5 Tough Questions for Tonight’s Democratic Debate

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/6-tough-questions-for-tonights-democratic-debate/

 1. The Republican debates have focused on ways to penalize and punish immigrants who may have entered the United States without required documents. But Americans genuinely differ with regard to immigration policy. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the best way to address immigration challenges is by providing immigrants with more legal advice and better services to help them through the process. Would you support the creation of an independent agency to advise immigrants, working with them in a humane rather than punishing manner to resolve status and eligibility questions?

 2. The United States Postal Service is as old as the country itself; its central role in the American experiment was mentioned in the US Constitution. It continues to provide universal service nationwide, often more efficiently and inexpensively than private carriers. Yet the postal service has been hamstrung and undermined by cumbersome requirements to prepay health benefits at a far higher level than federal agencies and private firms, and by archaic restrictions on the services it can provide. One proposal, advanced by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and others, has been to establish a postal-banking system that would provide basic financial services at post offices. Would you have postal banking as part of a broader effort to renew and strengthen the postal service?

 4. In an age of rapid digital transformation and automation, we are told that the future is a “sharing economy” or a “gig economy,” where Americans use their cars or their homes to provide services through operations like Uber and Airbnb. But there are real doubts about whether these “jobs” will provide the income, the benefits, or the security that Americans once knew. Should elected officials and regulators be stepping to up assure that, even as the United States encourages innovation, workers are protected in the “new economy”?