The Democratic Primaries

justjess

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Your just an ugly person inside aren’t you?

Even under sanders system - which for the bajillionth time isn’t socialism - people have incentive to work harder and do better. Does anyone really want to live out the rest of their lives with bare minimum subsistence? Not most, and for the few who do I don’t see what’s wrong with that. We still need those jobs filled don’t we? Most people are going to want nicer homes and cars and clothes etc, above and beyond what a living wage can provide.

McDonald’s made 11 billion in profit last year. Do you know how they profited so much? By under paying their workers and shifting the expense of their financial support onto middle class taxpayers LIKE YOU who had to subsidize the medical and food stamps etc that McDonald’s full time employees still qualified for. McDonald’s pays a living wage in every country other than America somehow. Your arguments are uneducated.

And yes, every single human being deserves to be paid enough to be able to live modestly. Every. Single. One.

If as a business you can not afford to pay someone fairly, don’t hire them. Do the work yourself.
 
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Socialism put a man in space before capitalism did.

So the "incentive" argument is utter nonsense. But please keep up with the talking points


And once again Sanders IS NOT socialism.

But why do facts even matter when your argument is "ma communism bad"
 

rainerann

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Why wouldn’t that be fair?


I guess that’s really the question isn’t it? Do people deserve anything? Do you deserve to be paid enough to live, or do you move yourself up the ladder to be paid enough to live? Do people deserve to get their medical needs be taken care of...and who’s supposed to take care of your medical needs, me? Do the dr‘s deserve to get paid for their expertise? If you squander your earnings..do you deserve to retire comfortably? We also need to look at a person’s culpability in their finances.

Not every company can afford to pay people a living wage, that’s why people look for companies that can. McDonald’s isn’t a company that was about paying a living wage but a company to give you work skills on your way up. Now, people expect to stay there and live comfortably...which puts all at risk of not having a job or getting less hours..therefore making it harder to find people to hire.

Socialism doesn’t work because of the incentive issue. Why work harder if you aren’t going to make more than someone that doesn’t because we have to be fair. We can only move up equally. Incentive is good for people.

Why would anyone who made a billion dollars..worked hard all their life to get there..want to pay more taxes to go to other people who didn’t work as hard for whatever reasons? That’s an incentive killer. I think billionaires/millionaires are incentive for people to see that people can attain more..that’s hope.
I think it would be good for you to read a good quality book on economics. In theory, you are capable of developing more substance to what you are saying, but everything in what you are saying in this post is rather meaningless at the moment.

The difference between socialism and capitalism in terms of incentive is not always the opportunity to make more. It is that what you make belongs to you and only you so that if you go to a store, you can exchange your money for anything you want. No will tell you that you can't buy lavender scented soap or whatever.

The problem with socialism or communism is that when everything is shared within a community, someone has to have the authority to distribute who gets what. This is why this system breeds dictators. It has nothing to do with people losing the incentive to work because they won't have the opportunity to get a raise.

It doesn't even have anything to do with having equal bank accounts. We could have equal bank accounts determined by an algorithm and the difference between this and socialism would be that you could spend your money on whatever you wanted. It would be yours alone. In communism or socialism, you wouldn't even need a bank account at all because everything would be shared.

Private ownership allows us the opportunity to fill out rental agreements or file civil suits independently and people often end up in disputes over material things, so this is important. With private ownership, a person who owns a house and wishes to rent it out can initiate their own rental agreement with another party. This rental agreement determines who is responsible for what and maintains that the owner has authority over the property without necessitating a third party of some kind.

This protects both parties in the event of a dispute. When everything is shared within a community, people will fight over authority at some point because there will never be a situation where everyone is going to think they are treated fairly in each and every case, which again is why a system like this breeds dictators because someone has to fill the role of an authority figure to handle disputes.

In a system of shared ownership, people lose the incentive to work because nothing they earn really belongs to them and becomes shared with a group. In some respects, taxation leads to some degree of shared ownership over certain things. However, there are other reasons why taxation and socialism are completely different and an argument for why they both can lead to negative outcomes for different reasons because of this.

And just an absolutely ridiculous description of McDonald's. I'm sorry, but that is the worst description of their mission statement that I have ever heard. In reality, many people do choose to stick with the same job for extended periods of time never aspiring to do more than this. The incentive for this is private ownership, which is a better way to address disputes which will happen within a community at some point so an individual should have a certain degree of authority over what they own independent of another person.

Outside of this, there really might be people who want to work at McDonald's their whole lives. I am not one of those people, but McDonald's does have a responsibility to their employees to provide these individuals with some dignity and quality of life. When this doesn't happen, a dispute results, and there are people who dispute that the way McDonald's compensates their employees is fair.

Addressing disputes like this is normal within a system of private ownership. Reaching a conclusion in favor of employees does not indicate anything resembling socialism. Sanders is also not an authoritarian candidate. When we were discussing socialism when Clinton was running. Honestly, I felt differently, but Sanders is a deer compared to Hillary and there just needs to be more substance to your arguments opposing Sanders, than your misguided argument opposing socialism.
 
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justjess

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You know what I’ve realized... my parents and grandparents generation (Lisa included she’s the same age as my mom) don’t seem to understand or want to accept (maybe due to suppressed guilt about their role in this mess) that ALL we (the younger generation) are asking for is the same opportunities, respect and dignity they themselves experienced and PROMISED us we’d have.

Go to school, educate yourself, work hard and you’ll have the same quality of life WE did if not better. That’s what we heard — all our lives. We followed the script. We went to school (defunded public schools with shitty quality compared to the ones they went to). We educated ourselves (to the tune of a trillion dollars of debt whereas they could pay out of pocket with a part time job). We worked hard (for wages that are a fraction of what they got when considering inflation, with no benefits unlike they had, in jobs that required way more qualifications for entry level gigs then they were ever asked to have). And then the economy fell out from under us as soon as we were reaching adult hood.

And what did they do? Did they rally around their kids and grandkids and insist the country make it right? Did they protest bailing out Wall Street and giant corporations and demand the country do whatever it possibly could to make good on the promises made to their own kin?

Nope.. they prioritized their own investment portfolios over their offspring and developed some sort of smug “I got mine, you get yours” attitude and have now been fighting for years to begrudge - again their own offspring - the same opportunities they themselves had and took for granted while pretending they didn’t have them or profit from them. It is sickening.

I hope they make college free - even though I paid for mine and will have paid off my loans well before anything ever gets passed if it ever does. I hope they make medical care a human right - even though I’ve gone ten years without it and will have acquired it myself by then. I hope they fix the wage issue - despite the fact that in a year it won’t personally effect me anymore (picked my field of study for a masters very carefully and already have a job lined up for the second the degree is in my hand - high demand/low supply niche field). Do you know why?

Because I NEVER want my kids or grandkids to have to experience the level of struggle I personally have as a result of being born at the wrong time in history (literally graduated college a year before the recession hit). I never want my kids to have to worry about housing themselves or how they can get medicine or see a dr if their sick. I never want their potential to be limited by their bank account - or mine. I don’t want anyone else’s kids to have to go through that either.

Maybe the older people just don’t get it cuz they’ve never been there, they think we are all just lying or exaggerating. Idk. But have some freaking empathy for your own kids atleast. Your grandkids. Your great grandkids. Unless your fabulously wealthy enough to support your family for generations after your gone. In which case, I have to ask.. do you pay your employees a living wage?
 

justjess

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Bernie Praised Fidel Castro’s Education System. So Did Obama.
By Eric Levitz@EricLevitz

A man who is not now, and never has been, a member of the Communist Party. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Bernie Sanders has a 100 percent rating from the American Civil Liberties Union. His support for individual political rights is so unwavering he has called for the enfranchisement of all of America’s incarcerated citizens. His belief in freedom of expression is so unyielding he has scolded progressive college students for shutting down the speeches of far-right speakers. “To me, it’s a sign of intellectual weakness,” the Vermont senator said in 2017. “If you can’t ask Ann Coulter, in a polite way, questions which expose the weakness of her arguments, if all you can do is boo or shut her down or prevent her from coming, what does that tell the world?”
And yet — days after the sitting Republican president asserted an “absolute right” to order criminal investigations into anyone he chooses and began purging the executive branch of civil servants who won’t pledge personal fealty to him — 60 Minutes wants you to know that Sanders may be too authoritarian to be trusted with the presidency.

On last night’s edition of the CBS program, Anderson Cooper made sure to give his viewers “both sides” of the debate over whether Sanders is a crypto-totalitarian. The anchor noted that, while “Sanders says the change he envisions most closely resembles Scandinavian and European countries with democratic governments,” both Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg have called his proposals communist. Cooper then offered some evidence for the Trump-Bloomberg position and asked Sanders to respond:
Back in the 1980s, Sanders had some positive things to say about the former Soviet Union and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
Here he is explaining why the Cuban people didn’t rise up and help the U.S. overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro: “He educated their kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society, you know?”


Bernie Sanders: We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba, but, you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad, you know? When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?

Anderson Cooper: A lot of p— dissidents imprisoned in, in Cuba.

Bernie Sanders: That’s right. And we condemn that. Unlike Donald Trump. Let’s be clear, you want to — I do not think that Kim Jong-un is a good friend. I don’t trade love letters with a murdering dictator. Vladimir Putin, not a great friend of mine.
One can reasonably critique Sanders’s remarks in political terms. Given the Cuban-American vote in Florida — and/or the devout anti-communist boomer bloc across the nation — the senator might have been wise to put more emphasis on his condemnation of the Cuban government’s authoritarianism and less on the unfairness of how the regime’s legitimate achievements have been elided.
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But as a substantive matter, the notion that Sanders’s acknowledgement of the Castro regime’s accomplishments betrays his secret sympathy for authoritarian communism is absurd. It is a fact that Cuba has one of the highest-performing education systems in Latin America, while its medical system has enabled its people to enjoy life expectancy and infant mortality rates similar to those of U.S. residents despite the island’s relative poverty. Meanwhile, with regard to Sanders’s remarks from the 1980s, the claim that Castro’s early social programs mitigated popular opposition to his government is endorsed by many historians of the region.
Every modern U.S. president — and a wide array of liberal commentators — has found positive things to say about an absolutist Saudi regime that beheads gays, suppresses all dissent, and had ties to 9/11. Does that mean Obama, Bush, Trump, and Thomas Friedmanare all secret totalitarian, anti-American Islamists? Or are those who cite Sanders’s remarks about Cuba as evidence of his closeted authoritarianism judging the senator by a fallacious standard they would never apply universally?

The socialist senator’s critics may counter that his equivocation about Castro must be read in its broader context. After all, Sanders also defended certain discrete policies of other authoritarian regimes. But again, this does not differentiate Sanders from the median major American political figure. Every Cold War–era president championed a wide array of authoritarian rulers for pursuing economic policies the U.S. favored. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan praised the murderous Guatemalandictator Efraín Ríos Montt, among other anti-communist despots, far less equivocally than Sanders praised Castro or the Soviet Union.

More important, the proper context for assessing the question “Is Bernie Sanders a Denmark-style, liberal socialist who believes economic justice must not come at the expense of civil liberties and political freedom, or a communist who wants to bury bourgeois democracy beneath the dictatorship of the proletariat?” would be the senator’s actualgoverning record on civil liberties and political freedom. And that record is more pristine than Trump’s, Bloomberg’s, or most any other 2020 candidate’s.

 

Stephania

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Bloomberg and the DNC bought this last debate by shutting out the general public and working class minorities with ticket prices ranging from $1750-$3000 and plagued the airwaves with his commercials in between :rolleyes: And it's not 'completely usual' as one spokesperson said in the article. No such thing happened before tonight in this election cycle

 
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Serveto

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You know what I’ve realized... my parents and grandparents generation (Lisa included she’s the same age as my mom) don’t seem to understand or want to accept (maybe due to suppressed guilt about their role in this mess) that ALL we (the younger generation) are asking for is the same opportunities, respect and dignity they themselves experienced and PROMISED us we’d have ...
For what it's worth, in the wintertime, I am often on the border of Texas and Mexico. There is an entire industry of Mexican border towns offering services primarily to the USA's senior citizens, ranging from comparatively inexpensive dentistry to cheap, name-brand pharmaceutical medicine. "Medicare for all" might sound like a scary proposal, especially to those more in favor of the warfare than welfare state (myself excluded, in this case), but the senior citizens making their way to Mexico are for the most part already getting SS and Medicare and still, sometimes, and were it not for Mexico, have to choose between food and medicine. I often talk to them. In many ways, "the system" seems broken, with candidates offering various solutions, and these Mexican towns are vantage points from which to observe effects of the break.

By the way, plenty of Canadians cross the border too, but they are usually only in search of cheap beer and a fun day out.
 

justjess

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For what it's worth, in the wintertime, I am often on the border of Texas and Mexico. There is an entire industry of Mexican border towns offering services primarily to the USA's senior citizens, ranging from comparatively inexpensive dentistry to cheap, name-brand pharmaceutical medicine. "Medicare for all" might sound like a scary proposal, especially to those more in favor of the warfare than welfare state (myself excluded, in this case), but the senior citizens making their way to Mexico are for the most part already getting SS and Medicare and still, sometimes, and were it not for Mexico, have to choose between food and medicine. I often talk to them. In many ways, "the system" seems broken, with candidates offering various solutions, and these Mexican towns are vantage points from which to observe effects of the break.

By the way, plenty of Canadians cross the border too, but they are usually only in search of cheap beer and a fun day out.
My mom is in the same boat with her prescription meds. She is literally bleeding money, still can’t overcome her anticommubist brainwashing. Seems like a lot of people are like her.. and some aren’t.
 

Lisa

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And yes, every single human being deserves to be paid enough to be able to love modestly. Every. Single. One.
That’s not reality and people don’t do a good job trying to make it reality...someone always gets hurt.

You know what I’ve realized... my parents and grandparents generation (Lisa included she’s the same age as my mom) don’t seem to understand or want to accept (maybe due to suppressed guilt about their role in this mess) that ALL we (the younger generation) are asking for is the same opportunities, respect and dignity they themselves experienced and PROMISED us we’d have.
No one can promise you the same life they’ve had..life isn’t like that. One can hope their children have a good life, try to steer them in the right direction for it..but life is too unpredictable to promise anyone anything. The generation you’re talking about were always told if you work your way up and work hard enough you’ll succeed..and that’s what they’ve tried to do...recent generations seem to whine about not having things they think they are entitled to..which I believe explains the difference between generations.
 

justjess

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You had entry level positions that paid enough to support a family. Employers who gave you health insurance and pensions. You could get a job without a doctoral degree. You had affordable college if you wanted to go. And then you fucked it all up by cutting taxes for the wealthy as soon as you acquired some wealth. Effectively denying the same opportunities you had to your own children while having the nerve to call us entitled?
 
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Lisa

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You had entry level positions that paid enough to support a family. Employers who have health insurance and pensions. You could get a job without a doctoral degree. You had affordable college if you wanted to go. And then you fucked it all up by cutting taxes for the wealthy as soon as you acquired some wealth. Effectively denying the same opportunities you had to your own children while having the nerve to call us entitled?
Isn’t it entitled to think you should have the same life your parents worked hard for?
 

Serveto

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And gas. Don’t forget gas.
By most reports, they get a lot of that from the spicy Mexican food and hot sauce they eat with their beer. Otherwise, and speaking of petrol, a five-gallon container gets too heavy for most of them to carry across the pedestrian bridge at border patrol.
 

Thunderian

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By most reports, they get a lot of that from the spicy Mexican food and hot sauce they eat with their beer. Otherwise, and speaking of petrol, a five-gallon container gets too heavy for most of them to carry across the pedestrian bridge at border patrol.
Mmmmm, Mexican gas ...
 

justjess

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Isn’t it entitled to think you should have the same life your parents worked hard for?
It is not entitled to think that if you get a good education and training and work hard you deserve to be able to afford basic housing and have the ability to see a doctor when your sick. No Lisa, that’s not entitled.
 
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