Yeah, subby. We get it. "Both sides are bad." But one side is boring corporatists who don't give a crap and the other side is 100% concentrated evil fascists, authoritarians and religious nutjobs. And while that's a choice between the lesser of two evils, it's not a difficult one.
Minimum wage works. Here is an article from the german newspaper FAZ (leans economically right) that presents a study that shows the low income sector has shrunk since the implementation of minimum wages.
Germany before had one of the biggest low income sectors in the western world.
And no, the unemployment rate did not skyrocket. In fact, Germany is as close to full employment as it gets.
Criticism of the comic aside, two party system is still definitely undesirable. I believe it is a side effect of first past the post voting. What we really should implement is ranked choice voting. It gets rid of the dumb "voting third party is voting for [opposite party]" argument by letting you vote for who you want guilt-free and falling back on your lower-ranked votes if #1 wasn't popular enough.
But you know, this will always meet resistance because politicians would lose their jobs for implementing this.
We all agree with this premise and mostly that the FPTP system is a large contributing factor to the TPS saying how it has based on seeing how places that don't have a TPS appear to do so because the have different voting systems like different iterations of ranked choice voting.
What I am wondering is what 'we' think the best way to implement voting would be?
Its always refreshing to look at the american political system if i am disappointed by the German one. Sure our sucks too, but at least we have more then 2 unvotable major parties.
The democrats have been trying to raise minimum wage for idk 15 years now, they just haven't been given a functional enough majority to make it happen at the national level, though they have absolutely done so at the state level. I think your complaint might be misdirected, and could better apply to the fundamental structure of our bicameral legislature, and especially at the filibuster rule that is getting increasingly unpopular with senators themselves. When the filibuster is gone sometime in the next 6 years I expect, you will see a noticeably more functional senate.
Don't ask your government for a living wage. Or your employer. An education that gives you leverage to negotiate a living wage tough... that's totally a governments responsibility and in its range of possibility. Everything else is a social subsidy which is fine as long as you call it by its name which is disability pay and unemployment pay. Ask your government for that too.
You need to learn a skill that leads to a living wage. Demanding politicians to directly do that is pointless, they are absolutely unable to give you that. The only thing they can directly do is set a minimum wage, which is essentially a lie. It doesn't actually give you a minimum/living wage, instead it makes you completely unemployable if your wage level is between 0-(minimum wage).
As u/nomad mentioned, demanding structures that make getting an education easier or give you safety nets when things go to shit, or basic income/negative tax rates for low incomes is something politicans can do. But don't demand stupid things like minimum wage, they might actually do those.