I downvoted because I disagree with the way they are arguing.

The gp's(grandposter) comment uses the word companies. Which companies? Well we're talking about the US and health care so it has gotta be the health insurance companies? No, the bill Lamar disagreed with was to make employer's provide sick time to their employees.

Also, pp(parentposter) is what I use. OP is reserved for poster of the content.

"Companies" in my comment refers to the 32.5 million businesses in the US since the proposal is that employers pay sick leave. I'm not sure why you're referring to health insurance companies. Yes they have employees that may need sick leave, but they are not the only ones.

I'm mentioned health insurance companies because I wasn't aware of the details of the bill that was rejected today by Lamar until after reading your comment when I educated myself by reading a more detailed source. While reading your comment I assumed you meant health insurance companies paying as that was the recent Trump kerfluffle from his speech last night and in addition if we're talking about US and health I'm putting money on our health insurance system being mentioned.

  No, the bill Lamar disagreed with was to make employer's provide sick time to their employees

... which Congress lacks the legal authority to do.

When you say parent comment are you referring to my comment or the one I replied to?

I was referring to yours. I edited the original in the hopes of improving clarity.

My suspicion is that it is because I wrote "I honestly don't understand why the Democrats are so consistently anti-business in so many things they do", which I will admit is a tad bit flamebait-y on a forum that leans heavily Democrat. Non-Democrat positions are heavily downvoted across Hacker News.

I dont understand one thing though in my life time I am in my late 30s. Us has done well economically under Democrats compared to Republicans. But Republicans are considered pro business and Democrats anti business. Republicans talk about fiscal conservation but run up huge bills. Democrats talk about spending on healthcare etc but actually improve the deficit.

Republicans haven't been about fiscal conservation in a while.

It's also a mistake to just look at who controls the White House to figure out which party is in control when the economy does well economically. Both the executive and legislative branches matter and for the legislative, you need to control both houses. Even if one party controls the excutive and both houses of congress, it's hard to attribute the success of the economy to the current controlling party. Somethings the economy might be doing better because of current policies and sometimes it might be doing better because of policies enacted by the previous administration and congress, but the effects were latent.

In general, you can't take a macro look to determine which party is better for business. Instead you've got to look at things on a policy by policy basis and look at the first and second order economic impacts of specific policies.

Also, while Republicans haven't been very fiscally conservative in many years, most of the "huge bills being run up" are only sometimes from new spending. Most of the time, running up the bills is just from tax cuts. The democrats pass spending bills with accompanying taxes and the republicans are unable to undo both the spending and the taxes at the same time, so they negotiate for at least cutting taxes to help the economy, but the spending gets left in place.

The truth is that both parties are generally drunken spenders, but that one party has no issue taking more money from productive Americans to pay for their drunken spending.

FWIW, I'm neither a republican nor a democrat. Both parties are awful, but at least the Republicans try to let people keep money they've earned and rarely try to raise new taxes.