two party system is a scam
two party system is a scam
two party system is a scam
Democrats keep trying to increase minimum wage, read a fucking News source.
The problem is, we need caps on profit margins on necessities, and to stop the making of things we need for basic survival investment opportunities.
But that would be difficult to get done. So they go for the low hanging fruit of wages, which never permanently solve anything because they’ll just keep raising prices under this scamflation cycle we’ve been in since COVID.
Every service that is necessary for human survival should have a not-for-profit vendor.
When all it takes to stop them is the nonbinding opinion of an unelected advisor, are they really trying, though?
The parliamentarian's word is law, baby.
If only people could eat Democrats' excuses, no one would ever go hungry.
They just repealed right to work in Michigan, and Meijer employees presumably used that leverage to significantly improve wages and benefits.
Right to work is another BS right wing policy that needs to die. I put in less than two weeks notice, I'm an asshole; company drops me in an instant, business as usual.
“Right to work” as the name of an anti-labor policy sure has a dystopic newspeak feel.
When will they finally increase it to something plausible, and then appoint some department to review and increase it in line with inflation every year according to XYZ rules.
Seems silly to need acts of congress to increase it every time.
*Pretending to try
Important distinction. Its an old tried and true election year chestnut they trot out every few years to hoodwink a few idiots. They refuse to use power when they have it, and cry about being unable to do anything when they dont.
inb4 - That they havent packed the court to unfuck Roe negates any point you may conceivably be contriving in the moment you read this. So save your breath.
Minimum wage is not the same thing as a living wage. The minimum wage should be a living wage, but it isn't.
See: NY. We just got our minimum wage increase and it's 15-16/hr depending on where you are in NY... That's what we were fighting for more than ten goddamn years ago. $15-$16/hr is an absolute joke on Long Island and NYC. I finally managed to claw my way up to 60k/year and as a single guy the thought of homeownership on long Island is as fantastical and far-fetched as a unicorn, forget about 15/hr... You can't even rent most illegal apartments at that income alone.
The conversation needs to be about what constitutes a living wage and how to calculate it at a given time for each area not just blanket minimum wage increases to specific numbers that sound nice to chant like "fight for fifteen."
Achieving a living wage starts by raising the minimum wage.
Lol getting down voted out of pure tribalism. The complete unwillingness of their base to seriously criticize Democrats is such a massive fucking turn off to voting for them.
Minimum wage and living wage are two very different things. Most Democrats absolutely do not support a living wage, and don't try to lie to us about how they do.
Sure they do. Keep believing, any day now...
My home state of Oregon mandates a minimum wage of $13.20 in rural areas and $15.45 in the Portland metro area, and it adjusts to inflation. Oregon has been governed by Democrats for years. Thanks to these and other laws, I can go down to a McDonald's and get a job that pays $16-17 an hour to start in my city. TriMet in Portland is always advertising a $28 starting wage for bus drivers (no CDL) up to $37 after three years. Rent in my city is $800-900 for a one-bedroom flat with excellent free public transit and fair bikeability. Fuel prices are reasonable. We have strong protections for tenants against abusive landlords. Strong anti-discrimination laws. Everyone has paid sick days. No regressive sales tax. Working-class people can afford a roof over their heads and decent food on the table.
Check out the neighbouring state minimum wages.
But yeah, keep harping on about how both parties are the same and that Democrats don't do more to help the working man.
There's an $18 minimum wage in Denver, for instance. Republicans sure as hell didn't vote for that.
Having fun in fantasyland?
Yeah, subby. We get it. "Both sides are bad." But one side is boring corporatists who don't give a crap and the other side is 100% concentrated evil fascists, authoritarians and religious nutjobs. And while that's a choice between the lesser of two evils, it's not a difficult one.
That may have been the point of the original comic, but given the caption, I think OP's point wasn't that both sides are bad, but was that a two party system is inherently biased towards corporate capture.
That’s the problem with this “both sides” take. Yes, there is no true leftist party in the US. They’re both corporatists. The Republicans are undeniably much worse, though. Anti-union, anti other labor rights, oppose every kind of social safety net, want to privatize (loot) and profit from public assets, are thoroughly in favor of racist classist policies of every type imaginable. Some democrats are too, but ALL republicans are like that.
We do get it. It's obvious. It's so obvious that the only people still supporting FPTP are in favor of it; they don't give a crap about selling us out to fascists.
And the "not fascists" angle worked a lot better when they weren't aiding a genocide.
And while that’s a choice between the lesser of two evils, it’s not a difficult one.
There's other choices. Moderates and Biden could choose to compromise with leftists and progressives any time. But all signs point to them preferring to lose to fascists a second time.
Minimum wage works. Here is an article from the german newspaper FAZ (leans economically right) that presents a study that shows the low income sector has shrunk since the implementation of minimum wages.
Germany before had one of the biggest low income sectors in the western world.
And no, the unemployment rate did not skyrocket. In fact, Germany is as close to full employment as it gets.
I'm just here to watch the complete and total dumpster fire in the comments.
Oh look, more both sides trash slapped on top of someone else's work. Lazy fucks can't even propagandize properly.
How about spending some of your time and energy telling moderates they can either compromise with leftists and progressives or lose to fascists a second time?
But if they compromise with leftists instead of telling them to suck an egg, they won't have a scapegoat anymore to blame all their losses and woes on!
Sure, they might just win instead, but that's like at best third on their list of priorities behind corporate donors and the status quo.
Both sides are fascists, you can't compromise with either.
It's not really propaganda when it's true, at least not in the negative sense of "false manipulative information." If it wasn't true we'd already have it. Republicans don't have complete control everywhere, and there are states where Democrats have complete control and they don't do it because corporations have complete control over most Democrats.
"We" have like a handful of actual progressives in the entirety of our government, state or otherwise.
Let's break that shit up!
Approval voting and proportional representation! So long as we have single-seat elections using choose-one voting, we'll be stuck with two parties.
Voting reform is absolutely the key… which is why neither entrenched party will do it, of course.
None of these things will pass so long as moderates would rather lose to fascists than compromise with leftists and progressives.
I'm so glad to see more people around here realizing this.
Criticism of the comic aside, two party system is still definitely undesirable. I believe it is a side effect of first past the post voting. What we really should implement is ranked choice voting. It gets rid of the dumb "voting third party is voting for [opposite party]" argument by letting you vote for who you want guilt-free and falling back on your lower-ranked votes if 1 wasn't popular enough.
But you know, this will always meet resistance because politicians would lose their jobs for implementing this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting
STAR voting allows you to say "I refuse to vote for this candidate at all," which certain implementations of RCV do not. It can and has ended up with candidates no one wanted winning in Australia, and other places that have implemented RCV
STAR Voting fails the Later-No-Harm criterion, which makes it a no-go for me. Any voting system that can have lesser ranked candidates siphoning off support from higher ranked candidates is, for me at least, a fundamentally broken system that ultimately just reverts to FPTP when people start bullet voting to avoid that flaw.
There are two sides, but you can alter that a bit if you get your asses to the primaries.
Lol, my primary choices 2024:
Biden
Democrats completely gave up on local elections in a purple county because it's in a red state.
Congress matters way more for minimum wage than president.
In Cali we can choose between Porter and Lee for (somewhat) pro-labor policies. Schiff is a standard Clinton OligoDem.
I prefer Lee's policies, but am worried that she and Porter will split their votes and put Schiff through.
Meanwhile in California there are a ton of choices, but the party has already decided who's gonna be the candidate in so many other states, that we don't count.
This is incorrect and lazy.
bOtH fUcKiNg SiDeS is an attitude that can suck my wang
I've just started blocking these people
Then spend some of that energy telling moderates to start compromising with leftists and progressives if they don't want to lose to fascists a second time.
Sadly, while we would value your support for stopping multiple genocides by voting against Trump, your numbers are far outweighed by that of moderates. I am sorry you can't comprehend very basic cause and effect and if that costs us our country, I guess you can rest well being so stupid you won't think you were part of the problem.
We all agree with this premise and mostly that the FPTP system is a large contributing factor to the TPS saying how it has based on seeing how places that don't have a TPS appear to do so because the have different voting systems like different iterations of ranked choice voting.
What I am wondering is what 'we' think the best way to implement voting would be?
Can't remember which South American country did it, might have been Venezuela, but at least one of them has an official app. You register to vote on your 18th birthday, and get daily notifications about the various proposals at each level of government that applies to your address. They also created a team to boil the proposals down into plain language. You vote personally and the government has to, in theory, listen to the will of the people.
Of course that system will still be susceptible to propaganda, as evidenced by the fact that whatever country did it, still has some serious issues.
I was curious about the app you mentioned and understanding how they solved the privacy & anonymity requirements.
This is the only similar app I could find but it's not exactly as you mentioned. Can it be this one?
If not I would be glad if you can share any reference to the one you mentioned. That would be really helpful.
The democrats seem more... ribbed in this drawing.
Its always refreshing to look at the american political system if i am disappointed by the German one. Sure our sucks too, but at least we have more then 2 unvotable major parties.
In the German system (or any other multiparty system), voters can effectively punish a political party without wasting their vote, because there is a lot of overlap between the parties.
If you don't like the current coalition but are a left-leaning person, you can vote for Die Linke. You might not agree with all of their positions but you at least can agree with some of them. Even if that is not palatable if you previously voted SDP you can switch your vote to Green or vice versa to punish the specific officeholders representing your constituency. If you voted for the FDP last time, maybe try Union next time. There are many ways to do this, and overall I think it makes the parties themselves more accountable to the voters because voters defecting their party list votes can drastically change the makeup of the Bundestag.
Similarly, right-leaning UK voters are punishing the Conservative Party by threatening to or actually voting for Reform candidates. Scots can punish the SNP by voting Labour.
You can't do this in the US. In the USA, the only recourse the voters have over the parties is to vote out undesirable candidates through primary elections so that the party cannot nominate them. This works alright, sometimes, but it is not an effective way to punish party leadership for bad decisions, and many primaries are uncompetitive anyway.
I see the more severe problem in the two party system, that is enforced by the weird voting process: https://www.history.com/news/two-party-system-american-politics
The democrats have been trying to raise minimum wage for idk 15 years now, they just haven't been given a functional enough majority to make it happen at the national level, though they have absolutely done so at the state level. I think your complaint might be misdirected, and could better apply to the fundamental structure of our bicameral legislature, and especially at the filibuster rule that is getting increasingly unpopular with senators themselves. When the filibuster is gone sometime in the next 6 years I expect, you will see a noticeably more functional senate.
I am thoroughly confused as to why this comment is getting downvotes. It corrects the misinterpretation of the poster in a polite and civilized manner, while bringing forth interesting discussion as to what the future may hold and possible solutions to our country’s predicament.
Unfortunately I think a lot of people find it easier to feel nihilistic than recognize that there is a path forward
Dare I say.. Democracy is a scam.
REEEEEEEEE
Go find one of the millions of times this has been explained already.
2 party system is almost the same as 1 party dictatorship. You do need unlimited amount of parties to have any kind of democracy
We definitely don't have a two party system. Trump came in and invented a whole new party just like that. We have republicans, democrats and trumpers.
Pro-Trump Republicans and anti-Trump Republicans are not at all separate parties, and 99% of anti-Trump Republicans still support him in practice when the alternative is working with Democrats.
Saying they're separate is like saying AOC and Nancy Pelosi are in different parties.
Don't ask your government for a living wage. Or your employer. An education that gives you leverage to negotiate a living wage tough... that's totally a governments responsibility and in its range of possibility. Everything else is a social subsidy which is fine as long as you call it by its name which is disability pay and unemployment pay. Ask your government for that too.
You need to learn a skill that leads to a living wage. Demanding politicians to directly do that is pointless, they are absolutely unable to give you that. The only thing they can directly do is set a minimum wage, which is essentially a lie. It doesn't actually give you a minimum/living wage, instead it makes you completely unemployable if your wage level is between 0-(minimum wage).
As u/nomad mentioned, demanding structures that make getting an education easier or give you safety nets when things go to shit, or basic income/negative tax rates for low incomes is something politicans can do. But don't demand stupid things like minimum wage, they might actually do those.
You need to learn a skill that leads to a living wage. Demanding politicians to directly do that
This is a perfect example of traditional neoliberal rhetoric, attributing success solely to individual effort and downplaying structural obstacles. It operates under the assumption that everyone has equal opportunities for success, which is simply not the case. This ideology perpetuates the existence of a low-wage sector for those who may not have had access to the same educational opportunities, such as migrants, single parents, and others facing systemic barriers. The American Dream, often touted as a symbol of success through hard work, is a myth perpetuated by neoliberalism. It is important not to buy into the narrative that one's circumstances are solely their own fault. Statistics show that social mobility is much lower in the US compared to many European countries, which further disproves the idea that hard work alone guarantees success.
This got me chubbed up. Preach, Chad.
Precisely this. People are taught by the wealthy class to devalue certain jobs because they are deemed "lesser than," and that the people that occupy those jobs are "not worthy" of a living wage, benefits, a stable living situation, respect, and more. This systematic dehumanization prevents us from realizing the true harms that working class people of all backgrounds are experiencing. Of course, the harms are compounded if you identify as a woman, a person of color, a queer person, as having a disability, or if you don't speak the native language.
Environmental Justice is what we need - a sense of community, mutual support, and a collective realization of past harms that have been baked into every policy, from the local to the federal level. These harmful policies have to be disrupted and dismantled, which can only be possible through education and action. The more people that engage in collective action under the banner of Environmental Justice, the better chance we have of really making meaningful, positive change.
/rant
Not sure what you have against minimum wage, it works well in other countries (I'm from the Netherlands). Obviously it doesn't solve everything by itself, but it's definitely a valuable part of a range of measures to treat people fairly. It's a fantasy that everyone can be educated to a level above minimum wage.
Other countries don't exist, silly!
But don’t demand stupid things like minimum wage
Wow. Let’s come back to reality for a moment.
There are millions out there that cannot afford to make themselves employable. They work long hours, possibly two jobs, plus a hustle just to not make enough for ends to meet. How do they go back to school? Learn a trade?
I am one of them, except I haven’t found my hustle yet. I work 40+ hours each week, but I take home so little. I was able to make rent two days ago, for last months rent. I have to hold off on a one of my meds, because paying rent took precedent over everything else, again. People like me don’t give a shit about programs that cannot help us in the short term. We already know our long term: work until we die, with nothing to show for it.
We could turn down the heat, so that the frogs might be able to escape their boiling fate? No, let’s design a better pot that won’t boil the frogs. The ones in there now won’t make it, but their progeny will also likely…not make it.
You ought to check yourself before you call what can be a major relief for millions, stupid. Seriously.
This is actually pure bullshit, by the way! Minimum wage is proven to be beneficial.
The solution is UBI.
Both
Sure, it is my fault that even though there is enough food and most of the farming is automated, I still need to work for it because I don't own the land. We shouldn't ask them to fix it for us, they never will. We need to take control of the land that feeds us.