Can someone explain to me in simple terms. USA elections

[ihatethecold]

What are the main differences between Obama and romney?
Is Obama like labour and Romney like very right conservative?

Why does Romney say he will get rid of the healthcare bill that Obama brought in.

Did it not work?
why wouldn't you want people without insurance to access healthcare ?
Thanks

It is an international health care policy term!!!!!

Not in my country, worldcitizen

I will confess that I am only familiar with health services and terminolgy in three European countries, only one of which uses English as the official language, so if you claim to know terminology in all countries in the world that use the English language, then you have the advantage of me.

Do you?

I did not say it was derogatory. I said it was used that way. Which in US politics it is . And in the UK it is rarely if ever used in a domestic context- hence some people only knowing it from its US use.

piglet please, does this really need a response???

Socialised medicine means Communism to the section of American politicians who use it to rile up the voters. The fact that the thoughts of pay at point of service medicine makes people quake with fear is a hangover from the days of the Red Scare, bomb drills in classrooms, McCarthyism, etc. America in the 1950s was in many ways as much a thought control state as the USSR was.

I agree it is not an international healthcare policy term, It is a term invented by Ronald Reagan.

FREE at point of service...

thanks, math

I don't think worldcitizen was able to help, and I am happy to continue without her response.

So if it does convey "free at point of service" and, I think, paid wholly or largely out of taxation, is the same term used to describe schools and other public services?

Piglet it's not that I am not able to help, and more not willing to help...

Really loving this read!

Sorry, simple question but why do some Americans like Mitt Romney? - he seems to be a broad church ( excuse pun) for a whole host of people. America is so huge that I believe views are so radically polarised across such a vast area - we are a much smaller culture in UK.

What ticks does Romney get? Family man?

Romney gets ticks for being a businessman in a party which fetishises business.

He gets ticks for being clearly religious, even though some in his party distrust his particular brand of religion.

He gets ticks for being rich, in a Republican subculture which is more and more tending to demonise the poor for being deserving of being poor.

very interesting.. will read when not saturday night!

He got ticks for being the least insane out of the crew of batshit lunatics who were all running for the nomination.

This is extremely interesting with very informative posts. I do think there is a massive cultural divide whereby the social values of the christian extreme right of the Republian party have no place in British politics. British politics tolerates religious sensibilities, politics is not based upons these sensibilities.

My understanding is that the very extreme Christian right is probably a vocal proportion with money and who are influential on that basis. I would imagine, especially at grassroots levels, that there are many who identify as Republicans on a predominantly fiscal basis, and do not share all of the social standpoints that are identified with Republicanism. Like cheerfulyank.

There is a very good episode of The West Wing where Donna'a Republican boyfriend (the lawyer, not Christian Slater's character) explains why he is republican. He distances himself from the extreme right social policies and explains the idea of fiscal conservatism and autonomy and less government intervention in ordinary life. The latter makes a great deal more sense now having read some of the helpful posts up thread highlighting the very different attitude Americans have towards government as a concept.

Romneys lack of effectiveness in the Mass. economy is widely reported and the only reason for the reduced unemployment by the end of his term was down to the national policies implemented by the Democrats at the time. The actual reduction in unemployment in Mass. and improved economy mirrors that of the whole US at the time. Anyone who knows anything about politics in the US knows that governors have little if any possibility to effect the economy of their state. For him to claim any improvement was affected by him is disingenuous.

For those who wonder why faith should come into things don't forget that for 5 years the republicans have tried to paint Barack Obama and protestant Christian born in the US as a muslim born in Kenya. Fox news itself had to shut down its chat boards as hey were populated by the tea party activists who would post pictures of bacon and pork etc to drive away any democrats on the chat rooms by trying to imply that barack supporters would be offended by any pork product as eating the pig is banned in islam. What the idiot tea party bunch forget was that eating pig is also banned in Judaism so they were offending all the jewish who support republicans as well. They are an anti semite racist bunch to the core.

TEA PARTY RACISM

No, free public (state) education is considered a birthright and one of the beacons America shines forth for the rest of the world. It is criticised heavily because of perceptions of poor standards, and funding is always a contentious issue but the idea that people would have to pay for education directly would cause ructions. People pay indirectly through local taxes and state income taxes and are very aware of this.

The inherent inequality of public education that is funded from local municipal property taxes doesn't faze a lot of people. Poor municipalities generally have bad schools and prosperous ones tend to have good schools. Large cities with large school districts often have good schools in some neighbourhoods and horrible ones in others. Families look for houses to buy or property to rent in good school districts and they are in general happy to pay the necessary taxes assessed on valuation of their property in order to send their children to the schools they have chosen. If that is not possible, they make all kinds of sacrifices to send children to parochial elementary schools or Catholic high schools (Catholics tend to run more private schools than any other denomination, and especially in cities) even if they are not Catholic. Enforcement of catchment areas is rigorous and offenders can be prosecuted and asked to pay the tuition fee charged to out of district students by some districts. The question of educational vouchers that would enable families to send children to better performing schools even if they were religious-run is a Republican favourite while Democrats tend to want to improve the public schools and not cross the church-state divide.

I have a question. I find the whole gun control issue in America utterly baffling.

Could someone enlighten me a bit? US per capita gun deaths are way way higher than ours, we have strict gun controls, they don't. Do those weirdos people who argue against gun control and for their right to purchase sub machine guns genuinely think that's a coincidence or do they think those deaths are a reasonable price to pay to preserve an outdated, completely out of context right to bear a musket?

I realise my own views are clear in this post but it is a genuine question. I am genuinely baffled by it and would be interested to hear the logic.

Flowery, it's a really difficult issue. I'm completely anti-guns so I have a hard time understanding it myself. I think it's actually a couple different strands of thought.

Some people are really afraid/paranoid about crime and self-defence. Maybe because they have been victims in the past, maybe because they are buying into often-racist stereotypes, but this kind of fear drives a lot of pro-gun feeling. The idea is that the criminals all have guns and 'decent people' need to be able to protect themselves (unspoken subtext: because you can't rely on the police).

Sometimes it ties into the anti-government feeling. There is a knee-jerk reaction against the government telling you what you can do, especially if you think it's guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

Some people just really like guns. Maybe they grow up in rural settings where everyone has guns and it's no big deal.

It's hard to explain why people want gun rights when obviously there is a lot of harm from guns. But then, you could ask why Brits allow alcohol to be sold so cheaply and at all hours when clearly there is a lot of deaths and violence because of alcohol abuse. The vast majority of gun owners are responsible and resent being restricted because of people who aren't.

I personally think it's a serious pathology in American culture. But then I'm a bedwetting liberal east coaster

I think there are a lot of historical undercurrents to the language used by the republican right.

'Elite', 'professional', 'establishment', and the distrust of government, the perception that it is an alien and malign entity -- all harken back to the days of FDR and the New Deal and following on that the Civil Rights movement. Behind some of the suspicion is the idea that it consists of well-educated Commie Jews pulling strings. FDR and the Kennedy and Johnson administrations featured prominent Jewish technocrats doing things that upset fundamentalist Christian susceptibilities.

JFK had the added disadvantage of being Catholic and from Boston. Catholics were as popular in the South as Jews were. Only after Roe v Wade did some protestant denominations come to an uneasy acceptance of the right of Catholics to participate in American democracy.

The Birther thing and the Joe Wilson (Rep.- SC) outburst during the State of the Union address a few years back would never have happened under a white president.

The feelings and the tone of the Republican right on social issues (and attitude to Catholics) mirror some of the Unionist/Loyalist politics of Northern Ireland. Not surprising since many of the places in the US (the south and south east and spreading into the south west) where Christian fundamentalism and conservative social values predominate are populated by people of Ulster Scots Presbyterian and Calvinist stock.

You can't compare people living in rural states with people living in cities like New York. People in rural parts of Arizona, New Mexico etc can't rely on the police, their nearest police station might be more than an hours drive away. America is really too big to have a single national government telling everyone what to do. The vast majority of government should be turned over to individual states. If the coastal states want to ban guns and have socialised medicine, they should absolutely be able to do so.

They can't. The Supreme Court has ruled that bans on guns by states and municipalities are unconstitutional. Cities that had handgun bans can no longer ban guns. Chicago had a ban and it was overturned.

Illinois remains (iirc) the only state to retain a ban on concealed carrying of weapons. Only the technical details of gun carrying and ownership can be fiddled with. The fundamental right to own and bear arms has been stated and upheld time and time again.

The constitution has a lot to say about state's rights vs federal rights and there was also a civil war fought on the issue...

Conspiracy theory, mathanxiety. I am not a Birther or a 9/11 "truther" (i.e. liar) and your idea that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion/ Reds under the Bed years are the cause for me or Republicans to use words like professional/MEL/ Establishment as terms of suspicion is just as ridiculous as those two ideas. The sensible explanation is as follows:

Religious structures of social import and attendance at organised religious events tends to decline with increased wealth in society, even if those people maintain a strong private spirituality. As GOP voters tend to be more religious they are concentrated in the poorer part of the USA. This is well known.

All the worst poverty, etc. figures are in the red states of the south and midwest and their economy is still based more around manufacturing, agriculture and lower level service industries so a lot less of the people will be professionals, post-bachelor degree holders, and so on. It is a widely acknowledged fact that the upper middle class, who I refer to- i.e. doctors, scientists, academics, middle managers in state/fed govt agencies, school principals, not billionaires who donate more than these people's annual earnings to GOP super PACs for tax reasons- are very much more likely to vote Democrat.

Do you know how many people are in the John Birch Society or similar now? They just have zero influence on GOP politics. McCarthyism and anti-semitism is in their past. Anti-Catholicism: while I believe it is still harboured in the hearts of many due to their fundie beliefs, they realise that promoting life and family values in a democracy through overlapping consensus between different groups is the only way forward politically, and hating those who support their main ideas is exactly what liberals would want them to do so as they'd lap up the split vote and win all their electoral campaigns. RCC vote has been a great boost to the GOP since Roe and other social issues took centre stage; now the generation gap is opening up with young Catholics serious about getting a pro-life, traditionalist president and their older coreligionists continuing their own tradition (of lifelong Dem support, cf. unions, war, civil rights, other issues.)

Hello GreenD

I see you use the term "socialised medicine"

Following on from what was said above, what do you see as the key moral difference between education, funded out of taxation and free at point of use, and healthcare, funded out of taxation and free at point of use?

Why is one called "state" and one called "socialised?"

If one "good" and one "bad?"

If so, why?

I've seen that argument used about "socialised medicine" before vs. other government run services... it's just a term that is used when something has been in private hands for the entire existence of the country.

I'm somewhere in between. Affordable Care Act, usually in derogatory contexts branded "Obamacare"=good. "Medicare for all" may be too far in the direction of big government and lack of personal responsibility. Some people assume that not believing in free-at-point-of-need healthcare is automatically uncompassionate or poor bashing on this side of the pond; Europeans tend to prefer collective responsibility after WWII as has been said, but this may change over time too. I'm a moderate in US economic terms which would make me fiscally conservative here.

People who don't like the idea of state-run schooling call them "government schools", which is always said with a sneer. I would not go that far, Ron Paul would like to defund them- he is admirable on the odd thing but way off base with this.

@Extrospektiv
"This is everything I'd expect from Mumsnet though, A.K.A. metropolitan elite liberal feminist professional pro-abortion pro-gay marriage pro-mandatory sex ed pro-redistributive taxation pro-state funded healthcare anti-gun anti-austerity set."
You say that like it's a bad thing!

why did s/he accuse math of bringing up the protocols of the elders of zion?