Interpret improvements as you like. For me it’s any large scale reforms or legislative packages designed to improve the country for all or see to the material interests of the majority without overly benefiting the elite.
Any big consumer protection, environmental, infrastructure, or other legislation from Clinton onwards that materially improved the lives of all?
Obamacare and the medicaid expansion comes to my mind. It has obviously improved people’s lives but considering how broken the healthcare system remains, and that it was written by the insurance industry to undermine single-payer, it seems to me a mitigated win at best.
Gay marriage and marijuana legalisation but that was the courts and the states although i’m sure the federal government could’ve stood in the way had they chosen to.
I’ve only live here since the 2010s so that’s all I can think of.
Requiring nutritional information on food
That was an EU thing.
It was also cheaper for manufacturers to use the same design in both USA and Europe, which made it an easy implementation for the States.
Food companies actually fought the law
Yeah, companies always fight for themselves, and never the customers!
With that change they had to measure what they actually put into the products. That cost money, which is a great reason to discard people’s health.
In terms of visual design, the US labels are so much easier to understand than the EU labels. The EU/international way of labeling food seems like they just copied an Excel spreadsheet.
?? Nutrition labels have been on food my entire life, and I’m almost 50. Has something about them changed in the last 30 years?
It wasn’t law until the mid 90’s. Ingredients have been around as long as I can remember but not nutritional information
The legalization of gay marriage
I’m hoping that the repeal of Roe vs Wade seals the fate of the republican party. With continued legal action against gerrymandered states, a solidified stance against women’s reproductive rights, along with the overt racism I’m optimisticly hoping to see a functional dissolvement of the republican party in it’s current form by 2028. The pessimistic side of me is worried about strategic division of the democrats “not wanting Biden” or other short sighted horeshit driving us straight into a hate filled fascist government we can never recover from.
seals the fate of the republican party? the repeal of Roe vs Wade happened on a democrat’s watch and on a Catholic one
when was it you saw and heard Biden on tv defending abortion rights and saying is fighting for us? maybe a few times shit is so real he should be on the tv or streaming or something everyday
Biden has rode “I am not Trump.” into the ground but people are still supporting him on that fact alone
and Obama who Biden was in the White with wrote policies that harmed the health of the citizens and Trump and then Biden both expanded on while in office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Smoking_Prevention_and_Tobacco_Control_Act
when has Biden been a champion of healthcare or for cannabis or for gay marriage? dude is Catholic for God’s sake and very public about it and his policies and actions in office have reflected this he chose a prosecutor for a vice who openly opposed what he promised on the campaign trail the ones he has went back on like cannabis when he fired all those staffers
and everyone still thinks he is a cannabis champion
being not trump does not make someone a better more qualified candidate
Biden took my right to vote away so this is one of the only outlets
know in this next election it will most likely be Biden vs Trump same as before how could it go differently remember what happened when we were going to have more options
Obama and Biden chained the Green Party candidate to a chair so she could not debate with them and the other major politicians how is that not fascist
This is one of the dumbest comments I’ve ever read.
Its not so much that the comment is dumb, but Verdant Banana thinks we’re dumb.
the repeal of Roe vs Wade happened on a democrat’s watch and on a Catholic one
The actions of the Supreme Court are completely unrelated to which party occupies the presidency at the time. The two branches are independent of one another.
The Infrastructure Bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act are huge examples from the Biden presidency.
From those we’re getting tons of bridges fixed, Internet upgrades, public transit improvements, research funded for climate change (including locally, Akron received finding for researching alternative polymers that don’t rely on oil), domestic security improvements from domestic chip manufacturing, port and airport upgrades, funding to increase the size of EV charging networks, power grid upgrades to help with all of that, labor got a huge boon as all of these bills encourage or require domestic manufacturing, medicare drug negotiation, we’re replacing ALL the lead pipes in public water supply lines, more fixes to tax cheats from corporations and rich people, and funds to cleanup superfund sites.
People really don’t realize how much Biden has gotten done; especially when compared to other recent presidents … like Mr. Build A Wall.
The affordable care act while controversial was also very big as you said.
Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) - which among other things created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and put in place the Volcker Rule which forbids banks from making certain risky investments with depositors money. To give you an idea of the power of the Volcker Rule, when it went in place banks begged (and got) a 5 year delay to divest for investments that violate the rule. Yeah, banks were playing fast-and-loose with with the money you deposited in your checking and savings accounts for their own gain. The Volcker Rule stopped (most) of that.
Didn’t Dodd-Frank get gutted a bit in recent years?
The inflation reduction act is probably the most significant piece of climate change policy in American history and is expected to bring emissions to a little under half 2005 levels.
Also, I think it capped insulin prices at $35 a month? That was the hope anyway.
I’ll be paying 380 ish bucks for insulin this coming month, only using my “good, professional job” type insurance to cover some of the cost. It’s around 200/mo. Cheaper to buy from Walmart directly without insurance than it is to process it through it at my required pharmacy. I don’t know if the insulin caps have taken effect, or if I don’t qualify, all I know is I’m getting screwed because I’m alive and want to stay that way.
The rest of the policy seems cool, but won’t be if it pans out like the insulin crap.
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Not that you are wrong about the rest of your comment, but not only type 1 diabetics need insulin, type 2 diabetics often become insulin dependent too, especially with poor adherance to interventions (bad diet, no excercise).
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Goddamn, America you never cease to find new ways to disappoint me.
It seems to vary state by state, though also for anyone on medicaid/medicare. You might be screwed by that professional job insurance!
I dunno if it helps but some googling took me to this diabetes resource Which seemed pretty good. Might be worth checking as this seems like stuff you have to look into vs having it happen automatically because why not screw us one more time?
Americans just won’t help them goddamn selves. The same people who piss and moan about socialized medicine are chapping at the bit to install the orange shitbag as a dictator. These people are dead set on being rotten to the core.
Not all of us! But yeah… idk what some of are thinking
Not all of us!
Not even MOST of us. Trump lost the popular vote in both Presidential elections he was in.
…Have there been any?
The border wall. But it should be further reinforced. People can’t just enter the country illegally.
Most illegal immigration occurs from visa over stayers, not crossing the southern border. A wall won’t help.
The worse problem is that they also sneak in illegal drugs like fetanyl through the border. A wall can definitely help here
Why would they do that when China can ship it in large quantities in containers? Like I know some drugs come that way but it’s not even the major source.
Smuggling is done with drones now not people
In that case we just need to build a wall that reaches the stratosphere. What do you think?
It also should extend underground into the Earth’s core to prevent tunneling.
Legalization would help more than anything. Full legalization of all drugs is the only drug war outcome compatible with conservative values such as personal responsibility and individual autonomy.
Nope, the border wall is expensive, ineffective, and it destroys ecosystems.
They don’t though. It’s not illegal to seek asylum.
I actually want to be educated here, because my stance is that there should be a road to cheap and speedy citizenship, and that immigrants should assimilate into the system.
My gut says that seeking asylum isn’t paying for someone to smuggle you over the boarder. It would require you going through an actual boarder checkpoint where you would do the paperwork to enter the country as a refugee.
I know Republicans are assholes who have been obstructing that, but my gut tells me there is the legal way of entering the country and the illegal one.
Hiding in the back of a pickup truck and buying a fake Juan Martinez social security card doesn’t feel like asylum seeking, it feels illegal.
For context, I invoke the fake Juan Martinez social security card because when I worked at the Arizona Department of Education, there were at least 3000 Juan Martinezes with the same social security number attending Arizona public education, which I thought was HORRIBLE and extremely dehumanizing to those children, and it wasn’t the US government that did that. It was the coyotes and parents illegally immigrating that did that.
Edit: to be crystal clear, Hegar is a fucking moron.
America is fundamentally broken.
Almost straight up shattered.
I seek the balance between “how it should be” and “how it is”, and if that isn’t the conversation. If the conversation is “imma just do it”, from EITHER END, I get pissed at grownups acting like babies.
I would say that the legitimate process of seeking opportunities has been intentionally made to look illegal by waves of xenophobic policy from both Rs and Ds who have created an immigration system that’s designed to generate workers without a legal foothold. If there was a functional way for people to seek the life they want, they wouldn’t need to resort to fake IDs and hiding in trucks to get a job. But then industries would have to pay them legal wages.
A lot of people want to create a distinction between someone who’s fleeing full-blown war or starvation vs someone who’s fleeing poverty. I can’t see how it is a crime to flee either. It is just a reality that humans will try to escape suffering, monumental suffering and everyday suffering - legislation and bureaucracy can accomodate or ignore that but it won’t change it. So when we ignore it, we know that the black market will step in.
More broadly it suits the needs of capital to restrict the flow of labour as much as possible. Labour free to seek the best conditions means upward pressure on wages, lower margins and less leverage for capital.
A large part of this is being driven by illegal trafficking operations that recruit desperate families looking to give their families a safer life. Republicans have chosen to demonize both the families as well as the traffickers. It must suck living a life incapable of empathy for others less fortunate.
Anyways, this is actually a pretty good read on it, despite it coming from CNN:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/20/us/migrant-surge-travel-agencies-smugglers/index.html
What believing in imaginary lines in the dirt does to a MFer
Johnny Depp did a great scene that covers this in Blow.
Go on thinking rules don’t apply to you.
It has really been working out for countries south of the U.S.
Aside from Boats, Tunnels, Ladders, Airplanes, Ropes or any of the large gaps where it’s not feasible to build a wall on. It’s more useful as a grift to pay Republican donors in the form of bloated contracts than it is effective at stopping people from crossing the border.
