Talk:Belief challenges/Party Equivalence

Some items to research, from this discussion:

• Obama has killed more civilians with drone strikes than Bush.
  • This is probably not a fair comparison, as drone technology wasn't as readily available before Obama. A more fair comparison would be who has killed more civilians. Some estimates:
    • Obama: "Credible, independent attempts to determine how many civilians the Obama administration has killed arrived at numbers in the hundreds or low thousands. And there is good reason to believe that they undercount the civilians killed." Atlantic
    • Bush: Documented violent deaths resulting from the invasion = "165,382 – 184,200" (Iraq Body Count) -- even if you assume this includes 10,000 for Obama, Bush is still the clear winner.
  • That said, Obama does have a great deal to answer for in this regard, and certain other Democrats have even more: "At least Obama resisted one of the two conflicts that his hawkish advisers, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, urged him to enter." Atlantic
  • Verdict: D & R are arguably equivalent on this issue
• Under Hillary the state department made sure Haiti kept its minimum wage at 31 cents
  • Snopes says "It was a concerted effort on the part of Haitian elites, factory owners, free trade proponents, U.S. politicians, economists, and American companies that kept the minimum wage so low, and to lay the blame squarely at the feet of any sitting Secretary of State would be an incomplete assessment, and thus inaccurate."
  • Politifact says "the cables do not contain conclusive evidence that the State Department actively pressured Haiti to block the increase nor do they prove that Clinton personally played a role."
  • Verdict: There is no evidence to assign blame for this to Democrats.

These seem to apply at least as much to Republicans as to Democrats, but further research wouldn't hurt:

• repealing Glass-Steagall
  • This was largely a GOP project -- the repeal is formally known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and Gramm, Leach, and Bliley were all Republicans.
  • "During debate in the House of Representatives, Rep. John Dingell (Democrat of Michigan) argued that the bill would result in banks becoming "too big to fail." Dingell further argued that this would necessarily result in a bailout by the Federal Government." (Wikipedia
  • No Republicans are known to have opposed it.
• harsh sentencing laws
• NAFTA
• TPP
• DOMA (Republicans wanted something worse)
• ACA (If it's bad, what Republicans wanted was worse)
• expanding the NSA
• Bush tax cuts (Obama did let some expire, too)
• constant wars
• support for Saudi Arabia
• support for Israel expansionism, killing, etc.
• welfare reform under Bill (GOP pushed heavily for this)
• opposition to BLM
• money from financial industry (they support everyone so they can always get their phone calls returned regardless of who wins)
• war on drugs
• fracking