Why do you think that Republicans (or any Conservative) wants others to have "even less"? Conservatives want everyone to have the freedom and right to work toward success, and to enjoy that success once it is EARNED. What's wrong with that? For the last 90 years it seems that Democrats only seem to want UNEARNED handouts from the government.
Groups of humans have generally had fit healthy members who made the biggest contributions, and one-year old babies and other people who didn't. We certainly have enough resources to support non producers, but have never in past encouraged anyone to become a non productive member. Our society has a more complex structure now with full time students, but shouldn't be too far removed from the old pattern. Instead of lots of students we could have lots of apprentices who did useful work and lived more productive lives.
The situation now is we have to accept both parts of society need to exist. In addition to the very young there are people who simply can't do some of the work we have now - it is too complicated for some people. But then why did we send the manufacturing work out of the country? A country like the US should be essentially self-sufficient and not want to take Ukraine's or Russia's oil and gas, or Syria's, or Libya's or .... If we stayed more within our own boundaries and solved our own problems rather than getting involved in other countries the problems would be more manageable.
So we need some amount of socialism but not a huge expensive sprawling bureaucracy that interferes with normal life. We need to keep the government small simple and efficient, and the military small simple and efficient.
Thank you! You eloquently summarized my own liberal political side. We can fairly and adequately help citizens who cannot help themselves, but that doesn't mean we have to be dictated to by bunch of woke, power-hungry zealots!
The last thing most Americans want is a rematch between Trump and Biden. 56% of all Americans don’t want Biden to run again which includes 64% of independents. 56% of all Americans don’t want Trump to run again either, that includes 56% of all Americans. Questions 20 and 21 https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/m7mcfid4y8/econTabReport.pdf Isn’t it interesting that both major parties are dead set on giving America what most American’s don’t want? A rematch. Which leads me to believe neither major party give a coyote’s howl about most of America. They care only about themselves, no one else. The above don’t want to run again numbers favors Trump a bit if the election were held today. So do the favorable/unfavorable’s. All Americans, Trump is viewed favorable by 40%, unfavorable by 56%. Biden is at 43% favorable, 52% unfavorable. But when it comes to independents, those who decide general elections, Trump is at 36% favorable/56% unfavorable vs. Biden at 31% favorable/60% unfavorable. Among independents, Trump has a very slight advantage. If the election were held today. Questions 2G and 3A. Independents are important as they went to Biden 54-41 in 2020. 2024 has a feeling of being more like 2016 than 2020. 2016 like 2024, had two unwanted and disliked candidates vying for the presidency. Voter turnout in 2016 was at 54% vs. 62% in 2020. Independents made up 23% of those who voted in 2016 vs. 29% in 2020. 12% of independents voted third party in 2016 vs. 5% in 2020. Numbers I think the Democrats should sit up and take notice of. I predict if 2024 is a rematch, that independents will once again stay home, not liking their choices as they did in 2016 along with a very high third-party vote coming against the two major party candidates, again ala 2016. I’ll be one of the third-party voters. If neither party is willing to listen to all of America, to heck with them.
Normalcy would be nice, but looks like more divisiveness is almost guaranteed. There ARE moderate people: Kasich, Romney, Cheney, Manchin....There are also conservatives, who are not so divisive: Rand Paul. I wish the populist pseudo-cons like Trump and DeSantis would not be leading the pack, but they are, they literally run on more division (divide and conquer approach). Who bragged about re-naming NAFTA as opposed to killing it? Who bragged about plans to broker a deal with EU (even though one already existed)? Who bragged about "historical trade deal" with China, which China never honored? Trump did. You have to judge people by what they do, not by what they claim, and this is even more important with people like Trump who are addicted to lying.
I don't relish the thought of another Trump election. But I do think he's the only one who can get us out of the mess we're in. He's a negotiator. Biden can't negotiate with Putin and the south of border countries or anyone else. Neither can Kama-la or Desantis if we're honest. I hope voters can get together to save the country even if they have to plug their noses.
I will remain a DeSantis supporter partly because of the reasons you mentioned. We are going back to the "Wild West" mainly due to the defund police and Soros funded prosecutor's. In a sense, it is always the Wild West when it takes police 20 to 30 minutes on average to get to the scene of a crime. Where I live, I bet it takes 45 minutes at best. If one of these urban crazies enters this territory and invades my space, you bet I'll be thankful for my 2nd amendment!
I sympathize with your frustration a lot! But the truth is that if a large number of us vote for a third-party candidate, then the Democrat candidate will win. It never fails. And the most recent examples of that are the two presidential campaigns of Ross Perot in the 1990's. Perot, an economic conservative, broke with the mainstream Republican Party, and that gave Democrats the White House in 1992 and 1996. I feel your pain because I voted for Ross Perot twice, hoping that we could finally get something besides another Republican or Democrat. The attempt failed.
Yeah, Republicans blame Perot for Bush’s defeat. But you need to look at this. I blame Bush for his own defeat as he spent most of the campaign presenting an image that he didn’t care if he won or lost. That is until around 2 weeks to go in the campaign, did Bush get serious. As for 1992 and Ross Perot, Clinton beat Bush by 6 million votes, Perot received 19 million. To win Bush would have to receive 13 million votes out of Perot’s 19. That is 68% which is very unrealistic. Exit polls show Perot drew 25% of his 19 million votes from Republicans, 20% from Democrats and 55% from independents and first-time voters. Perot drew 1 million more votes from Republicans than he did Democrats, but that still would have left Clinton with a 5 million vote victory instead of six. What is interesting is how independents voted in in 1992. 38% voted for Clinton, 32% for Bush and 30% for Perot. Exit Poll Data and the Perot Vote Now, let’s briefly consider the 1992 exit poll data and the actual composition of the Perot vote. According to the exit poll data, 38% of the Perot voters said they would have voted for Clinton in a two-way race, 38% would have voted for Bush, 24% would not have voted. Perot won 30% of independents, 17% of Republicans, and 13% of Democrats. Put another way, of his 19% popular vote share, 8 percentage points came from independents, 6 from Republicans, and 5 from Democrats. Fully 53% of Perot’s vote came from self-defined moderates, 27% from conservatives and 20% from liberals; so about 10 points of his 19% came from self-described moderates, with 5 points coming from conservatives and 4 points from liberals. We also know from the exit polls that the Perot voters were angrier at the political system than supporters of the other candidates. Do these Perot supporters really look like voters that would have gone heavily to incumbent Bush in a two-candidate race? http://www.pollingreport.com/hibbitts1202.htm
You make incontestable points, but what we can never know is how those races might actually have gone had there been no Ross Perot in them at all bringing in all the information and controversy that he became well known for. Polling data are useful, and in retrospect, they're all we have to go by, but there's always that what-if factor. No, for third-parties to stand on their own, growing membership and strength on an enduring basis, we'd need to have a parliamentary form of government, like many European countries have. As it is, though, everything is rigged to conform to a government dominated entirely by only two political parties, and quite a few of us now believe that both of those parties are actually run by the same group of 'insiders' who pull everybody's strings. Maybe that's why those of us who call ourselves "Independents" is growing so much lately: https://www.axios.com/2023/04/17/poll-americans-independent-republican-democrat
Exactly. I’ve always said both major parties owe their hearts and souls to corporations, wall street firms, special interests, lobbyist, super, mega rich individual money donors etc. That where they get their 10’s and 100’s of millions of dollars to run their organizations and candidates. In 2020 both major parties spent 14 billion dollars on that election. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/10/cost-of-2020-election-14billion-update/ What’s most interesting about that is 42% rounding off that 14 billion came from individual money donors. That’s close to 6 billion dollars coming from the super-rich individual donors. Bottom line, we have the best government money can buy.
Indeed, sir, to repeat your words, "We have the best government money can buy." Those words should be carved in a marble slab, twenty-feet high, and mounted in a permanent monument on the Capitol grounds!
Before you settle on the European-style parliamentary system,... have you considered trying out Ranked Voting as a potential alternative instead?? Something like Instant Runoff or Ranked Pairs for example? -Meta
I hadn't even thought about the idea of ranked voting! That may ultimately be the best way to proceed, because as we have seen throughout our American history, third-parties never win much of anything, and certainly don't seem likely to win anything today.
And with only 2 candidates it's too easy to buy both, often both candidates are just fronts for the establishment.
I didn't vote for Trump in 2016. My earned cynicism had convinced me he was just another act in the ever leftward marching DC last century+. But then, the first thing I saw him actually do was cancel Obama's move to drastically raise automotive fuel economy requirements driven by EPA and restart the rulemaking process over. I knew immediately that Trump knew where the Deep State bodies were buried and I was all in. In the fall Trump's Supreme Court will take up Loper Bright Industries v. Raimondo which has the very real possibility of destroying the Chevron deference doctrine which gave EPA the ridiculous right to regulate CO2 destroying the entire fraud of climate change and the horrible economic run on effects that it creates. As far as I'm concerned, Trump deserves the second term Biden and the Democrats cheated him out of. Go Trump!
I voted for Donald Trump..... I have the impression that he is the only person who can finish what he began back in January of 2017. Is President Trump and the NSA playing with Biden and the Democrats?????? Trump would have preferred to be able to campaign as a Democrat but................... the radical left had made that option impossible. MUST WATCH: A Lioness Adopts a baby antelope. A short documentary that will open your eyes.
Your profile says you're a Canadian. Are you admitting to voter fraud in favor of TFG? Exactly what did TFG start in 2017 that was noteworthy? Cutting corporate tax rates? The travel ban? Or maybe it was the wall. Which we paid for, not Mexico. All 80 miles of new fencing. Spare me. Trump is not an asset to either party. The Democrats recognized this, the GOP did not. Stupid, lying, incompetent traitors rarely are a asset. Fachrissake the guy was beaten in the popular vote by Hillary Clinton, another megaboob with a questionable past.