#wellfare

[hausofhounds]

hey if you guys need/want at home covid tests and you can't afford them you can get four shipped to your house ~for free~ using covidtests.gov and you will get an email confirmation from USPS

unfortunately I think this is limited to the US but I'm not totally sure

[feminist-voices]

[evilelitest2]

How can we fix the wealth inequality in the u.s.? Are there any politicians who are for wealth re-distribution that I can support?

Depends on how much wealth inequality you want to get ride of, I personally think its impossible to entirely remove it, but you can make it a lot smaller than it is now, and ensure that being on the lower end of that scale doesn’t result in you dying.  So to answer this, its two elements, the political and the policy question

From a policy perspective, its not too complicated, basically what you do is 

1) Higher Taxes on the wealth, like much much higher.  this can be broken down to

1a) Tax Capital gains as income

1b) add at least 8 and maybe 12 new tax brackets (corporate and personal)

1c) Bring back and expand the estate Tax

1d) greater Luxury Taxes 

1e) Possibly even a wealth tax 

2) Make a major effort to cut back on tax havens, white collar crime, and tax loopholes, and make white collar crime carry much higher consequences.  

3) Universal healthcare.  This will allow greater social advancement 

4) Cancel Student Debt and bring about free college.  Which also allows greater social advancement

5) Much larger safety net generally in all forms of wellfare. A higher minimum wage is just one part of that.  

6) Invest greatly in public schools 

7) Nationalize a lot of public industries, such as internet, transportation ect, to provide easier options for the public

This will allow the poorer population to have far more options to advance, while ideally taking more and more money away from the wealthy 

On the policy side, its a two step program 

1) Destroy the Republican party

2) pressure the democratic party to get money out of politics.  Banning lobbying will make a ton of those policy issues much easier to address.  And ever since 2016, democrats, even the politicians are taking that more and more seriously .  

[evilelitest2]

what do you think about universal basic income

I’m intrigued by the idea as a policy and I would want it to be tested out, though I don’t advocate switching to it entirely on a national level without more testing, nothing breaks a theoretical idea than putting it into practice.  So yeah, I would want to test it out and if it works maybe compliment it nationally.  I don’t think it is a silver bullet for our problems, but I do think it has the potential to really help.  

Two important Caveats however

 1) Universal Basic Income has to supplement traditional wellfare, not replace it. UBI is often cited as conservatives because they want to replace Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Food Stamps/ with UBI, and that is a disaster. Ideally everybody should have access to at least basic Education, food, clothes, healthcare, and Social Security from the word go,  and then maybe on top of that a couple hundred to a thousand dollars a month.  The point of UBI is not to be the primary form of wellfare, it is to allow those on wellfare to save up for something to improve their lives, spend money and thus stimulate the economy, or as emergency cash for problems that wellfare simply cannot solve.  

2) It should be adjusted for the individual based on need.  I actually think if we have UBI, even the 1% should get it, because it makes a point that they are citizens of this nation, not nations unto themselves, but Billgates should get like 50 bucks, while people with less should get up to 3000 depending on their conditions (numbers aren’t based on anything, again I want this policy tested out) 

So I like the idea of UBI but I would like to test it first and be wary of people who advocate it without due clarification.  Some alt right/libertarians/far right folks actually support UBI to hid accusations that they are rightists don’t fall for it.  

[berniesrevolution]

[berniesrevolution]

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

The political mean season has returned, with all the usual slanders of social programs that protect Americans from the worst kinds of hardship and deprivation. The poors! They’re behaving badly! And government handouts paid for with your tax dollars are to blame. In the end, we are told, the well-intentioned policies of meddling do-gooders do nothing but encourage bad behaviors and self-defeating choices.

The latest target in this campaign is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, more commonly called food stamps).

In a New York Times story over the weekend, Anahad O’Connor massages and misreports a USDA study to reinforce some of the worst stereotypes about food stamps. For his trouble, the editors placed it on the front page. Readers of the newspaper of record learn that the end result of tax dollars spent on food assistance is a grocery cart full of soda. No exaggeration. The inside headline for the story is “What’s in the Shopping Cart of a Food Stamp Household? Lots of Sugary Soda,” and the front-page illustration shows a shopping cart containing almost nothing but two-liter pop bottles.

O’Connor tells us that “the No. 1 purchases by SNAP households are soft drinks, which account for about 10 percent of the dollars they spend on food.” Milk is number one among non-SNAP households, we are told, not soft drinks.

And O’Connor does not hold back in building his indictment of the program. He begins by framing these and other alleged facts with a quote that informs readers, “SNAP is a multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidy of the soda industry.” The story doubles down on this misleading image by ending with a discussion of how the big soda companies lobby to keep the SNAP funds flowing — and with a quote asserting, “This is the first time we’ve had confirmation that this massive taxpayer program is promoting all the wrong kinds of foods.”

Let’s be clear here: this is nonsense. It’s a political hack job against a program that helps millions of Americans feed themselves, and we should all be outraged that the New York Times has disguised it as a piece of factual news reporting on its front page.

(Continue Reading)

[berniesrevolution]

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

The election of Donald Trump has rocked the political landscape, producing a deep sense of fear, mourning, and rage. With reactionary populism not just ascendant but set to assume power over the federal government, the Left must offer a clear alternative capable of defeating Trump’s brand of politics.

The Democratic Party’s strategy — yoking the prospects of some of the most marginalized to a cosmopolitan professional class and a socially liberal donor base — has failed to even advance a liberal agenda, much less hold back the Republican Party and Donald Trump.

What can the Left offer in its place? What can meet the pressing needs of a population ground down by neoliberal capitalism, while simultaneously producing structures and policies that create a basis for longer-term power?

Socialists and progressives should begin arguing for, and rebuilding, what I call “engines of solidarity.”

Constructing engines of solidarity means moving beyond the liberal view of solidarity as a sympathetic disposition and instead binding people together in relationships of shared material interest. It means ameliorating the brutality of life under capitalism while fashioning a working class that is more structurally unified and in closer political conversation with socialist ideas.

More concretely, it means significantly expanding the welfare state.

Over the years, socialists have produced serious critiques of the welfare state under capitalism, and it would be a mistake to ignore the contradictions and limitations of social-democratic reforms. But the fact remains that workers in the advanced capitalist world are socially fragmented and politically alienated, and winning significant social progress is exceedingly difficult without a more united working class.

The welfare state is one of the best and most readily available tools we have to make that happen.

(Continue Reading)

[vintagebutterfly]

I fear I'm going to join the Tumblr crowd of highly educated, chronically ill, and officially unable to work soon.