• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    First of all, screw Trump and J.D. Vance, their policies are awful. There’s no way they’re earning my vote, so it’s either going to be Harris (who I very much disagree with) or a third party protest vote. I’ll be watching the campaign to decide which it’s going to be, though my vote doesn’t really matter because my state is most likely going to Trump by 20%+ spread unless there are more anti-vaxxers than I thought in my state.

    That said, I disagree with most of those policies, but I don’t think they’re things that should scare you from voting for her, I just think they’re bad policies. For example:

    corporate tax

    Corporations aren’t people, they’re legal structures made up of people. Instead of raising the corporate tax, I think we should be taxing people, not entities.

    The intent here is to target wealthy people, so we should instead tax stock options at fair market value immediately upon issue, with perhaps an exemption on the first $20k or so of stock options (or perhaps to non-highly compensated employees) or if it is deposited directly into a workplace retirement account (but it would count toward the max). That would target one of the major ways the super-wealthy avoid taxes. A high corporate tax just encourages more creative accounting (e.g. here’s how Amazon dodged taxes years ago).

    capping rent and utility payments

    Landlords will just find other ways to get money from you, or they’ll skimp on maintenance. Or we’ll run into the problem San Francisco has with tons of vacancies despite tons of demand, which I’m convinced is because of their rent controls and renter-friendly policies (why give up your lease if you have a really good rate? Just keep paying in case you want to move back…).

    Utilities will just provide a crappier service if they’re not making enough profit. Instead of that, we should cap utility company profits and require utility companies to have a discounted rate that poorer people can apply for (I’m pretty sure both already exist, they do in my area).

    medicare for all

    This could be okay, depending on the formulation. We certainly need to change something about our healthcare system. My preference is to force care providers to be more transparent in their pricing, separate health insurance from employers, limit patents, and have strict caps on profits for any pharmaceutical or medical device that was partially funded w/ taxpayer dollars.

    I don’t know if that would solve it, and I think it’s impractical to actually get those passed, so I’m not necessarily opposed to expanding Medicare. But I don’t think it’s the panacea politicians make it out to be.

    investigated fossil fuel companies

    Yeah, do more of that! There’s a lot of corruption in that industry, and we need to air it out.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        It’s irrelevant how I vote. I live in Utah, which is all but guaranteed to go to Trump. Harris will get something like 30-35% of the vote, RFK will probably get 10%, and Trump will get 55%-ish. The closest a Republican got to losing was Trump in 2016 where McMullen got 20% or so and Trump only got 45%, but he still won by ~20% of the vote (Clinton got 25%-ish). I’d be shocked if I’m off by more than 5% on any of those.

        It literally does not matter who I vote for, so I might as well give third parties a little more credibility.