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.
The point of my hypothetical is that communicable diseases have a tendency to evolve to be less pathogenic over time.
That’s not actually a real thing. It was a theory by a guy in the 1800s that’s been soundly debunked but spread because people want to believe it’s true.
And notably they’re not really two entirely unrelated things. “SARS” is SARS-CoV-1 and “COVID” is SARS-CoV-2.
Office buildings are test tubes, schools are petri dishes.
Polling generally showed Democrats supporting masking by a massive margin. The most recent poll I could find (April 2022) had support for mandatory masking on public transportation among Democrats as 80-5.
What’s the point of this hypothetical? It’s both not remotely close to where we are currently and has redefined the consequences to absurdity.
“Would you still wear a mask if the consequence of infection was a single light sneeze?”
“Would you wear a seat belt if the only consequence of car crashes was a small bruise?”
And those were the good old days when they were just trying to be subtly racist, rather than the now times where they’re just straight up trying to smuggle Nazi dog whistles in.
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.
And pair that with the government saying it’s mostly killing old people and those with health issues then just declaring it over. I wasn’t expecting lockdown forever, but just like keeping it as an ongoing health concern. Instead they’ve been wiping their site of tracking, dropping funding, and abandoning workers to just hope their employer isn’t going to get them sick. COVID being over is good politically and good for business, so COVID is over.
You’re arguing that the EC’s unfairness is unimportant, not that it’s fair. And ignoring the senate imbalance where just a couple extra votes is a massive change.
So since it’s unimportant, let’s change it to be fair. Except I don’t think you really feel it’s unimportant and actually care very much about those two extra votes.
it’s still arguable that Republicans have unfair representation in the Senate and EC
LOL, wut? There’s nothing arguable about that. Republicans very definitely have an unfair senate and electoral advantage entirely related to being more popular in less populated states (which, with the notable exceptions you’ve highlighted, tend to also be more rural).
You’re cherry picking top ten and bottom ten like the whole swath of states in between don’t also have unfair allocation and thus don’t matter, while being pretty inconsistent with your battleground state definitions to suit your sorting needs (NH is blue because it only voted R once in 30 years, while every battleground you listed has the same history, and red Florida and Ohio have been 50/50).
While your point about population vs. density is correct, everything else seems to be trying to muddy the waters about the EC rather than just point out an interesting factoid or offer a pedantic correction. There’s no serious argument that the EC isn’t unfair from an individual voter perspective and biased toward one side from a national perspective.
Easy:
Support from the legislature is all that’s important. If the justices say “you can’t do it”, then ignore them because clearly they can. The constitution says very little about the supreme court and its size has been changed multiple times before. This is just doing history again.
Hawaii isn’t in the ten least populous states and Maine isn’t a blue state. It’s not a straight sort, but Republicans far and away benefit from the unequal representation of the Senate and Electoral College.
What? No we didn’t.