By, in effect, endorsing the police to completely bypass due process and seize property and assets of citizens?
I ask again: are you kidding me?
Gee, I’m so sorry you have to live in a country that provides services to its citizens. :smack:
All Democrats say one thing, many do another. Buffett I believe is sincere. Maher, I believe is as sincere about that as he is about guns. He thinks the second amendment is BS, but owns guns for personal protection. I believe more Democrats are like Maher than like Buffett. The proof is in the tax code. You’ve had 80 years of plutocratic Democrats since the New Deal making tax policy and that’s why the tax code is big enough to crush a pretty solid table. You will not find the 400 rich Democrats sincere about wanting to pay a lot more and elect them. you might want to google how many Democrats are in trouble with the IRS because of questionable deductions. John Edwards claims he’s a corporation, for example.
Gerrymandering is only part of the problem. The Republicans elected what, 31 governors? THe Republicans are winning the statewide elections as well as the gerrymandered district elections.
When they get a minority of votes yet somehow a majority of seats in Congress, gerrymandering is a problem.
And the national Dems need to refocus on winning gubernatorial elections, too. But I can’t think of anything to put in the Contract that would help directly there (anything in it that fires up the Dem base, boosts turnout, and/or appeals to independents helps indirectly there).
Not necessarily. It could also mean that geographic distribution of Democrats is a problem. Might as well call the fact that there are more red states than blue states a gerrymandering issue too.
Not that I’m disagreeing that gerrymandering hasn’t favored the GOP. It has. Just not enough to account for their historic majorities. The Democrats have needed to win big popular vote majorities for some time to control Congress, because they have a lot of minority districts where they win 90% of the vote. Outside of minority districts they aren’t winning the popular vote. THat’s why they didn’t win Congress back in 2012.
That’s another issue. The Democrats need to get back to remembering what the structure of our government is for. It’s a federalist system, not a system where all authority that the federal government is interested in belongs to DC, leaving traffic lights to the states.
For example, states have estate taxes and wealth taxes(property taxes). Why not leave those revenue bases to the states rather than continuing to fight huge battles over relatively smallbore revenue measures(for the feds anyway)?
This shouldn’t be particularly controversial. I think what it shows is that American liberals may be smarter than American conservatives, but must seem like the same kind of hicks to the more sophisticated European and even Canadian liberals. Canada’s provincial system has been strong. Many European countries also do well without needing to centralize authority in the federal government. American liberals, like American conservatives, too often reach for the seemingly easy answer: just have the federal government do it!
That is what it is, not what it is for; what it is for is a question always demanding constant reconsideration.
No it’s not. We have a well defined system. Liberals have simply decided that anything they want to do should be done at the federal level. But I’m always open to being demonstrated wrong. What are some issues that liberals believe are state issues? And I’m not talking about things that liberals just want left alone, like marijuana. I’m talking about affirmative issues where liberals want action, not inaction.
Gerrymandering is at the very least a part of the problem, and it is a problem we can fix if we put our minds to it. Are you suggesting we shouldn’t try? (Because gosh, there are all these other problems!)
No. Start your own thread and stop trying to hijack this one.
And if you say that enough times, the Candyman will appear and make it true! 
The USA was run that way in living memory.
I was actually agreeing with you until you trotted out this “shorter is better” stuff.
Yes, we should elect working-class representatives, or rather working-class-oriented representatives, which is not really the same thing.
But we should also have a tax code complex enough to work well in a complex economy, and…you know what? Let’s have loopholes. In tandem with punishingly high upper marginal rates. And alternative minimums despite loopholes. Let’s have all of it.
Complexity is caused by punishingly high rates. The higher the rates, the more loopholes get generated. That’s because even Democrats don’t want to pay a lot more in taxes. The precise words they use are, “a little more”. I think they mean it, don’t you?
As well defined as any in the world. But what government is for is a question always demanding constant reconsideration. No constitutional system can change that, and any constitutional system should be open to at least cautious revision in light of the latest answers.
What “government” is for, I agree. What level of government an issue falls under, however, is usually pretty well defined. There are many areas, such as in minimum wage, where the states have mostly already taken care of the problem. There are only a few states without minimum wage laws.
But, again, that definition should always be open to revision. The kind of minimal national government Lincoln inherited would not be adequate to the needs of any modern industrialized state.
True, but that’s really neither here nor there in regards to what role the federal government should have vs. the states. Canada does just fine with its provincial system, and Sweden’s counties handle health care and things like wage policy. there’s no real advantage to having these things done federally other than ideological preference.
That is logically untrue.
A local or provincial government, like a US state, lacks the ability to do some things as effectively as the federal government. It is a lot harder to raise taxes at the state level than at the national level, for example.
Some things. Not sure about raising taxes, since states raise taxes just fine.