Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

[BassAle]

Hi there. Enjoying your circular firing squad?

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Former Mayor Pete doesn’t think very highly of the Obama-Biden record. Let’s compare. <a href="https://t.co/132TB7MHaq">pic.twitter.com/132TB7MHaq</a></p>— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) <a href="https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1226189752598171648?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 8, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Still a member of the treasonous cult party?

 

[MissThundercat]

Still a member of the treasonous cult party?

Gotta fight for the BAY-BEEZ, don't you know?

 

[Deutsche Gopher Fan]

Still a member of the treasonous cult party?

Of course he is, that’s why he’s in the dem candidate thread popping his little head out

 

[rufus]

Hi there. Enjoying your circular firing squad?

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Former Mayor Pete doesn’t think very highly of the Obama-Biden record. Let’s compare. <a href="https://t.co/132TB7MHaq">pic.twitter.com/132TB7MHaq</a></p>— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) <a href="https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1226189752598171648?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 8, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I don't think much of it either. But its better than the alternative. And better than your cult leader's.

 

[FadeToBlack&Gold]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

Don't feed the tr...

Too late.

 

[French Rage]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

Gotta fight for the BAY-BEEZ, don't you know?

No, joe supported Hillary, since abortions went down during Clinton and Obama but stayed steady during W and in the end that's the important thing.

 

[Slap Shot]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America
In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry.

But beyond the headline economic numbers, a multifarious and strangely invisible economic crisis metastasized: Let’s call it the Great Affordability Crisis. This crisis involved not just what families earned but the other half of the ledger, too—how they spent their earnings. In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care centers. For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.

Viewing the economy through a cost-of-living paradigm helps explain why roughly two in five American adults would struggle to come up with $400 in an emergency so many years after the Great Recession ended. It helps explain why one in five adults is unable to pay the current month’s bills in full. It demonstrates why a surprise furnace-repair bill, parking ticket, court fee, or medical expense remains ruinous for so many American families, despite all the wealth this country has generated. Fully one in three households is classified as “financially fragile.”

Along with the rise of inequality, the slowdown in productivity growth, and the shrinking of the middle class, the spiraling cost of living has become a central facet of American economic life. It is a crisis amenable to policy solutions at the state, local, and federal levels—with all of the 2020 candidates, President Donald Trump included, teasing or pushing sweeping solutions for the problem. But absent those solutions, it looks certain to get worse for the foreseeable future—leaving households fragile, exacerbating the country’s inequality, slowing down growth, smothering productivity, and putting families’ dreams of security out of reach.

The price of housing represents the most acute part of this crisis. In metro areas such as the Bay Area, Seattle, and Boston, severe supply shortages have led to soaring prices—millions of low- and middle-income families are no longer able to purchase centrally located homes. The median asking price for a single-family home in San Francisco has reached $1.6 million; even with today’s low interest rates, that would require a monthly mortgage payment of roughly $6,000, assuming that a family puts down the standard 20 percent. In Manhattan, listings for sale now ask an average of nearly $1,800 per square foot.

The housing cost crises in the Bay Area and New York might be the country’s most obscene. But the problem is national, driven by a combination of stagnant wages, restrictive building codes, and underinvestment in construction, among other trends. Home prices are rising faster than wages in roughly 80 percent of American metro regions. In 2018, housing affordability declined in every one of the 160-some urban areas analyzed by the National Association of Realtors, save for Decatur, Illinois. Rising prices and housing shortages are squeezing families in Reno, Minneapolis, and Phoenix.

The cost-of-living crisis extends beyond housing. Health-care costs are exorbitant, too: Americans pay roughly twice as much for insurance and medical services as do citizens of other wealthy countries, but they don’t have better outcomes. In the post-recession period, premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs in general just kept rising, eating away at families’ budgets, casting millions into debt, and consigning millions more to bankruptcy.

The “cost burden” of health coverage climbed through the 2010s; just from 2010 to 2016, family private-insurance premiums jumped 28 percent to $17,710, while median household incomes rose less than 20 percent. That meant less take-home pay for workers. Deductibles—what a family has to fork over before insurance kicks in—also soared. From 2010 to 2016, the share of employees in health plans with a deductible jumped from 78 percent to 85 percent. And the average annual deductible went from less than $2,000 to more than $3,000.

Next up is student-loan debt, a trillion-dollar stone placed on young adults’ backs. Or, to be more accurate, the $1.4 trillion stone, up 6 percent year over year and 116 percent in a decade; student-loan debt is now a bigger burden for households than car loans or credit-card debt. Half of students now take on loans of one kind or another to try for a higher-ed degree, and outstanding debts typically total $20,000 to $25,000, requiring monthly payments of $200 to $300—though of course many students owe much more. Now nearly 50 million adults are stuck working off their educational debt loads, including one in three adults in their 20s, erasing the college wealth premium for younger Americans and eroding the college earnings premium.

Finally, child care. Spending on daycare, nannies, and other direct-care services for kids has increased by 2,000 percent in the past four decades, and families now commonly spend $15,000 to $26,000 a year to have someone watch their kid. Such care is grossly unaffordable for low-income parents in metro areas across the country, causing many people to drop out of the labor force. But one in four American mothers returns to work within two weeks of giving birth, so heavy are the other cost burdens of living in this country. The whole system is broken.

The federal government has set as a benchmark that low-income families should not spend more than 7 percent of their income on child care. But child care is generally the single biggest line item on young families’ budgets, bigger even than rent or mortgage payments: Putting a kid in daycare costs 18 percent of annual income in California; home-based options equal 14 percent of family income in Nebraska; having an infant in professional care in the District of Columbia costs more than most poor families earn.

It all adds up, and it all subtracts from families’ well-being. The price tags for tuition and fees at colleges and universities have risen twice as fast as wages, if not more, in recent years. Rental costs are outpacing wage gains by a percentage point or more a year. Health-care costs have grown twice as fast as workers’ wages. And child-care costs have exploded. These cost pressures are particularly acute on young Americans who have seen worse employment prospects and smaller raises than their older counterparts.

The effects are wide-ranging. High costs are preventing workers from moving to high-productivity cities, thus smothering the country’s economic vibrancy and putting a drag on its GDP; economists have estimated that GDP would be as much as 10 percent bigger if more workers could afford to live in places like San Jose and Boston. High costs are forcing families to delay getting married and to have fewer children, and putting the dream of owning a home out of reach.

The problem the Democrats have right now is not that they're on the wrong side of things and how this country should be managed, but they're failing to communicate what Americans want and need to hear. Despite everything written here consumer confidence is UP. How is that even possible?

Get the message out there.

 

[solovsfett]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

...I think Jimmy Dore is 100% correct here: https://youtu.be/gyub6M8Qfqs

Someone name a PEACE, justice and equality candidate like RFK in today’s field...

 

[Kepler]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

Or, just maybe, your policies just aren’t as popular as you think and your candidates and their fanbases didn’t engender much good will. How much the far left has learned.

The far left isn’t as large as you think. It’s thinking like that which carries about as much weight as the silent majority.

Opinions vary.

Most voters do not have a political ideology. They vote on their feelings. The thing the Center has had going for it is a general satisfaction with the way things are going. You don't risk anything if you have a lot to lose.

Thanks to the depredations of the Right and the impotence of the Center, that satisfaction is harder and harder to come by. Despite a free continent and hundreds of years of free labor, Capitalism has just about killed the goose that lays the golden eggs. At that point people will make a choice: whether to allow the rich to keep murdering them and their kids, or reform the system to be more humane and sensible.

I am quite confident we "will make the right choice, after exhausting all other possible alternatives."

 

[mookie1995]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

Keller’s point is the housing crunch is due to dems not letting builders put up housing due to tree slugs being in a habitat.

While one would think this is an issue dem candidates can champion, tD will go on about cutting regulations and win the argument

 

[walrus]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

Opinions vary.

Most voters do not have a political ideology. "

Once in the booth, most do have an ideology, they vote for their wallet.

 

[Kepler]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

Once in the booth, most do have an ideology, they vote for their wallet.

But how they determine what's best for their wallet is about marketing jingles and amorphous feelings. They think stuff like "a businessman can run the country." It's all a matter of manipulating those vague symbols and comforts (or discomforts). It's sales.

 

[unofan]

But how they determine what's best for their wallet is about marketing jingles and amorphous feelings. They think stuff like "a businessman can run the country." It's all a matter of manipulating those vague symbols and comforts (or discomforts). It's sales.

Yeah, and while Bernie himself may be a fine salesman, his surrogates suck at it.

 

[walrus]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

But how they determine what's best for their wallet is about marketing jingles and amorphous feelings. They think stuff like "a businessman can run the country." It's all a matter of manipulating those vague symbols and comforts (or discomforts). It's sales.

Perception is everything

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

 

[rufus]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

Once in the booth, most do have an ideology, they vote for their wallet.

Sure. Most folks maybe got a $100 tax cut. Yippee!!!!!

Meanwhile, Trump's tariffs are costing households an extra $1600 per year.

Vote your wallet. But maybe you won't, cause Susie waved at you in the airport.

 

[rufus]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

Perception is everything

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

Sure. Most folks maybe got a $100 tax cut. Yippee!!!!!

Meanwhile, Trump's tariffs are costing households an extra $1600 per year.

What do you perceive here?

 

[ScoobyDoo]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

Once in the booth, most do have an ideology, they vote for their wallet.

No, they don't. They're too stupid to understand their wallet.

 

[Kepler]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

You can't tell me this headline and graphic aren't deliberate.

 

[Deutsche Gopher Fan]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">In NH Sanders supporters start to boo <a href="https://twitter.com/amyklobuchar?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@amyklobuchar</a> . <br><br>She responds "Hi, Bernie people!"</p>— Tom D'Angora (@TomDangora) <a href="https://twitter.com/TomDangora/status/1226533115331518466?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 9, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[The Rube]

Re: Democratic Challengers 9: Can we climb this mountain? I don't know.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">In NH Sanders supporters start to boo <a href="https://twitter.com/amyklobuchar?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@amyklobuchar</a> . <br><br>She responds "Hi, Bernie people!"</p>— Tom D'Angora (@TomDangora) <a href="https://twitter.com/TomDangora/status/1226533115331518466?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 9, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

lol Awesome.