Current Events > What are the respectable Republican viewpoints?

(+) Yeah! (+)

- Lower taxes
- Others?
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EffectAndCause posted...

- Lower taxes

Nope. We're adding to the debt just to save the richest people money.

- Others?

None.
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EffectAndCause posted...

- Lower taxes

Only for the richest of the rich. Everyone else will pay more.
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I think people who broadly generalize low taxes as always a good thing are the shortest sighted people ever. Like they don't ever think two steps ahead regarding potential ramifications.

Lower taxes = less upkeep of infrastructure

Sure, you keep more money in your pocket, that you then need to spend fixing the flat tire because of all the potholes in your neighborhood.

Lack of public school funding = All the bright children move away from the neighborhood after high school

The ones who remain are lower socioeconomic. Increased criminality, poorer upkeep of a neighborhood, drive down property values. Couple hundred more in your pocket, but your home's value has depreciated 5 figures.

There is this notion of personal responsibility that presumes a person's presence in an environment doesn't affect it. Republicans complain about the poor so much, when really I think their ideology would be more willing to be paternalistic about how money is spent for the "greater good" of a community, because you can't trust every actor to behave perfectly in a system for the greatest net benefit for all. Some individuals, because of their ignorance or x,y,z variables, will make decisions that are worse off for them and the community. And the republican solution instead is jump ship. This works for the higher socioeconomic republicans, but the large majority of poorer ones voting based off of social and/or religious reasons are financially fucking themselves and their communities over because they can't just relocate to a bubble community.
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EffectAndCause posted...

- Lower taxes

LMAO
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Which isn't to say higher taxes always = better outcomes. How you spend the money and where it goes is much more important than absolute amount. Corruption always plays a role too. But the response to all that should be "how do we mitigate this, knowing it will always exist to an extent", not a total 180 that harms everyone involved except for an extremely small group that none of us are a part of.
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Oh I dont support lower taxes at all, I can just understand the your money is yours mentality.

So do they have ANY respectable viewpoints?
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EffectAndCause posted...

So do they have ANY respectable viewpoints?

They barely even have viewpoints period.
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.
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BLAKUboy posted...

They barely even have viewpoints period.

They have plenty.
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Antifar posted...

BLAKUboy posted...

They barely even have viewpoints period.

They have plenty.

What Alex Jones tells you isn't a viewpoint.
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Webmaster4531 posted...

What Alex Jones tells you isn't a viewpoint.

Paul Ryan isn't listening to Alex Jones. He very clearly has views and an agenda: to strengthen the already powerful at the expense of the already vulnerable.
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EffectAndCause posted...

So do they have ANY respectable viewpoints?

I mean that's a loaded question because it's not that their ideology is inherently flawed. Just like Democrats, the ideals all sound good on paper but in execution come with a set of side effects.

The republican notions of personal responsibility and economic equality are great. It's that neither of those are 100% directly causal to one's circumstance. So when the response in practice is blaming poor people for not "bootstrapping" it enough, they are ignoring some real factors outside of one's control. This is irrespective of the generalization that those in lower socioeconomic status could benefit from a higher dose of personal responsibility since those factors outside of their control usually aren't 100% attributable either.

Same with free market economics. A free market implies competition is not prohibitively prevented from entering the game. Any contender can compete based on the merit of their product or idea alone, and this will lead to a net drive of decreased costs and increased quality.

In practice, republicans treat free market as unregulated market. This leads to industries with so much monopolic power, they wrestle out any competitors. ISPs are a perfect example. The big ones don't overlap where they provide service and the smaller ones cannot obtain enough infrastructure to compete. They end up leasing from the big providers anyway, so there is a limit to how much the price can drive down, or how much pressure the company has to upgrading infrastructure.

Regulation can help in some circumstances, but too much regulation ends up crippling some industries. Health care is so regulated that you can't go in any direction without running into some regulatory policy. Since these policies are developed independently, they often aren't considered in the system as a whole and there can be some weird interactions. These interactions can effectively cripple any competition as well. The other ugly side is regulatory capture. ISPs controlling the FCC, for instance. They can then neuter any attempt at eliminating their monopoly.

So a real free market is neither fully regulated, nor completely unregulated, and I don't consider the republican conception of a free market to be a true free market, except in an ideal. Striking that perfect balance is extremely difficult.

So it's unfair to say they don't have respectable viewpoints, but at the same time, I can't in good faith say their viewpoints in practice are respectable either.
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BlameAnesthesia posted...

it's not that their ideology is inherently flawed

uh

Broseph_Stalin posted...

uh

I'm speaking in the abstract. It's pretty clear in practice the ideology is either not followed, or they were disingenuous about their intended outcomes in the first place.

I lean left, but I'm not going to pretend "my party" doesn't have some degree of disconnect from ideology and practice either.
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Uhhmmmm......
their official platform wants Puerto Rico as state.

You know they won't act on that though.
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