You’re confusing cause and effect. Usually people use drugs and have mental health issues because they are homeless. They’re not homeless because they have those maladies. Homeowners weather those challenges just fine. And living on the street creates drug and mental health issues. If I had to sleep on the sidewalk, I sure as hell would want to be high all day. Wouldn’t you?
A homeless drug addict is just a middle class drug addict with a smaller bank account balance.
So your parents borrowed against the value of their home to put you through college. They could have also taken out parent plus loans to do the same thing. Why is this an argument for letting home prices soar?
Stalin thought Siberia needed a lot of people living there. Look how that turned out.
Building more housing is the solution, even if those homes largely go to the upper middle class and wealthy. Building new homes primarily for well off people isn’t a historic anomaly, it’s the norm. If you’re already building a house, it doesn’t take that much more to add some luxury features to make it appeal to the high end of the market. This is how it’s always been. Historically, the affordable housing of today is the luxury housing of yesterday.
Preventing new home construction doesn’t prevent neighborhoods from gentrifying. You just end up with yuppies living in newly renovated former tenements.
Look what thinking cautiously has got us. Look what thinking audaciously has got them. What rational rational Republican voter would have thought that Trump was a good potential candidate in 2016? Rational opinion was that Trump was a candidate doomed from the start. Yet the Republicans through caution to the wind and went for the inspiring candidate. And look what it got them.
Every election we choose the path of least resistance. Every election we talk ourselves out of the truly inspiring candidate, all in the name of electability. How many Democrats have voted against the progressive primary candidate, the one who could inspire, the one who could rally…all in the name of electability? Hillary was the candidate in 2016 because she was more electable than Bernie. Biden was the candidate in 2020 because he was more electable than Bernie. Biden was nearly the candidate in 2024 because sticking with the incumbent was simply the rational and cautious move.
Maybe it’s time we have faith for once. Maybe it’s time we believe in ourselves and our message for a change. Maybe it’s time to stop talking ourselves out of running our strongest potential candidates. As a great poet said, you have to believe in impossible things, or else they can never come to be.
Yes. Spitting distance. They were both close elections. What rock have you been living under?
Unlikable to you. Not to his voters. And Trump also beat ten times as many men as he did women. So logically we can’t ever run a male candidate ever again. The voters clearly don’t like male Democratic candidates. Biden only won due to covid.
Why, in the name of all that is good and holy, should we require someone whose dream it is to be a carpenter, to take calculus to graduate high school? In what universe will that requirement be doing any good in their life? What will it serve other than a potential completely arbitrary barrier to simply graduating from high school? And a carpenter is actually far more mathematically inclined than most career paths people pursue.
Yes, learning calculus can be a revelation in mathematical beauty. But the same is true for a thousand potential fields of study. In terms of practical use to most people, they would all be equally frivolous. A case could be made that a thousand fields of study are something that people simply must be exposed to. I’m more in favor of letting people choose their own path. We shouldn’t be piling on arbitrary barriers on to a diploma that is only meant to signify basic competence.
You know, it may sound barbaric, but I’m beginning to reconsider the merits of public crucifixions as a form of state punishment…
Maybe instead of getting rid of the penny, we should simply redenominate the currency. You simply issue new versions of every denomination of currency and declare that their legal value is 100x the value of the old counterpart. So the new penny is legally worth an old dollar. Think of it as “US dollar v. 2.0.”
People get antsy when you suggest this sort of thing, as often it’s seen in countries experiencing hyperinflation. But it need not be. Countries with perfectly healthy economies could benefit to redenominate their currency every century or so. Even modest rates of inflation add up over time. If you want your currency’s value to remain reasonable, (ex: to avoid having to pay a million dollars for a cheeseburger some day.), eventually you do have to redonominate your currency.
Rationally, there’s really no reason not to do it. I wonder if it’s pride more than anything else that prevents us from doing it more often. It would be quite a mental adjustment to go from having a salary of $100k per year in the old system to $1,000 a year in the new one. Maybe that can’t help but make people feel smaller in some way? Even if rationally you can know that you haven’t lost anything, would you still feel poorer if you used to make $100k, but now only make 1k?
Surely no man who could be elected German Chancellor could turn out to be evil! /s
In this survey, a larger percentage of women under 50 said they (or someone they knew) wouldn’t vote for a woman as president, compared to men who responded.
Women tend to have larger active social circles than men. That alone explains this.
Eh. She already meets the requirements. She’s old enough. That’s it. And she is eminently more qualified than the current president. She’ll be 39 in 2028. The youngest president, Teddy Roosevelt, was 42.
This gets really ugly when Democrats start rejecting candidates for their minority status. Kamala explicitly rejected Pete Buttigieg as a running mate because he was gay. Kamala rejected him using the logic of a thousand other bigots, “I have no problem with it, but others won’t understand and will judge me for it.” This is the exact same logic that employers across the country use to deny hiring queer people, trans people, etc. Employers will claim to not be bigoted themselves, but that their customers wouldn’t get it, so they simply can’t hire the queer candidate.
Hogwash. Women have come within spitting distance of winning the presidency. Twice. Kamala and Hillary were both very unlikable candidates running no the same neoliberal platform that voters have rejected in the last three elections.
The real problem was that voting for Trump was voting for Mussolini today. Voting for Kamala was voting for Hitler in 2028. If she had managed to win, someone even worse than Trump would win the election in 2028. That’s the only possible result from a hypothetical Kamala admin, if she had managed to win the election.
Why did you vote for someone even worse than Trump? If Kamala had won, someone even worse than Trump would have got the Republican nomination in 2028. And they would have easily beat Kamala then. She wouldn’t have done anything to alter the conditions that lead to Trump. And now at least Republicans are likely to lose in 2028 (dooming about the end to elections aside.) And more critically, we actually have a shot at getting in Democrats that might actually be able to do something about fighting fascism.
You didn’t vote to fight fascism. You just voted for even worse fascism four years down the line.
So even worse, he manipulated and deceived the entire electorate from the get-go.
Did Biden explicitly promise to be a one term candidate? No. But he personally implied it on many occasions, and he had his underlings spread the messaging of him as a one-term president in the press. His minions were out there in the media basing their entire pitch for his candidacy on the idea of him as a one-term caretaker president, running to restore normalcy.
He deliberately put the idea in the public consciousness that he would only run for a single term but without ever explicitly promising to do so. This way the bastard could get woo voters on the prospect of him making a graceful exit, but while still leaving his future options open. It was a Machiavellian move, and it ultimately blew up in his face and gave Trump a second term.
If she had had more time, she would have lost even worse. The peak of her popularity was when people knew nothing about her. She just kept getting more unpopular as the election wore on.
The only scenario that Kamala could have won is if Biden had somehow dropped out just weeks before the election. Her only shot was to get elected before people really got to know her. She’s a deeply unlikable candidate.
Yes you can take out parent plus loans without collateral. That’s their entire reason for existing.