California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

Okay, call me naive but would we rather the government have done nothing? I understand racism still exists but you can't act like we haven't made any progress. Could you imagine the protests if segregation or something akin to it started now? I understand horrific actions have been made in the past, I understand there are still bad people in the government. Should we let that prevent us from doing anything to help people? What about people who die of hunger or homelessness? Millions and millions of Americans are in extremely difficult positions right now, my parents included. Should we tell those people we don't even want to try because we're scared of something that happened 90 years ago? Can't we progress? Can't we be better? We certainly can't if we never even give ourselves the chance.

I think the issue with property tax policy in California is that it is nativist. You essentially lock-in a price and if you don’t move, over time you’ll be paying peanuts compared to people buying a home for the first time. This starved communities of revenues so they keep jacking income tax on workers while people sit in or rent their homes that have appreciated to millions of dollars and pay almost nothing to the community. You can also pass the property down to kids who will continue to pay very little tax on it and be able to rent it for profit.

I have my own issues with property tax in that it penalizes improving a property (should be primarily based only on land value, not what is built on it for redudebtial) However it’s a tax that should be better at ensuring funds stay more local than a state tax. This means the schools and public resources can be funded by the community as they see fit. It’s a local tax abd I think local policies and power are best left to localities. It’s easier and more practical for citizens to participate in local government and it effects us most. Much better than sending all the tax revenue to a centralized government that shreds it apart like hyenas.

States like Texas get it right imo. No income tax and higher property taxes which the localities set mainly. With a portion going to the state to run and to distribute to communities that need a bit of help.

> 40% don't have the money to cover a $400 emergency expense

This is an often cited statistic that's been essentially debunked for being flawed and misleading[1][2].

> And yet 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck

Again, not a particularly useful statistic because 1. real consumption per capita has been increasing[3], and 2. the US has the 2nd highest household consumption[4] in the world.

"Living paycheck to paycheck" includes people that are destitute, but also people that just consume more than they should, and also people that are unable to save money due to increasing housing costs (not due to inequality, but due to zoning regulations). Of those who claim to be living "paycheck to paycheck", you don't know which are destitute.

> For our riches, we have the highest population of people without health insurance in the first world, and the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical expenses.

Sure, this has nothing to do with inequality. If you gave everyone health insurance in America today, inequality would hardly change. And inequality is NOT the root cause of America's healthcare system, the root cause is a series of policies passed in the 20th century that resulted in 1) healthcare being tied to employment, 2) a lack of any form of price transparency, 3) supply constraints on medical professionals that have resulted in the highest PPP adjusted salaries for medical practitioners in the developed world.

> Inequality drives cost of living up. Normal people in the US are competing with the richest people domestically and internationally for housing. While normal people need housing to shelter themselves, the rich, especially the rich outside of the US, see housing as a means to store value.

We’ve always had mega-rich families. The new phenomenon we’re seeing now is not that "normal people" are competing with the super-rich, it's that they are competing with the upper-middle class. Where I live (Brooklyn), The rents aren’t driven up because I’m in a bidding war with Jeff Bezos; they’re driven up because I’m in a bidding war with other high earning millennial white collar workers. The “middle class” worker doesn’t stand a chance in our neighborhood.

Also the cost of living isn't up uniformly across the US, it's only up in most big cities where the root cause is attributable almost entirely to poor zoning regulations, not "inequality". You can see the salary one must earn to purchase the median house in every city[5] and outside SF/NY/Seattle, it's around the median household income.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-40...

[2] https://www.cato.org/blog/it-true-40-americans-cant-handle-4...

[3] https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=A794RX0Q048SBEA

[4] https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-...

[5] https://www.hsh.com/finance/mortgage/salary-home-buying-25-c...

Sure, there were absolutely problems (though bear in mind you're addressing one program - there was also the TVA, CCC, and a bunch of others I could've told you off the top of my head when I was in US history in high school), but the point is it put unemployed people to work and helped stem the damage to the economy.

It's the best precedent we have for the situation we're in today, and it's silly to act as though it's not useful to draw on it now because it had problems. They're problems that are easily fixable, after all - it's very possible for us to create programs today that have similar positive effects on employment and the economy and just do them without the racism.

It's very easy to find fault with anything in history, but if that's all you try to do, you're going to miss out on a lot of really useful information.

> And Obama managed to pass healthcare reform (ACA, "Obamacare", national Romneycare).

If the best that the Democrats could do while controlling the executive and legislative was pass a Republican health insurance plan, we're in deep trouble. It should be clear by now that neither party passes anything that will materially better the working class and the toiling masses.

> There's also the need about dealing from all the COVID fallout, but that a lot there could be done via the competent running of the government. Infrastructure needs spending and that would entail Congress, so that may be a #3 priority.

All this presumes that the problem is competency. The problem is that none of these things are profitable. In a system that runs on profitablity, there is no room for services that lose money.

If you look through the lens of profit, I argue that the people who are running the government are competent in enriching themselves and those corporations that prop them. Both parties oversee the direct transfer of wealth from the masses to the few. For as much (or little) we pay in taxes, the masses do not benefit as much as the überwealthy do: we do not have a significant safety net, we have no housing, no healthcare, no security. Everything that is required to live costs money. This affects the masses more than it affects the wealthy, because the wealthy can afford anything. I would like to add that Obamacare is insurance and not healthcare, so it still costs the poor a significant portion of the little wealth they have.