I keep being told it’s because of the Republicans that we can’t have nice things. So what gives in California? We should be overflowing with progressive policies.
Remember that the Democratic party is NOT leftist and is NOT progressive… it is liberal, aka generally right-of-center. The few leftists we do manage to elect generally don’t wield much power, and are undermined and sabotaged at every turn by members of “their own party” as well as Republicans. The state also has a lot of very wealthy conservative extremists, and since money is power, they wield a lot without needing pesky things like votes or democracy.
Republicans and Democrats have been moving steadily to the right for the last 40 years. So now, Democrats are where the Republicans were in the 1980s: boring, middle of the road corporatists, friends of banks, insurance and pharmaceutical companies. And the right has moved all the way into an insane asylum. We haven’t had a real progressive president since Jimmy Carter and that was 50 years ago.
it is liberal, aka generally right-of-center
A lot of people don’t seem to know this in the US. If you look at most Liberal Parties, they are centre or centre right. Though some are centre left as well. That’s not a full list in that link.
Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party is the major right wing conservative party of Japan.
Do note that the US’ centre starts farther to the right than many other developed countries.
They are trying. AB 2200 aims at laying the groundwork for universal healthcare. Minimum wage just went up to $16 for everyone and $20 for fast food workers. There are experiments going on in several cities with guaranteed income. But everything comes with a cost, and the state is having budget problems. There have been job losses associated with the wage increases. Employers have begun to get very picky about who they hire for even minimum wage jobs. Hours have been cut.
Even Democrats realize one state can’t offer free stuff without attracting every freeloader in the country. Someone has to pay for the benefits, and if they tax those folks too heavily, they’ll find another place to live. There’s a real limit to how many social programs can be offered before they break the piggy bank.
Your conclusion makes no sense. California can’t afford the policies because states don’t print their money, the federal government does. And California doesn’t get much help from the federal government. So it’s constrained by what it can tax locally.
Those policies would work perfectly and cause no budgetary issues if the federal government paid for them by printing money.
The massive printing of money from 2008 to COVID really not make people realise that? We CAN pay for everything. The government just has to print for the money, and use it for that instead of bailing out the capitalists over and over.
Ah yeah, that’s how Zimbabwe did it, too! 💡
Zimbabwe is not sovereign monetarily. The US is the most monetarily sovereign country in the world. They can literally print trillions and it doesn’t do anything to inflation. It has happened multiple times already!! Like why would people deny reality?
Because its not a solution, it just makes the problem worse. It’ll just create even more money under 100 people can gobble up.
The money exists! It needs to be liberated from wasteful uses such as arms, billionaires or shareholders. We can also print more money, sure, but without first fixing the underlying spending/allocation/hoarding issue, we’d only be feeding the dragon.
The solution of not having enough money is to print more money? I couldn’t figure if you’re serious but apparently you are…
I think @[email protected] is oversimplifying by quite a lot, but not completely off base.
The most condensed explanation I’ve found is by Second Thought: Why The Government Has Infinite Money.
The links in the description are great as well, addressing some common questions and counter-arguments.New documentary film: Finding the Money (BitTorrent magnet link)
The film barely makes any class analysis, but is otherwise good.If you want a Marxian economic perspective, I highly recommend Michael Hudson. He dispels a few misconceptions here: The Use and Abuse of MMT
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He says that, as a state, California can’t afford to do this. Your response is this makes no sense, this would all work if implemented at the federal level.
So even assuming your points are valid, this isn’t an option for California.
The government just has to print for the money, and use it for that
Printing money means taxing those that have cash or assets valued directly in the units of the currency being measured. Those who mostly hold other assets (say, for example, the means of production, or land / buildings, or indirect equivalents of those, such as stock) are unaffected. This makes printing money a tax that disproportionately affects the poor.
What the government really needs to do is tax the rich. Many top one percenters of income fight that, and unfortunately despite the democratic principle of one person, one vote, in practice the one percenters find ways to capture the government in many countries (through their lobbying access, control of the media, exploitation of weaknesses of the electoral system such as non-proportional voting and gerrymandering).
instead of bailing out the capitalists over and over.
Bailing out large enterprises that are valuable to the public is fine, as long as the shareholders don’t get rewarded for investing in a mismanaged but ‘too big to fail’ business (i.e. they lose most of their investment), and the end result is that the public own it, and put in competent management who act in the public interest. Over time, the public could pay forward previous generations investments, and eventually the public would own a huge suite of public services.
Democrats aren’t actually trying to help people. They’re just the nicer version of capitalism, which still crushes the poor.
Because they’re bill mahr and Nancy pelosi style democrats. Not bernie sanders and AOC democrats
Ranked voting should really be at the top of our priority list. Would allow more than 2 parties to be viable and give progressives a real chance to distinguish themselves from the neolibs.
Honestly, Pelosi’s voting record has become a lot more liberal since she gave up her leadership positions. I feel like lot of her work as Speaker seemed more in gear with trying to pass an imperfect deal than getting perfect nothing.
She favors her stock rather than the flock
They’re called NIMBYs, “Not In my BackYard”. Everyone wants all the social programs, affordable housing, etc, until it affects their property value/tax, or perceived safety. They want all the issues to be solved…somewhere else that doesn’t affect them.
There was actually a decent video on this topic a couple of years ago: Liberal Hypocrisy is Fueling American Inequality
Relatedly, on a national level, making our homes into investment vehicles was a huge mistake, and 1978 California Proposition 13 made it worse.
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I think you’ve got some very mistaken ideas about who Democrats are if you think that a supermajority of them would be totally up for implementing a slew of progressive policies. They’re way more progressive than the Republican party is, for sure. But that’s such an incredibly low bar that it’s laughable. Democrats will do things like make Cesar Chavez day a holiday, or fly BLM and LGBTQI flags, but expecting them to actually pass legislation that addresses the root inequities in a meaningful way is an uphill battle.
It’s because it’s a neoliberal supermajority, not a progressive one.
Governor Newsom is much more representative of the California Democratic Party than progressives like District Attorney George Gascon. Even though the policy positions of Gascon are much more popular than those of Newsom and his fellow establishment Democrat neoliberals.
It’s the same in New York where Chuck Schumer is much more representative of the Dem politicians, especially the party leadership, even though AOC is much more representative of the policy priorities of the people in general.
As for why the mismatch, the main reasons are
- Party leadership control of primaries
- economical elites control of party leadership
- a hell of a lot of pro-establishment gaslighting by both the party leadership and the billionaire-owned media outlets that they’re allied with
Thr Democrats in the US are center right comppred to most European countires, the Repliblocans are … Some sort of fucking thing that’s hard to describe.
You’re going to need to Vote elsewhere in droves for that…
Good luck
California is near the top in these things, except housing which you can squarely blame on NIMBYs. It’s expanding healthcare for migrants, the minimum wage in most cities now is twice the federal minimum wage. It’s also doing well in terms of renewable energy even though energy rates are sky high. Alternative and public transportation and other public services are also getting better, albeit slowly. Can’t have everything, but CA is doing better than most.
The USA has a two faced one party system. Two sides of the same coin or “good cop/bad cop” if you will.
Both parties serve the rich, support imperialism and so on. In terms of economics they have the exact same function of serving the 10% over the 90%.
In terms of domestic affairs the good/bad cop dynamic really kicks in. The reps are ultraconservative, while the dems try to mud the waters with their slight progressiveness, in the end only coopting those things as not to endanger capitalism.
The best you will get from the dems is a
“I’ll try to not make things worse - for now. Vote for me or my buddy elephant over there will beat you up”.
(the not making things worse refers to their social policy, not their economic ones. Those will still get progressively worse for the working majority, even if it might be a bit more indirect. All the dems really are is a silken glove over the iron fist of capital).And tbh, for everyone outside of the US it doesn’t make a difference whether the bombs the policeman of the world drops wherever they please & the bags of money they send to genociders/reactionaries/fascists/terrorists have prideflag & BLM stickers on them, or not…
because implementing them is very unfeasable, especially on a statewide basis.
also california isn’t some sort of utopia, it’s still very republican it’s just that the bluer parts are in the cities
“It’s still very Republican, it’s just those the vast majority of people who live there are not.” 😬
Although maybe you’re just trying to state that Democrats are still rightists, even if they are significantly less so than the overtly fascist Republicans, which would be accurate.
Removed by mod
Tell that to pretty much every 1st world country but the US.
I have some bad news about what centrist Democrats actually want.
The Democratic party is a big tent and California is a big state with lots of competing interests. California does tend to lead the US in adopting progressive policies but the reality is progressives are one faction among many.
You’d have to understand what they are coming from - that they have to build up from a lower standard. You can’t just jump directly to super progressive without paving the road to it.
The people in the US are also more right leaning and religious in general compared to Europe. The US left is the EU right in some European countries.
California’s also still part of the US, and there will always be problems that they’ll share with their neighbour states.
TL;DR California DOES have nice things compared to the rest of the country, and I also believe that’s because of the lack of Republicans.
Ignoring all direct political alignments, also keep in mind that such problems are never trivial.
If they were, sooner or later we would have long solved them, even with enough idiots willfully not wanting them.
But it’s not easy. For example, California by and large cannot print money. And it’s not like the things you mention are the only problems any modern society faces, especially on a multi-culture multi-urban multi-layer multi-level scale like the whole of California.That is to say, if a bridge collapses, that’s urgent to fix. More so, to people in the immediate area, than to work towards a living wage with a 10-15y plan on how to deeply and permanently change and transform the job market and job situation. But now some money needed for the latter went towards the former. And a host of things are “on fire” every single day. Could you still put down policy changes? Sure, but if you cannot at least start on putting them into action, there’s no point. You’d just end up wording them in such a way that whoever comes after you could trivially ignore them, and you don’t want that.
And then we get into issues that do not benefit from human mass survival, and in fact would often benefit from the lack of it, like climate change, ozone depletion and species extermination. Which also cost insane amounts of money to work on, and if we’re being honest should take priority as they would automatically make all other considerations useless if we don’t first focus everything onto such basic issues.
So in short, it’s usually a combination of:
- Lots of problems
- All kinds of problems at the same time
- Lots of needs-fixing-right-now problems
- Lots of 105% prioty problems
- Lack of resources to fix all of those above + then also add more to the pile.
