Interpret improvements as you like. For me it’s any large scale reforms or legislative packages designed to improve the country for all or see to the material interests of the majority without overly benefiting the elite.

Any big consumer protection, environmental, infrastructure, or other legislation from Clinton onwards that materially improved the lives of all?

Obamacare and the medicaid expansion comes to my mind. It has obviously improved people’s lives but considering how broken the healthcare system remains, and that it was written by the insurance industry to undermine single-payer, it seems to me a mitigated win at best.

Gay marriage and marijuana legalisation but that was the courts and the states although i’m sure the federal government could’ve stood in the way had they chosen to.

I’ve only live here since the 2010s so that’s all I can think of.

  • ani@endlesstalk.org
    0·
    11 months ago

    The border wall. But it should be further reinforced. People can’t just enter the country illegally.

      • Melkath@kbin.social
        01·
        11 months ago

        I actually want to be educated here, because my stance is that there should be a road to cheap and speedy citizenship, and that immigrants should assimilate into the system.

        My gut says that seeking asylum isn’t paying for someone to smuggle you over the boarder. It would require you going through an actual boarder checkpoint where you would do the paperwork to enter the country as a refugee.

        I know Republicans are assholes who have been obstructing that, but my gut tells me there is the legal way of entering the country and the illegal one.

        Hiding in the back of a pickup truck and buying a fake Juan Martinez social security card doesn’t feel like asylum seeking, it feels illegal.

        For context, I invoke the fake Juan Martinez social security card because when I worked at the Arizona Department of Education, there were at least 3000 Juan Martinezes with the same social security number attending Arizona public education, which I thought was HORRIBLE and extremely dehumanizing to those children, and it wasn’t the US government that did that. It was the coyotes and parents illegally immigrating that did that.

        Edit: to be crystal clear, Hegar is a fucking moron.

        America is fundamentally broken.

        Almost straight up shattered.

        I seek the balance between “how it should be” and “how it is”, and if that isn’t the conversation. If the conversation is “imma just do it”, from EITHER END, I get pissed at grownups acting like babies.