> Like it or not, we need politicians who can work across the aisle and actually get things done.
To work with someone across the aisle you have to have someone on the other side of the aisle who wants to work with you. The republicans have made it absolutely clear over the past decade that they will not work with Democrats. Centrist Democrats need work with their colleagues to their left if they want to accomplish anything.
Not quite. 54% of the 135M American workers have a retirement plan.[1] That's 73M out of the ~250M American adults. Maybe you can call that the middle class. But point taken. To be less pithy, these individual shareholders have little power to sway governance, particularly if their stock is held in a managed fund. The rich, connected shareholders steer things, and it's not always in the interests of the company in the long term.
The vast majority of Americans derive the lion’s share of their income over most of their lifetime from selling their labor, not from capital returns, whether from stock alone or any other combination of capital.
That is such a joke. What does "booming economy" really mean? Mostly the stock market, I think. And "low unemployment"? It's low because people who have given up looking aren't counted. And because it includes lots of short-term and poorly compensated jobs.
That's more thanks to the Fed than anything else, though their role is also pretty small. The truth is the president doesn't have the ability to affect the economy very much one way or the other.
Unemployment, economy, stock market, GDP - all have been on the exact same trajectory post the 2009 recession. We would have been exactly here even if a tree was the President. The only thing that got worse economically was the Federal deficit, which is a trillion dollars now.
"low inflation"
...
not if you include assets (stocks, houses, education, health[care], etc.) that are not included in the "official" inflation calculations.
> work across the aisle and actually get things done
If the proposed action is part of / agreeable with the $opposing_party platform, I don't think I _want_ it to get done; with extraordinarily few exceptions.
I'd prefer someone who can push forward without compromising the point of the platform.
The problem here comes when there's no possible state of compromise that would make even anyone at all happy. For example, on a border wall: you build it to be functional, or you don't. A non-functional border wall is essentially not a border wall.
There's no compromise state; instead, there's at best some kind of tit-for-tat, where you'll concede something else in exchange for your most important plans.
That's because a border wall is too specific for a policy platform. The more general concept of border security provides plenty of room for compromise.
But even a wall provides room for compromise--physical barriers in some places but not others.
Arguably, Donald Trump is more of a media celebrity through inherited wealth that was funneled through mock business transactions for tax evasion than an actual businessman the way Yang is, but I'm not sure people are prepared to make the distinction, so that might be an effective political line against Yang even if it's not all that true in any relevant sense.
Trump is a business person in the same way that the Kardashians are business people. They have businesses, but they are, first and foremost, celebrities.
To work with someone across the aisle you have to have someone on the other side of the aisle who wants to work with you. The republicans have made it absolutely clear over the past decade that they will not work with Democrats. Centrist Democrats need work with their colleagues to their left if they want to accomplish anything.