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I feel like the US has to split into separate countries and maybe adopt a system like EU. Everything in the us gets so generalized no one has any agency over it
by kungito 5y ago
I feel like the US has to split into separate countries and maybe adopt a system like EU. Everything in the us gets so generalized no one has any agency over it except companies with enough money to push a narrative across 300 mil people. Either that or the way you think about US has to change. I find it hard to believe every state does things the same way but still you say "US" has a problem and not Georgia or California. Why not think locally to your state which has a lot of independance in how it does things? Maybe then it would be easier to push reform
- rayiner 5y agoWe already are, and Democrats keep trying to nationalize everything.
- kungito 5y agoLike what?
- rayiner 5y agoElections? Healthcare? (Continuing to push Medicaid expansion onto states that don’t want it?) Child care? Education?
- Jcowell 5y agoHonestly the first two should be a federal thing. I just don’t understand how a federal election has 50 different ways of doing and qualifying things and not one way for a position that affects the whole country. If we were to pull up on a Alien planet and see this kind of election style we would ridicule the ridiculousness that is the US election system. Don’t get me started on how it makes any sense that we don’t leverage the power of the government for something as crucial as life. Why in the god damn fuck is giving birth in this country not free?
- bhupy 5y ago> I just don’t understand how a federal election has 50 different ways of doing and qualifying things and not one way for a position that affects the whole country. This is how it works in the EU as well, and per the GGP commenter, the prescription was for the US to be more like the EU, which is how it was set up in the first place anyway per the GP comment. > Don’t get me started on how it makes any sense that we don’t leverage the power of the government for something as crucial as life. Why in the god damn fuck is giving birth in this country not free? Except there are several different viable ways of providing universal healthcare. You can have a single payer system like Canada/Denmark/American Medicare, you can have a single provider system like the UK/Veterans Administration, you can have a purely private non-employer funded system like Switzerland or the Netherlands, you can have a public-private mix like Germany, or only universal catastrophic coverage like in Singapore. Each approach has its own trade-offs, and those trade-offs are political in nature, where some States might prefer one set of trade-offs and others may not. This is exactly how Canada's single payer healthcare came about. Saskatchewan was the first Province to offer single payer in 1947, followed by Alberta in 1951, etc. By 1961, all Provinces had some form of a single payer healthcare system. To this day, Canada's single-payer system is Provincial, not Federal. The Federal government provides supplemental funding, but that only happened after each Province independently developed its own system, and only after all Provinces unanimously agreed to the Federal health transfer. As of 2020, Federal transfer payments in Canada only amount to 22% (https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/45/E1408 https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/45/E1408).
- beerandt 5y ago>leverage the power of the government Because people get paid to do those jobs, and the government mandating that they do it for free, or for some reduced price is theft of labor. We've already fought that war.
- rayiner 5y agoWe’re 50 different states that are, in theory, supposed to be quite independent of each other. (In some ways, even more so than the EU. For example, the EU has no equivalent of our anti-commandeering principle. The EU can direct national administrative organs to carry out task, while the U.S. federal government can’t direct state administrative units. The issue of why taxpayers won’t pay doctors to deliver children is orthogonal to the point I’m making. If taxpayers in California or New York want to do that, they should do it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- andechs 5y agoIn order to send representatives to the European parliment, the EU requires that representatives be elected in fair elections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_European_Parliament_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_European_Parliament_elect... Part of being a member state of the EU requires having access to some sort of public healthcare system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Health_Insurance_Card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Health_Insurance_Card This isn't "over reach of federal government" - it's ensuring that the citizens of anyone who wants to be part of a certain association have certain basic rights.
- bhupy 5y ago> In order to send representatives to the European parliment, the EU requires that representatives be elected in fair elections And the US Constitution requires that its member states have a republican (small r) form of government. > Part of being a member state of the EU requires having access to some sort of public healthcare system First of all, that's not even true; the only requirement is that the member states accept the European Health Insurance Card regardless of how the healthcare is financed (publicly or privately). The Netherlands, for instance, gets its healthcare primarily through private health insurance. An EU-like approach to healthcare in the US would be for the Federal government to establish a common standard that can apply across disparate health insurance systems that are implemented, funded, and administered by the States, but that's not really what the D party is selling (as far as I know).
- disposekinetics 5y agoThe big one in the news right now is voting, but Jimmy Carter formed the department of education at a federal level.
- iammisc 5y agoEnvironmental Policy (EPA). Family policy (gay marriage, transgenderism, etc via the Supreme Court). Healthcare (Obamacare). Education (no child left behind, the dept of education). Higher education (federal backed guarantees). We can go on...
- rackjack 5y agoNixon founded the EPA and George W. Bush established no child left behind...
- iammisc 5y agoI mean... duh. I'm just pointing out the general trend towards nationalizaton. It's not just a matter of democrats. Republicans do it all the time against their own values.
- hobs 5y agoThis has been one of the least informed comments I have read recently - most of the things you are attributing to democrats are were actually republicans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_Protection_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_Pr... President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act#Legislative_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act#Legislativ... The ACA was championed by republicans until it became a political talking piece. The concept of an individual mandate goes back to at least 1989, when The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, proposed an individual mandate as an alternative to single-payer health care.[121][122] It was championed for a time by conservative economists and Republican senators as a market-based approach to healthcare reform on the basis of individual responsibility and avoidance of free rider problems. Specifically, because the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requires any hospital participating in Medicare (nearly all do) to provide emergency care to anyone who needs it, the government often indirectly bore the cost of those without the ability to pay.[123][124][125] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act NCLB was totally a Bush thing. It was coauthored by Representatives John Boehner (R-OH), George Miller (D-CA), and Senators Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Judd Gregg (R-NH). The United States House of Representatives passed the bill on December 13, 2001 (voting 381–41),[8] and the United States Senate passed it on December 18, 2001 (voting 87–10).[9] President Bush signed it into law on January 8, 2002.
- viscanti 5y agoThe US could create an amendment to say something like "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people". Which would give individual States the right to control a lot of things. Is that kind of what you're thinking?
- autocorr 5y agoTo anyone who does not get the irony in the above, this already exists as the Tenth Amendment. It is effectively ignored because it is considered legally redundant with the Constitution itself.
- Jcowell 5y agoI disagree if it was effectively ignored, a lot of things would be better and alot of things would be worse. While the lines between state and federal power has even diminished, it’s very much still there.
- cindarin 5y agoI originally assumed you were a dumbass here, not a smartass. well played.
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoThe interstate highway system and the freedom of movement between the states greatly restricts the ability for states to have meaningfully different policies from one another. A popular policy that works for the current population of the state may become an economic disaster once residents of other states move in to join the action.
- dantheman 5y agoThat's why it's the Eisenhower interstate system. They could have passed an amendment, but instead they jammed it in as part of national defense.
- iammisc 5y agoThe US was envisioned as a union of separate countries, like the EU. The EU is sliding towards US-style centralization.
- dehrmann 5y ago> union of separate countries Hence "United States."
- Jcowell 5y agoYou should find it hard to believe that every state does things the same way because they don’t. That’s the point.
- harimau777 5y agoI'm not sure how that would work without allowing the individual states to act like separate countries. E.g. by being able to put tariffs on other states, sue them for their externalities, place restrictions on people who don't live and work in the state, etc. At that point, I'm not sure what you gain by not being completely separate countries.
- xyzzyz 5y agoWhat you could do is to enumerate powers of the federal government, and one of those powers would be to “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States”, with the understanding among the authors of the document that “regulating commerce” means regulating trade and tariffs, so that nobody then can misinterpret it as giving the federal power to regulate anything they want by arguing it affects interstate commerce.
- harimau777 5y agoThey you're right back where you started: People fighting over enacting policies at the national level.
- xyzzyz 5y agoThat’s exactly how the USA was originally designed to work, and how it originally worked up until early-to-mid 20th century. It was only then when a bunch of power grabbing politicians, along with a bunch of complicit elements in the judicial apparatus, have twisted the US into completely different system that we now get to suffer from.
- renewiltord 5y agoIt’s not just power-grabbing politicians. It’s what the populace desires. Look at the overwhelming support for something like universal health care. That is a massive expansion of federal power. A large number of Americans desire massive federal power.
- beerandt 5y agoDon't conflate the desired political goal with the political source. There's no reason states couldn't implement it if they wanted to. And some did. Which is part of why it's such a power grab. The "universal" part of it goes against the entire concept of tiered / federated / rupublic type of government. It's dogmatic. Politics has become religion, especially to the non-religous, and most don't realize it. "Catholic" means "universal". We can't allow States to have their own laws, when they might not align with the Truth. Praise Science!
- xyzzyz 5y agoYou could easily implement universal healthcare on a state-by-state basis. This is just another excuse for federalization by power-grabbers.