Okay. The Democrats’ policy on trans women in sports is unfair and rightly unpopular, and should be abandoned. Protecting trans people’s rights to equal treatment in housing, employment etc is good and also pretty popular. No one needs to be ‘thrown under the bus’.
Given Trump’s executive order on gender, and his government’s repellant policies and actions such as misgendering in Congress, it should be easy for the Dems to moderate and get back on the right side of the issue. This appears to be Gavin Newsom’s intention if he runs for President.
No, it isn’t. Enacting higher taxes does not necessarily increase revenue / effectively redistribute wealth. For a prominent counterexample, vice taxes depend on the phenomenon of higher taxes discouraging purchase of the target commodity. Past a certain point, raising taxes actually lowers revenue. The willingness and ability of rich people to change their behavior for marginal tax benefits has a huge impact on this relationship. See also, Laffer curve.
Matt Yglesias published a ‘Common Sense Democratic Manifesto’ on his Substack that might interest you, OP. Some of the articles expanding on the individual points are locked, but the main post is free to read:
It does when the people being taxed have most of the money. Getting money out of their hands and into the wider economy is how to make the economy stronger.
Ideally, you’d take nearly all of it and put a permanent cap on personal wealth, somewhere in the low millions range. Billionaires shouldn’t exist, for both moral and economic reasons.
Enacting taxes on rich people does not necessarily result in getting money out of their hands and into the wider economy. For example, I live in Florida. Pretend I make seven figures. Florida does not have a state income tax, but pretend the state legislature passes a 10% tax for the $500k+ bracket. Chances are very high that I will look into leaving Florida, or ask my employer to give me a ~10% raise.
Pretend I am a billionaire with holdings in Alabama. When I have the credit, I buy up rental properties because the income from the land is rising higher than the interest rate on my loans. Plus I can use the property as collateral for more loans. Alabama passes a huge property tax hike. Do I just sit there and lose money? Obviously not, I change up my portfolio so I don’t lose money. That could be passing the taxes on to renters (duh) or if the market won’t bear it, liquidating the affected assets. You bet money is going to politicians to prevent the tax hike in the first place. Point is, there is no situation where I eat the taxes. Either someone else pays the price or I take my ball and go home.
And in this scenario get hit for tax evasion. The scenario presumes a willingness to actually treat them like other people, instead of untouchable gods.
I think class warfare is much underrated as a tactic the Dems need to endorse. The GOP screams “Class Warfare!!!” at anything that hints at redistributing wealth, but Dems need to show that it’s a good thing, a necessary thing, and embrace it, as Bernie and AOC have shown effectively. To shrink from it is to concede the GOP’s point that gross inequality of wealth is a desirable outcome.
I mean there’s plenty of class warfare in the US; it’s just exclusively the wealthy warring on everyone else. That would be an important point to make.
I agree with not throwing allies under the bus. I’m all for Democrats taking the straightforward position of all out support of these minority groups, if only because morally it’s the correct position to take. WRT how Civil Rights was won, I think the picture is complicated in one sense and simple in another sense.
The story I have in my head is something like this. Back in the 50s and 60s, the alliance between Black Civil Rights leaders like MLK and powerful white people in the federal government (in particular Eisenhower, Earl Warren, and LBJ), won the fight. But it did so in large part by educating the public, and therefore diminishing the number of racists by largely eliminating the phenomenon of people being racist because they grew up that way. The flip side is that that those who were / are racist due primarily to the hate in their hearts kept on going. I think what’s happening now is that the proportion of the population who are hateful people is growing, and so the old problems are cropping up again. Why it’s the case that there are now more hateful people than there was 20, 30, or 40 years ago is the mystery. As such I don’t have any recommendations on that front, due to my lack of knowledge on the underlying mechanism that is causing the problem, other than to say that the it seems to me that the hate is primary and the targets secondary based on our cultural heritage.
Liquidating (selling) real estate because you don’t want to pay increased property taxes is not tax evasion.
Landlords routinely raise rent 5% or more year over year. 10% is ugly but I’m not convinced it would be impossible to cope with. That’s right around the amount where California rent control laws kick in and require three months notice.
Have you considered that “playing on any amateur sports team you want to regardless of biological appropriatness” and “being able to walk to the voting booth while black without being lynched” are, in fact, not in any way morally equivalent, lumping people who oppose them together as undifferentiated “hateful people” is ludicrous and offputting to 90% of the voting population, and no amount of screaming to the contrary is going to change that any time soon?
In the larger world, the question of what the Democrats do and should stand for is being answered by one particular group with the platform of “abundance liberalism.” This speaks to the exact sort of real pocketbook issues that swing voters respond to - primarily, it’s about ending the decades of control of housing policy by flippers and people who think their house is an “investment” that they are entitled to see a 400% return on. Under this plan, Democrats will let people build the 6 or 7 million apartments that we need right now, build the hotels that need to be built to meet tourism demand and stop the distortions of the AirBnB economy, and build actual mass transit systems instead of pouring money down a hole to build emperor’s-new-clothes phantom projects like the California HSR. It will lower housing costs immensely and give people more freedom to move to where they wish to be for jobs or cultural opportunities.
This is the sort of thing that needs to happen and that voters will respond to, but of course the “progressives” hate it. There may be nothing that can be done to make the Democratic Party functional without first purging its extremists.
There was a societal agreement that certain ideas were not allowed to be expressed in polite company - overt racism and misogyny, Nazism, offensive stuff about disabled people, etc. After the success of the gay rights movement, overt homo- and transphobia were added too. But in the last decade or so, the left has been pushing at this line, working to stigmatise views that are more and more mainstream. Hence all the complaints about ‘cancel culture’ - no one cares when you fire neo-Nazis, or deny a job to someone who likes to call people the n-word, but when you start denying people jobs because they don’t support a particular conception of DEI, or firing them because they merely said the n-word aloud during a discussion about it, you face more pushback.
But not only does broadening your definition of ‘hate’ directly result in considering more people hateful, it reduces support for idea that some views are simply unacceptable. I think that’s the consequence we’re seeing now with the resurgence in expressing unambiguously hateful ideas like Nazism.
Yes, this. I think it’s finally reversed, but California has been losing population for years despite being a wealthy state and main centre for the tech industry. Mostly because they refuse to allow enough housing to be built.
Build the houses and apartments, enforce the laws and clamp down on disorder and antisocial behaviour, so cities are safe and pleasant places to live. Build public transport, and again, make sure it’s safe, clean and pleasant. Stop trying to dumb down schools for equity, and make sure all kids can be challenged and get a good education.
Build nuclear power stations as well as renewables, so people can have clean energy without reducing living standards, and continue encouraging the rollout of electric cars etc.
No party is really offering this agenda, as far as I know.
Two years net population loss at the start of the pandemic, some due to disease losses but quite a bit due to people finding cheaper places for remote work. Population is back to increasing, thanks largely to immigration - but yes, California’s housing market is thoroughly wedged due to Prop 13 and NIMBYism, along with the tendency of Californians in particular to think of their house as a piggybank, rather than a place to live.
There’s nothing wrong with California that better housing and transportation policy wouldn’t fix, but it’s been decades creating the problems and they aren’t going fix themselves overnight - and worse yet, there’s a massive, transideological constituency for keeping things as they are. Until those folks start realizing they’re hurting themselves, net, there’s not much that can change.
