Thankfully, the bill that passed was indeed universal and will provide leave to anyone, no matter the size of the company they work for. a centrist Democratic councilmember offered an alternative to the universal paid leave initially proposed: “businesses with more than 50 employees would pay for a staffer’s leave out-of-pocket, and are then refunded through a $200-per-employee tax credit.” So instead of government just giving you the benefit, your employer pays you (as long as they’re the right size), and gets refunded by the government. Here’s an article on Obamacare, one that also features a diagram:īeyond just the Obama Administration, though, this kind of limp, obfuscated benefit has become common among progressives more broadly.ĭuring the recent debate over paid leave in Washington, D.C. Pretty easy to understand: Anyone can use it, and all you need to do is go to your family doctor. Those examples are about taking credit, but what about keeping it simple? As a model program, here’s an advertisement for the National Health Service of the UK. Removed ARRA sign and supports are the property of the contractor.”īy contrast, here’s a Works Progress Administration plaque on a Rhode Island sidewalk, still there 80 years after the job was completed. Here’s the Ohio government’s internal guidance on what’s to be done with ARRA signage after the road or bridge is completed: “Remove the ARRA sign and supports at the end of the project. They’re tangible improvements average people encounter every day.ĭid Obama’s stimulus take advantage of this? Sort of-here’s an ugly sign that was common:ĭid those signs stay up, as a reminder of what government had helped do? Hard to say definitively, but probably not, for the most part. Better roads, highways, and so on, are easy to understand and take credit for, in theory. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, “the stimulus,” as most people know it, had huge amounts of infrastructure improvements. Very high-minded. Let’s see if Franklin Roosevelt had similar qualms about sending checks: Did he send out a similar letter and check, crediting he and his Democratic Congress? Let’s go to The New York Times: Bush signed a tax cut in the first year of his term, during a recession, and sent out a rebate check of up to $600 to taxpayers, along with a letter saying that he and the Republican congress had passed the law providing that check.īarack Obama also passed a tax cut in the first year of his term, also during a recession.
Either Democrats complicate their initiatives enough to be inscrutable to anyone who doesn’t love reading hours of explainers on public policy, or else they don’t take credit for the few simple policies they do enact. This point has been made before on Obamacare, but the tendency behind it, the tendency to muddle and mask benefits, has become endemic to center-left politics. Now it’s, “you didn’t used to be able to log on to a website and negotiate between 15 different providers to pick a platinum or gold or zinc plan and apply a fucking formula for a subsidy that’s gonna change depending on your income so you might end up having to retroactively owe money or have a higher premium.” Holy shit, thank you so much. They could say to you, “you didn’t used to have money when you were old, now you do. The reason they held Congress for 40 years after enacting Social Security is because Social Security was right in your fucking face.
#Keep it simple quotes how to
You don’t have to go to a goddamned website and become a fucking hacker to try to figure out how to pick the right plan, they just tell you “you’re covered now.” And that’s it! That’s all it ever should have been and that is why - is bemoaning why it’s a political failure? Because modern neoliberal, left-neoliberal policy is all about making this shit invisible to people so that they don’t know what they’re getting out of it.Īnd as Rick Perlstein has talked about a lot, that’s one of the reasons that Democrats end up fucking themselves over. There are parts to it that are unambiguously good - like, Medicaid expansion is good, and why? Because there’s no fucking strings attached. And, in the interest of supporting a united front between liberals and socialists, let me start this off with a rather long quote from Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House, on why Obamacare failed to gain more popularity: As Democrats stare down eight years of policies being wiped out within months, it’s worth looking at why those policies did virtually nothing for their electoral success at any level.
0 kommentar(er)
