u/GwinnettDemocrats

I just wanted to make a quick reminder that there's a range of opinions in this subreddit. It is intended to be a left-leaning subreddit where people can post their opinions and they don't necessarily reflect the opinion or position of the official Gwinnett Democratic party.

I'm also just one person so if you see something sketchy hit the report button and I'll take a look at it.

TLDR: Gwinnett parents pay more for daycare than college tuition while the state government of Georgia hoards over fourteen billion dollars in a surplus vault. We are getting squeezed by corporate daycare monopolies while the state refuses to fund childcare relief for working families.

​Gwinnett parents do not need to be told how brutal the childcare crisis is. If you have a toddler in Suwanee or a baby in Lawrenceville, you are probably paying over ten thousand dollars a year just for basic daycare. For many families, that is literally more than in state college tuition. It is a massive, crushing tax on working parents.

​You are forced to pay it because you have to work, but it feels like you are working just to pay the daycare. Meanwhile, the actual workers at these centers are getting paid poverty wages while giant corporate daycare chains rake in record breaking payouts.

​It is an absolute nightmare, and it is a direct policy choice.

​Right now, the state of Georgia is sitting on a historic, mind blowing fourteen billion dollar budget surplus. More than nine billion of that is completely unallocated, undesignated money just sitting in a state vault. That is our tax money. It is money collected from our paychecks and our local Gwinnett businesses.

​But instead of using that massive pile of cash to help working families, the state government of Georgia actively chooses to hoard it.

​They flat fund critical programs like the Childcare and Parent Services subsidy, which only helps a tiny fraction of the families who actually qualify for it. They refuse to invest in early childhood education or cap costs for middle class parents.

​The state government of Georgia loves to brag about having a massive rainy day fund. But for a young family in Gwinnett trying to survive in this economy, it is already pouring.

​Hoarding fourteen billion dollars of public money while local families go into debt just to keep their toddlers safe is not good financial management. It is a total betrayal of the working class. It is a choice to let corporate daycare chains squeeze every last dime out of young parents while the state sits on a mountain of gold.

​We do not need a state government that treats our tax dollars like a high score in a video game. We need to elect leaders who will release those surplus funds to cap daycare costs, raise wages for childcare workers, and give working parents some actual breathing room.

​How much are you currently paying for childcare in Gwinnett, and what could your family actually do with that money if the state government of Georgia used its massive surplus to cap daycare cos

ts?

TLDR: If your boss steals your wages in Gwinnett, the state government of Georgia will not help you. They purposefully keep our state labor department toothless to protect corporate profit margins, leaving underpaid workers to pay for private lawyers just to get their own paychecks.

​Most of us in Gwinnett assume that there are basic safety nets when you work a hard job. If you spend forty hours a week busting your tail at a warehouse in Buford or a retail shop in Lawrenceville, you expect to get paid for every single minute of that labor. That is just common sense.

​But what happens if your boss decides to short your paycheck? What happens when they make you clock out but force you to keep folding clothes or cleaning the kitchen? What happens when they conveniently forget to pay your overtime?

​If you think you can just call the Georgia Department of Labor and get it sorted out, you are in for a massive shock.

​The state of Georgia does not actually investigate wage theft. They do not have state wage inspectors. They do not have a dedicated department to make sure bosses are actually paying workers their legal wages.

​If you go to the official state government website, they will tell you exactly how little they care. The state government of Georgia explicitly advises underpaid workers to either hire a private lawyer and sue their employer in local small claims court, or file a complaint with the federal government in Washington and wait years for help.

​This is not an accident. The state government of Georgia purposefully keeps our state labor department toothless and underfunded.

​It is a massive, quiet handout to the shareholder class and out of state corporate chains. These corporate executives know that a working class guy who is living paycheck to paycheck cannot afford to hire a lawyer over a shorted five hundred dollar check. They know the federal government is understaffed and backlogged. By refusing to enforce basic wage laws at the state level, the state government of Georgia has effectively legalized wage theft for greedy employers.

​This is a policy choice. In other states, if a corporate boss steals your wages, a state investigator steps in, audits the company, and forces them to pay you back with penalties. But the state government of Georgia has rigged the system so that the burden of enforcing the law falls entirely on the worker who just got robbed.

​We deserve a state government that actually stands up for working families instead of protecting corporate profit margins by looking the other way.

You do not have to choose between protecting your family and protecting the Second Amendment. Most of us in Gwinnett who own guns (including me) are incredibly responsible people. We teach our kids respect for firearms, we buy heavy duty gun safes, and we do not leave loaded weapons lying around on the kitchen counter. We do these things because we are part of a community.

So it is incredibly frustrating when the state government actively blocks us from being responsible.

A perfect example of this is House Bill 79, which was previously introduced as House Bill 971. This was a brilliantly simple piece of legislation. It would have given Georgia gun owners a state income tax credit of up to three hundred dollars to buy a gun safe, trigger locks, or to take a two hour gun safety training course.

It was a common sense incentive. No mandates, no registries, just a direct financial reward for being a responsible neighbor. Gwinnett Democrats joined with the vast majority of Republicans in the House to pass it in a massive landslide. The vote was 165 to 8.

But when it reached the state Senate, the bill was quietly tabled and left to die.

Why would the politicians kill a bill that encourages gun safety without restricting anyone's rights? Because the corporate gun lobby hates the words safe and storage. To those out of state lobbyists, encouraging you to lock up your guns implies that leaving them unsecured might be a problem, and they refuse to allow anything that might slow down their quarterly sales margins. They care about moving as much product as possible, even if it means keeping families in the dark.

Instead of helping you buy a gun safe, look at what the state Senate actually spent their time passing. They fast tracked Senate Bill 204, which legally bans local Georgia cities from requiring gun owners to lock up their firearms in unattended cars. They literally tried to make it illegal for a city to penalize someone for leaving a loaded gun sitting in an unlocked glove box, even though stolen car guns are the primary source of illegal weapons flowing into our local high schools. Even Governor Kemp thought they went too far and ended up vetoing it.

We do not want to take away your firearms. We want to stop state politicians from playing games with our kids' safety just to keep big corporate lobbyists happy. If we want common sense laws that reward responsibility instead of coddling negligence, we have to change who is running the Senate.

Would a three hundred dollar tax credit for a gun safe or a safety class have been useful for your household, and why do you think the politicians in Georgia are so terrified of supporting responsible gun storage?

If you work fifty hours a week at a warehouse in Buford or a store in Lawrenceville and your rent takes up half your check, you already know the truth.

​The majority party politicians love to brag that Georgia is the number one state for business. But they are hiding the quiet part. Good for business just means cheap for corporate bosses. The billionaire class built that slogan on the backs your lower wages.

​It is a rigged game by design. Under Georgia state law section 34 4 3 1, our local Gwinnett County commissioners are completely banned from raising our local minimum wage. The state majority party explicitly passed this law to stop our community from helping our own neighbors. They legally locked your wages down to guarantee massive profit margins for out of state tech billionaires.

​While wealthy investors collect record breaking payouts, you get stuck trying to survive an economy where basic necessities cost a fortune. We do not need a state government that treats Gwinnett like a bargain bin for cheap labor.

​What does being the top state for business actually mean for your bank account? How has it affected you personally?

This is a special election for congressional district 13. It encompasses Lilburn, Snellville, Grayson, Mountain Park, and parts of Lawrenceville and Loganville.

Gwinnett voting schedule

Gwinnett early voting locations

State of Georgia voter page

Here's a link to the website for those running

Marcye Scott (Democrat)

Everton Blair (Democrat)

Carlos Eugene Moore(Democrat)

You can comment for a combination or other

View Poll

You go to a quick clinic in Lawrenceville or a dentist in Snellville, get rushed through a five minute checkup, and then get hit with a massive bill full of weird junk fees. It feels like a total scam because it is.

​But do not blame the staff. Your local doctor did not suddenly get greedy. The shareholder class did.

​Billionaire fund managers and private equity firms are quietly buying up independent medical practices all over Gwinnett County. These Wall Street vultures do not care about your health. To them, a local pediatric clinic is just a corporate asset to bleed dry for quarterly profit goals.

​They buy the practice, cut the nursing staff to save on payroll, and force doctors to treat sick people like a fast food drive-thru. If you cannot pay their inflated surprise fees, these billionaires turn around and sell your debt to predatory collection agencies. It is pure corporate extraction disguised as healthcare.

​This happens because the state majority party completely rigs the rules by passing laws to give massive legal protections to these corporate monopolies while doing absolutely nothing to protect regular working families from predatory medical billing.

​We need state level laws that kick private equity out of our exam rooms and ban these predatory collection tactics.

Which local urgent care or dentist office in your part of town completely went downhill after the corporate suits took over, and what kind of ridiculous surprise bill did they try to stick you with?

​Have you noticed the new subdivisions popping up around Lawrenceville, Buford, or Dacula that look like normal single-family cul-de-sacs, but the signs out front say "Now Leasing"?

​These are not normal apartment complexes. This is part of a massive real estate trend called Build-to-Rent. Out-of-state private equity firms and Wall Street funds are building entire neighborhoods of single-family homes with a permanent ban on homeownership. You can live there, but you can never actually buy the house. This means young families are permanently locked out of building equity and creating generational wealth, while corporate shareholders and billionaires suck cash right out of our community.

​A lot of people are rightfully furious about this. They want to know why the Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners is letting these developers get away with it. Because our local county commission is majority Democrat, we want to be completely transparent with you about how the system is currently rigged against local communities.

​The fact is that our local leaders are caught in a legal chokehold by the current majority party running the show in Georgia.The state majority party passed a strict state preemption law called O.C.G.A. 44-7-19. This law explicitly bans local counties like Gwinnett from passing any form of rent control or rent stabilization. On top of that, the property laws written by the politicians in charge of the state protect corporate landlords so intensely that if Gwinnett tried to pass an outright ban on rental-only subdivisions, the county would get sued into oblivion by billionaire legal teams the very next morning.

​The shareholder class knows the politicians running things in Atlanta have handcuffed local governments. They exploit these loose state regulations to buy up our land because they know local communities cannot legally stop them.

​While the state-level majority protects these Wall Street landlords, Georgia Democrats are trying to break the chokehold from the top down. Federal leaders like Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock just worked across the aisle to pass a major bipartisan package in the U.S. Senate to crack down on out-of-state corporations mass-purchasing single-family starter homes.

​Locally, even though our commissioners cannot outright ban these neighborhoods because of the rules made by the state majority, we still need to push them to fight dirty. They need to use every hyper-local zoning tool, code enforcement rule, and technicality about driveway dimensions or cul-de-sacs to make it as difficult and expensive as possible for Wall Street to operate in our backyards.

​This is not a partisan issue for regular people. Whether you are conservative, independent, or progressive, if your kids are being priced out of the community they grew up in because an out-of-state investment fund bought the whole block, you are getting squeezed by the shareholder class.

​Let us stop letting the majority party running the state protect Wall Street over Gwinnett families. Have you seen one of these corporate rental neighborhoods pop up near you?