Please show me your magic wand of "targeting." This is the 4th article you have published, second from the editorial board against Direct Cash Payments. And the 4th time that your "targeting" has remained vague at best. Until you explain exactly how you plan to "target" AND get the relief to people as soon as possible, you are wrong. Direct cash transfers are the most progressive idea out there, in general. Your arguments: 1. People who don't need it will get it. Mine: people who DO need it won't unless your "targeting" is 100% efficient. 2. Unemployment benefits would be better. Mine: that misses a large swath of people, including gig workers and stay at home parents (who are staying at homer to educate their children). AND it is a drag on employment. 3. It's expensive. Mine: So is giving everyone a free vaccine which I assume we both support. At what price is a human life not worthy of being saved. The tax co...
There are some foundational, yet quite simple and elegant, ideas that inform my consciousness. I have already touched on a few but let me be more specific. "There is no one right way to live" Daniel Quinn in Ishmael . I have greatly enjoyed Quinn's books for they forced me out of the ineffective spiral that is issue based politics into a more holistic approach to what has been going on here. The idea above is so simple yet if you lived by it, so meaningful. What does "there is no one right way to live" imply? If there is no one right way then most of the folly of the world is put into a different focus - as attempts to make people live what one group deemed the "one right way". Timely is the disintegration of the Iraqi "state". Josh Marshall nailed it when he said the long term causes lie at the feet of the map drawers in 1917 in Paris and London, but nonetheless, the basic premise of the Iraq war was the Unites States trying to m...
Polling is important. Polling can tell us where the participants in the current lifestyle consciousness are, and we do have to take it seriously. But expecting the participants in the current lifestyle to accurately explain WHY they feel they way they do, or WHY they are willing to believe what they do, is truly problematic. This latest article from 538 is convincing and compelling. The graph showing how people "feel" about the economy, and how it directly correlates with political party and not how the economy is actually performing is likely the most convincing portion of the article. The thesis is that the root of the Trump support is not due to economic anxiety, but rather to race and partisan politics that grew up in opposition to the Obama presidency. I do not deny that that is the immediate cause. I do disagree that it is the ultimate cause. Hate must find fertile ground to overcome the messages we see all around us that tell us to love our brother ...
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