| DarthMetalliCube said: Man, I really want to like Cortez (cute as hell for one heh) and seems to have some of those Bernie oldschool Democrat, anti-neolib ideals, but a few of her proposals are just asinine: - Abolish ICE - you need SOME sort of immigration enforcement at least or you really cease to have a nation, and you basically open the doors for insatability and an extremely shaky job market and economy to follow - Mandated jobs for ALL by the government - Sounds nice in theory but I just don't see how it's feasable with the massive population of the US. - Eliminate the electoral college - In such a massive country like the US in terms of both land mass and population, this would be a restrictive, backwards, and unjust system. You need fair representation of all 50 states, otherwise you essentially have the highly populated NY and LA dictating every election in the US from here on out, with the power of those in middle America entirely diminished to irrelevancy. If she ditched those positions and just focused more on the working class, universal health care, her green policies, anti-war stances, etc, I think she'd have a real shot (at least in 2024 when she's actually able to run), she'd certainly have my support. |
Understand that with ICE, the plan isn't simply to abolish it, it's to basically reboot it with a new organization that would do the same thing, but finding a way to keep white supremacists out and preventing other systemic racism from creeping in. The details are definitely sparse though. She has time to come up with them though. She has 6 years before she can even run.
Same with the jobs mandate. It's a good idea, in some ways, as a way to totally eliminate unemployment, but it needs more detail on how it deals with certain issues. The issues are
1)what do you do in a major economic depression when there isn't enough work for the countless newly unemployeed people,
2) what do you do to prevent everyone working in the private sector from wanting to switch to the public sector because they know they'll get a job, and know it'll have great benefits, since this could cause turmoil in the private sector and mean you'll have to make jobs for a lot more people, and
3) if people don't flood in from the private sector, you're drawing from the most unemployable people in the whole job market, in theory, so what kind of work can they reliably do?
The solutions have time to work themselves out, but generally go along the lines of
1) when there's a depression, the economy needs government spending to get money into the hands of regular people to get it going again anyways as well as infrastructure investment so government infrastructure projects are a proven way to solve all these issues, as seen with FDR's public works projects in the Great Depression.
2) you actually want to draw some talent from the private sector to avoid the lack of talent mentioned in issue 3, you just don't want to overdo it, and furthermore the competition from the public sector forces the private sector to offer better pay and benefits to compete, which is good for people, but also the economy as it gets more money into the hands of the consumers that drive the economy. To not overdo it, find ways to fund the best benefits, like healthcare, on a national scale, like Medicare-For-All, and from there just raise the minimum wage to whatever the "guaranteed government job" wage is, probably $15 an hour if this is coming from Ocasio-Cortez, and if we were due for $15 an hour in 2015 when they started talking about it, we'll definitely be due for $15 an hour in 2025 when Cortez would start her first term. Then the disruption to the private sector will be minimal and probably even beneficial.
3) in regards to drawing from the least employable people, most of these people are only so unemployable because they lack the proper training in a skill relevant to today's job market. For example if you lost your coal mining job, where do you go? The solution here is for the job guarantee to come with job training. This has the added benefit of making them more employable when they go back to the private sector, and some kind of government job training is pretty needed regardless because so many jobs are going obsolete so fast right now due to automation. This takes care of the bulk of these difficult to employ people, but obviously there's a very small percentage that are just shitty workers, and there needs to be a way to fire these people and cut them off from the guarantee, as well as a way to earn the guarantee back. Maybe a three strikes law to lose it (fired from three jobs and you're out), then a referral to resources to help you get your life back on track from whatever was making you such a shitty worker (drug addiction maybe? Here's a rehab referral), then some way to measure that you've improved (maybe hold down a temp job for 6 months or something).
Then of course the final issues are what would the jobs be and how to pay. The easy solution is again infrastructure, which in the US is estimated to be a $10 trillion dollar backlog of needed work, so plenty of work for the foreseeable future that no simple "infrastructure bill" could ever take care of. The jobs would be quite varied, as some of this infrastructure would include the power grid, internet infrastructure, and if Ocasio-Cortez gets her way, a "Green New Deal" that would overhaul all U.S. Infrastructure from the ground up to be more eco-friendly, so you'd need all sorts of technicians and engineers and coders and construction workers and more. For additional variety you could allow states to commission other kinds of work depending on the state's needs, like social workers for public programs or something like that. Should be a way to get something for everyone.
As for paying, it will require a new tax. It's just too much to simply add to the deficit outside of an economic emergency like a depression. It would probably be some kind of infrastructure tax since most of the jobs would be infrastructure related. Such taxes have been sold to the public successfully before, like California's and Pennsylvania's gas taxes that pay for road repairs (doesn't work for PA because the money gets misused on traffic cops, but still, California just massively voted in favor of keeping it in a referendum, so they can be popular), so I think it's doable politically, but that's probably the biggest issue. Making the tax clearly and directly connected to infrastructure makes it easier to swallow. Then states could pay for the jobs based on states needs I mentioned.
But I don't know what Cortez wants to do, just what I've read that makes sense to me. If you're worried that it's asinine, don't, because these are achievable goals, they just need the details hammered out. She has six years minimum to do so, and tons of potential allies to help her do it. I'd certainly be crazy excited to have her as our first woman President.
