When we had a super majority in Congress we should have passed more permanent legislation. It seems like we never really progress, we just keep flipping from heads to tails and so on. The divide in this country is getting too serious and there will be a price to pay one day.
You're underestimating in hindsight how gigantic the fight over healthcare reform was in 2008/09. Even with a 60 seat supermajority in the senate, gained from the wave election in '08, the ACA BARELY passed. Afterwards the republicans won the messaging war about the ACA being the end of the world, and then the dems lost in the '10 midterms. The Obama admin spent all their capital on ACA, approval never recovered after that. You may call that squandering, I say it was the price of getting anything done. Maybe if they won the messaging after passage it would have gone better, but messaging with hate and fear is simply more powerful. If you think that in '08 the dems replicate what the republicans are currently doing, go with their own wishlist (let's say Obama's first wish, the public option) and shut down all debate and run for the touchdown... it wouldn't have passed. The blue dogs weren't even on board with the ACA, which was essentially a rehashed form of the republicans plan from the 90s plus Romneycare! And if the dems in this hypothetical scenario rammed the legislation through with no transparency or debate? The backlash would have been even more severe in the midterms. Same is about to happen with the Rs now. They rammed it through, but they're going to lose the messaging war, and pay for it in the midterms.
The diversity of opinion and the encouragement of those diverse opinions is a positive for Democrats but there does need to be some focus of goals
I do not know. I did not say it would do either one. What I said is that supply and demand of labor controls the price of labor. Immigration and offshoring are two ways in which the supply of labor is increased.
If you're a business, how would you decrease the price of labor if your supply of labor through immigration was cut off?
Lower minimum wage. Remove worker safety regulations. Remove hour restrictions. Remove age restrictions. That's how you MAGA.
Even that's not enough. There are geographical barriers as well. China's central location and access to resources makes it really hard to compete with in manufacturing as well. What we really need to do to MAGA is to do a Friends style trivia tournament where winner gets the Chinese geographical region. Ms. Chanandler Bong take us to our new home!
Yes, that's what I expect. It was irresponsible to cut tax rates and not have some other way to make up the revenues. Corporations are just one vehicle to deliver the revenues we need to run the government and we can use something else, but we really should use something. I know the Republicans think the lower revenues will force some fiscal discipline and force the government to do less. It's going to be pretty painful fighting that one out. That's not really what I was saying. The disparity is there and getting worse because of the changing landscape of business and innovation. But tax law is a tool we can use to influence the disparity. I think it ought to be used to throttle the growing disparity. The Republicans apparently thought it would be better to accelerate it. And it's not just the relative sizes of tax cuts, though increasing the tax rate at the higher brackets would have some effect. The main drivers are going to be policies that influence spending and investment choices. I understand this bill is going to give a more favorable tax treatment to companies that replace workers with robots. That isn't going to do anything good for disparity. Aside from taxing more heavily on the rich (which I consider a pretty blunt instrument anyway), the tax code should be encouraging behaviors that will shrink the disparity, like getting breaks for educating and training workers, and incentivizing hiring lots of them.
Look, I agree with both of you. If my significant other was a member (and thank goodness, she's not), she could quote chapter and verse on how much I complained at home and to friends about exactly this topic, and that eventually I went from complaining to getting more than a little ticked off. Yes, as Nolen pointed out, enormous political capital was spent getting the ACA passed, but far more still could have and should have been done. I honestly can't remember how much I complained about it here at the time without doing a search (it's been several years), but I'm sure I must have. As a Democrat during this political era, one of my biggest irritations with the party has been that when we are in power, no matter how ruthless the Republican Party was when they had a "super majority," no matter how many lies they told to the American people, no matter how much outrageous legislation they passed screwing the middle class, the working class, and the disadvantaged of this country, when Democrats get roughly the same amount of political power, we play the "bipartisan game" and largely ignore how god-awful the GOP was when they had control of Congress and the White House. We bend over backwards to try to get bipartisan support for legislation and, based on the history of the first 2 years of the Clinton and Obama administrations, we waste time doing it. The opposition will drag things out no end, pretending to be interested (while continuing their assaults on the Democratic Party), and wait for the next election in the hope that we will lose control of the Senate, or the House, or the presidency or, as we've seen in the past year, all three. Then, when they get their chance again, the GOP pretends that what they had been doing while on the outs never happened, and that our attempts at preventing terrible legislation from being passed, like this tax bill, are a terrible partisan and evil dastardly plan, often couched in a far worse way than that. Yeah, it pisses me off.
What is fair share? To just say 'more' isn't a real answer. $100? $1000? $10000? What's rich? $1,000,000 in assets? $5,000,000? $10,000,000?
The answer is always that those who have more than the person giving the answer should give enough so that they don't have more than the person giving the answer does anymore. As it stands, the bottom half of the country pay less than 3% of the taxes in this country (the bottom 45% pay nothing at all in income tax)....but you still hear the narrative that people aren't paying "their fair share". It's just propaganda that stupid people parrot because they think it sounds good.
