'Coulda saved some keystrokes,
The right: Oprah! Bill Cosby! Tiger Woods! Barak Husein 0bama!
Highest GDP and one of the highest - if not the highest - ratios of income/wealth inequality in the developed world. Nobody says we have to be giving unlimited handouts, but taxing and some degree of wealth redistribution (not so much direct transfers as reinvestment) is necessary.
/Nitpick:
Republicans love Mother Teresa. She was actually a pretty awful person.
In his book and documentary, Mr. Hitchens pointed out that Mother Teresa associated with (and applauded) the Duvalier clan, the dictators of Haiti. She accepted a donation of more than $1 million from Charles Keating Jr., the convicted savings-and-loan fraud. Paul Turley, the Los Angeles deputy district attorney in that case, sent her a letter stating that the money she received was not Mr. Keating’s to give, that it was stolen from hundreds of small investors. Mother Teresa never returned it.
On a broader level, Mr. Hitchens argued that Catholics and non-Catholics all over the world gave money to help Mother Teresa with her efforts among the poor and sick of Calcutta. But, he maintained, she and her order, the Missionaries of Charity, have not so much provided physical or medical aid as they have worked to convert the poor. The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, called the care dispensed at her Calcutta clinic “haphazard.” SOURCE
100% pure gold conservative right there.
I have a Facebook friend who was for Bernie Sanders. He’s the type of guy that wants Revolution Now! Well, hell, so do I. But it’s not going to happen that way. This is not Cuba in 1958, and it sure as hell ain’t France in 1789. I respect him for his sense of urgency and the need to address and solve the many problems this country has, but as you say, it’s going to take a while. That’s why, although it took me a while to come around to him, that I now think Biden was the perfect candidate. Easy to say now, since he won. 
But he supports some things that could be characterized as pretty far left, knows his way around D.C. arguably better than anyone who has ever took office, and hopefully will be able to get the support of at least some Republicans if they keep the Senate, and get support from other moderate Democrats if the Dems get it, to at least start down the path as you mention. Sanders (and Warren…), despite all their support from voters, were never going to be able to push through their agendas, even if the Dems did get control of the Senate. There are too many moderates, both there and in the House.
I don’t think that anyone should need a dictionary to figure out what a three word slogan means.
It’s supposed to be a slogan, not a policy paper. It’s too specific, no one should be debating your three word slogan.
Fix The Police conveys an appearance of unity, people with all sorts of different approaches to police reform can broadly get behind it. There’s a difference between a rally and policy debate. Maybe you can have a rally where some people chant “Divest and Reinvest” and other people chant “Defund the Police” and then they can fight among themselves?
Plus, and this is no small thing, if you get a street full of people shouting Fix The Police it’s going to sound like Fuck the Police. But it’s not, and you can plausibly claim with a straight-face that was not your intent.
I’m not going to use the word “dog whistle”, because I’m not delving into that debate, but it would sort of telegraph that there’s a more extreme position hiding inside the moderate one. And it pokes at the other side a little bit.
As someone whose’s career involved sales and marketing, I’m alway beating my head against the wall at just how BAD Democrats are at this kind of thing.
Your friend may certainly have been that way but I think most Sanders’ supporters were more, “We Need to Start Now!”
Hillary Clinton was the epitome of “let’s keep doing the same thing” and she lost the election because of it. Biden sure feels like Clinton v2.0 and has even made comments along the same lines.
Biden won but it was a LOT closer than it should have been and that should tell us something. So much of the Biden vote was a “Not Trump” vote. If Trump had been slightly less colossally awful Trump might have edged Biden out. He came within a whisker of doing just that.
Yet the Democratic party never learns these lessons. Pelosi and Schumer are not hearing the pain of so many and dismiss obvious lessons of Trump’s success and try to blame Sanders. Hell, to this day Clinton blames Sanders for her loss and is so mad about it that she was evasive on saying if she’d support Sanders if he won the primary.
I’ve posted it before but it is so powerful I will post it again:
I’ve heard this, but I’m not so sure of it, but then I haven’t done any looking for exit polls and the like, so I could be wrong. But it may be the case the Sanders would have been just as close. I don’t really know. Otherwise, I agree with the rest.
Someone to the right of Sanders, but to the left of Biden.
There’s a whole lot of room in that gap.
Agreed, but I’m not sure if you are responding to me or someone else, or exactly what you mean to say.
I don’t disagree. The question is are the programs productive or destructive but popular?
I would agree but I I think you need to start with Sanders far to the left to end up kinda maybe somewhere near the middle.
Obamacare started near the middle and was then made a mess trying to compromise to the right.
I suggest we judge the programs based on their results. Hey, what do you know? They create 70% of the country’s wealth! I guess that settles it, they’re much more productive than the shithole counties that only produce 30%.
I think the question is what happens if you have these programs in place, and what happens if you don’t. Socialism is a misnomer; even Bernie Sanders and AOC aren’t talking about total state centralization of the economy or a planned economy or socialized ownership of all property. They believe in capitalism’s ability to generate wealth but feel that profits and wealth should be redistributed better than it is now, and I don’t think there’s any question they’re right about that - I disagree with their solution or remedy but their diagnosis is correct.
Obamacare isn’t really a disaster; it’s a disaster because some right wing ideologues are determined to undermine it - precisely because they know it can succeed as designed. Christ, it’s working even after 3 years of attempts to kill it by stripping away individual mandates and after some red state governors have refused medicaid funds. Imagine how much it would help if people just admitted that it’s actually not a bad program.
It’s not bad inasmuch as it is an improvement over what we had but it is far from a good program.
In particular the carve-out for the pharmaceutical industry.
Capitalism does that. Not socialism or statism.
If the programs are mostly productive you get productive results. However, far too many government programs have consequences, intended or otherwise that are counterproductive but can be obfuscated enough that those who benefit from them can raise enough stink that politicians feel compelled to placate them. Folks act according to incentives.
The far left wants to use the concept of collectivism both in terms of economics and social justice in order to reward allies and punish enemies. Free this and free that is just the candy coating to entice the populace to swallow the poisonous core.
Which programs and what consequences?
Then those areas run by democrats must not be socialist or statist, right?
Capitalism has many great things to it, but it does have some flaws and shortcomings here and there. Recognizing and accounting for that is not socialism or statism.
Yes, as can be seen by those areas that are more productive than the ones who live by pure capitalism.
Yeah, they are mostly wealthy industrialists who bribe give campaign contributions to politicians to benefit themselves.
Anything at all can have unintended consequences. Is it better to look rationally and look at how to solve those as they appear, or just assume that capitalism, which in itself is causing many of those unintended consequences, will solve them with the magical hand of the market?
None of this is true.
That’s a whole different and endless debate!