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 Post subject: Health care for racists
 Post Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2017 2:24 am 
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This is pretty bizarre, but the white nationalist wing of the Republican party are coming around to the idea of single-payer health care, the holy grail of the American left.

You know the story. Since Nixon, the Republicans have used racist dog whistles to win support for untrammeled capitalism, and now the two are coming unhinged. The racists have started to ditch the free-market ideology (sorry, libertarians) and have become comfortable with just being really ^$&!ing racist. They've become more like European far-right parties that like the welfare state just fine, as long as there aren't any brown people around to claim benefits.

Is there a snowball's chance in hell that the Democrats would ever make common cause with blatant racists to get universal health care passed? This has got to be some kind of epic cosmic joke, right? This is like Stannis Baratheon being told he has to sacrifice his daughter to get fire god powers.

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 Post Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2017 2:07 pm 
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as long as there aren't any brown people around to claim benefits.


Well, there are. Will that be a problem for them, I wonder…

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 Post Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2017 9:01 pm 
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Why do you think they keep raving about deporting all the immigrants?

"I hate all these lazy, useless immigrants coming over here and leeching off our benefits and committing all these crimes!"
"What about successful immigrants?"
"They're stealing our jooooobs!"

Edit: punctuation fail

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 Post Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2017 7:57 am 
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I mean, will that be enough for them to not support single-payer.

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 Post Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2017 8:26 am 
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Well if you have other policies to punish undesireables for their brownness, i guess then giving them healthcare is not that much of an abnomination.

More seriously, if you do ethnic policy, in times when the cake gets larger, your aim is to gain more of the additional cake for your group. Universal programs tend to prevent you from grabbing more or benefit thoose, who already have a bad starting position. When the cake gets smaller, your aim gets more towards preserving what you have. Policies that aim to prevent people from falling below a certain standard are now good, even if some of the "others" also benefit from it.

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 Post Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2017 11:57 pm 
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I think the Democrats would go for it on the simple basis that you can easily expand a benefit but it's a political nightmare to cut one (ask the swines going after the ACA how it's working for them). Besides, the Democrats are the only party that can govern or want to; letting their enemies give them what they want for free wouldn't be anathema to them.

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 Post Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 12:10 am 
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drachefly wrote:
I mean, will that be enough for them to not support single-payer.

It used to be. I mean, decades of Republican railing against moochers and takers wasn't just aimed at libertarians, it was meant to attract white working-class voters who thought that minorities were lazy and undeserving but weren't particularly wedded to free-market ideology. That appears to be turning into a less attractive pitch as the population gets older and sicker and decently-paying blue collar jobs continue to disappear. So I think we're starting to reach the point where the desire for universal healthcare outweighs the prospect that some minorities might claim it.

But we're also going to see demands to define eligibility upwards. One (aborted) leaked executive order floating around in the first couple of weeks of the Trump administration proposed deporting legal immigrants for being a burden on the taxpayer, due to having claimed benefits that they were at the time legally allowed to use (e.g. food stamps). And you hear the far right clamoring to remove birthright citizenship so that you can't become American simply by being born in the US. This probably requires a constitutional amendment so it won't happen.

Anyway, that appears to be happening among the electoral base. The politicians are a different story. Republican politicians are not going to abandon their corporate donors so easily.

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letting their enemies give them what they want for free wouldn't be anathema to them.

I doubt the Republicans would give it to them for free, even if the corporate wing were overpowered by the angry populists. They'd demand some very ugly immigration crackdowns in return.

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