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.
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.
Because they’re bill mahr and Nancy pelosi style democrats. Not bernie sanders and AOC democrats
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
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.
I have some bad news about what centrist Democrats actually want.
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.
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.
Because “that’s socialism, and socialism bad!”
I assume.
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.
It’s very fucking big, it’s wildly diverse, and even with a supermajority laws need to be written and passed. They also aren’t wanting to pass a bunch of stuff that causes them to lose in reelections.
Then there has been some talk of Newsom wanting to lay the foundation for a possible presidential campaign at some point.
How many different neighborhoods are there in just the City of LA alone? How many of them would agree on how to run the city?
How do you align the interests of the gay urban city dwellers, the film industry down south, the tech industry up north, and the farmers in the central valley?
Orange country.
You forget that not all Democrats are progressive, especially politicians who can get an advantage (also kickbacks) from political donations
Rule #2 - Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions.
Great. I got downvoted for pointing out the fucking rules which you’re breaking. Enjoy your dumb fucking rage bait debate that goes nowhere. If you hate California and Democrats then move to Texas and freeze to death with the rest of the republicans.
This is such a bait post from a conservative Republican. Just disguised as a “question”
I’m gay, far left, and live in Los Angeles. Try again.
