I was trying to keep this short. :C See last section for tl;dr.

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Health care repeal: Insurance premiums have skyrocketed since the ACA went into effect. Just this year, I know a small business owner whose premium for high-deductible family plan has gone up 2.5x. My employer-provided health insurance premium increased a little (relatively at least), but both the individual and family deductibles jumped by about 40%.

Repealing the ACA doesn't include artificial price controls, etc., but the common belief is that the ACA is one of the biggest reasons that premiums have gone up, and that repealing it will allow them to come back down.

I understand that the causal relationship is arguable, but you asked for a perspective on how it helps the average person. The perspective is that the average person who isn't getting subsidized health insurance is getting raked over the coals (along with their employer, who usually pays 60-80% of the monthly premium), and that perspective is absolutely reflected in the real world where people are being forced to pay thousands more for less than they had last year.

"Without a replacement" isn't considered a big issue because it's not like repealing the ACA shuts down the medical facilities/industry in any real way. They'll continue to operate and health care will still be available. Everyone is not going to die because the medical system reverts to the regulatory structure that was in place five years ago. The insurance situation will get better for some and worse for others, but that's at worst a lateral movement, and it's arguably a positive because it allows people to forgo health insurance altogether again, which means the insurers will have to offer something for the "Well I'm not even going to bother" crowd.

This is another situation where polarization has caused us to miss the forest for the trees. The medical-industrial complex in this country is completely out of control. Completely. Everyone knows this. We need an elegant solution (and most conservatives don't consider a blank check from the government elegant), but we're not going to get one with each group playing off of each other and their politicians just toggling the situation in favor of their base every 4-8 years.

We have to hold our politicians accountable and demand something that is workable and stable for everyone. The heart of the matter is that the insurance companies have got to go, but we're never going to get other traditional conservatives on board with that if we don't engage in a real dialogue and build up trust.

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Permanent tax breaks to corporations with temporary to non-corporations is a polarizing misdirection. People comprise corporations and cutting corporate taxes means that more of that money is available for normal people who've earned it to use and deploy, rather than for the government to appropriate and reserve for the purposes of a handful of unmovable bureaucrats. Most conservatives consider this a default good.

The permanent nature of the corporate tax cut is not an insult unless you choose to make it one. Every dollar of corporate tax does not have to be replaced by a dollar of individual tax; the goal is to pay less tax, not just to shift it around.

If the the corporate tax rate was too high, it should be brought down, regardless of the implementation details on the individual tax side. The overall goal is to keep direct taxes minimized in general.

How does this help the average citizen? First, there is individual tax relief already baked in for at least 8 years. That's an immediate tax savings and that's great. Second, allowing resources to flow to the people who are capable of commanding them from the marketplace allows these people to expand their operations, hire others, develop new technology and goods, etc. etc. -- all the basics of our economy. And perhaps the key difference is that conservatives see themselves not just as potential indirect beneficiaries from a prosperous and competitive marketplace, but direct beneficiaries as shareholders (i.e., anyone with a 401k or retirement account), entrepreneurs (supposedly many people on HN), and full market participants. They don't see it as zero-sum, where one person's prosperity is their poverty.

That sentiment, that access to the marketplace is unequal and that corporate tax savings do not benefit individuals, may be a good perspective or vein to hit on re: unspinning a polarized atmosphere. I think it has been taken to extremes on both ends, with liberal-leaning persons seeing corporations as vicious vampires and conservative-leaning persons seeing them as infallible bastions of righteousness. We have to get back to the middle, where we can help wipe the biases off each other's windows and see things clearly.

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Net neutrality is an example of polarization run amok, because I think that there would be a lot more bipartisan support for a real solution if there wasn't a sentiment that agreeing with "the other side" was an automatic stain. Some conservatives understand the issue and oppose net neutrality for idealistic or technical reasons, but I think that most people who aren't simply repeating a party line know that something is broken and needs fixed one way or the other, whether they agree with the technical implementation under Title II or not.

To claim that this year's net neutrality repeal will have a significant immediate effect, positive or negative, is reaching, IMO. To the extent that telcos feel emboldened by the FCC's ruling, they will move ahead conservatively, because they know the backlash is dangerous. I don't expect to see any substantial user-facing changes any time in the next five years, and rather just expect the telcos to go back to using their ability to prioritize traffic as a bargaining chip with big tech companies, who are consuming a lot more bandwidth than would be feasible under a metered billing model.

Title II is a large regulatory burden, and rules like net neutrality are concerning because while they may stop Comcast from acting as scummy as humanly possible, they can also be wielded to quash small local ISPs (which, on more than one occasion, have been the only way I've been able to get decent internet access due to collisions of incompetence on the part of property owners and telcos) or emerging networks that are sufficient for lightweight transmission, and try to implement useful packet prioritization to stop whales from hogging all of the network's bandwidth.

Conservatives also hold minimal regulation as a principle, not because they want to hurt anyone whom a regulation may help, but because they've seen the other side of the coin, where big companies hijack well-intentioned programs or laws to quash competitors, technical advancements, and so forth.

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These are subjective perspectives informed by individual life experiences, and it's necessarily colored by our private biases, and that's exactly why we need each other. We need to keep each other honest, assuming good faith, and helping one another see where something is going too far afield. This can't be done under the default pretense or assumption that the other person is inherently wrong, evil, disingenuous, stupid, or deserving of punishment. That baseline self-awareness that we all need tempering, and that baseline respect for others that allows us to accept it, must be restored.

Most of the time, people on either side of the aisle are not going to end up fully agreeing with each other, and that's the whole point. We have to be able to disagree and accept compromises without impugning the character of the other.

On the grand scheme of things, it's only a small handful of people who are actively malicious, and the best gift we give them is taking their bait and bitterly bickering over intractable issues derived from personal background and context, instead of working to foster collaboration and compromise, grateful for the benefits of healthy and diverse civil discourse.

The polarized atmosphere allows manipulators to go hog wild, whether they're cold bureaucrats or greedy industrialists, because there are bad guys in both camps (in fact, these guys usually end up teaming up against the masses). We have to stop wasting rage on other people of goodwill while the true exploiters make off with the jewels.

At this rate, we won't realize what's happened until everything valuable is gone and the building is a smoldering ash heap.