• @InternetUser2012@lemmy.today
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    1338 months ago

    Back when Obama made it where you couldn’t be evicted and bailed out the auto industry, I had a friend that drove a car hauler. He wasn’t paying his house payment and lived for free for a year, and only had a job because of the bailout. He talked mad shit about the bailout and about people living and not paying their rent. This is republikkklown logic. I was blown away and said to him, he wouldn’t have a job or a place to live if it wasn’t for that. He said he’d live somewhere else and get a different job.

    Since then, he lives with his wife and child in his mom’s house with a shit job and complains about people being on welfare. They don’t get it.

    • @Soup@lemmy.world
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      718 months ago

      If there’s any way they can punch down instead of address their own issues they’ll take it. It’s why they resort to going after made up nonsense or the most vulnerable.

      • @SyntaxTerror@feddit.org
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        8 months ago

        This is happening right now in Germany. In two of our 16 federal states, the fascist party got around 30% of votes through fear mongering and propaganda. In one of the states, all of the remaining parties would be needed to create a functionable government with a majority, containing the whole spectrum from left to right. I am not sure about the future of this state.

        • @Soup@lemmy.world
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          28 months ago

          So that one state is a minority government? If it weren’t for the fact the right is just objectively wrong about literally everything I actually prefer a setup where no one party has a majority. Majorities mean that the ruling party can just ignore everyone else and huge numbers of people just have effectively zero representation.

          • @SyntaxTerror@feddit.org
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            28 months ago

            Election day was only yesterday, so the exploratory talks for possible coalitions are only just beginning. The party with the second most votes (conservative) had already announced that it does not want to form a coalition with the party “Die Linke” (our leftmost party, this is also the case nationwide) but also not with the fascists. This leaves only a minority government with a center-left party and a new party that has both radical right and radical left issues in its program (if I have understood this new party correctly). But “Die Linke” has already said that it would play along with a minority government, even if it is not part of it, as long as they agree or negotiate on the respective issues.

  • @dudinax@programming.dev
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    558 months ago

    “Social Security’s great for the old folks, but there’s no way it’ll be around when we’re old”

    Votes for the guy trying to destroy social security.

    • @ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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      178 months ago

      I mean, technically that’s correct, if they keep voting for the guy trying to destroy social security lol

      • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        28 months ago

        Ronald Reagan was cutting advertising telling people that Social Security was going to go bankrupt in a generation back in 1961.

        Then he took office in 1980 (after he’d predicted bankruptcy) on the position and “fixed” SS by raising taxes on low income Americans and gutting their benefits. But the subsequent multi-trillion dollar trust fund didn’t satisfy SS scalds. They still insisted it was going bankrupt, so Republicans raised taxes and gutted benefits again under Clinton and Gingrich, while introducing alternative privatized savings programs (401k, IRA, etc).

        But that still didn’t satisfy scalds. They tried to privatize the program in 2005 under Bush Jr. That failed, but we still got an earful about how SS was going to fail in the next 20 years if we didn’t do something. So then Obama tried to pass another round of cuts and tax hikes in 2013, but Republicans killed that too. So then Trump claimed we were headed to a Fiscal Cliff in 2017, and tried to privatize SS, but Republicans refused to pass that either.

        At this point, we’ve passed repeated deadlines under which SS was supposedly going to fail. The 1970s, the 1980s, the 2000s, the 2020s… We’re still waiting on the Big Cliff in 2037, but since COVID killed several million people far sooner than expected, that’s thrown the math of significantly.

        I anticipate we will continue to hear people predicting the end of SS until Congress finally finds the majority they need to kill it.

  • @henfredemars@infosec.pub
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    108 months ago

    Sounds like my retiree father-in-law who insists that Social Security isn’t a social service and should be the one exception to absolute abolition of all government services because they’re “communist.”

  • Kalkaline
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    378 months ago

    What they (Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, centrists) really want is emergency departments over run with patients who can’t get care for chronic conditions and then they have an excuse to repeal EMTALA. At that point they’ll be able to sink people deep into medical debt and when social security and Medicare/Medicaid fails to cover the costs then we can force medically disabled people into low wage jobs and take their assets to sell at pennies on the dollar to mega corps and further consolidate wealth in this country.

    We should instead create a pipeline for that wealth to flow through the lower and middle class on it’s way up to the top bringing the floor up and making sure basic infrastructure like medical care has the funding it needs.

    • SatansMaggotyCumFart
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      88 months ago

      If you make the wealthy ultra wealthy then their urine is full of healthy nutrients when they piss on you.

      That’s the basis to tinkle down economics.

  • @paddirn@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I supported the ACA (though would’ve preferred a public option), but the one time I actually needed to use it, was for my Dad when his private insurance from his job kicked him off after retirement, the rates and coverage seemed bad, like it was just such a hassle with no great benefits. It’s only when I realized my Dad could still get Tricare that I switched over to that and that was a million times better (even more reason for govt-funded healthcare). I have no idea why my Dad hadn’t been using it the whole time either, he probably wasted tens of thousands of dollars getting private insurance. I still think ACA is a step in the right direction, BUT public option still needs to happen, Fuck Joe Lieberman for blocking that.

    • @EnderWiggin@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The ACA is good when you actually reach out to a patient care “assister” for support. You can get rates WAY lower than advertised if you work with someone who can help navigate it. I think the program is actually tremendous, but it’s been made intentionally cumbersome and difficult to use by the folks trying to kill it. I’ve used it twice while out of work back in 2016 and again over the pandemic and had completely free plans that covered my “tier 3” prescriptions and specialist (rheumatology) appointments.

    • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      48 months ago

      It’s only when I realized my Dad could still get Tricare that I switched over to that and that was a million times better (even more reason for govt-funded healthcare).

      One of the biggest flaws of the ACA is how it’s engineered to be worse than employee sponsored care. Can’t actually just open up Medicare For All or you’ll make the private insurance system sad.

  • @niktemadur@lemmy.world
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    98 months ago

    You can mathematically group the people in your life in such a way so that half of the people you know are stupider than the other half.
    I swear to fuckin’ god, man, politics make it real easy to tell who goes in which half. It’s not a perfect method, but it works at least 85% of the goddamned time.

  • @MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    198 months ago

    I’m not American, but this happens a lot more than you’d think.

    I live in Canada.

    A relative of a friend actually voted for a party called “the People’s party of Canada”, and one of their goals as a party was to eliminate subsidized housing. That relative of my friend… lived in subsidized housing and was not able to afford to have a home if not subsidized.

    They literally voted for a party that, if they had won, would have made them homeless.

    I don’t think that the PPC won a single district (giving them no seats in government); much to their benefit and their disappointment.

    Schools really need to teach critical thinking.

  • @vga@sopuli.xyz
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    8 months ago

    Cool meme, but surely you realize that using a system and being against the system are not in conflict.

    Then again if they like the system and think it shouldn’t be dismantled and still vote for someone who wants to dismantle, that’s dumb stupid.

    • Todd Bonzalez
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      208 months ago

      Nah. Relying on the ACA, and voting for people who want to abolish it is a leopards eating faces situation.

      The guy in this meme is wrong because he’s not paying attention to the wider pressures of society, and the needs of the people he’s talking to, when those people just want a better system.

      He disagrees with the woman demanding better ethical practices from Apple because she uses an Apple product, but the reality is that it is difficult to navigate modern society without a smartphone, and there’s pretty much no brand that doesn’t have some ethical failings in their supply chain. It’s not hypocrisy to point out a systemic issue, and want to see it resolved, if your participation is unavoidable.

      He disagrees with the man wanting seatbelts for his car, because he bought a car without them. Wanting greater safety features for the machinery you regularly operate is pragmatic, not hypocritical. Seeing a problem and offering a solution is a productive thing to do.

      But relying on the ACA for access to healthcare, and then voting to have the ACA dismantled with absolutely no plan on how to replace it, essentially denying millions of Americans, including themselves, access to healthcare? That’s just fucking insane. There’s no call for a better system. There’s no suggestion for how to do things differently. Just a call to tear down a system that people rely on for their health.

      If you think that we ought to hear the Republicans out on their anti-Healthcare agenda, or that people who rely on the ACA aren’t voting against their own interests when they vote Republican, you’re not paying attention to what’s at stake.

  • @Michal@programming.dev
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    198 months ago

    To be fair it’s not hypocritical to use service you’re entitled to and still be against it. After all, you paid for it with your taxes.

    • @Tyler@lemmy.world
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      168 months ago

      But voting against it to remove its benefit to others is the hypocrisy. For instance, a cousin of mine was on her parents’ insurance until the cutoff of 26 because of Obamacare and was all about getting rid of it. I would point out how she was only insured because of it (this was before her being 26 and booted off) and asked her what her next plan for being insured would be. Of course she didn’t think that far ahead and just said she would be 26 by the time anything changed so it wouldn’t matter.

      The party of grifters is aptly put.

    • @MrVilliam@lemmy.world
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      228 months ago

      I literally knew a girl who said this. She truly had no idea that they were the same thing, but rattled on about wanting it gone while benefiting from it.

      I also knew an older woman who hated Obama and said “he’s arrogant for naming that after himself.” She didn’t believe me that her favorite channel was the one who named it after him unofficially and that its official name was ACA.

      They truly just repeat bullshit until it sticks, and it usually works on the people who don’t bother to diversify their information sources. It’s so goddamn frustrating.