there’s no question about it, it’s 4000x better by any objective measure. the problem is you still have a bunch of dipshits in congress even if dems get the trifecta who are absolutely 100% sure that “give poor people money” is immediately followed by “they spend it all on crack”
I wanna say it was Denver who tested a program of giving people in need either one single larger lump sum or smaller monthly sums to people who need it without any restrictions on what they could spend it on. In a year’s time, they found almost all were doing considerably better amd it actually saved the city money
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these sorts of “facts” and “evidence” will never penetrate the skull of a reactionary like joe manchin
It’s not even “dems”. I was talking to a young late 20s white woman who I used to work with. Probably liberal on every issue, but strongly against that. She was making about 50K/year in a very expensive city and the thought that some homeless person could get a significant fraction of her income without having to do anything for it, was so irksome to her that it had the potential to turn her into a single issue voter over everything else.
She didn’t even think they would use it for crack. Even if they used it for rent and groceries, it was “not fair”.
This was pre-Dobbs, tho. I suspect once that happened, abortion would have become her top issue.
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Kenya did this, and Planet Money did a story on it.
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Women also have higher turnout (68.4% vs 65% Presidential elections 1980-2020).
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Stockton got a lot of press for it recently, but it was to a pretty small sample of people. There has been a modest universal payment in Alaska since 1982. Iran had a large program. I think Denver did a small test program in the early 70s. As mentioned, Kenya has a program going now, but it is only for 20000 people.
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https://x.com/NidiaCavazosTV/status/1825241203324936653
Could you imagine Trump or Vance calling real voters?
I hope people like him and Lindsey Graham struggle to sleep at night after bending the knee.
If they were wearing knee pads the resulting joint pain shouldn’t be that bad.
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I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you.
Riding on the coat tails of Orange Man has likely helped them keep power. Openly defying him would have been career suicide. They sleep just fine.
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Yeah I’m definitely engaged in some wishful thinking. But goddamn, they gave some forceful denouncements of big bad drumpf that seemed sincere. I thought Lindsey at least had some principles. Now I just think they’re both pieces of cowardly shit.
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Steve Schmidt seems to have had the right take here:
“People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now,” Schmidt says. “The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.”
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That’s pretty good.
Is Cruz just a power hungry sycophant?
If it gives you some catharsis, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog landed some pretty direct hits here. (He interacts directly with Cruz starting at the 8:00 mark.)
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Trump called Cruz’s wife ugly in public and Cruz just stood there and ate it, there isn’t a bigger coward in modern politics.
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