medicare-type system. Democrats should have the confidence to ignore the lobbyists and simply ram through as good a bill as possible.

3. Family policy. 

The structure of American society is deeply hostile to parents even very far up into the upper class. Paid family and sick leave, a child allowance, universal pre-K, and some kind of universal daycare would go a great deal towards ensuring parents don't have a near-impossible struggle between raising their children and being forced to go back to work. This would further advance the U.S. welfare state and deliver meaningful goods to an important Democratic voting bloc: young people.

And while one can't say for sure what people would think about this, the fact that the United States is literally one of two countries in the world (the other being Papua New Guinea) without paid family leave shows you how much of an outlier we are on this. Like Medicare for all, once they figured out how great it is, people would love a family benefits package.

4. Sharp tax increases on the rich and corporations. 

It's not immediately obvious that this would be a win in terms of public opinion, though polls do consistently find a large majority of people saying the rich pay too little in taxes. But it would help pay for Democratic priorities, and may well end up strengthening growth by diverting money away from shareholders and executives, and towards workers and investment. And in tangible political terms, it would definitely take money out of the pockets of the ultra-wealthy, who spend ungodly sums subsidizing right-wing propaganda and dirty tricks operations.

5. Labor law reform. 

Again public opinion is muddled on this one, since unions barely exist throughout much of the country. But passing a pro-union legal package — by, for example, banning so-called "right-to-work" laws at the national level, passing card check, or, most aggressively, mandating what's called sectoral bargaining to unionize whole swathes of the economy at a stroke — would benefit workers and raise wages.

It would also directly benefit Democrats, as newly-revitalized unions saw their power, money, and influence grow by leaps and bounds. They would surely direct their votes and campaign donations to the party that secured those benefits, as they did in FDR's time.

6. Antitrust and other corporate regulation. 

Concentration is a grave problem in the American economy, where a handful of businesses have rolled up control over everything from computer chips to chicken. Breaking up these business will both provide more options for consumers, push economic activity into places other than a handful of very large cities, and help workers, who face labor market monopsony and hence lower wages. That could assist the genuinely left-behind Americans in rural areas and smaller towns Trump championed in his campaign but utterly failed to help as president.

Wall Street should come under special attention. The biggest banks should be broken up, and heavy new regulations, deliberately designed to keep financial businesses small and less profitable, should be levied. In contrast to Dodd-Frank, these should be simple and difficult to avoid, not complicated and take years to implement. This would benefit not just the actually productive parts of the economy, from which much financial profit is parasitically extracted, but also sharply reduce the risk of another global financial crisis.

Politically, antitrust and financial regulation would knock out one prop of reactionary politics. As we've seen in President Trump's Cabinet, Wall Street has been eager and willing to help along a truly vile president, so long as it get its tax cuts. Cutting finance's share of GDP by half would considerably reduce the amount they could dedicate to electing the next future conservative lunatic.

Meanwhile, vigorous antitrust in the media space, coupled to regulation of platforms like Facebook and YouTube, will also help break the influence of deep-pocketed right-wing propaganda. Restrictions on the number of TV or radio stations any one entity can own will further prevent reactionary businessmen pushing pro-Trump propaganda throughout the nation. It would not completely disable the grifting machine that is eating the Republican Party alive, but it would help quite a bit.

Foreign policy:

1. Defense spending cuts. 

The easiest step to take on foreign policy is to cut the bloat and waste in military spending. Back in 2016, The Washington Post reported that a study commissioned by the Pentagon itself had found $25 billion per year in pure administrative waste at the Defense Department, which it then suppressed due to fear of budget cuts. Even if that's overstated, there is still the psychotically expensive and dubiously necessary B-21 heavy bomber, the even more expensive and already outdated F-35 fighter jet, the $1 trillion-plus earmarked for new nuclear weapons and upgrades of the existing stockpile, and much more burning through government cash for little or no benefit. Every big-ticket defense project needs to be examined with acidic skepticism, to see what might be scaled back or canceled outright.

2. Imperial rollback. 

Further savings can be found by ending the hundreds of pointless overseas operations throughout the world. U.S. troops should be removed from Germany, Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and several other countries, Special Forces deployments largely ended, and the enabling of the Saudi war in Yemen should cease immediately. The drunken colonialism of the so-called War on Terror must end.

All this would free up immense resources for Democrats' other policy priorities. Just the $80 billion military spending increase passed in 2017 would more than pay for free tuition at every public college across the country. Returning to a pre-Iraq War spending level (if anything, a modest ask) would free up another roughly $200 billion per year.

And far from harming national security, it would probably help. At a minimum, it would remove U.S. troops from several places where they are inflaming violent anti-American extremism. And forcing the Pentagon to economize might actually get them to focus on genuine needs rather than expensive, useless toys.

(Continue Reading)

An incomplete blueprint for a progressive landslide.

[thedailymonty-blog]

Let’s take a look at U.S. taxes vs Swedish taxes.

Read the link below and take a look at his six reasons the Swedish tax system is great while ours is dumb. http://www.vox.com/2016/4/8/11380356/swedish-taxes-love I almost want to go in swinging but it’s a decent enough article so I guess I’ll start with the part I liked. 2. Tax forms come already filled out and 5. We get cash instead of deductions See how these link together? They don’t have to do our complicated bullshit with deductions because they get the money up-front where we’d get a refund, and so the tax documents are simple enough that the average citizen only needs to do minor deductions. I think item two could be implemented for 1040EZs even without item five, but item five is a great idea. The best part is this: we already have an agency that can take care of things like that! The IRS! And we can handle it step by step! The IRS could gradually go from being the monolithic mass of accountants, audit lawyers, and data entry clerks that it is to being a slightly-less-monolithic mass of accountants, audit lawyers, fraud lawyers, rebate clerks, and data entry clerks. This doesn’t sound like a big change but checking rebates for fraud is way easier than going after year after year of taxes to find something, so not only would we have a better system, but we’d be better at finding people who try to cheat that system. Seriously, this is such a good idea that I might dedicate my life to it. 4. Sales taxes in Sweden are higher — but less noticeable and 3. There is no property tax I promise you that the people notice when the sales tax goes up, even in Sweden... But, the basic idea that prices at the store should include sales tax when you see them on the shelves is a nice one, and it’s an easy enough law to write. So, Hell, I’m for that part! And, yes, U.S. property taxes are high, but we need a way for cities to pay for necessary services. Maybe these “less noticeable” sales taxes would work. But the sales tax is considered to be a tax that affects the lower classes more, while the property tax is considered to be a tax that affects the upper classes more, so... Uh... It’s worth pointing out the irony of this though: you have a writer for Vox (a liberal site) favorably comparing a European country to America (a liberal pass-time), and two of his items combined would make any liberal scream: raising a regressive tax to lower a progressive tax. This guy better find a Democrat to suggest that stuff, ‘cause if a Republican does it there’ll be a riot. But, I’m not necessarily against a plan to do this; it’s just that we have our high property taxes for a reason, and the reason is to help the little guy. I guess I’m fine with either on principle, though. Whatever. Let’s get to the areas where I disagree. 1. Swedish income taxes are not much higher than US taxes — but they give you an education This isn’t really a comment on our tax code, it’s about our spending. But, it does go to show why Americans are against high taxes: we pay all that money and get nothing for it. There’s a damn good reason for that, though! We don’t have as much of a budget for stuff like this because our money is going to our ridiculously over-sized military. I say that like it’s a bad thing, but the United States pays for 40% of the NATO Pact that protects twenty-seven other countries, including Sweden. But I should say 40% and rising! Not only because we’re thinking about including some of those new Baltic states and Georgia, but also because other members are cutting their contributions to pay for all that expensive quasi-socialist statecraft and their EU dues (but I repeat myself, ZING!). It’s a common enough criticism to say that we could just shrink our military, but it’s actually not that simple. The whole idea behind the Marshall Plan was, “You can rebuild economically while we defend you. Seriously, don’t break Europe again right after everyone just put the fires out guys.” That just sort of carried over into our current “world police” that defined our foreign policy in the post-WW2 era. By now we have all these treaties that make it tough for us to shirk on our military. Besides the NATO Pact, our naval bases in Japan and the fact that the Korean War is still technically going on are serious complications to any plan that involves making our military smaller. And all this is an important factor in trade deals that favor the U.S., of which there are plenty. Another problem is that healthcare is so damn expensive here. The author mentions this, and that deserves an entry on its own, because there are so many factors involved. But, “Hospitals have no idea what to fucking do anymore,” and, “Health insurance companies have to work with the constantly-panicked hospitals,” combine to make one of the biggies and the cause of that comes down to... Well, the fact that healthcare is so expensive. That’s right! Our healthcare is so expensive because of how expensive it is! The situation went out of control decades ago so it is out of control now, and we need to make huge, painful, confusing changes to fix it because nobody did anything all those decades ago! Fuck Baby Boomers. Fixing all that will be tough, but that carries some complications of its own. That brings me to... 6. High taxes give me more choices and freedoms Look, you’re being naive if you think the politicians are giving you all that stuff because they love you so huggy-muggy much. They do it because they want your vote. We’ll get the occasional politician who cares about the occasional cause, even here, but too much of that idealism crap makes you so inflexible that you can’t actually win an election. I mean, you can tell Al Gore really cares about the environment because he’s willing to stand up for it, even when it costs him. He’s still a pretty standard Democrat the rest of the time. He walks the same tight-rope every suspected liberal does in a country as conservative as ours. And part of that tight-rope is plain ol’ pork barrel politics. That’s where your awesome hiking trail really comes from. Some construction company wants to dig a hiking trail, so they all lobby a politician, and the politician gets some campaign money and all their votes, plus bonus votes from people who live where the trail’s gonna be and decide they just like the idea while the future Congress critter’s campaigning. But let’s say someone really is an idealist that wants to help Americans out: the size is a factor there, too. Look at the size of Sweden: 450,295 square kilometers (or 173,860 square miles in the system we still have to use here because of white trash) with 9.9 million people. Just two of our states - Alaska and Texas - are bigger than that all by themselves. And the third in the list, California, is about the same size as Sweden. Less then 10% smaller. So, any time we wanna spend money on something like that, we have to somehow get people who’ll probably never see it on board. This makes ideas like that hard to put into practice... And frankly? Even if you are an idealist, it kinda makes them bad ideas, all by itself. After all: this is all about helping people by building things they’ll use, right? Like I said: we have fifty states and some of them are huge. With Sweden being about the size of just California by itself, simple distance is enough to keep anyone from ever even seeing any of the nice pork our Congress critters send back to our districts. This is why you’ll sometimes see conservatives say, “Well yeah, they do all this stuff and reap all these benefits, but they’re a geographically small country,” about this criticism of the U.S. Infrastructure spending is just more helpful when more people use that infrastructure. For example, public transportation spending is way more efficient in areas where lots of people live. You can’t have a good bus system in a huge, spread-out city, and most American cities are pretty spread-out. So even if a politician’s “charity” (with other peoples’ money as collected by taxes) really comes from a place of kindness and caring, it has to be the weird sort of wall-building charity where you say, “The people of Oregon deserve the best!” and somehow still say, “The people of Maine do not deserve the best! That money should go to Oregon!” And it’s weird, because you’d think the number of people per square kilometer would factor in and America’s a denser country that way, but that’s not the issue. The issues are, “Where is the thing you want to build going to be?” and “How far away are you from all that?” In Sweden the answers are, “Pretty much in the south part of the country and along the east coast,” and, “Going all the way from the north part of the country where there’s nothing to Malmö in the very southern tip? 22 hours away by car or six hours away by plane.” Every place in Sweden is somewhere that a Swede could take a vacation, basically. In America the answers are, “We have some cities but pretty much just all over the place,” and, “Really fucking far sometimes.” Say the author gets his ferries and stuff? The 23,000-island Stockholm archipelago is still more accessible to huge parts of the country than your 23-island national park. It makes them wonder why they have to spend the money. The fly-over states are called that for a reason: our Important People fly over them just to get from one of our big population centers where all the stuff is (New York) to another (some city in the California metroplex or Seattle, depending on your job). Big, popular infrastructure projects will tend to have the backing of Important People trying to improve the already-very-wealthy areas where they live, so we have these bitter Midwestern and Southern states that just say, “Screw all that! Limited government! Give me my tax money back!” Somehow, this never actually leads to lower taxes, though. (Have I said “Fuck Baby Boomers!” yet?) It’s harder to build a coalition around the idea of doing anything like that, because the coalition will involve a much smaller percentage of the country, so our Congress critters need more wheeling and dealing to make it happen. This means politicians will be using a lot of time and energy on just getting the necessary pork back home. Makes it awful hard to work on other stuff, like healthcare! Not that that frees the Boomers from the responsibilities they’ve shirked. But I digress: think about some of that whenever you see an article about how Europe is awesome and we suck, tumblr. All I ask!