American Politics

[krbe 193]

On 18/08/2016 at 7:01 AM, Odainsaker said:

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce's International Trade Administration's statistics, Texas exported $248 billion worth of merchandise last year, of which $92 billion worth were exported to Mexico, the state's largest foreign trading partner, while $26 billion worth were shipped to Canada, the state's second largest foreign trading partner.

But how much were lost due to unemployed or underemployed Americans, money made from businesses employing illegal immigrants and costs due to immigrant enforcement and crime related to unemployed or underemployed?

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Seattle turns up heat on business experiment

Seattle has tourism, biotech firms, UW, and Amazon. Nearby cities have robust economies (ranked better than Seattle now). While Seattle hasn't suffered much from the amateur social engineering by its radical leftist government, it has suffered enough to slip down the rankings of cities with good economies. Small businesses are exiting the Seattle market faster than they are entering it now.

[Sabretooth78 808]

6 hours ago, OcramsRzr said:

Seattle turns up heat on business experiment

Seattle has tourism, biotech firms, UW, and Amazon. Nearby cities have robust economies (ranked better than Seattle now). While Seattle hasn't suffered much from the amateur social engineering by its radical leftist government, it has suffered enough to slip down the rankings of cities with good economies. Small businesses are exiting the Seattle market faster than they are entering it now.

Meh.  Local level is where these things should be happening, so if they want to try and do it all the more power to them.  If you don't like it, you don't have as far to move!

Then you read the article and come to this:

Quote

For example, legislatures in Idaho, Arizona and other GOP-controlled states forbade plastic-bag bans in cities and towns. Here, the lack of plastic bags didn’t end the American way of life, and Seattleites take it for granted.

Funny how "small government" GOP legislators love to enforce sweeping big brother-ish regulations.  Heaven forfend the town of East Boondock tries to ban plastic bags - critical state capitol business!

I'll take Seattle's nonsense over Idaho and Arizona's hypocrisy.  At least in Seattle you know what you're going to get!

[Ocram's Razr 964]

On August 22, 2016 at 9:45 AM, Sabretooth78 said:

Meh.  Local level is where these things should be happening, so if they want to try and do it all the more power to them.  If you don't like it, you don't have as far to move!

Then you read the article and come to this:

Funny how "small government" GOP legislators love to enforce sweeping big brother-ish regulations.  Heaven forfend the town of East Boondock tries to ban plastic bags - critical state capitol business!

I'll take Seattle's nonsense over Idaho and Arizona's hypocrisy.  At least in Seattle you know what you're going to get!

I have already moved.

States overriding cities is equivalent to the federal government overriding states.

 

EDIT: http://nytimes.com/2016/04/17/business/economy/san-francisco-housing-tech-boom-sf-barf.html

Despite how bad Seattle is, San Francisco has always been worse in modern history. Seattle has welcomed its tech boom with only a vocal minority in Ballard and Capitol Hill vehemently opposed. If Bill Gates wasn't from the area, Silicon Valley and other California suburbs would be the main tech cities until Amazon would have decided to set up in Texas (making the area in Texas around Amazon in that alternate universe equivalent to Seattle's real world tech center). As it stands, east of Lake Washington is the primary tech center of WA with Texas and Colorado getting the most start-ups and small businesses. Texas and Colorado have petroleum but fortunately have the intelligence to diversify into technology. When it comes to the technology sector alone, the best states are Minnesota, Utah, Nebraska, and Michigan.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2015/08/18/the-fastest-growing-states-for-tech-jobs-in-2015/

California and New York are hiring the most by bulk (not percentage growth) but the suburbs are seeing the most growth.

  Edited August 23, 2016 by OcramsRzr  

[Duke87 1,070]

On 8/22/2016 at 0:45 PM, Sabretooth78 said:

Meh.  Local level is where these things should be happening, so if they want to try and do it all the more power to them.  If you don't like it, you don't have as far to move!

On the other hand, making such policy on a local level renders it less effective precisely because it is easy for anyone who is financially impacted or otherwise inconvenienced by the policy to run away from it.  If all that's necessary to avoid paying employees $15 an hour is locate your business just outside the Seattle city limits, several business owners are going to do exactly that. If the $15 minimum wage were nationwide, there'd be nowhere to run and business owners would be forced to adapt rather than shopping for a jurisdiction with less stringent regulations.

 

[Sabretooth78 808]

8 hours ago, Duke87 said:

On the other hand, making such policy on a local level renders it less effective precisely because it is easy for anyone who is financially impacted or otherwise inconvenienced by the policy to run away from it.  If all that's necessary to avoid paying employees $15 an hour is locate your business just outside the Seattle city limits, several business owners are going to do exactly that. If the $15 minimum wage were nationwide, there'd be nowhere to run and business owners would be forced to adapt rather than shopping for a jurisdiction with less stringent regulations.

 

No, I don't disagree.  There's definitely a balance that needs to be struck.  Another classic argument against incredibly localized control is Walmart and their store sitings.  Stuff like that.  Regionalism does have its distinct benefits.

[hym 358]

On 8/22/2016 at 3:29 PM, OcramsRzr said:

States overriding cities is equivalent to the federal government overriding states.

Bit of a late response, but I thought this was worth addressing.

Legally speaking, the idea that states overriding cities is equivalent to the feds overriding the states is incorrect.  The states are constitutionally recognized and protected legal sovereigns.  They exist independent of the federal government.  Once created, the government cannot destroy or alter them without their permission.  Certain segments of legal issues are theirs alone to manage and control.  The overriding point is that they are legally separate entities, with corresponding powers and protections to match.

Cities and municipal governments, however, are no such thing.  They are not sovereign entities, they have virtually no true legal power or authority.  In fact, in the eyes of federal law, they don't even really exist at all.  They are "administrative divisions" of the state government that has authority over them.  Legally, they are the state government in a different form.  The US Supreme Court has even said as much.  If a state wants to be a massive pain in the federal government's side, it can do that, and there is relatively little the federal government can do about it.  If a city wants to try that with a state, the state can literally dissolve the city in a single bill.

So if the federal government were to pass an law banning "no plastic bags" laws, it would be a classic example of the federal government extending its authority over the states (and possibly also of federal overreach if it doesn't have the authority to do that).  By contrast, if a state were to pass a similar law, it would be impossible for the state to engage in the same overreach of the government, as legally, the state is just restricting its own authority.

[Duke87 1,070]

15 hours ago, hym said:

If a state wants to be a massive pain in the federal government's side, it can do that, and there is relatively little the federal government can do about it.  If a city wants to try that with a state, the state can literally dissolve the city in a single bill.

Not necessarily. It depends on the state and what its state constitution says. In New York, for example, the constitution (Article IX, Section 1d) states: 
No local government or any part of the territory thereof shall be annexed to another until the people, if any, of the territory proposed to be annexed shall have consented thereto by majority vote on a referendum and until the governing board of each local government, the area of which is affected, shall have consented thereto upon the basis of a determination that the annexation is in the over-all public interest.

So no, the state cannot dissolve a city in a single bill here. Not without the consent of the city government and its residents. Furthermore, the state government is not allowed to pass any laws that single out one municipality, period. This is a doctrine known as "home rule", which is well entrenched in New York.

It's also worth noting that New York is a state where there are no unincorporated areas, everything is part of a town or city. So it would not be possible to dissolve a town or city here without one or more adjacent towns or cities annexing its entire area.

[Sabretooth78 808]

Home rule is in general quite entrenched (if not even more so) in New England as well, although one difference is that VT, NH and ME all have unincorporated areas that exist outside the otherwise township paradigm.  I'm not familiar enough to know how far south and west you have to go before you start reaching the "strong state" (or whatever it's called) format?

One thing that always interested me were the counties.  In New England they pretty much just exist on maps - in reality they serve very little purpose and there really isn't much of a government to speak of.  I lived in NH for 4 years, and maybe twice did I ever hear about anything county-level.  Usually something to do with the sheriff or VA home.  In New York, on the other hand, they were originally created as direct administrative extensions of the state government and have since grown into quite a prominent layer of government in and of themselves.  Add in the whole "unfunded mandate" business from Albany that is driving them all into the ground and I wonder how their existential basis has evolved since creation.

[Jasoncw 11,949]

Yep, Hym is spot on and I think it's a very important point that a lot of people don't understand when talking about things being "undemocratic". 

I've heard the sentiment come up a lot here in Detroit because of the bankruptcy and the various state emergency managers. But it also comes up for bankruptcy and pension stuff when it turns out that the state is on the hook for many of the debts. 

I think in general the US would be better off if this reality was better known and embraced more. We have a major problem where all of the cities/suburbs and counties in a metropolitan area or a region are fighting with each other over tax bases and state money rather than working together to make their area as successful as possible. Ideally an entire metropolitan area would be one unit of government (with a number of smaller and weaker units within it for finer grained management and representation as needed) because that's what reflects the actuality of the situation. It's not small suburb vs small suburb, it's metropolis vs metropolis. It's basically impossible to organize dozens or hundreds of local governments across several layers to coordinate on things like regional planning or transit. And I also think that areas that are adjacent to each other in a single area having different rules, taxes, and levels of service is kind of inefficient and bad economically. 

[matias93 7,535]

...And that's why Uruguay is the political utopia: fertile, tiny and reachable territory, only one (real) city, with concentrates more than two thirds of the country population, most of them heavily educated and fairly homogeneous; the US, in the other hand, is like playing on super-hard level, with everything but money turn against their political success.

Oh, and what Jason said is basically the academic consensus on how cities should be governed. Anywhere it archieves to be implemented (local officers don't like it, for obvious reasons), quality of life indexes improve considerably. In general, to respect local authorities results much more frequently on local clientelistic-semi-authoritarian or rule-of-majority regimes, than on grassroots democracy, because minorities are too much dissolved to act autonomously against a well established statu quo. BTW, Edward Gibson has done some research into those issues, if you are interested on it.

[Sabretooth78 808]

We have the exact same thing here.  I forget what the figure is (somewhere around 400 IIRC), but we have an ungodly number of politicians and bureaucrats spread out over 3 separate layers of government just within the county.  You tell people that and they get outraged, but when somebody wants to come along and do something about it, he's vilified.  Serious discussion has occurred to the end of dissolving several villages (definition of village for those not familiar).  It ends up turning into the same phenomenon you see at the Congressional level, however:  Congress sucks, but "my guy" is OK.  Rinse and repeat - and nothing ever changes.

Their usual argument is apparently if you eliminate that level of government, you will eliminate the sense of place that most of these locations have - apparently it'll then simply revert to being some bland homogenized dead zone just like "everywhere else".  No concept that you can accomplish these sorts of things with zoning districts and such - or just by being active in your community and helping to make it the type of place you'd like to live in.  No, we need a separate overlayer of government, with its board/council, pensions, separate police department, etc. that make it 30% more expensive to live in than just on the other side of an imaginary line on a map, in a location with the exact same standard and way of living.  I'm reminded of a saying about fools and their money.

[krbe 193]

... so the chain of command is village -> town -> county -> state -> federation? Five layers in total?

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

10 hours ago, Sabretooth78 said:

Their usual argument is apparently if you eliminate that level of government, you will eliminate the sense of place that most of these locations have - apparently it'll then simply revert to being some bland homogenized dead zone just like "everywhere else".  No concept that you can accomplish these sorts of things with zoning districts and such - or just by being active in your community and helping to make it the type of place you'd like to live in.  No, we need a separate overlayer of government, with its board/council, pensions, separate police department, etc. that make it 30% more expensive to live in than just on the other side of an imaginary line on a map, in a location with the exact same standard and way of living.  I'm reminded of a saying about fools and their money.

 

The ironic thing is that most of those places are all the same, homogenized dead zone just like like "everywhere else."  Take Toledo for example. It's surrounded by main suburbs Sylvania, Rossford, Perrysburg, and a few other nondescript little towns.  They're all exactly the same, and they all compete heavily for the few things Toledo has.  Maumee fought to keep the Mud Hens playing there instead of downtown.  Rossford attempted to build a multipurpose arena to kneecap Toledo's plans to move their minor league hockey team across the river to downtown.  They did succeed in wooing Owens Illinois away from One Seagate.  But none of them are special at all.  You can find the same exact second-rate shopping centers across the entire US.  If I spend too much time thinking about the fragile egos involved and how short-sighted all their "vision" *cough* is my blood pressure rises and my night is ruined.

[Sabretooth78 808]

22 hours ago, krbe said:

... so the chain of command is village -> town -> county -> state -> federation? Five layers in total?

Pretty much.  Other states have other municipal concepts as well, for example "Boroughs" in Pennsylvania, etc., though in terms of tax structure most of them probably operate in a rough parallel to the New York model at a maximum.

Also, don't forget those special people for whom that still isn't enough, though.  It's possible that the resident of a village may also be a union employee residing in some sort of community under an HOA (homeowner's association)!  You know you work for a poorly managed company when you have 8 different bosses (Office Space reference); I tend to believe the same applies to public entities as well.

Don't let Americans fool you, especially the conservatives.  They all loves themselves some government, they just don't like to admit it.  It seems we're all looking for someone to tell us what to do, what we can and can't do.

 

17 hours ago, NMUSpidey said:

 

The ironic thing is that most of those places are all the same, homogenized dead zone just like like "everywhere else."  Take Toledo for example. It's surrounded by main suburbs Sylvania, Rossford, Perrysburg, and a few other nondescript little towns.  They're all exactly the same, and they all compete heavily for the few things Toledo has.  Maumee fought to keep the Mud Hens playing there instead of downtown.  Rossford attempted to build a multipurpose arena to kneecap Toledo's plans to move their minor league hockey team across the river to downtown.  They did succeed in wooing Owens Illinois away from One Seagate.  But none of them are special at all.  You can find the same exact second-rate shopping centers across the entire US.  If I spend too much time thinking about the fragile egos involved and how short-sighted all their "vision" *cough* is my blood pressure rises and my night is ruined.

Yeah, all too familiar.  Honestly, that sounds even more petty than what we have going on around here, and to be honest we seem to be in something of an uptick regionally (for the first time in what, 60 years? lol) so it probably has a tendency to push those things by the wayside.

My question is, do people in other countries have to put up with this nonsense?  I'm sure it takes many forms - rarely is the grass truly greener, all things considered.  Just different shades.

Or maybe it's just because no American city (at least post-WWII) has figured out a way to significantly grow an economy without an even greater increase in population.  Sort of a Ponzi scheme thing - which probably has something to do with these cases of home rule gone berserk.

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

From what little I know of Japanese politics (I was always more interested in culture and history than politics), towns seem to care about regional health, and you'll often see headlines talking about mergers between neighboring towns.  I'll be moving up to Marquette within the next couple weeks, and they had a sister city in Japan named Youkaichi back when I was in college.  Youkaichi no longer exists, having merged with a few neighboring cities to create a larger entity with a different name I can't seem to recall and refuse to google at this moment.  There is more emphasis on regional cooperation, but again this is Japan where 99.99% of the population is homogeneous and knowing your role in society is something that is instilled deep in the culture.  It makes sense that this attitude would be seen in city/prefectural governments as well.

 

Speaking of Marquette, there are two government councils, one for the City and one for the neighboring Township, and the Township loves nothing better than putting up big box stores to thumb its nose at the City Council.  Luckily it works out as a regional net economic plus for everyone, but my one geography professor who was involved in city planning spoke of the Township people with no small amount of bitterness.  And this is a town of 22,000 people (plus 8000 students 75% of the year).  Then there are the county people on top of them, and the State of Michigan etc etc.

[Jasoncw 11,949]

On 9/22/2016 at 2:20 PM, krbe said:

... so the chain of command is village -> town -> county -> state -> federation? Five layers in total?

It depends on the state, but in most states the sub-county units of government are at the same level, even though different types of sub-county units of governments are not the same (in most states you would casually refer to the sub-county units as cities even if they're not technically incorporated as cities). 

The vertical layers are somewhat of a problem (the United States is a big place. Our states are as big as many countries), but the main problem is horizontal conflict. 

This is a map of "Detroit". The thick black outlines are counties. The labels are for sub-county units of government which are mostly cities, but not entirely ("TWP" is short for "township" which is halfway between an incorporated city and unincorporated county land). You can see that many of them are only a few square kilometers big. Each of these (except the townships) has their own police system which has limited coordination with neighboring systems. The counties also have their own police system which overlaps with the cities'. 

I can't find a map of it, but schools are not administered by cities, they are administered by separate school districts. In some cases the school districts align with the cities, but in many cases they do not. The school districts are even smaller than the cities. My childhood school district has one high school, one middle school, and a few elementary schools, and includes students from three different cities. Each county has a community college system which is separate from any school district.

There are many separate transit systems. Detroit operates its own transit system. There's also SMART which operates buses in the suburbs. M1 Rail is a light rail project that is its own organization. There's the new Regional Transit Authority which is meant to eventually consolidate these, but it doesn't have funding yet. Commuter rail is also operated by a separate entity. Roads are built/owned/maintained by either the city, county, or state, depending on which road it is.

Each city has a parks department but there are also several other government regional park systems which are all separate from one another.

There are also a variety of either government or quasi-governmental planning and economic development organizations, some of which cover several cities and some cover small areas within cities. Within each city there are also special tax districts. 

I wish I had more maps to illustrate it better but at it's a big tangled web of competing and overlapping government entities, and it's a miracle that anything functions at all.

 

@matias93 That's an interesting article although I have to admit, without knowing much about latin american politics it went over my head. What are the authoritarian situations they're talking about? 

[matias93 7,535]

@Jasoncw maybe the closest examples in the US could be Huey Long, and in a lesser degree, George Wallace. Heading a uncontested party, managing discrecionally the civil service, gaining by any means necessary the full support of the state legislatures and governing basically by decree, but at the same time being almost fully limited to their state in terms of political power or even influence, and seeing as all their proposals and ideology being discarded and opposed by the central government, their style is summed on resisting on a bastion of authoritarianism the general flow of liberal politics and its policy implications, by using every resource of state autonomy to this task.

[Duke87 1,070]

On 9/22/2016 at 2:20 PM, krbe said:

... so the chain of command is village -> town -> county -> state -> federation? Five layers in total?

As has been pointed out, the chain of command is different in every state, since it is up to state governments (not the federal government) to make the rules about everything within them.

In New York, the state is divided into 62 counties. Everywhere in the state is also part of a town or city, but these are not directly subdivisions of counties as it is possible for a city (but not a town) to exist in more than one county. The city of New York exists in no fewer than five different counties, each of which is coterminous with the five "boroughs" that you may have heard of.
Then you have villages, which exist within one or more towns as an additional layer of lower government - however, most of the state by area is not in a village.

In Connecticut there is no county government, the next level down below the state is the 169 towns. A "city" in Connecticut is functionally similar to a "village" in New York in that they exist within towns. Today, every city in Connecticut except one is coterminous with the surrounding town and has its government functions entirely combined with that of the town (this is different from it being just a town government as city governments have some special powers that town governments do not).

In New Jersey, the state is divided into counties and within counties there are municipalities which may be either a township, city, borough, or village. Which a municipality is classified as determines what its government can and cannot do and there are qualifications that the municipality must meet. One of the quirkier rules is that if a municipality contains more than 50 traffic signals it cannot be a "village", it must be one of the other types. Municipalities have the ability to convert from one type to another if they so choose and are eligible for the classification.

In Virginia there are counties, and within the counties you have towns in some areas while other areas are simply unincorporated with no level of government below the county. Then there are cities, which exist independently from counties and cannot, by legal definition, be part of one.

And so on and so forth. There are 50 different states and 50 different setups.

[Sabretooth78 808]

On 9/23/2016 at 11:41 PM, Duke87 said:

In Connecticut there is no county government, the next level down below the state is the 169 towns. A "city" in Connecticut is functionally similar to a "village" in New York in that they exist within towns. Today, every city in Connecticut except one is coterminous with the surrounding town and has its government functions entirely combined with that of the town (this is different from it being just a town government as city governments have some special powers that town governments do not).

While it does seem that most villages are restrained to be within town borders, it isn't always the case.  For the most part, the villages are "cut out of" towns but there are some that also span county lines.

New Hampshire seems similar to Connecticut.  There are 200-some odd "township level" divisions (235 IIRC?), most of which are towns (some are unincorporated and I believe directly administered by the state); some are "cities" which as far as I'm aware is just a township with additional powers (and council-style government vs. selectmen) and are coterminous with the original township - unlike in New York where you'll often find a village or city cut out of and/or surrounded by a town of the same name.

Yeah, and school districts.  I don't even know how many we have in the county.  We have one town with parts of 5.  It's something of a regional joke whenever talks of consolidation do come up.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Politics would be better if voter registration included something akin to a citizenship test and voter turnout impacted electoral points (or the Electoral College was abolished).

 

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

It's called tyranny of the majority.

There is also a good drinking game you can do: drink every time people say the US is a democracy.

It is a constitutional republic! It is designed to stop tyrants upending the system and to stop the fickle majority upending the system to. This is because democracy can destroy itself by the majority voting in a leader/party who usurps the principles of democracy, this leader/party can do this if the majority of the people support him and thus can cajole the minority to fall in line through use of the police state and through populist pressure.

Which is why the increasing left/right polarization in both the US and the UK is a very disturbing thing because with each swing of the pendulum the ruling party's actions become increasingly extreme.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

12 minutes ago, Ln X said:

It's called tyranny of the majority.

There is also a good drinking game you can do: drink every time people say the US is a democracy.

It is a constitutional republic! It is designed to stop tyrants upending the system and to stop the fickle majority upending the system to. This is because democracy can destroy itself by the majority voting in a leader/party who usurps the principles of democracy, this leader/party can do this if the majority of the people support him and thus can cajole the minority to fall in line through use of the police state and through populist pressure.

Which is why the increasing left/right polarization in both the US and the UK is a very disturbing thing because with each swing of the pendulum the ruling party's actions become increasingly extreme.

Tyranny of the majority can be curtailed if all voters are informed. That is why I said voter registration should require a test. Other constitutional republics have proportional (of popular vote) representation and are doing better than US. As seen by the extremism of The D'ump, uninformed voters can be swayed by populist demagogues. In this case, mostly rural voters.

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

17 hours ago, OcramsRzr said:

Tyranny of the majority can be curtailed if all voters are informed. That is why I said voter registration should require a test. Other constitutional republics have proportional (of popular vote) representation and are doing better than US. As seen by the extremism of The D'ump, uninformed voters can be swayed by populist demagogues. In this case, mostly rural voters.

It's not as simple as that. There is a great difference of opinion even among facts which are generally agreed, differences of opinion based on the reason for a certain fact arising. Besides, more people than ever are informed and a record number of people go to universities. The problem is as old as time itself: ideologies, human emotions and interpretation of the past.

Determining who gets to vote or not transfers the tyranny to those who make the determinations.

Both supporters of Trump and Hillary were largely uninformed. Trump supporters because of every stereotype ever made about rednecks, the South and rural folk. And Hillary supporters due to how unaware they were of the corrupt and devious nature of that woman. It's called ideological blindspots and it trips up virtually everyone, myself included.

[MilitantRadical 2,844]

17 hours ago, OcramsRzr said:

Tyranny of the majority can be curtailed if all voters are informed. That is why I said voter registration should require a test. Other constitutional republics have proportional (of popular vote) representation and are doing better than US. As seen by the extremism of The D'ump, uninformed voters can be swayed by populist demagogues. In this case, mostly rural voters.

The contempt you have is staggering and this kind of "I'm smarter than those people" mentality is exactly why liberals are becoming increasingly unpopular.

You want 8 years of Trump? Keep talking like this.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

3 hours ago, MilitantRadical said:

The contempt you have is staggering and this kind of "I'm smarter than those people" mentality is exactly why liberals are becoming increasingly unpopular.

You want 8 years of Trump? Keep talking like this.

I wouldn't be able to pass a citizenship test without studying but I can brush up on my American history and PoliSci enough to pass. The Donald is a demagogue, no doubt about it. Educated voters voted against him while uneducated voters were swayed by his false promises and outrageous rhetoric. If a Universal Basic Income is ever enacted, it should only go to those who have voted in the past 4 years and voter registration should require a test. Once Robots take 30+% of jobs, a UBI would be needed for any capitalist system to survive. Requiring citizens to vote and requiring voters to be informed would help prevent overpopulation from everyone getting free handouts.

[MilitantRadical 2,844]

2 minutes ago, OcramsRzr said:

Educated voters voted against him while uneducated voters were swayed by his false promises and outrageous rhetoric.

"Educated" does not mean intelligent. It only refers to people with college degrees. Basic civics are taught in high school. An "uneducated" voter could be more informed than an "educated" one.

7 minutes ago, OcramsRzr said:

I wouldn't be able to pass a citizenship test without studying but I can brush up on my American history and PoliSci enough to pass.

Wait, you don't think you could pass the test yet you regularly engage in political discussion and are suggesting the test? You voted yet you don't even think you're qualified to vote by your own criteria?

This is backwards. Brush up on your American History and PoliSci then make the determination as to whether or not such a test is democratic or within the bounds of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Literacy Tests were banned in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 but there is nothing against them in the Constitution. Literacy Tests without Grandfather Clauses (which include questions similar to or the same as citizenship tests) could be allowed if a new law altered voting rights again. A Universal Basic Income and its qualifications could also be implemented without amending the Constitution.

Many high schools, especially poorly-funded ones in rural and inner-city areas do not teach basic civics. I was lucky enough to go to a properly funded school. If a single test was required, I would have passed it when I was 18 but my memory can get hazy on things outside my ranges of interest.

I never claimed to be smarter than anyone but Progressive Liberals make up the supermajority of the US population. If you include Classic Liberals, then only small fringe groups do not count.

[MilitantRadical 2,844]

1 minute ago, OcramsRzr said:

I never claimed to be smarter than anyone but Progressive Liberals make up the supermajority of the US population. If you include Classic Liberals, then only small fringe groups do not count.

Yeah but you've kind of implied that if everybody just took this test or were smart enough someone like Trump wouldn't win. Basically saying that if people were as smart as you could be if you brushed up on American History and PoliSci then the world you envision would come to fruition.

3 minutes ago, OcramsRzr said:

Progressive Liberals

Sometimes you sound a lot like them, minus the social justice element.

21 minutes ago, OcramsRzr said:

Literacy Tests were banned in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 but there is nothing against them in the Constitution. Literacy Tests without grandfather clauses which include questions similar to or the same as citizenship tests could be allowed if a new law altered voting rights again. A Universal Basic Income and its qualifications could also be implemented without amending the Constitution.

Fair point, although I don't think such a test is necessary or that UBI is sustainable but that is another debate entirely.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I am a Utilitarian (Rule based, not Act based). I believe that redistribution of wealth should be limited to what would result in the most utility from that wealth as well as acting on and siding with choices that improve things the most for the most people. I share some similarities with Progressive Liberals and some similarities with Libertarians but I am opposed to cronyism, statism, militarism, welfare quasi-fascist capitalism, and the like.

https://youtu.be/-a739VjqdSI?t=8m31s