Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
What hard left?
I'd like to get healthcare that covers everyone. I'd like to get fiscal support to people during a pandemic. I'd like to actually address the student debt crisis, and reduce it going forward. I'd like the minimum wage to reflect actual productivity. I'd like electoral reform so that the GOP can stop relying on voter suppression as it's main electoral strategy. I'd like to see massive investment in green energy and tech so that we can, finally, start to address both climate change and the lack of high quality blue collar jobs. Maybe even UBI.
We need a ton of change because the path we're on is not sustainable. All of that is way more valuable than the little bit more in taxes I might have to pay.
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One of the things that converts an angry idealist to a pragmatist is age. The other, which goes along with age, is the recognition that massive entrenched interests such as Big Oil or Big Education cannot be tackled through policy. We will continue to burn fossil fuels for a long time to come, and the environment will get worse, because we can’t and won’t go cold turkey, and even if we did, the rest of the developing world will not (
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-w...l-power-plants).
If you talk to people who cover energy, most have done considerable research on climate change. They plan for it to get much worse and see opportunity in retrofitting structures for more intense hurricanes, speculating on land in areas which will become more temperate, and developing technology that addresses sea level rise encroaching on large coastal cities.
As for Big Education, do you really think Democrats would discipline that sector? If they forgive loans, it’d be a great sugar high for the economy. But that’d be temporary. The real fix must be in tightening student loan lending and allowing clawbacks from Universities who give out useless degrees at outrageous costs. The bullshit arguments behind a lot of the looniest progressive policies are written by professors. The Democrats and Academia have a rich history of assisting each other in pushing ideas that sound great but would ultimately have horrible unintended consequences. (Like the very student loan system itself! What sane person would argue that giving 18 year olds unlimited borrowing power for non-dischargeable loans is a good idea? It’s a recipe for parasitic price inflation by providers.) The Progressives aren’t going to shoot their partner in policy sophistry.
This is a long way of saying, humans, particularly American humans, aren’t going to seriously try to fix anything until it’s so bad that there’s no choice. And by then it’s too late, so instead we simply adapt.
