It would take an income of hundreds of thousands of dollars PER MONTH to have child support that high. And regardless of how quickly they accumulated, that debt was generated in 2003. That’s TWO DECADES of not paying a pretty significant childcare debt. There’s no way to brush that aside as no big deal.

While it’s true the lion’s share is unpaid taxes, he owes $50k in child support. I’d still call that a deadbeat dad.

Anyone who votes for a third party candidate gets no value from their vote in FPTP. They have effectively no impact on the outcome at all. This is no worse than that and not in any way a reason not to implement RCV.

And again, this is the slimmest of edge cases for a sliver of voters. Most voters will easily adapt to the system (particularly if any effort at all is made to educate them) and even those that don’t will very rarely lose their vote due to not ranking lower candidates. And those voters that would are already throwing away their vote without impacting the result in FPTP. That this is a real issue that should block RCV implementation because it’s in the interest of voting fairness is A LIE.

It’s not really any more disenfranchising than FPTP. While RCV has tactical voting issues, so does FPTP, and in most cases someone who doesn’t understand the system is just going to vote for someone they perceive to have a chance of winning, which is very likely to be in the final two candidates. And if they’re instead the type to vote for a minor candidate, their vote would have just been meaningless in FPTP anyway.

All the trivia about the very rare cases where tactical voting matters in RCV is just that, trivia. No one really needs to try to game theory their vote out, because in most cases it just doesn’t matter and RCV just gives some people the ability to first declare who they actually want before sending their vote to the preferred major candidate. And in the end, people who can’t figure out basic voting instructions simply aren’t thinking about their vote that deeply. We’re lucky if they’ve even familiarized themselves with all the candidates.

It’s really hard for any system to be worse than FPTP. The people spreading FUD about RCV are mostly doing it because the flaws in FPTP benefit them.

So just don’t make it that way.

But undervoting isn’t really a problem. No one is being disenfranchised by not casting a second vote (or ranking all options), they just aren’t availing themselves of the full range of options. Even just voting for one person could be an intentional choice if you don’t really care about the other options or want your first choice to have a better chance of winning an expected head-to-head.

This is at worst an indicator the government should run some informational campaigns, not a reason not to use multi-voting systems.

It’s always going to be two parties, because any other arrangement just hurts the parties with more in common. What does happen is one dies and a new party rises to replace it. For more simultaneous parties we need to (and should) change our voting system.

There are plenty of rightwing pipelines out there for young people, regardless of their parents. With people like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, along with a much more online life so they can find and reinforce each other, I’d say it’s a much friendlier environment for right wing radicalization among young people than 20-30 years ago. The backbone of the Republican party may be old bigots, but at least some people in the movement are working very hard to generate young bigots to replace them and racism, sexism, and transphobia aren’t things only old people are prone to.

Sure, but you’re whatabouting an injustice of some people being temporarily detained to FOUR MILLION LIVES. If that was actually all it took, that’s a pretty reasonable exchange.

The consequences were way better than the let 'er rip nations. If China had a death toll equivalent to the United States, they’d have 5 million dead. Even the “China is lying” people are talking about hundreds of thousands, or possibly a million, not 5 million.

Staying COVID-zero until better treatments and vaccines are available actually does save lives.

Daddy Kavanaugh wouldn’t warrant a complete refusal to answer. “My father paid my debts” isn’t a scandalous statement at all and would put to bed a cloud that’s been hanging over him since confirmation. That they’re not saying such suggests the truth would be a worse look than just leaving the question open.

Unless this is a prelude to going third party, he’s not spoiling anything in the Democratic primary. He’s probably more of a play to deliver anti-Biden/anti-Democratic-Party messaging.

The US has worldwide taxation (so you can’t just live somewhere else to avoid taxes) and an exit tax (so you can’t just renounce your citizenship without paying up).

The exit tax would probably need to be increased to not make it an attractive choice, but it does already exist. I believe the current tax is basically “pay a 23.8% capital gains tax as if you sold everything”.

Seriously. It was a solid first draft of a solution in a world that didn’t have many contemporary examples to draw from, but then it was just left as a draft and almost never updated (with a few notable modifications for which “all men” were created “equal”).

There’s a reason we don’t instill a clone of our own form of democracy when we regime-change a place.

For a lot of people “unpaid time off” isn’t a favor. You’re asking them to pay to vote.

Plus the rules frequently only come into play if their work shift makes it literally impossible to make it to the polls. If they could wake up from their third shift job to get in line as polls open before making it to their other job at 7:45 sharp, then no time off for you. If you need to get your kids to school during that time slot? Too bad, that’s time you could technically be voting, so it’s not your employer’s responsibility.

I have a hard time believing someone who throws both the “printed too much money” and “backed down on student loans” talking points at the wall is a real person with a coherent political ideology.

It’s a wealth tax, those are pretty aggressive rates.

Eh, it is, but it’s not really 100 members strong. It means the word has good branding among Democrats, but members like Hakeem Jeffries aren’t going to go to bat to fight against business or do anything that might make the larger party uncomfortable if it doesn’t accommodate a progressive demand.

I mean, making Republicans publicly block good things is good. Just because the Court is captured and Republicans are reliably awful doesn’t mean the best course of action is just quietly accepting their power.

You’re acting like the law is a hard and fast rulebook that you turn the crank and find the result. Our legal system is already full of gray areas, split decisions, and laws that are ignored because that’s part of the role of the people enforcing it. Student loan forgiveness wasn’t definitively illegal, it was only “illegal” because we knew the Republican court would find some way to stop it. They threw away the law to make that happen, and they’ll do it again, but the first step in contesting their power is forcing them to wield it against public opinion, the next step is to remind the public of the limits of their power. Simply saying “good game, you got us, the Court gets to do whatever it wants” is just cowardice.

You’re almost certainly confusing wealth taxes with income taxes. Bernie Sanders had a wealth tax plan, it ranged from 1%-8% depending on wealth. From $1B to $2.5B the rate was 5%.