Suck_It_Trebek

Fuckin' up-country degens.

You have inferior thermal preservation stats. My neanderthal brethren and I are rolling nat 20s on constitution checks every day of the coming nuclear winter.

Utahns are some of the most conservative people in America. What is your strategy for motivating local liberals/progressives? Is there a margin of moderate voters that you can effectively engage with?

Also, have you considered linking environmental and conservation policy with the abundance of outdoor tourism in Utah generated by skiing, hiking, river-rafting, hunting, and fishing? It's always seemed to me that Democrats have ceded fertile ground in the Western states outside of large population centers when that would provide an inroads to capture some of the moderate vote.

I've just read through all your policy positions, and I'm impressed. I do have one criticism, and it's something that liberals/progressives need to take on board more broadly.

Raising the Federal Minimum Wage across the board will be catastrophic, not just for people at the Minimum Wage, but also people being paid close to it. Failing to take into account local variations in cost of living, as well as overall economic output, means that raising the Federal Minimum Wage to $15 regardless of locale will increase unemployment by either speeding automation or scaling redundancies.

I broadly think that Minimum Wage rates are abysmal right now, and create an artificially low floor of compensation, but it needs to be increased properly. To address this, I have several thoughts:

1) I think the Federal government needs to re-evaluate the statutory limits for the poverty line, which are a joke.

2) We should peg minimum wage to prevailing cost of living and set it as a floor, whereby not more than 40% of an average month of labor at Minimum Wage would be required to pay for housing costs (30% is typically the established level for poverty by economists).

3) We should use the Department of Housing and Urban Development's already-available-and-constantly-updated Area Median Income data used for housing programs and peg Federal Minimum Wage to that information.

4) The average ratio of CEO-to-worker pay in 1950 was 20:1. It is currently hovering around 271:1. We should use the Internal Revenue Code to incentivize a return to a less insane ratio by raising corporate tax rates, paired with a corresponding decrease based on said ratio.

The above would mark a radical departure from previous Minimum Wage theory and policy, so it would have to be phased in over a period of several years, perhaps a decade. What do you think?

Intimately linked to this problem are the housing and homelessness crises. Most job and wage growth is occurring in cities, and currently cities are struggling to manage demand for living space. Would you support a national vacancy tax to prevent real estate speculation, and encourage renting of unoccupied units?

Edit: Proposal #4

That must be why California is so important to the global economy.