US residents: What big domestic policy improvements have the american people won from congress in the last 30 years?
US residents: What big domestic policy improvements have the american people won from congress in the last 30 years?
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.
The inflation reduction act is probably the most significant piece of climate change policy in American history and is expected to bring emissions to a little under half 2005 levels.
Also, I think it capped insulin prices at $35 a month? That was the hope anyway.
I'll be paying 380 ish bucks for insulin this coming month, only using my "good, professional job" type insurance to cover some of the cost. It's around 200/mo. Cheaper to buy from Walmart directly without insurance than it is to process it through it at my required pharmacy. I don't know if the insulin caps have taken effect, or if I don't qualify, all I know is I'm getting screwed because I'm alive and want to stay that way.
The rest of the policy seems cool, but won't be if it pans out like the insulin crap.
Goddamn, America you never cease to find new ways to disappoint me.
It seems to vary state by state, though also for anyone on medicaid/medicare. You might be screwed by that professional job insurance!
I dunno if it helps but some googling took me to this diabetes resource Which seemed pretty good. Might be worth checking as this seems like stuff you have to look into vs having it happen automatically because why not screw us one more time?
One time my parents tried to tell me they shouldn't have to pay for insulin for "fat people" and the nurse educator in me went on a fifteen minute rant about how insulin dependent diabetics are actually the ones who get it genetically in childhood and finished the rant by asking why they're advocating for the deaths of impoverished children. Not that fat people deserve to die or be sick either but come ON if you're not willing to do the research yourself then just listen to what the experts say? Everybody in America these days wants to do 0 research and just walk out into the world to convince people that lavender oil will cure their cancer.
It only applies to Medicare recipients ... which is better than nothing I suppose.
The $35/month in the IRA goes into effect for Medicare part D jan 1st. So at the moment, it has not kicked in and you apprently do not qualify.
However, it spurred the biggest insulin producers to cap insulin prices to $35 for most everyone, including people on private insurance, starting Jan 1st.. This is undoubtedly to prevent regulation forcing them to reduce prices, but it will likely stick due to that threat.
So congrats, you should be saving $165/month starting in a few days.
Here in Sweden insulin is free. Although we have universal healthcare most medical things cost a little, up to about $230/year then any medication or procedure is free.
Insulin, and related equipment and so on, doesn't even cost a little for the patient here and is completely free. It does of course cost our government and taxpayers money, our government pays about $0.09 per person per day for insulin.
Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) - which among other things created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and put in place the Volcker Rule which forbids banks from making certain risky investments with depositors money. To give you an idea of the power of the Volcker Rule, when it went in place banks begged (and got) a 5 year delay to divest for investments that violate the rule. Yeah, banks were playing fast-and-loose with with the money you deposited in your checking and savings accounts for their own gain. The Volcker Rule stopped (most) of that.
Didn't Dodd-Frank get gutted a bit in recent years?
Parts of it were repealed in 2018 under trump and the Republicans.
Yeah, Dodd occurred to me but I had vague recollections of a recent gutting as well.
This is such a cope, we had glass steagall.. we had everything from this dodd frank already but decided only parts of it were worthwhile. It only took the fucking 2008 crash to decide we need 'some' oversight of banking speculation. We STILL dont have something to replace glass steagall. To say that dodd frank is good is like having diharhea in your bed wiped off and calling it clean.
SOPA/PIPA
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
That bill would have completely destroyed the internet. Democrats and republicans alongside Hollywood faught the American people and lost. It's the only time I've seen the people actually win, and pretty much every individual regardless of their other politics was united against it. It's debatable if we could have done it without Google and the rest of big tech helping though. But still, it sent a clear message across the entire political spectrum that there was a line they couldn't cross.
We also briefly won Net Neutrality ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality ), and although it's no longer in effect, the ISPs would have probably done a lot worse if they didn't know we cared and are watching.
Honestly though, I don't know if stopping things from getting a lot worse should even count as an "improvement".
Honestly though, I don't know if stopping things from getting a lot worse should even count as an "improvement".
It shouldn't. It's a very low bar for a modern country.
And by now we have so many worse threats to free communication on the Internet than the copyright industry, yet the Internet is nowhere near as united against any of them as in 2012. On the contrary, everyone now calls for censorship of the other side's "misinformation", "hate speech", content "harmful to minors", etc etc.
the other side's "misinformation", "hate speech", content "harmful to minors"
I hate to be "that guy," but c'mon! Only ONE side is responsible for 99.999% of that.
The legalization of gay marriage
SCOTUS is responsible for Obergefell; Congress gave us DOMA.
You forgot the activists who fought, literally, for decades before that. The court just declared us the Victors after the fact
I’d add Americans With Disabilities Act — though I don’t think it’s enforced enough.
I think that was passed in 1990.
Requiring nutritional information on food
That was an EU thing.
It was also cheaper for manufacturers to use the same design in both USA and Europe, which made it an easy implementation for the States.
?? Nutrition labels have been on food my entire life, and I'm almost 50. Has something about them changed in the last 30 years?
It wasn't law until the mid 90's. Ingredients have been around as long as I can remember but not nutritional information
The cares act listed 18 million people out of poverty. When it ended 4 million of them did not fall back into poverty.
When minimum wage was increased to $7.25/hour (although it should be increased again).
Affordable Care Act
Funding for covid tests and vaccines
Don't know if these count, since they only come from SCOTUS decisions however Congress has not written a law stripping these rights. Right to have a same-sex relationship (2003) Right to marry a same-sex partner (2015) Right to employment while LGBT (2020)
Affordable Care Act is a mixed bag. It brings insurance to the masses, but insurance is a rip off for the most part. ACA is very half baked without providing a Medicare plan buy in (public option) or forcing everyone to purchase their insurance from the exchange to increase benefits and drive prices down.
Personally I wish we just had universal healthcare/Medicare for all in the US. Hopefully I live long enough to see it.
The ACA isn't the end goal for sure, but it's better than where we were before. Hopefully as people get used to it, we will be more likely to pass a universal healthcare system.
The problem with the ACA was that it had to make a lot of compromises to get it through with support by Republicans. While the ACA was initially very unpopular, it's become more popular in time (if you discount rebranding efforts like Kentucky Connect being the name of the ACA marketplace there.. Then Kentucky politicians calling ACA broken but Connect good causing Connect to be popular but ACA not in that state).
It was a good effort at getting the foot in the door for universal Healthcare one day, imo.
There were also Cash for Clubker programs (although that could've just been state level) that gave people money to buy a newer car with better gas milage to help the environment and keep people from using as much gas.
Stimulus checks at the end of Bush presidency and during covid. As far as I know, those were the first, creating a precedent that the government could sometimes provide financial relief directly to citizens.
Cash for clunkers harmed buyers in the used car market, especially the poor.
Most of the Cash allocated for Cash for Clunkers went to people that were going to buy a new car anyway.
RCR Stories did an interesting story on this topic:
Multiple academic researchers studying the results of the regulation found the stimulus to be extremely minimal at best, at a high cost.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System
In the end, it's yet another example of taxes used to enrich those at the top.
I'm hoping that the repeal of Roe vs Wade seals the fate of the republican party. With continued legal action against gerrymandered states, a solidified stance against women's reproductive rights, along with the overt racism I'm optimisticly hoping to see a functional dissolvement of the republican party in it's current form by 2028. The pessimistic side of me is worried about strategic division of the democrats "not wanting Biden" or other short sighted horeshit driving us straight into a hate filled fascist government we can never recover from.
seals the fate of the republican party? the repeal of Roe vs Wade happened on a democrat's watch and on a Catholic one
when was it you saw and heard Biden on tv defending abortion rights and saying is fighting for us? maybe a few times shit is so real he should be on the tv or streaming or something everyday
Biden has rode "I am not Trump." into the ground but people are still supporting him on that fact alone
and Obama who Biden was in the White with wrote policies that harmed the health of the citizens and Trump and then Biden both expanded on while in office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Smoking_Prevention_and_Tobacco_Control_Act
when has Biden been a champion of healthcare or for cannabis or for gay marriage? dude is Catholic for God's sake and very public about it and his policies and actions in office have reflected this he chose a prosecutor for a vice who openly opposed what he promised on the campaign trail the ones he has went back on like cannabis when he fired all those staffers
and everyone still thinks he is a cannabis champion
being not trump does not make someone a better more qualified candidate
Biden took my right to vote away so this is one of the only outlets
know in this next election it will most likely be Biden vs Trump same as before how could it go differently remember what happened when we were going to have more options
Obama and Biden chained the Green Party candidate to a chair so she could not debate with them and the other major politicians how is that not fascist
The Infrastructure Bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act are huge examples from the Biden presidency.
From those we're getting tons of bridges fixed, Internet upgrades, public transit improvements, research funded for climate change (including locally, Akron received finding for researching alternative polymers that don't rely on oil), domestic security improvements from domestic chip manufacturing, port and airport upgrades, funding to increase the size of EV charging networks, power grid upgrades to help with all of that, labor got a huge boon as all of these bills encourage or require domestic manufacturing, medicare drug negotiation, we're replacing ALL the lead pipes in public water supply lines, more fixes to tax cheats from corporations and rich people, and funds to cleanup superfund sites.
People really don't realize how much Biden has gotten done; especially when compared to other recent presidents ... like Mr. Build A Wall.
The affordable care act while controversial was also very big as you said.
Consumer solar and EV rebates.
i’m sure the federal government could’ve stood in the way had they chosen to.
In fact, they're still trying to, for all three of these things.
But, uh, yeah, it's pretty much those three. The only other big one I can even think of is the crime bill, which is a net evil by a huge margin.
…Have there been any?
The border wall. But it should be further reinforced. People can't just enter the country illegally.
Nope, the border wall is expensive, ineffective, and it destroys ecosystems.
They don't though. It's not illegal to seek asylum.
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.
What believing in imaginary lines in the dirt does to a MFer
Johnny Depp did a great scene that covers this in Blow.
Go on thinking rules don't apply to you.
It has really been working out for countries south of the U.S.
Was this congress?
Aside from Boats, Tunnels, Ladders, Airplanes, Ropes or any of the large gaps where it's not feasible to build a wall on. It's more useful as a grift to pay Republican donors in the form of bloated contracts than it is effective at stopping people from crossing the border.