The result would be a sweeping transformation of American life. Millions would be forcibly removed from their homes and communities as new resources and a new mission invigorate the pace of deportations. Taxes would drop sharply for the richest Americans while rising for many middle-class families. Millions of low-income Americans would lose their health insurance, while America’s banks would enjoy the repeal of regulations enacted in the wake of the financial crisis. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gas emissions would end, likely collapsing global efforts to restrain emissions, greatly increasing the pace of warming.I think the character of presidential candidates matters; not in the sense that I'm looking for a goody-two-shoes with no affairs and no rich friends, but in the sense that being President is a really hard job and we need someone who knows something about it and will take it very seriously. (To take a random Republican example, I think Mitt Romney had the character to be a decent president.) So I do think the press should report stories that reflect the candidates' personalities. But policy also matters, and the media have done a terrible job this election of making clear how big the differences between Democrats and Republicans are.
Millions of Americans would love some or all of these changes, and millions of others would hate them. But most of all, the vast majority of Americans would simply be confused. Someone who’d been following the election moderately closely — scanning headlines, watching cable news, and tuning in to debates — would simply have no idea that this sweeping shift in American public policy is in the offing if Trump wins.
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
Elections are about Policy
The only statistic you need to really understand this election is that television has devoted more air time to Hillary's email server than to all of her policy ideas put together. I haven't seen similar statistics for Trump but you can bet that his groping and insulting women have gotten more attention than his policy ideas, too. Matt Yglesias thinks that most Americans would be stunned, if Trump wins, to discover what he actually proposes to do:
The media is getting to be a bigger problem than the politicians themselves, in my mind.
ReplyDeleteBrexit happened because the British media had a field day with a vote they were convinced could never succeed, and the collective campaign of misinformation and mindless rhetoric meant to drum up profits and consumption left many in the the UK stunned at the results and scrambling to google what leaving the EU actually would mean now that they'd voted for it.
And here in the US we have our own mess, with our media chiefly interested in muckraking and scraping the bottom of the profit barrel by any means necessary, and largely uninterested in meaningful discourse or the health of the democracy.
I don't understand how we can expect to have a functional democracy in a society that cares so little for facts and knowledge, and with a media that is so ready to actively breed ignorance for the sake of exploiting it for profit. We have millions of people voting who know effectively nothing about what they're voting for. You might as well give out votes to household pets at this rate, to be determined by which brands of pet food they prefer.
"left many in the the UK stunned at the results and scrambling to google what leaving the EU actually would mean now that they'd voted for it."
ReplyDelete-Brexit won by a million votes, man. This is like claiming the people who voted for Barack Obama didn't know who he was when they voted for him. It's nuts.
"We have millions of people voting who know effectively nothing about what they're voting for. You might as well give out votes to household pets at this rate, to be determined by which brands of pet food they prefer."
-Agreed. Ukraine isn't even mentioned on either of the candidates' websites.
Overall, a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for insanity, Goldman Sachs, Mookarthyism, and High Bushism. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for sanity and common sense.