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Scott Santens 🧢🏄‍♂️ Profile picture
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4 Aug, 4 tweets, 3 min read
THREAD: We have 12 days to end gerrymandering. The problem is that even though most voters hate it, many lawmakers love it because they get to pick their voters and stay in power. The Senate's new Manchin-approved #ForThePeopleAct needs to be passed before districts are redrawn!
If you're not familiar with how gerrymandering works, learn about the strategies of packing and cracking and how it enables politicians to subvert popular will and even gain and keep power despite getting fewer votes.

Read: theguardian.com/us-news/2021/j…

Watch:
Definitely watch the CGP Grey video above as it also shows that traditional solutions to gerrymandering aren't really the best solutions. We have to go deeper if we really want to fix this problem, and that's where the Fair Representation Act comes in.

fairvote.org/the_fair_repre…
The #ForThePeopleAct will help immediately, and we need to pass it first, but the only real way to permanently abolish gerrymandering is to change the rule of one House member per voter. We need multi-winner districts determined by ranked-choice voting.

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More from @scottsantens

Scott Santens 🧢🏄‍♂️ Profile picture
3 Aug
"Officials could coerce them to work... with so-called 'farm policies' where benefits were lowered or cut off during the planting or harvesting seasons to force parents and children as young as 7 into the fields for extremely low wages."

Sound familiar?

cbpp.org/research/famil…
Every governor who canceled the UI boost and extension early just did this same thing. You need to understand that this isn't about getting people to work in general, because people want to find the right work for them, paid or unpaid. It's about forcing people to accept low pay.
It's still too early to tell despite what misinfo media is already lying about, but the data so far is showing that employment has actually gone down a bit in the states that ended their UI early while going up in states that have kept UI going.

arindube.com/2021/07/18/ear…
Read 7 tweets
Scott Santens 🧢🏄‍♂️ Profile picture
31 Jul
I'd support Patricia's patreon, but what's the point really when her anti-UBI logic is that people don't need income in advance of the work they do, to enable that work, and that being able to refuse other work in order to pursue stuff like podcasting is not really contributing?
Having a patreon has actually deepened my understanding of UBI. The security provided by having a dependable monthly income is huge, and until I felt it, I didn't realize how little security I ever felt before that. UBI opponents tend to be people who take security for granted.
I also absolutely recognize to my bones now, that access to resources comes before work. Lacking money prevents work. Lacking economic security hinders focus by creating survival-centric tunnel vision that functions like a tax on higher order long-term thinking and planning.
Read 5 tweets
Scott Santens 🧢🏄‍♂️ Profile picture
24 Jul
I've been in the process of writing the article I've been working on for 5 months now. Basic income enables the kind of research and time that big projects need, and I think if everyone had UBI, we'd see far less click-bait and content for content's sake.

patreon.com/scottsantens
There's a big difference in general between subscription-based content and ad-based content. Ads require clicks which require as much content as possible. Subscriptions require subscribers which require subscriber satisfaction.

Quality is more likely via subscription vs adverts.
This is also behind the fall of local journalism and rise of disinformation. It was a devil's bargain to stop subscribing to our local papers to get our news for free on the internet. The loss of well-researched local journalism is a big piece of our mis/disinformation problem.
Read 9 tweets
Scott Santens 🧢🏄‍♂️ Profile picture
22 Jul
The heart of MMT is about spending before taxing instead of taxing before spending. It's not the concept of a job guarantee, but for some reason MMT has attracted a ton of people that see MMT as the way of "putting people to work" instead of the way of focusing on resources vs $.
The question, "Can we resource it?" instead of "Can we pay for it?" is the correct one to ask of any policy, and that question centers around efficiency. We should always focus on doing the most of what we want in the best way possible, where best includes efficiency + quality.
Because MMT focuses on resources, best utilizing it should center on evidence-based policymaking, where we only do something if we know it works, and we should not do stuff that doesn't work, or doesn't work as well as the provision of cash.

MMT should embrace cash benchmarking.
Read 11 tweets
Scott Santens 🧢🏄‍♂️ Profile picture
19 Jul
Inflation is a regressive tax that impacts those with low incomes more than high incomes. However the net outcome can be made progressive, where those with low incomes see an increase in buying power and those with higher incomes see reduced buying power.
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
I fully expect inflation hawks to soon start claiming the monthly CTC is part of the inflation story but if your income is $12k and you get $500/mo CTC, then an annual inflation rate of 3% would reduce buying power by $45/mo. That's $455/mo more.

It is $455/mo with 0% inflation.
What's also interesting about this is that any conservative crying about inflation as a result of the monthly CTC will be making the argument (whether they realize it or not) that taxes should be raised on *families* in order to reduce the invisible tax of inflation on the rich.
Read 6 tweets
Scott Santens 🧢🏄‍♂️ Profile picture
18 Jul
I started binging my way through Dr. Stone recently and it's one of my favorite things I've seen in years. It's 10 billion percent pro-science, and it's so clever how it teaches physics and chemistry and an appreciation of trial and error and how everyone is valuable to humanity.
No human could build human civilization on their own. We are all interdependent, and all our many diverse interests are additive. We are greater together than the sum of our parts, and we must escape this zero-sum thinking that says that others must have less for us to have more.
We're all better off working together for a mutual goal of human progress. One of our biggest barriers is poverty which in a world of abundance hinders positive-sum thinking. The fear of poverty also hinders trial and error. We must all be free to fail for us together to succeed.
Read 4 tweets

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