Tax and spend implies ever increasing taxes and spending. That cycle was broken in the 1980s. Any politician that wants to renew that cycle will deservedly be called a “tax and spend liberal”. Everyone will understand what it means and it will be 100% accurate.
But no Republican is going to say that. Democrat spinsters will insist they did, but no Republican is going to say that.
If “soak the rich and spend it” were unanswerable rhetoric, no Republican would ever have been elected.
I think you are mistaking the fact that Sanders’ positions are popular on the SDMB with the notion that they play well with moderates.
He isn’t going to get the nomination, more’s the pity, because if he did he would be lucky to win anything besides Vermont and DC.
Regards,
Shodan
That supposed cycle was mostly a fiction for taxes (considering how various taxes went down and up and down again in the 20th century) and was never broken for “spending” at all, especially not in the 80s.
For the last several decades it’s a total fiction that the Republicans have been more conservative on finances. “Reduce all taxes continuously forever” is not a serious policy position, and yet it’s one no major Republican repudiates. If anything, “tax and spend”, silly as the moniker is, is far more conservative than the actual Republican presidents lately, who have been just “spend” politicians.
I’m criticizing this because it’s incredibly, pathetically lazy analysis straight out of the RNC campaign playbook. It sheds light on nothing and only obfuscates the complicated nature of finances in governing. You can and should do better.
The concept of paid vacations is hardly a radical one in this country. Neither is unemployment insurance.
Oh, you’re totally right that Republicans have been irresponsible spenders. In fact, I think that breaking the correlation between taxes and spending in the public’s mind has been incredibly damaging to conservatism. Back when everyone knew that to get more public services they had to pay more taxes, it was easier to say no to new spending. Now we can just tax someone else or borrow it.
But it is a fact that taxes stopped going up, especially on the middle class, in the 1980s. And the definition of “middle class” keeps on expanding to include some pretty rich people. Those people cannot be taxed. It’s the new third rail of politics. Even Sanders appears unwilling to touch it.
Vacations are a benefit that an employer may or may not provide. No one has a right to paid vacations. Unemployment insurance is part of the safety net, nominally paid for by employers but when times get tough paid for by taxpayers.
Paid leave is less popular than you would think. My own company has it but only a minority take advantage of it and there’s some resentment because it’s the same people taking it multiple times while most of us never take it at all. In the real world, significant time off work comes with a cost to both the employee and the employer. Unpaid leave is a good policy, because it allows employees to take time off without repercussion, but the lack of pay causes them to return as soon as possible. Paid leave is an excuse to take far more time than needed.
This is not a fact – many taxes and brackets have gone up since the 80s.
Yeah, in blue states. At the federal level, we’ve had several rounds of middle class tax cuts, with more promised all the time.
Many taxes and brackets (but not all) have increased at the federal level since the 80s. So it’s not a fact that taxes stopped going up in the 1980s.
The brackets are not what taxes are. Brackets didn’t change when the Making Work Pay tax credit was implemented, but it resulted in taxes going down for middle class workers.
I’m just refuting your claim that ‘it’s a fact that taxes stopped going up in the 80s’. This is not a fact – there have been tax increases since the 80s.
Why would you decline part of your compensation? Or to put it another way, why would you work extra time for free–that time which you could have taken leave, and gain no additional compensation by working?
Because leave takes you out of the game. You only do it if you absolutely have to. Take a month off and so much has changed you’re practically new.
Also, because sometimes you just have too much work to take leave. My dad, who was a government employee, got a lot of paid leave, but he took almost none of it, just because he had too much work to do. He wasn’t really able to take time off because then stuff wouldn’t get done.
PTO days however I take every single one, because a day or a week is just good for you. But a month off, or multiple months off, that’s bad news unless you work at Wal-mart or something where you can take 20 years off and come back to pretty much the same job.
This is such an American view. My manager sat me down recently and said that she expects her team members to take at least one two-week holiday a year as taking lots of short holidays doesn’t give your brain time to adjust to non-work mode.
No one is indispensable.
Oh God, that sounds horrible. I can’t imagine just how messed-up my desk would have been had I been gone for two weeks.
Ideally, the system would be set up so that work was handled when you were gone. No system should be entirely dependent on one particular person being at work every day. It’s a recipe for disaster if that person has an accident or is unable to come in to work. And it means that person is often unable to take vacation, either because of the messy-desk you mention or because the leave time they’ve earned is never approved by supervisors because they “just can’t be spared.”
Exactly - “key man risk” (or “key person risk”) is a real risk for businesses of any size. The more indispensable you make one person, the more boned you are if they get hit by a bus.
Which is not to say that you must duplicate everyone’s work, but (unless you’re a REALLY tiny business) if your business can’t function for two weeks because Bob took the kids to Disneyworld your business is on pretty shaky ground.
Or, in other words, the person is getting screwed out of an agreed benefit. You might as well not pay them their full wage because you “can’t spare the money”; you’re withholding their personal time in the same way the latter example would be withholding their money. Whether this means that businesses have an incentive to tell employees they’re indispensable is left as an exercise for the reader.
But hey - how about that Bernie guy?