Your top political issues

[Starlight]

As I talk with people about the issues in this US election, I find different people have quite different sets of things they care about. People generally have 1-5 things that they passionately care about, which get their blood pumping, and which are "red lines" where they just couldn't bring themselves to support a candidate who is on the wrong side of those issues.

My 'key issues' are (in no particular order):
1. Climate Change
2. Wealth Inequality
3. Corruption
4. US Militarism
5. LGBT rights

But I'm a bit obsessive about politics, so I think the majority of people wouldn't have as many political issues they were passionate about, and would likely have only 1 or 2 key issues that they tend to vote on. What are your key issues that matter to you above everything else?

[KingsGambit]

Not going to place them in order.

Abortion (pro-life)
Environmental issues
Labor/union issues (pro-labor)
Religious freedom
Non-interventionism

[NorrinRadd]

First and foremost is "Pro-Life." I never vote for any candidate that does not at least make a solid pretense of opposing abortion.

After that, I want a candidate that takes the Constitution seriously -- the Bill of Rights, especially the First Freedom -- but also the limits on the various branches.

I prefer a strong military -- possibly not as interventionist as we've been in some cases, but definitely not as isolationist as most libertarians.

I don't care much about "wealth inequality." I think most of the rhetoric related to that amounts to nothing more than "politics of envy."

I don't care much about "social justice," except maybe in a negative sense. In most cases, "social" justice turns out to be the opposite of "actual" justice.

I don't care much about "climate change," except for the economic burden and restrictions to liberty of the associated rules and regulations.

I don't care much about LGBT rights.

[Jedidiah]

My 'key issues' are (in no particular order):
1. Individual liberty vs central gov. (incl. free speech, gun rights, everyone subject to same laws, etc.)
2. Anti abortion

[TheWall]

Pro seccond ammendment
Anti corruption
Anti monopoly
Pro life
I want honesty and respect.

[Yttrium]

Balancing the budget.
Building and maintaining good foreign relations.
Effective and responsible use of the military.
Balance of capitalism and regulations.
Realistic goals.

It's quite typical for candidates to have some unrealistic goals. It can set me off when those goals are obviously dead on arrival, such as a flat tax proposal, free college attendance for all, or a wall along the US-Mexico border funded entirely by Mexico.

[KingsGambit]

Balancing the budget.

This is a big plus for me. I am unimpressed by "reducing the deficit" as by definition, reducing the deficit is still allowing the debt to grow.

Because my political views are so varied, I don't really have individual hills to die on, otherwise I wouldn't ever be able to vote.

[guacamole]

1. Labor/Union issues as a function of inequality.
2. Scientific research and development
3. Corruption
4. Anti-privatization in any arena
5. Dismantling the drug war/prison industrial complex.

[KingsGambit]

3. Corruption

How do you honestly assess this, given that every candidate publicly disclaims it (and that true corruption is often undetectable)?

[Starlight]

How do you honestly assess this, given that every candidate publicly disclaims it (and that true corruption is often undetectable)?

I assess it with regard to what policies the individual has advocated and/or supported in the past with regard to reduction of corruption, and also with regard to the personal corruption of the individual themselves.

Clinton I believe has voted to try to amend the constitution to repeal Citizens United, has voted in support of a number of transparency bills designed to reduce corruption, has stated her supreme court picks would be against Citizens United, and regularly critiqued "unaccountable dark money" in politics which I regard as a half-measure (it suggests she is fine with corruption as long as it is transparent). However, as a person, she has received more from donors in her lifetime than almost any other politician, and she and her husband have done paid speeches worth tens of millions, and her Clinton Foundation has received money from terrible people and she appears to have done them favors in return.

Trump, by comparison, is not advocating any anti-corruption policies I am aware of, though he ran in the primaries on the platform that he was not taking money during the campaign and was therefore not a corrupt politician like the others. However, he has a history of corruption, and often speaks about how as a businessman he paid politicians to do favors for him, has unsavory mob connections and used the mob to do favors for him, and his campaign in the general election has taken a lot of money from large donors and in particular appears to have sold out to Robert Mercer, a billionaire who controls his top campaign staff and is now the top donor to the Republican party in general.

So both seem to be terribly corrupt individuals, but Clinton's policies are good, whereas Trump doesn't appear to have any.

[demi-conservative]

Clinton I believe has voted to try to amend the constitution to repeal Citizens United, has voted in support of a number of transparency bills designed to reduce corruption, has stated her supreme court picks would be against Citizens United, and regularly critiqued "unaccountable dark money" in politics which I regard as a half-measure (it suggests she is fine with corruption as long as it is transparent). However, as a person, she has received more from donors in her lifetime than almost any other politician, and she and her husband have done paid speeches worth tens of millions, and her Clinton Foundation has received money from terrible people and she appears to have done them favors in return....

So both seem to be terribly corrupt individuals, but Clinton's policies are good

Clinton policies feckless since as she herself shows, they do nothing to stop dark money and corruption, e.g. through Foundation.

Better to not be naive and ask this question: 'why is such massively corrupt politician supporting "anti-corruption" bill??'

[Starlight]

This is a big plus for me. I am unimpressed by "reducing the deficit" as by definition, reducing the deficit is still allowing the debt to grow.

Inflation and GDP growth both shrink the effective existing debt relative to GDP (which is the measure that really matters), by about 2% per year each. So if the country is running a balanced budget, the effective debt shrinks by about 4% per year, which is how the US shrank its massive post-WWII debt, and you can see the nice exponential curve as the debt drops off after WWII due to the country running only small deficits for 20 years:



So you don't need to even balance the budget - so long as the deficit size is less than about 4% of the total debt, the effective debt size will drop.

Current debt size is $19.5 trillion, 4% of which is $780 billion, and the current deficit per year is $441 billion, so the effective debt is going to drop this year.
This can be seen in a more recent timeline than the above, where the last couple of years have been flat and the most recent trend is downwards:

So "reducing the deficit" has a tendency to result in reducing the effective debt. (In total dollar amounts the debt size tends to always increase, but this is a meaningless amount because inflation and GDP changes constantly change the value of money, so it's not meaningful to compare a debt dollar amount of $34K in 1835 with $19.5T in 2016 because those aren't the same kinds of dollar and the size of the country's economy is different)

Also, it's worth noting that many economists seem to be of the view that it would be a terrible idea to actually pay off all the debt, because when the US actually did that it caused the longest and deepest recession in US history, and much of the current world economy depends on people being able to buy and hold US Treasury Bonds as a safe investment (Treasury Bonds are literally the US government debt), so if there is no US government debt then there are no treasury bonds to buy or sell and there are potentially devastating economic repercussions if people who want to invest their money in a 'safe investment' simply don't have any available investment options.

[Catholicity]

1) Balancing the Budget
2) Renegotiating ties with NATO
3) Human Rights
4) Social Justice (Not in the nutty warrior way)
5) Pro-Life
6) Appropriate pay and rights for labor workers in accordance to job (this means that soldiers should make more than assistant managers at Mcdonalds)
7)Fixing the VA benefits
8) Fixing SS Medicare and Medicaid
9) Restructuring the ACA in a way that actually is designed to work.

[Leonhard]

1) Abortion
2) The Environment
3) Human Rights
4) Religious Liberty
5) Science

In Denmark there's not much to do politically about Abortion, and to be honest I'll never vote for the party that does try to do anything about it, because they don't have a snowballs chance in hell of getting influence, so there I focus on all the other issues. In Denmark the pro-life movement is all about reaching individuals.

[One Bad Pig]

I'm not satisfied with merely balancing the budget; we should be actively paying down the debt. Far too much of what the federal government does would be better handled locally.