A billion dollars is a hard sum of money to wrap your head around. There is basically no ethical way to make a billion dollars. If you have a billion dollars it’s because you’ve stiffed a lot of people a lot of the value they created and kept it for yourself.

Boston Market. It might try to convince you it’s upscale homemade, but it’s just kfc in another wrapper

The Dems raised billions for the election and lost. What did I receive after donating thousands of dollars to them.

Pleas for more money. Give us just a little bit more money and we will finally do something.

I’m done. We should fight the fascists but the corporate democrats have been completely captured. They only know how to raise money and hand it to consultants that will tell them to parade around Liz fucking Cheney.

I’m not paying them to slide further and further to the right anymore.

You keep being an ass to people and you won’t have to worry about anyone wanting to be your ally.

Looks at this comment.

Looks back at politics satire article it’s posted on.

Looks back at this comment

Looks at all the politics comments on this comment thread.

Looks back at this comment again.

I think this might actually be a place for people to make comments about politics my dude.

What a weird way to spell “will” I mean they missed every letter, “could” some editor must be real embarrassed.

This problem has always bugged me writ large as well. It seems nearly impossible to have any conversation that looks at the bigger picture of things in a complete and nuanced way.

Take for example employment rates. It’s just taken as a given that high employment is the goal. But stop and think about that for a second. In any other part of your life is your goal to completely saturate all time with labor? No, obviously not.

But the goals are set and we must achieve them. More money next quarter than last quarter, it doesn’t matter if every conceivable customer already has a subscription, we must grow. Make the product cheaper to make, charge more, do anything but consider that we might have picked stupid goals.

Plenty do. The thought that democrats don’t have guns is a stereotype. Being pro gun control and being a responsible gun owner are compatible.

Excellent point and kudos to you for knowing that widgets are juiced based.

Tariffs suck for the country implementing the tariff. But before I tell you why they suck, let me tell you the way they are supposed to help.

Here’s the way tariffs are supposed to work according to people that like tariffs (spoiler alert, this thing I’m about to describe is a fantasy and I’ll explain why).

Let’s say people in the US can make widgets for $10 and sell them for $12 and have a viable business. But mean old foreign country can make widgets for $5 and sell them for $7 and have a viable business. The foreign country sells the people of the US widgets for $7, which is great if you live in the US and want to buy a widget but sucks if you live in the US and want to make a widget.

Tariffs are supposed to protect local businesses by making foreign goods less competitive. Let’s say we pass a law putting a $10 tariff on foreign widgets. I used to import widgets from foreign country and pay the manufacturer $5 per widget and sell them to Americans for $7. Now when I import the widget from the foreign country I still pay the manufacturer $5 per widget but now I have to pay the US government a tariff of $10 per widget. Each imported widget now costs me $15 and so I have to sell them for $17 to make a profit. This now means that American made widgets are competitive again, the locally made $12 widget is a great deal compared to the $17 imported one. Great if you are a US widget maker and shitty if you are a US widget buyer.

Now you might notice the people in the US buying widgets, even in the best fantasy scenario, end up getting dicked over. The theory goes that widget making jobs are good though and if we do that enough then everyone will have to pay more for goods but we will have lots of jobs making stuff that pay ok.

Now here’s the part that really, really sucks. Let’s say you are a US widget maker and now you know that your foreign competition can’t make a widget for less than $17. You could sell your widgets for $12 and have a viable business or you could sell them for $16.99 and have a super profitable business. I’ll just gesture broadly at the sea of corporate greed we find ourselves floating in and let you decide which is more likely.

Tariffs induce even local manufacturers to raise prices because it hurts competition. It’s basically a massive transfer of wealth from local consumers to local producers by cutting out the foreign producers and the competitive pressure they exert on the market. This is why basically every economist said “do this and kill the economy”

So why do people want tariffs? Well the promise for your average voter is that the tariffs are going to bring back good solid blue collar jobs. You can go work in a factory and pump out widgets and get a nice middle class paycheck. It’s a nice sales pitch and a lot of people would really want that to be true. I suspect though that the manufacturers will automate most of this work and pocket the profits, again, gestures broadly at the late stage capitalism hellscape all around us.

Remember when everyone that got the COVID shot would be dead in 2 years.

These are Christian nationalists, they love death cults.

Speech and debate clause.

Someone should read that on the floor

If there’s something in particular in that original analysis you disagree with feel free to point it out.

Progressive voters can’t vote for progressive candidates that don’t exist. My analysis explains why progressive candidates / parties don’t emerge in this system.

When there are progressive candidates progressive voters vote for them, while centrist Dems say they won’t (that’s exactly what Clinton supporters said they would do if sanders won the nomination)

What exactly do you think “you know what, fuck you guys, we’re done” looks like in the absence of progressive candidates? Maybe the presidential candidate getting 20M fewer votes? That literally just happened.

I’d refer you back to my first comment that explains the structural incentives and disincentives that prevent an alternative to the Democratic Party from emerging

How? Does Massachusetts not have working class people in it? Is it a state comprised entirely of the wealthy?

We have data so that we don’t have to go with our guts

You can check out the vote totals

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries

I would argue the 2016 is a better reflection, in 2020 there was a sort of coordinated drop out of centrist candidates on Super Tuesday as the establishment wing of the party threw their weight behind Biden.

But in either case the answer is that the Democratic Party is basically a coalition party of centrist Dems that seem to be fine with shifting further and further to the right and more progressive voters. In 2016 it was pretty evenly split so there is appetite just not enough for a viable party.

I volunteered for Bernie Sanders. His two runs for President (along with a long career) are probably as close as you can find to what a modern progressive party would look like.

https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=n00000528

He raised a lot of money, had very large rallies, and a lot of very passionate volunteers. But lost, and there’s two reasons why.

1. First past the post spoiler effect - Bernie had to run as a Democrat within the Democratic Party primary system. If he had run as progressive or democratic socialist he would have split the democratic vote. In a first past the post system Duverger’s Law mathematically guarantees 2 party rule.

Any progressive alternative would split the democratic vote, and ensure that, at least for a while, the republicans would win every election. You can see on Lemmy and Reddit and all other kinds of social media the amount of anger and infighting this causes on the left. This is a strong disincentive for anyone to start an alternative party.

2. The donor class - the Democratic Party is largely funded by big money donors. Big money donors have a lot of money because of how things are currently arranged. If the way the country works today has made you fabulously wealthy, even if that means a lot of people suffer, you tell yourself “they suffer because they don’t work hard like me” and want things to stay the way they are. So you donate to both parties to control them and make sure that whatever particular apple cart you’ve cornered doesn’t get overturned.

Every problem the American people face is a profit generator for some fuck face. Rent too high, some landlord is enjoying record profits. Can’t afford medicine, some pharmacy CEO is buying their third yacht. Those people have enough money to buy politicians, ads, political parties, media networks, social media companies, etc. They aren’t just going to sit back and let you fuck up their money making machine, they will deploy those assets against anyone that threatens the status quo.

Here’s a particularly egregious example coming from MSNBC during Bernie’s last run when his reforms threatened their wealth https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/chris-matthews-bernie-sanders-public-executions-949802/

So that’s what any progressive party is up against. The mathematical certainty that they would lose until they could unseat the current Democratic Party, something that would take some number of election cycles. The donor class wanting to thwart any change. And let’s say they do overcome both of those things. That party then becomes the thing the donors try to buy next. Your party starts with high minded ideals but one by one the members of your party get big paydays from the billionaires and suddenly they want to soften this reform and maybe hold off on that reform and… oh look they are holding the exact same positions as the current Democratic Party. Because those positions are the positions of the people that own the party, and they will happily buy another.

Oh I completely agree. And I don’t want any working poor stolen valor (for lack of a better term). I just think we won’t be able to fix these problems if we keep letting the owner class get away with dividing us up.

The way we pay for labor is unfair and the fact that I get a bigger paycheck is about 5% things I can control (skills, training, etc) and 95% blind luck (if I was born in 1890 or 2190 my ability to write erlang wouldn’t be nearly as marketable. In the 1390s my annoying fastidiousness and desire to work purely in theory would have me a pauper)

It’s that old meme though of the worker with a cookie, the immigrant with a crumb, and the wealthy guy with an immense pile telling the worker to watch out for the immigrant. It’s the same playbook for the working class, just add a third guy with 2 cookies and the wealthy guy is telling you “he’s also not on your side because he has 2 whole cookies, don’t band together to take any of mine”

If the working class could achieve class consciousness and start demanding their fair share, we could actually fix some of our problems. So I hope my brothers and sisters and non-binary siblings in the working class can embrace me and each other in solidarity and fight for a better tomorrow.

Republicans love a good scam

Next up is the dismantling of the ACA. They will roll out these amazingly cheap alternatives. Health insurance for $10 a month!

So the poor and the stupid will sign up. They’ll go to the bar and saunter up to a “libtard” and tell them that trump fixed everything.

Then when they get sick and try to use MAGA super plan plus premium they won’t be able to find a doctor. The $10/month plan only covers an annual trip to a CVS minute clinic. They’ll go on Facebook and write up how the goddamn liberals tricked him. Other faithful republicans will pray for them and tell them that it must be a glitch because trump made things better.

The con will win because it’ll only hurt those without power.

I’m one of those highly paid Silicon Valley workers.

But I’m still working class because I trade my labor for the money I need to live. I trade my labor for the healthcare that keeps me and my wife alive.

I’m working class because I can’t afford not to work.

Don’t let the owners of this country divide us up any longer. They love it when we fight amongst each other to determine who is really “working class” because it means we in-fight instead of challenging them.

No war but class war.