So just the two parties allowed then? Because last time, the time before, and every instance of Democrat rule for the past 50 years has resulted in a better, safer America? A more stable global economy? Appropriate environmental protections? The eradication of religion-based harm to every society in the world?
I wish it were even a remote possibility, but without preferential Voting, they have it stitched up to be the best of 2 bad choices, and a vote for anything else is in the Old Man shouts at Clouds category, … and, … while that’s the case, it will always be a fantasy, cause they aint changing it.
Not really. On the working poor, there are two elements to this:
The working poor in the USA are far worse off than the poor/working poor in many western countries. Because there is limited to no safety net, and as soon as you get above certain minimum poverty levels you start losing access to things like free health care.
There are more working poor (proportionally) in the USA than most western countries.
On the more qualified people, again this is often a fallacy. Many university staff* are homeless due to a combination of low wages. How about those law graduates a few years ago who came out in waves, and couldn’t get jobs? Student debt is absolutely crippling. That covers many of the professions you mentioned, especially if you are going into government jobs. The Dems passed a law which meant if you worked for 10 years in government with wages below a certain level, you’d get some of the debt waived. Guess who is now unwinding that?
The reality is that for a huge swathe of people in the USA there is huge financial stress, and probably to a much higher degree than many other western countries.
'* word I’m looking for isn’t staff, but they are teachers. I’ll see if I can hunt the article up I read earlier this year. It was absolutely terrible.
The notion that anyone in America who is willing and able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” can achieve significant upward mobility is deeply embedded in U.S. society. Conventional wisdom holds that class barriers in the United States are the lowest among the world’s advanced economies. Motivating this belief is the notion that there is a tradeoff between market regulation and mobility; advanced European economies are characterized by higher taxes, greater regulation, more union coverage, universal health care, a more comprehensive social contract, etc. Because some see these policies and institutions as impediments to mobility, mobility is believed to be greater in the United States.
While faith in the American Dream is deep, evidence suggests that the United States lacks policies to ensure the opportunities that the dream envisions. According to the data, there is considerably more mobility in most other developed economies. The figure below, from The State of Working America, 12th Edition, measures the relationship between earnings of fathers and sons in member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with similar incomes to the United States and for which data are available. An elasticity of zero would mean there is no relationship, and thus complete intergenerational mobility, with poor children just as likely as rich children to end up as rich adults. The higher the elasticity, the greater the influence of one’s birth circumstances on later life position.
The relationship between father-son earnings is tighter in the United States than in most peer OECD countries, meaning U.S. mobility is among the lowest of major industrialized economies. The relatively low correlations between father-son earnings in Scandinavian countries provide a stark contradiction to the conventional wisdom. An elasticity of 0.47 found in the United States offers much less likelihood of moving up than an elasticity of 0.18 or less, as characterizes Finland, Norway, and Denmark.
Who said anything about support? I was in the UK when they voted on preferential voting and I told everyone far and wide it was superior, and that Australians loved it. I think the US/UK first past the post system is a total disgrace, and makes Democracy facial.
But if I was a US citizen voting, I absolutely have to consider the system that applies when figuring out what will result in the best outcome for my vote. And if I make a choice that deliberately increases the chances of a Republican getting in, and they do, then I must own the fact I contributed to that and that representatives’ votes are partially on me.