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To Pay for Trump Tax Cuts, House GOP Floats Plan to Slash Benefits for the Poor and Working Class
(www.propublica.org)
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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"Kamala Harris is not the perfect progressive candidate in every way. How can I possibly vote for her? I'll sit this one out. That'll show 'em!"
People need to accept that the electoral system in the US is just a trolley problem at the end of the day unfortunately.
Basically, and people let 'the enemy of perfect get in the way of good enough'. Progress is incremental unfortunately. That's just how it is. We can accept that, or we get this crap.
not really close to ‘good enough’ but least bad
This is exactly the fucking problem, if it's not perfect enough then people allow it to get worse instead.
The only way a political party changes is when they stop winning.
If Democrats think they will win by being Republicans who hate the gays a little bit less, then that is what they'll do. They were just shown that that isn't a winning strategy, so we'll see if the party changes tack or doubles down.
"You monster, it is your fault you gave us Trump"
I make my voting preferences known in every primary, state, and federal election. I actively volunteer for candidates I like. The party knows what will earn my vote, if they wanted it. If they make the strategic bet that getting my vote will cost them more from somewhere else, then that is on them.
"That is so entitled, how could you"
Have you ever considered that the reason both parties seem so out of touch with mainstream thought is because they have 10s of millions of people who will vote regardless of policy, thereby preventing the parties from understanding what is actually effective in getting them votes?
Elections are an information gathering mechanism.
You seem to think there will be real elections again rather than the type they have in Russia now that Republicans control all three branches of government.
I'm not sure why. Do you think they will ever willingly give up power?
It is impossible to argue against conspiratorial thinking.
Let's say Kamala had narrowly won the election, would 2028 be the right time to hold the Democrats accountable for real, useful, policy changes? Or would there be another Republican Boogeyman (maybe Ted Cruz again? Or Desantis?) that would absolutely need to be defeated before it would be proper - in your opinion - to ask these public servants to actually serve me?
According to many commenters here, and I assume many of the downvoters whenever a comment questions the utility of unconditional loyalty to the blue party, the US has been hovering just above an irreversible descent into a fascist dictatorship.
So let me ask you, which of the leaders you voted for reversed that decline? Because the 'vote blue no matter who' dogma has given over a decade of historically unpopular candidates who consistently lose to - again according to you - naked fascists.
As I keep telling people, I take W.C. Fields' advice when it comes to voting: "I never vote for, only against."
And people like you don't get that. I didn't vote for anyone. I voted against Trump because there were only two viable choices.
And this has been true for me for every election in my adult life. Because I do not care about which team you or anyone else is on, all I care about is keeping the worst of the worst out of office.
And that failed, which is why I got the fuck out of America before my daughter was forced into a conversion therapy camp.
I expect, if you're like others who take your attitude, your next response will be about how I should put the needs of Palestinians over my own child and there won't be a genocide of queer people despite them being totally open about their intentions.
How has voting against worked for you? Given that you fled the country, it doesn't sound like it got the outcome you wanted.
With the data point, I'll keep voting for things I want - will let you know if that strategy works better.
Sounds like your plan to punish the dems is about to punch you in the face.
Y'all are really just allergic to actual discourse.
I get it, you don't like Trump being president. Neither do I. Personally blaming me for the party gaslighting about Biden's fitness, then running Kamala on trans erasure, 'most lethal' military, a militarized border, tax cuts, etc. etc. Is counterproductive. Large parts of her platform, and this is not an exaggeration, were literally what Trump ran on in 2016.
Did you vote for Trump's policies in 2016? Why are you insisting everyone do just that in 2024?
That's not even sort of true.
You're right, it's all lies. The Dems had the best platform ever and that's why they won.
Your vote was meaningless? Even in local elections? You sat out the whole thing because of the top of the ticket?
Unfortunately yeah my vote was pointless and local elections too. I ended up getting a runoff for my city council District, both candidates use pictures of them with Ted Cruz in their advertising. That'll sober you right the fuck up.
So the only down ballot election was the one for one city council seat?
You must have had a tiny, tiny ballot.
Buddy what kind of down ballot races did you think there where in my area? In an area in which two Maga Republicans who split their vote still won enough of the votes that they were the only two options in the runoff. I want you to think critically about what kind of fucking candidates are running in my area and what kind of vote totals they must have been getting.
I don't know... state legislature? Mayor? County council? County clerk? City clerk? At-large council members? Sheriff? Judges?
I'm sure I can come up with others. Or were they all vote-splitting runoff elections?
Wow you really failed at my request to think critically didn't you?
dudes just naive and likely not in a deep red state
I the fuck just emigrated to the UK because my gay daughter isn't safe in the U.S. and I am 47.
Why does any of that matter?
Also, I'm not mad.
At this point the trolley problem is "would you like to vote for killing 1000 per year for the next four years or would you like to vote for killing 4000 people this year with the hope that maybe it'll cause the whole trolley system to self destruct...? (The numbers are purely illustrative).
Edit: apparently it's not obvious that I think these are both horrible options, and I voted for the limping painfully along for an extended period.
Making things worse based on the idiotic hope that it might somehow magically spark things to get better is the absolute dumbest fucking idea one can have.
If by "trolley system to self-destruct" you mean violent revolution and a new system of government imperfect in a completely different way, yes. Good luck with the wait.
That's exactly what I mean, and I agree that it sounds awful. It's like people go into these conversations deciding which side the other person is on based on which they can argue the most with.
At least you're honest about this half-baked excuse for a plan
That isn't how trolleys work.
Not quite.
For starters it didn't use to be a choice of "who would you rather see killed" - or in other words, nothing was forever lost if one side won instead of the other - and beyond that it has always been a cyclical choice, so it made sense for voters who felt insufficiently catered to, to punish a side on one cycle to try and get it to offer a better deal on the next cycle.
Whether that remains the case - i.e. will Trump make himself dictator for life - is the big question.
That's true but I didn't mean it as a choice of who you'd rather see killed, just that the system is set up in such a way that as a rational voter you are forced into a situation where you must act to prevent the worst outcome rather than voting for your interests and what you believe in.
I think I used a wrong methaphor (sorry!) because the whole death thing carries a lot more implications than what I meant to convey.
In a Trolley Problem the A/B choice is fixed, is a once-only choice and its effects cannot be undone. My point is that, unlike a Trolley Problem, even in the US deeply flawed voting system the choice is (so far) not an irrevocable one time only choice - there is a new choice every 4 years, most effects from the previous choice can be undone (the chosen one of the next cycle always has the option to undo most of what the chosen one of the previous cycle did) and the actual choices available at voting time are not fixed and can be influenced before the actual vote (Parties can be convinced to field different candidates).
My theory is that in part Presidential Elections in the US system are a Cyclical Ultimatum Game, in that for each Party a candidate is fielded whose political offerings are a certain approportioning of the "cake" amongst different societal interests and the voters who care about such societal interests can chose to Accept or Reject, and given the cyclical nature of the choice, one can use Reject to Punish a party for fielding a candidate who is offering a specific approportioning of the "cake", the difference between a mere Reject and Punish being that the latter is done with the intention of affecting the choice of "cake" approportioning of the other side of the game (i.e. the Party whose candidate is being rejected) that they offer on the next cycle.
Or in common language, in the US system it's a logical strategy to, on one election, reject the candidate of one's "natural" Party who is offering an unacceptable approportioning of the "cake", to incentivise that Party to offer a better candidate in the next electoral cycle - the decision tree in the system is a lot deeper than merelly the single unrevocable choice of a Trolley Problem.
Had most Democrat voters actually been following this logic for the last couple of decades, rather than treating each vote as an independent event from all other votes, the situation in the US would be totally different, IMHO, not least because somebody like Trump would be facing Democrat candidates who actually would be trying much harder to appeal to the common people (as they otherwise would be rejected and hence never win).
Further, the mob here claiming that "natural" Democrat voters who refrained from voting Democrat in this election are losing everytime Trump does one of his extreme measures are totally missing the picture - those people did not reject Democrat to get Trump, they Rejected Democrat to get a better Democrat next time around and a Trump presidency was the risk they were taking for it. That choice will only be a "loss" if the Democrats do not field a better candidate next time around (or if Trump somehow manages to make it so that there is no "next time around").
Thanks for taking the time to come back and clarify your position in detail like that, I think I see where you're coming from here and I have to disagree with you. I think the trolley problem is still the best analogy and I'd go so far as to say some of the assumptions underpinning your view here are very dangerous.
Firstly, I would say voting is absolutely an irrevocable one time only choice from the simple fact that the past is immutable. Trump will always have been the president from 2016 - 2020 and now he's going to be the president for another term. No amount of voting in the future can ever change that. Roe v Wade is still overturned for example and the supreme court is still stacked as far as I understand.
Just ask Josseli Barnica's loved ones how easily the damage of some of Trump's decisions can be undone.
If someone thinks that the price is worth it for sending a message to the Democrats then that's up to them. Let's not be under any illusions though that we can simply change anything in the present day to undo history. That's why the trolley problem is the more apt analogy in my view because you must choose between two different bad outcomes irrevocably.
I voted for her because she was the lesser evil, but describing her as just “not the perfect progressive candidate in every way” is a gross misrepresentation. She was probably the most right leaning Democratic candidate to run in a general election and was openly adopting many of the Republican stances. There were basically two Republicans running.
Really? She was to the right of the Clintons? Obama? John Kerry, even? I think you have a selective memory.
Fucking absurd. There is a reason you don't name one specific
Trump won because the people that voted for him actually like him, they aren't choosing the lesser of two evils or whatever nonsense. The democrats message of "at least we aren't as bad" was awfully inspiring.
Hey democrats, if you win what will you do with that power? Change nothing? Cool!
Blame the democrats for getting tight lipped about literally anything anyone cared about.
You didn't listen - they talked about corporations buying houses, the middle class disappearing, being unable to live on minimum wage, expanding medical for people that need it.
The idea that a political party will change just because they lost because they weren't exactly where you wanted is also ignorant. That's never a guarantee. Otherwise we would currently be living in utopia. Maybe it will cycle back, by the time we're all dead
They honestly spent too much time talking about tax credits to start a business. Starting a business? Lady, I'm starting to look seriously at fleeing the country in hopes of finding one that hasn't lost its collective mind.
They talked about problems but rarely gave solutions. The ones the did would only help very specific sub groups of people, and there were still concerns they were only doing what their corporate donors permitted them to. The democrats need to stop acting like they think they are better than everyone else, it doesnt help.