Did you just invent a balanced budget amendment as part of this bargain?
Good point. Give them that too. They’ll love it. Do that first, don’t mention the 5% thing. Then do the 5%.
I am completely at a loss. But as far as I can tell the Cuse plan is to pretend we are Grover Norquist.
The cuse plan is to give the other side what they want as long as they let us do what we want. It’s a soft breakup of the United States.
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Yeah, it actually seems like a decent plan for a WestExit
We’re playing a rigged game. The system systematically favors Republicans. They negotiate like sociopaths, taking human hostages every time. We subsidize their states and they message as if it’s the other way around.
We want nice things that help people, they want death for the poor.
It’s time to flip the table over. Imagine the kind of society the West Coast and the Northeast could have if they pooled together to institute Clinton era tax brackets at the state level while paying 5% federal.
Imagine the kind of societies Alabama and Mississippi would have with low taxes and no federally subsidized anything.
It’s a soft WestExit and NortheastExit and we’ll pool resources with whatever other states want to. Illinois, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada.
But I’m telling you, within a decade Dems will be sweeping elections in the Deep South. They’ll run themselves so into the ground and it’ll be so undeniably their fault that it’ll break us out of this God awful meta. Then we can have a real talk. You want the old way back? Ok, we can do that… But we’ve gotta have a talk about proportional representation in the Senate, abolishing the electoral college, campaign finance reform, etc, etc.
It’s to take our ball and to home. Instead of paying massive amounts of federal taxes that the GOP keeps us from using wisely, and a small amount of state taxes that aren’t enough to institute the programs we want, we flip that around.
We might need some sort of a law protecting us from SCOTUS when it comes to merging programs between states. Other than that, it would work. The argument against it is that we’re leaving blue cities and people of color in the South for dead. That’s a valid argument. But I’m not sure that letting the entire ship go down is the right move, and I’m open to other ideas. It’s possible you could afford to subsidize people’s moves who wanted to come to a blue state.
We’re currently subsidizing these fuckers who turn around and say “no blue state bailout” while taking citizens hostage. They face minimal electoral ramifications because they only need 41 seats in a Senate that is massively favorable to them in structure.
The easiest way to win is not to play that game anymore.
It would at least restore traceable real world results to elections. The last 30-40 years it’s been very hard for a layperson to tell who is at fault for everything being fucked up while the hogs stuffed their faces at the government/capitalism trough.
Society has to make choices and execute them. The people who advocate for those choices then are either congradulated when it works or boo’ed when it doesn’t. For the last 30-40 years nothing meaningful that actually moved the needle either way got done and things have just slowly declined as we’ve glided downward off the tremendous altitude we started with.
If nothing else I really hope Coronavirus returns our politics to something like reality. If that requires the GOP to actually shoot the hostages this time and get the blood all over themselves in public… well hopefully the voters learn something from that.
The only reason any of this is happening is that 30% of the population is still aggressively denying reality. I suspect reality is going to keep violently shaking us until our government starts to actually react to it.
We are about to attempt something close to nationally reopening schools in the middle of a ridiculously fatal pandemic. We’ve already traumatized the whole country. It’s about to square itself again.
No choice is a choice. We’ve been making that choice for 35-40 years and now our 3500 bb stack has been blinded down to 15. If the GOP wants to opt for no choice again the blood will be on their hands. I do not take responsibility for any of this, and the Democrats behaving as though fixing the worst outcomes of GOP policy is their responsibility to the point that they have to make concessions on other things to get it done is insane. They’ve made a series of choices that have made this already total disaster even bigger. The country made a choice in the last election and that choice had consequences, serious ones.
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This is sorely needed.
Yeah it’s super obviously fuck these people. Just stop negotiating and tell them you’ll be happy to snap pass the bill you sent over in May. If not you’ll see them on election day. Help the people or don’t stop trying to use the opportunity to leach more wealth out of the bottom 75% and transfer it to the ownership class.
They’ll keep taking hostages until it stops working. It’s 6 months of hell vs 54 months of hell. There’s never going to be a moment where having some actual political courage would have more impact. Either we help people way more than we otherwise would have, or we auto win the election in November. Because I’m not a sociopath I’m willing to do the first one even though it could potentially give us 4 more years of Trump.
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If we’re going to give them something they want, then give Trump something symbolic but effectively useless like part of his wall?
If you want to run the country into the ground so that everything is completely broken and we have no choice but to change the system, then maybe we should re-elect Trump. Biden isn’t going to start a revolution. He’s band-aid that will allow a sick country to keep limping along before the next crisis.
I’m not trying to run it into the ground. I’m trying to let the blue states have the society they want and the red states can have the society they want. That the red states want to run their society into the ground becomes a them issue in this scenario instead of an all of us issue.
The rich will just move to states that don’t jack up their income tax rates and we’ll have a nationwide version of this
That’s a concern but I think you can legislate it with corporate taxes. Like assuming they’re actually doing work in the state, you can find mechanisms to tax them.
3 months behind currently.