The problem is, is that they were told that the police would be reformed, that they would be fixed. Over and over again.
At some point, someone said abolish/defund the police, and that stuck, that resonated with people who have been terrorized by “law enforcement” for generations, and constantly promised change that never came.
It’s a terrible slogan for a politician or community leader to pick up. However, the fact that that slogan resonated with so many means that we are fools to ignore them.
As usual, such numbers hide a great deal of nuance.
Republicans express intensely negative views of “socialism” and highly positive views of “capitalism.”
By contrast, majorities of Democrats view both terms positively, though only modest shares have strong impressions of each term.
Overall, a much larger share of Americans have a positive impression of capitalism (65%) than socialism (42%), according to a new survey by Pew Research Center.
There are large partisan differences in views of capitalism: Nearly eight-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (78%) express somewhat or very positive reactions to the term, while just over half of Democrats and Democratic leaners (55%) say they have a positive impression.
But these differences are dwarfed by the partisan gap in opinions about socialism. More than eight-in-ten Republicans (84%) have a negative impression of socialism; a 63% majority has a very negative view. Nearly two-thirds of Democrats (65%) have a positive view of socialism, but only 14% have a very positive view. SOURCE
For a slogan, just go with Fix the Police. Slogans should be simple and non-specific, a way to get a lot of people broadly on your side. It’s OK if they all have their own idea of what it means. That’s why MAGA worked well politically.
Plus, when you get a crowd chanting it, it’s going to sound like Fuck the Police.
And frankly, I think the whole Defund thing is a little privileged in that it ignores a lot of the realities of living in a bad neighborhood. Believe it or not, a lot of people (people of color even) that live in marginal neighborhoods want more policing, not less.
I think that they want better, not just more.
Crime is a problem, but when the police are not preventing or responding to crime, but instead primarily harassing and dehumanizing you and your neighbors, it’s not more of that that you need.
There shouldn’t have to be a tradeoff between keeping drug dealers off the corners, and also keeping your own kid out of harm’s way of the police.
This has to be a perfect example of how people come to believe things that just aren’t true. Perhaps through ‘insidious propaganda’. In this case, the notion that Trump’s tax cuts only helped the rich is pure bullshit.
Bolding mine.
It’s not even clear that the rich got a cut overall, because the removal of the state tax deduction primarily affected rich people in high tax states.
So when Biden said he was going to repeal the Trump tax cut, what he meant is that people making 15,000-20,000 per year will see a tax increase of 12.5%, people making 40,000-50,000 per year will see a 14.5% increase in their taxes, and millionaires and billionaires will again be able to deduct state taxes and lower their tax burden.
Have you read the Trump bill? Did you know that those cuts to individuals expire in 2025 while the corporate tax cuts never, ever do?
This has to be a perfect example of how people come to believe things that just aren’t true. Perhaps through ‘insidious propaganda’. In this case, the notion that Trump’s tax cuts is intended to help anyone but the rich is pure bullshit.
Cite:
Well, now you are moving the goalposts. At first you implied that the tax cut did nothing for people making under 400,000 per year. When I pointed out the facts, you have now reverted to a different claim, that those tax cuts only last 8 years.
I’d take 8 years of tax cuts over no tax cuts. I think most rational people would agree.
So will you now recant and admit that Trump cut taxes for pretty much everyone, and not just the rich?
I remember reading on the news about a group using the slogan ‘care not cops’, and thinking that sounded much better and more positive. But if that still sounds too much like abolishing the police, how about ‘more care less cops’?
No there shouldn’t be, but better policing doesn’t equal less policing. And while I agree that we need robust social service agencies working in tandem with the police - most of my life experience is in NYC and there’s is pretty robust social service network already in place and working with the cops.
I think it’s important to look at why we have so many bad cops. Not all cops are bad, but way too many are. Either they start out they way or they change.
Probably too many people with aggressive tendencies go into police work. Low salaries make the problem worse, because you start to draw the bullies, the guys that think getting to rough up people is more important than the pay.
Then you need to look at the training and reorient it to be more focused on communication and less focused on force. Same with recruitment techniques — look for angles that would draw compassionate people and use stringent psychological screening to weed out aggressive tendencies.
Then you need to look compassionately at why good cops go bad. We are need to study the desensitization that comes with the job, figure out how much of a factor it is and try to find ways to combat it. I think this is important because if you start replacing cops with social workers they may be vulnerable to the same psychological forces.
One thing I do agree with strongly is that the police forces need to be demilitarized. It’s my understanding that a lot of that happened at the federal level post 9/11, with DHS and other agencies outfitting the police departments with the heavy equipment. They should stop doing that and give that money in the cause of demilitarizing the departments.
But demilitarize is not the same as defund and I’m not in favor of punitively depriving police departments of funding, it’s counterproductive.
It’s still pretty much the rich.
CBO, in its first baseline update post enactment, initially estimated that the Act would reduce individual income taxes by $65 billion, corporate income taxes by $94 billion, and other taxes by $3 billion, for a total reduction of $163 billion in FY2018. Corporate revenues were about $40 billion less than projected whereas individual revenues were higher, with an overall revenue reduction of about $9 billion. From 2017 to 2018, the estimated average corporate tax rate fell from 23.4% to 12.1% and individual income taxes as a percentage of personal income fell slightly from 9.6% to 9.2%.
<<snip>>
The individual income tax changes for 2018 were smaller than the corporate tax changes in absolute size and substantially smaller as a percentage of income. The effective individual tax rate for federal income taxes as a percentage of personal income is estimated at 9.6% in 2017 and 9.2% in 2018, based on data in the National Income and Product Accounts. This change constitutes a reduction in effective tax rate of 4%.
<<snip>>
Distributional analyses of the tax change suggested that the tax revision favored higher-income taxpayers, in part because most of the tax cut benefited corporations and in part because the individual income tax cut largely went to higher-income individuals. During the debate about taxes, however, arguments were made that these corporate tax cuts would benefit workers due to growth in investment and the capital stock.After enactment, CBO projected these effects to be relatively small, with increases in labor productivity (which should affect the wage rate) negligible in 2018 and growing to 0.3% of GDP after 10 years. CBO projected that the total wage bill would grow because of the increase in employment and hours per worker of 0.2% in 2018. The labor supply response would rise through 2024, peaking at 0.8% and then decline as the individual tax cuts expired.
Absolutely mothing in there contradicts anything I said. If the original claim was that lower income people did not see the kind of absolute dollar reductions in taxes that rich people got, I would not have said anything, because it’s true. And it almost has to be, because the rich pay the vast majority of taxes, and therefore will get bigger reductions when rates are cut.
But the original claim was that no one under $400,000 per year had their taxes cut. Biden made the same claim repeatedly on the campaign trail. And it’s flatly untrue.
…have you read the thread?
Centrists want solidarity on things they think actually have a chance in passing. But (in general) centrist politicians just don’t want to do the work. Its harder to convey a message outside of simple talking points. So its easier to just not to convey the message.
From AOC today:
And that says it all really. You can’t control what the people decide to do. You can either listen to what people have to say, or not.
But that glosses over the issue. If we say there is a 5% tax cut across the board so everyone wins and it is totally fair is not really true. It is fair on the face of it but the person who paid $1,000 in taxes sees a $50 tax savings or about $0.14/day. They are not going to notice that. For the person who paid $100,000 in taxes they see a $5,000 benefit or about $14/day. They might just notice that.
You can see the arc here. If you are a corporation with a $1 billion tax bill that 5% is substantial.
Not to mention the people getting the biggest benefit are the people who don’t need it. The theory is they all go out and invest which helps everyone but that’s mostly not true. Mostly they stash that money away. Corp[oration don’t hire more people or raise salaries (why would they?). They either stash it away or do stock buybacks.
In the meantime the government is taking a lot less revenue which means a squeeze on government programs and projects and a rise in the national debt which disproportionately hurts the guy with the $1,000 tax bill. He probably loses overall in the end.
Again, this is not the statement I was refuting. We can argue lots of things about progressive taxes, but the claim that only people who made over $400,000 per year got a tax cut is simply false.
Also, I know your 5% was hypothetical, but the Trump tax cut gave almost three times the percentage cut to lower income people. Over 14% to the lowest income geoups, and 4.3% to the highest income groups. Yes, it still amounted to less absolute dollars. In fact, there is almost no tax cut for which this would not be true, because U.S. taxes are highly progressive.
Read this:
People with under $30,000 in income make up almost half of all tax filers, but pay only about 1.4% of all taxes. That’s a total of about $20 billion dollars.
People who make $100,000 or less make up 82.5% of taxpayers, but only represent 19.5% of individual income taxes.
People who make over $500,000 per year make up only 1.9% of the total number of taxpayers, yet pay 39.8% of all income taxes. If you make the cutoff $200,000, then you get 4.9% of taxpayers paying 59% of taxes.
Therefore, any tax cut large enough to actually make a difference to the economy will always have to disproportionally affect the rich, simply because they pay the vast majority of taxes. You can’t cut taxes that don’t exist.
Again, you keep trying to paint a picture of fairness that does not exist. Heck, the picture you paint makes it seem the people with money are the ones shouldering all the burden.
But it is no surprise that if the top 1% have 30+% of all household wealth in the country they are going to be paying substantially more in taxes. The top 10% of Americans own 88% of all corporate equity.
Yes, you love to nitpick and point out that everyone did in fact get a tax break but you seem to be pushing a bogus narrative that somehow these tax cuts were great for everyone. They weren’t. Not even close.
A politician can get a speechwriter to craft whatever political ideas they want. In the absence of an audience, reciting the speech isn’t harder because it is more leftist.
What’s hard is to tell people what they don’t want to hear.
In AOC’s district, it is easy to talk as she does because her constituents like it.
In Abigail Spanberger’s district, it would be harder to say the same because she would have to sell it to voters who tend to think differently (she is in Dave Brat’s old district).
If the measure of a politician is attempts made to sell unpopular ideas, Dan Lipinski should be your ideal.
I’d be willing to bet AOC would be happy to speak to the people in Spanberger’s district. I don’t think AOC has any problem speaking to anyone about her message. Indeed, where most moderate democrats hem and haw over things like M4A AOC embraces it and will talk to anyone who will listen about it.
No goal post moving here. I said you’d be voting against your best interests. Giving huge corporations a tax break for the rest of eternity while your tax break is only temporary is not in your best interest; it’s in the big corporation’s best interests.
The 400k figure was in regard to the proposed Biden tax increase, not the Trump tax cuts.
I really like the squad, although I’m a huge fan of a lot of the moderate Dem positions like the public option. It’s a bit frustrating to me that the moderates even run away from stuff like that. The public option should be the easiest thing in the world to defend.
I live in a district (and state) that was absolutely never going red, so I don’t know exactly what the messaging was like in competitive districts, but are moderate dems championing how great the public option is? Whenever I get to see a window into how that debate plays out, the Republican candidate is spouting complete nonsense, and the Dem counters with a bland corporate message like “we need to build on Obamacare.” ISTM like the MFA people are a threat because of how vociferously they advocate for their vision. Why can’t the moderates advocate for policies that are overwhelmingly popular?