The people and corporations who individually make more than the entire lower class combined, by screwing over and stepping on said lower class.
Which would accomplish, what, exactly?
Tax every person for 100% of the income of everyone who makes over a million and you would have, what, 2/3 of a trillion dollars?
Obamacare's annual cost is about 2 trillion. That's just Obamacare. Sanders wants the government to take on the health care costs of everyone, and that's just Sanders' health care plan. Not including the other stuff he wants socialized.
So congratulations, you've accomplished funding 1/3 of the yearly cost of a program that is far less than the cost of Bernie Sanders' program. And I'm sure the economy's not going to take a hit at all from all the peoples' incomes you wiped out. Great work.
So, where's the rest of the money going to come from?
By closing the corporate tax holes and offshore tax havens that allow the top 10 Fortune 500 companies to dodge almost 85% of their taxes?
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"I hope to have such a death... lying in triumph atop the broken bodies of those who slew me..."
You don't call "dying to removal" if the removal is more expensive in resources than the creature. If you have to spend BG (Abrupt Decay), or W + basic land (PtE) to remove a 1G, that is not "dying to removal". Strictly speaking Goyf dies to removal, but actually your removal is dying to Goyf.
By closing the corporate tax holes and offshore tax havens that allow the top 10 Fortune 500 companies to dodge almost 85% of their taxes?
How much money does that bring in?
Depends on your source. Wall Street Journal suggests around $150 billion, Huffington Post says $600 billion. Hard to say because Fortune 500 companies do not need to publish their tax results for their shareholders.
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"I hope to have such a death... lying in triumph atop the broken bodies of those who slew me..."
You don't call "dying to removal" if the removal is more expensive in resources than the creature. If you have to spend BG (Abrupt Decay), or W + basic land (PtE) to remove a 1G, that is not "dying to removal". Strictly speaking Goyf dies to removal, but actually your removal is dying to Goyf.
Depends on your source. Wall Street Journal suggests around $150 billion, Huffington Post says $600 billion. Hard to say because Fortune 500 companies do not need to publish their tax results for their shareholders.
Ok.
So, let's suppose that we take what Highroller wrote above as true.
-Obamacare's annual cost is ~2 trillion dollars.
-If you were to tax everyone who makes over a million at 100% you get ~2/3 of a trillion dollars.
And let's take Huff. Post's claim of 600 billion->.6 trillon.
~.66+.6=~1.26 trillion.
That doesn't cover the cost of Obamacare as given by Highroller.
Depends on your source. Wall Street Journal suggests around $150 billion, Huffington Post says $600 billion. Hard to say because Fortune 500 companies do not need to publish their tax results for their shareholders.
Ok.
So, let's suppose that we take what Highroller wrote above as true.
-Obamacare's annual cost is ~2 trillion dollars.
-If you were to tax everyone who makes over a million at 100% you get ~2/3 of a trillion dollars.
And let's take Huff. Post's claim of 600 billion->.6 trillon.
~.66+.6=~1.26 trillion.
That doesn't cover the cost of Obamacare as given by Highroller.
Except that Obamacare's annual cost is FAR lower than that. The amount is 3.1 trillion over 10 years. 310 billion per year. So that 600 billion goes a LONG way towards that. Even the lower amount pays for half of that (the other half comes from a 20% reduction in expenses towards military contracts (contracts for hardware that never get used because of deals between contractors and congressmen).
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"I hope to have such a death... lying in triumph atop the broken bodies of those who slew me..."
You don't call "dying to removal" if the removal is more expensive in resources than the creature. If you have to spend BG (Abrupt Decay), or W + basic land (PtE) to remove a 1G, that is not "dying to removal". Strictly speaking Goyf dies to removal, but actually your removal is dying to Goyf.
The interesting part to me is that whenever you consider moderates such as Clinton and Obama and Team Bush, you end up with people who have professional backgrounds and success. Then we entertain people like Sanders, Ayn Rand, Mises, Rand Paul, and so forth those people tend towards an extreme in their personal biography. Even Jack London for his literary success had issues early on his life, and he was an ardent socialist.
I think you have the arrow of causation flipped. It's not that having a conventional background makes you a moderate while having an "extreme personal biography" makes you more of a political extremist. I think it's the case that the political moderates (i.e. those most likely to win presidential elections) have been carefully pre-selected by their respective parties and political backers, ensuring that they don't have controversial personal histories. Candidates with extreme political positions (i.e. candidates who are less likely to win) have not been selected and vetted, so they tend to have a wide variety of backgrounds, including more "extreme" ones.
Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard were both Jewish immigrants from Soviet Russia, and created market based philosophies to counteract Marxism. Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Roepke were both affected by fascism and communism, and built within the same intellectual framework as Rothbard. Rothbard and Roepke were students of Mises inside of the libertarian tent. Much of libertarianism can be traced to taking classical liberalism ideas and applying that to WWII as a reaction against fascism and communism.
We can then see why someone like Ted Cruz's father, a Cuban refugee, and Ted Cruz himself would both be a part of reactionary.
Jack London, author of White Fang and Cry of the Wild and other books, was born poor and while many attempts to finish his education was never really able to do as much as he liked until he was older. While socialism was in vogue intellectually, and he was commercially success, we can see as a part of his own personal growth why he was a supporter of socialism. Then whenever we consider Bernie Sander's own personal biography, linked in a former post, we can consider his lifestyle choices and continued support of those ideals.
In part, the ideals that reflected one's own successes and fears in life can be seen in one's own political ideology. Even Hilary Clinton was a conservative in her young life, but still maintains similar to her husband a support of neo-liberal policies like free trade.
The vetting process sure has a lot to do with tone and moderation and talking points, much like Reagan or Clinton or Team Bush. However, we must conclude the basic tenets of their cherished philosophies have a bearing on their upbringing and locality and what determined success. For Bernie Sanders it was government, for Clinton it was both the private sector and government, while for others it was the private sector.
Murray was born in the Bronx, and was never a practicing Jew. For Mises, Rothbard, et. al. who were Economists first, and political communicators second, they didn't come to their political positions by an innate dislike of other philosophies, but because their economics informed them of some basic truths. In other words, they didn't put the cart before the horse as you so implied.
Yes, one's background is certainly important in how their future selves were shaped, and certainly the time period in which they grew up in is important, it doesn't necessarily portend an individuals political affiliations and leanings. For instance, Warren Buffet is nothing alike to this father Howard who was Ron Paul before Ron Paul and was a huge part of the mid-west libertarian faction in the GOP (Garet Garrett, Robert Taft, himself, etc.). You'd think growing up seeing the results of the USSR he'd be like Murray or Ayn, especially when growing up with his dad Howard, but no...my point is, it's more important to take ones actions into account more than anything.
One thing that's been mentioned a few times is Bernie Sanders' lack of numbers when it comes to fixing the economy. I even made a cynical (and now factually incorrect) statement about that in the Donald Trump thread. After doing some digging, I've found this article, which goes into some of the specifics of what Bernie Sanders would do to specifically fix the economy. Note: not mentioned in the list is also a Carbon Tax to help curb emissions, as well as reducing military spending.
Thoughts?
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
Depends on your source. Wall Street Journal suggests around $150 billion, Huffington Post says $600 billion. Hard to say because Fortune 500 companies do not need to publish their tax results for their shareholders.
Ok.
So, let's suppose that we take what Highroller wrote above as true.
-Obamacare's annual cost is ~2 trillion dollars.
-If you were to tax everyone who makes over a million at 100% you get ~2/3 of a trillion dollars.
And let's take Huff. Post's claim of 600 billion->.6 trillon.
~.66+.6=~1.26 trillion.
That doesn't cover the cost of Obamacare as given by Highroller.
Except that Obamacare's annual cost is FAR lower than that. The amount is 3.1 trillion over 10 years. 310 billion per year. So that 600 billion goes a LONG way towards that. Even the lower amount pays for half of that (the other half comes from a 20% reduction in expenses towards military contracts (contracts for hardware that never get used because of deals between contractors and congressmen).
Except that the expected cost is way, way lower than 310 Billion per year. It's actually more like 100 billion per year. 3.1 Trillion is the total amount the US spends on healthcare, and as discussed in the trump thread, it's mostly that high because you are completely awful at it. But The afforadable care act is much, much cheaper than that.
Except that the expected cost is way, way lower than 310 Billion per year. It's actually more like 100 billion per year. 3.1 Trillion is the total amount the US spends on healthcare, and as discussed in the trump thread, it's mostly that high because you are completely awful at it. But The afforadable care act is much, much cheaper than that.
And, unsurprisingly to everyone who lives outside the united states, the expected costs are *falling*, not rising.
I keep hearing the claim that socializing healthcare would reduce the total cost. But no one has explained the mechanism by which this cost reduction would supposedly occur.
Your link says *premiums* are falling, but premiums are just one of many costs associated with healthcare. The link also attributes some of the cost "savings" to inaccurate CBO estimates that are being revised in light of better data. I'm not sure you can call those real savings.
Except that the expected cost is way, way lower than 310 Billion per year. It's actually more like 100 billion per year. 3.1 Trillion is the total amount the US spends on healthcare, and as discussed in the trump thread, it's mostly that high because you are completely awful at it. But The afforadable care act is much, much cheaper than that.
And, unsurprisingly to everyone who lives outside the united states, the expected costs are *falling*, not rising.
I keep hearing the claim that socializing healthcare would reduce the total cost. But no one has explained the mechanism by which this price reduction would supposedly occur.
Your link says *premiums* are falling, but premiums are just one of many costs associated with healthcare. The link also attributes some of the cost "savings" to inaccurate CBO estimates that are being revised in light of better data. I'm not sure you can call those real savings.
There are a number of reasons it tends to fall. One is this:
Let's say you need a surgery of some kind. Let's say a hip replacement.
You are in utterly no position to bargain. If someone tells you it costs 20 grand, well, that's the cost. You need it; it's not like you're buying a beta lotus, which you can bargain on, you're buying something essential for you to function.
On the other hand, if you have a system like medicarein AU, someone else is doing the bargaining for you. The government tenders out to all the makers of new hips, and of those that meet the quality standard, everyone knows the winner is likely to be the cheapest*.
Winning the contract to replace all those hips is worth a ton of money, so all the companies are strongly motivated to provide their actual best price. It's a standard economy of scale; If I know I'm selling a thousand hips a year for 5 years I can gear up to sell them much much more efficiently.
It's also long-term cheaper because prevention is much much cheaper than cure. If you can catch a condition at the MD stage rather than the emergency room, you save a whole ton of money, and get the person to be a more productive member of society into the bargain.
Except that the expected cost is way, way lower than 310 Billion per year. It's actually more like 100 billion per year. 3.1 Trillion is the total amount the US spends on healthcare, and as discussed in the trump thread, it's mostly that high because you are completely awful at it. But The afforadable care act is much, much cheaper than that.
And, unsurprisingly to everyone who lives outside the united states, the expected costs are *falling*, not rising.
I keep hearing the claim that socializing healthcare would reduce the total cost. But no one has explained the mechanism by which this price reduction would supposedly occur.
Your link says *premiums* are falling, but premiums are just one of many costs associated with healthcare. The link also attributes some of the cost "savings" to inaccurate CBO estimates that are being revised in light of better data. I'm not sure you can call those real savings.
There are a number of reasons it tends to fall. One is this:
Let's say you need a surgery of some kind. Let's say a hip replacement.
You are in utterly no position to bargain. If someone tells you it costs 20 grand, well, that's the cost. You need it; it's not like you're buying a beta lotus, which you can bargain on, you're buying something essential for you to function.
On the other hand, if you have a system like medicarein AU, someone else is doing the bargaining for you. The government tenders out to all the makers of new hips, and of those that meet the quality standard, everyone knows the winner is likely to be the cheapest*.
Winning the contract to replace all those hips is worth a ton of money, so all the companies are strongly motivated to provide their actual best price. It's a standard economy of scale; If I know I'm selling a thousand hips a year for 5 years I can gear up to sell them much much more efficiently.
That's a great story, but unfortunately stories don't prove anything when we're talking about a system as complex as economics. I can tell a different story about the hip market and get to the exact opposite conclusion. Neither of our made-up stories proves anything (although I happen to think mine comes closer to reality):
Let's say you need a surgery of some kind. Let's say a hip replacement.
You are in utterly no position to bargain with any individual maker of replacement hips. But you are in a position to chose between the, say, five or ten different hip providers out there. If low price is what matters to you, you'll choose the lowest-price option available. The hip providers know this, and this means every hip provider has a strong incentive to offer its "best price" in order to take the business that would otherwise go to its competitors. If one provider tries to artificially hike up its prices, no one will buy from them and they'll lose money to their competitors.
On the other hand, if you have a system like medicarein AU, someone else is doing the bargaining for you. The government picks for you which hip you'll get. If the government is perfectly efficient and not corrupt, then this could be the best and cheapest hip provider.
Winning the contract to replace all those hips is worth a ton of money and grants the hip maker a government-sponsored monopoly over the entire market, so all the hip companies are strongly motivated to do everything they can to win the contract while getting the highest possible price for their product. This might include things like donating money to corrupt politicians who will make sure they win the contract. It also includes other tactics like regulatory capture. The ability to "cheat" the competitive bidding process is one reason why the US pays such an exorbitant amount of money for the military. Think Cheney and Halliburton, but now spilling over into the world of healthcare.
Also, what happens if the hip provider wins the contract and just decides to jack up prices later? I guess we go to their competitors? Wait, they don't have any competitors because we gave a single company a complete monopoly over the hip market and drove all the competitors out of business.
It's also long-term cheaper because prevention is much much cheaper than cure. If you can catch a condition at the MD stage rather than the emergency room, you save a whole ton of money, and get the person to be a more productive member of society into the bargain.
Source? Preventing something that kills you fast so something can kill you slow later might ultimately be much more expensive. Again, stories don't prove anything.
Except that the expected cost is way, way lower than 310 Billion per year. It's actually more like 100 billion per year. 3.1 Trillion is the total amount the US spends on healthcare, and as discussed in the trump thread, it's mostly that high because you are completely awful at it. But The afforadable care act is much, much cheaper than that.
And, unsurprisingly to everyone who lives outside the united states, the expected costs are *falling*, not rising.
I keep hearing the claim that socializing healthcare would reduce the total cost. But no one has explained the mechanism by which this cost reduction would supposedly occur.
Your link says *premiums* are falling, but premiums are just one of many costs associated with healthcare. The link also attributes some of the cost "savings" to inaccurate CBO estimates that are being revised in light of better data. I'm not sure you can call those real savings.
I think the first step is to establish what the ACA did right:
1. No lifetime on medical insurance
This means that if you get cancer when you're young and live a long and productive life, you can still use your medical insurance later in life if you get into an expensive health position. With the caps on specific healthcare coverage it caused specific people financial hardship just because of "luck of the draw."
2. Insurance until 26
This means that for people in their 20's who want to save up and pay for college the "old fashioned way" have a few years rather than going directly into college. One of the discussions at the community college level was that many students were there for the health insurance. So you would have people taking grant money from the Board of Education to try and just "barely" pass a class to maintain health insurance.
Young people switch jobs more readily to get training and move up faster, so therefore don't always have health insurance either as a result of natural choices in their life. Equally, it allows for entrepreneurial youngsters to not worry about their health insurance and focus on their business. This is no different than an entrepreneur living on the spouse's benefits. It's a strategy in the tool kit to create jobs.
One of the motivating factors was the inability for some young people to get jobs or were between college and the "real job" for far too long and were unable to acquire health insurance and had real medical issues that need to be treated. This is mostly a result of our education system graduating people later and a more demanding job market, requires people to stay dependent longer for some occupations. Which is sad, but a longer conversation about life span and life cycle in modernity.
3. The state exchanges allows people to have insurance independent of employer, so this allows them to move jobs or build a company using the state exchanges to buy insurance. That is a large win for conservatives to decentralize the healthcare system, but we've gotten to the point as conservatives "everything Obama likes we hate."
The price of health insurance has multiple factors, but the rising correlation between what we pay versus say Sweden does that enacted the healthcare legislation around the same time as the Clinton push has been successful. While more expensive than some other places, Sweden has a competitive market based system with a lot of options for insurance. What the US needs to do is to take a more market oriented approach and breakdown state line barriers for health insurance monopolies.
Most of the ACA is a framework, and to paraphrase Howard Dean "it's easier to amend something than to pass it." It's like building a Magic deck, once you have your nonbasic lands and specific rare cards that you have the bones to the deck. The real meat and skin comes from modulating and playing that deck. The GoP is irritated because it wants to play aggro while Progressives want to play a control deck. Most people prefer a Midrange strategy than an out and out aggro strategy and do not want a draw-go deck that some specific socialists want. That's mostly the result of people not wanting a full libertarian market approach without certain assurances, but do not want full government control.
It is difficult to discern what "Americans want" since there are several different ideologies, but also structural problems in institutions that needs to be completely restructured. In my opinion, I feel that libertarianism is something that is incompatible with social justice as we have seen with Jim Crow and gradual fall of anti-homosexuality that the states cannot be trusted with social justice issues. Economically, we are also struggling with concepts ranging from "unfair versus fairness."
Humans have an innate sense of fairness, all social animals do. If you have two dogs, one is trained to sit on command and the other is given a treat to sit. Then eventually both dogs will expect a treat to sit. Why? Because the other dog "feels" that it is entitled to the same treatment. Once we come to that basic conclusion about human nature, we need to grapple with aspects of value and price. Both value and price fluctuate based on variables, which market fundamentalists try to point to as the reason why fairness cannot exist.
Fairness is the point of improvement without total collapse into a mess. There is work in various areas of healthcare such as end of life treatment that have become better, and there are specific people making a real difference. The issue is that many conservatives do not want to allow for things such as abortion, but do not want to pay for excess children or donate money to take care of said children. While other social conservatives do not want to allow for doctor assisted suicide, while retaining a high amount of fall rates and other treatment problems in most nursing homes. I'm not an expert in the fields of juvenile justice or geriatric medicine, I just know these exist from other "stories" and factual information with regard to demographics.
Cost benefit analysis is a purely financial approach born out of the Commerce Revolution and refined through the mathematics revolution in economics taking on aspects of Utilitarian philosophy. Yet, with each philosophy and neurology study we see that there are different forms of appraisal mechanisms going on in the human mind as conditions change. Whether that person is sad or horny, direction of the mind changes. Conservatives like to push for always self control, but we all know the real story. People fall from grace, and make mistakes. It is the point to not invent systems that crater people, even Ayn Rand used social security because her own lung cancer would have bankrupted her. We can argue she "paid into it," but why is she entitled to denounce it then use it in her dying hour? It's sort of like Ron Paul, it makes little sense whenever we look at the finite nature of human beings.
Big and smallness are a part of our engines. Redistribution of the wealth mechanisms have existed in the world since before the Roman Empire. Healthcare and insurance itself has been refined through the role of personal and collective responsibility, especially through the evolution of free trade. The current reigning philosophy of market fundamentalism can be traced back to the role of communism which took the processes of the state as an absolute. As we have moved away from communism and more towards hybrid economics, we are seeing people in the US taking a longer look and trusting in what they know and the legends they grew up with about Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan was left of center economically and used Keynesian policies. He was not a fiscal conservative. He talked as a fiscal conservative, but did not fully govern as one. George Bush and Bill Clinton both were fiscal conservatives.
Thus far, I think we are seeing that the GoP has become a party that no longer has the best interests of the country at heart. While the Democrats are better at governing right now, we need a party that are much stronger. We can debate whether costs are cheaper or not, but that there are specifics in the ACA that lend itself to be built upon and also cause us to seriously question why certain provisions were even put into there. Not whether they need repealed and replaced, but whether the structure of our society is truly at total. I think the main reasons, outside of philosophy on government, is fear of change and the costs associated with change. People find change stressful and hate it with a passion, once we accept that change is coming we must deal with our ideals and resources for one time in tandem at once.
Healthcare is a cradle to grave issue, and we have arrived at the point where people can now live beyond their own bodies capacity to handle them. We have people surviving deadly illness. We have babies that used to die shortly after birth now able to live full productive lives. But it costs money, and it means that we will not be able to buy war machines and pave roads as we have more humans into the system and as they demand more resources.
The question isn't costs, it's practices and costs and culture. Which to analyze each of those structures is an entire book.
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Life is a beautiful engineer, yet a brutal scientist.
Except that the expected cost is way, way lower than 310 Billion per year. It's actually more like 100 billion per year. 3.1 Trillion is the total amount the US spends on healthcare, and as discussed in the trump thread, it's mostly that high because you are completely awful at it. But The afforadable care act is much, much cheaper than that.
And, unsurprisingly to everyone who lives outside the united states, the expected costs are *falling*, not rising.
I keep hearing the claim that socializing healthcare would reduce the total cost. But no one has explained the mechanism by which this price reduction would supposedly occur.
Your link says *premiums* are falling, but premiums are just one of many costs associated with healthcare. The link also attributes some of the cost "savings" to inaccurate CBO estimates that are being revised in light of better data. I'm not sure you can call those real savings.
There are a number of reasons it tends to fall. One is this:
Let's say you need a surgery of some kind. Let's say a hip replacement.
You are in utterly no position to bargain. If someone tells you it costs 20 grand, well, that's the cost. You need it; it's not like you're buying a beta lotus, which you can bargain on, you're buying something essential for you to function.
On the other hand, if you have a system like medicarein AU, someone else is doing the bargaining for you. The government tenders out to all the makers of new hips, and of those that meet the quality standard, everyone knows the winner is likely to be the cheapest*.
Winning the contract to replace all those hips is worth a ton of money, so all the companies are strongly motivated to provide their actual best price. It's a standard economy of scale; If I know I'm selling a thousand hips a year for 5 years I can gear up to sell them much much more efficiently.
That's a great story, but unfortunately stories don't prove anything when we're talking about a system as complex as economics. I can tell a different story about the hip market and get to the exact opposite conclusion. Neither of our made-up stories proves anything (although I happen to think mine comes closer to reality):
Cool story. I guess I'll just have to be satisfied that the evidence of what actually happens in the real world (That the US has the most expensive healthcare system in the world and gets worse outcomes for it) seems to reflect rather less your version of events.
Also, what happens if the hip provider wins the contract and just decides to jack up prices later?
Do you even know what a contract is?
It's also long-term cheaper because prevention is much much cheaper than cure. If you can catch a condition at the MD stage rather than the emergency room, you save a whole ton of money, and get the person to be a more productive member of society into the bargain.
Source? Preventing something that kills you fast so something can kill you slow later might ultimately be much more expensive. Again, stories don't prove anything.
<source> Every doctor or medical theory ever. </source>
That's a great story, but unfortunately stories don't prove anything when we're talking about a system as complex as economics. I can tell a different story about the hip market and get to the exact opposite conclusion. Neither of our made-up stories proves anything (although I happen to think mine comes closer to reality):
Except Verbal's "story" isn't made up, it's what currently happens in single payer countries.
It's also why labor unions are a thing.
Collective bargaining is real. It works, has worked, and will continue to work.
One of the reasons Bernie supports it.
Except Verbal's "story" isn't made up, it's what currently happens in single payer countries.
It's also why labor unions are a thing.
Collective bargaining is real. It works, has worked, and will continue to work.
One of the reasons Bernie supports it.
And one of the reasons that (according to leaked documents on the Trans-Pacific Partnership) pharmaceutical companies want the power of the New Zealand drug buying agency, Pharmac, reined in; apparently as it is now, it works so well that they worry other countries might start doing it.
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I am willing to bet my collection that Frozen and Solid are not on the same card. For example, Frozen Tomb and Solid Wall.
If Frozen Solid is not reprinted, you are aware that I'm quoting you in my sig for eternity?
Oh I know. Hillary is a juggernaut as far as the nomination goes. Highest numbers of any non-incumbent since forever, tons of cash, support of basically every person who matters in the party, etc. etc. Also if something catastrophic were to happen that would make her un-electable - well Biden is just waiting to step in and pick up right where she left off. Logically, there is about zero chance of Bernie Sanders getting the nomination. But I like him, and if I had the choice, he is probably who I would vote for.
Oh I know. Hillary is a juggernaut as far as the nomination goes. Highest numbers of any non-incumbent since forever, tons of cash, support of basically every person who matters in the party, etc. etc. Also if something catastrophic were to happen that would make her un-electable - well Biden is just waiting to step in and pick up right where she left off. Logically, there is about zero chance of Bernie Sanders getting the nomination. But I like him, and if I had the choice, he is probably who I would vote for.
Hillary also has no room to grow. I'm just wondering about the 4% who don't know who Hillary is.
As for something catastrophic that would make her unelectable, um, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the exclusivity clause?
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Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
Oh I know. Hillary is a juggernaut as far as the nomination goes.
To be fair, there have been zero Democratic debates so far. Consider that Scott Walker was the Republican favorite going into the debates this year for the Republicans. THAT changed. And there are examples like this pretty much every year.
But needless to say, I'm rooting against Sanders. I would actually take Hillary over him, and that's saying something.
Oh I know. Hillary is a juggernaut as far as the nomination goes.
To be fair, there have been zero Democratic debates so far. Consider that Scott Walker was the Republican favorite going into the debates this year for the Republicans. THAT changed. And there are examples like this pretty much every year.
But needless to say, I'm rooting against Sanders. I would actually take Hillary over him, and that's saying something.
As for Sanders, no. We should not have a socialist as a president. Look at Europe. See how well it's doing. And now someone wants to emulate that in the US? No, that's insanity, and we should all be very glad that we have an electorate that would not vote for such a person.
You're right, it's totally insane for the US to want to emulate the best places to live in the entire world, like Denmark and Finland. We'll never be able to pull that off because of people who don't understand what socialism is or does, and fight it out of extremely misguided perceptions.
Bernie is the only good choice in the current lineup. Hillary will just be more of the same neo-Liberalism which, while not necessarily bad, isn't actually changing the core problems with massive income inequality in the US, and convinces some of the less politically-savvy that they're making progress when they aren't.
You're right, it's totally insane for the US to want to emulate the best places to live in the entire world, like Denmark and Finland.
Yes, we know, you want us to pretend that the Happiness Index is actually something we should take seriously.
The fact of the matter is that Finland and Denmark are - while far from the worst places to live - by no means the best places to live.
Finland's economy in particular is very bad, Denmark's isn't much better, and there's no surprise as to why. These governments are having to recognize that they cannot sustain how bloated they've become. They're spending too much on social programs that they're having remarkable difficulty cutting because their people are so resistant on shrinking their welfare states. Meanwhile, you have a government who's taking so much money out of the private sector in terms of taxes that it hinders their economy from being viable, which is a problem because then their country brings in less money, precipitating the need for greater cuts. You also have people who just don't work, because why bother when the government gives out so much welfare? A study in 2013 found that only 3 of Denmark's 98 municipalities could say that a majority of their residents would have jobs.
Which is the key problem: socialism doesn't work. The obvious problems of rampant expansion of government should be obvious to anyone on a purely conceptual level, but then see country after country in Europe mired in difficulty and so we see the failure of socialism in practice. Countries throughout Europe are recognizing they need to make overhauls to their economic systems. Hell, over one-sixth of all countries in the European Union have gone bankrupt. Where is this great success of socialism we're supposed to be seeing?
But then people in the US come in and say, "Hey! That really bad idea? We should emulate that!"
Insanity.
We'll never be able to pull that off because of people who don't understand what socialism is or does,
Correct, most people think socialism actually helps a country, ignoring the crisis in Europe as countries are recognizing they cannot spend the amounts they are on welfare programs and still be economically viable.
You know what helps a country? Being economically competitive in a global economy. Economic growth helps a country.
Yes, I know, it's not as catchy as, "Hey, the government will take care of you from the cradle to the grave and things will only get better," but that's not reality. Unsustainable government spending doesn't help a country, it ruins a country.
Logically, there is about zero chance of Bernie Sanders getting the nomination. But I like him, and if I had the choice, he is probably who I would vote for.
*sigh*.... I've campaigned for Bernie on the streets of NYC. I talk to people (mostly Hillary supporters) and that above ^^ is the single statement I hear the most. To me, its utter nonsense. People seem to forget the fundamental ideas of Democracy, which is that WE decide. Almost every single Hillary supporter is like this, that they would prefer Bernie but don't think he will win. And do you know why? Because of people like you, who don't exert their voice and civil power by voting for who they genuinely think is best for the country. Imagine if everyone who said this voted for Sanders? Who do you think would win?
Anyway, voting issues aside, Bernie is a fantastic and honest man, and he is the only one who solve the real internal problems we are facing.
Imagine if everyone who said this voted for Sanders? Who do you think would win?
Clinton, still. You seem to be missing the part where lots of people honestly prefer Clinton, because she's more centrist, or because she's a known quantity, or because she's a woman, or for any number of other reasons. It's very definitely not the case that Clinton supporters secretly prefer Sanders. You have to be careful not to project your own preferences onto other people.
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candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Imagine if everyone who said this voted for Sanders? Who do you think would win?
Clinton, still. You seem to be missing the part where lots of people honestly prefer Clinton, because she's more centrist, or because she's a known quantity, or because she's a woman, or for any number of other reasons. It's very definitely not the case that Clinton supporters secretly prefer Sanders. You have to be careful not to project your own preferences onto other people.
You seemed to have missed the part where I said what I said based on in-the-field research. I never said all Clinton supporters were closet Sanders supporters, but a lot of the ones I have talked to. You should be careful not to quote out of context.
And honestly, I would have to disagree with your statement. We have seen recently that Bernie is polling better than Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire, all "closet Bernie supporters" aside. This can be directly attributed to Sanders' heavy campaigning in those areas. We see an increase in support in these areas because people who were unaware of him before are now, and genuinely prefer him over Hillary. I will go so far as to say that in an ideal world, where everyone knew Bernie as much as Hillary, and everyone voted honestly, Bernie would win, hands down.
And honestly, I would have to disagree with your statement. We have seen recently that Bernie is polling better than Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire, all "closet Bernie supporters" aside. This can be directly attributed to Sanders' heavy campaigning in those areas. We see an increase in support in these areas because people who were unaware of him before are now, and genuinely prefer him over Hillary. I will go so far as to say that in an ideal world, where everyone knew Bernie as much as Hillary, and everyone voted honestly, Bernie would win, hands down.
By closing the corporate tax holes and offshore tax havens that allow the top 10 Fortune 500 companies to dodge almost 85% of their taxes?
"I hope to have such a death... lying in triumph atop the broken bodies of those who slew me..."
How much money does that bring in?
Depends on your source. Wall Street Journal suggests around $150 billion, Huffington Post says $600 billion. Hard to say because Fortune 500 companies do not need to publish their tax results for their shareholders.
"I hope to have such a death... lying in triumph atop the broken bodies of those who slew me..."
Ok.
So, let's suppose that we take what Highroller wrote above as true.
-Obamacare's annual cost is ~2 trillion dollars.
-If you were to tax everyone who makes over a million at 100% you get ~2/3 of a trillion dollars.
And let's take Huff. Post's claim of 600 billion->.6 trillon.
~.66+.6=~1.26 trillion.
That doesn't cover the cost of Obamacare as given by Highroller.
Except that Obamacare's annual cost is FAR lower than that. The amount is 3.1 trillion over 10 years. 310 billion per year. So that 600 billion goes a LONG way towards that. Even the lower amount pays for half of that (the other half comes from a 20% reduction in expenses towards military contracts (contracts for hardware that never get used because of deals between contractors and congressmen).
"I hope to have such a death... lying in triumph atop the broken bodies of those who slew me..."
Murray was born in the Bronx, and was never a practicing Jew. For Mises, Rothbard, et. al. who were Economists first, and political communicators second, they didn't come to their political positions by an innate dislike of other philosophies, but because their economics informed them of some basic truths. In other words, they didn't put the cart before the horse as you so implied.
Yes, one's background is certainly important in how their future selves were shaped, and certainly the time period in which they grew up in is important, it doesn't necessarily portend an individuals political affiliations and leanings. For instance, Warren Buffet is nothing alike to this father Howard who was Ron Paul before Ron Paul and was a huge part of the mid-west libertarian faction in the GOP (Garet Garrett, Robert Taft, himself, etc.). You'd think growing up seeing the results of the USSR he'd be like Murray or Ayn, especially when growing up with his dad Howard, but no...my point is, it's more important to take ones actions into account more than anything.
Thoughts?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
Except that the expected cost is way, way lower than 310 Billion per year. It's actually more like 100 billion per year. 3.1 Trillion is the total amount the US spends on healthcare, and as discussed in the trump thread, it's mostly that high because you are completely awful at it. But The afforadable care act is much, much cheaper than that.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/09/obamacares-cost-is-falling-as-fewer-receive-coverage-under-health-care-law-cbo-says/
And, unsurprisingly to everyone who lives outside the united states, the expected costs are *falling*, not rising.
I keep hearing the claim that socializing healthcare would reduce the total cost. But no one has explained the mechanism by which this cost reduction would supposedly occur.
Your link says *premiums* are falling, but premiums are just one of many costs associated with healthcare. The link also attributes some of the cost "savings" to inaccurate CBO estimates that are being revised in light of better data. I'm not sure you can call those real savings.
There are a number of reasons it tends to fall. One is this:
Let's say you need a surgery of some kind. Let's say a hip replacement.
You are in utterly no position to bargain. If someone tells you it costs 20 grand, well, that's the cost. You need it; it's not like you're buying a beta lotus, which you can bargain on, you're buying something essential for you to function.
On the other hand, if you have a system like medicarein AU, someone else is doing the bargaining for you. The government tenders out to all the makers of new hips, and of those that meet the quality standard, everyone knows the winner is likely to be the cheapest*.
Winning the contract to replace all those hips is worth a ton of money, so all the companies are strongly motivated to provide their actual best price. It's a standard economy of scale; If I know I'm selling a thousand hips a year for 5 years I can gear up to sell them much much more efficiently.
It's also long-term cheaper because prevention is much much cheaper than cure. If you can catch a condition at the MD stage rather than the emergency room, you save a whole ton of money, and get the person to be a more productive member of society into the bargain.
That's a great story, but unfortunately stories don't prove anything when we're talking about a system as complex as economics. I can tell a different story about the hip market and get to the exact opposite conclusion. Neither of our made-up stories proves anything (although I happen to think mine comes closer to reality):
Let's say you need a surgery of some kind. Let's say a hip replacement.
You are in utterly no position to bargain with any individual maker of replacement hips. But you are in a position to chose between the, say, five or ten different hip providers out there. If low price is what matters to you, you'll choose the lowest-price option available. The hip providers know this, and this means every hip provider has a strong incentive to offer its "best price" in order to take the business that would otherwise go to its competitors. If one provider tries to artificially hike up its prices, no one will buy from them and they'll lose money to their competitors.
On the other hand, if you have a system like medicarein AU, someone else is doing the bargaining for you. The government picks for you which hip you'll get. If the government is perfectly efficient and not corrupt, then this could be the best and cheapest hip provider.
Winning the contract to replace all those hips is worth a ton of money and grants the hip maker a government-sponsored monopoly over the entire market, so all the hip companies are strongly motivated to do everything they can to win the contract while getting the highest possible price for their product. This might include things like donating money to corrupt politicians who will make sure they win the contract. It also includes other tactics like regulatory capture. The ability to "cheat" the competitive bidding process is one reason why the US pays such an exorbitant amount of money for the military. Think Cheney and Halliburton, but now spilling over into the world of healthcare.
Also, what happens if the hip provider wins the contract and just decides to jack up prices later? I guess we go to their competitors? Wait, they don't have any competitors because we gave a single company a complete monopoly over the hip market and drove all the competitors out of business.
Source? Preventing something that kills you fast so something can kill you slow later might ultimately be much more expensive. Again, stories don't prove anything.
I think the first step is to establish what the ACA did right:
1. No lifetime on medical insurance
This means that if you get cancer when you're young and live a long and productive life, you can still use your medical insurance later in life if you get into an expensive health position. With the caps on specific healthcare coverage it caused specific people financial hardship just because of "luck of the draw."
2. Insurance until 26
This means that for people in their 20's who want to save up and pay for college the "old fashioned way" have a few years rather than going directly into college. One of the discussions at the community college level was that many students were there for the health insurance. So you would have people taking grant money from the Board of Education to try and just "barely" pass a class to maintain health insurance.
Young people switch jobs more readily to get training and move up faster, so therefore don't always have health insurance either as a result of natural choices in their life. Equally, it allows for entrepreneurial youngsters to not worry about their health insurance and focus on their business. This is no different than an entrepreneur living on the spouse's benefits. It's a strategy in the tool kit to create jobs.
One of the motivating factors was the inability for some young people to get jobs or were between college and the "real job" for far too long and were unable to acquire health insurance and had real medical issues that need to be treated. This is mostly a result of our education system graduating people later and a more demanding job market, requires people to stay dependent longer for some occupations. Which is sad, but a longer conversation about life span and life cycle in modernity.
3. The state exchanges allows people to have insurance independent of employer, so this allows them to move jobs or build a company using the state exchanges to buy insurance. That is a large win for conservatives to decentralize the healthcare system, but we've gotten to the point as conservatives "everything Obama likes we hate."
The price of health insurance has multiple factors, but the rising correlation between what we pay versus say Sweden does that enacted the healthcare legislation around the same time as the Clinton push has been successful. While more expensive than some other places, Sweden has a competitive market based system with a lot of options for insurance. What the US needs to do is to take a more market oriented approach and breakdown state line barriers for health insurance monopolies.
Most of the ACA is a framework, and to paraphrase Howard Dean "it's easier to amend something than to pass it." It's like building a Magic deck, once you have your nonbasic lands and specific rare cards that you have the bones to the deck. The real meat and skin comes from modulating and playing that deck. The GoP is irritated because it wants to play aggro while Progressives want to play a control deck. Most people prefer a Midrange strategy than an out and out aggro strategy and do not want a draw-go deck that some specific socialists want. That's mostly the result of people not wanting a full libertarian market approach without certain assurances, but do not want full government control.
It is difficult to discern what "Americans want" since there are several different ideologies, but also structural problems in institutions that needs to be completely restructured. In my opinion, I feel that libertarianism is something that is incompatible with social justice as we have seen with Jim Crow and gradual fall of anti-homosexuality that the states cannot be trusted with social justice issues. Economically, we are also struggling with concepts ranging from "unfair versus fairness."
Humans have an innate sense of fairness, all social animals do. If you have two dogs, one is trained to sit on command and the other is given a treat to sit. Then eventually both dogs will expect a treat to sit. Why? Because the other dog "feels" that it is entitled to the same treatment. Once we come to that basic conclusion about human nature, we need to grapple with aspects of value and price. Both value and price fluctuate based on variables, which market fundamentalists try to point to as the reason why fairness cannot exist.
Fairness is the point of improvement without total collapse into a mess. There is work in various areas of healthcare such as end of life treatment that have become better, and there are specific people making a real difference. The issue is that many conservatives do not want to allow for things such as abortion, but do not want to pay for excess children or donate money to take care of said children. While other social conservatives do not want to allow for doctor assisted suicide, while retaining a high amount of fall rates and other treatment problems in most nursing homes. I'm not an expert in the fields of juvenile justice or geriatric medicine, I just know these exist from other "stories" and factual information with regard to demographics.
Cost benefit analysis is a purely financial approach born out of the Commerce Revolution and refined through the mathematics revolution in economics taking on aspects of Utilitarian philosophy. Yet, with each philosophy and neurology study we see that there are different forms of appraisal mechanisms going on in the human mind as conditions change. Whether that person is sad or horny, direction of the mind changes. Conservatives like to push for always self control, but we all know the real story. People fall from grace, and make mistakes. It is the point to not invent systems that crater people, even Ayn Rand used social security because her own lung cancer would have bankrupted her. We can argue she "paid into it," but why is she entitled to denounce it then use it in her dying hour? It's sort of like Ron Paul, it makes little sense whenever we look at the finite nature of human beings.
Big and smallness are a part of our engines. Redistribution of the wealth mechanisms have existed in the world since before the Roman Empire. Healthcare and insurance itself has been refined through the role of personal and collective responsibility, especially through the evolution of free trade. The current reigning philosophy of market fundamentalism can be traced back to the role of communism which took the processes of the state as an absolute. As we have moved away from communism and more towards hybrid economics, we are seeing people in the US taking a longer look and trusting in what they know and the legends they grew up with about Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan was left of center economically and used Keynesian policies. He was not a fiscal conservative. He talked as a fiscal conservative, but did not fully govern as one. George Bush and Bill Clinton both were fiscal conservatives.
Thus far, I think we are seeing that the GoP has become a party that no longer has the best interests of the country at heart. While the Democrats are better at governing right now, we need a party that are much stronger. We can debate whether costs are cheaper or not, but that there are specifics in the ACA that lend itself to be built upon and also cause us to seriously question why certain provisions were even put into there. Not whether they need repealed and replaced, but whether the structure of our society is truly at total. I think the main reasons, outside of philosophy on government, is fear of change and the costs associated with change. People find change stressful and hate it with a passion, once we accept that change is coming we must deal with our ideals and resources for one time in tandem at once.
Healthcare is a cradle to grave issue, and we have arrived at the point where people can now live beyond their own bodies capacity to handle them. We have people surviving deadly illness. We have babies that used to die shortly after birth now able to live full productive lives. But it costs money, and it means that we will not be able to buy war machines and pave roads as we have more humans into the system and as they demand more resources.
The question isn't costs, it's practices and costs and culture. Which to analyze each of those structures is an entire book.
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Cool story. I guess I'll just have to be satisfied that the evidence of what actually happens in the real world (That the US has the most expensive healthcare system in the world and gets worse outcomes for it) seems to reflect rather less your version of events.
Do you even know what a contract is?
<source> Every doctor or medical theory ever. </source>
It's also why labor unions are a thing.
Collective bargaining is real. It works, has worked, and will continue to work.
One of the reasons Bernie supports it.
And one of the reasons that (according to leaked documents on the Trans-Pacific Partnership) pharmaceutical companies want the power of the New Zealand drug buying agency, Pharmac, reined in; apparently as it is now, it works so well that they worry other countries might start doing it.
Hillary also has no room to grow. I'm just wondering about the 4% who don't know who Hillary is.
As for something catastrophic that would make her unelectable, um, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the exclusivity clause?
On phasing:
But needless to say, I'm rooting against Sanders. I would actually take Hillary over him, and that's saying something.
You're right, it's totally insane for the US to want to emulate the best places to live in the entire world, like Denmark and Finland. We'll never be able to pull that off because of people who don't understand what socialism is or does, and fight it out of extremely misguided perceptions.
Bernie is the only good choice in the current lineup. Hillary will just be more of the same neo-Liberalism which, while not necessarily bad, isn't actually changing the core problems with massive income inequality in the US, and convinces some of the less politically-savvy that they're making progress when they aren't.
The fact of the matter is that Finland and Denmark are - while far from the worst places to live - by no means the best places to live.
Finland's economy in particular is very bad, Denmark's isn't much better, and there's no surprise as to why. These governments are having to recognize that they cannot sustain how bloated they've become. They're spending too much on social programs that they're having remarkable difficulty cutting because their people are so resistant on shrinking their welfare states. Meanwhile, you have a government who's taking so much money out of the private sector in terms of taxes that it hinders their economy from being viable, which is a problem because then their country brings in less money, precipitating the need for greater cuts. You also have people who just don't work, because why bother when the government gives out so much welfare? A study in 2013 found that only 3 of Denmark's 98 municipalities could say that a majority of their residents would have jobs.
Which is the key problem: socialism doesn't work. The obvious problems of rampant expansion of government should be obvious to anyone on a purely conceptual level, but then see country after country in Europe mired in difficulty and so we see the failure of socialism in practice. Countries throughout Europe are recognizing they need to make overhauls to their economic systems. Hell, over one-sixth of all countries in the European Union have gone bankrupt. Where is this great success of socialism we're supposed to be seeing?
But then people in the US come in and say, "Hey! That really bad idea? We should emulate that!"
Insanity.
Correct, most people think socialism actually helps a country, ignoring the crisis in Europe as countries are recognizing they cannot spend the amounts they are on welfare programs and still be economically viable.
You know what helps a country? Being economically competitive in a global economy. Economic growth helps a country.
Yes, I know, it's not as catchy as, "Hey, the government will take care of you from the cradle to the grave and things will only get better," but that's not reality. Unsustainable government spending doesn't help a country, it ruins a country.
*sigh*.... I've campaigned for Bernie on the streets of NYC. I talk to people (mostly Hillary supporters) and that above ^^ is the single statement I hear the most. To me, its utter nonsense. People seem to forget the fundamental ideas of Democracy, which is that WE decide. Almost every single Hillary supporter is like this, that they would prefer Bernie but don't think he will win. And do you know why? Because of people like you, who don't exert their voice and civil power by voting for who they genuinely think is best for the country. Imagine if everyone who said this voted for Sanders? Who do you think would win?
Anyway, voting issues aside, Bernie is a fantastic and honest man, and he is the only one who solve the real internal problems we are facing.
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candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
You seemed to have missed the part where I said what I said based on in-the-field research. I never said all Clinton supporters were closet Sanders supporters, but a lot of the ones I have talked to. You should be careful not to quote out of context.
And honestly, I would have to disagree with your statement. We have seen recently that Bernie is polling better than Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire, all "closet Bernie supporters" aside. This can be directly attributed to Sanders' heavy campaigning in those areas. We see an increase in support in these areas because people who were unaware of him before are now, and genuinely prefer him over Hillary. I will go so far as to say that in an ideal world, where everyone knew Bernie as much as Hillary, and everyone voted honestly, Bernie would win, hands down.
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http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/21/politics/hillary-clinton-leads-bernie-sanders-2016/index.html