Didn't work out well in London. Let's hope NYC does better. Doubt it, but we can always hope.
Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
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Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#732The fact that people in here (who are richer than average) disagree with his policies makes his election more hopeful
You can both be rich and also want a better quality of life for everyone in society. Not every rich person is a selfish asshole...
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#733Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#734Didn't work out well in London. Let's hope NYC does better. Doubt it, but we can always hope.
London's fine. Trump and his supporters love to lose their shit over a Muslim mayor though.
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#735Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mamdani will learn that you need to be friends with the people your voters hate to get things done. Developers are the single most important players in lowering housing costs, but they are part of the "landlord" contingent in voters minds. If he doesn't learn that, the city is going to be in bad shape. Impossible to get an apartment unless you want to get an illegal sublet at regular old $4500/mo prices.
The market isn't going to function ideally in a place like New York. In other cities, a significant market-based response to high rents and housing demand is to increase supply with another ring of suburbs. Is there anywhere within reasonable commute radius left to develop around NYC at scale? Uncapping rents might trigger some refurbishment of idle or marginal space by dangling enough money in front of landlords, bu…
Left wing type policies can be very effective at producing housing in places like China where the government just says we are going to have 10,000 flats here and here and maybe contracts the construction to developers but deals with all the regulatory and permitting issues. Even in capitalist places like Singapore and Hong Kong a lot of the housing was built like that.
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#736Earlier quoted context omitted.
I genuinely can't believe, still, that I have to spell this out for people. Obama did not do a U-turn . It is the worst naivete to think that what happened was "he had big ideas and he changed his mind." He had to bring up big ideas to get elected, and then he got elected the first Black president and some of you seem entirely too dense to actually grasp what that means. President. Not King. Subject to all of those c…
Other people have mentioned mass surveillance and other ways that Obama expanded the law enforcement power of the federal government, but I'll add another thing. Based on Rahm Emanuel's advice, the Obama administration did not focus political capital on the federal judiciary. Not only did Obama fail to get RBG to retire when she could be confidently replaced by a liberal, he didn't take judicial placements in the low…
> Not only did Obama fail to get RBG to retire when she could be confidently replaced by a liberal, he didn't take judicial placements in the lower courts as seriously as he should have. The courts are substantial part of how we got here.
I imagine there was a lot of complacency based on the (erroneous) assumption that Hillary Clinton would be his successor.
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#737Didn't work out well in London. Let's hope NYC does better. Doubt it, but we can always hope.
Says who? And more importantly, on what possible basis? For my money Khan is an infinitely better mayor than ‘let the bodies pile high’ Johnson.
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#738I wish our country was like this. A city "president" can speak against the President. A city President has the power to work without the will of the President.
Well, maybe. Under Trump I’d be less sure of that.
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#739Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obama was hated by San Franciscan progressives because he came in with all of these promises and then backtracked on almost all of them. He basically turned into a Bush-lite, and he even maintained every single one of Bush's policies as well as deadlines. For example, he talked a lot about abortion and then immediately said it wasn't a priority for him once he got into office. He never closed Guantanamo and in both e…
“…the only thing it did was make it mandatory and unaffordable at the same time.” That’s such a fraught statement, because the _opposite_ is claimed by supporters of the ACA after the repeal of the mandatory rule. I’m old enough to remember the failed attempts for healthcare reforms under President Bill Clinton. The ACA felt like a miracle. It wasn’t what everyone wanted, but it was a start with principles. It has on…
>I’m old enough to remember the failed attempts for healthcare reforms under President Bill Clinton. The ACA felt like a miracle. It wasn’t what everyone wanted, but it was a start with principles. It has only been legislatively weakened over time, rather than improved.
I am also old enough to remember. And the health insurance companies spent heavily on lobbying and advertising ("death panels" and "healthcare rationing" and all sorts of other crap). It was sad.
Fast forward to the ACA and as I recall, insurers were spending USD1 million/day on lobbying efforts to block it.
I didn't think the ACA was a "miracle" though. Back then I used the analogy that it was like RFC 5386[0] ('Better Than Nothing Security'), as it wasn't single-payer and didn't even have a public option (thanks for nothing, Joe Lieberman -- I hope you're roasty-toasty in hell), but it was better than nothing.
I even have an ACA plan which costs me an enormous amount, but again, it's better than nothing.
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#740Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll give you one reason, among many, it wasn't a failure. It made it illegal to deny people health insurance coverage based on pre existing conditions. That was a big step forward in a broken system to restore some humanity to the system.
Had the ACA gone further and actually provided a single payer system, I'd consider the block on denials based on preexisting conditions a win. As it is we have a system of private "insurance" that can't consider the risk level of those being insured. All that means is the companies charge everyone else more to subsidize the cost of those who are more at risk. That bastardizes the whole point of private insurance. I d…
Wonderful point of view to consider people as akin to cars.