Easy:
- Climate change
- Universal basic income
- Universal health care
I was going to go with just one (use government power to reduce economic inequality) but I’d vote for a platform of these three.
Scott: one thing I was hoping to learn was how non-liberals perceive liberals, even if those perceptions are wrong, vague, misguided, etc. In order to facilitate non-liberals voicing their ideas, I was asking liberals not to challenge those perceptions. Also in addition to the facilitation idea, we also have numerous other threads where we liberals are correcting the misperceptions of non-liberals. On top of that I didn’t want a pile-on / shout down.
Since you are new here, I’ll add this: there are many other threads for you to challenge non-liberal fallacies in. That’s probably the dominant theme of most threads here. I myself have spent a fair amount of time in recent months challenging non-liberal fallacies on health care and immigration, for example. I created this thread to be different than that.
Folks, let’s make the top 3 liberal agenda thread a separate thread. That’s a good topic.
I would further say that the annoyance of PC is so great I see conservatives purposefully say extreme things just to rile up liberals, even if they don’t necessarily stand for those things personally.
Pretty cool, eh? This is where the whole conservative trolling can come in; and oh boy does it create shitstorms. Unfortunately, those shitstorms have been recognized as a media bonanza and you get the birth of the more egregious right wing talk shows, and of course Donald Trump.
This is definitely a case, although not limited to folks on the left. It’s more of a feature of zealots, regardless of the political persuasion.
It ends up being a tactical error, and if it were avoided I believe that Democrats could make significant gains.
You see this is the rejection of appealing to moderate Republicans (or honestly, even to moderate democrats). You see the kind of bullshit that I saw on the right wing, with folks calling inadequately “pure” conservatives “RINOs”.
You fall into this area where the perfect ends up being the enemy of the good. If you follow folks like Rick Wilson, or Tom Nichols, you periodically see this in folks on the left attacking them. The reality is, both of them are QUITE conservative. Moreso than myself by quite a margin, I’d say. But today’s political climate is such that they are the allies of the democrats. Hell, both of them have straight up told everyone that they need to vote for democrats in this election.
There comes a point where you need to compromise with folks in the middle. Because if you did that, you’d be able to get massive sweeps in the elections, which would give you the ability to methodically implement what you want.
The problem is that there are folks on the edges who fall prey to the “Well, whatever. Both parties are the same! I won’t even bother voting now! Derp!” I think the left wing may be more susceptible to this than the right, as the right wing is all crazy in the primary so that’s where they push folks to the extreme, but really, they would vote for literally anyone in the general, as long as they have an R in their name. Their hard core talking heads have absolutely no problem turning on a dime and endorsing someone they said was satan incarnate the day before. You saw this with McCain, and Romney, both of whom were castigated by the far right, until they won the nomination, and then they were beloved (until they lost in the general).
It seems like if you got the far left folks to accept a slower progression towards their goals, that the end result would be a much faster progression than they are ACTUALLY getting by demanding ideological purity. Because you’d actually win elections. The alternative I guess is to go with trying to gin up a totally rabid base of imbeciles like the GOP did, but I don’t think that’s gonna play out well. Even for the GOP, while it worked to get elected… I still feel like they’re in the situation of having caught the tiger by the tail.
I don’t think this is unique to liberals. Conservative leaders and politicians presume to speak for me all the time (“Americans won’t stand for X!”) and if I don’t agree with them on a particular policy point, they openly declare me the enemy. I’d say that this is how politics often works, especially in the hands of not-very-scrupulous politicians. It works like this because it is effective, which is not to say it is a good thing.
Edit: @Sharpe, @wahoo, @WhollySchmidt, is this discussion good discussion, or it is a violation of the rules?
I agree that it’s not limited to the left. I think it’s more volume on the left than the right in the sense that the right tend to have one issue hot buttons (guns! Right to life! Illegal Immigrants!) whereas the left tends to look questioningly at me if I don’t agree with 3 points out of 10. Not saying you don’t have people who have lots of hot-buttons on the right, but it seems more rare.
For example, I own a lot of guns, and I get into a lot of disagreements with my gun toting friends who don’t want an ounce of any type of restriction - whereas I see some things we definitely can improve on, but they’re for a woman’s right to choose.
Or a friend who owns a business and is tired of all the taxes put on him (fees, licenses) by our overwhelming liberal state, but could care less about guns or abortion.
I don’t see those types of “pick and choose” mentality as much on the left. Again, this is a perception.
Imagine the cost of funding those, all at one time, both to the government and the taxpaying consumer.
PS…I agree with 2 of them and could probably be made to agree with the third. But damn, would 2-3 prove expensive at start up.
Then look at something like healthcare and the cost of not doing them.
@Tman I’m curious, as a new resident of the state (as of about 9:05am today), about your PERS comment. Am I mistaken in that someone here mentioned that Oregon gave a big tax refund last year to residents? If that is the case, why not use that money to fund it?
Because my knowledge of local politics is zero. Heck, I’m not even sure what town I’m going to live in long term other than ‘Hillsboro-ish’
California is facing the same problems as Oregon with unfunded pension debt. The California response has pretty much been the same as the Oregon one. The improved economy has helped but not by enough.
It’s the same in most places. Asset backed securities hit pension, and university funds, especially hard. Banks seem to have specifically targeted state pension funds with the asset backed securities, and when they caused the crash it ranked them in a way I’m not sure they can ever fully recover from.
Not to say that they were doing great before. I don’t know about California and Oregon, but it has long been the practice of Illinois, and Cook County, to increase pension funding on paper during labor stoppages, but never properly allocate the funding.
Which can be a problem if growth and forecasts change. Like, say, a growing percentage of people in retirement age that are living longer.
These are actually two separate events. The tax refund is called a “kicker” and was passed years ago to prevent the state from using excess funds to fund even more programs - one of the more saner things they did, but it’s Achilles heel is that it is based on the 2 year estimate - so if the incoming funds exceed the estimate by 2%, the excess over 2% gets refunded to the citizens. It’s a good concept - keep the state from funding new programs, but IMO, could have been better stated as a rainy day fund which could have accumulated to some set amount and then refunded when the rainy day funding reached some goal.
Because - PERS is a longtime problem. PERS does so many things wrong that basically gives any public employee in Oregon a pretty dramatic retirement kick. I’m not going to list everything - but it includes guaranteed return rates, zero participation (like most people do with 401K where employer matches, PERS doesn’t do matching it just gives $$, the city / town governments are responsible for covering the PERS for their local area - this is decimating to small towns who have budgets < $4M and can see PERS eat up $500K because thje town is on the hook till death, the rate people get is based on last year’s salary, so if you bank 100 days of vacation your rate goes up over 30% of what it would have been, etc, etc. Several football coaches who only coached a few years walked away with huge payouts EVERY year, even though they’re still coaching in another state.
Don’t get me started on how football, or basketball, college coaches are near universally the highest paid state employees in every state.
My reading says the legislature ended the most generous portion (the guaranteed rate of return and the tax refund kicker) of this plan with legislation in 1995, a change which impacted all new hires from 1996 forward. And they modified the plan again in 2003, where all employees hired after that are limited to a maximum benefit calculated as 1.5% of salary per year of service capped at 30 years of service, or 45% of salary. Not particularly generous, but they also added a voluntary contribution plan which works more or less like any conventional 401k, where state employees can save more money by contributing to it.
What they haven’t done is make any of these changes retroactive to employees hired under the previous regime.
If the argument is ‘liberals aren’t doing anything about the problem with the plan’, this seems like important information.
that’s not the argument. The argument is our governor “formed a committee” and has done nothing to address PERS, except for propose a new ballot measure that would have taxed everyone.
In the meantime, she wants to tout the “18 accomplishments in 18 months” when I would say that addressing PERS should be the single highest priority in the state.
Sure, but there are more than 4 million people in Oregon, and it’s a safe bet that at least some of them think something else is a higher priority. And, if the governor proposed taxes to address PERS, that’s something the governor proposed to address PERS. I get that you don’t like that solution, but you can’t reasonably say it isn’t a proposed solution.
Adding taxes to pay for a broken system instead of fixing said system is a problem.
The measure went down 59-41, so I think a lot of people agreed that wasn’t going to work.
What’s your suggestion?
I think we’re failing to communicate, sorry. Oregon already acted to curtail the value of future pensions. The problem seems to be with the pensions granted under the original plan. The options seem to be either raise taxes to pay for those pensions or renege on pension agreements with past state employees or some combination of the two.
I get that you would prefer not to raise taxes, but I guess I’ve lost track of how any of this relates to your original complaint about liberals, i.e. that they can’t focus. Sounds like the governor focused on PERS, and came up with a plan to address it, but a majority of voters defeated it.