I feel there is something very wrong with us that this is immediately seen as "OMG Super partisan crazy talk!!!"
Call your Senators and ask them if they will be supporting passage of a Senate version of this legislation.
If they won't, ask why. And let them know that their answer will affect your vote.
> Should the White House and House Democrats come to terms, Mr. McConnell has indicated privately that he would quickly bring up the measure and pass it to allow Mr. Trump to sign it into law.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/us/politics/trump-house-c...
It’s hard to imagine he would incentivize Pelosi to pass an aid bill just so he can block it, what is the political upside for him if he does that?
Similarly, the fact that Pelosi is even trying to work with Trump, Mnuchin, etc suggests she believes passage is possible. If she’s just doing this to make the senate republicans look bad when they reject it, then it’d be much easier to pass something with little to no input from Republicans.
If it looks like it doesn't have a chance of passing anyway, it provides an opportunity to publicly rebuke the other party. He pushed through AoC's Green New Deal with a smirk [1].
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/26/aocs-green-new-deal-dies-in-...
There’s a famous saying in politics that every crisis is an opportunity. The United States has already fallen well behind everyone else and what we’re doing, there could be political problems to resisting this too much too publicly. Also, and saying this in a completely neutral fashion, the US president is a wildcard. If he supports this, R senators fearing reelection will support it as well
I know there are Socialist policies that are in place at the Federal level, but the intent of the framers was to guarantee freedoms for citizens. A social welfare state was not anywhere in the picture.
Bottom line, personal responsibility goes a long, long way in terms of dealing with job loss and economic downturns.
The Constitution itself states the role of the Federal government is to prevent mass turmoil and to help the general public. In fact, it lists both of those objectives before it mentions the securing freedoms and liberty; it is generally believed that the preamble is ordered in terms of the priority of its objectives. I understand that there is a very real argument that the Federal government should not be responsible for the well-being of every single citizen but a safety net in times of pandemic is, in my opinion, nowhere close to a Constitutional overreach based on how these objectives have been interpreted.
Fair.
The provisions in the bill are not impermanent, though. If they had a time limit on them, they would be reasonable.
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You aren't wrong. South Korea has prior experience in this arena and they've done really well by learning from their prior contagions.
I think there is a lot the Fed could do to enable state CDCs to handle outbreaks in the future. Part of all of this is the logistical half: materials for testing (which I understand is one of the major slowdowns this time around), distribution of knowledge, etc.
There's a lot of ground to cover even at a municipal level. The Fed has the ability to collect information and act as a hub of best practices. I think that will be critical for saving lives this time around and next.
[edit for missing words]
The Framers were not omniscient, and the Constitution isn't a religious text. They allowed slavery, forbid women to vote, and held an 18th-century understanding of economics and science. While their design philosophy for our government is good to consider, we are not beholden to them to implement as they would have wished.
The most successful nations today - in terms of population health, happiness, and well-being - are Western European countries with strong social safety nets.
Sure, but this is the text we have. If you don’t like what it creates, change it, there is a procedure to add amendments or change the whole thing altogether. Of course, the difficulty then is that quite a lot of people in fact like what we have and want to keep it this way.
What happened however was that the Supreme Court decided that the enumerated clauses are irrelevant, and that government can do whatever it wants, just saying magic words of "general welfare" and "interstate commerce". That's why there's no interest in passing amendments anymore: why bother when you can just get Supreme Court to stamp whatever you want?
I'm not against having federal social safety net, but I'd prefer it to be passed the way founders intended, and how things used to be done before the Progressive era in Supreme Court: by expanding the enumerated list of things government can do, through constitutional amendment. What I don't like is having it passed through the Supreme Court backdoor, by interpreting the constitution literally opposite to what it was intended and commonly understood to mean when it was written.
It doesn't matter what the Federalist papers say, as far as the Constitution is concerned, since the Federalist papers are not a body of law.
The Tenth Amendment of the Constitution reads as follows: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Powers not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution and also not prohibited by the States are not prohibited by the Constitution. The states can literally, and perfectly legally, vote to grant the government additional powers as they deem necessary, without holding a Constitutional congress and ratifying new amendments each time.
No, in fact it matters very much when the question is what the writers of the Constitution meant and intended.
> The states can literally, and perfectly legally, vote to grant the government additional powers as they deem necessary, without holding a Constitutional congress and ratifying new amendments each time.
Sure, the States can vote themselves social welfare, or anything else that the Constitution doesn't prohibit. You could have California Social Security with no constitutional issues at all. That is clear. It's the federal government that cannot do so -- or at least cannot under the obvious and intended reading of the constitution.
The writers of the Constitution were not unanimous in their beliefs - the Constitution was a compromise of principles, not a statement of absolute consensus. You're simply declaring the authors whose opinions you agree with to be correct.
James Madison himself opposed versions of the tenth Amendment limiting the Federal government to only the expressly enumerated powers, quoting from Wikipedia here: "James Madison opposed the amendments, stating that "it was impossible to confine a Government to the exercise of express powers; there must necessarily be admitted powers by implication, unless the Constitution descended to recount every minutia."[0]
>It's the federal government that cannot do so -- or at least cannot under the obvious and intended reading of the constitution.
Yes, the Federal government can do so through Congress. The only powers the Federal government is forbidden from exercising are those not enumerated in the Constitution and any others forbidden by the states. Nowhere in the Constitution are the states prohibited from granting powers to the Federal government - which you yourself conceded earlier. Indeed, it would contradict the Tenth Amendment and other parts of the Constitution[1] to claim that states don't have that authority.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
This is technically correct, and at the time perfectly reasonable.
What would the founding fathers advise when they observed our current situation, where we've allowed the planet to grow into this massively interconnected system, the particular design of which is derived from the "fact" that we've been optimizing for profits above almost everything else (like redundancy/resiliency/shock) for the last <x> decades? I imagine they'd start by remarking that they would never have gotten us into this situation in the first place (for reasons that I hope should finally be visible to people) - but now that we're here, what do you think their advice (including temporary measures) would be now that a significant number of variables have significantly changed?
We personally and responsibly elected officials to provide government assistance for various things rather than just hoping charity covers the gap. So that's fine, right?
Who's "we", and what jurisdiction are you talking about? If you're talking about the US federal government, you're factually wrong, especially for the executive branch, but also the Senate.
Point is I reject the idea that personal responsibility and deciding the right way to handle something is to have the government do it are necessarily opposed. I think the premise is somewhere in "not even wrong" territory.
I know that this isn't true for at least Social Security. The original promise was that it would be purely voluntary. It was later rolled out to be mandatory. It has also turned in to a stack of IOUs.
Obamacare was a stack of lies (prices didn't stay the same, quality and access to care decreased, providers could not be kept). It also is a money pit.
I also know that despite our awful implementations of social programs no other economy in the world currently rivals that of the US. Even in poor economic conditions. The poorest of the poor in this country is in magnitude better conditions than their companions in other countries. I'm don't want my country weighed down any more, the way most others are.
This is objectively untrue by pretty much any measure.
For instance on plenty of health related metrics the US is significantly worse than most first world countries (such as infant mortality), and some regions are worse than even many third world countries (such as Texas).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an...
44th on this list
The idea that poor people are significantly better off in the USA is a flat out lie.
Also, specifically:
> It has also turned in to a stack of IOUs.
I mean, that's what an awful lot of financial instruments are. It'd still kinda be true even if the fund were bales of cash in a warehouse.
> infant mortality
The measures used in the US for determining infant mortality are much more stringent than in other countries [0]. This accounts for the ranking: we track mortality where others do not.
[0] https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/09/infant-mortality-dece...
Here you are:
1) the WHO admits that measures in countries it collects data from are often not taken in a consistent manner. "Monitoring progress is challenging in light of weak health information systems in some countries. Problems such as underreporting and differences between official data and estimates made by international agencies are some of the contributing factors."
2) We have "... anecdotal evidence suggests that countries do not use consistent practices in measuring these data [2] [3]"
I'll have to do more digging. These are hard to find references. There may be a hard copy of [2] at my university's law library.
[0] http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/Life-stages/materna...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4193257/#__sec2...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12343088
[3] Hartford RA. New Perspectives on Infant Mortality in the United States: Findings from International Research Studies. Presented at the Association for Social Sciences in Health Meeting at the National Institutes of Health; Bethesda, MD.. Feb. 4, 1992 <-- What's interesting here is that the authors of [1] left a link to scholar.google.com, with no specific reference. This may take a while to track down.
Where does the Constitution say this?
Article 1, Section 8 specifies that Congress shall have power to: punish piracy, declare war, raise and support armies, provide and maintain a navy, provide for calling forth the militia to repel invasions.
Article 2, Section 2 specifies that the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States.
Defending the nation against foreign threats is integral to national security and definitely part of the US Constitution.
The role of government is fluid, roles and responsibilities change with facts on the ground.
Condemning the poor to death is not the way to go.
No. My argument is that if we don't sunset socialist policies, they will become rule of law. Without a time-limit provision the socialist programs in this bill are partisan.
> we should also end medicare, medicaid, snap and social security because that's not what the framers intended
Yes. Social Security removes a person's ability to choose how they spend and save the money that gets shuttled to the government. All social programs create dependency on the state; a state of being that we call "unhealthy" when it is between two consenting adults. I think that it is even less healthy when a person becomes dependent on a bureaucratic behemoth that does not have their best interest at heart.
I'll point you to the cases of Alfie Evans [0] and Bloomberg's comments on death panels [1]. Social programs aren't about helping people (even though they are talked about that way). Social programs are about power and removing choice from people.
> Condemning the poor to death is not the way to go.
I do not condemn the poor to death. I say that the states are responsible for their people, not the Federal government. This isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. It is possible for states, family, friends, etc. to see to the welfare of their own and for the Fed to stay in its lane. No one is condemned to anything.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/25/health/alfie-evans-appeal-bn/...
[1] https://twitter.com/CANCEL_SAM/status/1229127380402393088
[edit for spelling]
I get we are coming at this from vastly different perspectives but I see no issue with a social program such as sick leave, and medical care becoming permanent. I would argue this pandemic is a strong argument for universal health care. The poorest among us by not getting tested can spread the virus to those who are able to afford getting tested and treated. If I am a poor hourly worker and I get sick, I am still going to go to work because if I stay home my kids don't eat. When I am at work I likely make food for wealthier people who then get sick due to my lack of ability to afford to take time off. Guaranteed paid time off fixes this. This pandemic is not a one time event, there will be more and they could be worse.
Of course social programs are about helping people. If I am poor and cannot afford food for my family, what choice has SNAP taken from me? If I am am cold and cannot afford heat, what choice has LIHEAP taken from me?
One of the primary arguments against Social Security at the time of its enactment was that it would reduce the labor by allowing more people to safely retire in old age. I think we can safely say that this is, in fact, what actually happened.
If you compare it to a country like Italy that oddly enough seems to be getting praised for it's handling of the pandemic, what more should the US have done? Especially considering how much more lethal it is in Italy and just how crazily fast it spread there. Still, as a non american, it seems to me like everyone talks about how incompetent the US is when they are doing the same or better than their peers?
* Getting testing kits distributed earlier.
* Not downplaying the severity and contagiousness of the virus.
* Not presenting the virus as a Democratic hoax.
* Putting industry experts in charge of the response rather than politicians.
* Having a fully staffed CDC.
There have been multiple statements by the administration to correct or rectify earlier statements by the same administration. The response has been confusing, contradictory, and in its partisan nature (see bullet point 3 and 4), untrustworthy.
Would it have been wise to test people that travelled there? What if Italy was doing just fine but Sweden had an unknown huge infection number? Would checking every single traveller make sense then, because it could've been anywhere? And from the point when it was already inside the US and highly contagious, does Trumps incompetence really matter?
I mean we are at that point where it's definitely not stoppable. if the situation worsens in terms of mortality and infection numbers become unmanageable then yeah I think that would be something else. But right now the US is actually doing better than the average
The US had a whole month to get prepared for this, and instead did pretty much nothing, and even refused to import test kits and prepare itself for large-scale testing the way SK did.
The US has absolutely been incompetent, and while it hasn't been the only incompetent country (Spain is probably another one), it's easily the most visible because of its size and economic power and status as a superpower.
Especially since comments and news about this seem to always highlight how bad the US is dealing with this and how efficient and proactive the EU is when facts prove the opposite? There is a lot of things the rest of the world can blame the US gov for, but this?
This has to do with who is currently POTUS. The media in this country are far left leaning, to the point that most at the national level panicked when he was elected. If a person's only source of information is the big 3 or 4 outlets, they will never hear anything positive about the current administration.
The idea that people "just" hate him is a pernicious excuse for avoiding discussion of those specific criticisms.
In short, don't assume that most people share your basic values or worldview. You might be living in a place where they simply don't.
America is a big place. It is unwise to presume you know all of it.
In my part of it, most of us think letting people die of privation due to misfortune and societal factors outside their control in such a wealthy society is cruel and foolish (read history to understand why it is foolish). In my part of America, most of us also think letting random individuals own weapons constructed purposely for killing multiple humans quickly is absolutely insane.
YMMV
We don't need to create a social safety net at the federal level. Prove that the idea works at the state level before you trying to scale half-baked ideas to the whole country.
I think that's covered under his "something very wrong with us".
Suppose that every year the federal government gave each family a baked goose to celebrate our acquisition of colonies via the Spanish-American War. You can think this is an offensive celebration or a crazy waste of money, but why not accept the goose when it is delivered? It's still a tasty meal, even if you think it shouldn't be given out.
That is what is going on. It's not hypocrisy, hate, or inconsistent principles.
What matters is voting consistent with principles even if they aren't in your best interest.
For instance, should you vote to abolish police and courts, so you don't have to pay taxes for them? In the short term, that would net you more money. In the long term, it would mean you'll be living in a lawless wasteland and someone will rob and murder you.
Personally, I'm a well-paid tech worker, but even for me, if I'm quarantined, my company policy is that I cannot come to work (nor can I work from home), and I must take either PTO or (if that's exhausted) medical leave of absence (without pay). Luckily, I'm single and frugal, live well below my means, and have lots of savings because I'm somewhat paranoid, so I can easily live for a few months without pay, but this just isn't true for most people, especially people without families who aren't overpaid tech workers like me. So I certainly cannot criticize people at the low end of the scale who avoid getting quarantined: they have to do this to survive. If we don't like this, then maybe we should have done a better job voting for leaders who would handle health crises better and set up social safety nets for things like this.
Worse than that, they could even face a Tom Hanks Philadelphia like situation, after they test positive.
SNAP: People are going to be out of work because of this, not everyone has a job they can work from home with, and emergency savings in America are sparse enough to where it's a real concern.
Food bank services: People are going to be out of work because of it, so on, and encouraging people to keep in one region delays the spread of the virus.
Student Meals: ?
Senior nutrition programs: Reducing spread among the most vulnerable, plus most of those programs are about increasing the quality of nutrition, which might help boost immune systems.
Medicaid increase: (explained in that blurb)
If anything, it seems like this would be agreeable among both sides overall, especially when taking into account 45's television address, which focused heavily on the elderly. It makes sense, because there's a strong incentive for the Republican side of the aisle to keep them alive: too much of them gone at once and more than a few of them would be at risk of losing their seats.
Actually doing the tests and "here's what will happen if you get tested positive, and it's not horrible and won't bankrupt you" are two sides of the same coin. I mean, the end goal is not tests as such but to restrict spread of the disease. If "tests are available" but if the vulnerable parts of the population (e.g. the dude putting stuff on the shelf of your local store or the girl at the counter) don't have that safety net, then the testing was useless because they'll still go to work and infect you and others. So this safety net is a key part of the bill.
Dealing with only the surface level issues and ignoring everything else seems like a great way to pretend like you are accomplishing something without actually doing anything useful.
What parts of the bill do you consider too much "social assistance"?
There is a sect in the USA that considers the social assistance already in place as too much no matter what. That's the mindset of the opposition here.
This isn't even a political hot take from me. It's an often-stated purpose.
It could be seen as a political gamble that even Mitch McConnell doesn't want to be seen as that much of a monster, as one who turns away furloughed and quarantined workers from assistance.
Or it could be seen simply as "being a human being with some compassion".
Or it could be seen as, "doesn't make much sense for free testing if people are going to lose their homes if they test positive". I'm going with the last one. Free tests to see if I'm still employable or not? Yeah, that's a hard pass from me, I've got kids to feed.
Additional safety nets are required to incentive those people to get tested. The only way to do that is to ensure they receive their pay, their jobs are secure and the test and treatment is free.
None of those programs listed sound frivolous to me, given what’s probably coming financially. It’s better to get this on the table now, than have to keep coming back piecemeal over the next year.
9/11 got used to push through horrific legislation, but most people only cared because of partisan results and cared nothing for the mechanism of action. here we see the same mechanism of action in effect again, and again only people who disagree along partisan lines care. i thought we were engineers, coders, and scientists? hackers, for god's sakes. what happened to systems-level thinking? what happened to working the problem (the ROOT problem) with rationality?
we've had dangerous global pandemics very, very recently (SARS, swine flu) but none saw fit to take the alarmist stance so many commenters emotionally grandstand with today ("this is not.the.fucking.flu", et. al.). where will your righteous anger and verve be two years from now?
the HN comments themselves and subsequent upvotes/downvotes have been truly disappointing. divine comedy indeed. just weather the storm, friends. you know where the coronavirus looks safest? where there is the most testing - south korea.
dont worry, everyone. earth's orbit weaves through cosmic missiles with sufficient energy to immediately and permanently extinguish all life on earth, and we have neither the detection capacity for warning nor the prevention capacity to stop it even if we had warning.
All the proposals listed in the article makes total sense in the context of this crisis. Sick time for people to quarantine, food assistance for the people whose incomes will drop due to the fast approaching recession and isolation measures, all totally on-topic.
The US has long-understood systematic problems that will contribute to making this crisis worse. If you want to mitigate the crisis, you'll want to fix those issues that you can.
https://twitter.com/elwasson/status/1238133144173281280
> A key sticking point in the talks appears to be GOP demands to include Hyde amendment language in the bill to prevent federal funds from being used for abortion.
Michelle Obama's "kids should eat healthier school lunches" wasn't partisan, but it was treated as such.
We will not be able to test everyone even if it's free, and we don't need to test everyone to flatten the curve. We need to keep people insulated which can only happen if people are able to survive while insulated.
It's a win-win for Democrats -- either the bill passes, along with all this reform that was stuck into it, which dems can brag about to voters in the campaign.
Or it doesn't pass, because of all the stuffing, and dems get yet another example of republicans moving slowly on the issue and blocking much-needed reform.
Yep, and that's exactly why we've elected 8 Republican administrations (not counting Ford because he wasn't elected), and 5 Democratic administrations since 1968. Oh, wait....
Any negative aspect here is entirely on the heads of the Republican senate majority for being worse than useless about any kind of public relief. They could easily get ahead of this thing by passing a lesser bill that provides some or temporary benefits, but that would mean helping people instead of corporations.
sounds like American politics in a nutshell to me, aside from a few rare exceptions!
Edit: I mean limiting the amount of time these bills remain valid, not just limiting the amount of paid leave.
Those seem like pretty specific limits.
What other limits do you feel are missing from the bill?
If it's the rest of this year, then it likely should be passed.
It makes sense in times like these of course. But it's been 50 years since there's been a panic similar to this over a virus.
Attaching something permanent to a disaster relief bill is a scummy political move.
If it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing right instead of just throwing something out there that will only help in this specific situation.
But I find it really hard to believe this adds up to only several billion dollars, given there are over 150 million employees in this country.
What exactly are the unrelated wish list items here? Everything I'm seeing here looks on point and directly relevant to this crisis.
Workers need rights to sick time right now, or the virus will spread even more quickly and this will be worse. People are going to be losing jobs or hours because of this, and if they don't have extra cash they're going to need food assistance. Medicaid is about to get hit hard, just like every health insurance program. The elderly and disabled people are vulnerable groups, and are going to need greater levels of assistance during the coming disruptions.
Not really. They understand what they're doing, this happens because it is a contemporary political strategy in the U.S, it doesn't matter what individual constituents feel about the practice.
In the USA
The goal of not overwhelming our healthcare system and minimizing deaths is best served by getting a full set of measures out fast.
I compare it to Denmark where the opposition fully supported the government's decision to shut down schools and send home public sector employees.
I am pretty sure no politician here would dare to politicize a situation like this because of the fear of being punished by their voters.
Generally speaking, strengthening social assistance during a period where social assistance is going to be strained seems like a good idea.
Not when your stated purpose is to dismantle said social assistance, which explains why this bill is going to die in the Senate.
Disclaimer: I am an independent and don't think Medicare for all is a good idea. Still though.
testing is important for public health data and understanding how the virus is spreading and how to respond, but economic security is absolutely an "immediate issue" for anybody laid off or unemployed because of the pandemic.
It's a common game for the House to throw up packages they know the Senate will bat down. They are trying to make the Senate look bad in the eyes of the nation.
"Senate vetos critical Coronavirus support package."
Why do you hold the House responsible for the political choices of the Senate?
>In addition to supporting workers, the "Families First" bill would also seek to strengthen food security initiatives, including SNAP, food bank services, student meals and senior nutrition programs, while also increasing federal funds for Medicaid, as states across the country face increased costs.
By packing so much social assistance into the bill, the House is going to create serious problems with getting it through the Senate. The goal of mass testing would be better served if the controversial issues were separated from the immediate one.