Does giving out free school lunches to poor children drive up costs, increase inflation and wreck the economy? Does handing hundreds of billions of dollars to banks who invest it in other countries to expand their industries, and price our manufacturing out of the market help our country? Is it always true that giving money to poor people is a waste and giving to very rich people an investment? Is giving money to Americans wrong and investing it in other countries right?
Sentence 1. True. There is a widespread belief among the public that welfare is where all the money goes. Sentence 2. False. Most Americans believe economics is counter-intuitive, and any money that helps our economic competitors overseas helps us by reducing the costs customers pay. It is true that more and more money is leaving the country but there is an even stranger belief that Modern Monetary Theory will somehow fix that. Sentence 4 True. Investing in other countries often brings good returns and whatever is good for the billionaires is good for everyone. They aren't 'our' billionaires, they are multinationals, but we pretend they are ours.
I'd rather spend my own money how I see fit rather than the government spend it for me. I'm kind of queer that way in a non LGBTQ sense.
The optimum number of political parties for the US would be 2.5 (T/F?) The problem with having only 2 is that they will both take the center. Not the center of what the public wants because the people are mostly well to the left of the parties, the true left, that is, But between what the lobbyists want and what the public can be persuaded to pay for. And the two parties divide up the policies so each gets a lot of the unpopular policies and a claim on one popular policy, which they don't do but keep in reserve as a kind of carrot. We need a third party to challenge the other two.
Yes, at this point, everyone reminds us of the hazards of multi-way elections. For example, in 1860, as a result of splitting the vote, the election was won by a new party that had formed only six hours earlier.
Oh, six years earlier. But I think that having only two parties leads to the ball going back and forth between them and neither party making much effort to achieve anything.
Won't happen until 'winner take all' rules are changed at the state and local levels.A 3rd Party could win 49% of the votes and still end up without a singe seat in any legislature or major office.
Transferable votes is a good plan because it eliminates the need to do strategic voting in order to stop someone you really don't want as President by joining up and voting for the second-worst.
Multi-way elections are something the US public has been conditioned to believe are dangerous. The availability bias fallacy always kicks in saying: 'that's how Hitler got elected.' In Europe many countries have run multi-way elections for many decades, making hundreds of elections have gone well. Yet somehow the US is trained to think of only the one that didn't go well. Here, in the US a four-way election in 1860 led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, but that is forgotten in favor of the one we have been trained to remember.
It really depends on whether the giving is voluntary and whether its 'managed.' Money that is taken via the authority of the state and then redistributed tends to be largely absoarbed by the state (and its cronies) and very little of it ever makes it to those it was taken in the name of helping. Donations can have the same problem or worse if one does not check up on the institution they donate to, but donating to one that is genuinely more interested in its cause than its own profitability is a lot more efficient per dollar 'spent' than trying to help via the govt.
