'The Poor Suck'

[thewayne]

"I have to tell you the truth. I'm tired of hearing about the minimum wage. I really am."
—NJ Gov. Chris Christie

After running the statement through the Truth Behind The Lies (TM pending) filter, it comes out as "I have to tell you the truth. I'm tired of hearing about people so poor that they can't make meaningful donations to my campaign funds and those of my friends. I really am."

On rare occasion you find a politician who will honestly live on food stamps for a week, I believe Cory Booker did and found it extremely hard to work well while on it. I'd love to see Christie try it on minimum wage, obviously he couldn't survive the food stamps diet, he'd be roasting his kids.

Comments

[moiraj.livejournal.com]

I remember watching one newscaster ask another what she thought of living on the minimum wage for a while, as an experiment. She said she should because she would lose so much weight.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Wow. An attempt at humor that is sadly ironic, and still an epic fail.

[silveradept]

I don't think it goes to the level of campaign donations - populist issues like the minimum wage traditionally do extremely well for Democrats and liberals. The more people talk/hear about it, the more likely the Republican elitist gets bounced and the business interests at the heart of the Republican party complain more about nor being able to exploit as easily.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

When you get down to it, we're now a capitalism-driven oligarchy with little regard for the individuals and most rights disproportionately given to mega-corps. Money talks, period. We have a legislative process that is practically tenured with little hope for change in the next eight years: the Dems would have to have control of statehouses in 2018/2020/2022 in order to control redistricting after the 2020 census, and then I wouldn't be surprised to see them gerrymander in their favor, though probably not as radically as the elephants.

[silveradept]

Which, naturally, does nothing to fix anything, as it leaves actual change agents Locked Out Of The Loop.

[Ay carumba.]

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Probably a really silly question, but why is there virtually zero discussion in US politics of any form of proportional representation? There seems to be negligible discussion of multi-party politics, which I find rather saddening, given how ridiculously broad the Dem camp is - FFS, Obama made calls on Landrieu's behalf, who fought against even his weak sauce implementation of universal healthcare.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

One problem is that each state has its own laws as to how districts for the US House of Representatives are apportioned. Some require proportional representation, but most do not. They're re-drawn after every decennial census, and the Republicans did an amazing job of grabbing state legislatures in 2008 and 2010 to be in control when the new census came out. They gerrymandered the districts to such a ridiculous extent that even though the approval rating of Congress is at an all-time low, they're almost guaranteed reelection.

And I totally agree about the shame that we seem to be utterly locked in to a two-party system. I quite like a lot of what our Greens are for, but they have a zero chance of the presidency and not much higher for Congress in general. The two parties control the debate system and require a candidate to poll above X%, and because the Greens can't get any significant exposure, they can't poll high enough to be included in the discourse.