Let’s break that shit up!
Approval voting and proportional representation! So long as we have single-seat elections using choose-one voting, we’ll be stuck with two parties.
I’m so glad to see more people around here realizing this.
I’m just here to watch the complete and total dumpster fire in the comments.
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.
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.
In the German system (or any other multiparty system), voters can effectively punish a political party without wasting their vote, because there is a lot of overlap between the parties.
If you don’t like the current coalition but are a left-leaning person, you can vote for Die Linke. You might not agree with all of their positions but you at least can agree with some of them. Even if that is not palatable if you previously voted SDP you can switch your vote to Green or vice versa to punish the specific officeholders representing your constituency. If you voted for the FDP last time, maybe try Union next time. There are many ways to do this, and overall I think it makes the parties themselves more accountable to the voters because voters defecting their party list votes can drastically change the makeup of the Bundestag.
Similarly, right-leaning UK voters are punishing the Conservative Party by threatening to or actually voting for Reform candidates. Scots can punish the SNP by voting Labour.
You can’t do this in the US. In the USA, the only recourse the voters have over the parties is to vote out undesirable candidates through primary elections so that the party cannot nominate them. This works alright, sometimes, but it is not an effective way to punish party leadership for bad decisions, and many primaries are uncompetitive anyway.
There are two sides, but you can alter that a bit if you get your asses to the primaries.
Lol, my primary choices 2024:
Biden
Democrats completely gave up on local elections in a purple county because it’s in a red state.
Democrats keep trying to increase minimum wage, read a fucking News source.
The problem is, we need caps on profit margins on necessities, and to stop the making of things we need for basic survival investment opportunities.
But that would be difficult to get done. So they go for the low hanging fruit of wages, which never permanently solve anything because they’ll just keep raising prices under this scamflation cycle we’ve been in since COVID.
Sure they do. Keep believing, any day now…
