This is an interesting cross-product of poverty and employment type (with an element of personal choice thrown in). It doesn’t include a magnitude of subsidies however. AL and MS have higher poverty rates than FL, but perhaps FL has proportionally more people employed in job types that don’t typically offer insurance?
I suspect it is pre-65 retirees in FL/GA/TX and perhaps a few others, although surprised to not see AZ in that group.
Ah, good point.
I’m ready to save on these subsidies!
Do tourist jobs often come with health care coverage?
I was thinking that a lot of hospitality jobs didn’t, hence the contrast with AL and MS, which I expect have proportionally fewer such jobs. I bet Disney jobs do. But, there are also many pre-65 retirees who would be more worried to go naked on health insurance than restaurant workers in their 20’s.
Certainly some early retirees are getting the subsidies. I would guess more are coming from food service, construction, and small businesses though.
She got rejected from the MAGA club and has now been cast adrift. Not even running for re-election now.
100% deserved. She is a terrible person.
The bolded is what I am concerned about. I can see Trump going full on lunatic at that point.
The midterms typically fire the starting gun for the next presidential election, consigning the incumbent to lame duck status. It is not a position that Trump – who continues to drop dark hints about running for an unconstitutional third term – is likely to relish.
Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “With Donald Trump, ‘lame duck’ may just be another word for nothing left to lose. He will still have vast, unchecked powers, which he’s already made clear that he will exercise in the rawest, most reckless way possible.
“He’s figured out what he can do with the power of pardoning – for my friends everything, for my enemies the law. He’s pardoning major drug kingpins and corrupt politicians right and left before he’s officially a lame duck. How does Donald Trump behave when he has nothing politically left to lose? That’s a question I’m not sure that we’ve gotten our heads around.”
I think the “vast, unchecked powers” concern might be overblown (emphasis on the word “might”).
Part of the reason our Glorious Leader has been operating unchecked is because the courts have generally held that individuals, states, and individual congresscritters have lacked standing to bring suit on certain matters. There’s been an implication that “The House” or “The Senate” might have standing, but the GOP-controlled House/Senate haven’t been inclined to act.
If the Dems gain control of at least one house of Congress…that potentially changes, or at least we get to see the extent to which the courts are in our Glorious Leader’s pocket, rather than just being a stickler for a particular interpretation of how the delegation of powers in the Constitution is supposed to work.
There are, of course, constraints in how much a Congress with a slim Dem majority can do. The Glorious Leader will have veto power, and the Dems are almost certainly not going to get enough seats in the Senate to overcome a filibuster (they’ll have their work cut out for them just to pick up the 4 seats to get a simple majority).
But you are correct…there is a risk that our Glorious Leader will go completely off the rails, and the illusion that the Constitution still means anything will be dispelled. Hopefully that won’t happen, but the fact that I’ve used the phrase “the illusion that the Constitution still means anything” might suggest my thoughts on the matter. (I hope I’m wrong, but….)
“We the people” are the first three words of the constitution for a reason. The system is set up to prevent short term overreactions. If a president’s actions can be considered a crime, it opens the door to a small group of people overriding the will of the people. If a POTUS does something so politically unpopular that a majority of the people expect a consequence, this can happen through Congress, no crime is necessary. I don’t like the outcome of the SCOTUS ruling, but it is the right one.
Congressional elections are decentralized enough that one person can not control the outcome. One person can play with rules to try and alter the outcomes, and the electoral college arguably enables land to be represented in the voting, but there are limits to how far things can swing. 45%? Maybe. 35%? No chance.
My earlier comment probably needs some clarification.
The Constitution has a significant flaw. It requires that “enough” people are willing to abide by its explicit and implicit rules, and that the people have a mechanism to inject some corrective measures when the federal government starts to go too far awry.
The Constitution (as currently interpreted, at least) lacks a mechanism to address what happens when one or both of those are not actually the case.
Thanks to the architecture of our elections (gerrymandering, first past the post elections), it’s questionable that the people have had a viable mechanism to impose a check on the government when it gets too far out of kilter. At best, we’re likely stuck with choosing the lesser evil to represent people in our general area…and even then, the evils are increasingly gaming the system so that politicians/parties choose their voters, rather than voters choosing their representatives.
And, of course, the past year has highlighted what happens when the authorities who are supposed to act as checks/balances upon one another choose not to do so. We’ve had tastes of this problem before, and it could actually be worse in some respects.
It is fair to point out that this flaw I perceive in the Constitution is not one that is easy to fix. It is intentionally challenging to amend the Constitution, and the potential for abuse would make adding further safety nets risky.
I’m hoping that a Dem victory in the midterms will at least bring a few more people who respect the explicit and implicit rules of the Constitution and our system of government in general into power, and who might be willing to try to dust off some of the intended checks and balances in government. However, I think there is a valid concern that a Dem victory could push the administration into a position to run further amok.
I would hope that the courts and erosion of our Glorious Leader’s power base would be sufficient to guard against that. But if not….
Admittedly, at the core of the problem is the extreme political polarization in American society today, and how evenly matched the two sides are…and I don’t see a good way to fix that, short of some architectural change that would empower the moderate/muddled middle.
I’m sticking to my thesis that the US has been in a cold civil war for at least a decade and a half. While I think it’s still unlikely that the civil war will go hot, or that the republic will more obviously fail, I think it would be naive to think either isn’t beyond the realm of possibility (although I note that it’s my career to think about, quantify, and try prepare for very unlikely things to the extent reasonable).
In the meantime…
Isn’t the real question, has the pendulum swung any further out than it has in the last 250 years, and is there any reason to think it won’t eventually revert to the mean? Maybe it won’t until Trump is gone, but it seems we are much closer to the end of the Trump era at this point than we are to the start of it. He is just too old for it to be feasible for him to project “strength” for much longer, and he will fade away quickly.
Remember that the sociopaths behind most of the hate and meanness of others will still be there even if God decided to exist and smite tRump old-school.
Gotta get those people out on a rail, tarred and fathered as well.
Jefferson had the solution for shitty republics.
I would say that through at least the timespan covered by my political awareness (i.e. since 1980ish), the US has been in a pattern where, when the pendulum swings to the other side, it tends to get progressively further from the center.
Now admittedly that’s not a perfect metaphor. I could see a reasonable person pointing to one or two occasional exceptions when it didn’t go as far to one side as it had on the prior swing, and I think an argument can be made that so far it’s been swinging further to one side than the other.
It’s also a potentially flawed analogy in the sense that I don’t have a good, plausible picture of how the next rightward swing could exceed the current one, in the sense that I don’t know that there is a currently a credible cast of characters able to wrangle the requisite number of voters in the bullpen / in the farm system, positioning themselves to pull off such a feat.
But imperfections aside….
I have little hope that there will be a reversion to the mean (after adjusting for the current what I hope is an outlier) until something happens that shocks the American political system into derailing the pendulum.
Just to add to my prior comment…
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone could make the argument that Watergate and its aftermath was the most recent example of a real pendulum derailment in American political history.
I suppose that I could hope that Trump 2.0 will end up triggering another derailment….but I think to achieve such a derailment, both “sides” have to be shocked enough into working together to reset the system.
I don’t think the GOP (particularly its supporters) are there yet…and I’m skeptical that party inertia among the Dems will limit their willingness to make changes that the party of a couple of years ago would view as disadvantageous.
But who knows. Perhaps our Glorious Leader’s lame duck period will be bad enough to achieve the critical mass to provide the necessary shock.
