Diego Ricardo

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Are tax exemptions really subsidies?

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I think it is something approaching that but really it is the government declining revenue not handing out money.

But seriously, 700x cancer risk zone is wild.

People are cynical. They’ll clap like seals for it because maybe he comes to Nole, Gata, or Cane now.

The Democratic Party's weird coalitions over its history are an interesting subject.

The Dems were actively pushing out the conservative, mostly Southern faction in favor of the growing college educated urbanite demographic thanks to the post-war boom over the course of the 1960s and 70s.

It is also interesting that these often Democrat-led major city machines began pulling black people away from the GOP in the early 20th due to the diaspora of black people after Jim Crow to the industrial boom in the Midwest.

These things are ultimately a silly thing to focus on as a gotcha for the current policy.

There hasn't been a man that more embodies the spirit, ideology, demeanor, etc of Andrew Jackson in the last 100 years than Donald Trump. Jackson in some sense along with Van Buren is the Ur-Democrat and Donald Trump is ostensibly a Republican but I think he honestly represents something new at the same time.

The people who would vote for a guy like Jackson have been pushed out of his own party and replaced by college-educated liberals, black people, and - to a lesser degree than black people - all minorities with a more secular disposition or not elite. To that last point, that is why you see high-caste Hindu Indians on the GOP side of the dividing line. Ironically, the coastal financial elite element that made common cause with plantation owners in the beginning are still around in the Democratic Party today.

ACA was only meant to take the state-level insurer-of-last-resort risk pools and make a bigger national last-resort risk pool.

It's not really meant to be good insurance. Same thing exists for bad drivers for automotive insurance. The difference before ACA is already being sickly was a reason an employer plan would treat you like a bad driver so to speak. The difference being that the auto state risk pools were meant to allow a driver to improve their record and get back on a general consumer insurance policy. That's basically not a reality for anyone with a chronic illness.

The trade made with insurers was basically that they can't deny due to preexisting conditions but they get better last-resort risk pools instead of small state level ones.

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If we had left the power to elect Senators with the state legislatures, I believe we'd be better off.

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17th amendment would have been better off to make our legislature unicameral and prevent this representative cap at 435 we've been in since 1929. imo gerrymandering is only as important as it is because of that rep to population imbalance.



If the unicameral body was sufficiently large, you probably end up with the moderating force the senate is meant to create.

Maybe I'm wrong...but if we're going to empower the people across two bodies instead of the commons v. lords/states type divide as intended then one big representative body makes more sense to me.

"The Italian Question" was one of the great pressures that created these norm breaking slides that eventually set the stage for Caesar crossing the Rubicon.

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That's nice. I don't disagree with you in principle, but gerrymandering is allowed, and clearly legal, under our system of government. It would be stupid for a state not to utilize it. Standing on principle while the whole ship sinks around you is stupid.

ETA: Until there's a constitutional amendment forcing districts to be drawn by geographical footprint and population, this is what we will have.

Such an amendment would never happen because it would mininize the Democrat party and give full control of the House to Republicans for generations.

ETA2: You are wrong on one point though. This is something Republicans have not used until now. The only reason this is news now is because Trump forced them to start playing the game correctly. Now that they are, Democrats want to pretend Republicans started it. That is simply false.

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Right, our founding fathers looked towards the Roman Republic but I fear they also set the field for the same sort of demise of that republic within our own. Too much of what holds the political system together are implicit norms - or perhaps sportsmanship in a sense - that are apt to be destroyed over time. Hell, I'd say we're living in times that echo the era of Gracchi brothers, Sulla, etc.

I hear what you're saying. But just because nothing says a dog can't play basketball, doesn't mean they should.

Edit: This reminds me of at the time the constitution was being written, debated, and ratified many pointed out something to the effect, "this system will not work if we have political parties like Britain." And I think many of them optimistically believed that leaving so much power to the states - that were essentially ran by a few clans/families/interests at the time - would prevent that problem. However the federalists v. anti-federalists/democratic-republicans immediately formed within Washington's own cabinet.

My position is political gerrymandering, racial gerrymandering, it doesn’t matter: it is poison to the legitimacy of the system.

It is as wrong that rural Californian conservative gets their voice marginalized as it is that urban, center-to-liberal-leaning Southern population centers often get marginalized with similar sort of strategies.

Gerrymandering has essentially been a bug in the US political system since the beginning. The argument that one side is really at fault and the other is innocently responding in kind is ahistorical spin.

furk