Democratic Debate #2 Thread (Night 2)
welcome to debate #2, night 2. with night one out of the way, and the expectations set by our first night of candidates, we turn to a much more diverse, much more ideologically separated group of candidates ranging from asian-american technocrat andrew yang to moderate-progressives african-americans in booker and harris, and from berniecrat-type tulsi gabbard to solidly moderate joe biden. it seems likely that we'll see more fireworks today than we did last night, especially given CNN's adversarial lines of questioning in the first night. as always, here are all the details you'd ever need, and probably then some:
i recommend you sort by newest first (or order posted) instead of the default since this thread will likely be semi-active and covering a live event.
How to Watch:
The debate each night will start at 8 p.m. ET and last two hours.
TV broadcast: CNN
Free online stream: CNN.com, CNN apps
Additional coverage: CBS News, NBC News
The Candidates:
The second Democratic presidential debate: July 30-31, 2019
~ Night 1 (Tuesday, July 30): Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, author Marianne Williamson, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock. ~
Night 2 (Wednesday, July 31): Former Vice President Joe Biden, California Sen. Kamala Harris, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, former HUD Secretary Julián Castro, business leader Andrew Yang, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet.
The Rules:
A candidate "who consistently interrupts" on Tuesday and Wednesday nights will be penalized by having his or her time reduced.
Campaign representatives have also been told there will be no "lightning round"-type questions requiring a show of hands or one word responses.
The debate will be moderated by Dana Bash, Don Lemon and Jake Tapper. Each of the 10 candidates each night will be allowed to make brief opening and closing statements, the network said.
The Analysis:
NPR has 5 questions for this debate:
- Will there be any distinctions drawn between Sanders and Warren?
- Will some of the air be taken out of Sanders' sails because Biden isn't onstage?
- How is race raised?
- Who breaks out?
- Without hand-raising, will we get answers that are as clear?
other pre-debate analysis pieces that may be pertinent to you:
Aftermath of Night One:
- POLITICO: It’s a center-left party after all
- the Atlantic: Elizabeth Warren’s Big Night
- NPR: Sanders And Warren Stand Together: Takeaways From Tuesday's Democratic Debate
- NBC News: The Warren-Sanders wing comes up short
- NPR: 'Impossible Promises' Vs. 'Small Ideas.' Moderates And Progressives Clash At Debate
- the Atlantic: Democratic Moderates Fade Into the Background
- Buzzfeed: Mayor Pete Has A Plan To Address Systemic Inequality For Black Americans. He Was Barely Able To Talk About It In The Debate.
- Vox: Is it me or is Marianne Williamson making a lot of sense?
- Vox: 3 winners and 4 losers from the first night of the July Democratic debates
- the Guardian: Who won the Democrats' debate? Our panelists' verdict
The last time I used it, I had a ten pound lipoma removed from my left shoulder/back area. It was 18cm x 24cm x 10cm. It was also causing me shoulder pain and swelling up whenever I did a lot of work with my arms up past my shoulders. They tried to tell me it was a 'cosmetic issue' and deny treatment. Obamacare's preventative treatment clause put that denial to rest. By then it was pressing on my spine and every doctor I saw said it had to go, and now.
The best part was that I had to be copied in on every transaction between the hospital (which did a truly exemplary job removing it) and the insurance companies. This exchange lasted for three fucking years before the hospital finally got paid. They spent far more on the bullshit paperwork than they did on the surgery, which took less than an hour and a mere two followup visits.
I am still dealing with the fact that my insurance keeps denying me required testing on my foot, which is causing me issues even today, and I have relatively good insurance!
The discussion of "how could you rip people's healthcare away from them" is a line of argument from someone who has absolutely no idea how real people interact with the healthcare industry.
EDIT: I literally just got finished with the orthopedic appointment I scheduled today, and every single person in the office was so frustrated and apologetic, stating that insurance across the board is getting less and less willing to pay out and more and more expensive, making the jobs of doctors and their support staff more and more difficult.
The fact that some people's solution to this is "well the private healthcare industry isn't that bad" makes me infuriated. CNN and its moderators who clearly don't know how real people interact with insurance should be ashamed of using such a blatantly disingenuous argument in their questions.
The whole thing is a sham, and at this point I'm standing fully behind the candidates who want to completely abolish the private healthcare system, if for no other reason than the for-profit system does absolutely nothing that it's supposed to do.
My own preference is for the government to offer a platinum plan for $0 and let people opt-in to that plan, or not, as they choose. That plan will clean the cruft out of the market in a big damn hurry. The other plans that survive will probably build on the government plan, or offer new health coverage that the government isn't offering yet. Who knows what those plans will look like in fifty years with new medical tech? If there's a marketplace, at least plans can evolve without having to go through the government first. I think that's important to preserve.
However, if the current industry wishes to continue fighting and refusing to change, I'm willing to see the private health insurance industry end by fiat because they are obstructing and essentially committing capital crimes in the process. I have no sympathy for them and their gruesomely perverted market segment when other countries are managing their health care on socialist principles just fine. We know it can work that way.
But the thing is that insurance only works when enough people buy in. If you have most people being driven towards the $0 "platinum plan" that covers nearly everything, then other plans will simply be too expensive for anyone except the ultra-rich to buy into. And who does that benefit except the ultra-rich? Where is the incentive to bring this new coverage into the public option?
Does anyone know why we still have crowds during nationally televised debates? Moderators are constantly trying to keep them in check with the applauses, politicians clearly play to the room, and the crowd response could sway the viewers at home. Are they just a relic of tradition? Or is it some form of transparency where networks can rely on the hundreds in attendance to somehow prove that everything was broadcast without editing or some other form of manipulation?
probably tradition or some equally asinine reason.
I think the debates were in better hands when they were being run by the league of women voters. Those days are long gone now.
I'd like to see a long-form debate, with five minutes to answer, a panel of 20 fact checkers holding everyone's feet to the fire in real time, run by a panel of celebs from both sides of the aisle (please get Jon Stewart and Penn Jillette in there). Set them up with no audience, seated in comfy chairs in a semicircle. Dig deep enough to find out who knows their shit and who is just spouting platitudes. I don't expect the political parties to ever allow something like that to happen, though. It'll shatter their narratives.
100% this -- I remember thinking last night that I really wish someone would hold a debate that was like, a whole afternoon, with free-ranging discussion that naturally drifted from one topic to another. It could be live-streamed nowadays.
Of course, someone like Joe Rogan would be the one who'd do it, and I think that's a bad idea. And few candidates would want to participate. But it's my pie in the sky dream.
I'd have Joe hanging around doing pre/post interviews. He'd be far better at making that chit chat interesting than trying to wrangle a debate panel. :P
Yeah maybe -- to be honest, I haven't listened to Rogan, but I've heard enough about his non-challenging of far-right politicians/provacateurs that I'm not super interested in hearing what he has to say.
Joe doesn't have much of a dog in politics. He'll interview anyone, about anything, and not give a fuck in the slightest. Hell, half of his podcasts are just jock humor and talking about random bullshit for hours on end - they are kinda fun depending on who the guests are. I've seen people describe him as alt-right just because he's had a handful of alt-right nutjobs on his podcast. There's not much you can do about people who leap to snap judgements like that. Most of his guests (over 1300 shows now) aren't political at all. He spends more time on UFOs than politics.
Thanks for the reply. I'm glad to know that it's not quite so insane as I've
heard on the internet.
(Is anything quite so insane?)
I can relate. I'd picked up the whiff that he was alt-right somewhere on reddit and was kinda avoiding him, until Sturgill Simpson landed on his podcast. I wasn't going to pass up on Sturgill just because it was Rogan. Then I watched a couple more, and it's just some guy (who isn't a genius, or an idiot) and his friends interviewing whoever for a couple hours.
Lately they've been more into looking things up and fact checking, Joe's learning the value of calling bullshit and following evidence (something he was poor at in the pre-800 block of shows). Heck, Ben Shapiro didn't have a good time on there, Joe roasted his ass over some of his more conservative views regarding gender issues and really ruffled the right's feathers - to which Joe just laughs when it comes up. I enjoyed that immensely. Anyone giving people shit over their gender or sexual preference is a piss poor libertarian.
It's just a silly, exceptionally long talk show, everything else is projecting. He does boast an audience in the tens of millions somehow. It's not that different to Howard Stern back in the day.
This sounds much better. Thanks for the clarification! Maybe I should check
out an episode or two -- I do like me some Sturgill Simpson.
Tickets are $1,000 per seat.
Also, the candidates themselves feed on energy from a crowd. It’s a bit dispiriting for everyone involved to be in a sterile and empty studio. Same reason sitcoms are often filmed before a love studio audience.
The thing would have been a performance anyway. Politics has been a performance act since long before TV or radio were even things. You can’t divorce it from the more theatrical elements of rhetoric and public speaking. Even the Lincoln-Douglass debates these are based on were intended to raise publicity and mug for a crowd.
The not having much time to actually talk about stuff is a consequence of there being 20 people on the stage more than the audience. And the general vapidity of the questioning is due to the vapidity of the political press/debate moderators. The crowd doesn’t have much to do with it.
It’s not as if most viewers could even follow a “serious policy discussion” if it happened anyway. That’s not what presidential campaigns are about. They’re about signaling genera statements of goals and values. Policy discussions are for the nerds to deal with once in office.
Again though, the root cause there isn't that there is a crowd at the debate it's that cable TV news isn't wired to go deep into policy discussion. And even then, a debate stage with 10 people on it doesn't really permit having a deep discussion anyway. You'd be there for hours and people would go to sleep halfway through. I go to "serious" panels in academic settings often enough and even those are pretty objectively shit at actually addressing any subject matter past a surface level. Unless you're a complete naif on the topic you will get nothing out of them.
The fact is, on mass media you're never going to have "real policy discussion." That's not what cable news or twitter is for and the vast majority of the mass-media audience literally lacks the background knowledge or intellectual capacity to understand real policy discussion if it was actually happening. What most people think is "real command of the issues" when they watch TV is seeing Hillary Clinton drop bits of trivia like knowing this or that diplomat's name. Even the "serious" stuff is theater for people who like the aesthetics of "serious policy analysis."
If people were capable of making these judgements for themselves then they wouldn't need to be voting for politicians to implement them. We could just institute direct democracy and staff positions by lottery instead. The whole point of hiring professional legislators and policy makers to do the policy is because we have an understanding that those professionals have better judgement and have a better grasp of the policy details than John Q Public does. It's like expecting a doctor to explain the exact mechanism and biology behind a treatment plan being given to a patient. Who cares? All the patient needs to know is what they should expect and what they need to do. Everything else is literally just trivia that might satisfy your curiosity but won't make a dime's worth of difference to outcomes.
And honestly, command of deep policy details has a lot less to do with being a good President than raw charisma and values do. The policy details themselves are going to get worked out through political horse-trading and sausage making, so any firm commitments being made early in a campaign debate are basically just twaddle. At best they can signal the candidate's general values and beliefs about how things ought to work, but political theater does that more effectively and is accessible to more people anyhow.
The Presidency is a managerial position. The best managers aren't necessarily the smartest people in the room. Their most valuable skill-set is being able to articulate a clear strategic vision and keep a group of people focused on achieving it. They don't need to be nerds, they just need to be able to identify who are the right nerds for the jobs and get them pointed in the right direction. Wisdom and charisma factor into that a lot more than straight intelligence.
At this point I don't think it's profit incentive as much as it is monopoly power and the insularity of our political and media elites.
Here's a fairly definitive political science text on how public opinion and policy decisions are actually shaped. People at the Lincoln-Douglass debates were turbo-nerds who had the time to not have to work and just hang out listening to two guys drone on for hours. The only reason it was ever viable was because summaries got written up in the newspapers that people could skim. But even then people weren't making decisions based on their own deep understandings of policy, they were just referring to the judgement of the handful of people they knew in their communities who might be smart enough to have an informed opinion.
This is still what they do, except those opinion-guideposts are now cable news pundits and the whole system of maintaining a public sphere for discourse is fucked. But again, this is due to the hijacking of the organs of information by media monopolies. It has nothing to do with there being crowds at debates, and there was never a mythical time when people were keenly aware of the minutiae of economic and social policies.
for those of you keeping track, that heckler was screaming "THREE MILLION DEPORTATIONS!" at biden.
And yet he hasn't answered any questions about how he's going to prevent a situation that the alt-right and white nationalists are claiming will lead to a "virtual border wall" by pricing non-citizens out of being able to live in the US.
Also his online presence feels very forced to me. Every time I see someone talk about how amazing he is, I see other comments of theirs talking about how great Joe Rogan is or spouting Ben Shapiro talking points. It doesn't feel like a progressive supporting a progressive candidate.
Anyone who appeals to extremely online NEETs is going to have this problem. Yang has it, Sanders has/had it, and before him it was Ron Paul. And the phenomenon predates the internet. Before Ron Paul, you had a subculture of irony poisoned, socially disaffected dudes who were super into Lyndon LaRouche (and kinda Ralph Nader).
It's an undercurrent in American political culture. What's really interesting about Yang is that it's the first time the object of fixation isn't a curmudgeonly old White dude who likes to yell a lot. But in other ways, Yang is a prototypical example of the types of young men who used to follow these old curmudgeons around so maybe we've just moved on to cutting out the middle-man.
The actual values/ideological orientation seems to be some sort of South Park libertarianism and doesn't fit neatly into the major political coalitions. I think their main defining characteristic is their inability to resolve a few basic impulses within themselves.
They tend to not like socially constructed rules in general and want to be free of obligations, so they don't really get along with more traditional social conservatives. But they also are really uncomfortable with uncertainty, so they like clearly defined hierarchies and having everyone/thing being neatly categorized, so they don't like liberals or leftists much either.
They also can't resolve their economic views because on a basic level they don't really want to do work (see the thing about having rules and obligations). Where they shake out depends. If they think the thing making them work is taxes, they resent taxation and become libertarians so they can keep their property and not have anyone tell them what to do with it. On the other hand, if they feel the thing making them work is lack of resources, you get people who either want UBI or indulge in fantasies of fully-automated, luxury, gay, space communism which will come around the moment everyone signs a pledge to not like capitalism.
On a purely emotional level, I think these are dudes who feel a deep sense that they lack control in their lives and find living under overlapping bureaucracies to be kind of stultifying. But they don't actually have a clear idea about what the root cause is or how to make it better, so they go from one totalizing ideology to the next to make sense of this feeling and end up with some mish-mash of half-baked explanations for why they feel this sense of anomie. They never really figure out how to make peace with it or develop some coherent logic around it, though, so they just perpetually exist in a state of cognitive dissonance and get angry about their inability to resolve it.
This. Yang is a figure created due to the runaway far-right leaving a vacuum of people who both need social hierarchy to understand their place in the world, but don't want anything to do with the social aspects of the far-right.
They want socialism without socialism. They want their capitalism and the structure it props up, but don't like the consequences.
And this is precisely why they are the perfect targets for white nationalists to hop on, especially if they can get a policy in place that will help them drive out immigrants and non-citizens (read non-white people).
Because unless he has a response to this, he's only helping enable white nationalists. Ignoring the fact that white nationalists love a candidate is how we got Trump.
White nationalists are like cats. If they're hanging around it's probably because you're feeding them.
Feral cats also flock to poison sausages.
That would in fact be a response that fixes the issue, something which Yang has not given.
This is factually incorrect, as Yang's Freedom Dividend is actually a collection of several tax policies, including a carbon tax, financial transaction tax, and treating capital gains as ordinary income. Any article that mentions just the VAT simply hasn't done their homework and has missed the big picture completely. The VAT itself will not be a flat tax, it will be tailored to avoid commodities as Yang has said in every interview about it.
Most of his opponents are happy to focus on the VAT alone and pretend it's a flat VAT implementation. They attack a straw man and pretend their halfassed analysis is the real one.
Furthermore, as Yang has said, social security is not included, you get that with the Freedom Dividend, so it's a $1000/mo raise for everyone on social security right now. Honestly, if the people analyzing his policies can't even get the basic elements of it that are posted on his website correct, why listen to anything these hack outlets have to say about it?
These are the real numbers. It's the most progressive tax policy anyone has ever proposed in the USA. A full 87% of American households come out ahead of where they are now under this tax scheme. Almost all of the increased tax burden lands squarely on the top 1% of earners.
It seems like they're trying to talk about a watered down version of a Social Dividend, but trying to implement it in a way that doesn't involve nationalizing broad swathes of the economy.
Whether that's a bug or a feature for you comes down to whether you believe in collective control/ownership as good or bad and how you feel about persistent income inequality.
Either way the idea is a DOA. If you're on the left it's bad because it doesn't actually do anything about inequality and might actually make it worse. If you're on the right it's bad because you hate paying taxes. You could get a similar result by adopting a Social Dividend, and at least then you'd get Leftists behind you.
That's exactly what it is. Trying to build that into the american economic system is crunchy business. He's using Alaska's 38 year old model for their permanent fund, which is also the oldest and longest-running version of a UBI that has existed anywhere. The numbers are all there to prove it works, has beneficial effects over the long term raising outcomes for everyone, and is universally popular.
Yang is replacing oil with automation as the funding source, and applying it to the entire country rather than a single small state population.
You'll have to walk me through that line of thinking sometime. America's current welfare system is built to keep people locked into poverty - when you make more money, they reduce your benefits accordingly, which dis-incentivizes work. This model provides an effective escape hatch from those broken welfare programs and eliminates their administration overhead while doing it. It perfectly aligns the incentive structures to make people want to work, and stops penalizing them when they do. That seems like a big win to me.
Even Friedman said the only reason he was in favor of UBI/NIT was to use it to replace the existing welfare systems with something that actually works.
Welfare isn't really an anti-inequality measure and it's barely an anti-poverty measure, it's an anti-starvation measure. There are structural problems with how we implement it here, but UBI doesn't really fix most of them and the real issue with inequality is that a handful of absurdly rich people are permitted to exercise dramatically outsized influence on our economic, social, and political lives.
Poverty is an associated outcome of this, but it's a separate issue. Allowing there to continue being absurdly wealthy people who can exercise such absurd amounts of power with no democratic accountability ensures inequality will continue and perpetuate itself.
Moreover, a $1,000 defined benefit isn't nearly enough to actually meet anyone's basic needs and it is very likely to just drive up inflation. This is a good benefit for students and #VanLife types but it does not really help you if you have severe medical debt (or are overloaded with debts of any kind) or help you achieve any sort of long-term savings or capital accumulation.
And the fact that you'd need to keep re-upping it through legislative action rather than pegging it to some kind of CPI all but guarantees that the real value of the benefit will asymptotically approach nothing over time.
I think you're looking at this from a privileged position. If you are at the US poverty line, or living paycheck to paycheck, this nearly doubles your yearly disposable income. It also gets the apparatus of state welfare off of your back - no more hassles, meetings, state sponsored spying attempting to deny your benefits. No more being unable to volunteer or take small wage jobs because they will not gain you one single cent and could lose you money instead.
I completely agree that this is not a solution to inequality. That's not the point of this policy. It is a welfare policy aimed at reducing poverty, nothing more. It's sole purpose is to help people who are stuck living paycheck to paycheck on low skill jobs (soon to be automated away in the tens of millions) and people on social security. This is currently over 40% of all Americans (that's over one hundred and forty million people).
The fact that it is cash, rather than peanut butter, means it can be used to help solve any problem that person is facing regardless of what it is - repairs, food, tuition, etc. Keep in mind that in any given family unit, this is $2000 per month at least (for the adults). It starts to add up fast when you look at it as households rather than individuals. I'd expect this policy to drive up co-habitation and I never see anyone talk about that aspect of it.
Yang is fond of mentioning that it's not meant to be enough to live on. If this were a $5k/month policy, it would eliminate work. The $12k/year is enough to help you live, but not enough that you don't have to work. It's maintaining and improving the incentives to work, not letting people check out of the economy and lay around all day playing video games. When combined with social security, it is enough to support retirees at around $25k/year.
I also agree that it should be tied to other measurements rather than a flat rate which will lose effectiveness over time. I'm willing to let that pass just to get the experiment into play and see what the real outcomes are, but I'd like to see that revisited in the future and pegged properly. I'm hardly going to boycott the proposal just because it doesn't start out with that provision, though. You've got to start somewhere.
I'd be willing to be that just like in Alaska, it'll be universally popular, and politicians who oppose it after implementation won't be politicians for long, no matter what party or district they represent. In some ways, it's a bell that can't be unrung once it's a reality. I expect it'll be tinkered with and revisited on occasion, probably to do exactly what you suggest. That's par for the course on government policy.
As for the medial and student debt, you'll be glad to know Yang has solutions for those problems that aren't related to his UBI proposal. He's in favor of medicare for all and loan forgiveness, just like the rest of the field. His freedom dividend does not exist in a vacuum.
Fixing all of those is literally easier than inventing a functioning UBI scheme and getting it implemented. And I have a bridge to sell you if you think the forces of welfare reform that put the nanny state into welfare policy in the '90s wouldn't do the same thing to any UBI scheme you care to create. It's simply not durable in this form in the face of political opposition.
Contrast to Social Security and Medicare. Cutting those means killing grandma. Therefore, it's the third rail of American politics. The stakes are real and the stakes are high so people are highly motivated to defend these benefits. If you consciously make your UBI benefit too low for people to actually rely on it, then it's not a locus for political action and it will get chipped away by GOP ratfucking the way they chipped away at the various welfare programs until they turned into the bureaucratic messes they are now. And the same way they chipped away at the VA. The stakes are too low to expect anyone to defend it and all the costs of destroying it fall on politically disempowered people, unlike Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security which are aimed squarely at the middle class.
But Yang's stated goals are all mutually contradictory. You can't have the stakes be high enough to be politically popular without making the benefit big enough to create a disincentive to work. And if it's a disincentive to work, you're increasing cash flow while reducing economic output, which means inflation will eat away at the value of the benefit over time. In other words, if it's gonna be popular politically it'll be bad for the economy. And if it's good for the economy it'll be politically neutral which means its value will eventually atrophy away.
Yang consistently talks about this as an answer to the eventual automation of the economy. If that's the case, this falls far short.
That sounds like a bug, not a feature. That's a recipe for keeping abused spouses afraid to leave their abusers and for neglectful caretakers to under-provide elder-care for their ailing parents rather than putting them in hospice.
Again, a bug. If you have multiple kids and a medical issue that prevents you from being able to have steady work, it's actively making your life harder. As for "letting it pass to get the experiment into play" this is the real position of privilege where you're going to be removing welfare programs, which are already woefully inadequate, in favor of an even weaker safety net that has no guarantee of remaining politically viable over the long term.
a.) The Alaska permanent fund is financed by profits from oil money, not taxes. It's a lot easier to sell politically when it's already state money.
b.) Alaska is kind of a mess because so much of their politics revolves around using the permanent fund as a bribe to keep citizens quiet as Republicans gut all public spending. This has actually impoverished them further over the long term. A perfect example is how they literally about to destroy the University of Alaska system and plow all the money into a paltry increase in the social dividend to make up for it. College students are a minority and old people who already got theirs are happy to pocket the money.
If you believe in the concept of a Second Bill of Rights, as any good Democrat ought to, then Yang's UBI proposal is functionally loading the gun that Republicans will use to shoot it in the head, along with any concept of government as an agent for achieving collective action.
Seems to me you can use that excuse to avoid implementing any policy you like. If you want to sell me that bridge, you'll need a better pitch, I'm not buying it. I think UBI will become another one of those third rails the instant it's implemented.
The GOP will always chip away at everything, that's what their corporate backers pay them to do. Thanks for agreeing with me though that the current programs are a 'ratfuck' and could use an overhaul, that's my primary interest in this particular issue.
There will always be political dog fighting. There's no version of UBI that could be passed and be somehow perfect and/or untouchable by the opposition party. They'll strike it down just because the 'blue team' got a win, and they want to take it away. That's all the reason they've ever needed. The policy could be a post-it note with the letters 'FU' on it, and they'll try to overturn it just because of the note's color.
I agree, that's why I brought it up. I'd like to see that aspect talked about and addressed more. I've never seen anyone ask Yang that question. :P I don't think cohabitation needs to be a bad thing (as opposed to living alone in a shack, not good for mental health)... but I would like to see research on this stuff, if it's out there.
Yes, and that's why it's opt-in only. If your current welfare works, you keep it. Programs that provide choice usually come across as a plus for me. Programs that can phase-in slowly, as people decide to switch, on their own time, are usually better than programs that torch existing systems wholesale in favor of new ones that might not work or may need adjustment. We all know that no plan works the way it was intended, especially at this level of complexity. I expect Yang to have cost overruns, he's being quite optimistic about the job/revenue generation paying for about $800Bn of the cost.
Now you're in la-la land and I'm starting to wonder if you're trolling me. If you have multiple kids, the ones 18+ are getting $1k a month and off your back somewhat because of that. If you have a medical issue, Yang's covering your health care for free in total, and still giving you and your spouse $1k a month for sitting there with your health issue. He'll even help send your disabled ass to college. In no way does any of this make anyone's life 'harder.'
I'll grant you that one. Try this: The USA is the only first world economy without a VAT, and that lack of a VAT is exactly why corporations can dodge taxes so easily here and not elsewhere. The point of the VAT is to have a tax corporations can't escape. Sells it for me (an anti-tax libertarian) just fine, YMMV.
I'll take your word for it since I'm not an Alaskan.
It seems like your entire argument is a variation on 'gubmint bad, this is why we can't have nice things'. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. /shrug
I mean, I explained to you the exact economic reasons why it will be counterproductive, the political science reasons why it's inherently more brittle than other forms of social insurance, and even provided an example from Alaska of exactly how it will be leveraged to wreck any idea of government being committed to furthering social good. But if you jumped from that to claiming I was saying 'gubmint bad, this is why we can't have nice things' it really sounds like you didn't bother to read my comment at all.
Well, my sole objection is your assumption that what plays out in Alaska is inevitable anywhere this sort of thing is tried. That's just nuts. :P
I mean when Alaska is one of two examples the Yang Gang points to when talking about the successes of UBI, it's pretty important to discuss the fallout of these supposedly "working" systems.
I mean, hell, I just read through most of Yang's policy page and the number of times Alaska is mentioned is ridiculous.
I mean that's simply not true. Some policies are more durable than others. If you have a multi-faceted plan like UBI, which requires a carbon tax, a capital gains tax, a VAT, and several other forms of taxation to fund it and not have inflation go through the roof, as Yang claims, you leave open 5+ avenues of attack for getting rid of the program.
If you have "single payer" or "medicare for all", that is a binary choice, a single avenue of attack. it is paid in by all people equally, through a single avenue, a single tax, and a single mechanism. You either have single payer, or you don't. You can't defund parts of it and then sit back and watch it all come unraveled.
Yeah but nobody here is saying otherwise, so I don't understand why you had to chalk that up as a rhetorical win on your part, except maybe to signal to the Yang Gang that you got off a zinger.
In a world where there are more empty houses than homeless people, it's ridiculous that low-income people should be without housing, nonetheless forced into cohabitating.
Ok, folks of the Yang Gang keep saying this, but how exactly would that work? It's not like everyone on welfare has the time, knowledge, or will to add up all their benefits, assign a dollar value to them, and then objectively choose one or the other. Many people will make a bad choice and many people will be worse off if they are not given guidance.
Lol you immediately jumped to kids over 18. That's a ridiculous assumption:
I'm a working single mother of 2 children, 1.5 and 5, and I suddenly have a major medical issue. $1000 a month is not enough for food, clothing, diapers, etc. even with free healthcare.
VAT is a regressive tax system that only benefits the rich.
I mean when Yang himself repeatedly cites the successes of Alaska for a lot of his policy page, I think it's important to consider if Alaska is actually a nice place to live after this stuff has been implemented.
It seems like your entire argument is hand-waving and "gotcha" quips while disingenuously summarizing other people's arguments.
Thank god there's someone else out there that is willing to actually pick apart this mess of a policy. Yang seems to be throwing nearly everything at the wall to see what sticks, and his interviews show that he's not really able to answer deep questions about the mechanics of his bills, and instead switches subjects to point at various other not-quite-equivalent programs.
He feels like a Capitalist trying to implement socialist policies without actually resorting to socialism. He comes off as a Capitalists' wet dream.
Also, Alaska and a random Native American community are the only two places they can point to that have even remotely successfully implemented such a program, and the differences between that as a local/state program created via oil profits (as you pointed out) and this in a location like New York City are so vastly different that the comparison is almost pointless.
Thought you might like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/djpf40/iama_presidential_candidate_andrew_yang_ama/f470r3q/
Seems it's going to be pegged to CPI after all.
That’s not really enough to go on for something like this. The problem is, the money being out there will naturally bid up the prices of anything with inelastic supply. So even if it’s pegged to CPI (and I assume it would be CPI-W), is not necessarily scaling with the basket of goods people actually need. In other words, stuff people can’t trade off or do without ends up getting more and more expensive, but inflation metrics don’t keep up if food and other commodity prices drop to average it out. It all depends on the weighting, and we become at risk of that weighting becoming a political football.
To address the thing Yang wants, you need to decommoditize the basic necessities like healthcare and housing and education. UBI can work as a supplement after that, but it can’t be a good enough substitute.
Thanks for quoting me out of context.
I said Alaskans view their state dividend as universally popular. At no point did I ever say that Americans view UBI as universally popular. I did say in a comment down below that if America gets a UBI, after a year or two, I expect most Americans to see it the same way the Alaskans do, and for it to be universally popular.
Right now, though, for most Americans, UBI is a complete 'what the fuck are you talking about' idea that they will react to with suspicion.
And this is a perfect example of how UBI will dry up because there are multiple avenues of attack against it. Eliminate even one of the proposed sources of taxation in Yang's plan and UBI goes up in flames.
I'm surprised the level of support is that high. Whether or not you support UBI you have to admit it sounds like a crazy idea at first and probably most people, if they've heard of it at all, have only heard of it recently. It's being pushed more into the conversation now thanks to Yang but he's a 1–2% polling candidate in a field of ~20 who barely had any national exposure until last night. It's also interesting to note the demographic breakdowns: a majority of support from those under 50 years of age and an even split for households with income under $75K. I don't know if a UBI will ever be implemented on a large scale (in the US or elsewhere) but it's an idea that will probably be talked about a lot more in the coming years.
This exactly. It's a Capitalist's version of trying to implement socialism. The only thing it ends up doing is passing money up to the top, who already own the bulk of the infrastructure that the $1000 a month will go towards paying.
Forgive me if I don't exactly believe a medium article by a "UBI Center" organization that seems to only exist to support Yang and has only 4 posts, by an author who seems to, again, only post about Yang.
At the end of the day, you end up funneling more money from the lowest rungs of society directly into the pockets of the 1%. So unless you have a strategy that essentially nullifies this income in the 1%, which capital gains taxes won't really cover, you've essentially just given the 1% a relative boost while total cost of basic goods and services like housing, transportation, and food go up because they can.
That article is fully sourced, links to other studies, and explains its methodology in detail. If that's not enough, here's a breakdown of UBI policy that was endorsed by a thousand economists from back in '68 when this measure passed the US House, twice. It's over two hundred pages of detailed discussion on the effects of these policies, carried out by subject matter experts from both sides of the political aisle.
You made me curious about this regressive aspect of the VAT, so I did some digging. The entire EU uses VAT, and they make plenty of exceptions to the rates depending on the services and products. I found Investopedia's breakdown of how VATs operate to be interesting as well. The mechanics are tied to every step in production, which means it's going to hit manufacturers who are gleefully dodging our taxes like a net they can't escape. Sounds like exactly the tax fix America needs. I also like some of the possibilities for refund structures. Those would allow the poor to avoid paying so much as a nickel in VAT.
It seems that the VAT is as progressive, or regressive, as you want to make it. Arguments that it is one or the other are just hot air unless you look at the specific implementation. Everyone calling out Yang as proposing a regressive tax is doing just that - slinging complete bullshit. You can hear it right from him.
I suppose he might have mentioned it's a progressive VAT on his website, but since almost the entire developed world uses that style of VAT, perhaps he just assumed we'd all be smart enough to know that - his mistake. Perhaps someone should tell his staff to update the website to clear up that confusion. I certainly didn't know that.
This I fully agree with, and it's why I expect his programs to have cost overruns. Frankly, I'm not worried about that. We just gave two trillion dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans under Trump. I'm happy to take that all back and skip the VAT completely. I'm past caring where we find the money.
I like how you make it sound like the plan is intended to obliterate all other forms of welfare overnight, really helps your straw man. Perhaps you should look up the details of which programs are affected. It's only cash and cash-like programs at present. It doesn't include housing assistance for example. It has no impact on state welfare. This is far from an all or nothing choice. Perhaps that's why it's entirely opt-in, so people can make the right choice for their own circumstances while the programs come online, and year over year as their circumstances change.
I'm sure we'd all like to read Yang's bill, but politicians don't propose bills while they are still running for office. I've linked you to a thorough analysis. It's good enough for me, and you're not even moving my needle with your arguments here. I guess it's time to agree to disagree.
First I'm hearing about this. Do you have a link to articles or opinion pieces that are discussing this? I'd like to read more. I'd be willing to bet Yang has addressed it somewhere and it's just been lost in the shuffle.
Sure!
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/andrew-yang-4chan-alt-right/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/yang-gang-season
Thanks! I'll digest those and see if I can find him answering those concerns, maybe link you to an interview if there is an answer.
Edit: Well, this is rather a mess. You'll forgive me if I couldn't give less of a damn about /pol/ or various alt-right nutjobs playing their meme games, or that they like Yang. It's a small, loud, crazy group of people, nothing important, just as annoying and irrelevant as the alt-left. I try to stay away from both extremes. I have enough crazy in my life already. :P
The point raised though is rather interesting. The idea (if I'm getting my head around this right) is that Yang's Freedom Dividend is going to lead to inflation and price increases. Before long, these increases in the cost of living will make it impossible for illegal immigrants to be able to live and work in America without also receiving the freedom dividend to make up the difference. Therefore, this policy is somehow better than a border wall, because it'll force illegals out of the country by putting them at a permanent economic disadvantage. Therefore, Yang beats Trump on the border. Am I following this train of thought correctly? I don't want to be tackling a straw man here.
This strikes me as batshit crazy talk (about what I'd expect from /pol/) but let's walk through it anyway.
Let's start with the mistaken idea that UBI leads to inflation. There are no studies that prove this, and there are many which prove it has no effect, or at best, a tiny, negligible effect. I'll link you to this article on commondreams that itself summarizes and links to some of those studies.
I picked the common dreams article because it's a good, solid overview of this policy aimed at the UK primarily, rather than the US, and it's from 2017 so it predates this particular political cycle and Andrew Yang. It isn't tainted by partisanship. You'll note that they make the case that UBI raises demand along with supply and this offsets the inflation, keeping prices stable.
One could make the argument that the VAT being proposed to fund Yang's proposal will in fact make things harder for immigrants by raising prices, and if this is a flat VAT of 10%, it would be true - though I question if the 10% is enough to make all of our immigrants pack up and run for home, that seems a bit like wishful thinking. However, if this VAT targets luxury goods rather than commodity goods, as Yang repeatedly says it will, that argument will also fall flat, as illegal immigrants aren't buying much luxury with their low wage jobs.
I could call this done right here, but let's continue anyway and see what Yang's border and immigration policies have to say about this stuff. Maybe that's why alt-right loons like him so much.
Yang only has four immigration policies listed (rather light for him). I need to warn you about his overly mobile-friendly website - scroll down, there's more to these policies than the handwavy landing page. I think a lot of people visiting Yang's site miss that and it's kinda crappy design. :P
The first is a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. This does not deport the eleven million who are already here, instead it turns them into citizens. Not much help for the alt-right there. Next up is his support for the DREAM act which, if you're unfamiliar, is summarized on wikipedia. Again, not much help for the alt-right here, helping minors become citizens. Then we have Yang's plan to entice high-skill individuals to remain in the US. In any sane world this would be a bi-partisan supported shoe-in, but since it means more immigrants I expect the alt-right won't like this one either.
Last is his policy on southern border security which at last seems like something the alt-right might like. Yang is in favor of investing in and bumping up border security significantly, including a surveillance wall rather than a real one. I expect the alt-right will be all over this one, as it's stronger than you typically see from democrats. Just don't tell them Yang wants them to all register their guns, apply for 3 tiers of firearms licenses, and pass background checks to own them. Then they might shoot him. :P
As for Yang's campaign actively engaging /pol/ and other alt-right forums - that I totally believe. It's exactly the kind of strategy his campaign uses. It's hardly a coincidence that there were two clips of Yang on reddit's front /all page yesterday, I'm sure they engineered that as well. Yang's 4th wall break in his closing statement came from this reddit comment on his AMA from last week. His campaign staff is right there saying they'd use it.
Whoever is managing Yang's internet strategy is playing these various online groups like a damn fiddle. They aren't sending him to interviews like Ben Carlson, Dave Rubin, and Joe Rogan out of the blue. They are trying to energize the libertarians for Yang, and they've been successful. The libertarians will carry that message to the rest of the conservatives. My first exposure to Yang was after searching him and looking for long interviews, which lead me to Dave Rubin (who I'd never seen before then) with the two hour time tag. That's what I like - in depth conversations, especially with 'the opposition party.
So, I honestly don't see what the fuss is about, this is qanon-level hokum. If I'm missing something, help me follow the logic here. Yang is no friend of conservatives or alt-right white supremacists. He's merely playing them as useful idiots, like any savvy politician.
I should add, I would love to see someone ask him this question directly and put him on the spot about it. I don't get to see Yang squirm very often, it'd be glorious. Might even catch him in a gaffe.
I enjoyed that debate much more than last night, though I was missing Bernie and Liz. Yang did far better than I was expecting, surprised he tied literally every answer he could back to his UBI proposal. That slam about the debates being reality tv while hitting the media back over his tie was excellent. If you're wondering why the crowd was cheering him more than you might expect, remember this is Detroit and his non-profit venture for america did a lot of good work in that city, so he had a home field advantage (and the yang gang was pressing it hard, they organized for that crowd).
I liked Jay Inslee and Tulsi Gabbard as well. Honestly, the democrats should be proud of their first crop of candidates this early in the game. It's a pretty awesome team they fielded, far better than the republican's clown circus that brought us Trump.
Edit: Apparently the traffic surge knocked yang2020.com offline for a little while. Too early to declare a winner? You realize he now has collected all the geo-interest data he needs to know where to send the yang gang to organize. Clever monkeys in his campaign corner.
He paired that with a personal "exceptional immigrant" story, though. I appreciate not being demonized for issues in this country, but I dislike that many things said in my favor make it feel like I have to be a PhD graduate with 20 patents, win a gold medal at the Olympics, and give millions to charity. Most of us immigrants are just normal people.
I agree with this. I also think you're going to see a lot more of that from Andrew once the debate stage clears up.
His strategy seems to be pretty simple. He's hanging back, answering his questions, and tying everything to his UBI proposal to get everyone's attention in the clown car early debates. Quality and quickness over quantity. He can do this because he expects and has been saying for six months that he'll be around for every single debate, and his numbers are on track to make that happen, especially after last night.
He has more than one hundred and twenty policy positions on his website. He's hardly a one trick pony, that's just the game he's playing right now. He isn't talking about the rest of his ideas yet. He's saving them so he can spring them on everyone in the later debates when he'll have more talking time to explain them. I expect he'll start de-emphasizing UBI and switch to his other galaxy of talking points - which you will only see if you watch some of his 1-3 hour interviews.
Basically, he's leaning on the ropes during these first two rounds and letting the other candidates tear each other down. That's why he doesn't attack - he deftly dodged CNN's attempt to get him to attack Kamala, the look on her face was priceless when he passed on that and still managed to answer the question. Did you see him getting the fist-pumps out of Biden every time he redirected away from CNN's bait and stuck to policy? Andrew is the only guy on that stage still making friends of the other candidates.
He's a snake in the grass, don't let him fool you. That's part of what attracted me to his campaign. When he's one of eight, then one of five, then one of three people on the stage, he'll change his game to the one we see in his long form interviews. If he manages to win the nom, he'll change it again into the style that's winning over conservatives in those interviews.
One of Yang's policies is to grant green cards to anyone who comes to America and gets a degree. He has a similar policy for those on work visas as long as they keep their noses clean. Incentivizing people to stay here and work/build, rather than going back home.
Ah, but anything republicans might agree with is a republican talking point! Unacceptable!
The phrase "republican talking point" might as well be a republican talking point at this point. I'm over it.
I feel like Booker is making points that are important to make (“we are playing into Republican talking points. Decriminalization isn't legalization and it would just be a civil offense handled in civil court “ etc) but he isn’t making it forcefully enough to be memorable. But it’s nice that there is some awareness of the fact that they shouldn’t eat each other alive to appease Republicans who will turn around and call them socialists anyway.
the debate has not even started, and biden's already doing things that are pretty irritating and condescending as shit:
Joe Biden greeted Sen. Kamala Harris (an adult woman) by saying "Go easy on me, kid."
for the record, that disruption was apparently people wanting de blasio to fire that dude who killed eric garner?--i have no idea why they interrupted booker to do that, though.
booker's twitter team seems to be taking this in stride: To the folks who were standing up to Mayor de Blasio a few minutes ago—good for you. That's how change is made. #DemDebate
and now we've circled all the way to the garner issue, which is now being addressed on the debate stage. congrats, protesters!
After the flood, tornado, wildfire, or hurricane levels your house, that'll sound like sensible policy.
I didn't mind the too late comment because it's scientifically accurate. We are already too late to avoid a lot of the damage. Anyone living in the southern or western or even midwestern USA is in for a rough time, as is anyone living on the coast - any coast, anywhere. We're going to see trillions in damages before this chapter of human history plays out. I like to see someone with the courage to acknowledge that reality even if it's a bit grim. I very much liked Jay Inslee's passion for the issue as well, scored him lots of points with me.
Biden fumbles closing statement at 2nd Democratic debate
Predictably, the domains Joe3030.com and Joe30330.com were purchased, and interested parties were redirected to the campaign of South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
The latter URL was later redirected to JoshforAmerica.com, the “first Gen Z’er to declare candidacy for this office.”
Liberal media outlets are not Yang's friend. He gets attacked there far more than he does on Fox news (and NBC absolutely hates him). There's been a reluctance to talk about his UBI proposal because every time someone tries to pick it apart Yang kicks their ass with numbers and studies and a solid history lesson. If the question is disingenuously phrased he'll bring that up and attack right back, too - and he's good at it. Asking him that question is a total softball he can knock out of the park in his sleep at this point. Lately, it seems the major news outlets don't want to let him talk about it. They'd rather hit him on foreign policy, which is one of his weaker areas.
next debates aren't until september 12th and 13th (if necessary), so it'll be a bit.
The polling requirements go up as well. I think it's four qualifying polls from four states that are all 2% or higher. The individual donor requirements also double and require donors from multiple states. It's going to cut the field in half - and mostly, the ones going away will be the annoying, distracting centrists/blue dogs. All the real progressives are doing quite well.
This is frustrating, I missed the debates and cannot find a link online, CNN does not have them on their app for re-streaming at least as far as I can tell.
Does anyone have link so I can watch the debates?
This has been the case for me for both debates. Apparently, you can watch through CNN's streaming app if you have a cable provider login, which, frankly, is absurd. We shouldn't have to pay to see this.
Looks like none of the big publishers have uploaded it to YouTube yet, but there are a few small channels I've never heard of that have uploaded it.
aaaaaaaaaand de blasio opens with biden saying nothing will fundamentally change and harris not wanting to change the system! i suspect that that portends fireworks.
this healthcare debate feels so, so much less robust and invested than last night's, which is somewhat inevitable because of how the lots were (some of the less animated candidates are involved here) but also because half the people here simply cannot message for shit on this issue.
booker bringing up voter suppression is pretty novel--and of course, he hit the important black female vote in democratic primaries in doing so, which is a good idea. CNN clearly isn't going to ask a question on that issue, so it pays to distinguish yourself on that where possible.
there are some really weird coalitions on healthcare: we had a constellation of de blasio, gabbard, harris, and gillibrand pointing out biden's issues on healthcare in that whole discussion even though those people share like no other policy positions.
he also completely dodged answering de blasio or booker which... dude. they're correct! you can't dodge that shit forever!
sign me up
see, on one hand obama wasn't a bad president (at least socially and to some extent economically–things like his foreign policy are another story) but on the other hand, he wasn't a bad president because of the context in which his administration served. obama was good for a country coming out of the worst economic collapse and financial crisis since the great depression, and was good for a country coming around to the integration of the LGBT community and still reeling from the issues of racism. he would probably not be good for now, though, because his message of HOPE and reconciliation of racial and financial divide has been thoroughly dismantled, his progressive chops have been slowly whittled away by the sands of time and the realities of politics, and because the realities of the future we're staring at demand a lot more than he was willing or would be able to honestly offer. obama was in essence--and should have been--a building block president, but that building block after him never happened, and so while channeling his ideas and energy for a third term is good and all, it's at this point really not something that i can foresee ever being able to truly solve the problems of the world we now face. his time was good, but his time is also the past, and lingering in the legacy of that past is just not going to be enough.
Unless progressives can win a national election in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the upper Midwest, the new progressivism is going to be defeated by Trump's hand yet again.
Things like health plans and such probably play well there.
All of this outrage olympics and identity griefing doesn't as much. I mean, let's just remember that despite all of this rehashing of racial grievances and such, Biden is still killing it with black people.
there's not really a reason to suggest that they wouldn't be able to other than the false notion that "moderation" automatically means bipartisan voters; biden and sanders, as useless as polling is this far out, poll close to equally in almost every poll, and there's a similar parallel with warren and the more moderate harris and buttigieg. donald also has very, very tiny margins in those states, mostly contingent on lower than usual minority turnout that seem unlikely to replicate themselves and very good margins with whites that have been eroded badly through his presidency. i accordingly come down on the line of thinking that anyone worth their salt will win in 2020. it's much more of a donald problem to preserve those margins than a democrat one to erode them.
(also, democrats don't need ohio to win the presidency, at this point, and even a centrist candidate is probably not going to win the state again on account of demographic changes that are making the state whiter, less educated, and smaller on the whole.)
Polling at this point is basically meaningless.
A bit tautological.
I'll say the reverse. Nominate Biden or one of the moderates, and the dems win easily. Nomate Warren or Sanders and Trump kills it.
i did say that, yes. but you can draw certain things from it in the broader sense although its predictive value is meaningless: i reiterate the fact that biden and sanders poll equally despite stark ideological differences and harris and buttigieg poll equally with warren despite clear ideological differences suggests that there is not a huge difference between the perceptions of those people at this point among the general electorate, and accordingly there's no reason to think that any of the five would be especially favored over the others except maybe biden to a small extent, but not meaningfully moreso than sanders and not much moreso than warren, harris, or buttigieg?
i don't see what's particularly tautological about the take "anybody worth their salt will win in 2020 because it's far more a matter of donald preserving margins than democrats eroding them, and his margins sucked and show no signs of improving". i'm pretty sure you could run hillary again and she'd win at this point.
Because if someone doesn't win in 2020, they're clearly not worth their salt. That was the tautological bit.
you're reading it as an electoral prediction and not as "these candidates aren't literal nobodies and aren't total garbage", but i worded that ambiguously so i can see why you did. my position remains that any candidate who is not a gigantic tire-fire of a person will beat donald barring a significant shift in the status quo, not because of anything they do necessarily, but simply because donald's path to victory in 2016 was exceptionally narrow and i just don't see him pulling that off again given his (and the republican party's) erosion with every demographic of white voters and the likelihood of high minority turnout.
I have rarely heard anything as stupid as de Blasio's closing statement, where he said, "We need to be willing to tell people proudly we're going to tax the hell out of the rich. And then, right on queue, Trump will call us a socialist. No, Mr. Trump, you're the socialist. Socialism for the rich."
It's like he's the spitting image of a liberal who doesn't know what they're talking about and is just there to bait other candidates into taking stupid positions that won't play well in the general.
"socialism for the rich" as a political trope in general is just an incredibly stupid line, and i feel like nobody who has seriously workshopped a line like that when they're not going to give followup details would ever phrase it that way because you really can't make it not sound stupid otherwise. like, sanders flirts with something like that in his stump speeches, but he usually also actually goes into detail with what he means when he does because the line itself is just... not that good. de blasio apparently did not get that memo.
Yeah I think people would be sympathetic with arguments that talk about the use of the federal government to subsidize the rich at the cost of the poor. But... that's not socialism. Maybe it's revolution in the sense that there's a class-based upheaval, but the nature of the wealth distribution shift we're living through is that it's happening within existing institutions not through an ad hoc extralegal system.
Remember, what playing well in the general means is that it has to play well in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the upper midwest. Based on that logic there are a lot of Democratic proposals that probably aren't gonna play too well. Everyone is going to have to shift toward the center as the general nears or else the Dems are going to go down hard.
I think there's a big difference between "this is what I believe" not playing well with the general election, which is fair, and "this is what some random dude baited me into saying on a debate stage that I don't actually think; I got caught up in the moment." De Blasio feels like he's there to get people into that second category, which is decidedly counterproductive for dems.
I don't know if she reneged or renounced certain policies since then, but I wouldn't call Tulsi a berniecrat, although that's the impression I think she's aiming for.
it's more convenient to just label her one since she really cozied up to the progressive/bernie wing of the democratic party, even though her actual policies are all over the place and you can make a pretty good case for her basically just being a right-wing reactionary in a nominally progressive skinsuit.
that tailed off badly after the first hour. i would tentatively say that my rankings are something like: castro = booker > maybe biden? maybe inslee? > everybody else. almost nobody stood out here and i don't think this is going to move the margins at all. in the long term, that's a win for biden but also probably one for warren and sanders.