She’s not even trying. I mean, we shit on Steyer, but even buying your way on to the stage takes a little bit of effort. It’s good, it means I don’t have to listen to her. It’s gonna be cold in that arena.
All she had to do was buy access to the voter rolls for Iowa. I mean, you need that to canvass. grrr
By the way, did I mention I’m going to this? Leaving in the AM for Des Moines. Will be rallying/marching for Pete, then watching the speeches, then canvassing on Saturday.
I can do a mini-blog thread if anyone’s interested. I might do it anyway to force myself to journal/take notes.
It’s a massive net giveaway to rural people. A similar version is very popular in Alaska. I think some Dems are harder to persuade than most Republicans.
They hate it because they want to help poor people and only poor people. Just look at the responses ITT.
I disagree with them, because if I had my way we’d figure out how to make it so that we had no more poor people at all. I’m not trying to help make being poor more bearable, I want to make being poor something people read about in history books. We have the resources to do it tomorrow in the US.
Giving them a thousand dollars a day reminds them that they are Americans. They are going to be paying vastly more than that in to get that thousand. What matters is the net transfer.
Why do you want to invest huge sums of money to hire people to stop from sending them a thousand dollars? Why not stop millionaires kids from going to public school as well? They can afford private after all.
We should have a robust package of benefits that are the birthright of every citizen of this country. Every citizen no matter how rich or how poor. Those benefits should be paid for by a combination of income taxes, wealth taxes (that we can actually collect in real life), and probably a VAT tax because it’s super efficient to collect and nearly impossible to evade. Ideally the VAT tax which in a vacuum is somewhat regressive (although not as regressive as it looks at first glance because firms provably don’t pass on anywhere close to the VAT % to consumers) is used to fund UBI. We should also probably be taxing the shit out of carbon and distributing the revenue as UBI as well.
If those benefits are big enough there simply won’t be any super poor people left, and anyone who still is poor will very obviously be at fault for it. If you get 12k a year in cash, free healthcare, free education, free mental health care, and tons of other stuff and still can’t figure it out… well it’s you isn’t it?
And all of that would be immensely popular among everyone who isn’t suuuuuper rich because for everyone who isn’t suuuuuper rich they get back more than they put in. Old people shouldn’t be the only people who feel like society is there to help them.
Dude that’s just stupid. Again by your logic we should kick rich kids out of public school.
Means testing benefits is terrible. Full stop. Let go of it. The stigma alone is reason enough to just give the benefits to everyone.
It’s much easier to sell benefits for everyone politically than helping some people and not others. You can get the poor a much more robust package this way. Do you care more about not giving rich people benefits they don’t need than you do about giving poor people benefits they desperately need?
And don’t worry in the big picture those rich people are going to lose an awful lot more than 1k a month when you net it out. Jeff Bezos can have 12k a year from the government because we’re going to take billions a year out of his pocket to pay for it.
Also means testing means hiring people to means test. Those people are expensive. We’re trying to reduce the amount of public money spent on administration as much as possible.