"A New Kind of Republican"

[applegrove]

A New Kind of Republican

By Reihan Salam at Slate

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/02/jeb_bush_and_reform_conservatism_is_bush_a_reformocon_a_founder_of_the_movement.html

"SNIP.....................


Instead of defending the welfare state in its current form, reformocons look at the goals of programs like Social Security and Medicare and then try to find better, fairer, more cost-effective ways of achieving them. They believe a few other things as well. To the extent possible, social programs that help those who fall on hard times should be geared toward helping them achieve economic self-sufficiency, rather than letting them become permanently dependent. The tax code should encourage savings and investment. But it should also help low-wage workers out of poverty and do more for families with children. Barriers to upward mobility, like licensing restrictions that bar access to employment opportunities or urban land-use regulations that make housing unaffordable, are suspect. Reform conservatives, like most conservatives, favor greater competition in education and health care. Yet they also insist that government has a big role to play in making sure that everyone, particularly the poor, can reap the benefits of competition.



....................SNIP"

[applegrove]

1. This is branding. Nobody would believe it if they called it "compassionate conservatism"

Last edited Mon Feb 9, 2015, 12:40 AM - Edit history (6)

They know they have no choice but to run to the middle. To totally imitate Hillary Clinton down the line with their copying and 'replacement' of programs. Shadowing her narrative at every policy position. Trying to make her platform look impotent. Stopping any connection forming between independants and Clinton. Trying to make her look ineffective. Then, if Jeb wins, it will be a bait and switch. I hope Jeb gets trounced in the primaries by the kooks.

[Downwinder]

2. That has been tried before

and we saw what "compassionate conservative" got us.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

3. The "New Nixon", the "New Republican"

it's all marketing and scams. There's just so much you can do to spruce up a turd.

[Midnight Writer]

4. Meet the new BS, same as the old BS

Just like Boehner claims that tax cuts for the rich and slashing environmental regulations are "Jobs bills".

[MFrohike]

5. Sounds familiar

Except it sounds like Bill Clinton, not Ronald Reagan. If that's their new direction, I've got some bad news for them. It'll win elections, but probably not for them.

[daredtowork]

6. The problem no one can solve

No one can make people like other people. And 90% of unemployment and inequality is about not being "liked" enough to get the job, to get promoted, to get groomed, to get ahead. Even in the world of education, people who are treated like they will be more successful are likely to be more successful. Job training programs try to help people by endlessly rehashing their resume and basic social skills tips, but in the end there are ineffable and uncontrollable qualities around likability - looks, potential for connections/favors, pheromones even - people just get sorted out. And it's the big lie for society to keep telling them that it's their fault and that they just need to learn how to "work", "compete", and "save more".

Government needs to also make provision for the losers in competition because those losers do not vote for the system where only the winners get to survive and set the terms. When the losers outnumber the winners, they can bargain for some protections from the cruelty of the successful at last.

[ND-Dem]

7. I disagree that 90% of unemployment & inequality is about not being liked. Did something

magical happen to make 16% of the population in 1933 less liked than they were in 1916?

Were blacks more liked in 1942 than they were in 1939?

Were women less liked in 1960 than in 1980?

If business needs workers, they'll hire them, even if ungroomed and stinky. and if it doesn't need them, it will make excuses not to hire them, including the excuse that they're not likeable of have other personal flaws.

[daredtowork]

12. Yes something did happen

They tinkered with the HR process on both ends. First, computers and technocracy made job descriptions too specialized and the HR process to parcelized at one end, which tended to default back to hiring a connection under the table since "no one" fit the bill (or worse - claiming we needed more H1B visas because no one in America had the "right skillset&quot . And second, HR interposed itself as an over-specialized field, creating all these rewordings for "liking" people - good fit, various subjective vocabularies - as well as providing experts to back hiring managers up to make sure everything was legal. Since the 80s there has also been the ongoing corrosion of labor law and the replacement of the permanent workforce with temps, contingent labor, contract workers, and "gig jobs". The permanent jobs are reserved for those who get through the gauntlet of three interviews - you have to be pretty extraordinarily liked by multiple hiring managers!

Hmm, after your Amazon posts, though, I wonder if I may be seeing this mostly from the perspective of white collar jobs.

[ND-Dem]

13. i'd agree that white collar jobs weed out people who don't fit the standard mold more than blue

collar jobs do.

white collar jobs are as much about 'social' attributes as actual skills, imo. sometimes more so.

[daredtowork]

14. This gets very tricky in the disability realm because

disability is also easier to define in manual labor. You can either lift things or you can't. You have a range of motion or you can't.

If your normal job involves sitting there all day, but you can't do it because you are distracted by pain or fatigue - who is to judge the subjective levels of that?

But your health also contributes to that ineffable "likability" factor, and all the resume work in the world can't change that. Someone has to decide they WANT to give you a job. The rest can be fudged.

[CJCRANE]

10. It's only about "winners" and "losers" insofar as we set the rules of the game.

We could set the rules of the game to be beneficial to the majority of the population if we wanted to.

[daredtowork]

11. We haven't been doing that, though

All our "employment" aid has been going into rehashing resumes and brushing up on interview skills - i.e., hoping the people who weren't liked before will be liked now. If we want people to actually have work, we would be apprenticing them into guaranteed jobs.

[pansypoo53219]

8. the profit pigs wanna skim off them like 401k plans.

[Orsino]

9. They dream of the perfect talking points that would shield them from criticism.

That is their quest.

[11 Bravo]

15. That would be "sane" (but I'll have to see it ti believe it).

[LeftishBrit]

16. Blah de blah, and blah blah blah de blah; have they been listening to Shameron?