If the Dems hadn't caved on the shutdown and thus lost the healthcare battle, everyone's premiums would have stayed lower and folks would be happier. They'd forget how it happened and continue to vote Republican. (Lack of) affordability will give the Dems a rallying point for the midterms, just like Trump's scuttling immigration reform gave Republicans a rallying point.
Maybe I'm really cynical, but if folks don't suffer, they won't wake up.
Huge numbers of people were suffering because of the shutdown including millions of the poorest who depend on SNAP. It was already the longest shutdown in history. Dems did all they could. Now it’s up to voters.
I agree; even though I was in favor of the shutdown, as it dragged on, I realized how many people were being hurt. Americans are like alcoholics, we have to hit bottom before we are willing to change. So ACA recipients will have to be hit hard to make their unhappiness heard in the 2026 midterms. Florida however, I believe to be hopeless.
I think you're right about Florida. You can probably include Tennessee, both Carolinas, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and maybe Georgia. In many other areas, Murdoch's media will work overtime to convince people that it's all the Democrats' fault. I hope the length of the shutdown has made it impossible for that to be done.
One thing we not mentioned here is the reverberations from these drastic ACA premium increases that will affect us all. Many people will be forced off of health insurance altogether by these premium increases. These newly uninsured people, however, will not stop getting sick or injured. The difference will be that now their only access to medical care will be emergency rooms that have to treat them. The result will be increased uncollectable emergency room bills. To cover these losses, hospitals will charge their insured patients even more, raising everyone’s premiums. Higher premiums for everyone will lead still more people to drop insurance, increasing emergency room traffic even more and everyone’s premiums with it. And round and round it goes…
The point is that it is not just ACA subscribers who will be affected. Forcing millions of Americans to use the most expensive form of treatment available, emergency rooms, will force everyone else still covered by insurance to pay that cost though higher premiums.
We are all victims of billionaire greed and the callus contempt of their Republican stooges.
Absolutely right. It's part of what is so foul about what the GOP is doing. They couldn't get the votes to kill the ACA outright so they are doing it in a roundabout way by kicking the legs out from the entire system. They are willing to have God knows how many Americans die or go bankrupt due to a medical emergency - anything to kill the program.
And to replace it with what? Nothing. They have had a decade to come up with an alternative and have never done it. And as we all know, this was originally a conservative Heritage Foundation idea to create market places as an alternative to a single payer system which is much more efficient and the standard in every other advanced Democracy.
It's all so cruel and senseless and stupid on so many levels it makes me want to scream.
More consequences than you mention will drive things.. Emergency rooms will not be able to handle this; they are having trouble now. As people drop insurance ( the younger healthier) has an effect on premiums that insurance companies charge as well as what hospitals charge. Everything collapses. The more people get sick, especially with communicable diseases, the more people get sick and go for help... even if insured. We have many clinics locally, a boon, that also will not be able to handle this... and maybe won't if you don't have insurance...
And more... This will cause uprising surely because, I agree totally, the only way people "get it" is if they suffer or their loved ones suffer. Maybe ultimately we will get universal health care out of a process that first makes it worse and people understand that " I got mine" does not work. We are in this together.
The Republicans are not stooges. They know exactly what they are doing and doing it so that their base encourages it, even though they are being hurt. They, like all right wing parties, are the enemies of humanity, the scourge of mankind.
It's stupidity- hurting everyone, across the board. In every area they are able to destroy, they do. They destroy the ground they stand on and will fall through. That would be okay if we did not stand on the same ground. In the end we have to vote and impeach, then repair.
I hope that some hackers shut Fox News down. Even for a few days would be helpful. I have read that the Meidas Network is now having a larger viewership than Fox News.
North Carolina is one of the truly purple states. The Atlantic Coast and the Asheville area in the western part of the state are liberal. We have been gerrymandered by this Tea Party Legislature who are determined to take us back to a pre-Civil War culture, so our votes do not count any more. The central part of the state, except for Chapel Hill, Charlotte and Raleigh urban areas are held hostage by Fauxnooz. It is the rubes and fools ( who believe that anything to the left of Donald Trump comes straight from the devil) who are destroying this State by continuing to vote for Rethugs because of a knee jerk reaction to anything that might make their lives better. They are in thrall to fundamentalist religion cults and Fauxnooz. It all goes together.
As a Floridian, I agree that Florida is hopeless. Too much of the population here lives in an alternate information reality of either Fox or MSNBC. The spin doctors on the right will explain to their viewers why any new pain is the fault of Dems and they will believe it. The spin doctors on the left will explain to their viewers how the Reps will make it impossible to fix (so Dems can continue to fund raise off the issue) and they will believe it.
MSNBC. They don't overtly lie (as Fox does), but they do pretty routinely cherry pick, straw-man, and overdramatize the trivial at the expense of the actually significant. Specifically Rachel Maddow and Ali Velshi.
For 50 years the federal government controlled by the wealthy has been taking and stealing wealth from 95% of people and giving it to the top 5% mostly to the top 0.01%. The wealth transfer needs to be stopped and fair taxes restored. The tax rates for the top 1% and 5% in 2024 should be changed to what the tax rates were for the top 1% and 5% in 1965 with the tax rates for the 95% in 2024 remaining unchanged to what the rates were in 2024. That would create $1.3 trillion of new federal revenue for funding solutions to core problems including affordability of healthcare and housing.
Or even back to the 50's, when America was really great and the tax code was even more progressive. Not that hard, is it? Everywhere and every day in America, people are applying very sophisticated skills to accomplish truly amazing things. But in politics and governance, our comprehension is at a grade school level. And our president is an oaf.
it is not enough to fix rates, the tax base must be widened and deepened. the top1% escapes taxes not by low rates but by using all the custom-made loopholes (tax base erosion) that reduce their taxable income to zero or even a negative number - in that circumstance they receive a check. those loopholes need to go away
Well, in the '50s, we were still paying off the cost of WWII and Korea. And the bailout loans to Britain. And the cost of the Marshall Plan. We don't have to go that far today.
Why not? It worked then, it will work now. In fact, the economy was never so strong with a large, wealthy middle class. The root of the problem today is the concentration of wealth and power, and there is no better way to counter that than taxing the pilfering rich.
True. And, come to think about it, that's the equivalent of the WWII war bonds total, allowing for inflation. Maybe the '50s level of taxation is needed, after all.
The cost of WWII was financed by the sale of War Bonds (Series E Savings Bonds). Sales during the war totaled $185.7 billion. They paid 2.9% interest on maturity at ten years. That debt was paid off as citizens redeemed the bonds over time.
Britain made steady payments on their bailout loan, paying it off about 30 years ago. Britain also received over 1/3 of the Marshall Plan funds.
The Marshall Plan was actually profitable for the US government. American businesses provided technology, expertise, and materials to Europe as a strategic partner, and the Federal government purchased stock to reimburse them. The federal government made a profit later when the stock was sold.
This is the issue that must be addressed before long, or there will be little point in having a United States. Sorry, billionaires, but we don't need you. We need your selfish money grab spread around to the lower 95% income Americans. You'll get over it.
This was back in an era when 30% of all workers were in unions. We need a resurgence of labor unions, that work closely with their companies to see that workers get a fair share of the returns.
I agree on one level, but because the Dems caved, now they aren't just fighting to save ACA subsidies. Now the Congressional Republicans have suggested they'll tack nationwide abortion bans onto the bargaining table. Who could have seen that coming? (/s.)
So while, yes, the shutdown hurt many people, and I'm sorry about that, tens of thousands more will hurt exponentially more when Dems lose again, and this time every woman in the U.S. will be under one big huge bus. In every state, too many women will die on the emergency room tables from 100% preventable deaths such as ectopic pregnancies - not because there's a embryonic heartbeat, but simply because there's a zygote.
But not the men who got them pregnant.
In every state in the U.S., men will enjoy the exact same bodily autonomy they had during Roe v. Wade.
The reason the Republicans have been leaving the abortion issue alone is because it's a huge loser for them. They know it's suicide to try to tack on a nationwide ban.
If they try it the Dems should say, "Go ahead, we want to have the ammunition to codify Roe vs Wade back into law."
Actually, the shutdown did what it needed to. It put the spotlight on MAGA and raises in healthcare premiums. Now, when they go up MAGA will be blamed. People will start to say, remember that MAGA was alright with shutting down SNAP? Remember those big parties? Remember the bull dozers at the White House.
I hope Trump goes out on an affordability tour to tell people how much prices have dropped and how much better off they are. Let's put that on our Christmas wish list.
And while he's touring, let's be sure that we're speaking up, making the meme of he and the Republicans as the infamous Ebenezer Scrooge of "The Christmas Carol", his ill-treated and underpaid employees and their children (Tiny Tim) dying for lack of medical care. 'Tis the season and depressingly apropos.
Agree that the shut down accomplished clearly putting blame on Republicans, where even the most uninformed voter could see it. And now the promised floor vote in the Senate on extension of the Affordable Care Act credits is scheduled for next week. So another public show of Republican dislike of helping people. I was initially upset at the cave but now realize it wasn’t as bad as people are still making it to be - doubtful Republicans would have agreed to continuing credits at that time and people were hungry and hurting.
I believe the group of Dems who “ caved” to end the shut down also negotiated next week’s Senate vote on extending the ACA subsidies. While there was no guarantee that Republicans would agree to the extension during the shut down and people were suffering and losing SNAP, the vote next week puts on record the Republicans intent on making healthcare unaffordable. Who knows if now is a better time, when a public vote is looming, to force R’s to leave the ACA alone? Do I wish the D’s had been more forceful and fought harder beginning years ago? Sure, but I’m glad some of them have started even though they are in the minority with less to work with. I also wish American voters were smarter, more engaged and less focused on one pet peeve to the exclusion of the bigger picture. I don’t think D’s have stopped fighting. I think they’re letting R’s hang themselves for the long-run on this vote, if they continue down the path of making premiums unaffordable.
IF the subsidies come up for a Senate vote, they'll be voted down, and we're back to square one. Faux "news" will either not cover it or they'll gin up some spin, and viewers will believe it. Dems will wring their hands and Schumer will send a strongly worded letter to someone. The point being that, unless ALL, I mean ALL, the Dems are out there every. single. day. pounding on the issue, condemning the Rs in the bluntest possible language, pulling no punches, using no euphemisms, fuggedaboutit.
Let’s put the blame where it really belongs. Democrats aren’t the problem. It’s republicans who keep pushing these ridiculous laws on us that hurt women and working families and people get mad at Dems for not getting rid of them ?
I don’t believe trying to re-litigate the ACA of the basis of the abortion issue will succeed. It failed before, and the shifts we already see happening in the electorate should warn the Republicans that they are skating on thin ice. Now is the time for Democrats to press them on healthcare —extension of the subsidies and design for positive change going forward—because the midterms will be here in the blink of an eye.
I'm not sure Republicans are as afraid of the mid-terms as the media lets on. The Supreme's ruling on TX has unleashed the ability for all states to gerrymander. That doesn't guarantee Dems will win more seats, so I'm not all a-glow about it.
We were exactly where you say we'll be; the mid-terms were only two blinks of an eye away a month ago and we gave in. Republicans aren't going to campaign on a total national abortion ban. That won't be their narrative.
My husband was forced to retire earlier than he planned to by months. We are going to figure out how to make this work for us. We are not suffering, but we have been planning his retirement for the past decade as we did mine. I think that Trump is going to drive off a lot of people like us who can go elsewhere, and retain a lot of people who don't think they can leave. We all need to focus on GOTV in 2026. My new year's resolution.
Yes, and it became clear that Trump was just not going to concede on the ACA subsidies. And as the shutdown continued with no compromise in sight, my belief is that more voters would start to blame both sides, rather than blaming just Trump. If that's true, then the Democrats did the right thing in conceding. The Republicans know they have a serious electoral problem with with the ACA subsidies not being extended.
You’re right. Most people only learn things like that the hard way. People were upset in the moment about Dems caving, but in the long run it takes away any chance of Republicans shifting away the blame. People definitely won’t forget why their insurance costs skyrocketed if they have to see it every paycheck.
I'm STILL upset. My premiums are going to go from $89/mo to $224/mo.
$89/mo was not affordable, but I made it work. I couldn't afford the deductible in addition to the premiums, so not like I could actually GO to the doctor or anything. $224 is going to half kill me. I'm looking into using the foodbank, and I've been selling belongings, hoping to get a bit of cash behind me.
I've worked for Sen Kaine in every election since he entered politics. I've made phone calls, sat at tables outside of precincts, and done GOTV. I will never make a phone call, send a dime, or say a pleasant word about him ever again. He'll be lucky if I don't spit on the ground if he walks by (and I think spitting is disgusting).
Yeah, those subsidies will cause pain to Republicans and maybe it's necessary pain. But it will also cause unnecessary pain to people like me, who supported them through thick and thin, for decades. Other people may be too stupid to remember that Kaine is no friend, even to people who supported him, but I will not forget.
At the start of the shutdown, MTG said, the subsidies have to be extended. She was the only DC R saying it. At the end, she was STILL the only one saying it. Now, as noted above, even when Trump himself floated the idea, no movement from House Rs. Obamacare is their White Whale, and they'll pursue it to their own political destruction. They were shown polling in July that failure to extend would cost them the House, to no effect whatever. Senator Kaine can't make them sane, no one can.
Perfect analogy - it really is their White Whale. They are obsessed with trying to destroy it regardless of the collateral damage to so many lives and to their own party.
Not true. That's exactly what they're doing in Alberta, Canada. But Alberta constantly flirts with the idea of joining the US. But there is an obsession with fossil fuels there - which might explain it.
Alberta is MAGA North. I’m not surprised. My daughter lives there (doesn’t share their politics). Still, they’re pretty extreme and it didn’t used to be like that.
But even there I seriously doubt this is anything more than insurance companies trying to wedge their way in. I doubt that the majority of the population would vote for it.
It's a bitter lesson I've learned over my very long lifetime. Politicians only pay attention to you at election time when they need your vote, your activism and most importantly, your money. The rest of the time you are part of a large blob of people they try to ignore when pressed about the election promises they made to you. Their jobs are the most important thing to politicians. They say it is because they want to serve you but in reality this a soft gig for them. They are well-paid, have benefits we will never have, employ many staff and unpaid interns, and don't have to show results as one might in the private sector. Try calling their office and you often get a recording. Send them a letter and you get back a one-size-fits-all answer, probably generated by AI. I regret every day giving the Democrats my telephone number and email. Now I get approached by every Democratic candidate in the country, from dog catcher to president.
If you're an Independent or Unaffiliated you don't get to vote in the primaries which are where 90% of the candidate decisions are made. I'm a Democrat in a MAGA district. 10% Dem, 37% Rep, 39% Unaffiliated. That means that the most radical of the Rep party are the ones who are choosing your representative.
Senator Murray and Senator Cantwell of Washington state work quite hard for our state.
Many of the Trump GOP politicians are cynical, corrupt, and work only for oligarchs and oil and not for their state residents. But they keep getting elected. They are cruel to the people their constituents want them to be cruel to. That seems to be enough to secure their reelection.
Great. When they cut Medicare and medicaid you can blame the Democrats because they saw people without food. There was money for SNAP but Trump refused to release it because he could. The senators who voted to stop the shutdown down ruined their careers in order to get food (people were literally without food) to poor people.
But if it makes you feel better to vote for those who want to cut medical benefits and food for people, go ahead.
Thank you. In the span of just a few comments, three Democratic senators have been written off by voters who have no more acceptable alternatives. Politics is not compatible with purity tests. We have two options. If neither is acceptable to you, your only other choice is disengagement, joining the one-third of eligibles who let the other two-thirds decide elections.
Engage that one-third, and the GQP is likely doomed.
The Senators who voted to stop the shutdown were either retiring or not up for re-election in '26. They were "safe". They did not ruin their careers.
I agree there were poor people without food and that is tragic. I do have empathy. But it was a choice between "Worse Scenario #1" and "Even Worse Scenario #2". There was no good choice, just the lesser of two evils.
You realize that the SNAP benefits have not yet been 100% restored, right? Only partial benefits, so people aren't quite AS hungry.
Now with the OBBB coming into effect, even more people will go without food, jobs, housing, healthcare. Dems had Congressional Republicans over a barrel and decided to give in.
Maybe the end will justify the means. I certainly hope so.
I think Senators Ossoff and Warnock work hard for Georgia, but I don't believe either are up to the national moment we're facing. I contact them regularly and get boilerplate responses that mean nothing and are unrelated to my concerns.
I've promised both that I will not send either another dime. Not one dime. I already send them enough through my taxes, and I'm not seeing enough return on THAT investment.
I’m sorry to hear it, and I can definitely relate. I was mainly saying I think and hope the silver lining will be how strong the pushback is on it. Among the other economic issues, it will very likely lead to a big shift towards the Dems in midterms. Which would almost certainly mean extensions to the reduction in premiums, if not making them a permanent thing. It sucks that normal, economically literate people have to suffer for it to happen, but that’s the unfortunate reality we live in at the moment.
If they had not stopped the shutdown, people would not had food. Food banks were being overrun. Johnson knew that people would go hungry and he still would not have extended the ACA benefits. So you can blame the Democrats but Trump was the one who shut down SNAP.
I can understand your anger and frustration, but first let me thank you and express my appreciation for your civic engagement in support of the democrats in the state (I'm assuming) in which we both live (I'm in Hampton).
I,too, was 'mildly enraged' at Sen. Kaine's decision. Lately, I've realized that letting his fellow Americans, especially children, go without food was a position he couldn't in good conscience sustain.
This zero sum way of governing and policy making where one group 'wins' and another loses (like you and millions of others facing extreme rises in premiums and deductibles such that health care becomes unaffordable) is going to destroy our country.
I wish you well, Dejah. Stay strong. And stay well.
Dejah, Why blame Tim Kaine? It was clear to legislators that the ACA subsidies needed to be renewed this year. When the Repubs, in the majority in House and Senate, passed their one monster Big Horrible Bill, they stripped out 1 trillion dollars from Medicaid AND failed to renew the ACA subsidies. They have also imposed huge cuts on food stamps which take effect AFTER the midterms ( so voters won’t punish them IN the midterms!). Kaine and every Congressional Dem has tried every way they know to get Repubs and Trump to renew the ACA subsidies, which is why they allowed the shutdown to occur. But they don’t have a majority right now in either the House or Senate and so cannot vote these subsidies back into law. Republicans, meanwhile, have actively resisted re-instituting them. Most Repubs are in Republican-gerrymandered districts and so don’t fear their voters, so they’re not motivated by fear of losing their seats. Repubs have tried again and again to destroy the ACA (Obamacare) while Dem after Dem has used political capital to pass it. If you’re going to be mad at anyone, be mad at Repubs and Trump, who’ve promised a better healthcare plan for decades and never delivered.
Forgive me Dejah, but why are you blaming Senator Kaine when it was republicans who wouldn’t agree to extend the subsidies in the first place? There was no guarantee that
The whole shut-down was a lesson in cluelessness. It was Br'er Rabbit. Republicans should have jumped at the chance to fix their stupid mistake of not delaying Romney-care subsidies until after the '26 elections. Instead, they refused, and threw Br'er Rabbit back into the briar patch.
The truth is that the Dems seem to have had a heads up that SCOTUS was about to side with Trump over food stamps since the president can decide what is emergency spending or not in a shutdown.
This would mean back to 1/2 rations for November and likely nothing after that.
The poor have no wiggle room and food banks said they did not have the ability to fill all of the gap. The GOP were refusing to budge on the ACA and it is hard to negotiate with people who preferred a shutdown due to being able to cut programs, so in reality the Dems had little real leverage
Since the Dems had no leverage, it was mostly an awareness campaign and it ran its course.
Thus some Dems who were retiring "fell on their swords" and took the blame for reopening, but the reality was that the shutdown had done all it could, for now.
It highlighted who was really to blame for the rising premiums and also who did not care if people went hungry, Trump and the GOP. It put pressure on them and Trump's ratings fell due to the administrations willingness for cruelty being exposed.
The reason some had to "fall on their swords" and took the blame to keep people from starving is because they knew that some in their own party do not understand the logistics of the shutdown what real poverty is like.
With Trumps ratings falling, it frees up some in the GOP to grow at least a partial spine and maybe the ACA subsidies will be extended.
They fell on their swords because they know some far-left liberals will eat their own party members for breakfast if they do not get exactly what they want, starving poor be damned, even if it helps the GOP win, and the far-left who armchair quarterback from warm homes and comfy chairs, and pretend to be fighting for the poor, but only in theory and only if they get things exactly their own way, are often the main reason the GOP do win since the far- left often demands ideological purity or they will not vote or will run a 3rd party candidate that only helps the GOP win.
How does helping Trump and the GOP win elections by attacking your own and running 3rd party candidates because the one who won the primary is not quite "liberal enough," help the poor?
I certainly think Hillary and Al Gore would have done a lot more for the poor and climate change than Trump or Bush.
It often seems like "progressives" don't want to make any actual progress, unless they get things exactly their own way.
They even now attack Obama who finally at least was able to pass something on healthcare...sigh...it was a massive achievement.
I happen to be quite liberal in many respects, but I can't stand those who are willing to "burn it all down" to get what they want and who forget that there are many who can't weather the storm they will create, and the suffering we will endure if people like Trump get elected as a result.
Most who can't weather the storm over a fight about ideology are the poor and disabled. How does burning it all down and hoping a more liberal Phoenix will rise from the ashes, help the poor, or disabled, or fight climate change?
It does not.
Trump and his ilk are what rises from the ashes.
We have to stick together. Dems are nothing at all like the GOP even if some are more or less liberal than others.
I agree with your analysis of the shutdown, but I really wish that the centrist Dems would spend half the energy fighting the Right as they do policing the Left. I'm a Prog who just wants America to adopt some of the common sense policies that work all over the world, but are, because of Republican propaganda, utterly taboo in the US. Look at how the mainstream Dems attacked Mamdani (and Sanders, and AOC) for policy proposals that are only SLIGHTLY left of center.
The only Dems who were not on board with Bidens huge and very liberal Build Back Better bill were Manchin and Sinema, 2 out of 50 (Harris would have been a tie breaker) so who are the so-called centrist Dems who are standing in the way?
It had the votes to pass the House and the progressive caucus was a minority out of the Dem majority, so once again, who was standing in the way?
Most of those in favor and who were on board to vote for it were actually the so-called "centrists" and it was an extremely liberal bill.
Manchin was for the tax increases but thought some of the programs could be smaller and Sinema was for the programs but not all of the taxes. They were the problem children so to speak, but it was only them.
When Biden seemed to finally have Manchin on board, the progressives in the House kept adding more and more in after Biden went to a conference in Europe, and the deal fell apart.
With Build Back Better we got nothing in the end (until part of it was repackaged in the IRA) and part of the reason it did not pass was Manchin and Sinema, but also because the progressives in the House got greedy and exploded the deal when they kept adding more and more and more into the bill and drove Manchin away and we could not lose a single vote.
Even with the ACA's passage it needed 3 Independents that caucus with the Dems to even pass, and Lieberman, an Independent, was more to the center (and had campaigned with John McCain), but without his vote we would not even have the ACA.
So who are these people (Dems) standing in the way?
Schumer and Jefferies always vote for the liberal agenda, etc.
The truth is that Dems are not standing in the way at all and only the GOP are.
Manchin and Sinema are now gone, but so are the Dem majorities in the House and Senate and they are required to get anything done. We needed to take advantage of our majority when we have it and pass things even with the compromises.
Those further to the left, simply make up all the nonsense about the "centrist Dems" being the problem to promote themselves and their ideology, but the truth is that they simply have never had the votes for what they want mostly because of the GOP or those who caucus with the Dems who might help give them a majority.
Name a Dem that is standing in the way of liberal progress?
What is standing in the way are the numbers - meaning a majority in the House and Senate and often a supermajority is required.
NAME ONE PLEASE
Name the mysterious and imaginary "centrist or corporate Dem" and what makes them so.
It is just a meaningless talking point used by some to get attention and to promote themselves and it damages the party.
It is simply pure BS. 100% BS. Prove me wrong tell me who they are.
This comment is a perfect example of how skewed to the right American politics are. In the global community of 2025, BBB was not “extemely” or even “very” liberal. It was centrist…and finally seemed like some American politicians were ready to catch up with the rest of the world instead of pretending like we exist in an impenetrable bubble where consequences do not exist. In the actual real world of 2025, which is so globally intertwined in myriad ways, BBB was still not enough and way too late. We needed it, and it was a solid step in the right direction, but it was never liberal.
Bidens build back better was largely written by the progressive caucus in the House including people like AOC. It was also based on his campaign promises. Thus most all dems supported the same agenda as the progressives. So once again, who are the so-called centrists who are getting in the way? WHO? The truth is they do not exist. If something does not pass is is typically that we simply do not have enough Dems, not what type they are.
You missed the entire point of my comment. We are but one country that has to operate in what is really a global system, akin to one state operating within the larger country. Within the global system, the American political system is actually barely left of center (“progressives”) to center right (most Dems and formerly reasonable Reps) to far right (MAGA and the bootlickers). In the global system, we do not have actually progressives. What we call “progressive” is, for the most part, left of center. It matters because America does not live within a bubble. What we do, what everyone does, is entwined in myriad ways. We can call it “progressive” if we want, but it only is relative to our politics, not the system as a whole. In the globalized world that we live in, have to operate within, BBB was late-to-the-party centrist legislation. Although I disagree with you, I’m not engaging on “who gets in the way” because that’s jumping ahead of the fundamentals. My point is that the language Americans use to describe politics is totally misguided and distorts our entire view of left/right. Most Americans can’t even understand or have appropriate discussions about societal standards and politics that have global implications because our view is so skewed to the right. And, again, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, it does matter because this globe is intertwined. We do not live in a bubble.
It's not their voting records; it's that their rhetoric creates just enough substance to support the whole "radical socialist left" fuel that keeps the MAGA fires burning.
You are right. I was angry they gave in at first until a friend who is a social worker in IL said the food banks were being overrun. IL was fairly affluent and they couldnt keep up with the need, I can't imagine what poor people KY had to deal with.
And that's the difference between the Democrats and the GOP. The shutdown was the result of the Democrats trying to reverse what was unquestionably one of the dumbest policy moves by Republicans in my lifetime - cutting off the ACA subsidies put in place by Mr. Biden before the next mid-term elections. Democrats knew that getting those cuts reversed would remove a huge advantage for them for the next mid-terms, but they forced a shutdown over it anyway. Why? Because the Democrats, for all their flaws, believe in the efficacy of government and, frankly, aren't a bunch of self-serving deluded fascist assholes. The Republicans don't and are.
Krugman’s work would be better if it was more technical and less ideological.
For example he’s saying that Dems lost because they engaged in gaslighting on inflation, then proceeds to gaslight us about cancel culture. In reality all of it helped Republicans.
But what really brought us here are the effects of globalization. In his 1997 book One World Ready Or Not William Greider warned about what would happen today. No one else but Paul Krugman was highly critical. Nowadays I see Krugman making statements that could come out that book.
So a challenge for Paul Krugman, revisit the book and come clean about where you were right and where you were wrong.
No. The truth is that automation has taken far more American jobs than globalization over the past 25 years.
Studies indicate that approximately 88% of American factory job losses since 2000 were due to automation and increased productivity, while roughly 13% were caused by trade and offshoring.
That doesn't mean that U.S. jobs haven't been lost to globalization – they definitely have. But in factories, at least, automation has been a greater factor than most realize.
For completeness, there are studies that claim far greater number of jobs was lost to offshoring. I don’t know which number are real but let’s not cherry pick the data.
Also while automation is a big factor, when jobs moved from Michigan and Ohio to Mexico, that was jobs moving, not jobs being automated.
And what else contributes to offshoring? Prices and profits. Americans will never be willing to pay the true cost of a product. C-suites will never be willing to make less to offset worker pay. One way or another, these jobs were going to be lost because of prices and profits.
The problem isn't really lack of jobs. The US economy has created lots of jobs. The problem is that the profits from industry have been systematically funneled up to the top approximately 1% of the population, something like 50 trillion dollars that would have ended up in workers pockets ended up with the oligarchs post Reagan. It's "why we can't have nice things" now.
One thing Krugman wrote jumped out at me: that no one cared about the nonissue of immigration. He’s wrong. First, Biden did allow a big jump in illegal migration. It jumped after Covid subsided and he did nothing.
This was a huge issue to a certain group, a group obsessing over “replacement theory”. However, this group is VERY conservative and would never vote Dem anyway.
Immigration is a major issue that will persist for centuries. It's very complex and will never go away. It's probably THE biggest issue that put Trump where he is. It may be an even bigger issue in Europe. It's a major factor in Japan's ongoing "lost decade" (30+ years of no growth). It will continue to loom larger and larger.
Whatever popularity and authority Trump still has for some rests on the fact that amidst all his false promises, the border has magically closed. Inflation didn't magically go down and animal spirits didn't kick the economy into the next gear, and people don't like seeing law-abiding immigrants treated like criminals. But the border did close. And his voters know why. It's not because of immigration reform - it's because of his reputation for cruelty.
Immigration is a major issue that HAS persisted for over a century in the US. The only thing that changed over time is the nationality of the people villainized. Of course, we didn't have ICE hunting down the Irish. Or the Italians. Or the Chinese.
The importance of the issue in the looming election may have played a role in that timing, suggesting that the B-administration could have managed it better sooner. But A-I is telling me, if I can believe it, that non-citizen crossings in 2025 are not as minimal as I had thought, which is interesting....the one thing I was giving Tr credit for isn't as "fixed" as the media suggests.
If the GOP cares about not getting slaughtered in the midterms, they will focus on the border and on non-residents with significant criminal records. And it could also help if "they" would stop lying all the time and saying openly disgraceful and overtly racist things. They already have "that vote."
There was a sudden influx (it was a post-Covid thing). I don’t personally have a problem with it but plenty of people think that immigration should be regulated and not just people wandering in.
If you advocate for that, the Dems will continue to lose elections.
Dems? Did you notice how many Democrats split ranks and voted for the declaration that demonized the "horrors" of socialism? That would include single-payer healthcare, along with socialist programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the FDIA, "food stamps", and so on. Don't count on a "Blue wave" next November. The Democratic Party has become stupefied and incompetent, but hasn't got a clue. There is no organized opposition to Trumpism. The chaos we're experiencing can only end in calamity.
I was very angry at first, especially since I had knocked on doors for one of the defecting senators.
But...
Health care costs will go through the roof. SNAP is still a disaster. Medicaid is still a disaster. Folks will suffer and (hopefully) get angry enough to vote.
It had to end. People were starving. Republicans did not care. If they were fully in charge, it would haven't ended until the last low income child was buried.
The Senators who voted to stop the shutdown were either retiring or not up for re-election in '26. They were "safe". They did not ruin their careers. **
And...
The Republicans were stupid enough to have their changes happen before the mid-terms. People will see what the Republicans have done.
Maybe the end will justify the means. I certainly hope so. **
** Thank you Leigh Hamilton, from whom I stole a few lines
I hear you, but there's a countervailing issue: the first thing a Democratic House would do is impeach Trump, and if so, hold hearings. I watched the Watergate Hearings in real time, and see what it did to Nixon.
Trump, Miller, et al, CANNOT LET THAT HAPPEN.
I don't know exactly what multibillionaires' money, a newly expanded and lavishly funded ICE, etc., are capable of, especially in the hands of pathological liars, thieves, and thugs (and now cold-blooded murderers vis-a-vis the boat strikes) - i.e. the Executive Branch - but they will be pulling out all the stops to prevent Dems from taking the House.
At least with an impeachment, there are hearings in the House which shed light on the charges, organizing them and presenting them to the public. In a democracy, that’s of primary importance.
We say America’s birthday is July 4, courtesy of the Declaration of Independence. That document speaks of an equal right to life. If we do not have equal rights to health care, we do not have an equal right to life. And it shows in the data.
Perhaps you would be more comfortable in Russia. You should consider moving to a place that restricts free speech. I don’t like whiners, either, but you seem to be one yourself in your whining about having to tolerate freedom of speech.
It's like the Democrats' best possible outcome was to raise a huge stink about the issue so everyone knew about it, and knew that Republicans were refusing to address it, and then be betrayed by a small number of their own who *won't be on the ballot in 2026* (none of them; I checked), ensuring that they will reap all the electoral benefits and none of the costs.
If the Dems hadn't agreed to end the shutdown, we'd have NO GOVERNMENT...No air travel, no courts, and an open invitation for Trump to declare martial law...
The one thing they did accomplish was to illustrate the problem, and exact a promise from the Republicans to address the healthcare issue, which they have _not_ wanted to do for about 15 years..
Their last attempt was a "health Savings Account with $2700 dollars in it...to cover all medical expenses for a whole year...That was Paul Ryan's plan, and it was quite unrealistic..
This has been my view all along - MAGAts are so oblivious to reality that they won't change their minds until Trump literally stabs them in the back (or pocketbook). Even then, they will still believe Democrats are evil. It's going to take decades to unravel the damage Trump and the right-wing media has done.
Realistically, I don't think it would have passed. I also believe that they should have held strong longer, instead of folding at the very first sign that the blame was starting to get more evenly spread, but they DID make healthcare costs (a perennial winner for Dems) a major issue rather effectively. So it was effective, just less effective than we hoped it would be (in addition to being TERRIBLE optics to fold like a cheap suit right after crushing the GOP in off-year elections).
I know I was furious. However, my good friend who is a social worker in IL said that people were overrunning the food pantries. These people were desperate and scared that they couldnt feed their children. The Democrats who voted to end the shut down did it to release SNAP funds. They probably ruined their careers to help get food to people. Starving people was Mike Johnson sinister plan.
You're last line says it all . Our POTUS has ruined everyone that has tied their selves to his mast and unfortunately America deserves what we are getting for reelecting him.
This is happening because Americans never realized that Republicans don’t want them to have affordable health care and they never have. The media should be making that clear by reminding people of all the lies Republicans have told over the years about Democrats’ attempts to reform healthcare. They should be reminding people that those death panels Republicans freaked them out over never materialized.
If they never realized Republicans.... what a majority of Republican votes realized was DT hated brown and black people and that was good enough for them. It didn't occur to them that they also are hated. Even though there were ample examples of it .
Even while they go sick from a lack of affordable medical care and go hungry from the lack of food they take comfort in knowing 'those people' are being hurt too.
Unfortunately WE ALL have the day THEY voted for. A bare <2% plurality (along with the grotesque authoritarianism of the 'Electoral College' that allowed Mango Mussolini to lie and proclaim a "sweeping mandate".
(Which "College", by the way, was NOT EVER designed to prevent 'big cities' from running roughshod of the noble Rural People of the Earth...in 1789 ~95% of the nascent US population was rural; parity between urban residents and rural ones did not happen until the 1920 census. )
DonnyJon just announced that he's creating a list of the so-called "fake news" spreaders. I noticed that the Boston Globe is one of the first papers to appear. There's a list of the media to which we should subscribe.
And now the GOP can go after other programs they have criticized for years, Social Security and Medicare. They now have three more years to get rid of those!
According to the Congressional Budget Office they already did with the budget reconciliation act (i.e. “The One Big Beautiful Bill”). It’s likely to trigger more than half a trillion dollars of Medicare cuts between 2026 and 2034 under the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010. That 2010 Act automatically cuts spending to offset deficits unless Congress specifically protects a program. The Republican majority refused to explicitly protect Medicare last summer when it passed its reconciliation bill. Their reconciliation bill increases deficits by trillions of dollars.
Increasing deficits is actually the goal. Advantage the wealthy by dismantling progressive taxation and the ensuing deficits will make "gov'mint socialist programs" like social security and medicare insolvent. Win-win. That's the thinking at the very top. For the strategy to work (i.e., keep winning elections), they'll have to start with undermining medicaid and SNAP, but that's not the end-game.
Actually, they don't really have an end-game because none of that will work. They breathe a sigh of relief every so often when the wheels start coming off and Dems win power again.
I'm sorry, but how much clearer can the media make it? They report on politicians' votes. They report on the positions politicians take every election. They show politicians saying over and over again exactly what they'll do when in office. And people still go out and vote for candidates who want to cut taxes on the rich and gut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and anything else the helps poor and middle class people - aka the voters!
Like Dr. Krugman wrote in his post, most people just don't pay any attention to this stuff until it hurts them. And even then, many of them will just not have enough brains to connect the dots!
The media is complicit and you’ll never change my mind. They don’t challenge Trump, they let his abuse slide. They never talk about his mental decline which has been in full display for years. He’s nutty as a fruitcake. The big news organizations are kowtowing to him. To him they’re a protection racket.
You're half right. Yes, everything Trump (he's not a president so we need to stop calling him that) touches dies. I'll take that further and say he never let's anything, dead or alive, out of his clutches until he's beaten it to an unrecognizable pulp. So, we have that to look forward to.
More voters cast their vote for someone OTHER than Trump. It was the electoral college who gave us this hellscape, not the American people, and let me add, the EC did it TWICE. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by approx. 3.5 million. Besides, (and I could look this up to be precise) Harris won around 48.3 % of the vote and Trump 49.5% - ish. That's not a huge margin. So, no, I don't believe the American people - even those who were too stupid or lazy to vote - deserve this. No one deserves this.
Voter suppression was alive and well in 2024 election. A handful of states (Georgia n Wisconsin were 2)- the suppressing of black/brown votes was rampant according to Greg Palast documentary Vigilantes, Inc.
Trump has already come out and said he is going to make sure Republicans win all the elections because he intends on sending out people to "watch" that illegals are not voting, which, as former election worker, is really not at all possible.
If you worry about elections, be a poll watcher or apply for a job at the polling center. They'll take anyone. The polling place I worked was mostly Republicans and they were honest and professional. I hope that's true everywhere.
The voter suppression I was referring to was black/brown voters were thrown off the voter registrations in these states according to this documentary. There is also the issue of closing voting locations down in black and brown neighborhoods in order for the wait times to be hours which discourages voting.
I still don't think we elected him either time - the amount of interference, not only from Russia but from GOP operatives who deliberately worked hard to disenfranchise opponents along with ElectionTruthAlliance.org findings of notable irregularities in voting data, seems to me that he was INSTALLED despite a true majority voting for Democrats.
We've already seen elsewhere how wide the margins of victory were in most special elections for the Democratic candidates, the latest findings of manipulation in the TN race are demonstrating the path the GOP will take to try and steal the midterms and the next Presidential races.
We MUST take steps NOW to address the vulnerabilities in our elections that we've known about for decades and have done NOTHING about: older software in tabulation machines vulnerable to hacks, partisan oligarchs buying the voting machine companies, oligarchs like Musk openly bragging about being directly responsible for Trump "winning" while Trump openly thanks him for "knowing everything about the machines"...
Rather than engage, I just blocked a commenter on this article. They had the same tone that I see so often from the "both sides suck" faction. And I'm not sure whether these people are foreign trolls, disaffected Americans, or angry young men sitting in their basements - wait, those last two things are one and the same. Either way, they are a familiar group. They engage in a dumbed-down version of classist rhetoric and they never back up their arguments with actual facts or even anecdotes.
There's no point in engaging with willful ideologues who ignore facts and come off as trolls. The same tired talking points, based on a skewed and selective reading of current events. A nihilism. On the one hand, you have a party, however flawed, that has tried to advance our society, engaged in reasonable economic governance, observed the rule of law, obeyed the norms and respected the people and the constitution.
On the other, you have a party that has betrayed the country, the constitution, the people and the system, itself, the system that we have fought to improve for 250 years, however flawed it may have been to begin with. A party that has tried to ensconce itself in power permanently and waged war on the poorest of us so that the very richest could benefit. I could go on and on, but THERE IS NO COMPARISON BETWEEN THE TWO. You may hate the Democrats for many reasons, but they are the only choice at the moment to destroy the evil that walks in the land and all of this crap that you throw out to muddy the waters only benefits the traitors.
But you already know that. And if you don't know it - and I am aware of the similarities between idealism and cynicism - you need to take a hard look at the news and at yourselves. And, even though it's probably not the correct move for me - I won't engage with you anymore. Thank you, Dr. K, for you work and your words.
The people you're describing are immersed in Faux Newspeak, Snoozmax, Breitbart, InfoWars, and the myriad of web based incel chat groups like 4chan, 8chan, QAnon, and, of course, 卐itter.
They're burrowed so deep down in the rabbit hole that not even a glimmer of daylight reaches them.
I made that argument time and time again until Sen Kaine threw me personally under the bus along with the 20M other people who rely on Obamacare. Obama may care, but Tim Kaine CLEARLY DOES NOT.
I will never vote for him again. I will not work for his campaign or donate to him. I will not make a phone call. And I will start pushing back on this, "these awful, bad people who are fucking us over are better than the other awful bad people who are also fucking us over." I would not piss on Tim Kaine if he were on fire.
There was no sign whatever that Rs were going to move on this, none. MTG testified on The View to the panicked calls she was getting as we got further and further unto open enrollment. She can't have been alone. But she was the only one responding.
If there were any sign that Rs were beginning to crack, that would be one thing. But there were none.
I agree. Tim Kaine was in a spot in Virginia where a huge number of government workers were terrified that Trump was going to use the shutdown to permanently lay them off. Kaine did a hard thing and voted against his party but for a huge block of his voters. But I suspected at the time that he knew, and so did Schumer, that the Rs were not going to budge on this and that the pain with the subsidies going away is what the GOP voters need as their wake up call. I am so sorry that our fellow R voters refuse to acknowledge that they like and need the ACA subsidies. They need this to educate themselves. It’s painful and unfair to too many but it’s the only way to get through to them. This is the FAFO period for so many.
I recently read an article (probably in the BBC) in which the author interviewed high level people in the real Mafia and Cosa Nostra, as well as outsiders familiar with the organizations. DonnyJon is nothing like them. He's simply watched a few movies and thinks that's the way to behave.
I’m sure it was designed to make the insurance companies happy.
But it’s a huge suck of unproductive dollars. Health is not like auto or fire insurance. Expensive sickness can hit anyone. Single payer is way cheaper overall.
Yes and no. 15 years ago I lived and worked elections with Republicans. They were normal, honest people who differed for various, but legitimate, reasons.
I've since moved to an area with more Democrats. So it seems maybe Republicans since Trump have changed.
The great thing is that rank-n-file conservatives are still 110% convinced that Obamacare is a direct government takeover of healthcare and it needs to be abolished. So slashing or eliminating the subsidies is a good thing, according to them, because it will force people to "face the costs of their choices."
I heard this just two days ago from my boss and one of my business associates. They KNOW how horrible Obamacare is because they've been told this for years. It's worth noting that the very same conversation included their opinions that healthcare is a scam, healthcare is too expensive, and the government needs to be more involved in healthcare.
Thinking in a straight line is not part of their skill set.
It's a scam until they realize how much even a mundane visit with a primary care physician for an annual check up really costs more than the $20 to $50 copay you have. And heaven forbid you need some actual critical care. As I have crossed the half century mark myself, I have certainly been visiting the Dr more for all of these things that just pop up as matter of getting older.
I guess it would be true if you were younger you might feel like it's a scam since you seldom use it, but it does become important as you get older. If insurance only insured old people, then there would be little to no incentive for health insurance. But even young people will eventually need some kind of critical care which would devastate them financially if they had no insurance.
These two men in particular view health insurance as a scam. But they also view the entire medical profession as a scam because doctors do not want to cure you, they just want to treat you. Thus, according to them, they will not treat any disease in a way that cures it because there's no money in that--instead, the doctor will treat the symptoms forever because that's how they make money.
This line of "reasoning" brings them right to RFK jr.'s doorstep. They don't get physicals, they don't get vaccines (based on whatever the excuse du jour is), they don't get treatment for any of their conditions. They DO take Ivermectin like it's a vitamin, they drink apple cider vinegar/macha tea/acai extract/vanilla extract/ or whatever the latest "cures everything" fad is at the moment.
Oddly enough, one of them just had his 3-year-old daughter diagnosed with leukemia. For some reason, he's not treating her with berries or Ivermectin, but instead has had her flown to one of the leading children's hospitals in the country.
As far as the three year old is concerned, all I can say is thank goodness for that... but if she's not covered by health insurance, this guy may lose his house (and everything else he owns)...
Generalizing, I think this is a lot of the conservative and MAGA mindset - everything is zero-sum and everyone is out to screw everyone else. You have to get yours before someone else takes it. I earned what government gives me most anyone else who gets aid is lazy and is undeserving.
They will never vote for Democrats because they are at best naive do-gooders who will give away their hard earned tax dollars to these people. And Democrats are all in on a child-sex ring or some other conspiracy.
Jeff, you describe the conservative and MAGA mindset better in fewer words than anybody, conspiracy theories aside. “Everyone is out to screw everyone else. Get yours before somebody else takes it.”
And young people - esp. young men - frequently need health care b/c of, shall we say, "poor life choices." Like, you know, driving too fast and getting in a car accident or mouthing off at someone with a big fist (or a knife), etc.
Right. I just had an operation. The co-pay/deductible set me back $1,430, and there may be some extras rolling in this month. But the insurance paid the rest of over $17,000.
When I had my first child in 1983, we weren’t sure if insurance would cover the delivery because there was a case at SCOTUS awaiting a decision. Insurance companies that covered the spouse (woman) of an employee didn’t want to cover maternity expenses, even though they were happy to accept monthly premiums. The decision came down that yes, they must cover maternity costs, including child deliveries, about two weeks before my child was born. It turned out even more important for me because I needed an emergency C-Section!
Hypothetically yes. Indeed we did have not-for-profit without single payer long ago. But the execs wanted to make a profit, and so here we are today. Single payer is the only way to go.
This really highlights the fact that so many "conservatives" still buy into the old St. Reagan line that government is bad, period. In other words, they're idiots.
Hey Derelict… tell your friends that I had Obamacare when I was between jobs and it was far better than the employer-provided policy I have now. Seriously.
The GOP may attempt to kick the ACA can down the road another year, but I doubt they have the appetite for any serious reform of healthcare. In fact, the GOP seemingly lacks the curiosity to analyze and understand healthcare reform might require.
You can put the high cost of the American Healthcare System down to mostly 2 things: 1. For-profit fee-for-Service Medicine and 2. For profit Health Insurance. There is a huge sucking pipeline slurping up healthcare dollars and diverting them to corporate bottom lines. No other industrialized nation has this paradigm and we are not well served by it. There is the additional problem that our politics is largely funded by and driven by the special interests of Megacorps and the Obscenely Wealthy. When Congress allowed Private Health Insurers to convert to a for-profit model starting in the early 70s, they started this snowball rolling down the hill.
I read a book, Marketcrafters by Chris Hughes, that described how we ended up with this system. The American Medical Association threatened doctors that if they didn’t go along with the plan, the AMA would actively seek to have the doctors’ licenses revoked!
There is a bountiful plenty of blame to go around, but the gist of it is that the whole system is shot through with special interest carveouts and we the people are left holding the bag.
I wish it was that simple. All health care and insurance in Minnesota in non-profit as far as I know. But it's the same here as everywhere else. Expensive, confusing, and not terrible care, but not great either.
The list goes on and on... Drug companies that can charge whatever they want. Everyone wants the best and most advanced health care and there are few constraints on raising premiums. There's little transparency in much of the system, so little competition between providers. Hospitals have to provide indigent care no one pays for except they can make up by charging the paying customers. There are all sorts of groups and people with their hands in the pie who like things the way they are, etc., etc. On top of it all we pay twice as much as anyone and our health care is ranked near the bottom for industrialized countries. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2024/sep/mirror-mirror-2024
Not for profit for healthcare was supposed to reflect the “public good” of healthcare in society. Now it means big salaries for execs of healthcare chains and ever expanding hospital building. So not for profit means dump a bunch of money into that new wing with a flashy auditorium or research complex or whatever the board can justify to use this healthcare dollars you are paying. God forbid they open a clinic in a poor rural area. That would be subsidizing the poor and we can’t have that now!
Republicans understand what they are doing. They are extremist ideologues who want is the for-profit “free” market to run our healthcare system, schools, prisons, post office, public utilities etc. The government can run the military although mercenaries are acceptable because they don’t need benefits like healthcare coverage for injuries that happen on the job. Also they can get away with more lawless behavior because they are mostly under the radar. The media rarely covers what they are doing.
Much better to just copy Australia and have universal health coverage funded by a 2% income tax levy, plus state contributions towards public hospitals.
I think that's what's the frustrating part about our system. Solutions aren't all that complicated but it's impossible to get there. There are plenty of models out there that are working and will work. But there are too many people and institutions invested in our current system. The ACA was about as good as it was going to get except for not having a public option which Lieberman cut out if I recall.
Yes, it must be frustrating for Americans to know the USA is the ONLY developed country which doesn't have universal healthcare, which is SO much better than the system which exploits Americans for corporate profits. Our Aussie Medicare is brilliant. Americans who move here love it.
WHO keeps voting for Republicans even when it hurts them? White people. The majority of white people vote Republican no matter what it costs them in health care, inflation, Epstein, environmental damage. They vote for white supremacy. You can't leave this out of the equation, and you wouldn't if you had to confront the bumper stickers I see everywhere.
White people, a lot of them, are fearful and horrified by the increasing numbers of non-white people. So Republicans can be as corrupt as they like, can steal money, can deny them healthcare, destroy the Constitution, and they will still vote for them because they support white supremacy. They want to see the streets swept clean of non-white people. They don't want to see them in the grocery store and Walmart. They want them gone. And Trump and Stephen Miller will give them that, or at least say they will.
I'd agree there is a component of Republicans who are racist. But I think the majority will never vote for a Democrat and their self-interest just because they believe Democrats are evil. They believe the propaganda. Democrats give away their hard earned tax dollars to people who don't deserve it (yes, many are minorities) and illegal immigrants. Democrats allow crime to run rampant and are soft on criminals. Democrats love government and will regulate and tax you endlessly. And don't forget Democrats want trans (boys) in your girl's bathroom and open borders to let in the drug runners and criminals. Democrats support and promote abortion. They support gay rights which means they are recruiting your children and are promoting sex change drugs and operations for minors. They oppose free enterprise and are socialists who want to live off the public trough. The list is endless. Racism is there for sure, but it's not the sole explanation, if it were only that simple.
I think they believe the Democratic Party is the party of non-white people, immigrants and Black people. They aren't entirely wrong. If you look at footage of the Democratic Convention and the Republican Convention, the images are very different. The evangelicals are being told that wives should obey their husbands and abortion is evil. Although there was a time when they supported abortion. But the images of the Democratic Party display a diversity they are uncomfortable with.
They believe that they are victims of "reverse discrimination." They want Mayberry. There was no NC town that was a white as Mayberry (except maybe in the mountains). But Andy Griffith knew what they wanted to see, and where they wanted to live.
They never minded non-white people working for them as servants, but it bothered them to see them as equals. It "felt" off, wrong.
Definitely the bottom line. A country devoid of ethnicity is NOT a country I want to live in. Who doesn’t want authentic Italian cuisine, or Mexican or French.
This country was occupied by indigenous people when Europeans arrived. And the Europeans were from many countries. And they brought Africans. There were Spanish-speaking people, German-speakers, Native American speakers of many languages, Yiddish, French. This has always been a multi ethnic country.
What more noble legacy that being the place where people from every nation on earth gather together under the idea that "all people are created equal" and are governed equally without regard to the ethnicity of religion or country of origin?
If a person wants to live in a ethno-state, it is going to be difficult to find one, and it may well rely on authoritarianism to govern it.
No, but it is disturbing that a majority have supported Trump knowing full well that he tried to overthrow the government on Jan. 6, that he is racist and just plain mean, that he is corrupt. And still they voted for him. A majority.
I am white. The white people I know do not support him, but the majority do, and white evangelicals overwhelmingly do.
I am insulated from this rise (except for lateral damage) but a friend on ACA who works for a small business told me her premiums will rise from $250 to $1200(approximate).She is waiting to see what happens before she reupps or not. The owner of her business, same thing. Not only that, the business does a lot of importing and started getting wacked with tarriffs. A double hit. Welcome to winning with donny 2 dolls.
And, it's too often forgotten that in the 2024 election, 1 person absolutely HAD to win to stop the investigations and prosecutions. That person would say, do, be anything and everything to voters, in order to keep from spending the rest of their life giving depositions, and sitting in courtrooms - or worse.
And I am here to tell you that in a tiny town like Okeechobee, FL the food prices are at least what I am paying in the LA area. The only consumable cheaper than LA in this little town is gas. Visiting relatives here and thankfully flying back to SoCal today!!!!
We used to winter in Florida and noticed that grocery prices were higher there than up north. We had an RV and many of us packed our freezers with meat before heading south. The Republicans have no healthcare plan and they can't gaslight the voters any longer.
The interaction between people and taxes is quite odd and very distinct from other things we pay for, except perhaps for many digital services where we have no idea at all what we are paying.
As an example there was an artilce in The Guardian newspaper in the UK about childcare costs. A seemingly relatively well off lady wrote a comment about how after paying for child care she was left with zero disposable income. Large numbers sympathised with her. She decided there was no point in her working for nothing and she quit. Apart from some quibbles such as end of career progression, pension and National Insurance contributions end and many find losing work interaction leads to feelings of loss of connection with society there is quite a striking point. Her comment was one of outrage that she was, in her view, left with nothing. Yet if her child fell ill she would take it to the state funded health system, when her child goes to school she would take them to the state funded school and so on and so on. She had no idea at all she was expecting everyone else to pay for her child and for that matter for herself in many ways and I guess would have been horrified (perhaps offended) if she had been told such.
Maybe we need to spend some time reconnecting people with what they pay for and also what they pay to or receive from others?
Indeed, virtually no one has any understanding of the problems of public financing. They and many politicians, unfortunately, reduce the problem to 'commonsense' solutions familiar to them in household budgeting or running a business. It's why they think rich, 'successful' businesspeople are good choices to govern states or to lead nations. History proves otherwise.
Brilliant! When my 3 kids were young, the daycare bill was larger than my mortgage yet I was glad to pay it. They had excellent care and I had a career. My biggest pay increases were when they started in public education in first grade. We had really good public education but it still wasn’t as good as my daycare. Had to figure out summers and after school times, etc.
Ok but you're presenting this example as if the value people put on spending time taking care of their family is comparable to working. She may have framed it this way because she was frustrated about childcare costs, for valid reasons by the way. We want to encourage more labor force participation but then make it prohibitively expensive to do so.
Is work really where everyone should derive social meaning and connection? She may have friends she will see more, spend a lot more valuable time with her children.
Besides, outside of payroll taxes, that clearly fund health care and pensions in most countries, other taxes fund public goods and redistribution programs. So I should get excited to work full time to have a military and roads when the alternative may be a lot less stressful and personally fulfilling?
You keep saying the republicans/dems are trying to 'win votes' by making peoples lives better, or pretending to.
Entertain the notion that its basically a plantation. Dereg, piratization, regressive tax, destroying the environment....are policies you do to a plantation. Not your country.,
Overpromise, underdeliver and people voted for him. Republicans preach about God and Christianity, what about the good Samaritan? I call these people "Sunday Christians" They go to church on Sunday, the other six days of the week, screw people over.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke.[1] It is about a traveler (implicitly understood to be Jewish) who is stripped of clothing, beaten, and left half dead alongside the road. A Jewish priest and then a Levite come by, both avoiding the man. A Samaritan happens upon him and—though Samaritans and Jews were generally antagonistic toward each other—helps him. Jesus tells the parable in response to a provocative question from a lawyer in the context of the Great Commandment: "And who is my neighbour?"[1] The conclusion is that the neighbour figure in the parable is the one who shows mercy to their fellow man or woman.
"Electricity prices are soaring as data centers inflict the cost of their enormous power demands on consumers".
You are missing an important part of the one-two punch driving up electricity prices. It is not just the increased demand of electricity its also the fact that natural gas prices have been exploding. A big part of that is Trumps push to have foreign governments purchase natural gas from US. We really can't increase production of it much more and a lot of extra demand (and anticipated demand) drives up price.
They also take lots of water. Here in Texas, there are data centers they want to put in around Abilene and are trying to get the State to approve taking water from east Texas!
Some years back, the city of Atlanta was trying everything they could (including having the Tennessee/Georgia border shifted a few miles) to get a pipeline to the Tennessee river. Last year I read that the State of Utah was proposing to build a pipeline to replenish the Salt Lake from the Pacific Ocean. You guys are pikers!
If the Dems hadn't caved on the shutdown and thus lost the healthcare battle, everyone's premiums would have stayed lower and folks would be happier. They'd forget how it happened and continue to vote Republican. (Lack of) affordability will give the Dems a rallying point for the midterms, just like Trump's scuttling immigration reform gave Republicans a rallying point.
Maybe I'm really cynical, but if folks don't suffer, they won't wake up.
Huge numbers of people were suffering because of the shutdown including millions of the poorest who depend on SNAP. It was already the longest shutdown in history. Dems did all they could. Now it’s up to voters.
I agree; even though I was in favor of the shutdown, as it dragged on, I realized how many people were being hurt. Americans are like alcoholics, we have to hit bottom before we are willing to change. So ACA recipients will have to be hit hard to make their unhappiness heard in the 2026 midterms. Florida however, I believe to be hopeless.
I think you're right about Florida. You can probably include Tennessee, both Carolinas, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and maybe Georgia. In many other areas, Murdoch's media will work overtime to convince people that it's all the Democrats' fault. I hope the length of the shutdown has made it impossible for that to be done.
One thing we not mentioned here is the reverberations from these drastic ACA premium increases that will affect us all. Many people will be forced off of health insurance altogether by these premium increases. These newly uninsured people, however, will not stop getting sick or injured. The difference will be that now their only access to medical care will be emergency rooms that have to treat them. The result will be increased uncollectable emergency room bills. To cover these losses, hospitals will charge their insured patients even more, raising everyone’s premiums. Higher premiums for everyone will lead still more people to drop insurance, increasing emergency room traffic even more and everyone’s premiums with it. And round and round it goes…
The point is that it is not just ACA subscribers who will be affected. Forcing millions of Americans to use the most expensive form of treatment available, emergency rooms, will force everyone else still covered by insurance to pay that cost though higher premiums.
We are all victims of billionaire greed and the callus contempt of their Republican stooges.
Absolutely right. It's part of what is so foul about what the GOP is doing. They couldn't get the votes to kill the ACA outright so they are doing it in a roundabout way by kicking the legs out from the entire system. They are willing to have God knows how many Americans die or go bankrupt due to a medical emergency - anything to kill the program.
And to replace it with what? Nothing. They have had a decade to come up with an alternative and have never done it. And as we all know, this was originally a conservative Heritage Foundation idea to create market places as an alternative to a single payer system which is much more efficient and the standard in every other advanced Democracy.
It's all so cruel and senseless and stupid on so many levels it makes me want to scream.
More consequences than you mention will drive things.. Emergency rooms will not be able to handle this; they are having trouble now. As people drop insurance ( the younger healthier) has an effect on premiums that insurance companies charge as well as what hospitals charge. Everything collapses. The more people get sick, especially with communicable diseases, the more people get sick and go for help... even if insured. We have many clinics locally, a boon, that also will not be able to handle this... and maybe won't if you don't have insurance...
And more... This will cause uprising surely because, I agree totally, the only way people "get it" is if they suffer or their loved ones suffer. Maybe ultimately we will get universal health care out of a process that first makes it worse and people understand that " I got mine" does not work. We are in this together.
The Republicans are not stooges. They know exactly what they are doing and doing it so that their base encourages it, even though they are being hurt. They, like all right wing parties, are the enemies of humanity, the scourge of mankind.
It's stupidity- hurting everyone, across the board. In every area they are able to destroy, they do. They destroy the ground they stand on and will fall through. That would be okay if we did not stand on the same ground. In the end we have to vote and impeach, then repair.
I hope that some hackers shut Fox News down. Even for a few days would be helpful. I have read that the Meidas Network is now having a larger viewership than Fox News.
North Carolina is one of the truly purple states. The Atlantic Coast and the Asheville area in the western part of the state are liberal. We have been gerrymandered by this Tea Party Legislature who are determined to take us back to a pre-Civil War culture, so our votes do not count any more. The central part of the state, except for Chapel Hill, Charlotte and Raleigh urban areas are held hostage by Fauxnooz. It is the rubes and fools ( who believe that anything to the left of Donald Trump comes straight from the devil) who are destroying this State by continuing to vote for Rethugs because of a knee jerk reaction to anything that might make their lives better. They are in thrall to fundamentalist religion cults and Fauxnooz. It all goes together.
As a Floridian, I agree that Florida is hopeless. Too much of the population here lives in an alternate information reality of either Fox or MSNBC. The spin doctors on the right will explain to their viewers why any new pain is the fault of Dems and they will believe it. The spin doctors on the left will explain to their viewers how the Reps will make it impossible to fix (so Dems can continue to fund raise off the issue) and they will believe it.
There's really only one group of spin doctors in the US. Their goal is to keep the proles from uniting. They are wildly successful.
Can you provide any examples of spin doctors on the left working in the mass media like Fox News is on the right?
MSNBC. They don't overtly lie (as Fox does), but they do pretty routinely cherry pick, straw-man, and overdramatize the trivial at the expense of the actually significant. Specifically Rachel Maddow and Ali Velshi.
Americans have to hit bottom in order to get motivated to pay attention.
As will be Alabama for which the healthcare desertification will accelerate to consume the entirety of rural population.
For 50 years the federal government controlled by the wealthy has been taking and stealing wealth from 95% of people and giving it to the top 5% mostly to the top 0.01%. The wealth transfer needs to be stopped and fair taxes restored. The tax rates for the top 1% and 5% in 2024 should be changed to what the tax rates were for the top 1% and 5% in 1965 with the tax rates for the 95% in 2024 remaining unchanged to what the rates were in 2024. That would create $1.3 trillion of new federal revenue for funding solutions to core problems including affordability of healthcare and housing.
Or even back to the 50's, when America was really great and the tax code was even more progressive. Not that hard, is it? Everywhere and every day in America, people are applying very sophisticated skills to accomplish truly amazing things. But in politics and governance, our comprehension is at a grade school level. And our president is an oaf.
it is not enough to fix rates, the tax base must be widened and deepened. the top1% escapes taxes not by low rates but by using all the custom-made loopholes (tax base erosion) that reduce their taxable income to zero or even a negative number - in that circumstance they receive a check. those loopholes need to go away
as someone said lately, he much preferred the time when the President of the United States and the village idiot were different people.
Well, in the '50s, we were still paying off the cost of WWII and Korea. And the bailout loans to Britain. And the cost of the Marshall Plan. We don't have to go that far today.
Why not? It worked then, it will work now. In fact, the economy was never so strong with a large, wealthy middle class. The root of the problem today is the concentration of wealth and power, and there is no better way to counter that than taxing the pilfering rich.
Um, $35 trillion debt? Debt service is the elephant in the long-term room.
True. And, come to think about it, that's the equivalent of the WWII war bonds total, allowing for inflation. Maybe the '50s level of taxation is needed, after all.
The cost of WWII was financed by the sale of War Bonds (Series E Savings Bonds). Sales during the war totaled $185.7 billion. They paid 2.9% interest on maturity at ten years. That debt was paid off as citizens redeemed the bonds over time.
Britain made steady payments on their bailout loan, paying it off about 30 years ago. Britain also received over 1/3 of the Marshall Plan funds.
The Marshall Plan was actually profitable for the US government. American businesses provided technology, expertise, and materials to Europe as a strategic partner, and the Federal government purchased stock to reimburse them. The federal government made a profit later when the stock was sold.
This is the issue that must be addressed before long, or there will be little point in having a United States. Sorry, billionaires, but we don't need you. We need your selfish money grab spread around to the lower 95% income Americans. You'll get over it.
The wealth was developed by the people and should be returned to the people, not the pilfering rich and powerful.
This was back in an era when 30% of all workers were in unions. We need a resurgence of labor unions, that work closely with their companies to see that workers get a fair share of the returns.
A wealth tax and/or a financial transactions tax would add even more to the Treasury - maybe even pay for the deficit.
So, what you suggest is that there really is a solution available if an equitable revenue structure was restored.
Yes
I agree on one level, but because the Dems caved, now they aren't just fighting to save ACA subsidies. Now the Congressional Republicans have suggested they'll tack nationwide abortion bans onto the bargaining table. Who could have seen that coming? (/s.)
So while, yes, the shutdown hurt many people, and I'm sorry about that, tens of thousands more will hurt exponentially more when Dems lose again, and this time every woman in the U.S. will be under one big huge bus. In every state, too many women will die on the emergency room tables from 100% preventable deaths such as ectopic pregnancies - not because there's a embryonic heartbeat, but simply because there's a zygote.
But not the men who got them pregnant.
In every state in the U.S., men will enjoy the exact same bodily autonomy they had during Roe v. Wade.
The reason the Republicans have been leaving the abortion issue alone is because it's a huge loser for them. They know it's suicide to try to tack on a nationwide ban.
If they try it the Dems should say, "Go ahead, we want to have the ammunition to codify Roe vs Wade back into law."
Actually, the shutdown did what it needed to. It put the spotlight on MAGA and raises in healthcare premiums. Now, when they go up MAGA will be blamed. People will start to say, remember that MAGA was alright with shutting down SNAP? Remember those big parties? Remember the bull dozers at the White House.
I hope Trump goes out on an affordability tour to tell people how much prices have dropped and how much better off they are. Let's put that on our Christmas wish list.
And while he's touring, let's be sure that we're speaking up, making the meme of he and the Republicans as the infamous Ebenezer Scrooge of "The Christmas Carol", his ill-treated and underpaid employees and their children (Tiny Tim) dying for lack of medical care. 'Tis the season and depressingly apropos.
Scrooge repents however, and gives money to the poor. Trump? Not so much. Let them eat a ballroom!
But....they aren't leaving the abortion issue alone. They just said they won't continue ACA subsidies without a ban, as Leigh says.
Agree that the shut down accomplished clearly putting blame on Republicans, where even the most uninformed voter could see it. And now the promised floor vote in the Senate on extension of the Affordable Care Act credits is scheduled for next week. So another public show of Republican dislike of helping people. I was initially upset at the cave but now realize it wasn’t as bad as people are still making it to be - doubtful Republicans would have agreed to continuing credits at that time and people were hungry and hurting.
I think we may have had subsidies now if Dems hadn’t caved. Now republicans may just be assholes that they are and refuse to give subsidies for theACA
I believe the group of Dems who “ caved” to end the shut down also negotiated next week’s Senate vote on extending the ACA subsidies. While there was no guarantee that Republicans would agree to the extension during the shut down and people were suffering and losing SNAP, the vote next week puts on record the Republicans intent on making healthcare unaffordable. Who knows if now is a better time, when a public vote is looming, to force R’s to leave the ACA alone? Do I wish the D’s had been more forceful and fought harder beginning years ago? Sure, but I’m glad some of them have started even though they are in the minority with less to work with. I also wish American voters were smarter, more engaged and less focused on one pet peeve to the exclusion of the bigger picture. I don’t think D’s have stopped fighting. I think they’re letting R’s hang themselves for the long-run on this vote, if they continue down the path of making premiums unaffordable.
IF the subsidies come up for a Senate vote, they'll be voted down, and we're back to square one. Faux "news" will either not cover it or they'll gin up some spin, and viewers will believe it. Dems will wring their hands and Schumer will send a strongly worded letter to someone. The point being that, unless ALL, I mean ALL, the Dems are out there every. single. day. pounding on the issue, condemning the Rs in the bluntest possible language, pulling no punches, using no euphemisms, fuggedaboutit.
the impact of Fox poisoning on the possiblity of achieving sensible policies that would actually help real people cannot be overestimated.
Agree, John. Part and parcel of the GOP dumbing down plan, hatched under Ronnie Raygun.
Let’s put the blame where it really belongs. Democrats aren’t the problem. It’s republicans who keep pushing these ridiculous laws on us that hurt women and working families and people get mad at Dems for not getting rid of them ?
I don’t believe trying to re-litigate the ACA of the basis of the abortion issue will succeed. It failed before, and the shifts we already see happening in the electorate should warn the Republicans that they are skating on thin ice. Now is the time for Democrats to press them on healthcare —extension of the subsidies and design for positive change going forward—because the midterms will be here in the blink of an eye.
I'm not sure Republicans are as afraid of the mid-terms as the media lets on. The Supreme's ruling on TX has unleashed the ability for all states to gerrymander. That doesn't guarantee Dems will win more seats, so I'm not all a-glow about it.
We were exactly where you say we'll be; the mid-terms were only two blinks of an eye away a month ago and we gave in. Republicans aren't going to campaign on a total national abortion ban. That won't be their narrative.
My husband was forced to retire earlier than he planned to by months. We are going to figure out how to make this work for us. We are not suffering, but we have been planning his retirement for the past decade as we did mine. I think that Trump is going to drive off a lot of people like us who can go elsewhere, and retain a lot of people who don't think they can leave. We all need to focus on GOTV in 2026. My new year's resolution.
Yes, and it became clear that Trump was just not going to concede on the ACA subsidies. And as the shutdown continued with no compromise in sight, my belief is that more voters would start to blame both sides, rather than blaming just Trump. If that's true, then the Democrats did the right thing in conceding. The Republicans know they have a serious electoral problem with with the ACA subsidies not being extended.
You’re right. Most people only learn things like that the hard way. People were upset in the moment about Dems caving, but in the long run it takes away any chance of Republicans shifting away the blame. People definitely won’t forget why their insurance costs skyrocketed if they have to see it every paycheck.
I'm STILL upset. My premiums are going to go from $89/mo to $224/mo.
$89/mo was not affordable, but I made it work. I couldn't afford the deductible in addition to the premiums, so not like I could actually GO to the doctor or anything. $224 is going to half kill me. I'm looking into using the foodbank, and I've been selling belongings, hoping to get a bit of cash behind me.
I've worked for Sen Kaine in every election since he entered politics. I've made phone calls, sat at tables outside of precincts, and done GOTV. I will never make a phone call, send a dime, or say a pleasant word about him ever again. He'll be lucky if I don't spit on the ground if he walks by (and I think spitting is disgusting).
Yeah, those subsidies will cause pain to Republicans and maybe it's necessary pain. But it will also cause unnecessary pain to people like me, who supported them through thick and thin, for decades. Other people may be too stupid to remember that Kaine is no friend, even to people who supported him, but I will not forget.
At the start of the shutdown, MTG said, the subsidies have to be extended. She was the only DC R saying it. At the end, she was STILL the only one saying it. Now, as noted above, even when Trump himself floated the idea, no movement from House Rs. Obamacare is their White Whale, and they'll pursue it to their own political destruction. They were shown polling in July that failure to extend would cost them the House, to no effect whatever. Senator Kaine can't make them sane, no one can.
Perfect analogy - it really is their White Whale. They are obsessed with trying to destroy it regardless of the collateral damage to so many lives and to their own party.
This is why that in countries with universal healthcare, no politicians are campaigning on bringing in American style healthcare.
Other countries now use the US as a warning, not as an inspiration.
Not true. That's exactly what they're doing in Alberta, Canada. But Alberta constantly flirts with the idea of joining the US. But there is an obsession with fossil fuels there - which might explain it.
Alberta is MAGA North. I’m not surprised. My daughter lives there (doesn’t share their politics). Still, they’re pretty extreme and it didn’t used to be like that.
But even there I seriously doubt this is anything more than insurance companies trying to wedge their way in. I doubt that the majority of the population would vote for it.
Well they voted for Danielle Smith, the Alberta Premiere who promotes these ideas and cosies up to Trump. So who knows?
It's a bitter lesson I've learned over my very long lifetime. Politicians only pay attention to you at election time when they need your vote, your activism and most importantly, your money. The rest of the time you are part of a large blob of people they try to ignore when pressed about the election promises they made to you. Their jobs are the most important thing to politicians. They say it is because they want to serve you but in reality this a soft gig for them. They are well-paid, have benefits we will never have, employ many staff and unpaid interns, and don't have to show results as one might in the private sector. Try calling their office and you often get a recording. Send them a letter and you get back a one-size-fits-all answer, probably generated by AI. I regret every day giving the Democrats my telephone number and email. Now I get approached by every Democratic candidate in the country, from dog catcher to president.
Try changing your registration to Independent. You can still vote for Dems if you like, but you won't be on their beg list as often.
If you're an Independent or Unaffiliated you don't get to vote in the primaries which are where 90% of the candidate decisions are made. I'm a Democrat in a MAGA district. 10% Dem, 37% Rep, 39% Unaffiliated. That means that the most radical of the Rep party are the ones who are choosing your representative.
We need open primaries.
You can, if you're lucky to live in an enlightened jurisdiction like California. Non-affiliated voters can choose a primary.
Senator Murray and Senator Cantwell of Washington state work quite hard for our state.
Many of the Trump GOP politicians are cynical, corrupt, and work only for oligarchs and oil and not for their state residents. But they keep getting elected. They are cruel to the people their constituents want them to be cruel to. That seems to be enough to secure their reelection.
Bingo. The cruelty really IS the point.
Great. When they cut Medicare and medicaid you can blame the Democrats because they saw people without food. There was money for SNAP but Trump refused to release it because he could. The senators who voted to stop the shutdown down ruined their careers in order to get food (people were literally without food) to poor people.
But if it makes you feel better to vote for those who want to cut medical benefits and food for people, go ahead.
Thank you. In the span of just a few comments, three Democratic senators have been written off by voters who have no more acceptable alternatives. Politics is not compatible with purity tests. We have two options. If neither is acceptable to you, your only other choice is disengagement, joining the one-third of eligibles who let the other two-thirds decide elections.
Engage that one-third, and the GQP is likely doomed.
The Senators who voted to stop the shutdown were either retiring or not up for re-election in '26. They were "safe". They did not ruin their careers.
I agree there were poor people without food and that is tragic. I do have empathy. But it was a choice between "Worse Scenario #1" and "Even Worse Scenario #2". There was no good choice, just the lesser of two evils.
You realize that the SNAP benefits have not yet been 100% restored, right? Only partial benefits, so people aren't quite AS hungry.
Now with the OBBB coming into effect, even more people will go without food, jobs, housing, healthcare. Dems had Congressional Republicans over a barrel and decided to give in.
Maybe the end will justify the means. I certainly hope so.
And DonnyJon is claiming that SNAP benefits will not be restored to blue States.
I think Senators Ossoff and Warnock work hard for Georgia, but I don't believe either are up to the national moment we're facing. I contact them regularly and get boilerplate responses that mean nothing and are unrelated to my concerns.
I've promised both that I will not send either another dime. Not one dime. I already send them enough through my taxes, and I'm not seeing enough return on THAT investment.
Your donation to them is all they get. Government doesn’t help their campaigns.
I have and use caller Id and a spam folder.
I’m sorry to hear it, and I can definitely relate. I was mainly saying I think and hope the silver lining will be how strong the pushback is on it. Among the other economic issues, it will very likely lead to a big shift towards the Dems in midterms. Which would almost certainly mean extensions to the reduction in premiums, if not making them a permanent thing. It sucks that normal, economically literate people have to suffer for it to happen, but that’s the unfortunate reality we live in at the moment.
That is if Trump doesn’t rig the election.
If they had not stopped the shutdown, people would not had food. Food banks were being overrun. Johnson knew that people would go hungry and he still would not have extended the ACA benefits. So you can blame the Democrats but Trump was the one who shut down SNAP.
I am sorry.
Dejah,
I can understand your anger and frustration, but first let me thank you and express my appreciation for your civic engagement in support of the democrats in the state (I'm assuming) in which we both live (I'm in Hampton).
I,too, was 'mildly enraged' at Sen. Kaine's decision. Lately, I've realized that letting his fellow Americans, especially children, go without food was a position he couldn't in good conscience sustain.
This zero sum way of governing and policy making where one group 'wins' and another loses (like you and millions of others facing extreme rises in premiums and deductibles such that health care becomes unaffordable) is going to destroy our country.
I wish you well, Dejah. Stay strong. And stay well.
It is so sad that you've worked so hard and end up suffering for it. I am sorry.
You're buying the Republican propaganda and blaming the wrong party for your health care cost increase.
I will support a primary challenge to Kaine. I was supremely disappointed to see him on the list of Quislings.
Dejah, Why blame Tim Kaine? It was clear to legislators that the ACA subsidies needed to be renewed this year. When the Repubs, in the majority in House and Senate, passed their one monster Big Horrible Bill, they stripped out 1 trillion dollars from Medicaid AND failed to renew the ACA subsidies. They have also imposed huge cuts on food stamps which take effect AFTER the midterms ( so voters won’t punish them IN the midterms!). Kaine and every Congressional Dem has tried every way they know to get Repubs and Trump to renew the ACA subsidies, which is why they allowed the shutdown to occur. But they don’t have a majority right now in either the House or Senate and so cannot vote these subsidies back into law. Republicans, meanwhile, have actively resisted re-instituting them. Most Repubs are in Republican-gerrymandered districts and so don’t fear their voters, so they’re not motivated by fear of losing their seats. Repubs have tried again and again to destroy the ACA (Obamacare) while Dem after Dem has used political capital to pass it. If you’re going to be mad at anyone, be mad at Repubs and Trump, who’ve promised a better healthcare plan for decades and never delivered.
Forgive me Dejah, but why are you blaming Senator Kaine when it was republicans who wouldn’t agree to extend the subsidies in the first place? There was no guarantee that
even if the shutdown continued it
would have turned out any differently.
Agree
The common people were always going to lose
Snap health insurance, etc.
Dems by folding
A vote on this policy
Most republicans will vote against subsidies thus showing they are awful
Trump will be shown to have no clue
The epstein files got a vote
So call it a strategic retreat
The whole shut-down was a lesson in cluelessness. It was Br'er Rabbit. Republicans should have jumped at the chance to fix their stupid mistake of not delaying Romney-care subsidies until after the '26 elections. Instead, they refused, and threw Br'er Rabbit back into the briar patch.
As Lily Tomlin once said, “I try to be cynical, but I just can’t keep up."
The GOP is giving hypocrisy a bad name.
The truth is that the Dems seem to have had a heads up that SCOTUS was about to side with Trump over food stamps since the president can decide what is emergency spending or not in a shutdown.
This would mean back to 1/2 rations for November and likely nothing after that.
The poor have no wiggle room and food banks said they did not have the ability to fill all of the gap. The GOP were refusing to budge on the ACA and it is hard to negotiate with people who preferred a shutdown due to being able to cut programs, so in reality the Dems had little real leverage
Since the Dems had no leverage, it was mostly an awareness campaign and it ran its course.
Thus some Dems who were retiring "fell on their swords" and took the blame for reopening, but the reality was that the shutdown had done all it could, for now.
It highlighted who was really to blame for the rising premiums and also who did not care if people went hungry, Trump and the GOP. It put pressure on them and Trump's ratings fell due to the administrations willingness for cruelty being exposed.
The reason some had to "fall on their swords" and took the blame to keep people from starving is because they knew that some in their own party do not understand the logistics of the shutdown what real poverty is like.
With Trumps ratings falling, it frees up some in the GOP to grow at least a partial spine and maybe the ACA subsidies will be extended.
They fell on their swords because they know some far-left liberals will eat their own party members for breakfast if they do not get exactly what they want, starving poor be damned, even if it helps the GOP win, and the far-left who armchair quarterback from warm homes and comfy chairs, and pretend to be fighting for the poor, but only in theory and only if they get things exactly their own way, are often the main reason the GOP do win since the far- left often demands ideological purity or they will not vote or will run a 3rd party candidate that only helps the GOP win.
How does helping Trump and the GOP win elections by attacking your own and running 3rd party candidates because the one who won the primary is not quite "liberal enough," help the poor?
I certainly think Hillary and Al Gore would have done a lot more for the poor and climate change than Trump or Bush.
It often seems like "progressives" don't want to make any actual progress, unless they get things exactly their own way.
They even now attack Obama who finally at least was able to pass something on healthcare...sigh...it was a massive achievement.
I happen to be quite liberal in many respects, but I can't stand those who are willing to "burn it all down" to get what they want and who forget that there are many who can't weather the storm they will create, and the suffering we will endure if people like Trump get elected as a result.
Most who can't weather the storm over a fight about ideology are the poor and disabled. How does burning it all down and hoping a more liberal Phoenix will rise from the ashes, help the poor, or disabled, or fight climate change?
It does not.
Trump and his ilk are what rises from the ashes.
We have to stick together. Dems are nothing at all like the GOP even if some are more or less liberal than others.
I agree with your analysis of the shutdown, but I really wish that the centrist Dems would spend half the energy fighting the Right as they do policing the Left. I'm a Prog who just wants America to adopt some of the common sense policies that work all over the world, but are, because of Republican propaganda, utterly taboo in the US. Look at how the mainstream Dems attacked Mamdani (and Sanders, and AOC) for policy proposals that are only SLIGHTLY left of center.
The only Dems who were not on board with Bidens huge and very liberal Build Back Better bill were Manchin and Sinema, 2 out of 50 (Harris would have been a tie breaker) so who are the so-called centrist Dems who are standing in the way?
It had the votes to pass the House and the progressive caucus was a minority out of the Dem majority, so once again, who was standing in the way?
Most of those in favor and who were on board to vote for it were actually the so-called "centrists" and it was an extremely liberal bill.
Manchin was for the tax increases but thought some of the programs could be smaller and Sinema was for the programs but not all of the taxes. They were the problem children so to speak, but it was only them.
When Biden seemed to finally have Manchin on board, the progressives in the House kept adding more and more in after Biden went to a conference in Europe, and the deal fell apart.
With Build Back Better we got nothing in the end (until part of it was repackaged in the IRA) and part of the reason it did not pass was Manchin and Sinema, but also because the progressives in the House got greedy and exploded the deal when they kept adding more and more and more into the bill and drove Manchin away and we could not lose a single vote.
Even with the ACA's passage it needed 3 Independents that caucus with the Dems to even pass, and Lieberman, an Independent, was more to the center (and had campaigned with John McCain), but without his vote we would not even have the ACA.
So who are these people (Dems) standing in the way?
Schumer and Jefferies always vote for the liberal agenda, etc.
The truth is that Dems are not standing in the way at all and only the GOP are.
Manchin and Sinema are now gone, but so are the Dem majorities in the House and Senate and they are required to get anything done. We needed to take advantage of our majority when we have it and pass things even with the compromises.
Those further to the left, simply make up all the nonsense about the "centrist Dems" being the problem to promote themselves and their ideology, but the truth is that they simply have never had the votes for what they want mostly because of the GOP or those who caucus with the Dems who might help give them a majority.
Name a Dem that is standing in the way of liberal progress?
What is standing in the way are the numbers - meaning a majority in the House and Senate and often a supermajority is required.
NAME ONE PLEASE
Name the mysterious and imaginary "centrist or corporate Dem" and what makes them so.
It is just a meaningless talking point used by some to get attention and to promote themselves and it damages the party.
It is simply pure BS. 100% BS. Prove me wrong tell me who they are.
This comment is a perfect example of how skewed to the right American politics are. In the global community of 2025, BBB was not “extemely” or even “very” liberal. It was centrist…and finally seemed like some American politicians were ready to catch up with the rest of the world instead of pretending like we exist in an impenetrable bubble where consequences do not exist. In the actual real world of 2025, which is so globally intertwined in myriad ways, BBB was still not enough and way too late. We needed it, and it was a solid step in the right direction, but it was never liberal.
Bidens build back better was largely written by the progressive caucus in the House including people like AOC. It was also based on his campaign promises. Thus most all dems supported the same agenda as the progressives. So once again, who are the so-called centrists who are getting in the way? WHO? The truth is they do not exist. If something does not pass is is typically that we simply do not have enough Dems, not what type they are.
You missed the entire point of my comment. We are but one country that has to operate in what is really a global system, akin to one state operating within the larger country. Within the global system, the American political system is actually barely left of center (“progressives”) to center right (most Dems and formerly reasonable Reps) to far right (MAGA and the bootlickers). In the global system, we do not have actually progressives. What we call “progressive” is, for the most part, left of center. It matters because America does not live within a bubble. What we do, what everyone does, is entwined in myriad ways. We can call it “progressive” if we want, but it only is relative to our politics, not the system as a whole. In the globalized world that we live in, have to operate within, BBB was late-to-the-party centrist legislation. Although I disagree with you, I’m not engaging on “who gets in the way” because that’s jumping ahead of the fundamentals. My point is that the language Americans use to describe politics is totally misguided and distorts our entire view of left/right. Most Americans can’t even understand or have appropriate discussions about societal standards and politics that have global implications because our view is so skewed to the right. And, again, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, it does matter because this globe is intertwined. We do not live in a bubble.
It's not their voting records; it's that their rhetoric creates just enough substance to support the whole "radical socialist left" fuel that keeps the MAGA fires burning.
You are right. I was angry they gave in at first until a friend who is a social worker in IL said the food banks were being overrun. IL was fairly affluent and they couldnt keep up with the need, I can't imagine what poor people KY had to deal with.
And this was just the beginning and the GOP were not going to vote on the ACA subsidies in a shutdown.
And that's the difference between the Democrats and the GOP. The shutdown was the result of the Democrats trying to reverse what was unquestionably one of the dumbest policy moves by Republicans in my lifetime - cutting off the ACA subsidies put in place by Mr. Biden before the next mid-term elections. Democrats knew that getting those cuts reversed would remove a huge advantage for them for the next mid-terms, but they forced a shutdown over it anyway. Why? Because the Democrats, for all their flaws, believe in the efficacy of government and, frankly, aren't a bunch of self-serving deluded fascist assholes. The Republicans don't and are.
Krugman’s work would be better if it was more technical and less ideological.
For example he’s saying that Dems lost because they engaged in gaslighting on inflation, then proceeds to gaslight us about cancel culture. In reality all of it helped Republicans.
But what really brought us here are the effects of globalization. In his 1997 book One World Ready Or Not William Greider warned about what would happen today. No one else but Paul Krugman was highly critical. Nowadays I see Krugman making statements that could come out that book.
So a challenge for Paul Krugman, revisit the book and come clean about where you were right and where you were wrong.
Please share with us where he said dems gaslit the American people about inflation and cancel culture.
No. The truth is that automation has taken far more American jobs than globalization over the past 25 years.
Studies indicate that approximately 88% of American factory job losses since 2000 were due to automation and increased productivity, while roughly 13% were caused by trade and offshoring.
That doesn't mean that U.S. jobs haven't been lost to globalization – they definitely have. But in factories, at least, automation has been a greater factor than most realize.
For completeness, there are studies that claim far greater number of jobs was lost to offshoring. I don’t know which number are real but let’s not cherry pick the data.
Also while automation is a big factor, when jobs moved from Michigan and Ohio to Mexico, that was jobs moving, not jobs being automated.
And what else contributes to offshoring? Prices and profits. Americans will never be willing to pay the true cost of a product. C-suites will never be willing to make less to offset worker pay. One way or another, these jobs were going to be lost because of prices and profits.
Even better than cherry picking the data...let's see some links please.
The problem isn't really lack of jobs. The US economy has created lots of jobs. The problem is that the profits from industry have been systematically funneled up to the top approximately 1% of the population, something like 50 trillion dollars that would have ended up in workers pockets ended up with the oligarchs post Reagan. It's "why we can't have nice things" now.
Absolutely right. It's just greed and the opposite of what the late Senator Paul Wellstone said:
"We all do well when we all do well."
One thing Krugman wrote jumped out at me: that no one cared about the nonissue of immigration. He’s wrong. First, Biden did allow a big jump in illegal migration. It jumped after Covid subsided and he did nothing.
This was a huge issue to a certain group, a group obsessing over “replacement theory”. However, this group is VERY conservative and would never vote Dem anyway.
Immigration is a major issue that will persist for centuries. It's very complex and will never go away. It's probably THE biggest issue that put Trump where he is. It may be an even bigger issue in Europe. It's a major factor in Japan's ongoing "lost decade" (30+ years of no growth). It will continue to loom larger and larger.
Whatever popularity and authority Trump still has for some rests on the fact that amidst all his false promises, the border has magically closed. Inflation didn't magically go down and animal spirits didn't kick the economy into the next gear, and people don't like seeing law-abiding immigrants treated like criminals. But the border did close. And his voters know why. It's not because of immigration reform - it's because of his reputation for cruelty.
Over and over, in comments at the conservative WSJ they repeat “Trump closed the border!”
Immigration is a major issue that HAS persisted for over a century in the US. The only thing that changed over time is the nationality of the people villainized. Of course, we didn't have ICE hunting down the Irish. Or the Italians. Or the Chinese.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback
All TR-voters care about is new border-crossings; and they know that they are now way down - because they are.
The importance of the issue in the looming election may have played a role in that timing, suggesting that the B-administration could have managed it better sooner. But A-I is telling me, if I can believe it, that non-citizen crossings in 2025 are not as minimal as I had thought, which is interesting....the one thing I was giving Tr credit for isn't as "fixed" as the media suggests.
If the GOP cares about not getting slaughtered in the midterms, they will focus on the border and on non-residents with significant criminal records. And it could also help if "they" would stop lying all the time and saying openly disgraceful and overtly racist things. They already have "that vote."
Biden influx was the largest in history. Trump considers them to be illegals and is treating them thus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/briefing/us-immigration-surge.html
There was a sudden influx (it was a post-Covid thing). I don’t personally have a problem with it but plenty of people think that immigration should be regulated and not just people wandering in.
If you advocate for that, the Dems will continue to lose elections.
Disagree.
Good criteria for everyone working in what is left of the White House
I don't think they have lost yet, wait until January.
Dems? Did you notice how many Democrats split ranks and voted for the declaration that demonized the "horrors" of socialism? That would include single-payer healthcare, along with socialist programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the FDIA, "food stamps", and so on. Don't count on a "Blue wave" next November. The Democratic Party has become stupefied and incompetent, but hasn't got a clue. There is no organized opposition to Trumpism. The chaos we're experiencing can only end in calamity.
I respectfully disagree.
I was very angry at first, especially since I had knocked on doors for one of the defecting senators.
But...
Health care costs will go through the roof. SNAP is still a disaster. Medicaid is still a disaster. Folks will suffer and (hopefully) get angry enough to vote.
It had to end. People were starving. Republicans did not care. If they were fully in charge, it would haven't ended until the last low income child was buried.
The Senators who voted to stop the shutdown were either retiring or not up for re-election in '26. They were "safe". They did not ruin their careers. **
And...
The Republicans were stupid enough to have their changes happen before the mid-terms. People will see what the Republicans have done.
Maybe the end will justify the means. I certainly hope so. **
** Thank you Leigh Hamilton, from whom I stole a few lines
I hear you, but there's a countervailing issue: the first thing a Democratic House would do is impeach Trump, and if so, hold hearings. I watched the Watergate Hearings in real time, and see what it did to Nixon.
Trump, Miller, et al, CANNOT LET THAT HAPPEN.
I don't know exactly what multibillionaires' money, a newly expanded and lavishly funded ICE, etc., are capable of, especially in the hands of pathological liars, thieves, and thugs (and now cold-blooded murderers vis-a-vis the boat strikes) - i.e. the Executive Branch - but they will be pulling out all the stops to prevent Dems from taking the House.
At least with an impeachment, there are hearings in the House which shed light on the charges, organizing them and presenting them to the public. In a democracy, that’s of primary importance.
What terminology should I be using?
And what things should be done to lower health care costs?
Please explain this last sentence.
We say America’s birthday is July 4, courtesy of the Declaration of Independence. That document speaks of an equal right to life. If we do not have equal rights to health care, we do not have an equal right to life. And it shows in the data.
Perhaps you would be more comfortable in Russia. You should consider moving to a place that restricts free speech. I don’t like whiners, either, but you seem to be one yourself in your whining about having to tolerate freedom of speech.
Unless the GOP propagandists - and in this department they do excel - can find some cynical spin to blame Democrats for it all.
It's like the Democrats' best possible outcome was to raise a huge stink about the issue so everyone knew about it, and knew that Republicans were refusing to address it, and then be betrayed by a small number of their own who *won't be on the ballot in 2026* (none of them; I checked), ensuring that they will reap all the electoral benefits and none of the costs.
I think they folded at the right time. They held out long enough to place the blame properly close enough to the new insurance bills going out.
If the Dems hadn't agreed to end the shutdown, we'd have NO GOVERNMENT...No air travel, no courts, and an open invitation for Trump to declare martial law...
The one thing they did accomplish was to illustrate the problem, and exact a promise from the Republicans to address the healthcare issue, which they have _not_ wanted to do for about 15 years..
Their last attempt was a "health Savings Account with $2700 dollars in it...to cover all medical expenses for a whole year...That was Paul Ryan's plan, and it was quite unrealistic..
This has been my view all along - MAGAts are so oblivious to reality that they won't change their minds until Trump literally stabs them in the back (or pocketbook). Even then, they will still believe Democrats are evil. It's going to take decades to unravel the damage Trump and the right-wing media has done.
Realistically, I don't think it would have passed. I also believe that they should have held strong longer, instead of folding at the very first sign that the blame was starting to get more evenly spread, but they DID make healthcare costs (a perennial winner for Dems) a major issue rather effectively. So it was effective, just less effective than we hoped it would be (in addition to being TERRIBLE optics to fold like a cheap suit right after crushing the GOP in off-year elections).
I know I was furious. However, my good friend who is a social worker in IL said that people were overrunning the food pantries. These people were desperate and scared that they couldnt feed their children. The Democrats who voted to end the shut down did it to release SNAP funds. They probably ruined their careers to help get food to people. Starving people was Mike Johnson sinister plan.
Seems to be correct. No pain, no attention.
If they succeeded and their demands were met, which was very unlikely.
You're last line says it all . Our POTUS has ruined everyone that has tied their selves to his mast and unfortunately America deserves what we are getting for reelecting him.
This is happening because Americans never realized that Republicans don’t want them to have affordable health care and they never have. The media should be making that clear by reminding people of all the lies Republicans have told over the years about Democrats’ attempts to reform healthcare. They should be reminding people that those death panels Republicans freaked them out over never materialized.
If they never realized Republicans.... what a majority of Republican votes realized was DT hated brown and black people and that was good enough for them. It didn't occur to them that they also are hated. Even though there were ample examples of it .
Even while they go sick from a lack of affordable medical care and go hungry from the lack of food they take comfort in knowing 'those people' are being hurt too.
Have the day you voted for .
Unfortunately WE ALL have the day THEY voted for. A bare <2% plurality (along with the grotesque authoritarianism of the 'Electoral College' that allowed Mango Mussolini to lie and proclaim a "sweeping mandate".
(Which "College", by the way, was NOT EVER designed to prevent 'big cities' from running roughshod of the noble Rural People of the Earth...in 1789 ~95% of the nascent US population was rural; parity between urban residents and rural ones did not happen until the 1920 census. )
I don't disagree.
It's not that they're also hated so much as it is that they're "suckers and losers", as per Trumpkopf.
He would never allow them in his rodent infested golf motel but they don't realize this.
Never fall for a con man.
PROMISES
Trump’s Economic Promises Timeline
https://doggett.house.gov/issues/trumps-economic-promises-timeline
REALITY
Fact check: Trump’s lying spree about inflation https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/10/politics/inflation-trump-fact-check
The media are paid by the same oligarchs who fund GOP campaigns, so of course they won't expose Republican lies.
DonnyJon just announced that he's creating a list of the so-called "fake news" spreaders. I noticed that the Boston Globe is one of the first papers to appear. There's a list of the media to which we should subscribe.
He should put his own name on the list since nobody spreads more fake news than he does.
And now the GOP can go after other programs they have criticized for years, Social Security and Medicare. They now have three more years to get rid of those!
According to the Congressional Budget Office they already did with the budget reconciliation act (i.e. “The One Big Beautiful Bill”). It’s likely to trigger more than half a trillion dollars of Medicare cuts between 2026 and 2034 under the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010. That 2010 Act automatically cuts spending to offset deficits unless Congress specifically protects a program. The Republican majority refused to explicitly protect Medicare last summer when it passed its reconciliation bill. Their reconciliation bill increases deficits by trillions of dollars.
Increasing deficits is actually the goal. Advantage the wealthy by dismantling progressive taxation and the ensuing deficits will make "gov'mint socialist programs" like social security and medicare insolvent. Win-win. That's the thinking at the very top. For the strategy to work (i.e., keep winning elections), they'll have to start with undermining medicaid and SNAP, but that's not the end-game.
Actually, they don't really have an end-game because none of that will work. They breathe a sigh of relief every so often when the wheels start coming off and Dems win power again.
The “taxation is theft” crowd.
They can try, but there'll be hell to pay for it.
Not really. Les Peters is correct - they've already made horrific cuts to SS and Medicare required shortly.
They haven't exactly cut SS, they just reduced the COLA.
I'm sorry, but how much clearer can the media make it? They report on politicians' votes. They report on the positions politicians take every election. They show politicians saying over and over again exactly what they'll do when in office. And people still go out and vote for candidates who want to cut taxes on the rich and gut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and anything else the helps poor and middle class people - aka the voters!
Like Dr. Krugman wrote in his post, most people just don't pay any attention to this stuff until it hurts them. And even then, many of them will just not have enough brains to connect the dots!
The media is complicit and you’ll never change my mind. They don’t challenge Trump, they let his abuse slide. They never talk about his mental decline which has been in full display for years. He’s nutty as a fruitcake. The big news organizations are kowtowing to him. To him they’re a protection racket.
The death panels are called insurance companies.
Yup. My mama always said ‘you get the government you deserve’.
Sadly, a bunch of us are getting the government our moronic MAGAt neighbors deserve.....
Well, my mama always said that we have the best politicians that money can buy.
You get the government the majority of voters deserves. If you’re in a wise minority, you’re stuck.
I think the point was that even if in a minority, you still didn’t get out the vote. So in essence, everyone gets the govt they deserve.
You're half right. Yes, everything Trump (he's not a president so we need to stop calling him that) touches dies. I'll take that further and say he never let's anything, dead or alive, out of his clutches until he's beaten it to an unrecognizable pulp. So, we have that to look forward to.
More voters cast their vote for someone OTHER than Trump. It was the electoral college who gave us this hellscape, not the American people, and let me add, the EC did it TWICE. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by approx. 3.5 million. Besides, (and I could look this up to be precise) Harris won around 48.3 % of the vote and Trump 49.5% - ish. That's not a huge margin. So, no, I don't believe the American people - even those who were too stupid or lazy to vote - deserve this. No one deserves this.
Voter suppression was alive and well in 2024 election. A handful of states (Georgia n Wisconsin were 2)- the suppressing of black/brown votes was rampant according to Greg Palast documentary Vigilantes, Inc.
Trump has already come out and said he is going to make sure Republicans win all the elections because he intends on sending out people to "watch" that illegals are not voting, which, as former election worker, is really not at all possible.
If you worry about elections, be a poll watcher or apply for a job at the polling center. They'll take anyone. The polling place I worked was mostly Republicans and they were honest and professional. I hope that's true everywhere.
The voter suppression I was referring to was black/brown voters were thrown off the voter registrations in these states according to this documentary. There is also the issue of closing voting locations down in black and brown neighborhoods in order for the wait times to be hours which discourages voting.
and then making it illegal to bring these people food or water.
I still don't think we elected him either time - the amount of interference, not only from Russia but from GOP operatives who deliberately worked hard to disenfranchise opponents along with ElectionTruthAlliance.org findings of notable irregularities in voting data, seems to me that he was INSTALLED despite a true majority voting for Democrats.
We've already seen elsewhere how wide the margins of victory were in most special elections for the Democratic candidates, the latest findings of manipulation in the TN race are demonstrating the path the GOP will take to try and steal the midterms and the next Presidential races.
We MUST take steps NOW to address the vulnerabilities in our elections that we've known about for decades and have done NOTHING about: older software in tabulation machines vulnerable to hacks, partisan oligarchs buying the voting machine companies, oligarchs like Musk openly bragging about being directly responsible for Trump "winning" while Trump openly thanks him for "knowing everything about the machines"...
On the upside, leopards are extremely well fed these days.
Rather than engage, I just blocked a commenter on this article. They had the same tone that I see so often from the "both sides suck" faction. And I'm not sure whether these people are foreign trolls, disaffected Americans, or angry young men sitting in their basements - wait, those last two things are one and the same. Either way, they are a familiar group. They engage in a dumbed-down version of classist rhetoric and they never back up their arguments with actual facts or even anecdotes.
There's no point in engaging with willful ideologues who ignore facts and come off as trolls. The same tired talking points, based on a skewed and selective reading of current events. A nihilism. On the one hand, you have a party, however flawed, that has tried to advance our society, engaged in reasonable economic governance, observed the rule of law, obeyed the norms and respected the people and the constitution.
On the other, you have a party that has betrayed the country, the constitution, the people and the system, itself, the system that we have fought to improve for 250 years, however flawed it may have been to begin with. A party that has tried to ensconce itself in power permanently and waged war on the poorest of us so that the very richest could benefit. I could go on and on, but THERE IS NO COMPARISON BETWEEN THE TWO. You may hate the Democrats for many reasons, but they are the only choice at the moment to destroy the evil that walks in the land and all of this crap that you throw out to muddy the waters only benefits the traitors.
But you already know that. And if you don't know it - and I am aware of the similarities between idealism and cynicism - you need to take a hard look at the news and at yourselves. And, even though it's probably not the correct move for me - I won't engage with you anymore. Thank you, Dr. K, for you work and your words.
Paul Vlachos, thank you. Perfectly expressed, your entire commentary. I believe you speak for many of us.
The people you're describing are immersed in Faux Newspeak, Snoozmax, Breitbart, InfoWars, and the myriad of web based incel chat groups like 4chan, 8chan, QAnon, and, of course, 卐itter.
They're burrowed so deep down in the rabbit hole that not even a glimmer of daylight reaches them.
I made that argument time and time again until Sen Kaine threw me personally under the bus along with the 20M other people who rely on Obamacare. Obama may care, but Tim Kaine CLEARLY DOES NOT.
I will never vote for him again. I will not work for his campaign or donate to him. I will not make a phone call. And I will start pushing back on this, "these awful, bad people who are fucking us over are better than the other awful bad people who are also fucking us over." I would not piss on Tim Kaine if he were on fire.
There was no sign whatever that Rs were going to move on this, none. MTG testified on The View to the panicked calls she was getting as we got further and further unto open enrollment. She can't have been alone. But she was the only one responding.
If there were any sign that Rs were beginning to crack, that would be one thing. But there were none.
I agree. Tim Kaine was in a spot in Virginia where a huge number of government workers were terrified that Trump was going to use the shutdown to permanently lay them off. Kaine did a hard thing and voted against his party but for a huge block of his voters. But I suspected at the time that he knew, and so did Schumer, that the Rs were not going to budge on this and that the pain with the subsidies going away is what the GOP voters need as their wake up call. I am so sorry that our fellow R voters refuse to acknowledge that they like and need the ACA subsidies. They need this to educate themselves. It’s painful and unfair to too many but it’s the only way to get through to them. This is the FAFO period for so many.
And look what happened to the only R to rise up: death threats AND loss of her job. All the Rs fear the Mafia like Don.
I recently read an article (probably in the BBC) in which the author interviewed high level people in the real Mafia and Cosa Nostra, as well as outsiders familiar with the organizations. DonnyJon is nothing like them. He's simply watched a few movies and thinks that's the way to behave.
My theory is that they’re beholden to insurance company donors.
I’m sure it was designed to make the insurance companies happy.
But it’s a huge suck of unproductive dollars. Health is not like auto or fire insurance. Expensive sickness can hit anyone. Single payer is way cheaper overall.
very well said
How can I block that same misinformed commenter?
Yes and no. 15 years ago I lived and worked elections with Republicans. They were normal, honest people who differed for various, but legitimate, reasons.
I've since moved to an area with more Democrats. So it seems maybe Republicans since Trump have changed.
The great thing is that rank-n-file conservatives are still 110% convinced that Obamacare is a direct government takeover of healthcare and it needs to be abolished. So slashing or eliminating the subsidies is a good thing, according to them, because it will force people to "face the costs of their choices."
I heard this just two days ago from my boss and one of my business associates. They KNOW how horrible Obamacare is because they've been told this for years. It's worth noting that the very same conversation included their opinions that healthcare is a scam, healthcare is too expensive, and the government needs to be more involved in healthcare.
Thinking in a straight line is not part of their skill set.
It's a scam until they realize how much even a mundane visit with a primary care physician for an annual check up really costs more than the $20 to $50 copay you have. And heaven forbid you need some actual critical care. As I have crossed the half century mark myself, I have certainly been visiting the Dr more for all of these things that just pop up as matter of getting older.
I guess it would be true if you were younger you might feel like it's a scam since you seldom use it, but it does become important as you get older. If insurance only insured old people, then there would be little to no incentive for health insurance. But even young people will eventually need some kind of critical care which would devastate them financially if they had no insurance.
These two men in particular view health insurance as a scam. But they also view the entire medical profession as a scam because doctors do not want to cure you, they just want to treat you. Thus, according to them, they will not treat any disease in a way that cures it because there's no money in that--instead, the doctor will treat the symptoms forever because that's how they make money.
This line of "reasoning" brings them right to RFK jr.'s doorstep. They don't get physicals, they don't get vaccines (based on whatever the excuse du jour is), they don't get treatment for any of their conditions. They DO take Ivermectin like it's a vitamin, they drink apple cider vinegar/macha tea/acai extract/vanilla extract/ or whatever the latest "cures everything" fad is at the moment.
Oddly enough, one of them just had his 3-year-old daughter diagnosed with leukemia. For some reason, he's not treating her with berries or Ivermectin, but instead has had her flown to one of the leading children's hospitals in the country.
"The field of medicine doesn't cure us, so we might as well put a heroin addict in charge of the whole works".
As a side note, Alex Jones makes his money not from InfoWars itself, but from all the snake oil he promotes on InfoWars. He's a real POS.
As far as the three year old is concerned, all I can say is thank goodness for that... but if she's not covered by health insurance, this guy may lose his house (and everything else he owns)...
He's got coverage, andit seems to be gold-plated.
Generalizing, I think this is a lot of the conservative and MAGA mindset - everything is zero-sum and everyone is out to screw everyone else. You have to get yours before someone else takes it. I earned what government gives me most anyone else who gets aid is lazy and is undeserving.
They will never vote for Democrats because they are at best naive do-gooders who will give away their hard earned tax dollars to these people. And Democrats are all in on a child-sex ring or some other conspiracy.
Jeff, you describe the conservative and MAGA mindset better in fewer words than anybody, conspiracy theories aside. “Everyone is out to screw everyone else. Get yours before somebody else takes it.”
And young people - esp. young men - frequently need health care b/c of, shall we say, "poor life choices." Like, you know, driving too fast and getting in a car accident or mouthing off at someone with a big fist (or a knife), etc.
Re: what it really costs.
Right. I just had an operation. The co-pay/deductible set me back $1,430, and there may be some extras rolling in this month. But the insurance paid the rest of over $17,000.
When I had my first child in 1983, we weren’t sure if insurance would cover the delivery because there was a case at SCOTUS awaiting a decision. Insurance companies that covered the spouse (woman) of an employee didn’t want to cover maternity expenses, even though they were happy to accept monthly premiums. The decision came down that yes, they must cover maternity costs, including child deliveries, about two weeks before my child was born. It turned out even more important for me because I needed an emergency C-Section!
"...even though they were happy to accept monthly premiums"
This really highlights the whole business model. Take in premiums + deny coverage = Pure profits.
This is exactly why we need a single payer, not for profit, system.
Hypothetically yes. Indeed we did have not-for-profit without single payer long ago. But the execs wanted to make a profit, and so here we are today. Single payer is the only way to go.
What other industry charges a fortune for a product and then refuses to hand over your purchase?
This really highlights the fact that so many "conservatives" still buy into the old St. Reagan line that government is bad, period. In other words, they're idiots.
Hey Derelict… tell your friends that I had Obamacare when I was between jobs and it was far better than the employer-provided policy I have now. Seriously.
He was also going to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. <tapping fingers, waiting, waiting, waiting....>
Oh yes, because his buddy Putin want to do him a favor!
And eight other wars!
The GOP may attempt to kick the ACA can down the road another year, but I doubt they have the appetite for any serious reform of healthcare. In fact, the GOP seemingly lacks the curiosity to analyze and understand healthcare reform might require.
You can put the high cost of the American Healthcare System down to mostly 2 things: 1. For-profit fee-for-Service Medicine and 2. For profit Health Insurance. There is a huge sucking pipeline slurping up healthcare dollars and diverting them to corporate bottom lines. No other industrialized nation has this paradigm and we are not well served by it. There is the additional problem that our politics is largely funded by and driven by the special interests of Megacorps and the Obscenely Wealthy. When Congress allowed Private Health Insurers to convert to a for-profit model starting in the early 70s, they started this snowball rolling down the hill.
I read a book, Marketcrafters by Chris Hughes, that described how we ended up with this system. The American Medical Association threatened doctors that if they didn’t go along with the plan, the AMA would actively seek to have the doctors’ licenses revoked!
There is a bountiful plenty of blame to go around, but the gist of it is that the whole system is shot through with special interest carveouts and we the people are left holding the bag.
Exactly!
I wish it was that simple. All health care and insurance in Minnesota in non-profit as far as I know. But it's the same here as everywhere else. Expensive, confusing, and not terrible care, but not great either.
The list goes on and on... Drug companies that can charge whatever they want. Everyone wants the best and most advanced health care and there are few constraints on raising premiums. There's little transparency in much of the system, so little competition between providers. Hospitals have to provide indigent care no one pays for except they can make up by charging the paying customers. There are all sorts of groups and people with their hands in the pie who like things the way they are, etc., etc. On top of it all we pay twice as much as anyone and our health care is ranked near the bottom for industrialized countries. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2024/sep/mirror-mirror-2024
Not for profit for healthcare was supposed to reflect the “public good” of healthcare in society. Now it means big salaries for execs of healthcare chains and ever expanding hospital building. So not for profit means dump a bunch of money into that new wing with a flashy auditorium or research complex or whatever the board can justify to use this healthcare dollars you are paying. God forbid they open a clinic in a poor rural area. That would be subsidizing the poor and we can’t have that now!
Republicans understand what they are doing. They are extremist ideologues who want is the for-profit “free” market to run our healthcare system, schools, prisons, post office, public utilities etc. The government can run the military although mercenaries are acceptable because they don’t need benefits like healthcare coverage for injuries that happen on the job. Also they can get away with more lawless behavior because they are mostly under the radar. The media rarely covers what they are doing.
What a stupid system.
Much better to just copy Australia and have universal health coverage funded by a 2% income tax levy, plus state contributions towards public hospitals.
I think that's what's the frustrating part about our system. Solutions aren't all that complicated but it's impossible to get there. There are plenty of models out there that are working and will work. But there are too many people and institutions invested in our current system. The ACA was about as good as it was going to get except for not having a public option which Lieberman cut out if I recall.
Yes, it must be frustrating for Americans to know the USA is the ONLY developed country which doesn't have universal healthcare, which is SO much better than the system which exploits Americans for corporate profits. Our Aussie Medicare is brilliant. Americans who move here love it.
WHO keeps voting for Republicans even when it hurts them? White people. The majority of white people vote Republican no matter what it costs them in health care, inflation, Epstein, environmental damage. They vote for white supremacy. You can't leave this out of the equation, and you wouldn't if you had to confront the bumper stickers I see everywhere.
White people, a lot of them, are fearful and horrified by the increasing numbers of non-white people. So Republicans can be as corrupt as they like, can steal money, can deny them healthcare, destroy the Constitution, and they will still vote for them because they support white supremacy. They want to see the streets swept clean of non-white people. They don't want to see them in the grocery store and Walmart. They want them gone. And Trump and Stephen Miller will give them that, or at least say they will.
I'd agree there is a component of Republicans who are racist. But I think the majority will never vote for a Democrat and their self-interest just because they believe Democrats are evil. They believe the propaganda. Democrats give away their hard earned tax dollars to people who don't deserve it (yes, many are minorities) and illegal immigrants. Democrats allow crime to run rampant and are soft on criminals. Democrats love government and will regulate and tax you endlessly. And don't forget Democrats want trans (boys) in your girl's bathroom and open borders to let in the drug runners and criminals. Democrats support and promote abortion. They support gay rights which means they are recruiting your children and are promoting sex change drugs and operations for minors. They oppose free enterprise and are socialists who want to live off the public trough. The list is endless. Racism is there for sure, but it's not the sole explanation, if it were only that simple.
I think they believe the Democratic Party is the party of non-white people, immigrants and Black people. They aren't entirely wrong. If you look at footage of the Democratic Convention and the Republican Convention, the images are very different. The evangelicals are being told that wives should obey their husbands and abortion is evil. Although there was a time when they supported abortion. But the images of the Democratic Party display a diversity they are uncomfortable with.
They believe that they are victims of "reverse discrimination." They want Mayberry. There was no NC town that was a white as Mayberry (except maybe in the mountains). But Andy Griffith knew what they wanted to see, and where they wanted to live.
They never minded non-white people working for them as servants, but it bothered them to see them as equals. It "felt" off, wrong.
Definitely the bottom line. A country devoid of ethnicity is NOT a country I want to live in. Who doesn’t want authentic Italian cuisine, or Mexican or French.
This country was occupied by indigenous people when Europeans arrived. And the Europeans were from many countries. And they brought Africans. There were Spanish-speaking people, German-speakers, Native American speakers of many languages, Yiddish, French. This has always been a multi ethnic country.
What more noble legacy that being the place where people from every nation on earth gather together under the idea that "all people are created equal" and are governed equally without regard to the ethnicity of religion or country of origin?
If a person wants to live in a ethno-state, it is going to be difficult to find one, and it may well rely on authoritarianism to govern it.
Racist white people. Not all white people are racist.
No, but it is disturbing that a majority have supported Trump knowing full well that he tried to overthrow the government on Jan. 6, that he is racist and just plain mean, that he is corrupt. And still they voted for him. A majority.
I am white. The white people I know do not support him, but the majority do, and white evangelicals overwhelmingly do.
I agree that racism is a big part of his appeal. Calling entire groups “garbage”, etc.
I am insulated from this rise (except for lateral damage) but a friend on ACA who works for a small business told me her premiums will rise from $250 to $1200(approximate).She is waiting to see what happens before she reupps or not. The owner of her business, same thing. Not only that, the business does a lot of importing and started getting wacked with tarriffs. A double hit. Welcome to winning with donny 2 dolls.
People see a successful con man and think they can share in their success, but always end up being one of the conned.
Ah! That’s it—I’ll call it the “mirage effect”!! They laud the ballroom but will never ever see it.
💯
And, it's too often forgotten that in the 2024 election, 1 person absolutely HAD to win to stop the investigations and prosecutions. That person would say, do, be anything and everything to voters, in order to keep from spending the rest of their life giving depositions, and sitting in courtrooms - or worse.
And I am here to tell you that in a tiny town like Okeechobee, FL the food prices are at least what I am paying in the LA area. The only consumable cheaper than LA in this little town is gas. Visiting relatives here and thankfully flying back to SoCal today!!!!
We used to winter in Florida and noticed that grocery prices were higher there than up north. We had an RV and many of us packed our freezers with meat before heading south. The Republicans have no healthcare plan and they can't gaslight the voters any longer.
The interaction between people and taxes is quite odd and very distinct from other things we pay for, except perhaps for many digital services where we have no idea at all what we are paying.
As an example there was an artilce in The Guardian newspaper in the UK about childcare costs. A seemingly relatively well off lady wrote a comment about how after paying for child care she was left with zero disposable income. Large numbers sympathised with her. She decided there was no point in her working for nothing and she quit. Apart from some quibbles such as end of career progression, pension and National Insurance contributions end and many find losing work interaction leads to feelings of loss of connection with society there is quite a striking point. Her comment was one of outrage that she was, in her view, left with nothing. Yet if her child fell ill she would take it to the state funded health system, when her child goes to school she would take them to the state funded school and so on and so on. She had no idea at all she was expecting everyone else to pay for her child and for that matter for herself in many ways and I guess would have been horrified (perhaps offended) if she had been told such.
Maybe we need to spend some time reconnecting people with what they pay for and also what they pay to or receive from others?
Indeed, virtually no one has any understanding of the problems of public financing. They and many politicians, unfortunately, reduce the problem to 'commonsense' solutions familiar to them in household budgeting or running a business. It's why they think rich, 'successful' businesspeople are good choices to govern states or to lead nations. History proves otherwise.
Brilliant! When my 3 kids were young, the daycare bill was larger than my mortgage yet I was glad to pay it. They had excellent care and I had a career. My biggest pay increases were when they started in public education in first grade. We had really good public education but it still wasn’t as good as my daycare. Had to figure out summers and after school times, etc.
Well the argument would be that incentivsing her return to the workplace would contribute to collective prosperity.
Ok but you're presenting this example as if the value people put on spending time taking care of their family is comparable to working. She may have framed it this way because she was frustrated about childcare costs, for valid reasons by the way. We want to encourage more labor force participation but then make it prohibitively expensive to do so.
Is work really where everyone should derive social meaning and connection? She may have friends she will see more, spend a lot more valuable time with her children.
Besides, outside of payroll taxes, that clearly fund health care and pensions in most countries, other taxes fund public goods and redistribution programs. So I should get excited to work full time to have a military and roads when the alternative may be a lot less stressful and personally fulfilling?
Wow, just WOW!
This is going to be a tremendous shock for many, many people! Even for those who earn little, premiums look like they will often double!
Good thing I am above 65 - and please forgive me - but I think January 1st can't come quick enough - you call that Schadenfreude!
Thank you Unity Mitford.
You keep saying the republicans/dems are trying to 'win votes' by making peoples lives better, or pretending to.
Entertain the notion that its basically a plantation. Dereg, piratization, regressive tax, destroying the environment....are policies you do to a plantation. Not your country.,
Overpromise, underdeliver and people voted for him. Republicans preach about God and Christianity, what about the good Samaritan? I call these people "Sunday Christians" They go to church on Sunday, the other six days of the week, screw people over.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke.[1] It is about a traveler (implicitly understood to be Jewish) who is stripped of clothing, beaten, and left half dead alongside the road. A Jewish priest and then a Levite come by, both avoiding the man. A Samaritan happens upon him and—though Samaritans and Jews were generally antagonistic toward each other—helps him. Jesus tells the parable in response to a provocative question from a lawyer in the context of the Great Commandment: "And who is my neighbour?"[1] The conclusion is that the neighbour figure in the parable is the one who shows mercy to their fellow man or woman.
I’m currently reading Separation of Church and Hate by John Fugelsang — it hits on this topic and how to respond to it!
More about these so-called Christians:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/08/why-evangelicals-couldnt-care-less-about-trumps-epstein-scandal/
"Electricity prices are soaring as data centers inflict the cost of their enormous power demands on consumers".
You are missing an important part of the one-two punch driving up electricity prices. It is not just the increased demand of electricity its also the fact that natural gas prices have been exploding. A big part of that is Trumps push to have foreign governments purchase natural gas from US. We really can't increase production of it much more and a lot of extra demand (and anticipated demand) drives up price.
They also take lots of water. Here in Texas, there are data centers they want to put in around Abilene and are trying to get the State to approve taking water from east Texas!
Some years back, the city of Atlanta was trying everything they could (including having the Tennessee/Georgia border shifted a few miles) to get a pipeline to the Tennessee river. Last year I read that the State of Utah was proposing to build a pipeline to replenish the Salt Lake from the Pacific Ocean. You guys are pikers!
Those data center companies should pay for for the rising costs. After all it is them who make the profit.