this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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Both sides are same /s
"Entitlement Reform" has been a watchword in both parties going back to the Reagan Administration.
Democrats will tell you they've got an innovative exciting new solution to slow the rate at which health care costs rise, then shift a bunch of public sector money over to private sector subsidies.
Republicans will tell you they're cutting fat out of the system, then transform a bunch of public sector spending into private sector tax breaks.
Healthcare gets more expensive and less accessible. Each team blames the other one. A few socialists in some of the bluer states suggest we try a public Medicare-for-All model, then get primaried out of office in the next cycle by a pack of lobbyists in blue waist coats.
"Ah, but the pawl and the gear are clearly two different components doing separate things!" I cry, to any sucker who will listen.
It doesn’t always feel that clean cut to me. I’m not arguing that you are wrong. You are absolutely correct! You are describing a huge problem.
But our stupid voting system is another problem that serves to keep that first one in place. Small uprisings against the two party system might be noticed but they will be filtered out. To change the system it seems there has to be widespread and persistent discontent and rebellion well beyond what we’re already seeing. We’re definitely moving in that direction though, for better or worse.
That stupid voting system means that if you are going to support a third party with good ideas, you must necessarily withdraw your support from whichever of the pawl and gear you prefer to the other. Enter ranked choice, star, etc.
So in an election like 2024 when it comes time to cast the actual vote, I’m left thinking: So what if I take my finger off the pawl there, and what we thought was a gear starts spinning like a buzz saw and cuts my fucking leg off?
I guess going loopy from blood loss while I point my femoral artery at people like a garden hose and find ultimate rest knowing I was right about the system sure beats dying from nuclear winter.
So that’s what so many can’t ignore when it comes time to choose. Yeah if we elected Harris we’d be living in a country of capitalism and inequality, with Israel doing horrors under our wing. It wouldn’t be a good outcome.
But compare it with what we got. I’m just some employed straight white father living in suburban nowheresville USA, but I would very much rather my government didn’t have a gestapo, or bomb Iran, or sell access & secrets, or leave NATO, or support fossil fuels, or work against green energy, or round up people who have been living a peaceful productive life and destroy those lives by the thousands because they are ethnically undersirable to the base.
Show your work.
Don't work, Daddy musk is here to make a 3rd party which will toxify the potential of any legitimate 3rd party, and we will continue on with the same system.
If their plan for not having elections at all doesn't come to fruition
I, for one, am excited to see him Billionaire Blowout himself on a scale not seen since Bloomberg hemorrhaged $1B during the 2020 Primaries to come in fourth place.
He can't run for president. He wasn't born in the USA.
If Trump can run for a 3rd term, I don't see why Mamdani can't run for his 1st.
Oh no, I can absolutely see him starting a DOGE Party. He has enough money to entirely bankroll it himself. I wish he wasn't such a dipshit man child; he's in a position to do so much good, yet just makes everything he touches worse.
Third parties are only not toxic when they are big enough to be a main party and at that time they are too full of corruption to be any good.
This guy cynics
Voters chose the option furthest right so the government shifted right. This happens every time the left most option isn’t chosen.
Politicians picked their voters in order to guarantee this outcome. Gerrymandering, mass disenfranchisement along social and ethnic lines, vote caging, intimidation, misinformation, straight up sabotage of voting venues... It happens all the time in liberal democracies, particularly in poorer, more homogeneous, and more rural neighborhoods.
As soon as the politicians fuck up on the math and a socialist breaks through (as with AOC beating Crowley back in '18 or Mamdani trouncing Cuomo last week), you get to see the "moderates" and their conservative cats' paws rush in to subvert the popular will.
The joke is how quickly a government will move to the right when the left-most option is chosen.
you can just say you voted for trump, you don't need to show a diagram
It is looking like that more and more. If they don't fight back they are complacent and the same.
Ah yes it's the Democrats fault all along