What political reforms would help the working class prosper

[Aseahawkfan]

I was feeling bored, so decide to post what I look for in a political party these days.

What do the working class need to prosper in America? We all know that the majority of people in any nation are the working class people that go to a job daily to earn income and spend that income on goods and services made available to them by business owners.

From analyzing various world economies, the nations that seem to do very well supporting their citizens the provide the following:

1. Socialized or affordable healthcare: This is becoming a more and more essential service that is becoming more problematic in America. We pay the highest per capita for healthcare and do not receive superior health outcomes whether in lifespan, quality of health, or many measurable metrics for healthcare other than technology for those wealthy enough to access it.

Having an affordable, portable health insurance not tied to employment would go a long way to create a more flexible economy for working folk who often have healthcare tied to full time employment. This would allow them to better manage exigent circumstances that may require them to move to part time employment if taking care of children, relatives, or dealing with serious health issues without putting an excessive burden on the overall family during such periods.

It would also put healthcare back into their hands rather than the hands of business owners who are the true consumers of health insurance. The common worker obtaining health insurance from an employer is not the consumer of health insurance and have little control over the quality or cost of the insurance chosen by their employers. They are the consumer of medical services with the quality of the service they receive based on the quality of the health insurance chosen by their employer.

2. Government incentives to build more housing: Right now the biggest choke point preventing affordable house is the housing supply. There is an insufficient incentive by home builders to construct affordable single family dwellings. It has become more profitable to build either luxury housing for high income purchasers who are less likely to default on their payments or rental properties that can be sold to investors with sufficient money to afford the property and absorb the costs of managing it and pursuing renters for income.

Government needs to incentivize the building of affordable single family housing as this is essential for workers to turn income into a quality asset that invests them in the American dream of property ownership. A paid off house is one of the most important assets an American worker can achieve in preparation for a quality retirement.

It would be incredibly difficult to reform social security as some voters like Riverdog want if Americans cannot achieve affordable housing they can pay off in a working lifetime as renting on a social security payment is difficult at best.

Thjis should be an absolute priority for government.

3. Controlled Immigration: There is no way to provide quality social services in a nation with uncontrolled immigration. It no accident that every major nation providing quality social services limits immigration substantially. Social service systems can be overwhelmed by unlimited, uncontrolled immigration. Political reforms to truly curtail illegal, uncontrolled immigration would be required to implement a quality social services system in America.

Controlled immigration also better protects the local job market by lowering competition from outside labor markets that business owners insource into America. Uncontrolled illegal immigration is basically outsourcing in reverse which is harmful to the domestic job market.

4. Drug Policy Reform: Continuing these attempts at Prohibition Era drug interdiction is not working. It is leading to problems with the police and a massive, uncontrolled, black market drug industry our current government has proven unable to control that is undermining policing in working class or lower communities. Alcohol Prohibition proved that attempting to ban and interdict controlled substances leads to a massive increase in violent criminal cartels focused on controlling black market industries that leads to police corruption, excessive violence, and a lack of price and industry controls that allows these black markets to harm communities where they become embedded.

We need serious drug policy reform to be able to clean up policing and exert far greater controls over these substances given interdiction is not working. The primary goal needs to be eliminating the organized crime element out of these markets in the same legalizing and controlling alcohol drove the organized crime element out of bootlegging and such.

5. Support for small and mid-sized businesses: The government should provide greater support for small and mid-sized businesses to encourage the building of business relationships inside America rather than constantly encouraging large corporations to look to other nations to exploit cheap labor for production. A similar economic police in Germany is known as The Mittelstand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand

6. Child Care Support: With dual income working families being far more common, affordable, quality childcare is essential for working families. It would be great if one parent could afford to stay home, but that is not how modern America is set up with market driven economics having already adjusted to the dual income working family level of income.

This is some of what I'd like to see from a political party in America. The Democrats support quite a bit of this, but undermine their ability to implement change by focusing on crazy social issues that make them easy targets to politically undermine their economic goals. I think quite a few working class Republicans would buy into similar reforms if a working class party that jettisoned a ton of the Democrats looney social issues from their platform was created.

There is also the marketing of these issues which should not be allowed to be dismissed as "Marxist Socialism" when it is more European style capitalism with quality social services supporting the capitalist system as it does in places like Sweden and Germany. Supporting the working class helps workers better support the capitalist economy allowing them more flexible work hours, less pressure and stress from procuring childcare and health services, and generally leads to a more sustainable and higher quality of life for working people who form the majority of the people within America.

Economic reforms at this point in time are far more important than social reforms for America going forward. The American working class is being stratified into high paid tech workers and low paid non-tech workers. The working class workers are having a more and more difficult time obtaining the common American assets the working class values such as homes and quality health insurance.

Americans as a whole need to jettison the culture wars in favor of coming together for substantial, effective economic reform to set themselves and future generations up much better in the modern, complex economy.