BraveSirZaphod
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204·4 months agoIf you think Biden is only “slightly less extreme”, you really need to take another look at the Republican party, given its leader is casually suggesting sending out secret police to round up undocumented immigrants into camps.
Even restricting the view to economic policy, the gap between the average Republican and Democrat in office has been growing much much larger compared to the old 90s consensus. Both parties have grown critical of free trade, with Republicans going much further and wanting to throw huge tariffs on any country that feels icky (and somehow thinking that jacking up prices on all imported goods will improve inflation*). Republicans have also grown extremely fond of attacking any corporation they perceive as being too woke or socially aware, even going so far as to invoke the powers of supposedly-small government to ban certain diversity practices.
Both parties have become relatively protectionist, but Republicans tend to be against any form of actual domestic investment. On housing, pretty much all supply-side solutions (which you’d think would come from the supposedly market-loving Republicans!) are instead coming from the Democrats, with the Republicans instead reducing essentially everything to culture wars.
Again, look at the Republican party as it actually is today, because they largely do not have any substantial policy beyond stoking white conservative rage. I’m not saying mainstream Democrats are revolutionary champions of the working poor, but there simply is no competition compared to the Republicans of today.
There are very real constitutional issues with explicit wealth taxes. It took a constitutional amendment to authorize the federal government to collect an income tax, and it’s quite possible that it would take another to authorize a wealth tax. Particularly with this Supreme Court, Congress probably doesn’t have the legal ability to impose a wealth tax even if it wanted to, to say nothing of the general complexity and costs of collecting it. There are plenty of economists who support the general idea of taxing the wealthy more but who prefer other taxation schemes.
In most cases, longer. Jews had been in Iraq more than a thousand years before Islam was even developed.
There’s this notion that modern Israelis are essentially just Europeans who invaded after WWII, which is simply not true.
While the Zionist movement largely did originate in Europe in the late 1800s, the majority of Israeli citizens today are not of European ancestry / Ashkenazi. The majority are what’s called Mizrahi, coming from Middle Eastern Jewish communities that were forcibly expelled from Arab countries during the 50s and 60s. For instance, Ben Gvir, the current Minister of Defense (and to be clear, a complete little shit), is from an Iraqi family. In 1948, there were roughly 150,000 Jews in Iraq, making up nearly 40% of the population of Baghdad. Today, there are estimated to be less than five. Likewise, in Yemen, there were roughly 50,000 Jews, maintaining a presence that goes back well over 2500 years. Today, there may be one single Jew left in the country. The same situation happened all throughout the Arab world. The departing Jews generally had to flee their homes without any significant belongings, since their property was often confiscated. In Syria, for instance, a 1964 decree prevented Jews from traveling more than 3 miles from their homes, banned them from owning land, banned them from working in the government or in banks, banned them from leaving anything as inheritance - which would instead be seized by the state.
In this particular context, “I believe Joe Biden should be the elected to another term” in apparently objectionable.
Similarly, “I believe that the murder of 1000 Israeli citizens on October 7th was bad, and also that the Netanyahu government is atrocious and its military response has been grossly disproportionate and involved multiple war crimes” is enough to get you ejected from plenty of leftist spaces that insist that the October 7th attacks must be celebrated as an act of radical resistance.
It is also a Club founded to keep the LGBTQ community free of anointed gatekeepers and machine politics
This is comically hypocritical given that you’ll be gatekept out of any group like this the moment you express any opinion they disagree with, speaking as a gay guy myself.
Trump would gladly support turning Gaza into a parking lot, and quite likely would have US troops engaged in a war with Iran right now. So, the actual choice is Biden, who’s attempting but largely failing to restrain Israeli military actions, and Trump, who would actively support them and undoubtedly support subsequent Jewish settlement of Gaza once the Palestinian “problem” has been solved.
It’s an unfortunate choice, sure, but it’s not a hard one.
Conservatives are by no means the only problem here.
Ultimately, people become homeless because they cannot afford a home. Shockingly, housing prices thus have an extremely strong effect on homelessness rates. The great state of West Virginia, despite all its many many flaws and challenges between extreme poverty, addiction, lack of jobs, and everything else, does not have a significant homelessness problem. Why? Because housing in West Virginia is dirt cheap such that even people who are struggling can still maintain housing.
This is a policy choice, not some natural and inevitable state of affairs. While subsidies and other programs can move the needle a little bit, by far the greatest factor affecting housing costs is raw supply v. demand, and the fact of the matter is that voters all over the United States, even in the most progressive zip codes in the country, have decided that they would rather restrict the supply of new housing in order to increase the value of their own property investments instead of allowing new housing to be built, even if the consequence is huge swaths of people can no longer afford housing at all. To make themselves feel a little bit better, progressives might throw some money at broken homeless shelter systems and pretend that that band-aid actually fixes the problem.
West Virginia certainly didn’t avoid a homelessness problem by aggressively subsidizing affordable housing, making huge investments in public housing projects, implementing huge restrictions on landlords, or building a massive shelter and support system. They simply maintained an adequate supply of housing relative to the amount of people that want to live there. Until blue cities and states wake up to this fundamental fact, nothing is going to meaningfully change. You cannot simultaneously have your housing be an ever-increasing lucrative investment asset and have housing be affordable, no matter how many progressive sign posts you put in the lawn. It’s incredible how quickly people like California progressives who claim to care so much about the poor and the downtrodden show their true colors the moment you suggest building an apartment building in their single-family house suburbia that might actually be affordable by those same people.
You’re correct, but the fundamental blame for that does lie with the voters, at the end of the day. No amount of structural protections can protect democracy from voters that do not care about it. At that point, they’re just ink on a page.
To actually give an answer, it’s because the Constitution very deliberately does not allow criminal convictions to disqualify someone. This was done because it was, and in plenty of places still is, common practice for a government to simply make up charges and arrest any opposition, thus disqualifying them from running.
You always have to look at this kind of stuff from the other side. Would you really want a Trump to be able to disqualify an opposing candidate for running a red light once twenty years ago?
The amount of visceral anger in this thread seems to indicate that people seem to actually care quite a lot about what she says.
If people actually didn’t care, they wouldn’t have clicked on this.
Nothing, though the budget reconciliation process allows for one filibuster-proof bill a year if it primarily deals with the budget.
That said, the filibuster is just an internal Senate rule. A majority could simply eliminate it at any time, but that of course may come back to bite them when the balance of power shifts.
4·7 months agoThis is just exposing that you don’t actually read the New York Times.
Here’s an article on the plight of Gazans in Rafah in the face of a potential Israeli invasion.
Here’s an overview on the gang situation in Haiti as the government is functionally collapsing.
And here’s an article discussing the increasingly common practice of restaurants charging significant cancellation fees.
Meanwhile, the NY Post has such great stories as:
- Kate Middleton officially hits rock bottom
- Rudy Giuliani’s ex engaged to Palm Beach energy exec after six months of dating in ‘whirlwind romance’ (Exclusive!)
- Unions want full control of schools and our kids — we can’t let Albany allow it
- Activists lobbying to ‘morally’ allow trans kids to change their bodies are only doing more harm
Biden could be spontaneously replaced with Mao Zedong and that still wouldn’t suddenly make a Congress with a Republican House start passing laws.
You cannot set the rent to “whatever you like”. There’s a reason why my NYC apartment is $2500 a month and not $250,000 a month. If a corporation does take an owned unit into the rental market, it’ll be competing with all other rentals. That will decrease supply for the ownership market, yes, but it also increases supply in the rental market, which tends to consist of people who are financially struggling more than people looking to buy a house.
Regardless, the actual solution is to just build some more god damned housing so that it stops being an attractive investment in the first place. Housing cannot be both a good investment and affordable.
This is only available to first-time buyers, not universally, so it wouldn’t be quite that simple. If you’re confident your house will sell quickly, yeah, you’ll just increase the price by 5k, but if you’ve been having trouble finding a buyer, the credit might tip your current price into being affordable to a first-time buyer that would otherwise pass it up, so you may hold the price steady.
That said, subsidizing demand like this while ignoring the core supply crunch issue is generally not very helpful.
It won’t end until we have significant growth in the supply of housing units in the places people want to live relative to the number of people we have. Anything else is just window dressing.
We’ve been chronically underbuilding for decades, while population continued to grow. What would you expect to happen?
…did you read the article?
It’s long, but I’d hardly characterize it as anti-Biden. If anything, I’d say the ultimate tone is slightly positive and humanizing.
The First Amendment is pretty strong about how it’s legal to be a dick.
Just as I can say that evangelicals are delusional children who never learned how to get over their daddy issues to the extent that they literally invent a daddy in the sky who just so happens to approve of every bias and bigotry they hold to.