But, to make it a consistently libertarian platform, one would have to add:
(8) No crony capitalism, no sweetheart contracts for big biz, no favor to the “too big to fail,” no bailouts in times of crisis, etc.
What are the odds that will become GOP policy in your lifetime or mine?
…and the East Asians, and the African and Arab immigrants!
Does that mean anything though? Here, the left generally wants to balance the budget by raising taxes on the rich, and the right wants to do it by cutting things like Social Security and Medicaid. The left in Greece just rejected raising taxes OR cutting pensions.
Plus, the government of Greece seems to be doing everything it can to get kicked out of the Eurozone. In America, secession is mainly a right-wing thing.
And in both countries, when the money runs out they turn to borrowing. The difference is Greece is out of rope.
And ignores South Asians, Chinese, Blacks, Filipinos, Latin Americans, Arabs, Southeast Asians, West Asians, Koreans and Japanese …
From a practical POV the difficulty is threading the needle … how to you keep your side, a shrinking demographic, angry enough that they are sure to vote, without doing the things that revulse the other various groups?
Agreed on two. And the Senate returning to actually getting some shit done (not better than when it was Democratically controlled but not exclusively obstructionist) is a step to that.
As to the list … yes the same old same old with the addition of lowering military spending and reduction of government survelliance.
As always how that sells is what it actually means.
Since we’re focused on option to change from where the Party is now, Kasich might be a good example of a route ahead. He’s grown wings and absolutely stomped his Democratic challenger for reelection by a 31 point margin in a swing state. Along the way he hasn’t always synched up with the current RNC platform. He’s talked about protecting the environment as being good for business interests in the long run. In the lead up to his Presidential run he’s talked about his campaign not focusing on social issues. The doesn’t fit well with the current brand. It’s a potential route forward for getting votes from the middle.
Targeted incentives close to the point of decision making are probably more useful to change behaviors. Affecting decision making isn’t much of a sales point for the voters the Republicans can hope to sway. There’s big issues with the extending the approach outside the areas where it’s historically been sold to the public. I could write a long lengthy post savaging the practical issues of extending that approach to other areas.
We do currently have a system that costs people more for being unhealthy. We tend to forget that. Out of pocket expenses under insurance rules are a weak incentive but they aren’t toothless. There are also other costs associated with unhealthy behaviors. Being overweight is correlated with lower pay, for example. I haven’t seen research trying to break out social bias from simply job performance issues potentially related to the poorer health (by say comparing to health issues that aren’t as visually obvious.) Poor diet can be linked to both less money in and having to pay more for health care.
So how do we reinforce that existing system? Qualified high deductible health plans linked to HSAs are actually a great tool in my mind. They are in place and starting to gain popularity. Strengthening their attractiveness would be my first target. As they become more popular the costs of more comprehensive plans will tend to have some positive pressure (as a greater share covered by them have more health issues with associated higher costs tot he insurance company). That is those making risky choices paying more, whether the risk is Pepsi by the gallon or rock climbing. I’d look at loosening the requirements to still count as a qualified health plan. It’d tie qualification for those new expanded plans to minimum HSA balances/contribution rates so we just wouldn’t be inspiring health insurance gambling and more bankruptcies. The unhealthy on average should see total medical spending go up while the healthy see costs go down. It also increases market forces in health care decisions as more people face a higher marginal cost when making decisions. In the process we create an incentive to save. We don’t even need to create a new system to assess and value risks in the various insurance pools. Actuaries already do that.
None of that sells to those that prefer UHC …or the current Republican brand managers The Republicans only need to chip off a couple percentage points in the middle though. Small, incremental, (dare I say conservative) changes to an in place system which increases choices some and passes more (if not all) of the costs of risky behaviors on to those that take the risks. It’s a centrist rebranding. A Clinton triangulation like brand from the Center Right instead of the Center Left with less authoritarianism. The hardest part IMO is not pulling votes from the Democratic leaning or declared center. It’s pulling our base back from a very authoritarian social conservatism. I don’t see them ever going back to the Democratic Party instead of the new brand. The issue is getting them to lose the death grip on the brand.
Most of the current brand owners have a term for me - RINO. I have some choice words for them that are less polite. 
IMHO the Republican candidates are all saddled with the same purity test that appeals mostly to red-meat conservatives. They seem required to vigorously oppose each and every thing Obama has ever done, even if it was a good idea and worked. Any sign of compromise is instantly stomped-out in the conservative media - compromisers are traitors (Christie cannot embrace the photo of he and Obama after Sandy hit NJ. Romney had to distance himself from what was considered a successful health care law in MA).
They are not permitted to show any sign of cooperation with the enemy or any affinity to ideas supported by them. ISTM the GOP is governed by the power of the media and has no party bosses any more that can control traffic (as evidenced by the dozen or so candidates running for President). It’s every person for themselves (“I got mine!”), which ironically reflects the party’s general stance on most issues.
Meanwhile, the Democrats have a broad coalition that is inclusive of conservative and liberal schools of thought on various topics, and are willing to work with each other in spite of disagreements.
Some are, most notably Brownback, but LePage and Walker got reelected in states that voted for Obama, and Christie has been a solid governor, he’s just got ethics issues right now.
You’ll notice that Democratic governors are commanding all of 1% of the primary vote in polls, which has to be a new low and a pretty grim statement on the Democrats’ bench.
Sure, I’d like for there to be more Kasichs, but there’s a reason Republicans control the majority of states and only increased that majority between 2010 and 2014.
Turnout won’t be 30%, but it could very well be under 55%.
It works in that the opposition can offer amendments and bills pass by regular order. Focused only on outcomes, are we? Ends justify means?
Every site I look at has different percentages, weirdly, but the pattern is the same so I’ll start here. These are the last four elections:
2000 50.3%
2004 55.7%
2008 57.1%
2012 54.9%
That’s a hard set to extrapolate from. The normal expectation is that a contested election with two non-incumbents would draw more interest. 2000 is oddly low, therefore. Perhaps the closeness provided incentive for marginal voters to vote in later elections.
I would be surprised if the percentage in 2016 is lower than 2012, and not very surprised if it were higher than 2008. These are among the lowest percentages; other sites put the percentage well over 60.
The low turnout in midterms is a huge factor in Republican gains. It seems likely that the higher the percentage, the better for Democrats in presidential years, especially with no incumbent Republican. Mostly, though, it’s a matter of who is motivated and who is discouraged. And that’s correlated with the next 16 months of electioneering.
Well, in 2000 people were pretty content. Low stakes elections make for low turnout. Since 2000, every election has been “the most important election in our history” if you believe the hype.
IMO, the best thing for Republicans to do in 2016 is be non-threatening. Democrats have a hard time getting whipped up to vote. Heck, if Republicans could be quiet and boring enough half of Democrats probably wouldn’t know an election was coming up.
Or the opposite – Democratic candidates are so popular that even governors like O’Malley can’t break into the hunt. The “weak Democratic bench” thing that you’ve pushed before is nonsense.
Possibly, but we’ll see. Under 55% can still be more than enough for the Democratic candidate to win.
My definition of “works” is “passes good bills and helps America and the American people”. Feel free to call that “focused only on outcomes” if you like. I can’t imagine why anyone would value process over that – in my mind, the process doesn’t mean crap if the outcomes are bad.
Good luck attaching those wings to those pigs!
You’re quite a spinner. Here’s my counterspin: the Democratic field is so popular that a guy who is a fringe player and not even a Democrat until like last week is now viable. If the field was popular, Democrats wouldn’t be so starved for alternatives.
Democrats can win with under 40% if they win enough independents. They pulled it off in 2006.
Democracy is a process. The way Reid ran the Senate subverted democracy. Not allowing amendments, sparing members tough votes so as to keep voters uninformed, and blocking bills with majority support(which the GOP House does as well and needs to quit).
2014 may not be analogous to a Presidential election, but it is analogous to another midterm year. Between 2010 and 2014, turnout went down, in large part because Republicans made it a point to be unthreatening. No reason the same strategy can’t bring turnout down from 2012 to 2016.
Democrats aren’t “starved for alternatives”. There’s usually a relatively far-left candidate who does very well – this time it’s Bernie.
Further, there haven’t been any debates, nor have their been any primary contests. All the candidates will have their chance, even though I think Hillary has a huge advantage right now.
Getting the ‘independents’ is a deceptively useless statistic, from what I’ve read, since most supposed independents actually lean to one party or the other. Obama lost the ‘independents’ in '12 because so many of them were Republicans who just didn’t want to call themselves Republicans any more.
Bullshit.
Keep on trying with those wings. I’m sure the pigs will love them!
(buzzer sounds) Bad spin! Who were the far left candidates doing well in previous Democratic primaries? I can give you Howard Dean, assuming you are predicting an Iowa flameout. Other than that, I’d be very interested in your take on what other far left candidates have done well.
Yet Democrats won independents in 2006 by a big margin in a low turnout race.
YOu endorse the Hastert rule? Reid had the same policy. Look, you may not like the outcomes, but McConnell has kept his promise to run the Senate according to normal procedure. Democrats get far more opportunity to get their bills voted on and add amendments than Republicans did when they were in the minority.
Dean in '04 is the main one. Tsongas in '92. Dukakis in '88. No one (or Gore) in '00. In '08, the ‘very lefty’ vote was split between Edwards, Obama, and Kucinich.
But what were the party ID breakdowns?
That doesn’t mean it’s “undemocratic”. There are lots of democratic things that I oppose (like the no-talk filibuster), and lots of undemocratic things I oppose. McConnell’s shenanigans seem to be within the rules of the Senate, and are therefore “democratic”, but I still think they’re crap.
Whether this is true or not, I don’t care about Senate rules arcana. The modern incarnation of the Republican party can’t be worked with on most issues – on most things, they’re ruled by nutbars. It doesn’t matter what they allow or disallow in these instances. And if the Democrats get the Senate back, I’m in favor of doing whatever they can within the Senate rules (or changing the rules, like requiring filibusters to be ‘talking filibusters’) to keep those nutbars from doing anything, while working with them on the small number of issues that the nutbars don’t try to sabotage.
It would seem to me that nutbars would want to maintain tight control over what comes to the floor. Nutbars also tend to be paranoid and avoid making their members take tough votes.
What defines nutbars is what they support and advocate for, not how they try and get it accomplished.
So ends do justify means.
Not necessarily – depends on the ends, and depends on the means.