2020 Democratic Primary Thread: Focus on House & Senate races

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Berniewood Hogan said:
If Bernie explained in detail exactly how his plan would work, Republicans (and half the Democrats) would immediately get to work changing everything they could to stop Bernie from making those exact moves.

You don't tell your opponent what you're going to do.

Warren had to spew out all this shyt because

A. "she's got detailed plans!"

and

B. she doesn't really intend to threaten the status quo and they know that
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All cause she got pressed by booty judge and The Fabulous Moolahchar.

Just like she took a 23andme that showed she’s one quintillionth American Indian cause pumpkin man-titties called her Pocahontas.
 
Berniewood Hogan

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Mephistopheles said:
All cause she got pressed by booty judge and The Fabulous Moolahchar.

Just like she took a 23andme that showed she’s one quintillionth American Indian cause pumpkin man-titties called her Pocahontas.
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Basically she's kind of an idiot. But she went to Harvard, so she's convinced she's Above The Rest Of Us.
 
88m3

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The Onion
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"We hope that any Republican who finds Trump beyond the pale will turn to our campaign and see just how few black supporters we have."


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POLITICS.THEONION.COM

Buttigieg Campaign Appeals To Moderate Republicans By Touting Low Approval Among Black Voters
SOUTH BEND, IN—In an effort to unite disparate groups of white Americans, the Pete Buttigieg campaign released a new series of ads Monday appealing to moderate Republicans by touting the candidate’s low approval rate among black voters. “We hope that any Republican who finds Trump beyond the p...
 
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Everytime I try to enter this conversation @King Kreole drops another fantastic post that makes me not even bother. :hubie:

Warren should get you on the team fam :whoo:


Also :gucci: at Bernie having some super secret plan that he's holding onto in order to not have his enemies what? "Work changing everything they could to stop Bernie from making these exact moves" Wtf does this bullshyt even mean? Like they aren't going to do whatever it takes to stop him regardless of what he actually has up his sleeve. Like there is some miracle potion he has hidden in a safe somewhere that they can never predict but only if he saves it to the last minute? fukk out of here.
 
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King Kreole said:
Whether it's superfluous or not depends on your political approach. Bernie obviously wasn't planning on Liz coming out with a financing plan, and he doesn't want to get into details. That's fine, that's his strategy. He doesn't really do details. Liz's strategy is the opposite. They've each made their beds, and will be rewarded or punished by the electorate because of it.

And Breunig lost every shred of credibility he had on this issue. He is so far from a good faith approach it's pathetic. Dude turned a bunch of rose emoji leftists into Heritage foundation conservatives with one dumbass article. Pretty impressive.


Then what the fukk is the point of introducing the bill in week one when you know it will inevitably go down in flames? This is just like when McConnell put up that stunt vote for GND. Bernie's not doing this to advance health care, he's doing it to score cheap points against Elizabeth Warren. Her plan is to start the fight for single-payer universal healthcare in week one by taking realistic and meaningful actions to immediately expand healthcare to millions. I don't know what fight Bernie is waging by pulling a doomed stunt vote. Liz is straining credulity if she believes full M4A can get passed by her third year. Bernie and his supporters who believe he will get it passed earlier are out to fukking lunch. Liz is basically admitting this fact and has a backup plan to get millions onto healthcare in the meantime. I don't know what Bernie's plan for reality is. Saying you're going to primary Joe Manchin, who isn't up for reelection until 2024, by going to West Virginia, a state you will most likely lose badly in the Presidential election, and yell at him until he gives up is insulting to the millions of people who will die unnecessarily because you backed yourself into drawing idiotic distinctions with Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic primary. I believe Bernie is smarter and more compassionate than what his supporters are goading him into doing, so I trust that in reality he would just do exactly the same thing Liz would.


Republicans and donors will push back against both M4A and a public option, but the latter is a much more defensible proposition for the centrists and squishes. The vast majority of Democrats were ready to pass it back in 2009, it was Lieberman who killed it. Sinema and Manchin have already come out and said they're open to a public option but will absolutely kill full M4A. Passing a public option would be a dogfight for sure, but it's at the edge of what will be realistically passable. M4A is out. They are definitely not equally plausible.


Pete's former position of M4A-who-want-it or whatever as a glide path to full M4A is defensible. His current anti-M4A position is not. You have never seen Liz talk down on the principles of M4A or the fact that it needs to be passed. Pete has been out here using Republican talking points to harm the M4A movement.

The year 3 M4A push under Liz's plan would not be an even bigger policy movement. Showing the country that the government can be trusted to roll out and implement genuine, high-quality healthcare via a public option would both suffocate the political power of the insurance/anti-M4A forces and weaken them for the final year 3 blow, as well as reduce the size and scope of this year 3 final push.

Ultimately, this whole discussion depends on whether you think the M4A movement is currently strong enough for Bernie's bill to be passed into law. Liz doesn't believe so, and her plan is to build that credibility around public healthcare while giving the M4A squishes a way to support getting to the end goal without having to buy the whole thing right now. Bernie's apparently does believe so, and his plan is to pull everyone's cards right now.


Fantastic. My point still stands. In order to pull this off, Liz cannot divorce herself from M4A like Biden and Pete have. She needs that as the end goal to walk the tightrope. She very easily could have just come out and said "fukk all this M4A stuff, my plan is a public option" but that would broken the coalition she needs. She is still fully committed to M4A in 4 years like Bernie. She just gave it a pressure release valve to acquire the necessary buy-in in this political environment, which is definitely riskier from the standpoint of structural integrity of full M4A. But it looks like she's more optimistic that the more people have high-quality government healthcare, the easier it will be to expand it. Bernie is apparently pessimistic about this and believes that any non-M4A healthcare expansion will inevitably cause Republicans to gain power.
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You keep repeating this notion that Bruenig’s critique was in bad faith and right wing in nature but you are literally the only person on the internet who I have read say that. It’s a strange argument.

The majority of progressives, especially the Jacobin left types (and Bernie Sanders himself) find the regressive nature of a head tax vs. a payroll tax as a prime negative. You seem to like the employer-side tax vs. employee-side tax aspect of her plan, and for that reason you find it more progressive. Why, I have no idea. I’m a progressive so I like progressive tax structures, not regressive ones like her head tax and that is the superseding factor to me as a progressive. I thought that when I first read her plan, before I read the Bruenig article.

Either all these progressives and democratic socialists all morphed into Heritage foundation sleepers overnight because they stan Bernie Sanders or something, or we genuinely find her plan regressive and unworkable. Talk about arguing in bad faith.

Also, you need to understand that more important than the ideological underpinnings of how workers’ earnings are taxed is can it work. Based on our last conversation I don’t think you understood the critique of contracting out workers making it unsustainable.

You kept talking about the 50 person exempt threshold which mirrors the ACA, and how it didn’t cause a giant leap in contracting out work to firms with less than 50 workers to avoid paying healthcare. That isn’t even relevant here. The argument is that companies will contract out workers regardless of how many employers they have because contractors are exempt from paying the head tax under her plan...and of course they will do that and they already are. Saying they’re already doing it doesn’t bolster your argument, in fact it weakens it because avoiding healthcare costs is already a major factor in why they do it. So as full and part time employers swap out workers to contractors that’s lost tax revenue, which can lead to the head tax being raised, and a multiplying effect of tax raises and contracting. If you have a payroll tax, on top of being progressive not regressive, contractors are not exempt so even if/when employers contract out for whatever reason, that tax revenue is still collected.

Do you work in the private sector? I’m asking cause I find it humorous that you kept saying labor reorganization is so expensive and cumbersome to companies that they wouldn’t dare do it to avoid a head tax. I’ve seen it for years. You wanna know how it works? It’s simple. Someone quits or gets fired, the company hires a contractor to do the same job...or an intern.
 
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King Kreole

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Mephistopheles said:
You keep repeating this notion that Bruenig’s critique was in bad faith and right wing in nature but you are literally the only person on the internet who I have read say that. It’s a strange argument.
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If you purposefully confuse employer-side taxes for employee-side taxes, you're peddling in right-wing economics. I don't care what publication you write that in or what emoji you have next to your twitter handle. It's a dangerous and wrongheaded line of thinking that negates working class power by turning workers into shields for corporations.

Mephistopheles said:
The majority of progressives, especially the Jacobin left types (and Bernie Sanders himself) find the regressive nature of a head tax vs. a payroll tax as a prime negative. You seem to like the employer-side tax vs. employee-side tax aspect of her plan, and for that reason you find it more progressive. Why, I have no idea. I’m a progressive so I like progressive tax structures, not regressive ones like her head tax and that is the superseding factor to me as a progressive. I thought that when I first read her plan, before I read the Bruenig article.

Either all these progressives and democratic socialists all morphed into Heritage foundation sleepers overnight because they stan Bernie Sanders or something, or we genuinely find her plan regressive and unworkable. Talk about arguing in bad faith.
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Regressive taxes on businesses are very different than regressive taxes on actual people/workers. The fact that this has to be explained is ridiculous but here we are. Levying a tax on a company composed of mainly lower-income workers is by definition regressive, but regressivity in itself is not a problem. It's a problem when it's levied on individuals via income tax. But because we distinguish between corporations and the economic status of their workers, a regressive employer-side tax isn't necessarily a problem. For example, do you know what companies would be the losers in Liz's progressive head tax? Amazon. Walmart. Home Depot. McDonalds. Kroger. FedEx. DHL. These companies are disproportionately composed of low-income workers, but the companies themselves are very rich. These are the companies a progressive corporate payroll tax structure would be protecting, but they can afford a tax hike. Liz's flat/regressive head tax is protecting the knowledge economy companies that pay their workers high wages. I'm personally more in favor of incentivizing wage increases (head tax) than I am low-wage hiring (payroll tax), which is why I favor Liz's approach.

Mephistopheles said:
Also, you need to understand that more important than the ideological underpinnings of how workers’ earnings are taxed is can it work. Based on our last conversation I don’t think you understood the critique of contracting out workers making it unsustainable.

You kept talking about the 50 person exempt threshold which mirrors the ACA, and how it didn’t cause a giant leap in contracting out work to firms with less than 50 workers to avoid paying healthcare. That isn’t even relevant here. The argument is that companies will contract out workers regardless of how many employers they have because contractors are exempt from paying the head tax under her plan...and of course they will do that and they already are. Saying they’re already doing it doesn’t bolster your argument, in fact it weakens it because avoiding healthcare costs is already a major factor in why they do it. So as full and part time employers swap out workers to contractors that’s lost tax revenue, which can lead to the head tax being raised, and a multiplying effect of tax raises and contracting. If you have a payroll tax, on top of being progressive not regressive, contractors are not exempt so even if/when employers contract out for whatever reason, that tax revenue is still collected.
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Both you and the general anti-Liz discourse were arguing that companies would avoid the head tax by shedding to get below the 50 head trigger, but I'm glad we've agreed on that being a ridiculous concern.

I previously asked you whether you think efforts to expand government healthcare over the past decade were responsible for the multiple decades-long trend of contracting that started in the 1960s, and you correctly said no. I'm not sure why you're backtracking now. Contracting is a bigger, more long-term, structural problem than a head tax would induce. Utilizing a payroll tax instead of a head tax isn't going to solve the issue of contracting, because contracting isn't a health care originated issue, it's a broader, labor rights issue. Liz handles the concern of contracting through supporting laws attacking employee misclassification in her labor rights plan, where it rightfully belongs. If your idea is that companies are already contracting due to healthcare costs pre-M4A, why would Liz's plan to reduce that company's healthcare costs by 2% induce a massive wave of contracting? The pertinent question is "How does the situation change for a business if Liz's plan is implemented?" The 50 head tax trigger is already here via the employer mandate. Average healthcare costs will decrease by 2% for companies. There is no new major cost increase these companies are facing. So what exactly would trigger a massive exacerbation in corporate behavior re:contracting?

Mephistopheles said:
Do you work in the private sector? I’m asking cause I find it humorous that you kept saying labor reorganization is so expensive and cumbersome to companies that they wouldn’t dare do it to avoid a head tax. I’ve seen it for years. You wanna know how it works? It’s simple. Someone quits or gets fired, the company hires a contractor to do the same job...or an intern.
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My claim was never that contracting wasn't a large scale phenomenon across the economic landscape. In fact, just the opposite, I have been claiming that it is a long-term, deep-rooted trend going back decades. Which is why Liz's plans to combat employee misclassification are necessary. What's expensive and cumbersome is breaking up your large company to get under 50 employers just to avoid paying 2% less in healthcare costs via the current head tax system.
 
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