Keep in mind she want in the inside of politics until the Biden term. It could be that she was a true believer in the talking points that everything wrong was the Democrats fault and that maga would “drain the swamp” if they just had a chance. His first term the kept claiming deep state and dem inference. Now she can’t help but to see how it is and his second term is so much more openly corrupt.
the highest turnout of registered voters and young voters in American history.
This is one of the problems with how we’ve pushed the messages like “rock the vote”, that you should vote, no matter what, or you’re being a bad citizen.
If you can’t be bothered to actually try to be informed, then you shouldn’t feel pressure to vote. Sure, you should be allowed to vote no matter what, but no one should be pressuring you to vote even with lack of interest.
We should be emphasizing you should get to know the candidates up and down the ballot, not just getting your mark on a ballot.
Risky joke, woosh is very likely.
Why Putin seems to be so good at doing that is anyone’s guess.
It’s probably not all that hard. We’ve seen him waffle back and forth on this one so it seems like just about anybody with the patience and will to be a sycophant can butter him up and convince him of anything.
Even then there would be a collective ‘oh that sucks, but without a clean election we can’t know how it would have gone so we will just wait for the next election and be more careful’.
Yeah, it wouldn’t be, just don’t like it when a line like that manages to be the takeaway. “I’m with her” was not Hilary Clinton’s slogan yet it became too prominent even more prominent than her slogan.
Still not crazy about “I want to win” type statements. I just feel those are too self serving. I’d like the central statement to be focused more on the people than the candidate.
Even the obsessively self centered Trump made his central slogan to be “Make America Great Again”.
Still based on taxes, they know how to make it work.
The basic logistics or the least of the open questions.
If every one gets 2k a month, how do prices react? Social security participants are only a subset of participants in the economy.
If everyone’s compensation is equal, guaranteed, and sufficient assuming prices didn’t just screw up, can you still get people doing work like sanitation? Social security is from a mindset that no productive prior is no longer required. It pays more to someone that made 100k a year than someone that made 50k a year, so your get proportional to what you put in.
It’s less a matter of needing years under its belt and more about paying out an actual basic income to everyone regardless of means testing or work requirements and without an expected end date for participants. We’ve just not seen it done at all.
Alaska is too small a payout. No one could have even basic needs meet there. It faiils the criteria for “basic”.
To receive social security, you can’t earn too much money. You generally have to choose either receive benefits or work. Also your payout depends on your specific pay in. You have to get paid during your younger years to “earn” your social security.
You can’t just do a "study’ of UBI. Every single study attempt I’ve seen looks like: -They have funding from something or another, they do not model the taxation half at all -They end up means testing because they can’t model taxation, so they fixate on those in need exclusively. -They tend to last maybe a year or two. The beneficiaries know this is a limited term benefit and need to make the most of it. -They do not target everyone, so the local market won’t even notice the difference in base earning power. You still have lots of poor people excluded from the study. -They did not just force people into the program, participants had to actively seek out participation.
What the experiments have repeatedly proven is that welfare can work to give motivated poor people a needed reprieve to get their feet on solid ground, which we already knew. We haven’t had an actual “study” of real UBI, just studies on welfare that they say is about UBI. About the only difference from actual welfare programs is that the participants are not audited to try to make sure the benefit shuts off the second they get a job. Which may be a good indicator at least that auditing the benefits could stand to be more lax.
UBI might work, but to date we haven’t actually tried it in any useful way. We have universal income in some places, but it’s generally well short of even basic.
We have voluntary programs, they are called charities and they gave so little participation that they have to pick and choose their battles and ensure they spend money on those that care.
Also hard to know if the charity is efficient, competent, and free of corruption.
UBI needs universal participations on contributor and recipient to maybe work. Hard to say even then since the nature of it resists meaningful experiments, and the few actual programs tend to fall well short of even “basic” income.
Definitely interesting to be in the demographic that casually thinks of colonoscopy prep
Ask it about Microsoft Teams next
Not sure. She was politically inactive until MAGA/QAnon triggered her to become an active outsider. Trump’s first term was relatively milquetoast economically. He did do China trade war stuff, but overall mild. He didn’t impose so many tariffs and largely left the resident immigrants alone, fixated on the border instead. To the extent she might have been dissatisfied, she was on the outside and the blaming if deep state and for the last half of the term, obstructionist Democrat rhetoric worked.
Then she became an insider, but an insider to an opposition party for the Biden presidency. Their blaming Biden and performative opposition still worked even on the inside.
Now she is on the inside of a party that has all the control she imagined and is seeing the administration double down on the most destructive policies and seeing first hand her party pretty much doing nothing except letting Trump unilaterally do whatever.
I think she was a naive gullible true believer and is perhaps finding out that no one actually is sincerely with her in the power structure.
She’s a fool and racist, but I think this is sincere.
Her and RFK Jr I think are the true believers with respect to their stances compared to the broader sea of exploitative grifters.
That said, I’m not sure whether the grifters or the true believers are more dangerous…
MTG entered office as a ‘the establishment is corrupt, all the conspiracy theories are real’ under Biden.
Now that ‘her team’ has won, now the establishment is all corrupt and there’s tons of actual conspiracies… So in a way, she’s actually shockingly consistent…
I think that unlike some others in the maga leadership, she was a true believer. She believed in all the most dubious deep state conspiracy theories. She thought this movement was about purging deep state corruption, and replacing it with some more meritocratic system. A big old dose of racism in there but with her rationalizing it with convenient conspiracy theories.
Now she’s faced with more blatant objective evidence of conspiracies. So she gets turned a bit by the betrayal.
Over a long enough time span, I think MTG is doomed to always, eventually turn against whomever is ostensibly “in charge”. She’ll go for conspiracy theories and of course the people in charge are to blame.
To keep in mind that another true believer is RFK Jr. While a true believer in some ways can be less vile, they still can be even more dangerous than the ones running a con.