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Saturday, July 22, 2017

A "Better Deal" Still The Same Old One

The Democrats are giving up on their current "Resistance" slogan which has not worked in all those special elections that they lost.  The party has a new slogan:  "A Better Deal!"  It's an obvious play off of the New Deal that Franklin Roosevelt put forward 80 years ago.  I doubt that there are many voters who remember the actual New Deal, and I strongly suspect that most voters don't even know what the New Deal included.  Still, this is the big step that the Dems have come up with to improve their message.

So what does the Better Deal include?  According to early reports, it's an economic package of infrastructure spending of 1 trillion dollars over ten years and raising the minimum wage to fifteen bucks.  This is a rather strange pair.  The Trump agenda item is to spend 1 trillion dollars on infrastructure over the next ten years, but the Democrats have been opposing that up until now.  To say the least, it's rather bizarre for the Dems to adopt the same idea as part of their own plan after opposing it for the last six months.  The minimum wage increase sounds good, but while it will raise low wages it will also destroy a huge number of the jobs affected.  The 15 dollar minimum wage was passed in Seattle and studies have shown that income among low wage workers declined by 12% because many had hours cut back and others lost their jobs completely to automation.  If the higher minimum wage doesn't work in super-liberal Seattle, how will it work across the country?

What the Better Deal really shows is that the Democrats still have no ideas of their own.  They always say that their problem is messaging.  They're wrong.  The problem is lack of message.  No matter how you say it, nothing does not turn into something.

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