It's a 50/50 country. It would be alarming if, after one election, which will at best be decided 60/40 in their favor, a radically different (from their immediate predecessor) President was actually enable to enact their agenda. The system we have is literally designed to prevent that thing from happening. "Volunteer network" or not, Sanders isn't passing his agenda. If he was serious about doing that, he'd stay in the Senate.
Let's agree to disagree. I actually think big alarming changes are coming (and have already happened). I'm just a Canuck though, and not out to convince anyone. I'm really fascinated with the political changes I see happening (or think I see happening at least).
After 10 years in DC working in political circles, I can tell you that very little is actually changing. The giant, faceless bureaucracy still runs most of the show.
If you look into many of the "unprecedented events" you'll see that most of them aren't new and some of them are decades old.
Though if the events really are bad and were ignored before, it's worth asking "why?"
> After 10 years in DC working in political circles, I can tell you that very little is actually changing. The giant, faceless bureaucracy still runs most of the show.
Maybe but aren't you in danger of missing the big changes coming precisely because you are inside the bubble?
A political equivalent to "let them eat cake".
As an outside observer to the US it does seem like the pressure has to give somewhere soon at some point (and in a few other western democracies including my own though I think the US is further down the pipe on this one).
Valid line of reasoning but I'm 10 years out from that world specifically because the bubble was/is ugly.
I think you're 100% right that there's building pressure and something will give but that's precisely because things haven't changed much. If the general populace decides "no matter how I vote, things don't change" some will lose hope and give up.. while others will look to other approaches.
Canada is very different, because the party in power in the House of Commons can basically do anything it wants. By contrast, the political system of the US is effectively designed to produce gridlock. The Canadian Senate rarely blocks and introduces legislation unlike that of the US, just to name one example.
There are benefits and drawbacks to both systems. Right now I'm pretty happy with this aspect of the US system. (There are other parts of the US system I'm less happy with—such as the Electoral College.)
A lot of people think the changes Trump is making are radically different, and the system has turned out to be a gentleman's agreement that doesn't prevent anything.
Except that it's prevented all sorts of things, including the two biggest-ticket items in Trump's agenda --- the repeal of "Obamacare" and the construction of a wall on the southern border. I'd extend the argument by observing that the widespread belief in the Republican party that anything and everything was on the table ended up royally screwing them; it is, for instance, why they failed to repeal the ACA.
The reason why they failed is because they were the dog that caught the car - they had no plans that were remotely workable.
They pounded it with demagoguery to get elected but they didn't have anything behind the policy and knew it. They also knew that going forward with their disasters would hurt them even more.
Trump has been able to get almost nothing done. He got a tax cut, which was billed as radical but mostly just brings our corporate taxes in line with Western Europe. And he put tariffs on China—one of the few things the President can do without the support of Congress.
Is was my understanding it moves our nominal rates in line with the rest of the world, but this reduces our effective rates to below the rest of the world.
It’ll take a few years for the data to play out, but that’s likely not the case. A CBO study found that our effective corporate tax rate before the Trump tax cut was 18.6%. https://www.npr.org/2017/08/07/541797699/fact-check-does-the.... France, Australia, and Canada were from 8.5-11.2%. The Trump tax cut dropped the nominal rate by about 1/3 (accounting for state corporate taxes, which didn’t change). Assuming a proportional drop in the effective rate (which is a wild ass guess), that would move us below Brazil, Germany, and India, but keep us slightly above France, Canada, And Australia.
The US media coverage of Trump’s corporate tax cuts really misrepresented how completely mainstream it was: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/wp-content/uplo.... While the US nominal rate of almost 40% total was around the OECD average in 1990, the rest of the OECD dropped to just over 20% by 2017. Meanwhile, the US nominal rate didn’t drop at all.
As of August 14, 2019, the United States Senate has confirmed 146 Article III judges nominated by President Trump, including 2 Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, 43 judges for the United States Courts of Appeals, 99 judges for the United States District Courts, and 2 judges for the United States Court of International Trade.
