US Presidential Candidates

The prescriptions, then for curing America's ills is the following.

Empower unions to more thoroughly represent employees. Unions will be instrumental in defining how much a job pays, performance standards for employees and effectively minimum productivity levels. Employers will also have some input in this process and government breaks up any serious disagreements.

Government is needed to coopt more private services like healthcare. Those working in the fields become government employees and higher taxes will pay for the larger public sector takeover of what used to be the private sector. Government provides more services that individual citizens and employers will no longer have to provide. Government becomes the principal employer as well as the principal provider of services.

This will solve our problems because government can control the livelihoods of an ever growing chunk of the electorate whose salaries or healthcare or housing is provided for by government. Those people will vote their pocket book to continue living as they have grown accustomed.

Is that right?

PeterZ wrote:
So you trying to say utterly stupid and disconnected things in homage to Trump? Why bother? Very few truly think He is a good candidate. We just believe the alternative is much worse. Heck, even significant numbers of Democrats believe this

Perhaps you are trying to distract other posters from your ignorant comment? Again, why bother? All of us learn things every day. You are no different.

Riiight... Because having an incompetent and corrupt facist lunatic with zero connection to reality as your bigwig is such a GREAT idea...

Well, sure i mean, if you WANT corruption to jump skyhigh while your nation goes into the dumps, then Trump is a great idea.

Hilary isn´t someone i would want in the highest office either in USA or here(or anywhere), that´s for sure.
But if the alternative is Trump? Get her ass in there now while you still have a choice!

PeterZ wrote:Until Mexico makes a serious attempt at closing their Norther border, why not charge tarrifs on Mexican goods to pay for a wall? Heck, it will likely be something other than a wall, but at least whatever policy he implements will attempt to secure that border.

Wow, seriously...
You already have what almost amounts to a Berlin wall there(as close as you can get without paying massively for it at least), and you actually think enforcing that even more will help?



That´s a 99% worthless "promise". Did Trump actually promise something else that would work?
No, of course not, because then it wouldn´t be a mindless but catchy slogan to shout for the dazzled drones that are silly enough to believe him.


Please go ahead with it, make yourself laughingstock of the world when you shoot yourself in the foot.

Socialism is a poor choice to achieve higher standards of living for ANY class save the elite. Often it is the best choice available, but that isn't true in the US. The US is vastly more wealthy than the majority of nations, but the distribution of that wealth has skewed increasingly away from the middle/working class as seen by the falling median wage.

Wow, do you have even the slightest idea how selfcontradictory the above is?
Or how divorced from reality?

Please go back to school and take a few years to read about what different political directions actually do or try to do, and what they mean.

Your definition of socialism is more idiotic than Trump and Hilary together are corrupt.

So your private sector health system works really well?
Ours isn't all public sector, far from it, but the foundations that guarantee freedom from dying due to lack of funds are.
As one of our polies said "Lifesaving medical care should be determined by your Medicare card, not your Visa card". There is always room for improvement in any system, but most developed countries seem to have more efficient and kinder health care than the US does. I pay a small amount towards our government Medicare, and a larger $250 a month towards a voluntary non profit private health care provider. Not cheap but I can afford it, and am getting more medically needy in my dotage.
As to industrial relations, our system where the unions and employers in each industry go to an independent government set up court to set wage rates seems to work, as both sides always go away saying they are unhappy. Obviously we have a bedrock lower minimum wage for those tht fall through the cracks, and employers can pay more for better employees.

Tenshinai wrote:

thinkstoomuch wrote:
Actually you got it backwards it was to turn the water back off.
...

Oh sort of like it was all President Bush's fault when the currrent president got elected on "Hope and Change" and the mantra for the first year was "Shovel ready."

You are so clueless about the US you quite the joke yourself! You were Trump before he was and still are.

Whatever,
T2M

Ps Back on the phone do to failure of solar to provide enough power in cloudy Southeast US. But it is economic here really. As long as there is real capacity around.

Unions worked well and were good for the country back at their origin when their primary goal was the health and safety of the workers and addressing truly exploitative job conditions (not like we have today but really really exploitative ones), then over time the unions gained success after success and after a while became victims of their own success driving wages etc to truly unobtainable levels much of which was the kick the can down the road type of unfunded pension benefits etc. And they grew big and out of touch with the average worker they were in theory supposed to represent. And they became as bad as big business and big government (personally I actually think they became worse because of the betrayal factor).

So if you actually want to have unions, we need to get back to the in touch, relevant unions of the past.

Step 1 - Keep the unions in touch by instituting some accountability

Alter the union selection process. It tends to be very fascist, in the sense of selecting a union is vote once and be forever stuck. So employees can find themselves stuck with a lousy unrepresenative union basically forever.

1. The union as a whole should need to be recertified on a regular basis - say every 10 years or so. There should be 3 options on the ballot

1. yes keep this union
2. no revert to non-union shop
3. Keep a union but we want a different one.

2. Encourage smaller local unions over the big out of touch multistate unions

Big unions may be necessary for big business but that sort of size just makes them out of touch when dealing with smaller local businesses. Ban big unions from representing workers in small local businesses. Require those unions to be small and local as well.

3. Encourage arbitrators to factor in flexibility when negotiating contracts and union contracts should have a bad economy plan written into them.

Encourage things like profit sharing over salary hikes. Overly generous salary hikes can truly damage a business causing job losses plant closures, bankruptcies etc during an economic downturn. Profit sharing on the other hand allows workers to benefit by getting big bonuses when the company is doing well, encouraging them to work hard for the success of the company but aren't so rigid that the company will be in trouble if factors beyond their control i.e. a recession occurs.

Plus too many union contracts arbitrated during good times assume that the good times will go on forever. Contracts should be required to have a bad economy clause.

4. Ban kick the can down the road contracts. All future benefits such as pensions, retiree healthcare etc must be fully funded!

5. Ban public employee unions. In blue states that's basically the union negotiating with itself. NEVER a good idea and it's responsible for a great deal of the anti-union sentiment in the USA as well as the collapsing economies of California, Illinois etc.

Daryl wrote:So your private sector health system works really well?
Ours isn't all public sector, far from it, but the foundations that guarantee freedom from dying due to lack of funds are.
As one of our polies said "Lifesaving medical care should be determined by your Medicare card, not your Visa card". There is always room for improvement in any system, but most developed countries seem to have more efficient and kinder health care than the US does. I pay a small amount towards our government Medicare, and a larger $250 a month towards a voluntary non profit private health care provider. Not cheap but I can afford it, and am getting more medically needy in my dotage.

It may help that Australia only has a population of 23 million not 320 million. Our Federal government can't seem to run anything right. Medicare is incredibly inefficient and the VA is incompetent. Why would we give them more control? Their past performance has been abysmal.

Admittedly Bernie seemed to be able to get the socialist thing to work on the local level. But it's success was primarily due to him personally micromanaging the whole thing. Since he's (a rarity for a politician) honest, it worked but that simply doesn't scale up to 320 million people.

I don't want to give the Feds any more power until they can fix, the currently existing problems with what power they've got. The VA has been publicly known to be a disaster for more than a decade and nothing gets fixed. Civil service laws prevent anyone from being fired and the institutional inertia keeps genuine reforms from being made. Doctors who care are incredibly frustrated. Don't know how you in Oz deal with bad departments. Up here, they seem to be dealt with by ignoring the problem and hoping it goes away.

As to industrial relations, our system where the unions and employers in each industry go to an independent government set up court to set wage rates seems to work, as both sides always go away saying they are unhappy. Obviously we have a bedrock lower minimum wage for those tht fall through the cracks, and employers can pay more for better employees.

Sounds better than our arbitrators. It's variable but too many of them aren't neutral and favor one side or the other. In blue states they favor the unions too much, in red the opposite. As you mention you can tell if the arbitrator is doing a good job by if both sides are unhappy. And in too many of the blue states we have way too many happy unions.

PeterZ wrote:
Together we can keep that group in check covering each other's blind spots.

Lefties are blind to the need for an efficient economy that facilitates increase in wealth through a profit motive. Most lefties view this process as somehow immoral. They are comfortable using the coercive power of the state to combat this.

Conservatives view the aggregation of power into the hands of the state as the principal threat. Syphoning power into the private sector is viewed as the optimal tool to combat that threat. We tend to be dismissive of the collected power of the private sector when power is aggregated into too few hands.

Lefties to keep the private sector from aggregative wealth and power into too few hands. Conservatives to keep government from taking too much of our individual liberties/sovereignty.

This is a very accurate analysis and in an ideal world would work to as you say cover one another's blind spots. Unfortunately now we are so polarized that honest lefties and honest righties spend all their time demonizing one another instead of working together.

Perhaps we should be put in charge? The lefty/righties or conservatives/progressives here have had much animated discussion, but coming from very different directions we seem to be in danger of agreeing on quite a lot of points.
A funny minor item is that our conservatives call themselves The Liberals and their signature colour is blue, and our progressives call them selves Labor and their colour is red.
We are getting a lot more minor parties lately, as usual most are on the looney left or looney right fringes, but some of the newer ones seem to be a bit more practical.

Is it demonizing or simply arguing past each other because of our fundamental assumptions?

As an example, I find government sponsored activity morally inferior to the same activity engaged by the private sector. I don't believe this because I find the people in government any less moral. I believe this because government has the monopoly on the use of force and compliance to government programs are accompanied by the threat to use force to secure compliance.

I understand that some programs and policies require that threat. Laws to deter and punish common law felonies are a case in point. Yet, some programs like providing healthcare can be provided by the private sector without that compulsion. Mandating healthcare through government uses that threat of force and so in my estimation makes the program morally inferior to a private sector model that does not compel participation.

At its core, the woman's right to choose in the abortion debate is predicated on this essential moral point. The right of an individual to choose how to treat his or her person rates pretty high on the list of priorities of protected liberties and can be extended to just about any government activity to varying degrees.

So, when honest lefties and righties argue about their views, do they understand the fundamental elements that drive the other side? I suspect that there are two sorts of both righties and lefties: one that honestly believes their positions and the second that uses ideology to gain political power. I suppose that there are also the lesser informed in both camps that believe what they do because others have done the thinking for them.

Not sure if any of this matters as all of the people in these groups have reason to close their minds to the arguments of the others.

biochem wrote:
This is a very accurate analysis and in an ideal world would work to as you say cover one another's blind spots. Unfortunately now we are so polarized that honest lefties and honest righties spend all their time demonizing one another instead of working together.

PeterZ wrote:I understand that some programs and policies require that threat. Laws to deter and punish common law felonies are a case in point. Yet, some programs like providing healthcare can be provided by the private sector without that compulsion. Mandating healthcare through government uses that threat of force and so in my estimation makes the program morally inferior to a private sector model that does not compel participation.

I have no idea what you are on about regarding morality. All experience we have with government-run or government-mandated health care shows that such systems are more efficient and less of a burden on individuals and communities than any privately run effort can be. Any privately run company is duty bound to extract a profit from its business, and it doesn't take long for the desire to increase profits to override the intent of providing a service to the individual or the community. I mean, John Oliver recently bought and then abolished 15 million USD in debt, accumulated by just 9000 people. That's a symptom of something being deeply wrong in your country, that people can be bankrupted without any wrongdoing on their part. And you honestly expect others to believe that this is somehow a better solution than having the government run it?