sundin13 said:
False. I'm not going to talk about all of them, but to start with the first, affordable healthcare, Democrats passed the affordable care act which expanded coverage and lowered prices for many Americans. Additionally, it included an expansion of Medicaid that states could opt into. Democrat run states overwhelming opted into this expanded eligibility, allowing about 25 million Americans to enroll in Medicaid who would have previously been ineligible. Additionally, the ACA made the process of enrolling much easier. The Biden Administration also implemented the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program, with the reduced prices of the first 10 of these medications (which are used by about 10million people) kicking in next year. You continue to be blinded to the positive effects of legislation due to your obsession with the GINI Index. The people who are still alive because they were granted access to healthcare shouldn't be ignored because your favorite number doesn't account for the dead. Based on the way the GINI Index is calculated (looking at distribution of wealth by different chunks of the population), keeping the poor alive could actually lead to a greater degree of perceived inequality, because a dead person isn't counted as a portion of the population. Very Mitchell and Webb to just boil everything down to a number: "Have you tried 'Kill all the poor'?" |
Again: there are a lot of policies, but how does it impact who. And again both Republicans and Democrats offer policies that are intended to help the poor. But my obsession with Gini is an oobsession with actual effective policies. If these policies would've an wider effect, we would see an effect on the Gini. But it doesn't happen, because these policies are widely ineffective or nulled with other policies pulling in the other direction. I don't deny that on paper the policies of the democrats look better. But in the end they are widely ineffective. That has a wide array of reasons, but the main one is, that the democrats are fearful of changing the system substantially. Bandaids are not helping if the bleed is too big.
The Yes minister scene is more supporting my view: killing all the poor wouldn't actually help, as they do the work (aka create all the wealth) in the first place. Which is mentioned in the sketch. So I don't know why you post it, you probably didn't really understand it.
The thing is: if the US wants real change of their system, they have to stop thinking in the way of either republicans or democrats. They have to break out of it, try actual new policies.
And look, europe and canada aren't on the same path, although often enough our politicians try to emulate the stupidiest stuff in the US. Britain though had their own Reagan called Thatcher, you see the effect around the same time. For Canada and France only projected data (single points) reaches back to that time, but shows they started with wealth distribution in the seventies around the place the US were, but they actually dropped the Gini - effective policies. For Germany I don't see such projected data, so I don't know. But as you can see the leading european countries and canada are now around the same place in Gini index - a much better (more equally distributed) place than the US. The US needs to learn that an alternative to the dem-rep death pendulum exists.
BTW, if you look closely, germany had their own version of the Thatcher/Reagan influence in form of Gerhard Schröder's "Agenda 2010". Which you can see the effect of from 1998 (when Schröder took office) to about 2005. Schröder was member of the center-left (yes left) party SPD, yet he was too strongly influenced by the neoliberal bullshit.
I think the US has the major problem of the two party system. The best justification for Dems many come up with is "but the Reps are worse". In most european countries this doesn't fly. After the Schröder fuckup the SPD lost a lot of support - without that flowing directly to the center-right (CDU), it strengthened other left parties like The Left and The Greens (directly after the Schröder era, now has some time gone). The US needs to understand that real solution lie outside of their two-party system.
