you are de-facto arguing for single payer government health care
I have been arguing for single payer health care for decades, as a matter of fact. I wasn't necessarily trying to steer the discussion that way but I would prefer to see a sane single-payer system then the giant clusterfuck we currently have. The best insurance I've ever had in this country was from a state-run system, but the government gradually restricted it to fewer and fewer eligible people as time went on. If I could drop my current insurance and buy medicare instead I'd happily do so.
Which I think probably answers your original question
As opposed to letting people suffer and die without insurance?
In that I just want the insurance industry to go away. It's been shown in simple dollars why we have the system we have, and it's not because it is in any way better. We have the system we have because the insurance industry owns Washington DC. They pad the pockets of politicians on both sides of the aisle to make sure they get what they want - they outspend the NRA and compete with the defense industry for top "honor" in terms of lobbying spending - and the Affordable Care Act was their collection on their investment.
Actuaries are frequently employed by insurance industries; they are responsible for the tables that set the rates. The Affordable Care Act gave a very powerful industry - the for-profit insurance industry - even more power by making us all their obligate consumers. Naturally in their quest to enure maximum profitability they would want to hire more actuaries so they could make more tables to justify screwing over more consumers.
This is likely not a side-effect either, but rather an intended outcome of the original Heritage Foundation proposal.
It's not hard to find sourced articles showing that home ownership is a losing investment. Here is a CNBC (note that this is the NBC business network, not the NBC network that conservatives love to trash for being "too liberal") article:
But there have been plenty others in recent months and years that have done a more thorough mathematical workup of it. There is a long list of things that are better financial investments than houses and physical properties.
Unfortunately it has been shown over and over again that a house is actually a terrible investment. People are finally starting to realize this. For decades the realtors and their marketing engine (which has included 24 hour cable networks for years) have been pushing this mythology on us; the myth is over and people are recognizing this. Even CDs that are selling at barely 1% interest in banks today do better over 30 years than the return on a 30 year mortgage; at best a homeowner can expect to pay off the mortgage and then make up enough difference in selling the house to cover what they paid in interest - essentially they've bet against themselves for 30 years and at the end the best they could hope for is to break even. Then once you factor in additional costs of home ownership you realize they fell behind rather badly.
We are told we need single-family houses to make us happy and wealthy - so we buy single-family houses. We are told we need cars to make us happy and productive - so we buy cars.
Mass transit has no effective marketing. It's just there, like municipal water service. You can use it or ignore it. And as we keep telling people that the "good life" is outside the city - and hence outside the reach of many transit systems - they don't invest the effort in using them.
Our fearless, super-intelligent, undeniably attractive, and mega-stable leader tells us that he won the election because he was a better candidate and no other reason. He tells us that if not for mountains of illegal voting he would have won even biggerer. Facebook is clearly a tool of the lamestream media, the enemies of the people! Turn them off and read only twitter for news!
I'll add that Trump is not intelligent enough to recognize the damage he is doing to the country. He may well go down as the last president of the 50 states, and he would likely take that as a compliment. President Camacho was at least intelligent enough to ask for help from people smarter than himself, while Trump fires people who openly disagree with him.
Forcibly remove Trump from office, even through the totally legit and legal process, and you will trigger at best social unrest, assassination attempts, terrorist attacks and violent demonstrations with many deaths, and at worst, civil war.
What you describe seems like a choice between two terrible outcomes then. Let Trump destroy the country or destroy it by removing him. I will counter with the notion that the people who put him in power consist of a few different factions:
GOP faithful who would vote for anyone with an (R) after their name
People who deeply hated Clinton and all things Clinton and would vote for anyone who is running against anyone named Clinton
People who honestly felt like the system didn't care about them and voted him in as a way to attack the system
Now between those two groups the first two wouldn't really be that offended by removing Trump as they would still have Pence in the White House. They could then begin rebuilding their party in his image.
The third group would be the ones who would gather torches and riot. We saw them at Charlottesville and other places. However there really aren't that many of them across the country and how attached they really are to Trump is questionable. Would they really opt for violence? Maybe but that's hard to predict.
As to whether or not civil war would be an outcome - or even the worst outcome - is debatable. At this point we may have already gone beyond a repairable union of states, it may be time to cut bait. The conservatives can let their experiment run its course in the south while the north proceeds towards modern society. It is possible to fracture our nation peacefully and it might be the best way to give the people what they want. 30 years later the southern states will beg the northern states for a bailout and then repairs can begin.
Reputable news sources (the ones that Trump calls the "enemy of the American people") covered the story itself. Here on DrudgeDot, where protecting the GOP is more important than truth or reality, the white house response was covered instead. We have a maniacal idiot in the White House who has the power to bring us to our own destruction. Trump should have been removed from the White House some time ago, we'll be lucky if we survive 4 years of his administration with our 50 states intact.
But no, slashdot instead wants us to know that the White House wants the whistleblower out. Because responsibility is not in fashion anymore.
The coward that needs to resign is Trump himself. He has been consistently working to undermine our actual democracy. Whether it has been through intent or ignorance is of no importance; he has disgraced the office and committed numerous criminal offenses. It is a shame that the critters in congress lack the collective spine to remove him through the prescribed legal mechanisms.
Yes, you gotta visit the actual twits if you want to see the pics but...is that that bad?
In this case, it is rather bad. Some of the texts tell me how great the design of a given device was, but then I have to click the tweet to see the image that actually shows how great it was. If this was an actual article I could just page through it and see the text and images in one coherent location; instead I get snippets, images, and then drivel from tons of random people I don't give a shit about. I really don't give half a shit about which calculator helps Trump's accountant's brother's hooker's dog walker's rabbi's best friend get off.
You write that as if reality has somehow been an impediment to this administration. They flushed the constitution down the white house toilet long ago. Damn the torpedoes and all that...
Twitter could probably ask for a $1 billion bailout tomorrow and Trump would order congress or the executive branch to pay it.
Fixed that for ya. Trump couldn't - and wouldn't - come up with $1B of his own money. He seems himself to be above such things anyways; he is sharing his wisdom through that medium therefore he believes it should be paid for by someone else.
Apple and Samsung have done so much to push up the price of a new phone that now the mid-range phone - which is hard to find at retail anywhere - costs more than the flagship phones cost not many years ago. The mid-range phone exists mostly on paper, to encourage people to go out and buy the flagship phones. Good luck finding a Samsung other than a Galaxy S8 (or newer) in any store near you. You'll never find accessories for anything else from them in a retailer either.
The main problem with a two-party situation is that it's inherently polarizing.
I think that is pretty close to what I said, but in fewer words:)
The only way to differentiate yourself from the other party is to illustrate your differences, and to move further away from the other party
I would argue that the parties here haven't really moved that much further away from each other as much as they have moved further away from the center. The democrats have moved to right-of-center, and the republicans to very-very-very-very-extremely far right of center. I will also say this reflects pretty accurately on the collective lack of spine in the democratic party; they are willing to be abused by the republicans repeatedly and allow themselves to be bullied into this weak position.
Whereas, in real life, people don't automatically fall into the neat camp on one side or the other.
Politics generally makes a lot more sense on a 2-axis plot, but the US seems to want to keep placing things on this weird 1-axis plot. This does encourage grouping and polarization; the 2-party system tends to encourage that.
And the Liberal Party of Canada believes that firearms should be banned, and are busily deciding if outlawing handguns completely will solve the problem of 'illegal guns used in crimes.'
I am most definitely not an expert on Canadian politics. However when I look at the website for the Liberal party of Canada, their gun policy proposal does not to me read as one that wants to take away or ban all handguns.
You know, I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day about how America has a very confrontational culture; it's baked into the legal system, it's baked into the governmental system, especially with the two-party reality, it's baked into the mythology, and it's baked into the basic culture.
I would split the two-party reality from the governmental system, though. Our government doesn't have to be a two-party system, it's just that for as long as anyone has been alive who is alive today it has essentially been that way. There have been other parties that have come and gone, and neither of the parties we have now existed in 1776 - arguably they are products of the 1920s or perhaps even more recently.
I'm not sure that the two-party reality (I like that phrase, by the way; I might start using it more often) necessarily requires the confrontational culture, though it does seem to benefit from it. A two party system makes it easy to get people to vote for candidate A out of disdain or fear of person B even if they don't actually agree with person A. When candidate A can confidently say "you'll end up with candidate B in power if you don't elect me to power", it changes the psychology of voting.
I'd also like to point out that those other countries tend to have lower violence for the same reason they have tighter gun laws; they both point to different cultural norms, rather than one following from the other.
Indeed I think we're in a agreement that gun violence is a multi-factorial problem. From my vantage point while there is no single solution that will resolve it satisfactorily I think there are some things that should be tried sooner than later that would inconvenience most people very little (if at all). I myself am very much in the camp of people who are tired of people either only wanting to talk about it or (as seem to be the case with too many of our politicians) not even want to talk about it.
To bring it back around to your observation of the poison of the two party system, a lot of people have shifted to assuming that people they disagree with are automatically arguing in "bad faith". In the context of the gun argument, those who refuse to move on gun legislation like to tell us that those who want new gun regulations are aspiring to move us down a slippery slope towards guns being taken away. Similarly those who want to push legislation through ASAP often tell us that anyone opposed to it is being paid off by the gun industry. It leaves us at the same impasse, year after year after year after year after year...
Pence may end up being the democrats' final excuse for not impeaching Trump; they'll say we'd be stuck with an even worse POTUS if they proceeded. At this point I'm hoping for either a peaceful succession of several states (including the one I'm in) so we can just be done with this, or banning that a giant meteor. Either way I have a hard time seeing anything other than Trump being the last president of the 50 states.
What're the Dems going to do unless they can take congress?
The bigger question might be what they would do if they did take congress. While there is a fair chance of it happening, there is at best only a very marginal chance of them actually doing something productive with it. They have a decades-long record now of repeatedly fumbling the ball any time they have power and allowing the republicans to drive the bus more often than not regardless of who is in power.
Impeachment will likely be off the table even if we have an epic blue wave. They aren't even very good at light resistance; likely we'll see Kavanaugh installed on the bench regardless unless someone finds certifiable video of him personally beating to death a crippled minority person for asking him directions to the bathroom (and even then he'd have to surrender his hearings voluntarily).
The establishment Rs already rolled over for fear of being primaried, they won't turn on him unless Fox News does.
I think at this point a lot of people are hoping he either dies soon of natural causes (after all he is quite obese for a man of 5 foot 11 inches) or resigns. Obviously the former is much more likely than the latter. Unfortunately then we're stuck with Pence. If someone can convince Trump that he has a way to knock out Pence, it might be possible to talk him into resignation.
If this is really about making guns available for law-abiding citizens, then why aren't the gun manufacturers concerned about what this would do to their businesses? After all, remington and the rest are most concerned about lawful uses of their weapons; wouldn't this cut into their margins? Are they expecting that they'll make more money just selling accessories and ammo while letting the sale of the actual weapons go away? If that is the case then why do they fight so hard to make it as easy as possible to buy guns at retail (it's already easier to buy a gun in some places than it is to buy Sudafed)?
Trump will continue attacking anything that he sees as a challenge to his fragile ego, regardless of how far beyond reason it is for him to do so. Constitutional norms mean nothing to this maniac, and the constitution itself is but a vague reference to him - certainly not a document he has any familiarity with. It's unfortunate that the "opposition" party lacks the stones to actually take action against this goon. This may be our last chance to save our democracy and the democrats are asleep at the wheel.
You must be new here... article titles have been presented that way here nearly since day 1 (even in times when the first letter should not be capitalized). It's their standard editorial style, damned the torpedoes and all that.
Did someone sneak in a special update to the slashcode to allow this in? We can't use such long titles for our comments or JEs, and until now I don't recall ever seeing such a long title. It's even longer than what my web browser wants to allow...
Sorry, but blacks are getting out of poverty and their unemployment numbers are at record lows.
Which is a continuation of the trajectory we established when there was an intelligent man in the white house rather than a man whose entire life is a lie. Give Trump time and he'll end that trend, whether on purpose or not.
DNC has attempted to keep blacks as slaves
The DNC did not exist when slavery was abolished. Keep trying, though.
prevent them from voting
The DixieCrats are not of any real significance in 2018. We do have documented examples though of current republicans trying really, really, really, hard to suppress the vote in places that are majority non-white, majority low-income, majority college-educated, or majority-democrat. Can you find a case of democrats making an effort to suppress the vote anywhere this year?
to keep them in poverty reliant on the government
Can you support that with actual data? Of course not.
The GOP has...
You're trying to take credit for things that the Republican Party did ~150 years ago. You're conveniently ignoring the fact that Lincoln would be thrown out of the party for being too liberal. Hell Reagan would be thrown out for being too liberal (and not accepting enough of Russia). And have you bothered to look at a map of the states that voted Lincoln into the white house? Almost none of them voted Trump into the white house, and few of them ever supported anyone named Bush.
Slashdot Mirror
you are de-facto arguing for single payer government health care
I have been arguing for single payer health care for decades, as a matter of fact. I wasn't necessarily trying to steer the discussion that way but I would prefer to see a sane single-payer system then the giant clusterfuck we currently have. The best insurance I've ever had in this country was from a state-run system, but the government gradually restricted it to fewer and fewer eligible people as time went on. If I could drop my current insurance and buy medicare instead I'd happily do so.
Which I think probably answers your original question
As opposed to letting people suffer and die without insurance?
In that I just want the insurance industry to go away. It's been shown in simple dollars why we have the system we have, and it's not because it is in any way better. We have the system we have because the insurance industry owns Washington DC. They pad the pockets of politicians on both sides of the aisle to make sure they get what they want - they outspend the NRA and compete with the defense industry for top "honor" in terms of lobbying spending - and the Affordable Care Act was their collection on their investment.
Actuaries are frequently employed by insurance industries; they are responsible for the tables that set the rates. The Affordable Care Act gave a very powerful industry - the for-profit insurance industry - even more power by making us all their obligate consumers. Naturally in their quest to enure maximum profitability they would want to hire more actuaries so they could make more tables to justify screwing over more consumers.
This is likely not a side-effect either, but rather an intended outcome of the original Heritage Foundation proposal.
It's not hard to find sourced articles showing that home ownership is a losing investment. Here is a CNBC (note that this is the NBC business network, not the NBC network that conservatives love to trash for being "too liberal") article:
it's better to rent than to buy in today's housing market
But there have been plenty others in recent months and years that have done a more thorough mathematical workup of it. There is a long list of things that are better financial investments than houses and physical properties.
I'm pretty sure we saw this story on Friday or Saturday.
Unfortunately it has been shown over and over again that a house is actually a terrible investment. People are finally starting to realize this. For decades the realtors and their marketing engine (which has included 24 hour cable networks for years) have been pushing this mythology on us; the myth is over and people are recognizing this. Even CDs that are selling at barely 1% interest in banks today do better over 30 years than the return on a 30 year mortgage; at best a homeowner can expect to pay off the mortgage and then make up enough difference in selling the house to cover what they paid in interest - essentially they've bet against themselves for 30 years and at the end the best they could hope for is to break even. Then once you factor in additional costs of home ownership you realize they fell behind rather badly.
We are told we need single-family houses to make us happy and wealthy - so we buy single-family houses. We are told we need cars to make us happy and productive - so we buy cars.
Mass transit has no effective marketing. It's just there, like municipal water service. You can use it or ignore it. And as we keep telling people that the "good life" is outside the city - and hence outside the reach of many transit systems - they don't invest the effort in using them.
Our fearless, super-intelligent, undeniably attractive, and mega-stable leader tells us that he won the election because he was a better candidate and no other reason. He tells us that if not for mountains of illegal voting he would have won even biggerer. Facebook is clearly a tool of the lamestream media, the enemies of the people! Turn them off and read only twitter for news!
I'll add that Trump is not intelligent enough to recognize the damage he is doing to the country. He may well go down as the last president of the 50 states, and he would likely take that as a compliment. President Camacho was at least intelligent enough to ask for help from people smarter than himself, while Trump fires people who openly disagree with him.
Forcibly remove Trump from office, even through the totally legit and legal process, and you will trigger at best social unrest, assassination attempts, terrorist attacks and violent demonstrations with many deaths, and at worst, civil war.
What you describe seems like a choice between two terrible outcomes then. Let Trump destroy the country or destroy it by removing him. I will counter with the notion that the people who put him in power consist of a few different factions:
Now between those two groups the first two wouldn't really be that offended by removing Trump as they would still have Pence in the White House. They could then begin rebuilding their party in his image.
The third group would be the ones who would gather torches and riot. We saw them at Charlottesville and other places. However there really aren't that many of them across the country and how attached they really are to Trump is questionable. Would they really opt for violence? Maybe but that's hard to predict.
As to whether or not civil war would be an outcome - or even the worst outcome - is debatable. At this point we may have already gone beyond a repairable union of states, it may be time to cut bait. The conservatives can let their experiment run its course in the south while the north proceeds towards modern society. It is possible to fracture our nation peacefully and it might be the best way to give the people what they want. 30 years later the southern states will beg the northern states for a bailout and then repairs can begin.
Reputable news sources (the ones that Trump calls the "enemy of the American people") covered the story itself. Here on DrudgeDot, where protecting the GOP is more important than truth or reality, the white house response was covered instead. We have a maniacal idiot in the White House who has the power to bring us to our own destruction. Trump should have been removed from the White House some time ago, we'll be lucky if we survive 4 years of his administration with our 50 states intact.
But no, slashdot instead wants us to know that the White House wants the whistleblower out. Because responsibility is not in fashion anymore.
The coward that needs to resign is Trump himself. He has been consistently working to undermine our actual democracy. Whether it has been through intent or ignorance is of no importance; he has disgraced the office and committed numerous criminal offenses. It is a shame that the critters in congress lack the collective spine to remove him through the prescribed legal mechanisms.
Yes, you gotta visit the actual twits if you want to see the pics but...is that that bad?
In this case, it is rather bad. Some of the texts tell me how great the design of a given device was, but then I have to click the tweet to see the image that actually shows how great it was. If this was an actual article I could just page through it and see the text and images in one coherent location; instead I get snippets, images, and then drivel from tons of random people I don't give a shit about. I really don't give half a shit about which calculator helps Trump's accountant's brother's hooker's dog walker's rabbi's best friend get off.
You write that as if reality has somehow been an impediment to this administration. They flushed the constitution down the white house toilet long ago. Damn the torpedoes and all that...
Twitter could probably ask for a $1 billion bailout tomorrow and Trump would order congress or the executive branch to pay it.
Fixed that for ya. Trump couldn't - and wouldn't - come up with $1B of his own money. He seems himself to be above such things anyways; he is sharing his wisdom through that medium therefore he believes it should be paid for by someone else.
Apple and Samsung have done so much to push up the price of a new phone that now the mid-range phone - which is hard to find at retail anywhere - costs more than the flagship phones cost not many years ago. The mid-range phone exists mostly on paper, to encourage people to go out and buy the flagship phones. Good luck finding a Samsung other than a Galaxy S8 (or newer) in any store near you. You'll never find accessories for anything else from them in a retailer either.
I was interested in the material until I realized every link was to a tweet. We can do better than this.
The main problem with a two-party situation is that it's inherently polarizing.
I think that is pretty close to what I said, but in fewer words :)
The only way to differentiate yourself from the other party is to illustrate your differences, and to move further away from the other party
I would argue that the parties here haven't really moved that much further away from each other as much as they have moved further away from the center. The democrats have moved to right-of-center, and the republicans to very-very-very-very-extremely far right of center. I will also say this reflects pretty accurately on the collective lack of spine in the democratic party; they are willing to be abused by the republicans repeatedly and allow themselves to be bullied into this weak position.
Whereas, in real life, people don't automatically fall into the neat camp on one side or the other.
Politics generally makes a lot more sense on a 2-axis plot, but the US seems to want to keep placing things on this weird 1-axis plot. This does encourage grouping and polarization; the 2-party system tends to encourage that.
And the Liberal Party of Canada believes that firearms should be banned, and are busily deciding if outlawing handguns completely will solve the problem of 'illegal guns used in crimes.'
I am most definitely not an expert on Canadian politics. However when I look at the website for the Liberal party of Canada, their
gun policy proposal does not to me read as one that wants to take away or ban all handguns.
You know, I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day about how America has a very confrontational culture; it's baked into the legal system, it's baked into the governmental system, especially with the two-party reality, it's baked into the mythology, and it's baked into the basic culture.
I would split the two-party reality from the governmental system, though. Our government doesn't have to be a two-party system, it's just that for as long as anyone has been alive who is alive today it has essentially been that way. There have been other parties that have come and gone, and neither of the parties we have now existed in 1776 - arguably they are products of the 1920s or perhaps even more recently.
I'm not sure that the two-party reality (I like that phrase, by the way; I might start using it more often) necessarily requires the confrontational culture, though it does seem to benefit from it. A two party system makes it easy to get people to vote for candidate A out of disdain or fear of person B even if they don't actually agree with person A. When candidate A can confidently say "you'll end up with candidate B in power if you don't elect me to power", it changes the psychology of voting.
I'd also like to point out that those other countries tend to have lower violence for the same reason they have tighter gun laws; they both point to different cultural norms, rather than one following from the other.
Indeed I think we're in a agreement that gun violence is a multi-factorial problem. From my vantage point while there is no single solution that will resolve it satisfactorily I think there are some things that should be tried sooner than later that would inconvenience most people very little (if at all). I myself am very much in the camp of people who are tired of people either only wanting to talk about it or (as seem to be the case with too many of our politicians) not even want to talk about it.
...
To bring it back around to your observation of the poison of the two party system, a lot of people have shifted to assuming that people they disagree with are automatically arguing in "bad faith". In the context of the gun argument, those who refuse to move on gun legislation like to tell us that those who want new gun regulations are aspiring to move us down a slippery slope towards guns being taken away. Similarly those who want to push legislation through ASAP often tell us that anyone opposed to it is being paid off by the gun industry. It leaves us at the same impasse, year after year after year after year after year
Pence may end up being the democrats' final excuse for not impeaching Trump; they'll say we'd be stuck with an even worse POTUS if they proceeded. At this point I'm hoping for either a peaceful succession of several states (including the one I'm in) so we can just be done with this, or banning that a giant meteor. Either way I have a hard time seeing anything other than Trump being the last president of the 50 states.
What're the Dems going to do unless they can take congress?
The bigger question might be what they would do if they did take congress. While there is a fair chance of it happening, there is at best only a very marginal chance of them actually doing something productive with it. They have a decades-long record now of repeatedly fumbling the ball any time they have power and allowing the republicans to drive the bus more often than not regardless of who is in power.
Impeachment will likely be off the table even if we have an epic blue wave. They aren't even very good at light resistance; likely we'll see Kavanaugh installed on the bench regardless unless someone finds certifiable video of him personally beating to death a crippled minority person for asking him directions to the bathroom (and even then he'd have to surrender his hearings voluntarily).
The establishment Rs already rolled over for fear of being primaried, they won't turn on him unless Fox News does.
I think at this point a lot of people are hoping he either dies soon of natural causes (after all he is quite obese for a man of 5 foot 11 inches) or resigns. Obviously the former is much more likely than the latter. Unfortunately then we're stuck with Pence. If someone can convince Trump that he has a way to knock out Pence, it might be possible to talk him into resignation.
If this is really about making guns available for law-abiding citizens, then why aren't the gun manufacturers concerned about what this would do to their businesses? After all, remington and the rest are most concerned about lawful uses of their weapons; wouldn't this cut into their margins? Are they expecting that they'll make more money just selling accessories and ammo while letting the sale of the actual weapons go away? If that is the case then why do they fight so hard to make it as easy as possible to buy guns at retail (it's already easier to buy a gun in some places than it is to buy Sudafed)?
Trump will continue attacking anything that he sees as a challenge to his fragile ego, regardless of how far beyond reason it is for him to do so. Constitutional norms mean nothing to this maniac, and the constitution itself is but a vague reference to him - certainly not a document he has any familiarity with. It's unfortunate that the "opposition" party lacks the stones to actually take action against this goon. This may be our last chance to save our democracy and the democrats are asleep at the wheel.
Why Capitalize Every Word
You must be new here ... article titles have been presented that way here nearly since day 1 (even in times when the first letter should not be capitalized). It's their standard editorial style, damned the torpedoes and all that.
Did someone sneak in a special update to the slashcode to allow this in? We can't use such long titles for our comments or JEs, and until now I don't recall ever seeing such a long title. It's even longer than what my web browser wants to allow ...
Sorry, but blacks are getting out of poverty and their unemployment numbers are at record lows.
Which is a continuation of the trajectory we established when there was an intelligent man in the white house rather than a man whose entire life is a lie. Give Trump time and he'll end that trend, whether on purpose or not.
DNC has attempted to keep blacks as slaves
The DNC did not exist when slavery was abolished. Keep trying, though.
prevent them from voting
The DixieCrats are not of any real significance in 2018. We do have documented examples though of current republicans trying really, really, really, hard to suppress the vote in places that are majority non-white, majority low-income, majority college-educated, or majority-democrat. Can you find a case of democrats making an effort to suppress the vote anywhere this year?
to keep them in poverty reliant on the government
Can you support that with actual data? Of course not.
The GOP has ...
You're trying to take credit for things that the Republican Party did ~150 years ago. You're conveniently ignoring the fact that Lincoln would be thrown out of the party for being too liberal. Hell Reagan would be thrown out for being too liberal (and not accepting enough of Russia). And have you bothered to look at a map of the states that voted Lincoln into the white house? Almost none of them voted Trump into the white house, and few of them ever supported anyone named Bush.