A potential huge winner for Dems: a "Public Safety Employee Protection Act"....

[HardWorkingDem]

It baffles me how tone deaf Democrats are from time to time. The Dems should craft some sort of bill that offers funding for public safety employees. Anyone else out there remember how popular Bill Clinton's strive to put 100,000 more police officers on the street was back in the 90's? Probably more important was the political narrative that it helped to create.

For the past year, all across this nation in almost every state and community, because of deficits and lack of funds, firefighters and police officers been being laid off. This has been going on all across the nation for some time and the Democrats have not faced this issue well at all on a national scale.

People talk about how the right uses wedge issues so well, and to me, that is utterly correct. Those people have been born with wedges for fists. The Dems need to step up their game a nbit.

Yes, there are grants available for these types of jobs, but normally in policing the grants are hard to get and pretty restrictive.

Another side benefit is many firefighter unions are very active in the political process. It's just sad because there are so many political threads that are tied to this topic and ones that would benefit the political party pushing for some sort of act like this.

[dkf]

1. More police are needed when the populace feels unsafe due to increasing crime statistics.

Personally I haven't seen anything in the papers on this matter yet so I imagine the public thinks we have more pressing issues at this time.

[Denninmi]

2. One of several things they should push right now.

Continue old Stupid's tax cuts for the average people, push for tremendous tax increases on the 1% to maybe 5%, and a plan to permanently fix Social Security by eliminating the cap on withholding and upping the rate on that top 5% again, along with means testing for those with high incomes and high net worth.

If they came out with that very forcefully right away, rammed it all through the House and Senate in the next month, made the conversation all about Republican obstructionism and support for the 1%, they might turn this election around.

But, it will never happen.

[Uben]

3. The problem is.....

....U.S. crime rates are down, across the board! Usually, in a recession, crime rates grow, but this time they are falling. Violent crime is down 5.5% and property crime is down 4.9%.

How does one justify expanding enforcement when crime is down?

[HardWorkingDem]

5. It's not about "expanding" but keeping what is there...

For probably one of the first times in modern times, across the nation (do a Google search) all forms of governments -local, county, state- are having a hard time meeting their payrolls and are making cuts in public safety employee areas to save money.

Much of this is being done as quietly as possible because the entities really want to avoid having a public debate over public employees.

And what really baffles me is how the Obama Admin doesn't use the tactic of attaching something like this to his jobs work bills. For one, when the Republicans and deficit hawks attack it, they can be attacked as anti-public safety and it can help to get the entire bill through.

And even though the show "Rescue Me" is fictional, even it touched on the cuts going on in fire departments.

[Uben]

6. I know municipaities are hurting.....

...and are cutting firemen and police departments, but I am also sure they are looking at the stats to make their decisions. Right now, the stats support shrinking these departments to keep other vital resources such as trash collection and street maintenance going. Cutting budgets that are already squeezed is not easy because any decision is going to piss some folks off, namely those losing their jobs! They are also looking at long term effects, ie. pensions and healthcare. The ones that cost the most will be going first. That's just the nature of the beast. It's not so much politics that determine which services must go, but mathematics.

[HardWorkingDem]

7. Oh, there are plenty of politics going on...more complex than mathematics..

For example, politicians who have spent their entire time making terrible fiscal decisions are relying upon union employees to take concessions or lay offs or other "cost cutting" measures to protect their rear ends come election time.

And this allows for the so-called fiscal hawks to avoid raising taxes just so they can avoid the ire of the public - in other words, many of these places are also hurting because of poor decisions where no one is held accountable for their decisions, so they put it on the backs of employees.

Still, in many of these places, we are talking of large populations and urban workers, hence, leaning potential Dem voters. Is it theater? Yes, it is, but it's good building block theater and something it seems political Dems seem to be forgetting about.

[HardWorkingDem]

4. self delete....

[RedCloud]

8. Where are those great paying jobs in vintage republican strongholds?

oh, that's right. They don't create wealth, only transfer it to foreign shores.
Those traditionally repug areas need some wake up calls too. Nothing easy for them. Repugs claim they have the business know how and I say, "Prove it, clowns!" Where are your jobs aplenty? Where have they been for the past half century?