• AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Modern Republican voters embrace pyrrhic victories. Their goal is never to make things better for anyone, it is solely to cause harm to their enemies at any price. They literally, reliably vote to hurt themselves, to take away their own rights, so long as their countless enemies, everyone outside their rigid in-group, suffer along with them. It’s a race to the bottom, their enemies losing is the only victory they care about. It is an obsession.

    Modern Republicans will happily shit their own pants with a forced victorious smile, as long as any of the “filthy leftists/coloreds/queers/heretics/etc” that they hate more than they love themselves or their own families will have to stand around and smell it.

    That to me is the most important distinction between them and just about every other American. I want them to have access to medical care based on need and not income. I want them to have access to quality education from pre-K through college whether they have rich parents or not, we all know they really fucking need it.

    They, on the other hand, would rather someone like me be dead, preferably by cruel and painful means. That’s why they love Trump so much, he talks lovingly on stage about how he’d like to “beat the crap out of” those that dissent from the Republican message, to thunderous Republican applause.

    https://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/donald-trump-punch-protester-219655

  • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I want a bill that just says “if money is approved to be spent by Congress, automatically increase the Debt Limit by that amount.” Call it the National Bankruptcy Prevention Act. See how they justify voting against that.

    • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      They’ll justify it with “This is just an unlimited credit card for the Spendocrat party to make all kinds of regulations and social programs at the expense of the hardworking taxpayer”

      • ashok36@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        social programs at the expense of the hardworking taxpayer

        Imagine that: Paying taxes and getting social programs in return. What a novel concept.

        • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          The thing is, most “hardworking taxpayers” don’t consider themselves to be the recipients of social programs. That’s only for poor people who don’t work.

          And for a lot of programs, the means testing that has to be done to allocate budget does give money to people who actually need it, like the poor. However, this creates a resentment from people who aren’t getting the program. This resentment can be eliminated by making the program universal. This is why things like Social Security and MediCare are so popular: Everyone gets them, even if they don’t need them, so everyone sees a benefit.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    From TFA:

    The main specific Fitch cited was “repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions” that “have eroded confidence in fiscal management.” Can anyone dispute with a straight face that, here too, the blame lies with Republicans? The two big debt limit fights occurred in 2011 and 2023. In both instances, Republicans had just regained control of the House of Representatives and narrowed Democratic majorities in the Senate. In both instances, the GOP was itching to flex its muscles against a Democratic president with a presidential election one year away. In both instances, events were driven by extremist members of the GOP—Tea Partiers in 2011, the Freedom Caucus in 2023—who called for catastrophic (and economically destabilizing) cuts to the federal budget, and professed indifference (at least some of them) to the prospect of forcing a default on U.S. debt. In both instances, the Republican motive was performative to the point of undermining stable governance. And in both instances, a big-three credit-rating firm ended up downgrading the credit of the U.S. government—Standard & Poor’s in 2011, Fitch this week. (The third big-three firm, Moody’s, threatened a downgrade in 2011 but did not carry it out.)

    It’s painfully obvious for anyone who’s paying attention that Republicans act like sociopaths. That they are able to distract their base so successfully with culture-war bullshit is why I’ve lost hope that the USA can ever be politically healthy.

  • ATQ@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Half the country elects a bunch of ‘Pub clowns and here we are with a circus. Who’d’a thunk it.

  • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Who the hell is Fitch, and why does his downgrade matter? I’m uninformed. Okay I read it. Credit rating. Give me a break

    • treefrog@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      This rating going down makes the dollar weaker.

      Meaning we have to pay more, because the dollar is worth less internationally, to pay the national debt back.

      In other words, the ‘pro-economy republicans’ that stormed the capitol just increased the national debt by about 45 billion a year.

      • ZzyzxRoad@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        just increased the national debt by about 45 billion a year.

        But helping student loan borrowers would have cost too much. For fuck’s sake.

    • YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Fitch Ratings Inc. is an American credit rating agency and is one of the “Big Three credit rating agencies”, the other two being Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. It is one of the three nationally recognized statistical rating organizations designated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 1975.