The Dems need to go back to the 50 state strategy and just "show up" at a number of uncontested races preparing to lose but win the 2nd or 3rd time - the problem is that the establishment wing of the Democratic party cock-blocks that and actively advances "their person" into such races and proceeds to lose them (blaming the grassroots candidate in the process), while ignoring large swathes of winnable races.
Honestly, with this issue, and it's a huge issue, it seems the government is broken. I don't know how the Dems plan on solving this either, so I'm not sure replacing every GOP politician with a Dem politician will solve anything.
I think blocking all these M&A would go a long way too. No one can compete in an industry with just one or two giants who enact huge barriers to entry, etc.
Who proposed that? Bernie?
Keep in mind that Obama (widely seen as a sellout from Dems and the antichrist on the GOP side) was effective in reducing mobile subscription costs by blocking the AT&T / TMobile merger in 2014 - that was the FCC.
I'm of the mind that no large company mergers shouldn't be allowed period, at least for a long time. Small company mergers in growing industries, sure. These large mergers in established industries only serve the companies and hurt both the workers and the consumers. The word cartel comes to mind.
I think the biggest problem with US politics, at least in the executive branch, is presidents need to be cautious until the last 2 years of an 8 year term, and still, anything radical they do can hurt the party. I think we need something radical done to fix middle America.
Are any of those policies ones that the Republican party stands for? Sex education, socialized healthcare and education, and welfare are on the GOP hit-list. Democrat states have had these things for decades now, which is why they are the prosperous ones.
The closest thing you listed is pushing people to college degrees. Once they get their degree, they'd have to move to a prosperous city to get employment. The non-prosperous city hasn't improved at all.
So I think what you aren't understanding about the problem, is that in all these non-prosperous towns, there are few jobs and most of them pay shit. They had jobs, but they all left. The problem is to get the jobs back.
What have the Dems done to get the jobs back? Again, I'm not saying the GOP has done anything either, but see my issue? Nothing is being done by either party, and that's a huge issue affecting millions of families. I mean it's not even really discussed. Warren is the only one even on the trail of some solutions, but she is an outsider (by her own admission).
I mean if you go to these areas, it's the Great Depression. The towns are all boarded up and the people are hurting and have been for 4 decades. It's a huge failure of government that this is happening, and has been happening for so long.
They're not coming back.
And if you look, you'll see that Democrats did propose plans in the last election. But without the approval of Congress, there's not much that can be done.
So should we continue to just tell a good chunk of the country to go to hell? What plans would the Dems enact if they sweep the 2020 election? I mean this is the most pressing issue for a huge voting block. Without a good plan, I don't think the Dems can take back the house or senate, much less the presidency. It's long over due, and the GOP don't have any good ideas either.
>And if you look, you'll see that Democrats did propose plans in the last election.
Like what?
Absolutely not, and no one is suggesting this. But it would be completely foolhardy to say you're going to "bring back coal" when that's just not going to happen.
And please, stop with this "Dems have no plan" narrative. It's entirely false, and it's quite dishonest to bring it up when even a cursory Google search will prove it wrong.
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/workforce-and-skills/
So Dems do have plans. But the problem is that many of the people in those areas don't want to hear that their previous jobs are gone. They don't want to retrain. So they latch on to the people who say things like, "We're gonna bring back coal jobs," regardless of how realistic it is.
Coal is done (except in China where we send a lot of manufacturing), even the coal workers know that. Subsidizing solar and "solarizing" middle America would create quite a few jobs, including long term jobs maintaining the solar panels, etc. Haven't heard any proposals along those lines though. I believe Obama had mentioned it a few times, but nothing concrete.
>stop with this "Dems have no plan" narrative. It's entirely false, and it's quite dishonest to bring it up when even a cursory Google search will prove it wrong.
Look, I like the Dems, I vote for them quite a bit, but I'm not going to blindly say they are great and have a real solution to this problem, because they don't, at least none that I've heard anyway.
Anyway, I Googled it like you said (I found it odd that no one could actually name any though) and here is Schumer's (and therefore the Democrat's) idea:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/opinion/chuck-schumer-emp...
First, we’re going to increase people’s pay. Second, we’re going to reduce their everyday expenses. And third, we’re going to provide workers with the tools they need for the 21st-century economy.
None of these is going to solve the problem. I'll go one at a time.
- "First, we’re going to increase people’s pay." Increasing pay is great in the larger cities with a good knowledge and industrial base, but closes a lot of small town stores and restaurants with not a large customer base. Cost of living varies greatly from region to region and even city to city. In summary, this will improve the minimum wage workers positions in already prosperous cities, but hurt them in small towns (which is the target of this discussion).
- Lowering household costs by providing paid family and sick leave. This is nice, but it attacks a symptom rather than the problem of few to no jobs and even fewer ones that pay enough to live on. I assume it's an attempt to lower the cost of living, but I don't see how it does, unless you are sick and already have a job.
- We’ve already proposed creating jobs with a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. I've always thought this was a good idea, but it's temporary, unless the US commits to building and maintaining a hell of an infrastructure forever. Based on how our elections work and the GOP not liking this sort of thing, I don't see how it could be a permanent solution. I mean it's something though.
To solve the middle America problem will require something a lot more radical, I just don't know what it is. I'm hoping to hear it from the Democrats though. I haven't yet. I certainly haven't heard anything from the GOP either.
It's not only manufacturing that left, agriculture scaled so high that you need 1000+ acres to make it in most crops. 1000 acres costs millions of dollars, leaving even more people behind. I don't know your age, but there were a bunch of Farm Aid concerts in the 80s. Didn't seem to do much though.
That said, I'm not entirely sure what the executive branch can be expected to do here aside from tweaking interest rates and actively hiring people directly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2016_Nationwide_US_presid...
It cuts both ways.
If your metric is land mass, dividing on party lines is only going to get you one result.
That kind of map conveys acres of unfeeling land, rather than a quantity of distressed humans.
So that particular graphic is simply not very useful -- whichever way folks want to argue things.
I don't understand how the article can claim this when their own graphic at the top of the page shows that the majority of distressed communities are in Republican-dominant areas.