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Why Republicans are fighting the basic-income programs many cities and states are adopting: 'Is money a birthright now?'
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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You say this like they have any decency or shame. They will continue to talk out of one side of their mouths about being a party of the common man while letting people who can't "afford to live" continue to die quietly in the gutters.
I”m not sure how you arrive at that. You seem to have missed my point. That is, if the republicans get what they want (a ban on min incomes), they could end up getting as a consequence something they want even less: the state getting involved in commerce in the course of upholding human rights legal obligations.
It makes little sense because they know full well the money will spent one way or another. So most likely this is a political tactic for something else. If there is a segment of unmotivated R voters somewhere but a strong likelihood that they would be more motivated to the polls if there were a proposition to ban any form of welfare, getting a proposition on the ballot would actually just be a trick to get more people turning out for Trump (because they will tick the Trump box while they are there).
What matters to republicans the most is not any kind of values or ideology; it’s simply nothing more than taking and holding power.
IIRC it was the Bush election where the republicans put a proposition on the ballot for gay marriage. Superficially you would think “sure, the republicans want to stop gay marriage”. But in reality the republican politicians did not care about gay marriage at all. They cared about a segment of elderly non-voting christian right conservatives. Those voters could not be motivated to get off their asses and travel to the polls to vote for Bush, but they would be damned if gays could get married, so they were highly motivated to vote in that election and of course while they are in the voting booth they ticked the Bush box. The gay marriage proposition was just a trick to get more votes for candidates.
I mean, again, you're claiming if Republicans get rid of minimum wage then they'll have to come up with some state-sponsored plan to get Bob his shoes when the inevitable wage reduction makes shoes even more unaffordable. Republicans do not care. They will let Bob walk to work barefoot, starving, and destitute, until it eventually kills him, and the whole time claim Bob's well-being is his own responsibility, and if he can't manage his life on the wages that the free market provides, maybe he didn't deserve to live in the first place. This is the party that asks rape victims what they were wearing, and suggests that bulletproof backpacks are the answer to school shootings. They do not give a fuck.
Min wage is entirely different than what these bans are about. There are no wages in this context. This is about a flat periodic income for non-wage earners for the most part.
You’re confused about how these bans work. If they don’t want to give Bob a flat living income from state funds at the state level, a ban is pointless because they can simply neglect to provide the money (as they already control the policy and money at the state level). The purpose of a ban is to prevent lower governments from acting. So if they implement a state-level statute banning Bob getting min income, city/county X can cannot give Bob a min income but they can still buy Bob a pair of shoes. Hence how it can backfire.
I’ve seen public libraries with sewing machines. So for example a librarian could theoretically use it to help Bob construct a pair of shoes using material that’s supplied by public money to the libraries. Such an outcome is a game of whack-a-mole.. The republicans would have to discover that’s happening and then legislate against it separately.