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>>>And about bringing up issues - what's the average influence of voters on issues where the two parties agree? Do these ever come up for public debate?
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>>What do you mean by 'public debate' ? People publicly debate things all the time. Nobody stopping them. Do they get publicly subsidized airtime? No. Do they get a forum paid for by my taxes? Hopefully not. But nobody is suppressing them. Minority opinions ( many of which I share ) are just that - the opinion of a minority. Hence there are fewer people making that argument. Political parties most often take positions according to what they think will get them the most votes ( when you hear the words "Big Tent" you know you are talking about "To hell with principle" <g> )
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>>But one thing I don't think we lack in this country is the expression of minority, unpopular or downright strange opinions <s>
>
>With "Do these ever come up for public debate?" I meant do these ever get on the agenda of any policymaking public talk... place, i.e. do they ever get listed as issues anywhere? For instance, the immigration and gay marriages were both listed and discussed everywhere. So did the fate of Social Security. Was the fate of FCC or SEC discussed? Was the issue of paid vacations discussed? We've seen that there's a huge discrepancy between what vacations are guaranteed here and in other developed countries - seems to be that both parties don't think that's an issue, so we don't have it tossed around in the media, nobody seems to mind.
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>Or let's try something that hurts more: companies outsourcing jobs probably still have the tax benefits they got for creating the original jobs here. Which party will pick that issue and push it through the media?

I think it is more a question on some issues of who you expect to fix it. Paid vacations for anything but government employees are not the governements to gaurentee. They are the subjst of discussion in labor negotiations all the time and are part of the incentive package in the job market. The FCC and SEC are subject to continuous congressional oversight (there are committees for that ) of the peoples representatives even it 90% of the people don't know what the letter stand for <s>

News media make their living alerting people to issues they think the public cares about (or should care about ) but the public can decide for itself whether or not it does in fact care.

It is not part of the culture of the country that every problem requires a government mandated solution. I understand there are those who would like it otherwise, but I feel pretty comfortable with the idea that there is a lot of interaction between humans that is not under the control or supervision of the nomenklatura.