Sneering progressives are driving young white men into the arms of the GOP

[HurricaneDitka]

@Slash1972

This is similar to the other thread where you said pretty much the same thing. And when asked which Democratic policies you think are bad, you stated something about minimum wage and your hope that it was abolished. When asked whether or not you thought abolishing the minimum wage would be good for most poor people, you conveniently stopped posting to the thread.

I don’t want to distract from the topic of this thread either, so I’m going to spoiler my response:

Here is the exchange we had in that other thread:

@HurricaneDitka

… I don’t want government to “fail”. I want it to advance conservative goals and principles. The second best thing it can do is nothing. The worst thing it can do is advance liberal goals. And there’s a vast distance separating these last two. I don’t call it “failure” when they do a little bit of the first, a lot of the second, and none of the third.

@Slash1972

Seems a strange position to take. “Hey, there are a lot of people in poverty. Maybe the government can get off it’s lazy ass and do something about it?” “Nope, I’d rather they do nothing than advance liberal goals”

@HurricaneDitka

It doesn’t seem strange if I consider the liberal policy goals, taken broadly, to be harmful to the poor.

@Slash1972

Fair enough. Without derailing this thread, could you pick one of the goals from this list and explain why you think it’s harmful to the poor?

@HurricaneDitka

Sure.

We should raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour over time and index it…

What would the results of such a policy be? I suspect we could have a robust debate about it, but here is one such analysis:

… increasing the minimum wage results in a substantial drop in the rate of job creation. They determine that the decline in job growth is the result of expanding establishments decreasing the number of jobs they create rather than resulting from additional job losses among declining industries.

The authors find that those most affected by the decline in job creation tend to be younger and less educated jobseekers, because these jobseekers are more likely than other workers to be interested in obtaining jobs that pay minimum wage. …

The discussion in that thread continued, but this is a good point to pause and point out what I see as a critical difference between that time and this as asking two distinct questions. In that thread, you constrained my choices with the following limitations:

1. “without derailing the thread”; which, BTW, I think was a good thing, I didn’t want to derail the thread either, even though our continuing discussion started to do just that (and I don’t want to derail this one, which is why I’m constraining my responses on this subject to this spoiler).

2. “pick one”; you were asking me to name just one thing, not give a comprehensive list of everything that the Dems have wrong. Up above, you said “when asked which Democratic policies you think are bad”, but you never asked me which “policies” (plural) were bad, you asked me to “pick one” (singular).

3. “from this list”; there are policies and positions the Dems pursue, collectively or individually, which are not listed in the party platform, but you limited my choice to only those things, giving me the distasteful chore of skimming through the Dem party platform to find one. Nonetheless, I obliged.

4. “harmful to the poor”; at that time, we were discussing a policy, from the Dem party platform, that harms the poor specifically. In this thread, my post which engendered this conversation was “overall I think the policies generally supported by most Republicans are better for the country”, there’s nothing limiting it to poor people there.

TL;DR: In the posted quoted at the top of this reply, you said, “when asked which Democratic policies you think are bad”, that’s a far larger category with fewer constraints than what you asked for previously, so you’re entire “when asked which Democratic policies you think are bad” is a misrepresentation of our earlier conversation.

As for when I “conveniently stopped posting to the thread”, the conversation died like an hour or two after my last post, for several days, and I did indeed lose track of the thread. My normal habit is to keep tabs open for discussions that I’m actively participating in, but sometimes (like computer restarts or crashes, or switching devices) I lose track of those and don’t always get back to replying to every thread or question. Shit happens.