Clinton’s top 10 campaign promises:
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Free college education for everyone with household income below $125k.
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Path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants other than criminals.
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Expand the ACA to achieve universal health care / insurance.
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Overturning the Citizens United decision, which I suppose has to be read as substantially limiting corporate and private money in politics.
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Federal regulation / oversight of pay for women to ensure pay equity.
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Raising taxes on incomes over $5m and raising capital gains tax rates.
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Opposition to trade deals unless they protect American jobs and wages.
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Raising the minimum wage, either to $12 or to $15.
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Stronger gun control laws.
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Spending ~70B per year over 5 years on infrastructure, using money raised from increased taxes.
Call me crazy, but this is not very far from what most of Dem candidates are selling. Where is the Republican constituency for this agenda? Because I don’t see it,
ShivaX
3538
He said the exact opposite of that.
Timex
3539
I think that Clinton’s loss boils down to two things:
- the manifestation of decades of personal demonization by the right wing
- the assumption among many other the left that she was gonna win anyway
Lots of folks stayed home because they didn’t really like her personality, but assumed she was going to win against Trump because Trump was such a dumpster fire.
I don’t think the policies she was taking about mattered, at all.
This is quite a good piece about where Joe Biden was at a critical juncture in racial politics:
One critical thing to understand here is that during the all-too-brief period in which federal courts were actually imposing active desegregation measures, they worked . Real, substantial progress was made, progress that has been eliminated because the Biden/Eastland side won the war to reduce Brown v. Board to a nullity…
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/07/there-was-a-war-on-brown-v-board-and-joe-biden-was-on-the-wrong-side
The accompanying chart is…eye-opening.
That’s true, and the policies won’t matter in the general election this time either.
Apparently in America, radical, far right fasicts are preferable to “radical, far left socialists” if there’s even an infinitesimal chance of taxes going up.
Timex
3543
It’s more that nearly 80% of Republicans describe themselves as conservative (as opposed to moderate or liberal), while only 50% of Democrats describe themselves as liberal.
The Republican party is significantly more extreme than the Democratic party at this point.
And really, for a lot of what we are talking about here, it’s mainly just an issue of messaging. You don’t need to take away people’s private insurance. If the government can do it better, then those private insurers will just go away on their own.
Personally I think this is more about the effective demonization of a label than about ideological position. When queried on actual issues, Dems come out much more liberal than they claim to be.
This is absolutely true.
But everytime a D. says “Medicare for All”, the R. says “Aha! Look at them destroying everyone’s health care to make you take the govt. run plan!” It doesn’t matter what the plans are.
Sharpe
3546
The health care issue is suffering from poor framing IMO. What the Dems should be promoting is “universal coverage” but for complex reasons, the question keeps getting framed as “single payer or not”. Single payer is one way to get to universal coverage, but not the only way. Also, when people respond positively to “Medicare for All” they are typically responding positively to a voluntary buy-in type program (Medicare Buy In would be a better phrasing or Medicare For All Who Want It) rather than a pure single payer system that immediately replaces the current private system.
I prefer a voluntary Medicare Buy In type system both for political reasons and for policy reasons. Politically, it reduces the disruption of a sudden transition away from private insurance, but policy wise I believe it will lead to the same or very similar end-state as a more abrupt single payer transition, with the big-scale public option becoming dominant over the comparatively smaller for-profit alternatives (leveraging the Medicare fee schedule either fully or in part is key to making this work).
To me, the Dems should be answering these questions by saying “I support universal coverage for all Americans, with an option for people who want it to buy into a Medicare-type plan”. But b/c we can’t have nice things, we end up with “SINGLE PAYER YES/NO???” which is frankly dumb-assed given the complexity of the issues.
Kamala is getting her groove!
That’s an good reminder Kamala, there is a lot more that unites us (Trump is the worse president of all time) than divides us.
On healthcare- I think what the people want is two things
a) The ability to keep their current insurance if they like it
b) A price guarantee that they will never have to spend more than X% of their income on healthcare
I think a system can be made that does both those things.
I don’t think this is a framing issue. I think some Dem candidates explicitly want single-payer, not universal coverage provided by private insurers. And I think some — probably most — people actually want that, too. I know I do.
There is no good social policy reason to prefer that people get basic health care coverage through private insurers.
I think both those wants are problematic. On the first, most people don’t get to keep their insurance for very long now, whether they like it or not, and most people don’t like it anyway. I know that when polled they say they want to keep it, but I think that’s a function of fear rather than any real liking for their insurance.
On the second, I think if you tell the truth to people about what they will spend in premiums under any health care plan at all, they will always reject it, and always say they want something else. That’s why bad insurance plans existed before the ACA, and why some bad ones still exist, and why the Republican alternatives are always to permit that bad low-premium plans exist as an alternative.
I think that annual per-capita health care costs are something on the order of $10k. If you’re buying private insurance for yourself, that means by definition your own costs are doing to be something like that number, plus funding the profit margins and risk pooling of the insurer. If you’re buying it for your family, multiply by the number of people in your family. That’s why even minimal ACA coverage for a family costs $9k per year for a $28k annual deductible. Tell people that, though, and they will reject that plan.
That’s why I mentioned the income-based. Basically the government provides a guarantee that you will get X level ACA coverage, and your premiums+deductibles won’t exceed X% of your income.
If you can beat the government guarantee, or if you want to pay more, you can get private insurance. Otherwise, you get put on a public insurance plan and charged that X% in taxes.
This also has the benefit of taking Medicaid mostly away from the states.
Why have premiums for single-payer at all? Why not just fund it through progressive taxation? Why have two mechanisms for paying for health care — both taxes and premiums — and a complicated mechanism for deciding how much the premiums are? Taxes are already adjusted for income.
Agree, that’s a benefit of any guaranteed government health insurance program.
I am with you on this! It is better politics. Why should I, as an old person, get Medicare, when so many of the children in this county have little or no medical coverage? But then, I have private choices too, so why shouldn’t they?
Its amazing how much money Pete is raising despite being 5 or so place in the polls.
