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Comment by psychometry | Hacker News Reader

Are you referring to the billionaires who vote Republican because they believe it benefits their personal financial situation and they don't care about anyone else's? Or is there some other type of person who actually benefits under the sorts of policies like this that the GOP has been pushing for the last 50 years?

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If you can’t understand why poor rural voters like republicans, it’s because you’re missing information, not them. It’s perfectly comprehensible if your understanding of politics goes beyond what you can get from talk show hosts.

Have you asked yourself why rich people pretty reliably vote Democrat if, according to your model, it’s going to disadvantage them?

> Have you asked yourself why rich people pretty reliably vote Democrat if, according to your model, it’s going to disadvantage them?

Personally, to give others access to education, parental leave, sick leave, vacation, healthcare, access to broadband internet, ranked choice voting, personal freedoms, public transportation, etc.

Obviously Dems are nowhere near perfect, but they at least tick some boxes. But the point is I do not mind voting for someone even if it causes me a loss, as long as I think it helps others.

>>Personally, to give others access to education, parental leave, sick leave, vacation, healthcare, access to broadband internet, ranked choice voting, personal freedoms, public transportation, etc

and to most republicans and libertarians believe none of those things are a proper role for government nor should be provided by the government

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It's an opinion, it isn't right or wrong

Or you know they believe the constitution actually means something, and no where in Article 2 Section 8 does the enumerated powers of the US Federal Government say the government is authorized to provide (or even regulate) "education, parental leave, sick leave, vacation, healthcare, access to broadband internet, ranked choice voting, personal freedoms, public transportation,"

While I share your strong negative feelings, we need to be a bit more honest. There are such people as one issue voters that are perfectly aware of how the GOP will vote on other issues and do not like it (or even hate, e.g., Trump), but are abortion or 2nd ammendement absolutists.

For many, the Democratic party left me and swung to the left. I'm all for policies which are low taxes & limited government (remember under Trump & before corona, we had record unemployment even among minorities). Hence my move to a red, growing state (Texas). It's a vote between economic growth and personal freedom over culture/identity politics.

I don't see where this bill supports "limited government", it seems like the government is expanding it's powers by restricting yet another thing. I'm more of a quality-of-life kind of person, but to each their own. If I was optimizing for "personal freedom", I'd try find a state that allows you to do things like use legal marijuana, bet on sports, purchase a Tesla in-state, automatically register to vote, etc.

And while Texas does have an impressive economic growth record, some other states (California and NY) are actually growing faster [1]: The most trusted measure of economic strength says California is the world-beater among democracies. The state’s gross domestic product increased 21% during the past five years, dwarfing No. 2 New York (14%) and No. 3 Texas (12%), according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

I remember before Corona, we had record deficits and government spending. How is that an example of limited government?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-14/califo...

Unfortunately you misunderstand not just the indicators of a healthy economy (hint: look at cost of living and changes in wealth distribution and not just employment figures) but also the reasons for why such indicators change over time.

On economic issues, people ascribe far too much blame or thanks to whoever happens to be president at the time. Whatever positive indicators you think pointed to a healthy economy in 2017 or whenever probably have nothing to do with the regime at the time; that was just the continuation of a decade of post-recession growth.

Anyway, where are you going to move to next now that Texas is slowly turning purple?

"Record unemployment" gives a lot of credit for something that largely happened under Obama. What was the percentage improvement?

"Trump didn't screw it up" isn't as impressive a claim though, I suppose...

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