Pelosi elected speaker despite defections, as Democrats reclaim House majority

Giving Nan all that power is like arming Jesse James with AK-47 when all the other banditos only have a six shooter.

Where the hell is this country heading with all of the nut-cases we have running the show?? All they do in an attempt get THE VOTE is bull-shit the public on all of the freebies they are going to pass out. The major stumbling block is, they have no answer or idea on how they will fund them.

The following is a short list of their long list of how they propose to put the government in a deeper financial hole.

1. Single-payer healthcare

Everyone wants to be the hero with the health care issue. I say, let ALL Americans receive the same health and retirement benefits as the politicians, that way we are all on an even playing field. How can anyone of those fools argue the point that they do not consider themselves better than they people they represent?? They display it everyday by the actions or in-actions the take.

More than half the House Democratic Conference and several of the party’s most prominent potential presidential candidates have endorsed some form of universally available government-funded health insurance, including independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ proposal to make all Americans eligible for Medicare. But House Democratic leaders prefer starting with a more interim step — repairing the damage they say Republicans have done to the Affordable Care Act.

How aggressively to push on health care will be one of the Democrats’ defining internal debates in advance of the 2020 election.

“All of us feel very strongly that health care is one of the major issues in the [midterm] election, and that Democrats are for affordable health care for all,” said Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), a co-sponsor of the Medicare For All bill. “There may not be total agreement on how to do that.”

Even lawmakers who favor offering government-funded health insurance to everybody are split on how to do it. Some Democrats favor creating a government-funded “public option” within Obamacare to compete with private insurers, a plan Republicans warn would eventually compel private insurers to withdraw. Others would work outside Obamacare, allowing people to buy into Medicare or herding everyone into a single government-funded system.

Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to wield Medicare For All as a wedge issue to drive elderly voters away from Democrats. “Democrats would gut Medicare with their planned government takeover of American health care,” Trump warned in an Oct. 10 op-ed. If this tacticenjoys any success in the midterms, a Democratic House might hesitate to press single-payer.

“I tell some of these young activists, before you were born I was for universal health care,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.). “I am all for moving as fast as we can toward doing that, but there are things we can do right away.”

2. $15 minimum wage

The minimum wage increase is a toss up. The wage goes up 2%, the merchants and company owner raise their prices 15% and blame the wage increase. Did anyone of these fools ever consider how to  cut prices instead?? 

Two years ago, Sanders found few Democrats willing to support his call for raising the hourly minimum wage to $15, up from the current $7.25. Now it’s hard to find any congressional Democrat who opposes it. Bills that would phase in such an increase over several years have drawn the support of nearly two-thirds of the Senate Democratic Caucus and more than 170 House Democrats, including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Polls consistently show that Republican and Democratic voters alike tend to favor raising the minimum wage. Still, Republican opposition in the Senate would likely doom a $15 wage minimum — unless Trump supported it to shore up his image as a champion of the working class. Candidate Trump said he favored a minimum wage increase to $10, though only after a series of messy flip-flops on the subject that included a suggestion that there shouldn’t be a national wage minimum at all.

Another obstacle: Minimum-wage workers tend to vote Democratic; it’s their white blue-collar counterparts, who pull down bigger salaries, who favor Trump. “It’s an easy vote for the Democrats to push in the House,” said Marc Freedman, vice president of employment policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “because nobody who has to worry about it thinks it will go anywhere.”Who wins 2018? Predictions for every House & Senate election

3. Abolishing ICE

This idiotic move is just another indicator of the stupidity of these fools. ICE is an organization that was developed to keep undesirables out of this country and the democrats want to shit can them. FIGURES!! They are still under the illusion that government can exist without discipline and law and order. ABSOLUTELY WRONG.

Although a faction of liberal Democrats wants to shut down the agency tasked with arresting and deporting undocumented immigrants, it seems doubtful a Democratic House will even attempt it.

The “abolish ICE” mantra acquired momentum as a result of Trump’s family separation policy, which split thousands of children from their parents from April through June. The message was amplified by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s defeat of Democratic stalwart Joe Crowley in his Queens congressional district.

But the movement never went mainstream, and Democratic leaders don’t want to touch it. In a recent interview with POLITICO, Dick Durbinof Illinois, the second-highest-ranking Democratic senator, called it an overly simplistic “campaign slogan.”

ICE “should be changed, of course,” Durbin said. “Abolished? We will need some agency to do what it does.”

An abolish-ICE bill introduced in the House in July by Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) counts only eight co-sponsors — with half of them from immigrant-friendly New York City.

If Democrats take the House, they won’t have a shortage of immigration issues to tackle, and dismantling a federal agency probably won’t be the first order of business. Approximately 700,000 undocumented Dreamers — people brought to the U.S. illegally as children — haveonly tenuous protection from deportation since Trump moved to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. And roughly 400,000 people with Temporary Protected Status also could face removal as the president seeks to phase out their ability live and work in the U.S.

“I think all of those will take priority,” said Democratic strategist Maria Cardona.

The reality of that became clear in July, when House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy cornered Democrats with a resolution to stand in solidarity with ICE officers, a sort of countermove to the “abolish” movement. A majority of Democrats refused to take a stand and simply voted “present.”E

4. Repealing the tax cuts

Not One Penny, a coalition that includes unions, MoveOn.org and other liberal interests, is pressuring Democrats to revoke the tax cut that Republicans enacted last December. “If Democrats want to prove that they’re ready to wrench power away from the wealthy elites, then they should repeal the law,” said spokesman Tim Hogan.

But even a Democrat-led House would probably flinch from repealing the tax cuts in their entirety, because they wouldn’t want to raise taxes on middle-class Democratic constituents.

More likely, the House would follow former President Barack Obama’s example in 2013 when he made George W. Bush’s tax cuts permanent, except for high earners, on whom he raised rates. That’s the playbook that House Ways and Means Committee ranking member Richard Neal (D-Mass.) followed in a recent proposal to restore the top individual tax rate to 39.6 percent, where it stood before the GOP overhaul lowered it to 37 percent.

One way to improve the chances for a full or partial repeal would be to make public Trump’s own tax returns, something Congress has the legal authority to do. Democrats renewed that call after a recent New York Times investigation alleged that decades’ worth of documents show a long-running pattern of tax fraud by members of the Trump family, including the president. With tangible evidence in hand that the rich man who sits in the White House evaded paying taxes, a tax hike on the rich might become a much easier sell.

5. Debt-free college

AGAIN; WHERE ARE THESE FOOLS GOING TO GET THE FUNDS TO PAY FOR ALL THESE FREEBIES?? MAYBE THEY WILL AXE CHINA FOR A FEW MORE CRUMBS. Have they looked at the National Debt real time clock lately??

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Gotta make a normal person wanna

Americans owe $1.5 trillion in student loans, a staggering debt that helped fuel momentum for Sanders’ idea of “debt-free” college during the 2016 Democratic primaries.

This year, Ocasio-Cortez and fellow Democratic congressional candidates such as Ilhan Omar in Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib in Michigan are campaigning on the idea of free or debt-free college. In July, Pelosi joined Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, the top Democrat on the House Education Committee, in proposing a bill that, among many other provisions, would provide federal grant aid to states that make an associate’s degree at public two-year colleges free for every student.

In the Senate, meanwhile, Democrats Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California — all potential presidential candidates — have signed onto the Debt-Free College Act of 2018 by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). The bill “provides a dollar-for-dollar federal match to state higher education appropriations in exchange for a commitment to help students pay for the full cost of attendance without having to take on debt,” Schatz’s office says.

The sticking point is cost. The Tax Policy Center estimated that Sanders’ free college plan would cost $800 billion over a decade. That was in a year when the federal budget deficit was $587 billion. Today, thanks in large part to Trump’s tax cuts, the Congressional Budget Office projects the 2018 budget deficit will be $793 billion.

In addition, Democrats are divided about whether free college programs help wealthier young people more than less-wealthy ones, who might not attend college at all. “There are more targeted ways we could be spending this type of money,” said Tamara Hiler, deputy director of education at the center-left think tank Third Way.

6. Net neutrality

Liberal activists cried foul in 2017 when Trump’s Federal Communications Commission revoked the Obama administration’s net neutrality rule, which barred providers like Verizon and Comcast from blocking or throttling certain web traffic or creating higher-priced fast lanes.

“I’m determined to bring back a free and open internet and to make sure we go back to net neutrality as the national standard,” said Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), who’s set to chair the Energy and Commerce Committee if Democrats win back the House. Pallone said he would hold FCC oversight hearings on net neutrality and “try to pass some legislation.”

But 17 House Democrats aligned with the telecommunications industry declined to sign onto a resolution to reverse the FCC’s 2017 revocation, a sign that the party isn’t unified on the issue. And anyway, by next year the legislative window will have closedfor reversing the revocation under the Congressional Review Act, a 1996 law that allows lawmakers to block regulatory actions on an expedited basis.

“I know at one time the Democrats really thought that this was going to be an issue that they could run on, but I don’t see any campaign talking about it,” said Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.). “I don’t see any evidence that they’re getting much traction.”II

7. 1 trillion $ infrastructure plan

This probably makes the most sense out of all their ambitions. Our infrastructure is literally rotting from the inside out. Politicians always wait for the bridges to collapse before they consider fixing them.

House Democrats have made enacting a “historic” $1 trillion infrastructure plan a centerpiece of their midterm election platform, seizing on Trump’s failure to gain any headway in the Republican Congress this year for his own $1.5 trillion proposal to rebuild roads, bridges, airports and other transportation features.

But the Democrats would face the same problem Trump’s plan could not overcome — that money must come from somewhere, and the obvious options all face steep political obstacles. Trump’s proposal called for cutting other federal programs, selling off government assets and making cities and states paymore, none of which appealed to Democrats. The preferred Democratic option is to reverse or roll back the 2017 tax cut, but good luck getting Republicans to go along. The traditional avenue, hiking the federal gasoline tax, has been a nonstarter for both parties — and would be especially risky just before a presidential election.

8. Defense cuts

They might as well set out the welcome mat for China and the Ruskies. They are building their military, while the liberal fools in the USA want cut back. What the hell do they think has kept the USA out of harms-way for all these years?? Our mighty military. VERY BAD MOVE

Liberal Democrats have complained for years that the Pentagon budget, which now exceeds $716 billion and represents more than half of all discretionary spending, is bloated. Progressive lawmakers in the House drafted a budget plan this year to cut more than $800 billion from the Pentagon over a decade “in a responsible manner” and redirect the money to medical research, environmental cleanup and combating climate change.

This year’s marquee Democratic insurgent, Ocasio-Cortez, has noted that military spending increases under Trump have exceeded the Pentagon’s budget requests. “They’re like, ‘We don’t want another fighter jet!’ They’re like, ‘Don’t give us another nuclear bomb,’ you know? They didn’t even ask for it, and we gave it to them,” she said in July.

But in Congress, nondefense spending is held hostage to defense spending, leaving Democrats with virtually no chance of cutting the Pentagon’s funding. In every major budget deal over the past decade, leaders of both parties have agreed, in the interest of “parity,” to equal-sized increases to defense and domestic programs.

“On a practical level, it’s the only way you get a deal,” said Emily Holubowich, executive director of the Coalition for Health Funding. For most Democrats, she noted, maintaining a substantial pot for domestic programs is “more important … than cutting military spending.”

9. Ending “too big to fail”

Republicans have succeeded in rolling back key rules imposed on banks after the financial crisis — and progressive groups hope a Democratic-controlled House can turn the tide. The activists want to impose higher capital requirements on banks and tighten limits on executive compensation, among other moves to cut the nation’s megabanks down to size.

I might suggest that the politicians take a good look at their pay checks, perks and other compensations and chop them down to a reasonable level. NOT ON YOUR LIFE.

“Under Republican leadership, the House has become like a vending machine for K Street” lobbyists, said Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform. “We expect that to stop if people who call themselves progressive are in charge of the House, and it’s something we’re going to be keeping a close eye on.”

But many Democrats are as eager to collect campaign contributions from Wall Street as Republicans are. Even Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), a progressive firebrand who would chair the Financial Services Committee if Democrats win back the House, collected almost $85,000 from the securities industry during the current election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Waters co-sponsored a House-passed package this year that would relax financial regulations to make it easier for young companies to raise capital.

10. Climate change

The latest sobering United Nations report on the declining odds of averting a global climate catastrophe is increasing progressives’ impatience to confront Trump on his hostility to fight against global warming.

There definitely has to be something done about the environment. Any fool that claims mankind has not had a hand in polluting the Mother Earth is probably sniffing carbon fumes. Are we totally responsible?? I don’t think so, BUTT we have played a significant role in where we are now.

But environmental groups are divided on how to proceed. Some want to push for a carbon tax to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy, while others see no political advantage in pressing for a vote given stiff Republican resistance. (The failures of Obama’s cap-and-trade bills in 2010 and Bill Clinton’s “BTU tax” in 1993, both times with a Democratic House and Senate, still haunt Capitol Hill.)

11. Probably their most preposterous PIPE DREAM

Universal Income – everyone in the country is guaranteed a paycheck, BUTT no on is required to work. Are they shitting me or what. Obama and a large number of ultra-liberals are trying to promote it.

I will go on record stating; many of the issues the democrats are proposing are going to put this country in a deeper hole than it is already. There is now such thing as a free lunch.

Take a good look at the social services that has put the USA in the poor house and they want to add more.

Are many of these service necessary?? Absolutely yes, BUTT, if all of the parasite that do not legitimately qualify were taken off the programs, it would save billions a year. The systems and programs have become humongous and out of hand to be policed.

Just like a kid. When they are young and in their formative years, they are much easier to handle. When they are grown and set in their ways, – FA-GET-ABOUT-IT.

PAY MR NOW OR PAY ME LATER.  All of this financial abuse will absolutely come back to haunt the USA and in the long run destroy it.

The Roman’s said it could not happen to them. Their ego and out of control life-styles finally killed them.

https://www.history.com/news/8-reasons-why-rome-fell

The only difference between the politicians of today and the Romans is, the way they dress. Everything else is exactly the same.

Nothing in politics has changes in 1,000’s of years.

Remember who told you so.